French Writers of the Great War

Écrivains français de la Grande Guerre

During the Great War, there was much anxiety about the steadfastness of the home front's support, and the rallying cry "On les aura!" soon gave way to a nervous "Pourvu qu'ils tiennent!" Thus, from the earliest days of the war, the French government called upon writers and intellectuals to use their skills to guide and influence public opinion. Poets and novelists flooded the bookstores and newspapers with war-related verse, novels, essays, and plays, including Paul Géraldy's best-seller of 1916, La Guerre, Madame, Histoire de Gotton Conixloo by Camille Mayran, winner of the Grand Prix du Roman in 1918, Mathilde Démian d'Archimbaud's A travers le tourment: une vie intime, winner of the Prix Jules Davaine in 1917,  as well as Gaspard by René Benjamin, and  La Flamme au poing by Henry Malherbe, respective winners of the Prix Goncourt in 1915 and 1917.

Although Henri Barbusse's Le Feu (Prix Goncourt 1916), Roland Dorgeles' Les Croix de bois, (Prix Fémina 1919), and Georges Duhamel's La Vie des Martyres, 1917 and Civilisation 1914-1917 (Prix Goncourt 1918) remain the best-known examples of French writing on the Great War, many other writers published significant novels, poetry, and plays during the period 1914-1918. The following paragraphs delineate my work on pacifist poets, women novelists, and other French writers of the Great War, many of whom have slipped into obscurity. It is my hope that this site will help to bring them the recognition they deserve.

Women of letters, too, registered their talents in service to the nation. During the period 1914-1919 (censorship ended in October, 1919), many of France's best-known contemporary female authors and scholars produced a substantial number of non-fiction (histories, economic analyses, scientific reports, essays, and personal narratives) as well as a large collection of war-centered fiction, in the various forms of poetry, short stories, and novels. While these authors were critically-acclaimed and certainly prolific, their names and works are largely forgotten now. In Woman, Your Hour is Sounding: Continuity and Change in French Women’s Novels of the Great War, I examine more than forty of the novels and short stories published during the war era and analyze how these writers used fiction to voice their perception of the war's impact on women and their understanding of the personal and social transformations taking place as they wrote. See author list below. In "Women, War and H. G. Wells: the Pacifism of French Playwright Marie Lenéru,"   War, Literature and the Arts , 14 (2002): 165-77, I examine the British writer's internationalist proposals and their interpretation in Lenéru's antiwar play, La Paix, written in 1917. My essay, "French Women Poets Respond", contained in the collection, Beyond Modern Memory: The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered, edited by Patrick Quinn and Steven Trout, analyzes concepts of love as poetic vehicles to express attitudes about the war in the poems of Anna de Noailles, who supported the war, Noélie Drous and Henriette Sauret, both opposed, and Cécile Périn, whose views on the war fluctuated. The chapter, " Les Femmes, le civil, et le soldat dans les romans de la Grande Guerre" in the collection Les Femmes Écrivent la Guerre, edited by Frédérique Chevillot and Anna Norris, (Éditions Complicites, 2006), analyses how women and men of letters, including Colette Yver, Henri Barbusse, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Roland Dorgelès, and Camille Marbo, understood the integration of patriotism and social critique, especially of women's behavior during the war. .

For many of these poets, their antiwar stance launched long and distinguished careers in French letters. For others, like Charles Vildrac and Henri Guilbeaux, the war provided the catalyst for the expansion of a humanist-based aesthetic devoted to the unification of life and art and the blending of the real and ideal. Inspired by a love of Hugo, Wagner, Tolstoy, and Whitman and fueled by the activities of contemporary socialists and anarchists, an entire generation of young creative people defined beauty as the symbiosis of the physical and spiritual presence of the community of humankind. My essay, "Charles Vildrac: Nothing is Lost from a Loving Heart," published in Focus on Robert Graves and His Contemporaries (1995-96), situates Vildrac's war poetry within his understanding of art as the most perfect expression of modern life. His war-era poetry presents a multifaceted, synthetic consciousness of war, yet remains concerned with the beauty of language and the energy of experience. While Vildrac emphasized the power of the individual to actualize a harmonious universe, Henri Guilbeaux turned toward the more collective means of action envisioned by trade unionists and communists. In "From Whitman to Mussolini: Modernism in the Life and Works of a French Intellectual," published in the Journal of European Studies in 1996, an analysis of Guilbeaux's poetry and activism illuminates the modernist fusion of aesthetics and social change. Two other essays examine the translation into action of this unified view of life and art by those opposed to the Great War. In "Nietzsche contre Hugo: l’Individu, la Communauté et l’Abbaye de Créteil," published in Studi Francesi in June, 2000, I investigate the first published poems (1905-1908) of the famed Abbaye writers: Georges Duhamel, Charles Vildrac, and René Arcos, in the context of their shared communal living experience with fellow artists Albert Doyen, Albert Gleizes, Henri-Martin Barzun, and Alexandre Mercereau. In "Unanimism in the Concert Hall: Les Fêtes du Peuple, 1919-1939," published in The French Review in 1992, I examine composer Albert Doyen's community-centered effort to democratize the experience of art by drawing on the untapped energy of factory workers and others traditionally excluded from musical performance.