Catulle Mendès

Born in Bordeaux into an affluent banking family, Catulle Mendès moved to Paris at the age of eighteen. In 1861, he founded La Revue fantaisiste, the first journal of the literary group the Parnassians. Advocating a restrained formalism in response to the sentimentality of Romanticism, the Parnassians inspired a return to the sonnet form among a segment of nineteenth-century French poets, a movement Mendès captured in his treatise La Légende du Parnasse contemporain (1884). As well as acting as the historian for the Parnassians, Mendès was a prolific poet in his own right. He died from complications following a railroad accident.