Raymond Radiguet

Radiguet was born on 18 June 1903 in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, near Paris. He attended the municipal school there from about age six and was described as an excellent student. In 1917, at fourteen, he entered the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris on a scholarship, but he neglected his coursework in favor of classic literature and left within a year or two without a diploma. His father arranged private lessons in Latin and Greek, which he also largely ignored. No university study is documented.

By his mid-teens he was writing and publishing journalism and poetry, and he became closely associated with Jean Cocteau, who championed his work and helped place it in front of the Paris literary establishment. Radiguet's short career produced poems, criticism, a play, and two novels. Le Diable au corps, an autobiographical account of a wartime love affair between a teenage boy and an older married woman, was completed when he was seventeen and published in 1923. It provoked public controversy, including a protest from the Association of War Widows, even as Cocteau's circle promoted it. His second novel, Le Bal du comte d'Orgel, a more classical novel of manners, appeared posthumously in 1924.

Radiguet died in Paris on 12 December 1923, of typhoid fever, which multiple biographical sources say he contracted after a trip taken with Cocteau. He was twenty years old. Some accounts, including Encyclopaedia Britannica, note that his health had also been strained by a physically demanding lifestyle in Cocteau's circle in the months before his death. He is reported to be buried at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Le Diable au corps was received as a startling debut for a seventeen year old, admired for its cool, unsentimental narration of an affair conducted while French soldiers were away at war, and attacked by some for its subject matter, most visibly in the public protest by the Association of War Widows. Cocteau's outspoken advocacy for the young novelist was itself part of the controversy, since critics debated whether his enthusiastic promotion reflected genuine literary merit or personal patronage. Le Bal du comte d'Orgel, published after his death, was read as a more disciplined, classically structured novel and helped cement his reputation as a writer of unusual formal control for his age. Later literary histories, including retrospectives in outlets such as The Paris Review, treat his short life and rapid critical rise and fall as inseparable from the work itself.

There is no documented art auction market for works created by Raymond Radiguet, and no reason to expect one: he was a writer, and the public record shows no attributed paintings, drawings, or sculpture by him. Auction databases that list his name in connection with lots are referring to modest literary material, book lots, or ephemera, generally valued in the low hundreds of euros, not fine art.

Readers researching him online will likely encounter a much larger, unrelated figure: Amedeo Modigliani's 1915 portrait titled Raymond, which depicts Radiguet as the sitter. Press accounts report that the painting sold at Sotheby's Paris in 2025, in the Modernités sale, for about EUR 10.6 million, though sources vary on the exact date and do not clearly distinguish a hammer price from a price with premium. That result belongs to Modigliani's market, not to a Radiguet market, and should not be read as an auction record for the writer himself. A separate bronze portrait of Radiguet by Jacques Lipchitz, dated 1920, has also appeared at auction, with a Sotheby's Paris listing giving an estimate of EUR 18,000 to 25,000, and is likewise a work by another artist about him rather than a work by him.

Raymond Radiguet is not a visual artist, has no catalogue raisonne, no gallery or estate representation in the art market, and no documented auction record for a work he created. Anyone encountering his name in an art market context is almost certainly looking at a work about him by another artist, most notably Modigliani's 1915 portrait Raymond or Lipchitz's 1920 bronze, and should treat those as belonging to those artists' markets and provenance histories, not to a Radiguet market. Collectors interested in Radiguet as a literary figure are better served by rare book and manuscript specialists than by fine art auction houses. His name should also not be confused with Maurice Radiguet, an unrelated artist who appears independently in auction databases under the same surname.