The war 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 sixth and final text in our series “Writers in the Trenches”, “Le Devoir” focuses on Ernst Jünger, René Char, Vercors, François Mauriac, Louis Aragon, Marguerite Duras and Philippe Sollers.
Faced with war, it happens that the time is no longer for testimony, but for resistance, whether frontal or subtle.
Wounded seven times during the Great War, from which he emerged at the age of 23 with the highest German decoration (the “Pour le Mérite” cross), Ernst Jünger became immediately famous when his first book was published in 1920. steel storms still resounds with chilling warmongering: “Life only receives its meaning if it is committed to an idea; there are ideals beside which the lives of individuals and even the lives of an entire people are unimportant. »
Hostile to the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), who had become an important figure of German nationalism during the 1920s, Ernst Jünger gradually changed course. Multiplying the travels and the readings, he leaves Berlin and settles in the countryside, where develops his interest for botany and zoology. From 1930, the writer seems to have returned from his youthful patriotic enthusiasm, holds Hitler in horror and ignores the beacons of the Nazi regime. “There is no place for me in an army where Goering is a general. The more Hitler rises, the more Jünger descends.
To implement his new vision of the world, the writer chooses rather “internal emigration”. From that time, in fact, his existence seems to be divided into two radically different movements, “like those medieval warriors who one day hung their swords on the walls of a cloister”, wrote Julien Gracq in a text that the author of Shore of Syrtes devoted to On the marble cliffs in 1959.
Neither explanation of our time nor book with keys, On the marble cliffs quickly became a cult book, at the crossroads of literature, science and philosophy. At the end of long warlike campaigns, the hero of the book and his brother have retired to a hermitage on the edge of the marble cliffs in the heart of the Marina — land of vineyards, sun and high culture. The two men lead a contemplative and studious existence there, before the Grand Forester and his savage hordes, who reign over the neighboring country, invade the Marina and force them to take up arms again.
A novel of hermitism and withdrawal, a poetic pamphlet as much as an ode against tyranny, On the marble cliffs, published in 1939, will quickly be considered as a text of resistance. This will not prevent its author from being called up in the autumn of the same year and from finding himself an officer of the German forces in occupied Paris. Its fascinating war diaries — whose notebooks he keeps in the safe of his office at the Hôtel Majestic — testify to this time full of ambiguities.
Parachute poems
Involved in the assassination attempt and putsch against Hitler on July 20, 1944 (the famous “Operation Valkyrie”), Ernst Jünger escaped repression against the conspirators on personal orders, it seems, from Hitler himself. even, who was an admirer of his work.
Others had more courage. Such François Mauriac, who will be the only writer member of the French Academy to exercise a clandestine activity during the Second World War. Designated “agent of disintegration” of the French conscience, the author of Thérèse Desqueyroux will publish The black notebook under the pseudonym of Forez in 1943, with Éditions de Minuit — launched in February 1942 with The silence of the soulr from Vercors (pseudonym of Jean Bruller). Mauriac castigates the attitude of Marshal Pétain and the French who agree to collaborate with the enemy.
Like the poets Louis Aragon and Robert Desnos — active in the AGIR network from July 1942, before being arrested and dying in Theresienstadt in the spring of 1945 — Paul Éluard also became involved in the Resistance, while pursuing the writing his poems. Copies of his famous poem Freedom will notably be parachuted by Royal Air Force planes over occupied France.
For still others, the best way to resist tyranny is to remain silent. Like the poet René Char, who, while not ceasing to write, refused to publish during the war. “The weather is not conducive to elementary alchemy: with writing do printing”, he wrote on July 7, 1941 to the Romanian painter Victor Brauner, before taking to the maquis and multiplying the actions under the name of “Captain Alexander”.
Not so many will have taken sides with the Resistance during the Second World War, risking their lives in an attempt to repel horror and oppression. Like Marguerite Duras who, at the beginning of 1943, after having published her first novel, adheres with her husband, Robert Antelme, and her lover, Dionys Mascolo, to a network of resistance fighters formed around François Mitterrand. 1er June 1944, she escaped a roundup by the Gestapo, while Robert Antelme was arrested and deported to Buchenwald and Dachau. “I didn’t commit,” she said. We weren’t heroes. The Resistance came to me. »
“The army is health”
At the end of 1961, Philippe Sollers was called up for military service, from which he had been granted a suspended sentence a few years earlier. He had received the Prix Médicis a few months earlier for his second novel, The park. However, since 1954, the French army has been leading an intense campaign of “pacification” in its Algerian colony.
After a few weeks of painful medical examinations, and despite a medical file which should have earned him an exemption, the 25-year-old writer receives his roadmap and is sent to a disciplinary battalion in Montbéliard. “No, nothing helped, they took everyone… The army is health… In times of war, people die there at their peak… Algeria, an infected pitfall…” (Player Profile1984)
Algeria? One of his best friends died there during a military operation in 1959. Like more than 25,000 French soldiers (with 65,000 wounded), and like 250,000 Algerians, who were also killed during this war where the Algerian nationalist forces were opposed to French state power, in the midst of decolonization.
For the writer, there is no question of going there. “I have known no refractory, no deserter: it is however my immediate decision”, he will write a few decades later in A true novel. To be admitted to the infirmary, the writer goes out at night and walks barefoot in the snow hoping to catch a cold.
He was transferred to a military hospital in Belfort – hunger strike, silence, meticulous contemplation of the floors – where, for three months of a patient “war of attrition”, seeing wounded and mutilated soldiers arriving in Algeria, Philippe Sollers will fake madness.
Dead of worry, his parents will end up alerting the writer Francis Ponge, who in turn warns the chief of staff of André Malraux, then Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, who intervenes personally. On March 9, 1962, Philippe Sollers will be reformed “without pension, for acute schizoid ground”, twenty kilos less. On March 18, the Evian Accords were signed, and the following day, the ceasefire was effective in Algeria.
When the writer wrote to Malraux to thank him, the latter replied on the back of a mourning card: “It is I who thank you, Sir, for having made the universe less stupid at least once. »