Ceux de 14
Ceux de 14 brings together 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 severely wounded 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 Paul Dupuy, secretary general of the École normale supérieure, with whom he had corresponded extensively during those six months of ordeal, he agreed to recount his experience of the front and published Sous Verdun in April 1916. It was followed by Nuits de guerre (May 1917), Au seuil des guitounes (September 1918), La Boue (February 1921), and finally Les Éparges (September 1921): a body of work at once historical and literary, ranking among the foremost accounts published of the Great War.
In 1949, Genevoix decided to bring these texts together, reorganizing their divisions and making some changes to the original text so as to form four narratives instead of five. “Ceux de 14 is an absolute masterpiece, reading like a climb toward sacrifice and horror. Its summit is the Battle of the Éparges, the paroxysm of violence, one of the worst ordeals of 1914–1918 … the continuous bombardment of a narrow position prefigures 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 admired immediately,” writes Michel Bernard, author of Pour Genevoix (La Table ronde, 2011). Eight hundred pages, for eight months at the front: unquestionably the fullest, most precise and most accurate account of the combat experience.
Maurice Genevoix, elected to the Académie française in 1946, was thereafter regarded, from the 1950s on, as the spokesman of the veterans of the Great War, and especially those of Verdun. General de Gaulle entrusted him with overseeing the creation of the Verdun Memorial; upon his death in 1980, a national tribute was held at the Invalides. The success of this definitive edition went far beyond the circle of veterans of 1914, still numerous in 1950: it proved a genuine publishing success, reprinted repeatedly over the following decades.
The working notebooks and 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 President of the Republic during a visit to Les Éparges (Meuse), site of the terrible fighting of 1915 where Genevoix was wounded, this dual pantheonization had originally been scheduled for 11 November 2019, with a memorial planned in tribute to the poilus. As no design satisfied the President, and with the Covid crisis intervening, the ceremony was postponed to coincide 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 rest in 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 of the last century besides André 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, which he kept in his study-library at Les Vernelles, his home on the banks of the Loire near Orléans. This copy is one of them.
The deluxe-issue copy kept by Maurice Genevoix himself.