The following essay discusses Jules de Goncourt and his brother, Edmond de Goncourt.

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, brothers and lifelong, intimate friends, played a role of considerable importance in the development of French culture, and especially the novel, in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the time they entered adulthood, romanticism was already waning in the arts and letters and in cultural life; the brothers shared in the elaboration of attitudes, approaches, and artistic and literary techniques that gradually acquired recognition during their lifetimes. While romanticism has certainly never died and the Goncourts subscribed to Romantic doctrines--for instance, their belief in the elite status of the artist--they were important forces in developing newer doctrines. They shared with their contemporaries Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert the conviction that words, properly used, could capture most of what it is to be human, including those aspects of humanity...