Clerambault
Agenor Clerambault is a mild, popular French poet who greets the outbreak of war in 1914 with the same patriotic fervor as everyone around him. Then his son is killed at the front, and grief forces him to think for himself. Slowly he turns against the war and the crowd that cheers it, becoming an isolated voice for conscience and against mass hatred, at great personal cost. Romain Rolland, a lifelong pacifist, wrote the novel partly as self-portrait and partly as argument, subtitling it “The Story of an Independent Spirit During the War.” It is a searching study of how one person resists the pressure to conform. Published in 1920 and offered here as a free PDF and EPUB.
About the Author
Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was a French novelist, dramatist, and essayist awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature. A committed pacifist and humanist, he is remembered for the epic novel cycle Jean-Christophe and for his outspoken opposition to the nationalism of the First World War.
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