Leon Werth

Its life

It was born in 1878 with Remiremont in the the Vosges in a comparable Jewish family. His/her father was clothier and his mother resulting from the Picardy minor nobility. He is a brilliant pupil, Grand Prix of philosophy to the open Competition and studying in Hypokhâgne with the Lycée Henri-Iv. He gives up nevertheless his studies to be a chronicler in various reviews. Carrying out the bohemian life, it is devoted to the writing and with the criticism of Article Très close to Octave Mirbeau, the author of the Newspaper of a chambermaid , to which he is to some extent the heir, he appears by its anticlericalism, its spirit very independent, antibourgeois and libertarian. It misses little the Prix Goncourt in 1913 for its novel the White House , that Mirbeau prefaced and supports indéfectiblement to the thirteenth turn. In 1914, it leaves for the face, where it will fight for 15 month before being wounded. There will remain marked by this war becoming pacifist convinced. It draws from it an account, Clavel Soldat , pessimist and violently anti-war. Appeared in 1919, the work makes scandal. Unclassable writer, with the acid feather, it as well writes in the years of the interval wars against colonialism ( Cochinchine in 1928), with counter-current of the colonial mode of this period ostentation of the French empire, as against the Stalinism whose this man of the left denounces imposture. He will criticize also the rising Nazism. In 1931, it meets Saint-Exupéry: it is the beginning of a great friendship. This last will dedicate the Petit Prince to him. During the Occupation, it will be folded up in the the Jura. In its newspaper Deposition , published in 1946, it delivers a damning testimony on the France of Vichy. He dies on December 13rd 1955 in Paris.

33 days , a posthumous publication

33 days is a short account hot written a few weeks after the rout of 1940. Leon Werth tells his escape of Paris there towards his house of Saint-Love in the the Jura. An account of a great acuity over this period when France is reduced so that it qualifies “kingdom of the mattress”. The manuscript, entrusted as of October 1940 to his/her friend Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is given by this one to an editor of New York, where his trace is lost. It is only in 1992 that Viviane Hamy discovers it and publishes it. This editor allowed to redécouvrir this writer by republishing several of her works in the years 1990 and 2000. The various demonstrations organized in 2005 for the fiftieth anniversary of its death gave this writer to the last style.

Principal works

the White House , foreword of Octave Mirbeau (1913)
Clavel soldier (1919)
Clavel in the majors (1919)
Yvonne and Pijallet (1920)
Voyages with my pipe. Brittany and countryside, Paris, suburbs, province, Belgium and Holland, Europe and America (1920)
the invisible Lovers (1921)
Nineteen years (1922)
Some painters (1923)
Cochinchine (1925)
Dance, dancers, dance halls (1925)
Court of Assizes (1932)
Painting and the fashion, forty years after Cézanne (1945)
Deposition/Newspaper 1940-1944 (1946)
Saint-Exupéry, such as I knew it (1948)

; Posthumous publications

33 days (1992)
Barracks 1900 (1993)
Impressions of audience, the lawsuit of Pétain (1995)
Le Monde and the city (1998)

Quotation

It returns to me on Pétain an anecdote, which, if I had remembered it earlier, had saved much useless psychology to me. Few years after the war of 14, the Brasseur sculptor had had the ordering of a memorial for I do not know which city of North. One showed the model with Pétain of it: a group of soldiers and an officer. “It is beautiful, says it, but it is necessary to make the officer larger than the men| Deposition/Newspaper , April 1942

The dedication of the Small Prince

The name of Leon Werth appears in preamble to the '' Petit Prince '' that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry dedicated to him.

In Leon Werth.
I am sorry to the children to have dedicated this book to a large person. I have a serious excuse: this large person is the best friend than I have in the world. I have another excuse: this large person can all include/understand, even the books for children. I have a third excuse: this large person lives France where it is hungry and cold. She needs to be comforted. If all these excuses are not enough, I want to dedicate this book well to the child who was formerly this large person. All the large people initially were of the children. (But little of them remembers it.) I thus correct my dedication:
In Leon Werth when he was little boy

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