Sully Prudhomme elected to the Académie française in 1881. Another distinction, "Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur", was to follow in 1895. After, "Le Bonheur", Prudhomme turned from poetry to write essays on aesthetics and philosophy. He published two important essays: "L'Expression dans les beaux-arts" (1884) and "Réflexions sur l'art des vers" (1892), a series of articles on Blaise Pascal in "La Revue des Deux Mondes" (1890), and an article on free will ("La Psychologie du Libre-Arbitre", 1906) in the "Revue de métaphysique et de morale". The first writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (given "in special recognition of his poetic
M. and Mme. Joseph Prudhomme M. and Mme. Joseph Prudhomme Monsieur and Madame Prudhomme were a pair of French caricature characters of the 19th century, created by Henry Monnier. They were a bourgeois couple. Monsieur Prudhomme first appeared in 1830 in the first version of the "Scènes de province", then in the play "Grandeur et décadence de M. Joseph Prudhomme" (1852) then in two volumes of collected drawings "Mémoires de Monsieur Joseph Prudhomme" (1857), then in "Monsieur Prudhomme chef de brigands" (1860). Plump, foolish, conformist and sententious, Joseph was called by Honoré de Balzac “l’illustre type des bourgeois de Paris” (the classic example of the