New material added 13 October 2003
|
Particular thanks to Jérôme DUBY,
and to Nancy Sloan Goldberg
(
French Writers of the Great War), author of
En l'honneur de la juste parole:
La Poésie francaise
contre la Grande Guerre.
and Woman, Your Hour is Sounding:
Continuity and Change in French Women's
Great War Fiction, 1914-1919.
The major source for
bibliographical & biographical
material in this section is Tim Cross's
The Lost Voices
of World War I:
An International Anthology of Writers, Poets & Playwrights. |
Edmond ADAM, poet & essayist. Born 1889. Died 24 Aug 1918 at Veuve, of wounds received at Courmelois-Thuisy. Sub-Lt, Reserve, 1st Regiment du Genie. Chevalier Legion d'honneur.
Contibutor to Les Humbles.
|
Charles Jean AJALBERT
, poet. Died 28 March 1915, of wounds received in the Argonne.
'La Maison dans la nuit'.
|
Wilhelm de Kostrowitsky
(pseudo: Guillaume APOLLONAIRE) Born in Rome, August 25, 1880. Habitue of Montmarte, close friend of Picasso, poet, short story writer, journalist, art critic.
Served as a volunteer in the
French Army 1915, serving first in the artillery and subsequently, as
a lieutenant, in the infantry. Winner of the Croix de Guerre. Sustained a head wound in the trenches. Invalided out of service. Died from combination of influenza and war wounds in 1918, just prior to the Armistice. His war verse was published in a volume entitled CALLIGRAMMES
(1918). "His inspirational influence has reached well into the 20th century, and he stands as a major figure in the first rank of European modernism, the greatest French poet of his generation." (Peter Read in Tim Cross's The Lost Voices of World War I.
|
Emile ARNE
poet. Born 1890. Killed in action 7 April 1915 at Flirey. Influenced by Mistral; collaborated with Octave de Vitrolles on periodical Quatre Dauphins, 1913.
|
Rene AUDIGIER
, poet. Born 1894. Killed in action 27 July 1917 at Longueval.
~~~ 'Le Manoir de Chateaugay'
. (Anthologie des ecrivains morts a la guerre 1914-18, iv, 23).
|
Georges BANNEROT
. Anti-war poet; died in the war.
~~~ 'Les Statues mutilées'
(Libr. d'Action d'Art de la Ghilde: 'Les Forgerons', Paris).
|
Jean (Louis Henri) BEAUFORT
, poet. Born 1891. Died in the war, 1916.
~~~ Premiere Mosaique.
Unpublished.
|
Jean-Baptiste BEGARIE, poet of the Provence.
~~~ 'An me fusilh'
in J. B. Begarie, mort pour la France, Bibliotheque de l'Ecole Gaston, Febus.
|
Francisque-Anatole BELVAL-DELAHAYE, poet & playwright. Died 27 Sept 1918 of influenza at Romans, Drone.
~~~ Par le Fer et par la Torche, 1908.
~~~ La Coliere du Lion, drame revolutionnaire en vers, Emile Noel, Le Dernier Poete Romantique: A Belval-Delahaye, l'homme et l'oeuvre, 1911.
|
Hernan de BENGOECHEA,
French-Colombian poet, playwright & essayist. Born 1889. Served in 1st Regt. Etranger; awarded Croix de Guerre. Killed in action 9 May 1915 at Ouvrages Blancs.
~~~ Poetry: Les Crepuscules du Matin,
(Les Tablettes, 1921).
~~~ Play: Le Vol du Soir,
(Les Tablettes, 1922).
~~~ Essays: Le Sourire de l'Ile-de-France,
(Les Tablettes, 1924).
|
Edouard BERNARD
, poet. Born 1888. Killed in action 27 Sept 1914 at Apremont-la-Foret.
~~~ Breves Silhouettes,
(Dole, 1911).
|
Leon BERTHON
, story writer & war poet. Born 1893. Died 12 Feb 1917 at Clermont, Oise, of illness contracted at the front. Contributor to Journal Rose.
