Romain Rolland

Romain Rolland wrote Jean-Christophe, a ten-volume novel about a German musician living in France — and became the voice of European humanism in years when humanism badly needed one.

He was born in Clamecy, in the Nievre, in 1866. Then came the Ecole Normale, Rome, the history of art. Jean-Christophe appeared volume by volume between 1904 and 1912; the Nobel Prize followed in 1915.

Above the Battle, his manifesto against the First World War, was written in Switzerland. Both sides hated him for it; the pacifists treasured it.

Colas Breugnon, and biographies of Beethoven, Michelangelo and Tolstoy: Rolland did not merely describe his heroes, he sought in them the "heroic pessimists." He died in 1944.