Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
French and other French-language writers on war and peace
Alain: Why is there war?
Amiel on war
Louis Aragon: Selections on war
Louis Aragon: Caravans of Peace
Louis Aragon: Children scattering flowers will some day scatter deadly flowers, grenades
Louis Aragon: The military: parasite and defender of parasitism
Louis Aragon: The peace that forces murder down to its knees for confession
Louis Aragon: War and its gloomy procession of storm clouds, sacred rites, illusions and lies
Louis Aragon: War, signal for the coming massacre of the sacrificial herd
Marcel Aymé: A child’s view of war
Henri Barbusse: Selections on war
Henri Barbusse: All battles spring from themselves and necessitate each other to infinity
Henri Barbussse: As long as the colors of uniforms cover the flesh of men
Henri Barbusse: The awful power of a dead man
Henri Barbusse: Blood-stained priest of the God of War
Henri Barbusse: Butchery as far as the eye can see
Henri Barbusse: Cold death sits brooding, great and sumptuous bird of prey is in the act of taking wing
Henri Barbusse: Crows eddying round naked flesh with flapping banners and war-cries
Henri Barbusse: The enemy is militarism and no other
Henri Barbusse: Flags and swords, instruments of the cult of human sacrifice
Henri Barbusse: The goddess of slaughter, the world worn out by war
Henri Barbusse: I will wage war, even though I alone may survive
Henri Barbusse: Jesus on the battlefield
Henri Barbusse: Manual laborers of war glutting the cannon’s mouth with their flesh
Henri Barbusse: The mournful hearse of the army razes harshly
Henri Barbusse: Murder enters as invisibly as death itself. Industry multiplies its magic.
Henri Barbusse: The only cause of war is the slavery of those whose flesh wages it
Henri Barbusse: Pay for a glory which is not yours or for ruins that others have made with your hands
Henri Barbusse: “Perhaps it is the last war of all”
Henri Barbusse: Sepulchral sculptor’s great sketch-model, the gate of hell
Henri Barbusse: Soldier’s glory is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war
Henri Barbusse: “That’s war. It’s not anything else.”
Henri Barbusse: There will be nothing else on the earth but preparation for war
Henri Barbusse: These murdered souls, covered with black veils; they are you and I
Henri Barbusse: Torture…agony…human sacrifices…
Henri Barbusse: Under Fire
Henri Barbusse: War, as hideous morally as physically
Henri Barbusse: War befouls the country as it does faces and hearts
Henri Barbusse: “War must be killed; war itself”
Henri Barbusse: War which breeds war, whether by victory or defeat
Henri Barbusse: War’s loathsome horror and lunacy
Henri Barbusse: “We must have a new Ministry: a new public opinion: War.”
Henri Barbusse: The world has come to the end of its strength: it is vanquished by wars
Henri Barbusse: “You understand, I’m against all wars”
Julien Benda: Military mysticism
Béranger: When from the miseries of war we wake…
Georges Bernanos: Wars like epidemics, with neither beginning nor end
León Bloy: The Sword
Pierre Boulle: The long reach of war profiteers
Albert Camus: Where war lives. The reign of beasts has begun.
Chateaubriand: Would-be master of the world who knew only how to destroy
Victor Cherbuliez and Erich Fromm: Wars are outbursts of destructiveness and paranoid suspicion
Michel Corday: Selections from The Paris Front
Michel Corday: Blood! Blood! But there is still not enough.
Michel Corday: The everlasting glorification of murder
Michel Corday: War, the most brutal heritage of the past
Michel Corday: In war fathers bury their sons
Michel Corday: War sentiment is general dementia, barbarous and neolithic
Michel Corday: Millions of men killed to cure a single hypochondriac
Michel Corday: War – hell let loose, butchery, a return to barbarism
Michel Corday: War is irreparable loss for the earth and the human race
Michel Corday: The hideous futility of war in itself
Michel Corday: Future description of these horrors ought to make any return of war impossible
Michel Corday: Striking against war
Michel Corday: The Truth is the chief victim of war
Michel Corday: Glorification of slaughter is the beginning of future armaments
Michel Corday: The plague that comes in war’s train
Maurice Druon: A contempt for all things military
Maurice Druon: The dual prerogatives of minting coins and waging wars
Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas: Breaking oaths of peace, cover the fields with bloody carcasses
Georges Duhamel: Selections on war
Georges Duhamel: The demon of war had imprisoned us under his knee
Georges Duhamel: The Fleshmongers, War’s Winnowing Basket
Georges Duhamel: Mosaic of pain stained with mud and blood, the colours of war
Georges Duhamel: No end to war without moral reeducation
Georges Duhamel: No man desires war…but if there’s money to be made…
Georges Duhamel: The possession of the world is not decided by guns. It is the noble work of peace.
