Artistic and cultural respresentations of twentieth century europe at war

Mnemosyne and Mars: Artistic and Cultural Representations of Twentieth-century Europe at War Edited byPeter Tame, Dominique Jeannerod and Manuel Bragança... 120 The Fate of Icarus: Mas

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Mnemosyne and Mars

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Mnemosyne and Mars:

Artistic and Cultural Representations

of Twentieth-century Europe at War

Edited byPeter Tame, Dominique Jeannerod

and Manuel Bragança

Mnemosyne and Mars:

Artistic and Cultural Representations of Twentieth-century Europe at War,

Edited by Peter Tame, Dominique Jeannerod and Manuel Bragança

This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Peter Tame, Dominique Jeannerod, Manuel Bragança and contributors All rights for this book reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5158-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5158-9

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This volume is dedicated to the memory of Pierre, Louis and André Rozé, François-Joseph Muckensturm, Marie-Louise Kayser, Roman Boncza-Bartoszewski, and Marion Wierzbicki

MȞȘȝȠıȪȞȘ die Mutter der Musen.]

—Martin Heidegger, Holzwege.1

Calliope, begin! Ye sacred Nine […],

Inspire your poet in his high design […]

To sing […] the vast circuit of the fatal war

For you in singing martial facts excel

You best remember, and alone can tell

—From John Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.2

1 Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2007), 322

2 P Vergilius Maro (Virgil), The Aeneid, Book IX, ll 525-529

T ABLE OF C ONTENTS

List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgements xii Foreword xiii

Jay Winter, Language and Memory

Introduction 1 Peter Tame, Dominique Jeannerod and Manuel Bragança

of the Second World War

Gavin Bowd

Chapter Three 41

Remembering Lacombe Lucien—Becoming Lucien Lacombe:

Mirror Image or Broken Mirror?

Part II: Heroes and Heroines

Chapter Five 76 Goodbye to All That? Critiquing the (Masculine) Nation in Post-First-World-War Britain

T G Ashplant

Chapter Six 99 Manly Heroes and Innocent Victims: Italian Representations of Warfare after Defeat (1945-1961)

Marco Mondini

Chapter Seven 120 The Fate of Icarus: Masculinity, National Identity, Memory and the Image

of the Second World War Royal Air Force Fighter Pilot

Jonathan Black

Chapter Eight 145 Model Martyrs? Remembering First-World-War Resistance Heroines

in Belgium and France

Alison Fell and Emmanuel Debruyne

Part III: Picturing the War—The Ekphrasis of Memory

Elli Lemonidou

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Part IV: Memoriographies of War / Writing the Memory of War

Chapter Thirteen 240 The Representations of the 11th of November Armistice and Armistice Day in Interwar French Fiction and Theater

Christina Theodosiou

Chapter Fourteen 258 From Mars to Mnemosyne: The Idea of Culture in André Malraux’s

Antimémoires (1967)

Peter Tame

Chapter Fifteen 276 Charlotte Delbo and Marie Chaix: Variance of World-War-II French Memories

Nicole Thatcher

Chapter Sixteen 292

Coincidentia Oppositorum, or Music as a Key to Memory:

The Meetingpoint Music Messiaen as a Site of War Memory in Europe

A Transnational Perspective on European History in the Twentieth

Century

Marzena Sokoáowska-ParyĪ

Chapter Nineteen 343 The Jew as St Christopher: The Holocaust and the Participation

of Soviet Jews in Russia’s Great Patriotic War Effort in the Œuvre

of Andreï Makine

Helena Duffy

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Conclusion 361

Contributors 368 Index 374

L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS

Fig 7-1: William Rothenstein, Flying Officer C S P Russell, 1940

Fig 7-2: Cecil Beaton, Icarus, Stirling Bomber Crew Member, 1941

Fig 8-1: Monument to Louise de Bettignies

Fig 8-2:Atrocity propaganda revealing the similarities between images of Edith Cavell and other atrocity imagery

Fig 8-3: Meeting of the Association des ex-prisonnières de Siegburg,

1966 (private collection of the family Crabbé)

Fig 8-4: Drawing of the Siegburg prison by a captive, 1917 (private

collection of the family Crabbé)

Fig 9-1: Jean Dubuffet, Paysage aux Tracés Crayeux, 1944, Indian ink on

paper, 21.5 x 25 cm., Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris

Fig 10-1: Peter Edel, Self-Portrait, 1944, pencil on paper, 12 x 8 in./30.5

x 20.3 cm., Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, OĞwiĊcim

Fig 10-2: Adolphe Feder, The Reader (Jew with Yellow Star), Drancy,

1943, charcoal and pastel, 49 x 37.6 cm., Beit Lohamei Haghetaot (Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum), Israel

Fig 10-3: Austen Deans, POW with Mandolin, Stalag XX-A, Poland,

1943, Archives New Zealand, Wellington (AAAC 898, NCWA Q604)

Fig 10-4: Tadeusz Myszkowski, Birthday Card, Auschwitz, 1944, ink and

watercolour on photo paper, 13 x 18 cm., Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, OĞwiĊcim (caption reads: “The greatest pleasure in the world

is riding a horse”)

Fig 10-5: Maja Berezowska, Distribution of Soup in Ravensbrück, 1944,

pen and ink drawing on paper, 23.4 x 35.5 cm., Muzeum Niepodleglosci (Museum of Independence), Warsaw

Fig 10-6: Charlotte Burešová, Dormitory, Terezin, n d., pen and ink

wash, graphite and Chinese white, 31.3 x 23.3 cm., Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem

Fig 10-7:Waldemar Nowakowski: Nazi and Child, Auschwitz, 1943,

pencil, 5 x 4 ins, Coll Ewa Huczkowska, Krakow

This volume is an edited collection of chapters on the theme of war and memory in twentieth-century Europe The editors would like to thank members of the War and Memory Research Group at Queen’s University Belfast for their contribution to this volume In particular, we would like to thank Drs Roberta Quance and Marko Pajeviü for reading and commenting

on certain chapters Other consultants to whom we should like to express our warmest gratitude include Mr Richard Lewis and Dr Guy Cuthbertson The original inspiration for this volume was a major international conference on “War and Memory: artistic and cultural representations of individual, collective and national memories in twentieth-century Europe

at war”, which took place in Warsaw in September 2012 The conference was jointly organised by the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN) and Queen’s University Belfast

We would like to thank Professor Józef NiĪnik for his genial hosting and organisation of the conference Also, thanks are due to the IFiS Foundation in Warsaw for the organisation of this event as well as the volunteers from the Graduate School for Social Research at IFiS PAN for their help We should also like to express our thanks to the editorial team

at Cambridge Scholars Press, in particular to Carol Koulikourdi, Amanda Millar, and Sophie Edminson for their help with the manuscript We should finally like to thank Queen’s University Belfast for substantial funding for the expenses of the guest-speaker at the conference, Professor Jay Winter, who has kindly contributed a Foreword to this volume