~~~ Poemes de la Guerre,
(M. Rocher [ed]).
|
Adrien BERTRAND
, poet, journalist & novelist. Born 4 August 1888. Worked as journalist in Paris on Paris-Midi and Clemenceau's L'Homme libre, among others. Founded literary journal, Les Chimeres, in 1908. Edited Verlaine, wrote critical biographies, and lyrical poetry in classical, almost Parnassian, forms. Winner of Prix Goncourt, 1914 (awarded 1916). In the war, saw action early on in the cavalry and was noted for several daring single-handed exploits. In late October 1914 was wounded in the chest by a a shell fragment. Underwent a number of operations in several hospitals. Knowing he was soon to die, he worked feverishly on a one-act play, and his collection of verse. Died of his wound at Grasse, 18 Nov 1917.
~~~ Les Soirs ardents. Cadences et rythmes,
(Sansot, Paris, 1908).
~~~ La Conquete de l'Autriche-Hongrie par L'Allemagne. Une nouvelle forme du pangermanisme: le 'Zollverein',
(Berger-Levrault, Paris, 1916).
~~~ Les Jardins de Priape,
(Dorbon aine, Paris, no date [1916]).
~~~ L'Orage sur le jardin de Candide,
(Calmann-Levy, Paris, no date [1917]).
~~~ La Victoire de Lorraine,
(Berger-Levrault, Paris, 1917).
~~~ Le Verger de Cypris,
(Berger-Levrault, Paris, 1918).
~~~ Sonnets sur la Nature,
(privately printed by R. Devigne, Paris, 1923).
~~~ L'Appel du Sol,
(Durandera, Challes-les-Eaux, 1986).
|
Jean-Pierre CALLOC'H (pseud: "Bleimon").
Breton poet & playwright. Killed 10 April 1917 by shellfire while standing outside his dugout.
The son of a sailor lost at sea, Calloc'h was described as terrifying in battle, wielding an antique sailor's
axe of the sort formerly used in boarding ships.
~~~ 'Ar En Deulin'
.
~~~ 'Ar Flamaked'
, 1906.
~~~ 'El ma pardonamb'
.
|
Jean BOINE. Poet, writer & jounalist.
Killed in action 16 April 1917. Contributor to La Vie Doloise.
~~~ Poesies.
Dole, 1920.
|
Henri de BOISANGER. Born 1877.
French Army novelist and poet from Brittany.
Killed in action 8 September 1914.
~~~
Le Lieutenant de Tremazan.
Perrin, Paris, 1908;
~~~ 'La Conquete Nouvelle',
Le Correspondant, 1911.
|
André BRETON,
poet, essayist, critic, editor, communist, surrealist, described by
Ionesco as "one of the four or five great reformers of modern thought".
During the war he served in the neurological ward of a hospital in Nantes
and made some attempts to use Freudian methods to psychoanalyze his
patients, whose disturbed images he considered remarkable. Among the
wounded soldiers he treated in 1916 was one Jacques Vaché, whose
life and death by suicide in 1919 had tremendous influence on
Breton, and whose Lettres de Guerre, with Breton's introductory
essay, proved a seminal work in the pre-history of Dada and
Surrealism. Equally influential for Breton and Surrealism, was
his wartime meetings with Apollonaire in Paris. Breton's pre-war and
wartime poems were collected in his first book,
Mont de Piété (Pawnshop), published in 1919.
|
Aristide-Louis-Armand BRUANT. Army captain & poet.
Killed in action 16 April 1917.
~~~ L'Ame des Fleurs.
1911.
Bitton, Frederic, Le Capitaine Bruant.
1919.
|
Roger BRUNEL
(b.1884), poet of Provence. Drowned 25 Jan 1917 when the Amiral Magon was torpedoed.
~~~ La Provence,
(unpublished).
|
Joseph CAHN
(b.1887), died on wounds on 30 Jan 1917, which he sustained at
Biaches on 29 Dec 1916.
~~~ Au Souffle des Mois,
(St Maude, 1912).
~~~ Vers de terre ... de France,
(Deshayes, 1916).
~~~ Et puis voice des Vers,
(Cahors, 1921).
|
Eugene CAPDEVILLE
(b.1892), killed in action 7 May 1917 at Craonnelle..
~~~ Tel le roman de notre coeur,
(1917).
|
Charles CARRAU
(b.1885), Killed in action 12 Jan 1916, at Maison de Champagne.
