Planet Literature

Jacques Prévert’s Anti-war Poems

Jacques Prévert saw war as firmly anchored in the structures of modern society. For him, social criticism was therefore also a form of lived pacifism.

Peace Speeches

Statesmanlike oaths statue-like words
Freedom! Peace! Fraternity!
but all of a sudden a stumble a fall
into the maw of a hollow phrase
into the abyss of an astonished understanding:
the mouth, wide open, reveals the carious truth
behind the immaculate white smile
the rottenness of the polished phrases
Freedom! Peace! Fraternity!
eaten away by the caries of war
the rapacity of capitalism.

Jacques Prévert: Le discours sur la paix from: Paroles (Words, 1946)

Pacifism Outside the Mainstream

Being a pacifist in post-war France was no easy matter. From the conservative side, the deployment of the French army against the freedom movements in the colonies – especially in Algeria – was patriotically inflated. At the same time, the positive view of the military was fuelled by the Resistance’s fight against the Nazi occupiers in the Second World War. Even those who had come to terms with the fascist Vichy regime or at least passively endured it identified with the liberation struggle order to be on the side of the victors.

Jacques Prévert thus faced criticism for his pacifist position from both the left and the right. This was especially true of one of his most famous poems, entitled Barbara. In it, the destruction of a love affair in the port city of Brest, which was particularly affected by the war, is addressed in retrospect with the words: „Quelle connerie la guerre“ („What a bloody mess war is“; 1).

The original French version is written in the form of a prose poem. In her English-language adaptation, Ilona Lay has combined the central motifs of the poem into a sonnet:

Brest

Pouring rain a singing woman
Brest dissolving behind veils of fog
lips intertwining silently
seagulls drifting through the clouds

Pouring rain a spitting gun
Brest a bleeding wound a wreck
thunder screaming floods collapsing
flotsam twitching in the hail

Pouring rain forlorn desires
murmuring forgotten voices
dreams congealing into steel

Veils of fog like writhing dogs
Brest enclosed by graveyard walls
staring a deserted mourning [2]

War as a Mirror of a Warlike Economy

Prévert counters his critics by saying that there is no such thing as a „good“ and a „bad“ war [3]. In war, he states, there are no winners, it always resembles a „terrible disease“ for which there are no vaccines [4].

However, Prévert is far from downplaying war as a quasi-natural event. On the contrary, he explicitly refers to the economic interests associated with war and criticises the economic calculations that lead to wars.

The consideration of „whether a massacre makes economically sense or whether it is time to be economical with massacres“ is something he denounces as profoundly inhumane. This utilitarian rationality, he says, can even be observed in the treatment of children killed in war: Instead of lamenting their deaths in general, it is only a matter of regret that future geniuses or „little Mozarts“ may have been killed by mistake [5].

Against this background, Prévert emphatically rejects the biblical saying that there is a time for everything – and thus, as it is explicitly stated in the Book of Ecclesiastes (3:8), also „for war“. He even disapproves of a remark stating that it is time to end a war, since this implies that at some point it was also time to start the war [6].

War as Part of Everyday Life

An example of Prévert’s poetic treatment of the close connection between war and economics is the poem Le discours sur la paix (The Peace Speech) reproduced above. In it, the speaker’s rotten teeth are associated with the hypocrisy of his hollow peace phrases, through which the true „nerve“ of war – „the delicate question of money“ – is revealed.

The poem thus also alludes to another aspect that Prévert complains about when dealing with the subject of war – the euphemistic terms used to talk about acts of war. In this context, Prévert mentions, among other things, the term „cleansing“, which is used to disguise massacres of the civilian population [7].

In addition, the poem also refers to the increasing intermingling of war and peace, as stated by Prévert. Modern warfare, he says, causes all areas of society to be affected by war and the preparation for it. This diagnosis is even truer today than it was in Prévert’s lifetime, given hybrid modes of warfare, globalised economic wars and the partial shift of warlike activities into cyberspace.

The Bourgeois Nuclear Family as Fertiliser of War

According to Prévert, the penetration of everyday life by war means that even supposedly peaceful times are affected by military concerns. This, as Prévert sarcastically remarks, makes one think back almost nostalgically to those times when the military had „nothing to do with peace“ and „nothing to say about it“ [8].

In the poem Familiale (Family Life), Prévert illustrates the influence of war on everyday life by focussing on the seed from which the structures of bourgeois society are reproduced: the traditional bourgeois family. The classic division of roles, according to which the father earns a living, while the mother takes care of the household and education, is described here as a field in which the seeds of war can flourish:

Family Life

The mother goes to the kitchen,
the father goes to work,
the son goes to war.

Life goes on as usual,
nothing special happens,
thinks the mother.

The father works,
the mother cooks,
the son fights.

Life goes on as usual,
nothing special happens,
thinks the father.

And what does the son think?
The son thinks nothing at all
on the battlefield.

His mother goes to the kitchen,
his father goes to work,
he goes to war.

When the war is over,
he will do business
with his father.

The war goes on,
the mother goes on cooking meals,
the father goes on doing business.

The son does not go on at all:
He is devoured
by the war.

The son goes down into his grave,
the mother goes to the cemetery,
the father goes to the hero’s memorial.

Life goes on as usual,
nothing special happens,
think the mother and the father.

The mother goes on cooking meals,
the father goes on doing business,
the son goes on doing nothing.

Business war business war kitchen war …
Life goes on
at the cemetery [9]

References

[1]      Prévert, Jacques: Barbara. In:Paroles (1946). Paris 1949: Gallimard.

[2]      From: Ilona Lay: Versunken. Gedichte [Immersed. Poems], 2008.

[3]      Prévert, Jacques / Pozner, André: Hebdromadaires (1972), p. 104. Paris 1982: Gallimard.

[4]      Ibid, p. 118.

[5]      Ibid, p. 104.

[6]      Ibid, p. 103.

[7]      Prévert, Jacques / Pozner, André: Hebdromadaires (1972), p. 106. Paris 1982: Gallimard.

[8]      Ibid, p. 98.

[9]      Cf. Prévert: Familiale (PDF). In:  Paroles (1946).

Image: Peter Ludwigs (1888 – 1943): The War (1937); Museum Kunstpalast (Art Palace) Düsseldorf, Germany (Wikimedia Commons)