F OREWORD

L ANGUAGE AND M EMORY

Language frames memory, especially memories of war This is true in

a linguistic sense, since English, French, German and so on, have different lexicons both of memory and of war It is also true in a formal sense, in that prose, poetry, theatre, painting, sculpture, film, and music—the media

to which the authors of the essays in this book refer—have different conventions and rules Memory is always mediated by the medium in which it is expressed It is in this sense that these forms of expression frame memories They both make it communicable, and limit or constrain how we convey or perform them

Memories of war, understood as representations by those or of those who live through armed conflict, are a special case of the general phenomenon of the mediation of memory War is simply too frightful, too chaotic, too arbitrary, too bizarre, too uncanny a set of events and images for us to grasp directly We need blinkers, spectacles, shades to glimpse war even indirectly Without filters, we are blinded by its searing light The volatile sets of traces war has left on our minds and our memories are never pure; memory (like history) is not the event itself but a trace of

it, usually association with affect At times the emotions linked to memories of war are overwhelming In a sense, war is too terrifying for individuals to remember without passing through a kind of decompression chamber; language itself is such a device All soldiers who try to go back

to their battlefields know that what they see and what they say are transformed in the telling Their memories are processed and organised in

a host of socially-determined ways

On the individual level, such memories have to fit in with the stories

we tell ourselves and others about who we are When memories are so terrifying or compromising to these personal narratives, when a sense of what happened in war can’t fit in to such stories of self, men and women face essentially three options They change the narrative; they repress the experience; or they face a kind of collapse, when an individual’s identity fractures In some cases all three happen, and happen again Linking Mars and Mnemosyne, the aim of this book, is to enter into an unstable, volatile world, one with dangers both to the storyteller and to his or her audience

In a sense all representations of war touch on the instabilities it introduces in the lives and identities of the people caught up in it This book is about these fragmentations and reactions to them in the creative work of people who used their wit and their art to try to make sense of the violent world in which they lived

As the essays in this collection show, fragmentations came in all shapes and sizes Starting in 1914 and continuing throughout the century, there is the grand sweep of collapsing empires There is the unraveling of the four empires that collapsed during the First World War—the Russian, the German, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman There is the fragmentation of multi-national empires that survived the war; the Irish revolt of 1916 is a case in point There is the dangerous weakening of the capitalist world order, from its peak of globalisation in 1913 to the world

of economic crisis of 1929-31 Not only did the Russian revolution point

to another way to organise economic life, but the war effectively ended the period of economic liberalism, based on the free movement of capital, labour and goods By 1931, all three of these factors of production had vanished, belated though real casualties of the Great War

State legitimation of organised violence in the Great War set in motion

a wave of bloodshed the world had never seen before The Armistice of

1918 could stem that wave, but could not stop it The war after the war was in some respects more dangerous, because it was uncontrolled The killings in the Russian civil war created a regime that soon made war on its own population Russian society did not demobilise in 1918; it stayed on a war footing until 1945 at least The massacres that took place in the conflict between Greeks and Turks after the war were as terrifying as those that happened during and because of it The Irish civil war was no different, nor was the outbreak of anti-colonial violence in 1919 in Egypt, India, Korea, and China Fragmentation is the right word for both the causes and the effects of such a paroxysm of violence

Some see the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War as a continuation of the first; others see them as representing an even worse episode of the breakdown of the international order, following the failed peace of 1919 Most of those who engaged in creative artistic work in or immediately after the 1939-45 conflict had either experienced directly or known about the earlier war in their childhood or adolescence Most of the leaders of the Second World War had served in the First Some were unlucky enough, like the German painter Otto Dix, to serve in both conflicts as infantrymen, rather than staff officers And the wartime fragmentation of the world they knew included genocidal and nuclear

Mnemosyne and Mars xv

violence, both hallmarks of the degeneration of twentieth-century warfare into industrial killing on an unprecedented scale

The essays in this volume register a wide-ranging search for framing devices, for modes of expression which can convey the disorder in which individuals, societies, nations, empires—effectively everyone—faced in the age of total war There is no one story here, no one interpretive line, or narrative structure What is most impressive about this body of scholarship

is its heterogeneous character, its refusal to adopt grand narratives or reaffirm the nobility of man, or at least of European man run riot This is a chastening set of essays, one with a deep sensitivity to the relentless courage of men and women writers, artists, composers, and others, faced with the impossible task of giving those of us who were fortunate enough not to know war directly, a sense of its horror and what it meant to be in the crucible of armed conflict As such, these essays are important contributions to the growing trans-national project of writing the cultural history of war

Jay Winter

9 May 2013 Paris

Cultural history and cultural studies emphasise the notions of representation and affects The artistic creations studied in this volume are inscribed in rich and complex overlays that have accumulated, literally been “cultivated” or “grown”, over a period of time The novels, plays, poetry, painting, sculpture, and films presented here are signs of memory and statements on war They expand on, and interrelate with, personal and collective memories, testimonies, archives and monuments commemorating war Their existence and circulation are linked with more prosaic and mundane products, such as political and commercial agreements, legal texts, and, of course, objects and relics from periods of conflict and imprisonment All are dependent upon the dimensions of time and place Historical and geographical perspectives are, therefore, applied here since they are vitally relevant to the study of culture, war, and how war is remembered and represented

This volume has its origins in the major international conference on

“War and memory: artistic and cultural representations of individual, collective and national memories in twentieth-century Europe at war”, held at the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw on the 7th-9th September

2012 The conference attracted a large number of participants, most of whom gave papers of great interest to researchers in the disciplines of history, literature, film studies, drama studies, sociology, and politics The conference also hosted exhibitions of art, photographs, propaganda, and posters on the subject of war in the twentieth century in Europe The

conference programme included a visit to the Warsaw Uprising Museum and an excursion to the Kampinoska Forest (Palmiry), a war-memory site just outside Warsaw The aim of the conference was to attract a wide range

of specialists from all over the world who work in relevant fields in the various global centres of learning and research, and to invite them to participate in, and contribute to, the on-going discussion and analysis of artistic, cultural and memorial representations of twentieth-century warfare

in Europe The editors of this volume believe that a multidisciplinary dialogue of this kind, as it emerged and was developed from the transcultural and transdisciplinary perspectives of the conference, is an exceptionally effective way to focus on, confront and analyse the phenomenon of the memory of war in the twentieth century

Part I, “Commitments”, begins with a contribution by Martyn Cornick

on a little-known French writer and journalist of the interwar era, Armand Petitjean Cornick’s specialist interest in one of the most influential

journals of the 1930s and 1940s, the Nouvelle Revue Française, allows

him to identify Petitjean as one of the review’s moving spirits Correspondence between Petitjean and Jean Paulhan, a major French intellectual figure of the time, reveals new insights into the way in which

the Second World War affected writers, as well as the role of the NRF as

an important site of memory in terms of reflection on, and intellectual engagement in, the French experience of the war Gavin Bowd explores

the events depicted in the Romanian novel by Marin Preda, Delirul (1975),

and its controversial reception in Communist Romania, whose remembrance

of the Second World War emerges as a deadly national “delirium” The ideological commitment of Preda himself, his protagonist, and indeed of Romania as a nation in the Second World War are shown to be highly

problematic In France, the “mode rétro” that caused such a revisionist stir

in the 1970s is the subject of William Kidd’s sensitive analysis of Louis

Malle’s controversial film Lacombe Lucien about a young farmer’s boy

who, rather than following a positive, ideological commitment to a cause, falls mindlessly into the trap of collaborationism in the last year of the Occupation and World War Two Kidd concludes on the film’s illustration

of the impossibility of a collective memory of those “dark years” owing to

a fragmentation of national identity that is conveyed by a wealth of cinematographic and, more generally cultural, “fractured images” Also in post-World-War-II France, the re-emergence of old myths and the forging

of new myths mark much of the literary production concerned with

memory of the war Margaret Atack reassesses Résistantialisme (the use and abuse of Resistance credentials in post-1945 France) and