~~~ "Carillon Pascal",
(published in La Biche).
|
Frederic Sauser, (pseud. Blaise CENDRARS), born on September
1, 1887, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. French-speaking poet and essayist who created a
powerful new poetic style to express a life of action and danger. He was in St Petersburg
in October 1905 for the first convulsions of the coming Russian Revolution. He made his
literary debut in 1912 with a poem Les Paques a New York,
which was an important influence on Apollinaire. In 1913 Cendrars published the poem,
La Prose du Transsibérien,
which was described by critic Monique Chefdor as standing
out "...among all twentieth-century poetric experiments, [as] the work that best captures
the prismatic reality of the modern world in all its multiplicity..."
Letter by Cendrars written on
a cigarette box distributed
to French soldiers during WWI |
In 1914 Cendrars joined the Second Regiment of the Foreign Legion, and, along
with the Italian singer Canudo, was among the first to sign the foreign artists' call to
the defense of France. He lost his arm in September 1915 in the battle of the Ferme
Navarin in the Marne valley, during the First Battle of the Marne. Cendrars wrote most
directly of the First World War in two works, J'ai tue
(I have killed),
published in
1918, illustrated by Ferdinand Leger, and
La Main coupee (The Cut Hand),
published in 1946 (printed in English in 1973 with the title
Lice). During the Second World War he served as a war correspondent for the British army. Cendrars'large corpus of mainly autobiographical writings proved a strong influence on his contemporaries. Though the critics long ignored Cendrars, the American writer Henry Miller saw in him "...a continent of modern letters..." Cendrars finally received his recognition in 1958 when Andre Malraux, as minister of culture, bestowed upon him the title of Commander of the Legion of Honor, and in 1961, when he was awarded the Grand Prix Litteraire de la Ville de Paris, shortly before his death.
Special thanks to Jérôme DUBY.
|
Georges CHENNEVIERE
|
Henri COCARDAS.
Poet. Died of wounds at Saint-Maurice on the Meuse, 26 April 1915.
~~~ "La bonne Auberge",
Nouvelle Revue, 15 Mar 1914.
|
Jean COCTEAU, (1889-1963),
poet, novelist, playwright, actor,
artist, film-maker, critic.
Born at Maisons-Lafitte. Served
at the front in 1914 in the volunteer ambulance corps. Close
friend with first French ace Roland Garros, with whom he
often flew over Paris, & to whom he dedicated a long poem. Collaborated with Picasso &
Eric Satie. Influenced, & influenced by, Cubism, Dadaism,
Surrealism.
|
Auguste COMPAGNON
, killed in Champagne, aged 36.
~~~ POEMS ET LETTRES DES TRANCHEES
(1916).
|
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
, (1893-1945), poet, novelist, essayist. Born
and died in Paris. Decorated for leading a bayonet charge at
Charleroi in August 1914. Forged his war experiences into a slim
volume of poems, INTERROGATION
, which appeared in a limited edition in 1917.
Influenced by Paul Claudel and the Futurists, it celebrated war's
virtues without concealing its horrors.
Drieu's postwar novels of the '20s chronicled the aimlessness
and debauchery of soldiers returning to the banality of civilian life.
In 1934 he published a memoir of the war,
LA COMEDIE DE CHARLEROI .
Later works include REVEUSE BOURGEOISE
(1937); and
GILLES (1939). Drieu eventually became a
fascist and collaborated with the Vichy government during World War II.
Shortly after the liberation of France, he committed suicide. His
RECIT SECRET (1961)
and MEMOIRES DE DIRK RASPE
(1966) were among a number of his works that
were published posthumously
|
Antoine DUJARDIN. Born 1887. Died of
wounds 30 April 1915.
Paul ÉLUARD (1895-1952). Born in Saint
Denis. A founder
of Surrealism with Louis Aragon, André Breton among others, &
one of the important lyrical poets of the 20th century. Though
tubercular, he served in WWI in the French Army (hospital
corps & infantry), and was a casualty of gas. In WWII he
served again in the French Army, as well as in the Resistance.
He joined the Communist Party in 1942.
| |
Jean de FOVILLE.
Poet, novelist, art historian, mumismatic aesthete &
winner of the Croix de Guerre. Killed in action at Les Eparges 26 April 1915.
