Octave Mirbeau’s biting 1888 satire ‘Tomorrow’s Gaiety’ savagely mocks Captain Driant’s militaristic novel through dark irony, lamenting the death of French wit while pretending to celebrate a book that finds joy in warfare and destruction.
He shows us in no less captivating fashion the destructive effects of the Lebel rifle and torpedoes. —Chincholle
For ages now, we have been clamouring for a book to unknit our gloomy brows; a book to rouse that French gaiety once so vibrant, now so dismally slumbering amongst the brambles of pessimism; a book to resurrect the jolly songs of our fathers, the Mères Godichon, the Evohé, the Zon, Zon, Zon, the Tra déri déra; a cheerful book, in short, brimming with that hearty, robust cheer that makes one, strolling home at night, unhook shop signs in the streets and hang cats by their paws from the door-pulls of bourgeois doorbells—all those marvellous larks that earned our dear country such a reputation for charming wit and delicate allure, as that German philosopher so flatteringly put it: “Other countries have monkeys; Europe has the French—it all balances out.”
Alas, no, it doesn’t balance out anymore.
We must face facts, however much it pains our French-European pride: we have lost the genius of our race. Since Paul de Kock and Désaugiers, those last true Gauls, we have been thoroughly denationalising ourselves. Under the influence of God knows what perverse literatures, what bleak philosophies, we no longer unhook shop signs, we let cats yowl freely in Schopenhauer-tinted moonlight; and doorbells themselves no longer even have door-pulls. Those illustrious chroniclers who were, are, and shall be great sociologists—being all great unhookers of signs—will tell you this is a worrying social phenomenon, and that peoples are no longer peoples, properly speaking, when they cease to engage in these general exercises that elevate hearts and fortify minds.
Let’s have the courage to say it: the disease runs deep; perhaps it’s even incurable, for science is undermining us and intellectuality has us in chains. We think. It’s ghastly to admit, but we think. Yes, that’s what we have come to. All of us, or nearly all, are devoured by this cerebral and demoralising vermin: thought. Poets think, novelists think, painters and sculptors think, and—God help us—philosophers too. Only politicians and the military have escaped this universal plague. But what does that amount to? Shakespeare invades our theatre, and before him retreats and freezes the laughter of operetta; Dostoevsky and Tolstoy drape a Cossack shroud over Béranger’s rhymes, O fatherland… over M. About’s complete works, O Voltaire… One more year of the Théâtre Libre and France will no longer be France, and the French will no longer be French. Can this really be happening?
Anything is possible.
We have had—we still have—a comedy, Les Surprises du divorce, a play where they mock mothers-in-law, I believe, and which, by this unheard-of feat, nearly brought us back to true national traditions. Darwin, Claude Bernard, Spencer were forgotten for a few days, and M. Taine was quaking in his boots. France breathed again: she had witnessed the rebirth of laughter, her own laughter, her dear laughter she had thought dead. Then enthusiastic critics predicted historic and miraculous things: the union of parties, the reconquest of Alsace, the pulverisation of Germany, the instant crumbling of the Triple Alliance. By some surprising phenomenon that will remain unexplained, these prophecies failed to materialise. At the same time, Mme Victorine Demay, who could have done everything for the nation’s recovery, went and died, her work unfinished. It was a crushing disappointment. Everything collapsed again. The dreary analysis beloved of that fantasist Stendhal triumphed. Thus had Bismarck willed it, who, true to his reptilian politics, not content with bribing spies amongst us, had subsidised the corrupting arts and stuffed the degrading psychologies with gold. I appeal to Mme Edmond Adam, who knows these dark secrets.
So, we were demanding a book that would do what the betrayed play couldn’t, what the dead song couldn’t. We demanded it without hope it would ever come to cheer our saddened spirits and comfort our decadent souls. Well, that book has arrived. We have it. It’s called: Tomorrow’s War.