Résistancialisme (a term forged later by Henry Rousso to identify the

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Gaullist “myth” of Resistance), particularly as illustrated in two examples taken from a more extensive corpus of French post-war narratives, namely

Résistantialisme (Georges Bonnamy) and Les Crimes masqués du résistantialisme (L’abbé Desgranges) The conclusion of her analysis is

that Resistance memories, as mirrored in fiction, are “relentlessly political”

In Part II, “Heroes and Heroines”, one of the key issues is that of gender, masculinity and femininity in wartime Drawing on his previous work on the politics of war memory (Ashplant, Dawson & Roper, 2000), and on the fracturing of socio-political identities under the impact of war

(Ashplant, 2007), T G Ashplant uses Robert Graves’ satirical Goodbye to All That (1929) as a prime example of those Great War memoirs by which

writers and intellectuals attempted to remake the self and its relationship with the nation, shaping post-1918 British war memories in the light of their experiences in the war In analysing Italian literature, film and media concerning World War II, Marco Mondini scans the period from 1915 to

1960 in order to demonstrate the complexities and contradictions that shaped the construction of the remembrance of the war in Italian contemporary culture In so doing, he raises topical issues such as the warrior’s masculinity, traditional gender roles in wartime, along with archetypes in ideological narratives Jonathan Black features the iconography

of British war artists whose visual representations of the Second World War, and in particular of fighter-pilots, demonstrate clear associations with other aspects of British culture This analysis of British masculinity reveals how such icons, portraits and illustrations shaped popular memory

of the Second World War fighter ace, a winged Mars, to the present day, and offers intriguing insights into preconceptions concerning national identity at a time of crisis In contrast, Alison Fell and Emmanuel Debruyne focus on women’s resistance activities in occupied France and Belgium during the First World War A number of case-studies of female heroism in the Great War, including the most famous of these martyr-heroines, Edith Cavell, are presented here In some cases, their memory persisted after the Armistice, and played a role in the post-war construction of national identities It emerges, moreover, from this analysis that the figures of these women became iconic symbols for diverging memories, ranging from those exploited by right-wing nationalists to those who figured largely as heroines for the Flemish and Francophone communities during the interwar era

Part III, “Picturing the war: the ekphrasis of memory”, focuses on the visual aspect of remembering and representing war Caroline Perret

examines artist Jean Dubuffet’s exhibition Tableaux et dessins (1944) as

the expression of the horrors of World War II and, more broadly, as an

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invitation to exercise one’s imagination in order to reflect on art’s universal, humanist values and its role in triggering a “memory shift”, optimistically ushering in a new era of reconstruction in post-Liberation France Monica Bohm-Duchen compares art works produced by prisoners interned on both sides (Allies and Axis) during the Second World War, often in the most primitive conditions She demonstrates, with illustrations, that the problematic insights they provide into the relationship between trauma and creativity, and between work of art and historical document, remain of crucial importance Nancy Goldberg examines two American film versions of Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s best-selling

novel, Los cuatro jinetes del apocalipsis (1916), that abandon the author’s

denunciation of German racial theories of Aryan superiority in the context

of the First World War, principally in order to enhance the films’ office appeal The net result appears to be a “rewrite” of history that amounts to a dangerous eradication of the role and accountability of nations, their governments and policies in the legacy and memory of war Part III also includes an examination of representations of World War II in film and their ideological appropriation as exemplified by Greek cinema and presented by Elli Lemonidou Such representations are found to serve both collective and “prosthetic” memory.1

Part IV, “Memoriographies of war: Writing the memory of war”, begins with a chapter on literary and theatrical representations of the end

of the First World War Christina Theodosiou demonstrates the ways in which both the 11th November 1918 and its national annual celebration have been represented in French literature and popular theatre during the interwar period In the context of discursive modes of memory, while paying special attention to the relationship between narrative, identity and traumatic memory, she questions the influence of the historical and social context on the writing of the end of the war and its collective remembrance.Examining the social phenomenon of memory-building, she examines the ways in which the cultural representation of armistice contributes to the emergence of the war’s metanarratives which structured collective identities in connection with the other discursive modes of memory, commemoration and co-reminiscences Myth and the role of myth, in its broadest sense, in European culture and in the memory and representation of war are the subject of Peter Tame’s examination of

1 According to Geoffrey Cubitt, “prosthetic memory” develops in people who

“have no direct personal experience” of a particular past but have access to it via the media and mass culture that enable them to relate “these images empathetically

to their own life experience.” (Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory, Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2007, 248.)

Mnemosyne and Mars 5

André Malraux’s Antimémoires (1967), a work that was clearly written

under the aegis of Mnemosyne and Mars In terms of post-war reflections

on World War II, Nicole Thatcher analyses the variance of World War II French memories and postmemories in the work of Charlotte Delbo and Marie Chaix, two women whose representations of World War II might be regarded as oppositional While Delbo conveys the trauma of her deportation to Auschwitz, the younger Chaix writes in an attempt to understand her collaborationist father, opening the way to subsequent works by children of collaborators Both kinds of memories (personal and postmemory) continue to be the subject of controversial debate today, and offer richly diverging representations of war Such writings therefore testify to the diversity and multiplicity of literary representations of the experience of war In turn, readers react as special types of witnesses themselves and, thereby, as participants in that experience In terms of a very different kind of writing, the musical composition of Olivier Messiaen focuses the attention of Joanna Lusek and Albrecht Goetze, researchers based at the Central Museum of Prisoners of War in àambinowice They argue for music, and in particular the music of Messiaen, as a key to memory Messiaen was a prisoner of war in Stalag

VIIIa in Görlitz where he premiered his celebrated Quartet for the End of Time in 1941 The area has been transformed into a “European Centre for

Culture and Education at Zgorzelec-Görlitz Meetingpoint Music Messiaen” as a bi-national project hosted by Poland and Germany The authors examine the combined influence of Messiaen’s work and this wartime “memory-landscape” on twentieth-century music and, more broadly, on modern-day pedagogic and artistic concepts

