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Christian Combaz born september 21, 1954 in Algiers, is a french writer and columnist.

Biography
Born in a middle-class family, of a corsican mother, in Algeria ( his father originated in the french Alps worked as an engineer in the Sahara desert for a french petroleum company), Christian Combaz is raised in the southern provincial city of Bordeaux, and receives a traditional education at Sainte-Marie Grand Lebrun, where the french Nobel Prize of Literature François Mauriac had spent his own tormented childhood (L'Enfant chargé de chaînes).

When his family gets settled in Paris (1968) Combaz attends college at the fashionable lycée Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague held by the Jesuits in the Trocadero district, then in the Sainte-Croix de Neuilly college among the french aristocracy. Part of his early works are deeply influenced by this education among the privileged ones, with a typical french narrative touch that the critics called "balzacian" in which the narrator seems obsessed with social recognition. His first novel Messieurs, published in 1979 (and 30 years later Votre serviteur in 2015) give an accurate and quite severe description of the french high-society under the President Giscard d'Estaing, a world that seemed to drift apart from modernity.

While attending the courses of Sciences-Po in Paris in 1977, he registers a few blocks away at  the Beaux-Arts school  in sculpture and learns some art in the  studio run by Claude Viseux. Apart from his personal training in literature, art and journalism he is involved in social life in Paris, Rome and Venice (Montefalco, 1980), he writes a daily column in Le Figaro and starts to publish novels related to various society circles he frequents - often depicting among his characters father/son ambiguous relationships with older churchmen, writers, veterans, war pilots, later portrayed in his autobiographical novel Votre Serviteur.

His literary works in this early period include a roadbook about Florida, Lettres de Floride. As a licenced pilot, he considers during a few months to fly for living in America, then pretends to start a career as a reporter/explorer, but soon gets back to literature with instant recognition. "This is real art!", writes the very influential Angelo Rinaldi in L'Express, about Messieurs, his first novel.

Columnist, reporter, Christian Combaz then steadily publishes novels and essays - including the highly praised Éloge de l'âge. His novels are often nominated in the annual french literary competition known as "prix littéraires" but he lives in a secluded countryplace in the south of France and shows no taste for the parisian circles. Later he describes his exile in Gens de Campagnol and, invited to speak out in the praised radio show of Alain Finkielkraut he declares he prefers to devote himself to the depiction of "those we call simple people but are, finally, as complex as everyone". This attitude led him, long after (2016) to deliver a daily TV chronicle about "la France de Campagnol", and claims to be the voice of "those who are never listen to". His various columns and chronicles have included throughout the years J'informe, Le Figaro, L'Express, Jeune Afrique, Le Quotidien de Paris, Grands Reportages (1976-1987) le Figaro and Valeurs actuelles (1995).

He has been also making a living out of english-to-french translations such as Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon or The face of Battle by John Keegan. During the year 2001, he often stays in New York where his brother runs an internet business. A few months before September 11th, he writes and publishes a futuristic novel, Une heure avant l'éternité, the paperback cover of which shows a picture of the twin towers of the World Trade Center hacked by the bayonet of a New Jersey veterans monument .Over the years, unable to stand the cost of his flying licence (which he describes, in his writings, as a doom) he sticks to hanggliding and paragliding, adopts the latter at a very early stage of its history (1987) and publishes, along with his friend Jacques Ségura a flight manual, Parapente translated in several countries. At age 62 he is still flying on a regular basis.

A well trained sculptor but stuck in a form of classicism that did not seem to lead anywhere, he finds a way out in the years 2000 in studying and practicing 3D, modelling, rendering, animation. It led him to foresee, in his novels, a future world where 3D immersion and entertainment soon dominate every aspect of our lives.

