10 - War and the Holocaust

Summary

Writing on war did not begin with the twentieth century. Far from it: the whole tradition of epic can be defined as, precisely, literature of war. Nevertheless it is only in our own century that it has expanded to become a major genre. There are of course nineteenth-century antecedents in French: best known, La Chartreuse de Parme, where Stendhal takes Fabrice del Dongo on a gratuitous excursion to Waterloo. But these pages, famous though they are, amount to less than a tenth of a very long novel. Zola's La Débâcle (1892) is the most important individual nineteenth-century novel devoted to the theme of war, taking in its sweep both the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune which followed. La Débâcle has acted as a seminal work, since many of the typical incidents of First- and Second-World-War narratives appear, if only in embryo, in its pages, together with the dominant theme of war as confusion, a humiliating shambles. And at the same time as presenting the war as experienced by individual characters, Zola succeeds in incorporating into his fiction a bird's eye survey of the conflict, almost from a historian's viewpoint, in a way no writer was to emulate until Jules Romains in the late 1930s. His description of the shattering defeat of the French armies at the hands of the Prussians prefigures, precisely, the even greater debacle of May-June 1940.