War involves displacement, and World War II saw some of the greatest and most widespread mass-movements of populations, civilians and refugees that any war has incurred Displacement, dislocation, diaspora and regrouping form the central themes of the final part of this

volume Part V, “Dislocating isotopias: the ekstasis of memory”,

introduces the concept of the imaginary space or homeland (isotopia),

reinforced by the Heideggerian notion of ekstasis as a form of

chronological and spatial alienation in a time of turbulence and conflict In

her study of Joseph Wittlin’s Salt of the Earth (1936), one of Poland’s

greatest novels, Hanna Trubicka shows how Europe becomes a theatre of war, a space in flux, during the First World War Trubicka analyses the novel’s main character as both the victim and the accomplice of modern mechanised warfare in the Great War that is mythologised as the summum

of the institutionalised eruption of violence against the cultural backdrop

of European humanism Wittlin shows how the myth of war helps the

protagonist, a simple peasant-soldier, to find himself in the seemingly incoherent dislocations of dystopian, embattled Europe The focus of the subsequent chapter by Marzena Sokoáowska-ParyĪ is the divergent international meanings of the Great War determined by the specific location of the conflict in history and the casting of fictive protagonists in ideologically defined roles as either agents or victims of historical change.Examining five texts, Sokoáowska-ParyĪ finds that the Great War, far from being a clear example of a component in the “grand historical narrative”, may be considered as a powerful factor behind social progress, the founding event of national identity, or a harbinger of the gradual destruction of societies and nations in the decades that followed it.2 There are, she concludes, as many Great Wars as there are authors and creative artists Moving further east into the vaster, isotopic spaces of Russia, Helena Duffy analyses the self-referential novels of the Franco-Russian author, Andreï Makine, in order to evaluate the innovative nature of their treatment of the themes of war and memory She finds that his novels, while they often combine an investigation of the past with the protagonist’s quest for an identity, cannot be considered as ideology-free, post-modern treatments of historical material since they largely tend to perpetuate the Soviet version of World War II

The scope of this volume involves academics and researchers from all over Europe and even from further afield All contribute to an examination and assessment of cultural representations of war in twentieth-century Europe and their place in national historiographies Literature, film and painting are shown to be of the utmost significance in the construction of national memories, nourishing a historiography that increasingly accepts their importance in this respect They all participate in the process of

“national normalisation”, as Jeffrey Olick calls it, that takes place after a war.3 In this context, Europe being a collection of nations, only an

2 The “grand narrative”, or “metanarrative”, implies the proposal of a coherent, totalising narrative explanation of the world and of the course of historical events Examples of grand narratives are Christianity, Islam and Marxism The best- known challenger of this historical perspective is Jean-François Lyotard who, in identifying the “grand narrative” as characteristic of modernism, defines the

“postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives” in The Postmodern Condition:

a report on knowledge (transl Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi),

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005, xxiii

3 Jeffrey Olick’s notion of “national normalization” after a war depends on the concept of a “national historiography”, a concept that gained in popularity at the

end of the nineteenth century (Jeffrey K Olick, The Politics of Regret: on

collective memory and historical responsibility (New York/London: Routledge,

2007), 68-78, 112.) See also Heidemarie Uhl, “Culture, Politics, Palimpsest”, in A

Mnemosyne and Mars 7

understanding of other nations’ memories can provide a real sense of identity at a transnational or European level Above all, such approaches allow a more complex and subtle evaluation of the war that, as it recedes

in human memory, takes on aesthetic accretions that bring important nuances to the phenomenon of war As Stefan Berger observes generally

of studies on European memory:

[…] the most recent developments can be described in terms of a thorough historicisation, which aims at allowing for less dichotomous and more complex memories of the war years to emerge 4

Moreover, these more recent developments to which Berger refers question the relative roles of style, stylistics and poetics in representations

of war, including their reliance on myths, metaphors, on symbols and on stereotypes, in painting as in writing and in films Developing these concerns, the contributions to this volume advance further, querying the instrumentation of mimesis, and considering (ethically, politically and aesthetically) the limits of representation Around such issues, the international perspective of the volume allows its contributors to probe the extent of the very rich aesthetic and intercultural exchanges that characterise representations of war in Europe

Peter Tame/ Dominique Jeannerod / Manuel Bragança

War and Memory Research Group, based at Queen’s University Belfast

European Memory? Contested histories and politics of remembrance, eds

Maágorzata Pakier and Bo StrǗth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 83

4 Stefan Berger, “Remembering the Second World War in Western Europe

1945-2005”, in A European Memory? Contested histories and politics of remembrance,

133

P ART I:

A W RITER AT THE F RONT L INE :

A RMAND P ETITJEAN , W ITNESS TO W AR ,

Nouvelle Revue française from 1925 until 1940 and a major intellectual

figure of the interwar era in France.2 Petitjean is a neglected figure whose life and actions will be of interest to those working on war and culture for three principal reasons First, he remains relatively unknown, despite the very high esteem in which he was held by Jean Paulhan during the late 1930s Because of his self-imposed silence after the war, largely due to his proscription by the CNE (Comité National des Ecrivains) in September

1944, and the inclusion of his name on their blacklist, he fell into obscurity.3 However, following his death in 2003, and the publication of the letters he exchanged with Paulhan, it is possible to appreciate both the depth of their friendship and his contribution to intellectual activity Later

in his life, he took over the management of the family business, Lancôme, and, after his retirement in 1964, he became one of the founders of the trans-European ecology movement, Ecoropa

1 I wish to record my thanks to Clara Mure-Petitjean for her generosity in granting

me access to the Petitjean Archives

2 Jean Paulhan-Armand Petitjean, Correspondance 1934-1968, ed Martyn Cornick (Paris: Gallimard, 2011) Hereafter Corr JP-AP

3 The Comité National des Ecrivains was an organised grouping of Resistance writers in France, founded in 1941

A Writer at the Front Line



11

Secondly, it is important to appreciate the strength of his reaction to

the threat posed by the Anschluss in March 1938.4 I have shown elsewhere how this reaction was supported by Paulhan, and by Jean Schlumberger,

one of the founders of the NRF Between them they reoriented the NRF

politically, marking it out as profoundly anti-appeasement, anti-Munich, nationalist even This has a direct bearing too on Petitjean’s own intellectual trajectory Finally, it is enlightening to consider Petitjean’s

own role as a historical actor, as an archetype of the intellectual “en situation”, in the Sartrean sense, the writer-as-soldier His unit was one of

those to endure the most severe combat when the Germans’ attack began

on 10 May 1940 He never lost the urge to bear witness to war, to the War,

to explain what it meant for his fellow soldiers, what war meant for

France His own review, Le Courrier de Paris et de Province, was one

tangible result of this determination For the purposes of this introductory study, we shall present this “work in progress” in three parts: Who is Armand Petitjean, and how did he become “a man of genius” for Paulhan?

How did Petitjean and the NRF react to the Anschluss and to Munich in

1938? Finally, how did he bear witness to war, and what was the outcome

of his engagement?

Who was Armand Petitjean?

