Henri Barbusse

Before the war

Henri Barbusse was born on 17 May 1873 at Asnières-sur-Seine, outside Paris. His father, Adrien Barbusse, was a journalist and drama critic; his mother was English and died when he was three.

He published a book of poems, Pleureuses, in 1895, and three years later married Hélyonne Mendès, the daughter of the poet Catulle Mendès. He worked in journalism and then in publishing, as an editor at Hachette.

His early novels are decadent and pessimistic in the manner of the period. Les Suppliants appeared in 1903. L'Enfer, published in 1908 and translated into English as Hell, is narrated by a man in a Paris boarding house. He finds a hole in his bedroom wall and spends the book watching the room next door. Sex, birth, illness and death go past, observed and never interrupted. It sold well and was thought scandalous. Nothing in it predicts what he did next.

Volunteering

When war broke out in August 1914 Barbusse was forty-one, in poor health, and exempt from service. He enlisted in the infantry as a private and joined the 231st Infantry Regiment that December.[2]

He served for seventeen months in the front line, as a stretcher-bearer and a runner, and was cited twice for bravery. He was invalided out in 1916 with lung damage and exhaustion.

He kept notebooks throughout, and he was explicit that the novel came out of them: he had set out to record what he was seeing because he did not believe anyone at home understood it.

Le Feu

Le Feu: journal d'une escouade was serialised in the Paris daily L'Œuvre from August to November 1916, and published as a book by Flammarion late that year, while the Battle o[3]f Verdun was still going on.

It has almost no plot. It follows a squad of ordinary soldiers — a carter, a miner, a farm labourer — through mud, boredom, lice, cold, artillery and death, and it is written in their language, with the obscenity and the dialect left in. The famous chapter, The Dawn, ends with survivors lying in a flooded shell-hole arguing about what the war has been for.

Two things made it new. It described the physical conditions exactly, without heroism, at a time when official accounts did not. And it was published while the war continued, by a decorated soldier, which made it very hard to dismiss.

Le Feu won the Prix Goncourt in December 1916 and sold in the hundreds of thousands.

The argument about Le Feu

Not every reader accepted it. Nationalist critics said the book would damage morale and that no real squad had ever talked the way Barbusse's squad talks. Others complained about the last chapter, in which the survivors reach a political conclusion about who profits from the fighting, and said the argument had been bolted onto a documentary.

Barbusse did not dispute that the last chapter of Le Feu argues a political case. He had joined up to see the war, and he came out of it convinced that the men who fought it had nothing to gain from it. He put that conclusion inside the novel rather than saving it for afterwards.

Where he lived

Barbusse spent almost all of his working life in and around Paris. He was born at Asnières-sur-Seine, just outside the city, and from his twenties he worked in its newspaper offices and publishing houses. After the war he ran the Clarté group and then the paper Monde from Paris offices, and he spoke at meetings across the working-class suburbs.[4]

From 1919 he kept a house at Aumont-en-Halatte, in the forest of Halatte about fifty kilometres north of Paris, and wrote there whenever the political work let him. It was where he did most of his writing for the last sixteen years of his life, and the house is preserved.

Influence

Le Feu was translated into English in 1917 by Fitzwater Wray, as Under Fire: The Story of a Squad. Siegfried Sassoon read it that year while recovering in hospital and recorded that it hardened his determination to write about the war truthfully; his own public protest against the war's continuation followed.

Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929, comes out of the same territory a decade later, and the two books are usually discussed together as the point where the soldier's account displaced the official one.

Communism

Barbusse came out of the war a pacifist and moved steadily left. In 1917 he helped found the ARAC, a republican veterans' association, and in 1919 the Clarté group, an international association of writers and intellectuals against war; he published a novel with the same title that year. He joined the French Communist Party in 1923.

For the rest of his life he wrote and organised full time. He founded and edited the weekly Monde in 1928, published two books in 1927 presenting Jesus as a revolutionary — Jésus and Les Judas de Jésus — and campaigned against the rise of fascism in Germany. In 1932 he and Romain Rolland organised the World Congress Against War at Amsterdam; the movement that grew out of it, known as Amsterdam-Pleyel after its two meeting places, was his last large piece of political work.

He travelled repeatedly to the Soviet Union, and in 1935 published Staline, a biography that presents Stalin admiringly and is now read chiefly as a document of how Western intellectuals of the period wrote about him.

Death

Barbusse died of pneumonia in Moscow on 30 August 1935, aged sixty-two, while working on a second book about Stalin.

His body was returned to France by train. The funeral procession crossed Paris on 7 September and drew a crowd counted in the hundreds of thousands. He is buried at Père Lachaise, close to the Mur des Fédérés. In the decades that followed, French municipalities named a great many streets, squares and schools after him, most of them in towns with communist councils.

Why Henri Barbusse matters

Le Feu changed what a war book could be. Before it, the literature of war was largely written from outside the fighting or after it, in a register that made the deaths meaningful. Barbusse wrote from the mud, while it was happening, in the soldiers' own words, and refused the consolation.

Later accounts of infantry war used the form he built. Remarque, Sassoon and Céline's Journey to the End of the Night all give the ordinary soldier his own account, in his own speech, with no redeeming purpose supplied at the end.

After Le Feu

Soldiers wrote to Barbusse after Le Feu to tell him he had got the trenches right, which was part of why the book could not be dismissed as a civilian's invention.

As a communist he ran the literary pages of the party's daily paper, L'Humanité. He was in Moscow for a writers' congress in 1935 when he died there.