Georges Duhamel: The stupid machine of war throws out, from minute to minute, bleeding men
Georges Duhamel: The Third Symphony, a slender bridge across the abyss
Georges Duhamel: War and civilization
Georges Duhamel: War has achieved the mournful miracle of denaturing nature, rendering it ignoble and criminal
Georges Duhamel: Who has taught children of man that war brings happiness?
Georges Duhamel: World where now there are more graveyards than villages
Maurice Duplay: Colloquy on science and war
Maurice Duplay: Imperative to uproot the passion of war
Marguerite Duras: The civilizing mission
Jean Dutourd: The horrors of war
Paul Éluard: True law of men despite the misery and war
Erckmann-Chatrian: In a century the war gods will be recognized as barbarians
Erckmann-Chatrian: In war belligerents conspire against their own citizens
Fénelon: War is the most dreadful of all evils by which heaven has afflicted man
Gustave Flaubert and George Sand: Monstrous conflicts of which we have no idea; warfare suppressed or civilization perishes
Anatole France: Selections on war
Anatole France: Attack the monster that devours our race; make war on war, a war to the death
Anatole France: Barracks are a hideous invention of modern times
Anatole France: Brutal impulse which has led and still leads one half of humanity to destroy the other
Anatole France: Ceaselessly repeating that war is abominable, avoiding all the tortuous intrigues which might provoke it
Anatole France: Country living under shadow of war is easy to govern
Anatole France: Education and War
Anatole France: Emerging painfully from primitive barbarism, war
Anatole France: The ethics of war
Anatole France: Financiers only wanted colonial wars and the people did not want any wars at all
Anatole France: “He left us impoverished and depopulated, but he gave us glory”
Anatole France: How the U.S. Congress deliberates on wars
Anatole France: In civilised nations the glory of massacre is the greatest glory known
Anatole France: Letter to an advocate of “peace with victory”
Anatole France: Military service the most terrible pest of civilised nations
Anatole France: Modern Romans, the Americanization of the world
Anatole France: No one has right to kill, just man will refuse to draw his number for war
Anatole France: Nobel Prize speech
Anatole France: Only two ways out of militarism – war and bankruptcy
Anatole France: Restoring order by means of theft, rape, pillage, murder and incendiarism
Anatole France: To avert the danger of peace breaking out…
Anatole France: The tutelary gods of world war
Anatole France: Wait till the warriors you make gods of swallow you all up
Anatole France: War brings to the victor himself but ruin and misery, is nothing but a horrible and stupid crime
Anatole France: War, burlesque masquerade in which fatuous patriots sing stupid dithyrambs
Anatole France: War debases man beneath the level of ferocious beasts
Anatole France: War is committing all crimes by which an individual dishonours himself: arson, robbery, rape, murder
Anatole France: War is the last redoubt of oligarchy, plutocracy
Anatole France: Wars fought over territorial acquisition, commercial rivalries
Anatole France: “What you call murder and robbery may really be war and conquest, sacred foundations of empires”
Anatole France: Whether civil or foreign, war is execrable
Anatole France: Why should not humanity abolish the law of murder?
Anatole France on Victor Hugo: People to substitute justice and peace for war and bloodshed
Anatole France on Émile Zola, military terrorism and world peace
Anatole France and Michel Corday: The press fans the flames of war’s blast furnace
Anatole France and Michel Corday: Threat of annihilation in gigantic Armageddon
Anatole France and Michel Corday: War is a crime, for which victory brings no atonement
André Gide: Transformation of a war supporter
Jean Giono: Led to the slaughterhouse
Jean Giono: Rats and worms were the only living things
Jean Giono: War, nourishment and dismemberment
Jean Giono: War! Who’s the madman in charge of all this? Who’s the madman who gives the orders?
Remy de Gourmont: Getting drunk at the dirty cask of militarism
José-Maria de Heredia: Drunk with dreams that brutal conquests bring
Victor Hugo: Selections on war
Victor Hugo: The black eagle waits with claws outspread
Victor Hugo: The face of Cain, hunters of men, sublime cutthroats
Victor Hugo: War, made by humanity against humanity, despite humanity
Victor Hugo: Glorious war does not exist; peace, that sublime, universal desire
Victor Hugo: Brute war, dire birth of hellish race
Victor Hugo: International Peace Congress 1851
Joseph Joubert on war: All victors will be defeated
Joseph Kessel: In my family, war is in the blood…the blood of others
Joseph Kessel: The monstrous ululation of an air-raid siren
Joseph Kessel: War’s ultimate fratricide, killed for not killing
La Bruyère on the lust for war
La Fontaine: When shall Peace pack up these bloody darts?
