Hervé was the great-nephew of the Roman Catholic traditionalist novelist René Bazin. After solid academic training, years of family conflict, and financial and professional failure, Hervé, a rebel and bohemian approaching middle age, finally achieved literary fame in 1948 with the autobiographical novel Vipère au poing (Viper in the Fist). In this book he portrays his unhappy childhood as an unrelenting battle with his mother, a monstrous figure who assumes near-mythic proportions through the concentrated energy of her own virulence. Bazin's relentless attacks upon the institutions of family, church, and motherhood seemed to many Frenchmen to verge on blasphemy. The revolt continued in La Tête contre les murs (1949; Head Against the Wall), a novel about penal institutions and the judicial system that supports them, and in a second autobiographical novel, La Mort du petit cheval (1950; “The Death of a Small Horse”).

Having exorcised the demons of his youth in his writings, Bazin underwent a spiritual metamorphosis, from which he emerged a moralist. He discovered paternal love (Au nom du fils, 1960; In the Name of the Son), spiritual fortitude (Lève-toi et marche, 1952; Constance, 1955), and conjugal responsibility (Le Matrimoine, 1967). He departed from his mellower mood to exorcise a few remaining monsters in his world—a pyromaniac fireman in L'Huile sur le feu (1954; “The Oil on the Fire”) and a country Phaedra in Qui j'ose aimer (1956; A Tribe of Women). His later works include the novels Madam Ex (1975; “Madam X”) and Un Feu devore un autre feu (1978; “A Fire Devours Another Fire”) and the books of verse Traits (1976) and Ce que je crois (1977; “What I Believe”). First elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1958, he became its president in 1973.