SOURCE: de Pomerai, Odile. “An Unknown Giono: Deux Cavaliers de l'orage.” The French Review 39 (1965): 78-84.

[In the following essay, de Pomerai argues that one of Giono's last published works is an allegory for war and a condemnation of violence.]

The case of Jean Giono is probably unique—that of a writer who changed his “manner,” and changed it successfully, half-way through his career. As the Times Literary Supplement remarked in 1955, “from a distinctly sentimental lyricist of his native Provence, he has become a novelist of the greatest power and invention … one of the most important novelists in Europe.”

Giono's pre-1939 books fall roughly into two groups: the “peasant novels” which became with the years more and more tinged with Utopian ideals, and the “prophetic writings” which include a number of stories, essays and pamphlets, and in which the main goal is conversion of the reader to the author's philosophical and social ideas. The appeal of either group is primarily to the emotions. Giono's passionate imagination over-rides his intellect, both in subject matter and style. For this reason, his success in the Thirties was due to his influence on young people and to the unstable atmosphere of those years, crowded as they were with fears of war, struggle between rival ideologies and threats to democracy.

But Giono's influence and fame suffered a sudden and complete break at the onset of the 1939 war, and especially during the years of the Vichy régime. After the War, he remained, even more than Montherlant, smirched by the accusation of collaboration (“collaboration spectaculaire,” says André Rousseaux), by the virulent attacks of Communist writers (Tristan Tzara, in Les Lettres françaises, calls him “un romancier de la lâcheté”) and by the ban imposed upon him, among others, by the Comité Nationa des Ecrivains. Against these powerful forces, Henry Miller's view, in 1944 that Giono represented what was best and most alive in France, had no weight at all.

When Giono started publishing again in 1945, there was a deep cleavage between his new works and his pre-war productions. The impersonal ironical approach of Le Moulin de Pologne, the bitterness and complexity of Un Roi sans divertissement, the tantalising obscurities of Les Ames fortes repelled those who had yielded to the warm and rich humanity of the pre-war novels, or to their lyrical identification with Nature. On the other hand, unlike the socio-political effusions of 1936-38, the “new” novels, many of them called “chroniques,” deliberately turned away from modern times: their stories are placed in remote villages, un-named little towns, within a period only vaguely defined as “19th century.” During two decades of “littérature engagée,” Giono chose to ignore his own epoch. In this way, he neither recaptured his pre-war following, nor did he fully conquer a new public of significant size.

There are those, however, who persist in looking for other values in literature than contemporary messages or social propaganda, and among them, a number of French critics have been rightly fascinated by the phenomenon of a writer who had been able not merely to survive years of silence and neglect, but also to renew his style and his material. Post-war writings on Giono are filled with speculation as to the causes of this change, its extent, its genuineness, its value.

Pierre Boutang praises the new restraint of lyricism which “ne prétend plus à la complicité avec l'obscure profondeur du monde.” Marcel Thiébaut claims that, disillusioned and wounded by the war and its aftermath, the “second” Giono, “ayant rompu avec les hommes, se compose une vie stendhalienne dans un monde disparu,” which he discovers through books and documents and describes in his “chroniques.” Marcel Arland underlines the paradox of this career that goes “de la gloire au décri, du décri à la gloire.” He prefers “Giono déchaîné” and deplores the element of artifice that dominates the post-war novels, with the exception of Le Hussard sur le toit.

It is easy, however, to distinguish in the later books features that survive from the earlier ones. Giono incidentally claims that a number of the post-1945 stories were actually written at the same time as the pre-war novels. The outstanding example is Angélo, published in the NRF in 1953, and by Gallimard in book form in 1958. This is a “trial run” of the character who was to become the hero of Le Hussard—“un simple rapport de laboratoire, rédigé à toute allure pendant l'expérience même,” says Giono in the Preface—, a text written in 1934, when he was working on Batailles dans la montagne. The truth of this statement has been openly doubted; yet, is it so surprising? Batailles is a long, heavy book, for which, as the author admitted in 1954, he devised “un style boueux pour peindre de la boue” which is indeed “illisible.” It is easy to imagine Giono, weary of this tremendous murky creation, finding relief by contrast in reading his beloved Stendhal. From this to a kind of “pastiche,” an “essay” in writing like Stendhal, for diversion, for fun, is but a small step.

But Angélo is the germ of Le Hussard and the Stendhal influence is clear throughout. This does not account for the Chroniques not belonging to the Hussard cycle—those harsh, brutal, only half-explained tales of the countryside, where man's cruelty to man is shown relentlessly. Many years ago, in Colline, there was cruelty, but it came from the Great Pan, the “Il” that will punish men if they treat Nature unfeelingly: “Et s'il veut effacer les Bastides … quand les hommes ont trop fait de mal, il n'a pas besoin de grand-chose. … Il tient dans sa main la grande force.” But Un Roi sans divertissement tells of apparently motiveless murders, a kind of Dominici affair (the Drummond case) of one hundred years ago; through this, a good man is driven to recognise his own cruel tendencies and to kill himself, out of remorse, boredom or both.

