The war that is currently raging at the gates of Europe awakens the ghosts of other conflicts, which have sometimes marked literature. Both writers and soldiers, they recounted what they saw, wrote about their traumas and their disappointments. For this third text in our “Writers in the Trenches” series, The duty looks at Simone Weil, George Orwell and André Malraux.
On August 8, 1936, Simone Weil, a 27-year-old trade unionist and philosophy teacher, crossed the border between France and Spain to join the Aragon front.
Without speaking a word of Spanish – she who could read Babylonian, ancient Greek and Sanskrit – this Parisian intellectual in fragile health decided to take part in the fighting. Despite her pacifism, Simone Weil joined the Durruti column, the most famous column of anarchist fighters, which was formed a few days after General Franco’s military coup on July 18.
“I don’t like war”, she wrote to the writer Georges Bernanos after reading the violent anti-Franco pamphlet that he published in 1938, The great cemeteries under the moon. “But what has always horrified me the most in war is the situation of those who are in the back and gossip about what they don’t know,” she continues.
A former student of the philosopher Alain at the Lycée Henri-IV (who had nicknamed her “the Martian”), born into a family of Jewish Alsatian origin, this union activist close to revolutionary Trotskyist and anarchist groups, to try to understand the “condition worker”, had chosen to put her hand in the dough 18 months earlier: worker on a press at Alsthom, assembly line work in a factory in Boulogne-Billancourt, milling machine at Renault.
It is driven by this quest for justice and charity, coupled with a background of Christian mysticism, that the author of gravity and graceis trained to the complex theater of the Spanish Civil War.
About this episode, which lasted just a month and a half in the life of Simone Weil, we know that we know nothing. Or almost nothing. A Log from Spain of 34 sheets, some letters and photographs of her in uniform. The novelist Adrien Bosc takes advantage of this biographical void to try to understand, in Column (Stock, 2022), the author’s commitment.
“Death to intelligence! »
Shocked by the barbarity of the civil war, by the suffering of the Spanish people and by the arbitrary executions, she wrote that she had met peaceful French people there “who would not have had the idea of going to kill themselves, but who bathed in this blood-soaked atmosphere with visible pleasure”.
This radical experience will also have allowed Simone Weil to grasp the impossibility of her anarchist dreams, while taking the measure of the immense mess of leftist alliances during the Spanish Civil War. She won’t be the only one.
At the time, two events were to shock international opinion: the assassination of the poet Federico García Lorca and the bombardment of the small Basque town of Guernica by Franco’s aircraft on April 26, 1937. Artists, intellectuals and writers from around the world will thus mobilize, as a response to “Death to intelligence! Long live death! launched by General Millán-Astray in the large amphitheater of the University of Salamanca during the last public speech of Miguel de Unamuno.
From just about everywhere, very quickly, volunteers will flock to Spain. Some, rarer, to support the Franco regime there. The others, to defend freedom and the nascent republic, while Great Britain and France adopted a policy of non-intervention.
Thus, on December 26, 1936, the Englishman Eric Blair, alias George Orwell, a well-known but not yet famous writer, arrived in Barcelona to join the militias of the POUM (Workers’ Party for Marxist Unification), a little by chance. against the advice of Henry Miller, met a few days earlier in Paris, who considered that it was “pure stupidity”.
In the heart of the Catalan powder keg, the future author of animal farm and of 1984 understands that the “republican government feared the revolution more than the fascists”. In Barcelona, the conflicts between communists and anarchists, nourished secretly by Stalin’s USSR, will quickly be a source of disillusionment for many. Like George Orwell, particularly lucid, who understands that left and right totalitarianisms could come together.
In the early morning of May 20, 1937, while on duty, standing in a trench, as he recounts his experiences in Parisian brothels, a sniper’s bullet pierces his throat. A few millimeters further to the left and the injury would have been fatal, say the doctors. Orwell testified vividly to his experience in Tribute to Catalonia in 1938.
defend the republic
At the end of July 1936, enthusiastic about Spanish anarcho-syndicalism and convinced that the outcome of the war had to be decided in the air, André Malraux, the author of The human condition (1933), appeared before Spanish President Manuel Azaña to inform him of his intention to create an air force composed of volunteer pilots.
He will quickly manage to get his hands on around thirty aircraft and train pilots, before himself commanding the España squadron, active for seven months, increasing aerial combat and pounding Franco’s positions. The writer recounted his “hot” experience by romanticizing it in hopewhich appeared in 1937. He also made a film of it, shot in Spain in incredible circumstances, Hope, Sierra de Teruel (1940).
Coming back from the “lyrical illusion”, André Malraux will share much the same disenchantment as George Orwell in the face of the failings of the camp of the left.
Malraux, Weil, Orwell, Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls1940) or Dos Passos (Adventures of a Young Man, 1939): most of the writers who saw the fire in Spain up close chose to defend the republic and its values of freedom in the face of the growing Nazi threat, convinced of the rightness of their cause. Which will even make some people say that the war in Spain was a “war of poets”.
For many of them, the Spanish Civil War will also have served as a dress rehearsal before their engagement in the Second World War. As for Malraux, metamorphosed into “Colonel Berger” in the French resistance, before forming the Alsace-Lorraine brigade and becoming a major political figure under Charles de Gaulle.
In December 1942, Simone Weil joined the resistance within Gaullist circles in London. She works there as a writer in the services of Free France, when she would have preferred to participate in missions in the occupied zone. In anticipation of this, she had even procured a parachute helmet and an aviation manual.
Exhausted, undernourished, suffering from tuberculosis, she died on August 24, 1943, before completing Rooting. Prelude to a declaration of duties towards the human beingwhich will be published by Albert Camus in 1949 and described by Hannah Arendt as “one of the most intelligent and lucid works of its time”.