The son of an industrialist installed at
Asnières, Jean Claude Brisville, fed during his adolescence of the novels by , who made him his last secretary until 1959. The family responsibilities made him renounce the risky profession of playwright and devote himself entirely to that of publisher. In 1964, after he became a literary director, he made
Ernst Jünger known in France by publishing a new edition of the "Journal de guerre", thanks to the determination of In 1970, he established a lasting friendship with
Julien Gracq who accepted the adaptation he wrote for the television production that
Jean-Christophe Averty did of the
Beau Ténébreux. In 1976, he was appointed director of
Le Livre de Poche. His dismissal in 1981 at the age of sixty, made him reconnect with his pen and settle his accounts with the medium of publishing in the form of a satirical piece,
Le Fauteuil à bascule where an editor is opposed to an avid boss. The success of the play at the Petit Odéon and the led him, after several failures with other creations, to resume the process of dialogue between two characters, each incarnating a cause opposite to the other,
Descartes and
Blaise Pascal for reason and faith, the
marquise du Deffand and
Julie de Lespinasse for the old and the modern,
Talleyrand and
Fouché for political genius and arrivism,
Napoléon and
Hudson Lowe for tragic destiny and honest pettiness. It is in ''
L'Antichambre'' that he expressed all his melancholy for a French language in the process of disappearance. In 1984, he approached
René Char, a brother in writing of Albert Camus. Starting in 1997, he began a work of "anamnesis" "Not to be alien to oneself" which he published, faithful to
existentialism, in the form of fragments of the past which related less to his person than to their times, memories mixed with
aphorisms with pessimistic humor. Jean-Claude Brisville was a Chevalier of the
Légion d'honneur and Officier of the
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. == Works ==