Critics have made fun of Giono the pacifist taking delight in describing battle after battle in Le Bonheur fou, but in the Chroniques, the peaceable optimist who loved and trusted his peasant friends now seems to revel in the worst aspects of their character. This, however, is not so sudden a change as it might appear.

In her Giono par lui-même Claudine Chonez mentions a book called Les Cavaliers de l'orage which, says Giono, he is keeping in his drawers though it is finished. “Il ne veut pas le publier parce qu'il le tient pour raté et pas davantage le remanier parce que son style a trop changé.” The book's title indeed has long been on the list that Giono has kept over the years of his intended novels. It is mentioned by Michelfelder and Bernard Marion. But Giono is not quite truthful when he says the novel is not for publication. It has been published already.

The first chapter, under the title “Histoire des Jason,” is to be found in the NRF of December 1940, and it clearly belongs to the peasant stories, told by an unnamed narrator, but it is a fragment, almost deliberately left rough and jagged at the edges. This story of the Jason brothers' ancestry is no doubt largely imaginary, yet tales of eccentric characters in the countryside have a way of assuming gigantic proportions and becoming legends, even without the help of a creative writer like Giono. The Jason ancestor is shown going to a fair, and he stays away for nine years, part of which he spends in a gang of highway robbers. On his return to his native village, he wins for himself a bride of immense strength, after challenging her to a fight. Their two eldest sons are also renowned for physical prowess, but the younger is a weakling born seventeen years later. The Jason inn becomes a nest of smugglers which the gendarmes leave alone when they see the capabilities of the owner and his wife. The story breaks off at this point on a brief paragraph recording the death of the elder son in the war, presumably 1914-18, although this is far from clear. The second son returns, marries and looks after the young one now known as “Mon Cadet” after being “Notre Cadet” for years.

The novel, with the title Deux Cavaliers de l'orage, was published during the war in La Gerbe, the notorious collaborationist paper of Alphonse de Chateaubriant (La Brière), between December 3, 1942 and March 18, 1943. Incidentally, this publication, with one or two less significant articles about Giono, is the basis for the accusations of “collaboration spectaculaire,” and in particular for the repeated statements from Communist writers that Giono made a fortune out of, and wrote propaganda for, the Vichy régime. The interesting point is not, however, why Giono gave his novel to La Gerbe to publish: obviously no author likes to remain unpublished. Giono had never approved of the war anyway, and in 1941-42, when the decision must have been taken, the confusion in the minds of people living in the French Unoccupied Zone was at its height. Many thought in perfect good faith that Pétain was saving France even if they changed their minds later—which may be the case for Giono.

Pierre de Boisdeffre in his study of Giono published this year states that the story was published by Chateaubriant without the agreement of the author. Why this should have happened is not clear, but Giono is not always consistent in his own explanation of his past actions and ideas: indeed Boisdeffre's statement is the first time to our knowledge that the Gerbe publication has been openly acknowledged.

But motives for the publication are of small interest compared to the story itself. From beginning to end, it is a saga of mounting violence, both in men and in nature, and it is also a re-telling of the story of Cain and Abel.

Cain is Marceau, whose nickname “L'Entier” conveys well the powerful nature of this hairy stallion of a man. He is the eldest surviving Jason brother of the NRF story. Abel is “Mon Cadet,” whose real name is Ange; his sickly childhood has been protected by the gigantic strength of his brother. Now both are married and live with the old mother Ariane on Marceau's farm. At the opening of the story proper, both men go to a horse fair while the women at home deal with the newly-killed pig that will provide the household with winter meats. In the gory descriptions, counterpointed by the sensitive fears of Esther, Ange's wife, the atmosphere of cruelty and terror is established even before the action starts. This, unduly complicated perhaps by long descriptions of seasonal phenomena like storms and wheat-threshing, is centred on the evolution of Marceau's character as he becomes aware of his physical strength and of the use he can make of it to gain fame, money and power. At the fair, he, a horse dealer who loves horses, has to stop a run-away, excited horse, and he kills him with a blow of his fist. The upheaval of his mind is made clear in an apocalyptic speech, yet he regains his sanity by persuading himself that “je sais frapper quand je suis perdu.” He even tries to resist the challenge of a professional fair-wrestler. Nevertheless, in the end, despite swearing to abide by the rules and to fight only to measure their strength, the two men yield to their instinctive savagery. The contest is orchestrated like a barbaric poem, and Marceau wins.

For a while, his strength will be used to a good purpose: the “Cadet” is very ill with diphtheria and Marceau saves his life. But the taste for excitement has taken hold of him; he enters into a number of fights, all victorious. Again he imagines he has made his peace with his own urges: he feels he only wants to love, especially his brother, and to give him all he may desire. This is expressed in a lyrical lover's speech which is a reply to the Cadet's rising jealousy and succeeds for a while in smothering it.