An long-time lover of Hungary, he writes several books on this martyrized country. Friend with the famous hungarian art dealer Tibor de Nagy that he met in New York in 1980 ( who had never returned in Hungary since he fled Budapest in 1947), he finally convinces him to travel back to his country before his death. This episode is narrated in the Roman de Budapest, a book at the end of which Tibor de Nagy plays his own role visiting the remains of a lost world. Settled in Budapest for a few months, Combaz writes Franz (1994) a novel the action of which takes place in the heart the Danubian city, and De l'Est de la Peste et du reste, a vigourous plea for the creation of a "cultural european parliament", able to defend the core of european civilization against the laws of "international mundanity", "violence made commonplace, american taste applied to everything and everyone". He predicts a future where Europe will have to protect its values against the permanent so-called "diversity", and the force-feeding of the traditional european population with alien customs and language brought by the "open society". In 2016, he tries to wake up his initiative by founding an association, Europe is proud of Hungary, to resist the negative campaign Hungary initiated by most liberal newspapers who blame its rigid policy towards unwanted immigration. Combaz stresses out that Hungary once endured 80 years of islamic/ottoman rule before the industrial revolution (end of XVIIth century), and says that the rest of Europe should remember it.

After having declined the french award ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1992 because he publicly resented the policy of the minister of culture Jack Lang he has finally accepted this medal from his opponent and successor Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres en 2004. He has been awarded the annual Académie Française prize "Eve Delacroix" for all his fiction works.

In 2006, he has become director of the Centre culturel français de Milan, (2006-2009). After two more years (2009-2011) spent at the head of another cultural delegation in Zaragoza, Spain he is back to writing in the Figaro and publishes various essays including in 2015 a literary document with the help of a belgian world-famous endocrinologist Pr Balthazart, Les Âmes douces. In this book he abruptly, scientifically questions the religious notion of "against-nature" when it comes to homosexuality, a theme that is present in many of his novels, such as La Compagnie des ombres et La Barque de nuit.

His literary works are translated in spanish, italian , portuguese , russian et serbo-croat and dutch.

Novels

 * Messieurs - Seuil, 1979
 * Montefalco - Seuil, 1981
 * Constance D - Seuil & Points-roman 1982 ; réédition - Rocher, 1998
 * Oncle Octave - Seuil, 1983
 * La Compagnie des ombres - Seuil, 1985
 * Le Cercle militaire - Seuil, 1987
 * À ceux qu'on n'a pas aimés - Seuil, 1988 ; réédition - Fayard, 2000
 * Chez Cyprien - Laffont, 1990
 * Bal dans la maison du pendu - Laffont, 1991
 * Franz - Laffont, 1995
 * Une petite vie - Flammarion, 1996
 * La Clémence de Neptune - Rocher, 1997
 * Jours de France - Rocher, 1998
 * Le Seigneur d'Uranie - Flammarion, 1999
 * La Barque de nuit - Fayard, 2000
 * Une heure avant l'éternité - Fayard, 2001
 * Nus et vêtus - Fayard, 2002
 * Lion ardent ou la confession de Léonard de Vinci - Fayard, 2003
 * Cent ans et demi - Fayard, 2006
 * Votre serviteur - Flammarion, 2015

Essays

 * Éloge de l'âge - Laffont & LGF, 1987
 * Les Sabots d’Émile - Laffont, 1989
 * Lettre à Raymond qui ne croit pas au bon Dieu - Laffont 1990
 * De l'Est, de la peste et du reste - Laffont 1993
 * Égaux et nigauds - Rocher, 2000
 * La France mérite mieux que ça - Rocher 2002
 * Enfants sans foi ni loi - Rocher, 2003
 * Le Roman de Budapest - Rocher, 2006
 * Gens de Campagnol - Flammarion, 2012
 * Tous les hommes naissent et meurent le même jour - Le Cerf, 2015
 * Les Âmes douces - Télémaque, 2015
 * Le Troisième âge est un tiers état, Le Cerf 2016

Theater

 * Les Encombrants - L’œil du prince, 2003
 * Cheval Rose, 2010
 * La Petite Hirondelle, 2014