Léon Werth

Léon Werth (17 February 1878, Remiremont, Vosges – 13 December 1955, Paris) was a French writer and art critic, a friend of Octave Mirbeau and a close friend and confidant of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Léon Werth wrote critically and with great precision on French society through World War I, colonization, and on French "collaboration" during World War II.

Werth was born in 1878 in the Remiremont, Vosges, in an assimilated Jewish family. His father, Albert, was a draper and his mother, Sophia, was the sister of the philosopher .

He was a brilliant student, a Grand Prize winner in France's Concours général and a literary and humanities CPGE philosophy student at Lycée Henri-IV. However, he abandoned his studies to become a columnist in various magazines. Leading a bohemian life, he devoted himself to writing and art criticism.

Werth was a protégé and friend of Octave Mirbeau, the author of The Diary of a Chambermaid, completing Mirabeau's final novel, Dingo, for him when the author's health failed. He manifested his anti-clericalism as an independently minded anti-bourgeois anarchist. His first significant novel, La Maison blanche, which Mirabeau prefaced, was a Prix Goncourt finalist in 1913.

At the outbreak of the First World War, despite opposing the war and having already done his military service (which he seems to have detested), he mustered as a private and was assigned to one of the worst sectors of the front, where he served as a radio operator for 15 months before being invalided out by a lung infection. Shortly after, he wrote Clavel, soldat, a pessimistic and virulently anti-war work which caused a scandal when it was released in 1919 but which was later cited as among the more faithful depictions of trench warfare in Jean Norton Cru's monumental 1929 survey of French World War I literature.

...
Wikipedia