I have discussed elsewhere how and why Petitjean came to prominence

at the NRF.5 Suffice it to say here that in 1934, through André Gide’s friend Auguste Bréal, Paulhan recruited him, at the same time as Roger

Caillois, to rejuvenate the critical effort of the NRF.6 When they were recruited, Petitjean was still only 20 years old Before truly embarking on

his career at the NRF, whilst Caillois took the agrégation teaching

qualification, Petitjean had to fulfil his military service In the autumn of

1935 he joined the 8th Regiment of the Chasseurs à pied, based at

4 The Anschluss (which took place on 12 March 1938) was the annexation of

Austria by Nazi Germany, an event which signalled Hitler’s expansionist ambitions, in the lead up to the Munich crisis on September 1938

5 See Martyn Cornick, “Embracing Modernity: Roger Caillois and Armand

Petitjean at the Nouvelle Revue française”, in Nottingham Journal of French

Studies 50, no 3, Autumn 2011, 28-42; Martyn Cornick, “Voies et impasses en

littérature: Armand Petitjean à La NRF de Jean Paulhan”

http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document1722.php [accessed 2nd July 2013]

6 See Martyn Cornick, “Le renouveau critique à La NRF Roger Caillois et

Armand Petitjean”, in La Nouvelle Revue française Les colloques du

centenaire-Paris, Bourges, Caen (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 400-415

Forbach and Toul This experience, he would insist, was an intensely formative one, one which inspired his thinking on the status and importance of French youth He found himself with “young people from all over the place, from all walks of life in France; it is with them that for the first time in my adolescence I felt ‘good’.”7 For example, he maintained a correspondence with one of his comrades, Raymond Defente,

a worker from Lille, and he would draw on these personal, but also political, reflections in his later projects Military service did not prevent him from pursuing his ambitions as a writer: for his comrades he was

“Armand the Scribbler” [Armand le Scribouillard] He corrected the proofs of his first book, Imagination et Réalisation, undertook translations,

started new essays for some of the major contemporary reviews such as

Mesures, the NRF, Europe, and Esprit.8

Probably the most important essay to emerge from this experience is

“Disponibilité de la jeunesse française actuelle”.9 When it appeared in the

NRF in January 1937, it made a considerable impact, resounding like a

“manifesto”, according to the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and French Academician Louis Gillet (with Gillet, Petitjean shared a common interest

in James Joyce) Petitjean’s aim was to reveal to the French the importance

of the country’s youth, a new generation which was only now maturing and assuming its own political, sociological and cultural significance Here one can detect some of the intellectual bases of the mobilisation of youth which, later, would become so important for Petitjean and others under the Vichy regime This text, in some measure at least, conferred on Petitjean the status of spokesman for French youth (as many testified: cf Claude Roy, René Etiemble, Pierre Schaeffer, Raymond Abellio, and Jean-Paul Sartre).10

When his military service ended in October 1936, Petitjean needed to earn a living Paulhan engaged him as an editorial assistant to prepare the

new “Bulletin de la NRF” rubric Thus was his career launched As the

months went on he occupied more and more space at the review At the same time, Petitjean’s life in Paris became hyperactive Among the

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/french/french/BibliographieArmandPetitjean1.pdf [accessed 2 July 2013]

9 Corr JP-AP, letter 27: 72; letters 28 and 30: 73, 75

10 E.g., Jean-Paul Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, septembre 1939-mars 1940

(Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 207

A Writer at the Front Line



13

networks he frequented were Gaston Bergery’s “frontiste” movement;11 he

was present at meetings to develop Nouveaux Cahiers (with Auguste

Detœuf and Denis de Rougemont);12 as well as the “Travail et Nation” group, where he met Paul Marion and other colleagues whom he would encounter again after the Fall of France And from October 1937, he

became literary critic for Vendredi, the pro-Popular Front weekly, where

he befriended André Ulmann, with whom he would work later on his own review All this led Paulhan to report to Gaston Gallimard, in the summer

of 1937: “I wonder whether I’ve mentioned to you just how much

Petitjean is a man of genius; that he is perfectly sound and reliable; [ ] he

could become a great writer (and indeed he should) [ ] And I cannot overstate my admiration for him (At the moment he is revising for the foreign office examinations)”.13

How did Petitjean and the NRF react to the Anschluss

and to Munich, in 1938?

As Paulhan remarked, in the summer of 1937 Petitjean hoped to enter the French diplomatic service The family had contacts through both

Armand Petitjean père and Auguste Bréal; Jean Giraudoux was a friend of

the family Young Armand evidently nourished a deep admiration for Giraudoux who, at this time, was at the pinnacle of his dual career as a dramatist and as a roving cultural ambassador for France However, because of his political attitude Petitjean would have to abandon these

ambitions after the appearance of his April 1938 text in the NRF,

“Dictature de la France”, which “horrified” his teachers.14 Why was this?

On the international scene, the reoccupation of the Rhineland had already

sounded an alarm for the French, but much worse was the news of the

Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938 It is from this moment on that the NRF, which exercised an international political

influence of which Paulhan was fully aware, reoriented itself to follow an anti-appeasement line It was Petitjean’s article in April which marked this

11 Corr JP-AP, letter 52: 94 The Parti frontiste was a short-lived grouping

founded by Gaston Bergery and Georges Izard in 1936, and formed part of the Popular Front coalition

12 Where he published three texts on French “youth”; see Corr JP-AP, letters 54

and 80: 97, 117

13 Jean Paulhan-Gaston Gallimard, Correspondance, 1919-1968, ed Laurence

Brisset (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 146

14 Corr JP-AP, letter 169, 5 July 1938, 195

“Dictatorship of France over the French [Dictature de la France sur les Français]”, he issued a call to arms:

We don’t wish to die a pointless death, an ill-prepared death So we turn ourselves to confront the face of darkness, then the energetic and warlike face of our country: towards the great Jacobin tradition which makes war for the Nation, by and with itself in its entirety

With this essay Petitjean launched a crusade against what he perceived as the nation’s moral apathy and lack of preparation for war A crusade

which saw the NRF accused of making a sudden lurch to the right, and Petitjean of being a “nationalist brainwasher” (“bourreur de crâne tricolore”), even of fomenting “despair”.17 But then a few weeks later in September, in advance of the Munich crisis, came the general mobilisation: as a reservist, Petitjean was called back to Toul This was a revelation for him, as he confessed to Paulhan: “I’m delighted to have been able to immerse myself again on a completely equal basis in the mass

of my comrades”.18 After the Munich Agreement, Petitjean returned home, galvanised by his experience and absolutely determined “to act” What form would this action take? First of all, he was now convinced that France must surely change:

It is senseless to expect to find Paris in any way in the same state it was in

a month ago—considering that a few million men have been plunged into that marvellously popular form of meditating on death that can be engendered by a partial mobilisation 19

15 For further details, see the introduction to Corr JP-AP, esp 20ff

16 See Petitjean, “Dictature de la France”, La NRF, 1April 1938, 663-665

17 I.e the objections made by Maurice Heine to Paulhan, the exchange with Robert

Aron, in Bergery’s newspaper La Flèche de Paris (Corr JP-AP, 188-191); the

accusation of “despair” came in a long and interesting letter from Louis Blanchard,

the Esprit critic, dated 7 April [1938], Archives Petitjean

18 Corr JP-AP, letter 185, Sept 1938, 209

19 Corr JP-AP, letter 187, 2 Oct 1938, 211

A Writer at the Front Line



15

He resolved to embark on a new campaign of articles for the anti-Munich press.20 To bear witness to the “mobilisation seen from the inside”, he composed a “Prayer for our comrades after the mobilisation of September