First off, the title—Tomorrow’s War—reassures, and the name—Captain Driant—promises. The sixteen magical letters that dance and laugh gaily on the hilarious cover dispose even the most reluctant to joy. As for the captain, is it rash to suppose that, being General Boulanger’s son-in-law, he might also be a Boulangist? I think not. Boulangism is, in itself, a jolly thing, and amongst the extraordinary and unknown surprises its advent has in store for us, we must count gaiety first and foremost.
Tomorrow’s War is therefore—at least one may imagine—merely a description of the particular festivities a military man wishes to offer us, one whose sabre has wit and who rallies Déroulède to his plume. Thus the idler stops at bookshop windows, eye fascinated, lips eager, face beaming all over. Now, it seems the book delivers infinitely more than the title and author’s name promise. From the very first pages, where there’s talk of nothing but death, massacres and fires, you sense this is going to be prodigiously funny, so funny that everyone’s already holding their sides, unbuttoning their bellies, already shaken by the swells of a surging gaiety that M. Maurice Barrès hadn’t foreseen when he consecrated the general in his delicate glosses.
The pages unfold, chapters succeed one another, burying the dead, piling up ruins; and the laughter intensifies. Now it’s squadrons sinking, entire cities exploding like champagne corks, forests falling like wheat fields under the scythe; armies of men and horses littering the earth, their entrails scattered, filling with their shattered limbs the chasms carved by melinite, that sublime prankster; it’s also balloons colliding in the air, cannons thundering, axes raised, from which fall clusters of headless, armless, legless soldiers, irresistibly funny in their aerial and side-splitting mutilations, and it’s also the amusing procession of carts full of wounded, the jolly carnival of ambulances, whence spring the spirited banter of death rattles and the farcical repartee of agonies.
With every line, laughter runs, grows, explodes. It ignites at shell percussion caps, at cartridge fuses, at torpedo guide wires, at flaming mine fuses, at the discreet and profound jovialities of Lebel rifles. At one point you can’t distinguish bursts of laughter from bursts of shrapnel. They merge into an enormous and charming gaiety that seduces and comforts at once. Then it becomes delirium, intoxication, something strong and delicious that tickles your palate, expands your brain, caresses your belly, delightfully. If one didn’t have the prospect of dying a near death a thousand times funnier, crushed by melinite, reduced to bloody pulp by jubilant projectiles, one would want to die laughing.
The rare thing about this adventure, what makes it so originally meritorious, and also what critics warmly praise the author for, is that, unlike those “boring” writers who have spoken of war in a rather sad way, with foolish misgivings and outdated pities, Captain Driant has sown throughout his work a frank, broad, unaltered gaiety, an irreproachable gaiety that never lapses into irony—which would have been bad form for a captain—nor into humour, for humour often retains an aftertaste of bitter sadness and disenchantment that a truly jolly man must know to avoid. And then this book arrives at just the right moment. Though, children of a barbarous age, we are educated in schools where teaching national hatred is called civic education, we are beginning to wonder what war wants with us, what its defeats cost us, what even its victories cost us, and why the frontiers that separate men must always be marked with a purple line, bristling with iron and closed by cannons.
An instinctive feeling of revolt, maintained by free writers and philosophers, enters our souls against the brigandage of the shepherds of peoples, and millions of human beings, tired of giving their lives for territorial, diplomatic or financial schemes they understand nothing about, cry out: “Peace, disarmament! We want to work, we want to love, we want to live!” Obviously, this is a dangerous symptom of melancholy, and these poor people understand nothing about gaiety. Captain Driant wants us to be jolly, and it’s to react against the dangers of our sadness, which carries us towards dreams of ideal humanity, that he has written the captivating Tomorrow’s War. Finally, here’s literature, and such as we have long awaited. It will console us for the dreary reading we have grown accustomed to from unscrupulous psychologists who don’t know how to laugh whilst interrogating life’s pain and death’s terror. And if, after all this, laughter still resists torpedoes, mine warfare, balloon battles, the frightful and hilarious destruction; if gaiety sulks before the massacres of young men, before empty hearths where grieving old mothers weep, it’s because we are a people definitively closed to joy, a rotten people, and there’s nothing more to be done with us, not even make us MPs.
Octave Mirbeau, Le Figaro, 13 December 1888
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 