French Literature of the Great War (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PERIOD OF PHILOSOPHICAL AND POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS SUGGESTED BY THE WAR (MORE ESPECIALLY SINCE THE BEGINNING OF 1917) I. THE POEERUNNEES It will be well to remind the reader at this stage that our division of war literature into three periods, each having its predominant character (patriotic lyricism, documentation, and philosophical considerations), was meant as a rough classification for convenience in handling, and in no way implies that the periods succeeded each other without overlapping. There has been since 1917, a marked tendency to examine systematically and dispassionately the ethical, social, and political problems now confronting the world and, more especially, France. But a study of the philosophical works dealing with the world crisis would be very incomplete and inadequate without an introductory brief survey of earlier efforts in that direction. Indeed, some most striking pronouncements were made not only prior to 1917, but prior to the war itself, and often by many years. And some of the authors whose views have attracted public attention since 1917,?because the public is now better able to appreciate them,?not only held the same views which they now do, but had already expressed them in various publications long before that date. Let us first recall one of the earliest of those prophets: Edgar Quinet, who died in 1875. That remarkable seer, nearly a hundred years ago, i. e., in the thirties and forties of the nineteenth century, had warned his countrymen in unmistakable terms of the impending evil which came to a head in 1914. Quinet 'a writing had sunk into oblivion; but he has, at last, come to his own through a book in which the author quotes the most striking of his prophetic utterances: Paul Gaultier, Edgar Quinet, edition...