World War I (Literature of). In the Great War of 1914-18 the new technology of attack (high-velocity shells, machine-guns, tanks, aeroplanes) at first out-stripped the defensive capacities of the combatant armies. The ‘industrialized killing’ which resulted called in question traditional attitudes to war and eventually made its conventional literary expression obsolete. The war cast a long shadow over subsequent writing: such movements as Surrealism, for instance, may be seen as responses to the perceived collapse of European values.
In France the number of dead and wounded was proportionately higher than in any other country. A whole male generation was virtually wiped out: Alain spoke of ‘ce massacre mécanique’, and Apollinaire, himself a victim of the war, wrote: ‘J'ai pleuré ma génération sur son trépas sacré’. Although bellicose patriotism was the dominant mood in France, especially in the first years of the war, this gave way to more complex and critical responses. Faced by new physical and moral dramas, very few writers could remain detached, many were directly involved, and a striking body of war literature was produced in France, as in Britain and Germany.
Péguy, Alain-Fournier, and Psichari were among the writers killed in the opening weeks of the war. The first major novel to be published about the experience of war was Gaspard (1915) by René Benjamin (1885-1948). It was awarded the Prix Goncourt, but many later readers found Benjamin's attitude to physical suffering too light-hearted. Other early war novels included Jean des Vignes Rouges's Bourru, soldat de Vauquois (1916, supplemented in 1917 by the same author's André Rieu, officier de France), and above all Barbusse's Le Feu. The latter was the first really graphic picture of the horrifying killing and maiming of trench warfare. It shared the Prix Goncourt with Adrien Bertrand's L'Appel du sol (1916); this was a more consciously patriotic work, but did not minimize the horror, while employing the language of high moral idealism. In 1916 also Genevoix published his vivid novels about the soldier's experience, Sous Verdun and Nuits de guerre, which were published in 1950 together with La Boue (1921) and Les Éparges (1923) under the collective title Ceux de 14.
Other novelists who attracted considerable attention at the time were Henri Malherbe (La Flamme au poing, 1917) and G.-T. Franconi (Un tel de l'armée française, 1917). But apart from Barbusse and Genevoix, the best-known of the war novelists today are probably Duhamel, whose collected sketches Vie des martyrs, 1914-1916 (1917) and Civilisation, 1914-1917 (1918, Prix Goncourt) are marked by a rather sentimental humanism; Dorgelés, whose Les Croix de bois (1919) is one of the most balanced accounts of trench warfare; and Léon Werth, author of an excellent pacifist novel, Clavel soldat (1919). Among the most significant of the many war novels written after the end of hostilities one may cite Montherlant's heroic Le Songe (1922), Giono's eloquently pacifist Le Grand Troupeau (1931), Drieu la Rochelle's bitter La Comédie de Charleroi (1934), and Jules Romains's panoramic Prélude à Verdun (1937) and Verdun (1938). The first part of Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) offers a nightmarish vision of the carnage.
France was notably less productive of good war poetry than Britain. There is much banal verse, and not a little patriotic bombast, in Henri de Régnier's 1914-1916; poèmes (1922), Maurice Rostand's Le Vol de la Marseillaise (1919), and Claudel's Poèmes de guerre 1914-1916 (1922). In Verhaeren's Les Ailes rouges de la guerre (1917), by contrast, war is denounced. The experience of the trenches finds more adventurous literary expression in Apollinaire's Calligrammes (1918), the finest French poetry of World War I. At times Apollinaire appears to delight in the beauty of war (‘Ah Dieu! que la guerre est jolie’), but his poems also convey both the banality and the horror of military life.
Although the book trade and the press were subject to tighter controls during these years, the war inspired a great deal of journalism and argumentative prose. Three important works in particular display characteristically contrasting responses. Barrès, the champion of right-wing nationalism before the war, wrote patriotic daily pieces in L'Écho de Paris, subsequently collected in the 14 volumes of Chronique de la Grande Guerre (1920-4). Alain, in Mars, ou la Guerre jugée (1921), offered a rational analysis of war, its literary expression, and the moral harm it causes. Romain Rolland, finally, working for the Red Cross in Geneva, called on the intellectuals of France and Germany to join in the rejection of war in Au-dessus de la mêlée (1915); denounced by patriots on both sides, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1916, the year when Dada was launched in Zurich.
[John Cruickshank]
Bibliography
- N. Norton Cru, Témoins: essai d'analyse et de critique des souvenirs de combattants édités en français de 1915 à 1928 (1929)
- L. Riegel, Guerre et littérature: le bouleversement des consciences dans la littérature romanesque inspirée par la Grande Guerre (1978)
- J. Cruickshank, Variations on Catastrophe: Some French Responses to the Great War (1982)
