Politics in the novel: Céline and Drieu
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
See all videos for this article
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey
to the End of the Night) and Mort à credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were radically
experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of repressive
authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and across
continents. With hindsight, Céline’s novels can be seen as portraying the preparation of the
common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such, they were read
for a long time in that light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets,
Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École des cadavres (1938;
“School for Corpses”). During World War II he was an active collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugène Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the young
French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and despair in the
1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Drieu’s
example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author of Notre Avant-guerre
(1941; “Our Prewar”), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach, contributed during the
Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin’s decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. André Gide’s adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans.
Antoine Bloyé). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his espousal of
Socialist Realism, published his own account of society’s move from capitalism to more-
emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read
were the novels of André Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and glamour of
revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s Fate) depicts the communist
uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope) is a lyrical and epic account of
the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among revolutionary
factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; “Voyage to the
Congo”) and Retour du Tchad (1928; “Return to Chad”; trans. jointly as Travels in the Congo)
and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie). Henry de
Montherlant’s L’Histoire d’amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not published
until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of a nationalist
officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s Albert Camus, still in
his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on Alger-Républicain, was starting to
make his voice heard.
Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern city.
Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed by
Breton’s Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that joins the
beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris.
François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse
Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the romance and thrill
of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French psychological novel to evoke the
banal desolation of characters deprived of God’s grace and stranded in a desert of provincial
middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing more explicitly on Catholic dogma and
symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d’un curé de campagne [1936; The Diary of a
Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur
des bien-pensants (1931; “The Great Fear of the Conformers”) is a blistering attack on bourgeois
complacency; Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938; “The Great Cemeteries in the
Moonlight”; Eng. trans. A Diary of My Times) denounces General Francisco Franco’s Falangists.
The tradition of the family novel was continued by Roger Martin du Gard’s novel cycle Les
Thibault (1922–40). A different kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union
action, was described by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La
Maison du peuple (1927; “The House of the People”). Guilloux’s Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter
Victory) is an even bleaker depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les
Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–46; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved
into the history of the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension
connecting isolated individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night
Flight) was a popular adventure novel.
Poetry
Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did
Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In
such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’s free verse plays
innovatively with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as
on images. The poet’s own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux’s prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. René Char’s work exalts the mystical
forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its twisted
vegetation. Jules Supervielle’s poetry of the 1920s and ’30s conjures up the mysterious spirit
animating animals, plants, and objects.
Theatre
Find out about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William Shakespeare's
Romeo and JulietLearn about Jean Cocteau's Surrealist stage production of William
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as depicted in the book Roméo et Juliette (1926).
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The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau’s tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a literary
and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage design; and they
tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class audience. The plays
produced for this theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early
Jean Anouilh—have aged less well than the innovations in staging. Giraudoux’s La Guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates) has remained famous for
its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and the inevitability of war.
Cocteau’s best contribution was his merging of theatre with other arts (including music) and
spectacle, a mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the
stage (Orphée [stage version 1927, film version 1950; Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back
onto the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac’s black comedy Victor;
ou, les enfants au pouvoir (1928; “Victor; or, Children in Power”). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit
in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double),
now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence only after
republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist
turned religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the
start of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; “Break of Noon”)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L’Annonce faite à
Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel’s experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the absolute
presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is an account
of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace pursues the
characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1930; The
Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the two halves of
the globe. Claudel’s moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his work by the
great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and the dramatic
heights of violence and passion it attained.
