Romain Rolland

Rolland came from Clamecy in Burgundy to the École Normale, wrote a doctorate on early opera, and taught music history at the Sorbonne; his 1903 life of Beethoven launched a cycle of hero-biographies and a lifelong faith in creative vitality. A youthful exchange of letters with Tolstoy, who answered the unknown student at length, marked him permanently.

Jean-Christophe appeared from 1904 to 1912 in Péguy's Cahiers de la Quinzaine. When war came, Rolland published Au-dessus de la mêlée from Switzerland, calling France and Germany to rise above the slaughter, and was reviled in both countries as the Nobel arrived in 1915.

His later decades made him Gandhi's first European champion and an increasingly credulous friend of the Soviet experiment; he died at Vézelay in 1944, under the occupation his whole life had argued against.