1938” that appeared in November 1938 in the NRF, an issue whose

composition showed that the review was firmly anti-Munich, and therefore criticised as “bellicist”.21

Most important of all was his decision to form what he termed a “corps franc” [a volunteer corps]: “Those gentlemen of the Foreign Office, if they

carry on in the same vein, will force us towards that extreme form of

desertion that is a corps franc”.22 Paulhan pledged support: “If you

organise this corps franc, then by all means count me in (Yet I’d like to

know more about your conception of democracy).”23 Rejecting Paulhan’s suggestion that he might consider joining the Collège de Sociologie (for Petitjean, Roger Caillois, Georges Bataille et al were not apt for

mobilisation—“no-one among them is mobilisable”24), Petitjean’s action implied complete commitment: the abandonment of literature, the abandonment of a “normal life”, and finally, it meant mobilising support

and commitment for the “corps franc” by creating a review: this project, which led to the launch of the Courrier, was largely inspired by Charles

Péguy, and indeed, over the coming months, Petitjean worked toward the

creation of “new Cahiers de la Quinzaine” Barely a month after the mobilisation, he wrote to Paulhan on 4 November: “My corps franc: this is

more or less how it stands… it includes [Georges] Pelorson, for the content and the imaginative input, and [André] Ulmann, for the shape and the practical side I’m currently engaged in a search for financial backing”.25 He knew Ulmann from Vendredi, and Pelorson was a writer,

teacher and pedagogue, friend of Samuel Beckett and future founder of the

Equipes nationales under Vichy.26

20 See, for example, “Leçon d’une mobilisation”, Marianne, 9 Nov 1938;

“Mussolini et Bismarck Ce que le fascisme n’a pas changé”, L’Ordre, 10 Dec

1938

21 “Prière pour les Copains après la mobilisation de septembre 1938”, La NRF, November 1938, 757-760 See also Corr JP-AP, letter 187, 2 Oct 1938, 211

22 Corr JP-AP, letter 189, 24 Oct 1938, 213 Petitjean drew parallels with the

Freikorps units that emerged in Germany after the Armistice in 1919; see his

review “La ‘Victoire des vaincus’, Histoire de l’armée allemande depuis la guerre par Jacques Benoist-Méchin” in Vendredi, 8 April 1938

23 Corr JP-AP, letter 190, 26 Oct 1938, 214

24 Corr JP-AP, letter 193, 4 Nov 1938, 215-216

25 Ibid., 216

26 The Equipes nationales constituted the only major youth movement to be

organised by the Vichy government

In order to review briefly their actions until the outbreak of war, we must first note that Petitjean and Ulmann solicited support for their project The archives contain evidence of a sustained campaign.27 For example, in

November 1938, the socialist député Pierre Viénot congratulated Petitjean for his “Prière” in the NRF, and offered his support, even if he could not

contribute himself:

I believe that it would be most interesting for young men like you, of your generation, to have the possibility of expressing yourselves freely, and the format you have in mind seems very good to me Alas, however, I am completely unable to be of practical use to you Yet if you would like to come and talk with me informally about your project, I hardly need to tell you that I would be very happy to do so [ ] Your “Prayer”, in the last

issue of the NRF, is admirable.28

One of Petitjean’s most fervent supporters was Roger Ikor, a former fellow student at the lycée Condorcet For a time it seemed as though Ikor

would be a member of the “corps franc”, but it is conceivable that

politically he was too far on the left for Petitjean’s taste Commenting on a

draft that Petitjean must have sent him not long after the Anschluss, Ikor

wrote:

I almost thought our number was up this time [i.e the threat of war posed

by Hitler’s annexation of Austria] [ ] But I cannot really agree with your nationalistic exasperation, or at least not to the extent that you abandon the language of democracy However, like you I believe in the need for a dose

of Jacobinism […] But to argue for nationalism in and of itself, no! We must not forget our basic mission To believe in France, in its place at the head of civilisation and everything, to endow it as much as you like with

an expansionary zeal… 29

At this time Ikor was a teacher, and from his observatory in Avignon, he kept Petitjean in Paris informed of how his provincial colleagues were reacting to this initiative, and gathered information and kept an eye on

27 The archive contains letters from the following correspondents, among others:

Francis Ambrières (Aux Ecoutes), P O Lapie, Albert Demangeon, Brice Parain,

Simonne Ratel, Marie-Anne Comnène, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Robert Delavignette, and Claude Roy

28 Unpublished letter from Pierre Viénot, dated 8 Nov 1938, Archives Petitjean

29 Unpublished letter dated 25 March 1938, Archives Petitjean

A Writer at the Front Line

a prospectus reproduced in the NRF in February 1939, “believes in the

need for a national and popular revolution, national because it is popular

We shall depart from Péguy’s conclusions”.31 They would continue Péguy’s “limited” efforts, but would use modern propaganda methods There would be themed issues on the “Family,32 the Army, Professions, Teachers, Youth Organisations, Racism and France” and so on, essays by experts, and most importantly, “a number of popular testimonies which we shall obtain through our friends’ networks” The overall aim, they insisted,

in a phrase that has a clear Jacobin ring to it, was to “make the blood circulate simultaneously from the summit to the base and from the base to the summit.” And as we have suggested, Péguy’s ghost hovered over this enterprise, representing as he did the sacrifice of a generation when he was killed at the front in 1914 Petitjean himself paid tribute to Péguy in the

NRF in July 1939, to mark, obliquely as it were, the 150th anniversary of

the French Revolution After Munich, wrote Petitjean, “nothing is more reassuring than to see our Péguy, alive again, rise up close to us, as though solid enough to touch.”33 Because Péguy had managed to rally Dreyfusards and Catholics on the eve of the First World War, Petitjean, in

30 E.g.: “I was forgetting something really important I’ve just received a pile of

leaflets about Cercles Jeune France, L’Unité française and Vérité aux Français

The director is Jean Rivain […] They’ve produced pamphlets much like those you have in mind—coming out monthly more or less since the end of 1936-beginning

of 1937 […] It could be really important […] On Thursday or Friday I’m meeting

a propagandist from this organisation I’ll pass him your address for him to send you their material (that’s how they operate, getting addresses from people’s mates)”; Unpublished letter dated 12 March 1939, Archives Petitjean On Rivain,

see Corr JP-AP, letter 245 [after 22 May 1939], 271

31 “Pour de Nouveaux Cahiers de la Quinzaine”, printed prospectus [dated

janvier-février 1939], Archives Petitjean “Jean Guérin” (Jean Paulhan’s pseudonym) saw

this as “less of a programme for a review than the creation of an institution”, and concluded that “this should result in a call for a meeting of the Estates General”

[réunir des États généraux—a reference to the key stage at the beginning of the

1789 French Revolution]; La NRF, March 1939

32 This issue was planned to include studies by André Siegfried, Jacques Lacan, Paul Nizan among others

33 See Petitjean’s article “Péguy et nous”, La NRF, July 1939, 5-13 Here, Petitjean reprises ideas emerging from his book review “Souvenirs, par Charles Péguy”,

