Death of Jean Carzou (August 12, 2000)

Carzou was the most famous Armenian painter in France with a unique style of painting.

He was born Karnig Zouloumian on January 1, 1907, in Aleppo (Syria), then part of the Ottoman Empire. He first studied at the school of the Marist Fathers and then, when he moved to Cairo in 1919, he went to the Kaloustian School. His brilliant academic performance earned him a scholarship and he moved to Paris in 1924, after graduation, to study architecture.

He graduated from the School of Architecture in 1929. He created his name from the first syllables of his name and surname, to which he added the French name Jean, but he always kept close to his Armenian roots and Armenian life. However, he abandoned architecture for the fine artist. He started working as a theater decorator but quickly realized he preferred drawing and painting. He worked as a street artist to support himself, and his sketches of politicians and public figures found their way into Parisian newspapers.

Cannes, Le Suquet

In 1930 Carzou had his first exhibition at the Salon des Artistes Independants, which he would continue annually for more than six decades, until 1992. In the 1930s he also participated in the exhibitions of the Union of Armenian Artists “Ani.” He had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Contemporaine in Paris, and from then on he would have more than a hundred personal exhibitions in France and abroad (Belgium, Germany, Lebanon, Cairo, Switzerland, England, and the United States). In 1966 he had his first personal exhibition in Yerevan, followed by a second exhibition in 1983 and a posthumous one in 2007. Following their trip to Armenia in 1966, his wife Nan Carzou would write a celebrated travelogue, Voyage en Arménie (Travel in Armenia), and his son Jean-Marie Carzou, a journalist, would produce the first comprehensive account about the Armenian Genocide in French, Arménie 1915: un genocide exemplaire (Armenia 1915: An Exemplary Genocide), in 1975. In 1980 he was awarded the “Martiros Sarian” prize in Armenia.

Carzou started working in stage designing for the Opera de Paris for several operas and ballets during the 1950s. His designs of settings and costumes made him known to the general public. In 1957 he created his famous antiwar series “The Apolcalypse.” In the 1950s and 1960s he also created book illustrations with his line drawings and engravings (Andre Maurois’ France, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Albert Camus’ Notebooks, Edgar A. Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue ), and his sharp graphic style became extremely popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, he earned the coveted Hallmark prize in 1949, and became Knight of the French Legion of Honor in 1956 and Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters two years later. In 1955 the art magazine Connaissance des Arts rated him as one of the ten most important painters of his generation.

L'Apocalypse

Near the age of seventy, Carzou became the first living artist to have his work, “Distant Princess,” appear on a French postal stamp in 1976, and the following year he was elected a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts, succeeding painter Jean Boucheaud. In 1977 he was also awarded the National Order of Merit. However, he garnered a great deal of hostility from the art world with a statement that Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne were symbols of the “decadence in painting.”

After a long career as a painter, illustrator, and stage designer, in 1991 he finished the design of a chapel in Manosque (Alpes of Haute-Provence) with more than 600 square meters of paintings of a huge Apocalypse, which was not a literal illustration of St. John’s book of Revelation, but the depiction of the “climate of our times.” The chapel later became the headquarters of the Carzou Foundation.

The prolific French-Armenian artist lost his wife in 1978. He passed away near his son on August 12, 2000, in Perigueux, at the age of ninety-three.  

Death of Henri Troyat (March 2, 2007)

Prolific and popular French novelist and biographer Henri Troyat, a member of the French Academy for almost half a century, was also of Armenian origin, even though he had little connection to Armenian life.

He was born Lev Aslanovich Tarasov on November 1, 1911, in Moscow. His last name was the Russianized form of Torosian, and his maternal grandfather was of Armenian-Georgian mixed descent. His father was a wealthy Armenian draper who had made a fortune through investment in railways and banking. His privileged environment included a Swiss governess who taught him French. When the Soviet Revolution broke in 1917, the family retreated to their estate in the Caucasus, but the failure of the counter-revolutionary movement forced them to catch the last émigré boat from Crimea to Constantinople in 1920. From Constantinople, they traveled with passports of the Republic of Armenia to France and joined the exiled Russian community in Paris. They settled in the prosperous suburb of Neuilly, where young Lev attended the Lycée Pasteur. The family found exile life difficult and was forced to move to the city, where Lev Tarasov studied law at the Sorbonne. He would once say: “Success means nothing. I know what I'm talking about: at the very beginning of my life, I saw my parents lose everything in a reversal of fortune, and I kept that lesson in mind.”

He would never return to Russia, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, claiming that he wanted to keep alive the imaginary country he had created out of childhood memories and dreams. He acquired French citizenship in 1933, and departed to Metz to complete his mandatory military service. He was still under arms when he published his first novel, False Light, in 1935, which obtained the Prix du Roman Populiste, under the pseudonym Henri Troyat.

After returning from military service, the writer was appointed as a civil servant in the prefecture of the Seine. He continued his literary career, publishing a series of short psychological novels. In 1938 his fifth novel, The Web, earned him both the Prix Max Barthou of the French Academy and the very prestigious Prix Goncourt. He was mobilized with the outbreak of World War II and returned to Paris in 1940.