José-André Lacour: War’s sanguinary peacock
Jacques de Lacretelle: War’s atavistic brigands
Lamartine: The republic of peace
Marie Lenéru: War is not human fate
Maurice Maeterlinck: Bloodshed, battle-cry and sword-thrust are the joys of barbarians
Jacques Maritain: What good one can expect from such a war and its pitiless prolongation?
Roger Martin du Gard: Selections on war
Roger Martin du Gard: From Nobel Prize in Literature speech
Roger Martin du Gard: All the pageantry of war cannot redeem its beastliness
Roger Martin du Gard: “Anything rather than the madness, the horrors of a war!”
Roger Martin du Gard: Be loyal to yourselves, reject war
Roger Martin du Gard: Deliberately infecting a country with war neurosis
Roger Martin du Gard: “Drop your rifles. Revolt!”
Roger Martin du Gard: General strike for peace
Roger Martin du Gard: A hundredth part of energy expended in war could have preserved peace
Roger Martin du Gard: How make active war on war?
Roger Martin du Gard: Launch against the war-mongers a concerted movement to force the governments to bow to your desire for peace
Roger Martin du Gard: No more dangerous belief can take root in the mind than the belief that war’s inevitable
Roger Martin du Gard: Nothing worse than war and all it involves
Roger Martin du Gard: Romain Rolland
Roger Martin du Gard: Secret commitments which from one day to another may plunge you, every man of you, into the horrors of war
Roger Martin du Gard: A thousand times more honor in preserving peace than waging war
Roger Martin du Gard: Tragedy of war, like that of Oedipus, occurs because warnings are ignored
Roger Martin du Gard: War breeds atmosphere of lies, officials lies
Roger Martin du Gard: War is at our gates, dooming millions of innocent victims to suffering and death
Roger Martin du Gard: War’s “serviceable lie” costs tens of thousands of lives
Roger Martin du Gard: When you refer to war, none of you thinks of the unprecedented slaughter, the millions of innocent victims it involves
Guy de Maupassant: Selections on war
Guy de Maupassant: The army, murdering those who defend themselves, making prisoners of the rest, pillaging in the name of the Sword
Guy de Maupassant: The Horrible
Guy de Maupassant: How and why wars are plotted
Guy de Maupassant: I do not understand how these murderers are tolerated walking on the public streets
Guy de Maupassant: I only pray that our sons may never see any wars again
Guy de Maupassant: Military hysteria, military presumptuousness
Guy de Maupassant: Why does society not rise up bodily in rebellion at the word “war”?
Albert Memmi: So the war had caught up with us, a celebration in honor of death
Robert Merle: The present war, and all the previous wars, and all the wars to come
Robert Merle: There’s no such thing as a just or sacred war
Octave Mirbeau: All these wan faces, all these bodies already vanquished – toward what useless and bloody slaughters?
Octave Mirbeau: It was not enough that war should glut itself with human flesh, it was necessary that it should also devour beasts, the earth itself, everything that lived in the calm and peace of labor and love
Octave Mirbeau: An orgy of destruction, criminal and foolish. What was this country, in whose name so many crimes were being committed?
Octave Mirbeau: Stupidly, unconsciously, I had killed a man whom I loved, a man with whom my soul had just identified itself
Octave Mirbeau: A sudden vision of Death, red Death standing on a chariot, drawn by rearing horses, which was sweeping down on us, brandishing his scythe
Henry de Montherlant: A constant state of crime against humanity
Paul Morand: The magic disappearance of ten millions of war dead
Paul Morand: Nations never lay down their arms; death which is still combative
Paul Morand: The War for Righteousness ends in the burying of moral sense
Charles Morice: Woe to you enemies of peace
Alfred de Musset: “No, none of these things, but simply peace.”
