La Guerre des boutons

“Cy n’entrez pas, hypocrites, bigotz”: the Rabelaisian epigraph Pergaud places at the head of his book sets the tone. The novelist claimed to have written a “healthy book,” at once “Gallic, epic and Rabelaisian, flowing with the sap of life” — a book of childhood memories recounting the martial exploits of two gangs of boys, one led by le grand Braque of Longeverne, the other by l’Aztec des Gués of Velrans. The spoils of war fought over by the two rival armies, consisting of trouser buttons and shoelaces, are ceaselessly and fiercely contested.

While the novel, published in 1912, set its forest skirmishes in the 1890s, Yves Robert, in his 1962 film adaptation, gave the story a contemporary setting at the time of the “end of the peasantry,” imagining that Lebrac runs away and lives for a time in the woods, hunted by the respectable townsfolk. Hiding in an oak tree that woodcutters fell, he tumbles down shouting “Vive la liberté!” Sent to a reformatory, he is reunited with l’Aztec and makes peace with him. This “Republic of children” already sensed the end of its state of grace: “To think that, when we grow up, we might be just as stupid as they are.” It should be noted that the famous line “Ah ben mon vieux, si j’aurais su, j’aurais pô v’nu!” does not appear in Pergaud’s novel but was invented for the film.

Mobilized in August 1914 in the French army as a second lieutenant at Verdun, Pergaud served in Lorraine on the Western Front. On 7 April 1915, his regiment launched an attack on the German lines: Pergaud, caught in the barbed wire, was wounded by gunfire. It is now believed that several hours later German soldiers came to his aid and took him, with several of his comrades, to a makeshift hospital at Fresnes-en-Woëvre, in the Meuse, which was then destroyed by French artillery fire. His body and those of his comrades were never found, and Pergaud still has no grave. A memorial stele commemorates him at Fresnes, while the two villages of the Doubs that inspired his novel, Landresse and Belmont, had his name inscribed on their war memorials — a final tribute from the two communes to the author of the fratricidal struggle of La Guerre des boutons.