At this point Troyat’s career took a major shift. He continued with his short psychological fiction--his novel Snow in Mourning (1952) was filmed with Spencer Tracy in 1956 as The Mountain —but his subsequent work was dominated by two major innovations: the long novel cycle and biography. In 1942 he left his civil service job to devote himself entirely to literature. He married twice; he had a son from his marriage, which ended in divorce, and later married a widow, the love of his life, with a young daughter whom he raised as his own.

He initiated a whole series of biographies of Russian writers (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, Leon Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, and Anton Chekhov) and tsars (Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Alexander I, and Ivan the Terrible). These works brought an introduction to Russian literary and political culture to the French public. The historical research became the grounds for a series of historical novels, mostly based in Russia. Troyat devoted the trilogy While the Earth Endures (1947-1950) to prerevolutionary Russia, the revolution, the civil war, and the exile, and then explored France from the same perspective in the tetralogy The Seed and the Fruit (1953-1958), which became a popular French television series in 2001. These cycles of novels were followed by other multivolume novels from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. He would have more than a hundred literary works in his count, including novels, short stories, biographies, and plays.

Troyat became one the first French best-sellers, combining critical recognition with commercial success. In 1952 he won the Grand Prix Littéraire du Prince Pierre de Monaco. Seven years later, on May 21, 1959, at the age of forty-seven, he was inducted into the French Academy. Intriguingly, he sat on seat number 28, which had previously belonged to Claude Farrere, a novelist well-known for his pro-Turkish stances. He became the most long-standing member of the group of forty “immortals” who safeguard the French language. He would later earn a series of state decorations, including the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, the highest ranking in France.

Henri Troyat published his last novel, The Hunt, in 2006, at the age of ninety-five. He passed away on March 2, 2007.

Death of Henri Verneuil (January 11, 2002)

Prolific filmmaker Henri Verneuil was one of the well-known names in French cinema for forty years, and closed his cinematographic career with two autobiographic films that narrated the Armenian experience.

He was born Ashod Malakian on October 15, 1920, in Rodosto, Turkey. The Malakians emigrated from their hometown in 1924 as a result of Turkish anti-Armenian persecution in the years after the genocide and settled in Marseilles (France).

Young Ashod graduated from the French lyceum in Aix-en-Haute and entered the École Nationale d’Arts et Metiers in Aix-en-Provence (1942). Upon graduation in 1944, he put aside his technical diploma and started working as a journalist. In 1945 he wrote an article about the Armenian genocide and the editor suggested he adopt a French name to make it look more objective. Thus, Henri Verneuil was born.

In the postwar, Verneuil entered the world of cinema. He directed his first short film in 1946 and moved to Paris in 1949, where he became an assistant director. In 1951 he directed his first feature, the black comedy The Hunting Ground. His second film, the drama Forbidden Fruit (1952), won him international acclaim. Both films featured the great French comic actor Fernandel in the main role. The same actor played the six main roles (a father and his five sons) in The Sheep Has Five Legs (1954), which earned the first prize at the Locarno International Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for best script to Verneuil in 1955. Verneuil’s biggest hit, before the New Wave of the 1960s, was The Cow and I (1959), once again with Fernandel.

Later he also directed other movie stars including Jean Gabin, Alain Delon, Lino Ventura, Jean Paul Belmondo, Yves Montand, and Michele Morgan. In the 1970s he directed a few films in English with Anthony Quinn, Yul Brynner, and Henry Fonda. His last commercial film was in 1984.

Afterwards, the veteran filmmaker would focus on his Armenian heritage. In 1985 he published an autobiographical work, Mayrig, which recounted his childhood and the Armenian experience in Marseilles. It would become the basis for his two last films, Mayrig (1991) and 588, rue Paradis (1992), featuring Omar Sharif and Claudia Cardinale. In 1988 he had directed the video clip of “Pour toi, Arménie” (For You, Armenia), the song composed by Charles Aznavour and Georges Garvarentz to the benefit of the victims of the 1988 earthquake in Armenia. 

In 1996 Verneuil, who had earned the French Legion of Honor in 1955, was awarded an honorary César, France's equivalent of the Oscar, for lifetime achievement in film. He was elected a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. He died in Bagnolet, a suburb of Paris, on January 11, 2002. Two of his children, Patrick Malakian (a TV director) and Gaya Verneuil (an actress), followed in his steps. Several streets and squares in France and Armenia bear his name.

Birth of Shahan Shahnour (August 3, 1903)

At the end of the 1920s, a group of young French Armenian writers started a movement towards the renewal of Armenian literature. The innovative works and theoretical writings of the so-called “Paris boys” would mark the beginning of Diasporan literature. One of the most famous names in that generation was Shahan Shahnour.

Born Shahnour Kerestejian in Scutari (Üsküdar), a district of Constantinople (Istanbul) on August 3, 1903, the future writer first attended the Semerjian School in Scutari, until 1916, and then the Berberian School. His pen name would become a combination of his first name and the first name of the Berberian School’s principal, the philosopher and educator Shahan Berberian (1891-1956).

