Hector Nicolas Alphonse Marie France (1837–1908) was a French writer and soldier, the author of numerous stories of an erotic nature. Has also translated from English into French and from French into English. He sometimes collaborated with Hugues Rebell (alias Georges Grassal) and Charles Carrington under the collective pseudonym Jean de Villiot.
Life
Hector France was born on 5 July 1837 at Mirecourt. He was present at the rout in Algeria in 1870. He returned to France and became a member and an officer of the Paris Commune but was deported in 1872, taking up a secondary career as a writer. He died on 19 August 1908 in Rueil-Malmaison, aged seventy-one.
Appraisal
France was by profession a soldier, and wrote ably on military and economic subjects, as John Bull's Army (1887) and several pamphlets evince. His fictions show a loving care of form and effect, also a delight in dwelling on painful and revolting aspects of passion. The Pastor's Romance (1879); Love in the Blue Country (1880); and Sister Kuhnegunde's Sins (1880), exemplify both.
In 1881 he published his most famous work, Sous le Burnous, which included some illustrations by Édouard-Henri Avril. The play was translated into English by Alfred Allinson as Musk, Hashish and Blood (1900).
