Les Taxis de la Marne
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Maurice Genevoix qui sait ce que c'est, lui, que la gloire militaire, en respectueux hommage. Jean Dutourd, 6 nov. 1963.”
In this satirical novel, Jean Dutourd imagines France invaded by the American army and responding with a mobilization as burlesque as it is symbolic: that of the Parisian taxis. Deliberately anachronistic in tone, the fiction critiques hollow patriotism and jingoism in a vein of ironic antimilitarism.
The inscription to Genevoix plays on this contrast: Dutourd recognizes in his elder the authentic embodiment of “military glory,” which he implicitly opposes to the deliberate derision of his own narrative. Where Genevoix treated war with painful gravity, Dutourd subverts its signs the better to question its deeper meaning.
Jean Dutourd joined Maurice Genevoix at the Académie française in 1978, in seat no. 31, previously held by Jean Guitton. His wit, humor and passionate defense of the French language (he was notably a member of the Haut Conseil de la Francophonie) made him one of the most prominent Academicians from the 1980s to the 2000s. In a style very different from Genevoix’s, Dutourd nonetheless carried on a certain tradition of the learned French writer engaged in public life through the written word.