Civilisation

By mid-December 1914, Georges Duhamel — then still a practicing physician — wrote to his wife: “I shall owe it to the war to have emerged from my usual hole and to have seen an enormous array of characters that nothing could have prepared me to imagine.” These early impressions led him to write Vie des martyrs, published in April 1917, a book praised by Maurice Genevoix in L’Europe nouvelle in January 1918. A year later, Duhamel followed it with Civilisation, a more ambitious and more novelistic work, in which he broadens his subject through several narrators. It is no longer simply a matter of bearing witness, but of reflecting on what war does to humanity. The physician’s compassion is joined by moral disillusionment, even despair, in these texts written from the ambulances behind the front lines.

On 11 December 1918, Civilisation was awarded the Prix Goncourt, beating Koenigsmark by Pierre Benoît, Les Silences du colonel Bramble by Maurois and Simon le pathétique by Giraudoux. Following this literary recognition, Duhamel abandoned medicine for good. The book was published under the pseudonym Denis Thévenin, for reasons never fully established — Duhamel signed most of the review copies under his real name.

Jean Norton Cru, in Témoins, expressed reservations about the book, questioning the veracity of certain episodes and accusing the author of a degree of aestheticization: “Did the author not play too insistently on the string of pity, for literary purposes, with the intention of producing successful set pieces?” Nonetheless, Civilisation remains one of the most important accounts of a physician’s experience during the Great War.

In August 1940, Civilisation was banned and placed on the Bernhard list, before Duhamel’s entire body of work was placed on the Otto list. At the Liberation, Duhamel joined the Comité National des Écrivains, from which he resigned in 1946, disapproving of the excesses of the Épuration.

This printing for “Les XX” does not carry the printer’s statement of the first edition, but only that of the Imprimerie Roy of Poitiers. Like all titles published by this society of bibliophiles, it is signed by the author — who signs “Georges Duhamel.”