~~~ Bethsabee
(novel), 1913.
|
Noel GARNIER
|
Leon ISRAEL. Songwriter and poet, killed in action on
6 April 1916.
~~~ 'Ballade des fiers conscrits'
~~~ 'La glaise'
|
Pierre-Jean JOUVE,
poet, novelist, critic. Born 1887 in Arras. Volunteered at beginning
of war for service as a medical orderly, but soon forced to give it
up due to ill health. His pre-war influences were the Neo-Symbolists
and the Unanimism of Romains. During the war he was influenced by the
altruistic humanitarianism of Romain Rolland.
A personal crisis, brought on partly by the war and by his discovery of
the mystics and psychoanalysis led him to renounce his earlier work.
His most important novels and poetry were all post-WWI.
The following biographical sketch of JOUVE, and translation, courtesy of Nancy Sloan Goldberg:
Pierre Jean Jouve (1887-1976) retains today in France an exceptional reputation as one of the
twentieth century's premier poets. Nonetheless, the more than three volumes of poetry and the
many articles he wrote against the war in the period 1914-1919 remain shrouded by the poet's
disavowal of all of his works written before 1925. In 1921 Jouve had changed the direction of
his life, abruptly divorcing his first wife, Andrée, a noted pacifist, and separating himself
from their mutual friends including Romain Rolland and the others of internationalist antiwar
circle in Geneva. His publications of the war era are noteworthy for their often grisly
descriptions and unflinching condemnation of the war, aimed particularly at allied generals,
politicians, and other leaders. They encompass numerous essays, short stories, and hundreds
of pages of pacifist poetry, including, "Vous êtes des hommes" (You Are Men), 1915,
"Poème contre le grand crime" (Poem Against the Great Crime), 1916,
"Danse des morts" (Dance of the Dead), 1917, and "Heures, livre de la nuit"
(Hours, Book of the Night), 1919.
Pierre Jean Jouve spent the first year of the war as a nurse in a hospital for infectious
diseases but left to recuperate in the mountains of Switzerland from the tuberculosis,
scarlet fever, and whooping cough he had contracted. The poetry and essays he published
during the war era demonstrate the evolution of his viewpoint, from the Tolstoyan belief
in the possibility of world unity through fraternal love to an apocalyptic vision of the
doom of an ignoble and impenitent humanity. While in the poems early in the war, Jouve
recounts sympathetically the suffering and sacrifice of soldiers, he nonetheless introduces
the theme of universal guilt, the organizing principle of his poetry from 1916-1919.
Granting to himself as poet the role of a wrathful preacher, Jouve inveighs his readers
with images of their total depravity and ignominy. In his poetic world where all are at
fault and none repent, Biblical allusions reinforce a distant and mocking voice, bolstered
by a graphic and even grisly vocabulary of mutilation and savage death. While greed is the
main cause of the war in his view, Jouve
also blasts the duplicity of governments, the church, the press and other institutions,
as well as the willful ignorance of "honest folk," mothers who teach their sons to love
war, and even soldiers who try to perform their duty. The following is a translation of
part of "Les Enterrés" (The Buried), published in Danse des morts in 1917.
This man is in his foxhole
Buried alive;
He's barely breathing,
With his bare hands, he digs out the earth.
He listens--- the sound of the canon,
Still distant, swallowed by the earth.
He sweats, his pick ax strikes.
He calls to his buddies to be sure
That they are still alive.
They feel a strange moistness,
Like the earth oozing.
One says: We're being flooded.
--- That's better then, it'll be over faster.
But while digging, the water
Engulfs the miner's face
His lips are smeared with it:
Blood, it's blood.
[…] The earth collapses, cracking limbs,
The bloody stream runs faster,
Making the ground ever more viscous.
Soon he scratches out another matter
Spongy and wet.
The spongy matter is human matter.
|
Jean KLINGEBIEL. Christian essayist & poet.
Killed in action 16 April 1917 at Chemins-des-Dames, body unrecovered.
|
Rene LANCON.
Killed in action 12 April 1915 at Marcheville, on the Meuse.
~~~ 'Les Fleurs qui s'ouvrent'
, Sansot, Paris, 1912.
|
Marc de LARREGUY.
Died at Verdun.
|
Jacques LAVOINE. Poet.
Killed in action 17 April 1917.
~~~ "Jacques Lavoine, mort pour la France
, Nouveau Mercure, 1918.
|
Anatole MEPLAIN. Poet.
