Les deux corps de Jules Romains

• Main Author: Augustin Voegele
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association Portugaise d'Etudes Françaises 2015-11-01
• Series: Carnets
• Subjects: Romains (Jules); pacifism; Verdun; account; fiction
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/carnets/432

Jules Romains did not go to the front, but he made an unremitting effort to fight against war. He wrote numerous essays and a long poem entitled Europe, where he enjoins European peoples to say no to the war. He also recounted the Battle of Verdun in Men of Good Will. He evokes the life behind the lines, but also in the trenches, and he succeeds in bearing witness to the war experience. He consulted public and private archives, and his literary empathy permits him to live intensely the life of an enlisted man as well as the life of a general. However, he does not want to glorify a war he did not make. That is why he splits himself into two characters. He has two fictional brothers: the first one stays in Paris, the second one goes to Verdun. This dissociation between the ordinary individual and the poet who is able to crystallize the universal psyche allows Romains to cause both the hymn to the soldiers’ courage and the elegy which deplores the war’s atrocity to resonate.