ABSTRACT
George Bataille (1897-1962) was born in Puy-de-Dôme, France. Raised without any formal religious education, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1914, at age seventeen. The zeal with which he embraced his newfound faith is evident in his first published text, lamenting the World War I bombing of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame at Reims and praying for its restoration (see Hollier, Against Architecture). In 1920, however, he lost his faith abruptly when, by his own account, “his Catholicism has caused a woman he has loved to shed tears” (“Autobiographical Note,” p. 113). He studied paleography and library science, and worked for twenty years at the Bibliothèque nationale. In 1951 he was named conservator at Bibliothèque municipale at Orléans. In a scholarly and artistic career spanning more than four decades, he wrote on a wide range of subjects, including numismatics, eroticism (he wrote erotic fiction as well as nonfiction on the subject of eroticism), autobiography, politics, literary criticism, philosophy, sociology, and religion.