Reflets de la semaine, 8 Dec 1938

Finally, it is possible to trace the composition of the first issue Petitjean learned the hard lessons of composing a review There was disappointment when contributors failed to send their promised text.37

Paulhan lent solid support, including an approach to the Péguy family for

an unpublished text.38 The biggest problem arose when Mme Péguy

refused permission for them to use the title Nouveaux Cahiers de la Quinzaine.39 Ulmann agreed that it was worth changing the title to keep the review going.40 To maintain the Jacobin flavour of the project, they

settled on Le Courrier de Paris et de la Province In harmony with his

stated view in “Dictature de la France” to revive “the grand Jacobin tradition”, Petitjean realised that in 1790 the Jacobins quickly built up a network of correspondents throughout France, linked to Paris by a

“courrier Paris—province” and “province—Paris” [postal service between

34 “I am continuing to draft my pamphlet on the ‘New French Revolution’ [La

Nouvelle Révolution française]”; Corr JP-AP, letter 203 dated 10 Dec 1938, 228

35 For instance Georges Guy-Grand invited Petitjean to speak at the Union pour la Vérité, in the rue Visconti in Paris, sharing a platform with Georges Izard, Georges Duveau, Robert Aron and Georges Friedmann Unpublished letter dated 12 Jan

1939, Archives Petitjean

36 Armand Petitjean, “Introduction”, Combats préliminaires (Paris: Gallimard,

1941), 9

37 “As for the Cahiers, I’ve one problem after another After the General’s

unsatisfactory text, after Malraux pulled out, now Mme Péguy has just brusquely announced that she is not going to authorise the publication of these few pages My

first issue has been decapitated”; Corr JP-AP., letter 232, dated 6 April 1939, 260

38 See my article “Une ‘Voix de mémoire’ Jean Paulhan et la Nouvelle Revue

française face à la guerre”, in Paulhan: Le Clair et l’obscur Colloque de la-Salle 1998 (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 245-264

Cerisy-39 Unpublished letters from Pierre and Marcel Péguy, 19, 22, 27 Feb and 10 March, 1939; Archives Petitjean

40 In an unpublished letter, Ulmann stated that “Courrier suits me fine”, but also suggested “Témoins de France, Actes de Paris et de la Province, Actes des

Français”; dated 13 March 1939, Archives Petitjean

www.Ebook777.com

A Writer at the Front Line

mid-published in June by Europe.42 Here, he continued with his Péguy-inspired argument: “the condition of those fit for mobilisation is not just a state of fact, but also a state of mind And this state of mind was consecrated in last September’s partial mobilisation.”43 And at last, Petitjean’s first issue (which would be “number zero”) was taking shape: “Change of battery,

for the first Cahier […] I’m asking those who have preceded us in efforts similar to those we are making for the Courrier (by getting them to look at

our statements of principle and projected issues) to explain their disappointments and their hopes”.44 Entitled “Elements of a Generation—

An Assessment of Failings and Hopes [Eléments d’une génération—Bilan des échecs et des espoirs]”, it opened with a text by Petitjean and a response from Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, and included contributions from Léo Lagrange, Emmanuel Mounier, Hubert Beuve-Méry, Thierry Maulnier, Georges Izard, and others According to the introduction, among the principal aims was to draw a contrast between the statements, the voices, of the older generation(s) and the new As they had promised, the final section, “Correspondence”, contained brief comments from the grassroots, including Petitjean’s fellow-comrade from his military service, Raymond Defente, and substantial extracts from Roger Ikor and other teachers In a key passage explaining their “action”, Petitjean and Ulmann outlined their conception of the “Nation”:

41 See François Furet, “Jacobinisme”, in Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution

française, eds F Furet and M Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 752

42 “If I’m not called up, I’m going to give a lecture on 3 May [1939] at the Maison

de la Culture on the qualities of those apt for mobilisation It seems to me that when we have left for the front, we should delegate our police powers to the

veterans”; Corr JP-AP, letter 234, dated 12 April 1939, 262-263 The review

Europe published the lecture in its June 1939 issue, 156-171, and Paulhan noticed

it in La NRF, July 1939, 176 Roger Ikor’s commentary is noteworthy: “In any

case, the Communists are the only constructive party on the Left It’s very

interesting that your talk was published in extenso by Ce Soir” [Louis Aragon was

editor of this Communist evening paper]; unpublished letter dated 24 May 1939,

Archives Petitjean

43 “La Condition de Mobilisable”, Europe, 15 June 1939, 157

44 Corr JP-AP, letter 234, dated 12 April 1939, 262

It is only in the celebration of our national life that we may situate our own pure and vigorous conception of international life, and which a future Europe will need urgently: the idea of equality between races, of the human species Without the intense contribution of its provincial lives, never would the French nation have accomplished anything It is clear that this conception of the nation, a positive source for European energies, marks a definitive break at once with pre-war conservative or reactionary nationalism, and with post-war fascism In truth, all we are doing is re- appropriating from Maurras—and restoring its meaning—that version of patriotism that he surreptitiously stole away from the 1793 Jacobins […] Our nation can only be revolutionary 45

The review finally appeared on 20 July, printed in 10,000 copies However, its impact was not widely felt in the mix of indifference and confusion of the summer weeks of 1939 Petitjean himself, convinced that

the war would break out at Danzig, went to Poland to report for Marianne;

he produced at least two articles, but these were quickly overtaken by the declaration of war and remain unpublished.46

How did Petitjean bear witness to war, and what

was the outcome of his engagement?

This final part is necessarily more tentative as this is a summary of the work in progress There are three elements to develop: Petitjean’s experience in combat; how he composed his review; the final attack and his reaction to defeat

With the declaration of war Petitjean was mobilised again As we shall see shortly, Petitjean’s unit was highly exposed during the initial combats, leading Pierre-Frédéric Charpentier, one of the few critics to talk about Petitjean as a writer at war, to affirm that “he was the one most exposed to the war”.47 As Paulhan was evacuated with the NRF from Paris to

Normandy, their exchange, subject of course to the disruptions of wartime, presents a detailed record of contact between a writer at the “front” and his correspondent in the “rear” On 4 September, almost jubilantly, Petitjean wrote to Paulhan: “Since ‘Dictature de la France’ I don’t think I’ve got the

45 Le Courrier de Paris et de la Province, no 0, July 1939, 100-101

46 Unpublished typescript entitled “Dantzig et l’Europe”, dated 22 August [1939],

Archives Petitjean Marianne was an influential weekly newspaper, owned by

Gaston Gallimard, who launched it in 1932, and directed by Emmanuel Berl It supported the political Left in France, in particular the Popular Front in 1936

47 P.-F Charpentier, La drôle de guerre des intellectuels français (1939-1940)

(Panazol: Lavauzelle, 2008), 57

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21

situation wrong That’s meagre compensation for my foolish sense of fear

But what makes me really happy is that the Courrier and “La Condition de

Mobilisable” are actually being circulated around the battalion”.48 He determined to continue to bear witness

