Jules Huret

Born to a family of fishermen, he started work aged 15 at the secretariat of the mayor's office at Boulogne, to support his widowed mother.

In 1881 he founded a small literary review and four years later came to Paris, finding work there as an editor of scholarly books on the Rive Gauche.

In March 1891, he began his famous "Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire" (Enquiry on literary evolution), in the course of which he interviewed 64 writers, including Émile Zola and his five collaborators on Soirées de Médan, Octave Mirbeau and Maurice Barrès, about the state of French literature and their perspectives on it, and on the battle of the "Psychologists against the Naturalists" and the "Symbolists against the Parnassians".

The basic proposal of these interviews, which the interviewees had to accept, was that the Darwinian principal of evolution could be applied to literature, which was also in certain ways a battlefield in which the fittest survived.

He published enquiries on the United States of America in Le Figaro, which his friend Octave Mirbeau proposed for the prix Goncourt, along with ones on Germany and Argentina and on France's universities, politics, poor, and critics' rights.