He showed graphic talent and his first contributions to the Armenian press in Constantinople were drawings. He moved to Paris in 1923 and worked as a photographer. He followed courses at the Sorbonne from 1928-1932. He shocked the Armenian literary world with the publication of his first literary work, the novel Retreat without Song (Նահանջը առանց երգի), first in installments in the daily Haratch (1928-1929) and then as a book (1929). Branded as “the novel of the Diaspora,” it depicted the life of a group of Armenian immigrants in France and their process of assimilation and loss of identity. It was followed by a heated controversy concerning its ideological underpinnings, its denial of tradition, and various passages deemed as immoral for the standards of the time.

Shahnour became a leading member of the group of writers called “Menk” (“We”), which published the literary journal of the same name from 1931-1933, and published a collection of short stories in 1933, The Betrayal of the Resurrecting Gods (Յարալէզներու դաւաճանութիւնը). He would continue writing for the French Armenian press until the 1930s, and his essays did not lack polemical overtones.

However, health problems started in 1936 with the beginning of osteolysis (degeneration and destruction of bone tissue). The condition would take a turn for the worse after a botched surgery in 1939. For the next two decades, Shahnour, pretty much disabled, would wander through hospitals and shelters in different French cities, surviving with the help of a few Armenian and French friends. Finally, in 1959 he would find a safe place at the Armenian Home of Saint-Raphael, in the south of France, where he remained until the end of his life.

Despite his health issues, Shahnour continued writing. Although he abandoned Armenian literature for a while, he wrote poetry in French under the pseudonym of Armen Lubin that reflected his condition. His poetry, published in five collections from 1942-1957, earned him the praise of leading French writers and several literary prizes well into the 1960s. (A complete Armenian translation appeared in 2007.) He returned to Armenian letters in 1956 and forged a friendship with Arpik Missakian, publisher of Haratch, who would assist him for the rest of his life. Although his disability precluded him from writing literature, he focused on essay writing, and collected much of his old and new works in several collections: The Sunday Issue of My Newspaper (1958), A Couple of Red Notebooks (1967), The Open Register (1971), and The Fire at My Side (1973). The popularity brought by his old works continued alive with the readers until the end of his life and beyond; Retreat without Song would have four more editions between 1948 and 1994, and was posthumously translated into English (1981) and French (2009).

Shahnour’s life came to an end on August 20, 1974, in the hospital of Saint-Raphael. He was buried in the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, in Paris, along Shavarsh Missakian, the founding publisher and editor of Haratch, the newspaper that had launched him to fame.

Birth of Alice Sapritch (July 29, 1916)

Alice Sapritch (her name was originally spelled Sapric, the Turkish spelling of the Armenian word saprich/սափրիչ “barber”), was a French actress of Armenian origin with a forty-year career in cinema, theater, and television.

She was born in the Istanbul district of Ortaköy on July 29, 1916, and had a childhood that she qualified as unhappy. Her family had serious financial problems due to the gambling debts of her father. She abandoned Turkey at the age of thirteen with her family and continued her studies in Brussels before moving alone to Paris. She entered the Cours Simon, one of the oldest courses of theatrical formation for professional comedians, and then the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique. Her theatrical career, mostly in dramatic and tragic roles, would span over thirty-five years (1949-1984).

At the end of the German occupation, she met writer and actor Guillaume Hanoteau, whom she married in 1950. The same year marked her debut in the movies with Le tampon du capiston (The Captain’s Buffer), on a script written by her husband. For the next thirty-five years she would appear in some 40 movies, including François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianist (Shoot the Pianist, 1960), where she played along Charles Aznavour. In the 1960s she had remarkable roles in several TV adaptations of novels by French authors like Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Honoré de Balzac, and François Mauriac. She divorced in 1970, and her great breakout came a year later, at the age of 55, when she made a lasting impression with two roles, one comic and the other tragic, in the feature movie La folie des grandeurs (Delusions of Grandeur), along with  two great actors, Yves Montand and Louis de Funès, and the TV movie Vipère au poing. However, throughout the 1970s, she took roles in a series of French-style comedies qualified with the colloquial word nanar (movies that were so bad that they were good). She mostly abandoned this genre in the last years of her career and returned to dramatic roles in André Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë (The Bronte Sisters, 1979), as well as in a TV film, L’affaire Marie Besnard (The Affair Marie Besnard, 1986), which earned her the prize “7 d’or” for best fiction comedian. Her last role in cinema was in an American film, Amy Heckerling’s National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985).

She played her first and last role in TV films as Catherine de Médicis (queen of France in the sixteenth century), both in 1961 and in 1989. She wrote many autobiographical works (Alice, My Dinners in the City, Public Woman: My truth, and Unfinished Memoirs) and a novel (An Endangered Love, 1973), all in French. 

She remained quite close to the French Armenian community, and participated in many of their gatherings. A year before her death, her life was the subject of a documentary, Le passé retrouvé: Alice Sapritch (The Past Retrieved: Alice Sapritch), by Mireille Dumas (1989). She passed away in Paris on March 24, 1990, and was cremated in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, in Paris, with her ashes being spread over the Seine River.