As for his unit, the 8th Battalion Chasseurs à Pied, it was engaged in

some of the most severe fighting, both between September and November

1939, and again in May 1940 In early September his regiment pushed into Germany to occupy a village (Kleinbittersdorf) on the German side of the Saar river At the beginning of November, his unit was still engaged with the enemy: “With our picks and shovels we are struggling against cannon, snow and the cold”.49 But the war soon stagnated, and Petitjean fell victim

to “le cafard”, or “the blues”, a mix of boredom and depression: “it’s not fatigue, but inactivity which is the killer.”50 Indeed he found the lack of action insupportable and in mid-February told Paulhan that he wanted to get back to the front line even if it meant leaving his own unit as a volunteer: “I’ve finally decided, after taking my second period of leave, to get back to the front line at the beginning of March, whatever the battalion might be doing (at the moment deployed on spectacular guard duties) […]”.51

What became of his review, the Courrier? His first specimen issue had

announced a special issue on the Army, but nothing appeared It was Paulhan, in fact, who wrote saying that he would look after the practical and technical side of producing the review.52 At last Petitjean announced that with the continuing help of Ulmann, who was also at the front not far away, he intended to prepare another issue of the review “As for the

material, it’s all there: but the most tricky thing is finding the best point of view”.53 Thus began the preparation of his next issue on “Bearing Witness

to the War”: “Témoignages de guerre” Although his time was necessarily

more limited, he proceeded to write to friends and comrades to collect his raw material

To try to compose a review at the front, having to contend with postal delays and the censorship, was nothing short of a Herculean task, spread out over six months of the Phoney War:

48 Corr JP-AP., letter 264, dated 4 Sept 1939, 287

49 Corr JP-AP., letter 286, dated 3 Nov 1939, 316

50 Corr JP-AP., letter 305, dated 7 Feb.1940, 341

51 Corr JP-AP., letter 306, dated 10 Feb 1940, 342

52 Corr JP-AP., letters 274 and 276, dated 9 Oct and 14 Oct 1939, 300 et

302-303

53 Corr JP-AP., letter 276, dated 14 Oct 1939, 303

The Courrier is making slow but sure progress through the incredible

vagaries of the postal service, and the absorption in the war of too many of our comrades Peignot must already have sent the cover page to the printer’s—but today I’ve just received the news of his death, which puts the company in the greatest difficulties I’m asking his successor for his prices, but doubtless it will be best to enquire elsewhere (once the question

of the censorship has been dealt with using a specific example), and I’m now doing so Do you have any suggestions? 54

By February he was aiming for “around 100 pages” in “10,000 copies, with half distributed by us and half by Hachette, for the end of March”.55

At the same time, Petitjean drafted another in-depth study, “Nous sortirons

de la guerre”, but this essay would only appear later, under Vichy, in his

book Combats préliminaires.56 Finally, in summary, at the beginning of May, he sent Paulhan part of the special issue, with half the witness statements, the correspondence, his own essay, and a study by Ulmann And he promised the whole issue would be ready for the printer by mid-May.57 But aware that time was passing quickly, on 8 May he agreed to let

Paulhan publish a selection from this issue in the NRF for June as it was

too urgent to wait for his own printer “In haste, replying to your note received Sunday Personally I have no objection to the reproduction you mention (on the contrary) I’m writing to my sister to complete the whole dossier for you—and at the same time will seek Ulmann’s agreement which won’t be a problem”.58 The dozen or so “témoignages” in the NRF

were censored, and we have located the galley-proofs in Paulhan’s archives

The quality and the variety of the testimonies are arresting: “In this war there can be no accusations of dilettantism in showing a wide variety of examples”.59 This is the raw material which will be reconstructed as completely as possible by the work in progress Despite the letters he lost

54 Corr JP-AP., letter 301, dated 16 Jan 1940, 334

55 Corr JP-AP., letter 305, dated 7 Feb 1940, 342

56 In this text, Petitjean would answer his own question: “What have we achieved

in five months of war? […] Trenches, leave, and inactivity…”; Combats

préliminaires, 139

57 “A little more than half the testimonies, and the ‘correspondence’ section”; the

article ‘Nous sortirons de cette guerre’, […] and a long piece by Ulm[ann], not

well structured and pretty badly written, as usual, but very pragmatic (it seems to

me)”; Corr JP-AP., letter 322, dated 1May 1940, 359

58 Corr JP-AP., letter 326, dated 8 May 1940, 363

59 Petitjean’s “Introduction” to “Témoignages sur la guerre”, La NRF, June 1940,

723-743 (723)

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A Writer at the Front Line



23

on the battlefield, nevertheless much remains in the archive It represents

an extraordinary treasure house of testimony, written over the months of

the Phoney War until the beginning of the Blitzkrieg There are letters

from writers, both well known, and those less familiar: Henry de Montherlant, André Malraux, Claude Roy, Henri Massis, Roger Caillois, Paul Nizan, Raymond Dumay; politicians, mainly anonymous, but including Georges Boris; a woman, Colette Max; teachers, both behind the lines and those “in the thick of the fight,” such as his friends André Chastel or Roger Ikor… It is a unique resource and offers a snapshot on the state of French troops’ moral just before the defeat of France The historian Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, describing the “recovery of the army’s morale in spring 1940”, insists that “the letter from the front

published in the NRF [for June; he mistakenly writes “May”] is truthful”

This letter is from “R L., a reserve adjutant in a regiment of the line”.60 Finally, on 14 May 1940, Petitjean was gravely wounded on the battlefield at Forbach He would lose two fingers of his right hand In another unpublished text dating from soon after his wound, “Wedding

Nights in Forbach” [Nuits de noces à Forbach], one can only be moved by

the symbolism of the last lines: “…Ssspaf a flame burst full in my phizog and then nothing for an eternity my watch stopped on the fourteenth of May at two in the morning…”.61 He also lost the manuscript of his text

“Nouvelle Révolution française”, and parts of the Courrier, losses which,

he insisted, would be fixed in “ten days’ time”, 62 but losses which were in fact irreparable There followed an extraordinary odyssey for this young man (still only 26 years of age), evacuated from hospital to hospital, having his wound infected; he finally ended up at Marseille on 9 July

1940 As for Paulhan, he had accompanied the caravan of Gallimard’s

NRF to Carcassonne, whereas Ulmann was already a prisoner of war For

Petitjean, the loss of all his hopes for a French recovery and the nature of the defeat itself left him profoundly embittered Already on 17 June, the day of Pétain’s call for a ceasefire, he wrote: “Today I swear that I shall do

my utmost to vanquish (after our bodies and our illusions) the spirit of defeat and cowardice which I’ve grown to hate with increasing

60 See J.-L Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’An 40, II, Ouvriers et soldats

(Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 514 We believe we have identified “R L.”: it is probably Roger Lardenois In the Petitjean archive we have located a partial typescript

61 “Ssspaf une flamme en plein’gueul’ puis plus rien pour un(e) éternité ma montre s’est arrêtée le quatorze mai à deux heures du matin ” ; unpublished typescript entitled “Nuits de noces à Forbach (mai 1940)”, Archives Petitjean

62 Corr JP-AP, letter 334, dated 28 May 1940, 369

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