The Conscript

Erckmann-Chatrian was the name used by French authors Emile Erckmann (1822-1899) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826-1890), nearly all of whose works were jointly written. They specialised in military fiction and ghost stories in a rustic mode, applying to the Vosges mountain range and the Alsace-Lorraine region techniques inspired by story-tellers from the Black Forest. Life-long friends who first met in the spring of 1847, they finally quarrelled during the mid-1880s, after they did not produce any more stories jointly. Tales of supernatural horror by the duo that are famous in English include: The Wild Huntsman (tr. 1871), The Man-Wolf (tr. 1876) and The Crab Spider. Gaining popularity from 1859 for their nationalistic, antimilitaristic and anti-German sentiments, they were wellselling authors but had trouble with political censorship throughout their careers. Generally the novels were written by Erckmann, and the plays mostly by Chatrian. A festival in their honour is held every summer in the town of Erckmann's birth, Phalsbourg (German Pfalzburg), which also contains a military museum exhibiting editions of their works. Their other works include: Strange Stories (1857), The Conscript (1864) and Waterloo (1865).