On June 12, 2023, La Poste issues a stamp bearing the effigy of Pierre LOTI, writer, draftsman, photographer and French naval officer on the occasion of the centenary of his disappearance.
Protected with a hieratic face, concealing his personality under changing appearances that never reveal him as much as they hide him, Pierre Loti was, during his lifetime, an unparalleled phenomenon. Born on January 14, 1850 in Rochefort, Julien Viaud became Pierre Loti on leaving adolescence. After the Naval School, he travels the world; frail, he puts together the body of an athlete; soon, he will be a reporter and then a writer. If his first novel, Aziyadé, did not achieve the expected success, the following ones, such as The Marriage of Loti, Fisherman of Iceland or Ramuntcho, enjoyed the esteem of the public and the critics: very quickly, in 1891, Loti was elected at the French Academy.
A sailor, he is also the surveyor of distant lands: his travel stories, his collections of memories have nothing to envy to his novels. Polynesia, Japan, China, Cambodia, India, Persia, Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Morocco or even Senegal: Loti comes and goes as few have done before him. He is one of the first world celebrities, like his friend Sarah Bernhardt. In Rochefort, the family home, which he never stopped renovating and expanding, gradually took on the shape of his world: shimmering and cosmopolitan, a fairyland that imperfectly concealed a melancholy that often bordered on despair. .
Of a temperament more artistic than intellectual, Loti claimed not to read; if the affirmation is more pose than reality, we find there its bias of a literature freed from fashions and nevertheless obsessed with the passage of time. At the same time, he denounces wars of aggression, criticizes colonization, protects the environment, defends ethnic or regional identities. Naval officer, novelist, autobiographer, draftsman and even photographer, Loti leaves to posterity a legacy as rich as it is complex. Modern and conservative, he certainly personifies the contradictions of the Belle Époque. Loti died on June 10, 1923 in Hendaye, in the Basque Country, his chosen land.