Killed on
Western Front in mine explosion, 21 April 1917. Published posthumously in Oeuvres de Jeunesse.
|
Charles PEGUY, born January 7,
1873, in Orléans, France. Died September 5, 1914, near Villeroy.
Poet, philosopher, Catholic, socialist, patriot. Péguy was born in
poverty. His father died when Charles was an infant; his mother mended
chairs for a living. He attended the lycée at Orléans on a
scholarship and in 1894 entered the École Normale Supérieure
in Paris. In 1895 he turned to socialism, abandoning the conventional
practice of Roman Catholicism, though he retained to the end of his
life a fervent religious faith. Wrote first version of Jeanne d'Arc
in 1897, a dramatic trilogy embodying his religious and socialist
principles. When the Dreyfus affair broke, Péguy threw himself
unreservedly into the battle to establish Dreyfus' innocence and
persuaded many of his fellow socialists to join the cause. In 1900
Péguy began publishing the influential journal Cahiers de la Quinzaine,
which exercised a profound influence on French intellectual life for the next 15 years.
Many leading French writers, including Anatole France, Henri Bergson, Jean Jaurès, and Romain Rolland, contributed work to it. Though Péguy published several collections of essays prior to World War I, his most important works are his poems. Lieutenant Péguy was killed in action while leading a charge at Villeroy on the opening day of the First Battle of the Marne.
~~~ JEANNE D'ARC (1897)
~~~
LE MYSTÈRE DE LA CHARTIÈ DE JEANNE D'ARC(1910)
~~~
MYSTÈRE DES SAINTS INNOCENTS (1912)
~~~
ÈVE (1913) .
~~~ Yvonne Servais,
CHARLES LES PÈGUY: THE PURSUIT OF SALVATION (1953)
~~~ Marjorie Villiers,
CHARLES PÈGUY: A STUDY IN INTEGRITY (1965, reprinted 1975).
|
Marcel SAUVAGE
|
Marius TOURON. Poet.
Killed in action at Les Eparges, 24 April 1915.
~~~ Glanes et Copeaux,
Revue Picarde et Normande, Caen, 1917.
~~~ Winner, Prix Capuran, Academy francais.
|
Charles VILDRAC (1882-1971)
The literary career of French writer Charles Vildrac (pseudonym of Charles
Messager) spanned nearly seventy years, and while he wrote in a variety of
genres, he is best known for his plays, especially Le Paquebot Tenacity (The
Steamer Tenacity, 1920). Vildrac received world-wide attention from this
simple tale of two Great War veterans. He continued to write successful plays,
and his fame as a poet, essayist, and author of children's stories made him an
important figure in European letters.
A thematic and stylistic unity connects Vildrac's works, although his poems,
plays, and stories are often no more than simple episodes in the lives of
ordinary people. Vildrac gently leads his characters to recognize and accept
the power of love to transfigure even the most failed or tragic life. While
Vildrac's concept resembles Tolstoy's emphasis on Christian love, it is not
derived from any theology. Its origin is decidedly human, even though its
powers are certainly transcendent.
A life-long pacifist, Vildrac retained his antiwar position even while serving
variously as soldier and nurse-stretcher carrier at the front. His letters
recount the all too familiar stories of deprivation and death. His poems
appeared during the war in periodicals and later in the 1920 volume Chants du
désespéré (Songs of a Man without Hope). Inspired by Tolstoy, Vildrac presents
a multi-faceted, synthetic consciousness of war, yet remains concerned with
the beauty of language and the energy of experience. His poetic vision is not
limited to the mere reflection of a horrifying reality, but seeks to incite
the reader to recapture an ideal world. Vildrac, like other French antiwar
writers, attempted to use poetry as a vehicle to change the actual course of
history by placing the events of the war within an ethical context. In the
title poem he underscores the redemptive power of poetry, the narrator's art,
to synthesize opposing realities. It concludes:
It's the never-ending agony
It's the delight
To approach like a pilgrim,
Filled with death and filled with love!
Filled with death and filled with love,
I sing, I sing!
It's my fortune and my wealth
To have in my heart
Always burning and faithful
And ready to burst forth
This white beam that powders
Every suffering
This cry of pity
On every happiness.
Biographical sketch & translation by Nancy Sloan Goldberg.
|
|
