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 fourth text in our “Writers in the Trenches” series, The duty focuses on Charles Péguy, Ernst Jünger and Gabriele D’Annunzio.
On September 5, 1914, Reserve Lieutenant Charles Péguy, leading a platoon of 120 men, was shot in the forehead while leading an attack against German troops in an oat field. near Meaux.
The author of Our youth (1910), one of the greatest French writers of his time, an openly Germanophobe, had a fascination with war — “Blessed are those who died in a just war! Happy the ripe ears and the harvested corn! — going so far as to celebrate death in battle as a form of supreme achievement.
From 1908, his return to the Catholic religion and his disgust with the modern world led him to exalt the old France of the pre-industrial world of his childhood. Close in certain aspects to the thought of Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès, less anti-Semitism, Péguy began to act as spokespersons for the entry into the war at the dawn of the First World War, seeing in the France “undeniably a kind of patroness and witness [et souvent une martyre], freedom in the world. »
In his eyes, two visions of the world were inevitably going to clash in what would be, he believed like so many others, the “last of the wars”: republican France and imperial Germany. For him, the war only lasted 35 days.
Eros and Thanatos
A few months later, on the German side, a 19-year-old volunteer will experience his baptism of fire and will be injured in the left thigh. Enlisted in August 1914 as a “volunteer” in the 73e Hanover infantry regiment, after a cadet course, Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) will return to the front and will be wounded several times.
In 1920, Jünger took up the 16 small notebooks he had filled in during the war to make steel storms“the most beautiful book of war”, wrote André Gide in his Log in 1942. Both first-hand testimony and birth certificate of an immense writer. The title of this first book alone echoes the world of technical violence that the Great War has just inaugurated.
In 1922, with The fight as inner experience, he wanted to give an insight into the spiritual experience of a soldier at the front. A meditation and a text-manifesto nourished by a very Prussian sensitivity, celebrating virile bravery against a backdrop of eros and thanatos, and in which he affirms that “war is the strongest meeting of peoples”.
We have often, not without reason, accused Jünger of advocating war. In his preface to the 1924 reissue ofsteel storms, with the German frustrations that had given rise to the Weimar Republic, Jünger deploys all his warlike lyricism. “We need, for the times to come, a generation of iron, devoid of scruples. Again we will exchange pen for sword, ink for blood, speech for action, sentimentality for sacrifice — we absolutely must do this, or others will trample us in the mud. »
A time is approaching, he adds, “of such brutality as we cannot yet imagine.” And “the invitation to action in the new Europe will sweep away all the bombast of bombastic speeches which tire us without bearing any fruit, it will sweep away the shopkeepers, the writers and the wimps, like a destructive tidal wave that crowns a crest red with blood. »
We know the rest. In March 1933, Hitler rose to power in Germany, paving the way for Nazi dictatorship, World War II, concentration camps and the Holocaust.
Between 1925 and 1933, Jünger will thus publish numerous political texts in German nationalist journals. According to the many reissues ofsteel storms, he will however gradually modify his text, attenuating its warmongering tone to make the work correspond to his change of ideological perspective. Evidenced by its war diarieswritten between 1939 and 1948, which take us between the Caucasus and occupied Paris.
To not sleep
He was crazy about uniforms and speed, a taste for risk and bravery, love of country and a passion for pretty women: Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938), “poet of action” and main figure of Italian decadentism, has a dizzying biography.
The Italian aesthete had a favorite motto, ” Never sleep (To not sleep), and perhaps also that a “complex of Napoleon” fueled his warmongering, he who was only 164 centimeters (5′ 5”) tall. But when it comes to the war effort, perhaps no one in the literary community comes close to D’Annunzio in words and deeds.
Always in the front line, after having convinced Italy to abandon its neutrality to join the Allies, he will be in turn infantryman, sailor, horseman, airman. The polygraph writer will distinguish himself by his courage – and also by his luck -, and will lose an eye in the plane during an emergency landing. Which was nothing to slow his warrior libido.
Like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), author of the famous Manifesto of Futurismraunchy warmonger and leader of a European avant-garde that glorified speed, machines, the automobile and the plane, D’Annunzio was one of the first to flirt with Mussolini — without, however, ever being a fascist.
In a 1920 poem titled D’AnnunzioErnest Hemingway was furious about him: “Half a million dead macaroni / And that turned him on / That son of a bitch”.
A fervent supporter of Italian irredentism, on September 12, 1919, at the head of a private army, the Comandante “liberated” the town of Fiume (Rijeka, in Croatian), where the Italian-speaking population was the majority, and offered it to the Italian State, which will refuse it.
Swapping literature for a few months for combat and “balcony dialogues”, endowed with full powers, D’Annunzio went so far as to declare war on Italy. Several elements of his panoply fiumist will later be recovered by Mussolini, including the black shirts, the Roman salute and the cult of heroism.
Beneath these martial appearances, D’Annunzio, who is not stingy with paradoxes, endows the city-state with an astonishing libertarian Constitution: equality between men and women, compulsory education, protection of minorities, labor rights, freedom of worship and decriminalization of homosexuality.
After a bombardment by the Italian Navy in December 1920, the adventure ended for D’Annunzio, expelled from the Free State of Fiume, recently recognized by the Treaty of Rapallo.
A little cold, the writer retired to his villa-museum of Vittoriale degli italiani, on the shores of Lake Garda.