Les Champs d’honneur
One of 47 copies on vergé de Vizille, from the deluxe issue (no. 8).
Manuscript notes on the title page (“Prix Goncourt 1990”) and on the last page (“Septembre 1990, no 8”).
Jean Rouaud’s first novel (born 1952), Les Champs d’honneur surprised critics with its limpid, lyrical prose, rooted in a family memory bereaved by the Great War. Published in midsummer, Françoise Giroud wrote as early as August that “word is spreading, flattering, and resonating through the most powerful advertising network, word of mouth; some twenty thousand readers bought Les Champs d’honneur in a month, a considerable figure for the first novel of an unknown author.”
Critics were divided: some hailed a “miraculous” book that restored to literature its power of emotion and memory, while others suspected an “editorial coup” by Jérôme Lindon, head of Éditions de Minuit, in search of renewal after the successes of the Nouveau Roman and Duras. This controversy proved short-lived, as opinion was nearly unanimous. On 6 November 1990, on the first ballot and by near-unanimous vote (only two votes went to Philippe Labro), the Académie Goncourt thrust this unknown author, a newspaper vendor from the rue de Flandre, into the literary spotlight. Sales exploded (over 500,000 copies), securing another unexpected success for Minuit.
The text opens a novelistic cycle devoted to family and regional history, which gradually established itself as a meditation on memory, lineage and the passage of time. Les Champs d’honneur has certainly not aged and remains one of the great French texts of that decade, if not of the end of the century, on a subject nonetheless addressed many times before — the First World War.