The dominant hypothesis to be questioned is that of a profound and decisive break on many levels, notably literature, between the year 1913 and the period that begins with the Great War. Is this, as some tend to say, a change of era, or even the true end of the nineteenthcentury ?
The writers and artists who had made their mark in 1913 would all be affected by the war. These biographical facts, or the fact that the lines from Péguy's Eve, " Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre charnelle...", were soon parodied, for example in Barbusse's Le Feu , seem to confirm the conventional wisdom about the sudden suspension of the modern and international movement in August 1914. And it was a literature of generally more conventional forms that was written and published during the war, even when it was an expression not of warmongering and heroism, but of pacifism or despair. War literature went hand in hand with a certain classicism or academicism, starting with Edmond Rostand's famous sonnet La Cathédrale, composed as early as September 1914 and dedicated to the destruction of Reims Cathedral.
Among the novels, the biggest bestsellers, such as Barbusse's Le Feu and Dorgelès's Les Croix de bois , quickly elevated to the rank of classics of the genre, acknowledged their debt to the naturalism of Zola(La Débâcle) and Maupassant, which had been considered outdated just a few years earlier. To describe daily life at the front, the "slice-of-life" style, which had been fashionable in the 1880s, took over. Without going as far as the Germanophobia of some, such as André Suarès, this French war literature, whose return to order certainly coincided with the war and national effort, seems to have been more conventional than others during the conflict. Thibaudet, when evoking this academicism, compares it to the classical literature that paradoxically continued during the upheavals of the Revolution and Empire.
The relative conventionalism of French literature, which even continued into the 1920s, contrasts with English literature, in which there is a well-established genre of war poetry, with works constantly republished and read to this day by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves. French literature, where war poetry is a forgotten genre with the exception of Apollinaire and Cendrars, has not seen for long enough works as disturbing as Jünger'sOrages d'acier , Remarque's À l'ouest rien de nouveau , Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, or the tales of the American Lost Generation (Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cummings). The English and American literatures of the 1920s, taking note of the war to transform themselves, seem more modern than French literature.
Yet their themes, whether patriotic or pacifist, are strikingly similar across language and cultural boundaries. It's the same experience of modern industrial warfare, where we are killed far more than we kill, and killed without seeing the enemy, by shells, grapeshot or gas. This uniformity of war stories suggests a kind of paradoxical extension of modern pre-war internationalism through the globalization of the horror experience. 1913 would not seem so remarkable if the war had not provoked a return to academic traditions and national forms. And the revival of modernity in 1918 was the work of a new generation, that of Dada and Surrealism, which made little mention of its war experience. The modernity of Breton, Éluard and Aragon, all of whom had experienced war, was achieved through the denial of this experience.
