Ceux de 14
Ceux de 14 gathers Maurice Genevoix’s war narratives. A young student at the École normale supérieure, Genevoix joined the 106th infantry regiment in September 1914 and fought in the Argonne, notably at the Tranchée de Calonne, where he was gravely wounded six months later, on 25 April 1915, by three bullets, two in the arm and one in the chest. After seven months of treatment, he returned to Paris, to the rue d’Ulm, and, encouraged by the secretary general of the École normale supérieure, Paul Dupuy, with whom he had corresponded at length throughout that six-month ordeal, he agreed to recount his experience of the front and published Sous Verdun in April 1916. Nuits de guerre followed in May 1917, Au seuil des guitounes in September 1918, La Boue in February 1921, and finally Les Éparges in September 1921: a body of work at once historical and literary, ranking among the foremost published accounts of the Great War.
In 1949, Genevoix decided to bring them together, altering the division of his narratives and making some changes to the original text so as to form four narratives instead of five. “Ceux de 14 is an absolute masterpiece that reads like an ascent toward sacrifice and horror. Its summit is the battle of Les Éparges, the paroxysm of violence, one of the worst ordeals of 1914–1918 […] its extreme violence and the continuous bombardment of a confined position foreshadow the intensity of the battle of Verdun. The attention paid to the living men fighting beside him, more than a hundred of whom are precisely identified, gives this text an incomparable human depth, and its literary beauty was immediately admired,” writes the author Michel Bernard, author of Pour Genevoix (La Table ronde, 2011). Eight hundred pages, for eight months at the front. It is unquestionably the most extensive, precise and accurate testimony on the experience of combat.
Maurice Genevoix, elected to the Académie française in 1946, would from the 1950s onward be regarded by veterans of the Great War, and especially by those of Verdun, as their spokesman. General de Gaulle entrusted him with the task of creating the Mémorial de Verdun; upon his death in 1980, a national tribute was held at the Invalides. The success of this definitive edition extended well beyond the circle of the veterans of 1914, still numerous in 1950: it proved a genuine bestseller, going through numerous reprintings over the following decades.
The working notebooks and the complete manuscript of Ceux de 14 were donated by Maurice Genevoix’s grandchildren to the French state, entering the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France on 4 November 2020.
A week later, on 11 November, Maurice Genevoix entered the Panthéon, symbolically accompanied by “Ceux de 14.” Announced on 6 November 2018 by the head of state during a visit to Les Éparges (Meuse), site of the terrible fighting of 1915 where Genevoix was wounded, this double pantheonization had initially been scheduled for 11 November 2019, with a memorial planned in tribute to the poilus. No project having satisfied the President, and with the COVID crisis intervening, the decision was made to postpone the ceremony and align it with the centenary of the burial of the Unknown Soldier: on 11 November 1920, the tomb of this unidentified French soldier was installed beneath the Arc de Triomphe, prior to the entry into the Panthéon of Léon Gambetta (1838–1882), founding father of the Third Republic.
In total, seventy-six men and seven women currently occupy the vaults of the republican temple by virtue of their personal merit, whatever its nature. Maurice Genevoix is its seventh writer (alongside Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, André Malraux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and Émile Zola) — and the only one from the last century besides Malraux.
Of Ceux de 14, Maurice Genevoix had kept the original manuscript (now at the BnF), two working copies and several copies of the first edition. This copy is one of them.
From the library of Maurice Genevoix, at “Les Vernelles,” with bookplate.