Later, the Cadet, for fun, initiates a fight with Marceau and it clearly shows that fighting has a stronger lure than love. Even when once again the elder saves the younger's life, a latent hostility remains, and another fight brings Marceau to the point of defeat at his brother's hands. The battle is now merciless between the brothers, and in a rising tide of horror, Ange's garden is found torn up at night by a mysterious intruder, and Ange himself is found murdered and horribly disfigured. After the initial exultation of victory, Marceau-Cain runs away to escape his guilt, realising that he has killed what he loved and that he must die.

The story ends on a scene of wild sorrow when the old mother “keens” over the death of her son, where a single pathetic question crystallises the moral of it all: “Qui a gagné maintenant?”

This violent epic is of the same strain as Batailles dans la montagne and Que ma joie demeure. It has the same “outsize” kind of subject; the characters are sketches, but on a vast scale; nature itself seems to join in the struggle and add its own wild notes to the orchestration of the story. Some of the scenes have the apocalyptic character of the flood descriptions in Batailles. But there is also realism on a smaller, almost Flaubertian, scale: the killed pig is described with the loving care that Giono will bring to the cholera passages in Le Hussard. And the peasants are far from being idealised. Their brutality and taste for violence, their delight in savage pastimes and excitement, not merely ring true, but they link the cruelty of the wizard in Colline with the blood-thirstiness of the bored M.V. … in Un Roi sans divertissement.

Here, the taste for physical violence which critics have deplored in the post-war Gionos is given fuller rein than anywhere else. Yet it is not done for the sake of sensationalism. The intent is clearly moral: there can be no doubt that violence is shown here able, when unleashed, to corrupt even the noblest instincts of human nature. The near-complaisance in describing the fight-scenes again and again is part of the corrupting process. Psychologically, the tale is an attempt to make Cain understandable: the strong man who cannot help using his strength for evil once he has taken joy in using it victoriously.

This is no doubt a strange book to come from a man who, three years before, had gone to prison for not obeying a mobilisation order and for maintaining his pacifist protest in its integrity. But perhaps it marks the implied recognition by Giono that his youthful optimism, his faith in man, his belief that the noblest instincts would reliably lead mankind towards progress—in one word the idealism bequeathed to him by his remarkable father—had been mistaken. He saw in 1941 that he had entertained a blind hope, not an enlightened certainty. By 1935, it is true, he had begun to doubt the possibility of realising Utopia; that is the deep meaning of the death of Bobi at the end of Que ma joie demeure. But the war more than confirmed these doubts.

The war was violence erupting and corrupting despite the efforts of men of good will and the novel implies a recognition that violent instincts exist in everyone. For Giono, the writing of this story was a more or less conscious catharsis: he exorcised in it his fear of the violent forces he had so far pushed out of sight in himself. Deux Cavaliers is a great and courageous act of recognition of violence in man, a bitter acknowledgement of its presence. Thereafter, Giono could use it as material for his creative work. But for those who missed the vital link of Deux Cavaliers, the change in Giono appeared sudden and hard to explain.

There is, however, another aspect which seems inescapable in this work. It is also a symbol, a contemporary symbol. Giono has dismissed various “symbolical” interpretations of Le Hussard, especially American ones. Nevertheless he has also stated that Le Bonheur fou is, if not a symbol, at all events, a parallel to the 1944-45 events in France. Symbols in literature are of course of two kinds, the conscious ones—and Giono is not incapable of using them—and the unconscious ones, often much more revealing. Whatever Giono's avowed intentions may have been in Le Hussard sur le toit, it is certainly possible to look on it as an allegory of mankind faced with an overwhelming crisis. In Deux Cavaliers de l'orage, the symbol is even plainer.

The brothers are Cain and Abel of course, but surely France and Germany also. The recurrent fights, the desire at the start of each to keep the struggle honourable and decent, the invading corruption of violence, the blind reaching-out for domination and victory at all cost, no matter how or over whom, the final destruction of the best and noblest in both contestants, the death of love, and victory itself turning to futile ashes—“Qui a gagné maintenant?”—surely Giono was not writing all this without reference to his own times. Consciously or unconsciously, he was creating in Deux Cavaliers de l'orage his own apocalyptic, horrifying version of his own epoch. The best proof of this is that one hardly remembers the characters as such: they are forces moving inexorably towards their ends in a larger-than-life manner, which is of course the very effect produced by the sudden storms of history upon the observing mind. The storm carries the two horsemen to their destruction, in the way Giono, and others at that time, felt carried towards the disaster of war despite their protests and their struggles.

So that in one sense, this unknown novel, for all its brutality, is a warning against violence, a sermon about its deathly seductions, its corrupting power and its utter futility. It is the work of a deeply convinced pacifist thrown against his will into the savagery of a World-war.