Paul Nizan: War completely assembled, like a mighty engine
Georges Ohnet: Pillaging in the wake of victorious armies
Zoé Oldenbourg: War provides a feast for the vultures
Pascal on war: An assassin if he kills in his own country, a hero if in another
Charles Péguy: Cursed be war, cursed of God
Benjamin Péret: Little song for the maimed
Vladimir Pozner: Mars and Ceres
Marcel Proust: Every day war is declared anew
Edgar Quinet: The soul of man has vanished, nations and races are doomed to combat and destroy each other
C.F. Ramuz: Little by little the war spreads
Arthur Rimbaud: Evil
Emmanuel Roblès: Respect is first due to the living
Romain Rolland: Selections on war
Romain Rolland: A father’s plea against war
Romain Rolland: The abominable war crimes of intellectuals
Romain Rolland: Above The Battle
Romain Rolland: Against grasping imperialism and inhuman pride, military caste and megalomania of pedants
Romain Rolland: America and the war against war
Romain Rolland: Ara Pacis and Ave, Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant
Romain Rolland: Centuries to recreate what war destroys in a day
Romain Rolland: The collective insanity, the terrible spirit of war
Romain Rolland: Content with having said “No!” to war
Romain Rolland: The enormous iniquity, the ignoble calculations of war
Romain Rolland: Goddess of prey, Anti-Christ, hovering over butcheries with spread wings and hawk’s talons
Romain Rolland: Hatred and holy butchery; the deadly sophistry, carnivorous poetry of war
Romain Rolland on Leo Tolstoy: How is it they are able to retain the lust of destroying their fellows?
Romain Rolland on Henri Barbusse: The isolated bleating of one of the beasts about to die
Romain Rolland: The life that would have been, the life that was not going to be
Romain Rolland: Message to America on the will to conquer the world
Romain Rolland: Not enough that nations are destroyed, they are bidden to glorify Death, to march towards it with songs
Romain Rolland: Our Neighbor the Enemy
Romain Rolland: Pacifism only allowed when it is not effective
Romain Rolland: Peace and war are in the hands of those who hold the purse-strings
Romain Rolland: Real peace demands that the masters of war be eliminated
Romain Rolland: Reawakening of old instincts of national pride, lapping of blood
Romain Rolland: Recurrence of the hell of war
Romain Rolland: To the Murdered Peoples
Romain Rolland: To the undying Antigone; waging war against war
Romain Rolland: Totalizing, to their personal profit, the ruin of all nations
Romain Rolland: War, a divine monster; half-beast, half-god
Romain Rolland: War, a pathological fact, a plague of the soul
Romain Rolland: War and the factories of intellectual munitions and cannon
Romain Rolland: War enriches a few, and ruins the community
Romain Rolland: When we defend war, dare to admit we are defending slavery
Romain Rolland: Where to rebuild the world after war?
Romain Rolland: Youth delivered up to the sword of war
Jules Romains: Selections on war
Jules Romains: Colloquy on God and war
Jules Romains: Communion of saints opposing war’s mutual massacre, human sacrifice
Jules Romains: Condign punishment for war profiteers and professional patriots
Jules Romains: Deadening effects of war on human sensibilities, defeat of civilization by barbarism
Jules Romains: Destruction of war itself, its deletion from the pages of history
Jules Romains: Distinguishing characteristic of modern warfare is that it will never come to an end of itself
Jules Romains: Fraternization versus fratricide, the forbidden subject of peace
Jules Romains: If mankind could put two and two together, there’d be no more war
Jules Romains: Just kill because the more dead there are, the fewer living will remain
Jules Romains: Romantic view of war played a dirty trick on the warriors
Jules Romains: Squalidly degrading everything that the civilization of mankind had created
Jules Romains: Unnatural war will only stop when everybody, on both sides, is killed
Jules Romains: War means a golden age for the munitions makers
Jules Romains: War: symphony of death, vast pudding concocted of corpses
Jules Romains: War turns murder into a public and highly praiseworthy action
Jules Romains: War under modern conditions has need of everything that man produces
Ronsard: Far away from Europe and far from its wars
Rousseau: The State of War
Claude Roy: Great wars and those which kill just as effectively
Gabrielle Roy: This was the hope that was uplifting mankind once again: to do away with war
Jules Roy: Any attempt to escape the universal holocaust would mean being hunted and tortured wherever he went
Saint-Exupéry: Charred flesh of children viewed with indifference
George Sand: Trader in uniformed flesh and the religion of self
Jean-Paul Sartre: They lift their heads and look up at the sky, the poisonous sky
Jean-Paul Sartre: When staging a massacre, all soldiers look alike
Jean-Paul Sartre: When the rich fight the rich, it is the poor who die
Senancour: Lottery of war amid heaps of the dead
Stendhal: Dreaming of the Marshall and his glory…
Stendhal: You’ve got to learn the business before you can become a soldier
Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay
Hippolyte Taine on the inhuman travesty of war
Henri Troyat: Selections on war
Henri Troyat: All humanity passing through a crisis of destructive madness
Henri Troyat: Nothing grand, nothing noble, in the universal slaughter
Henri Troyat: Shedding blood for the motherland: War is ugly and absurd
Henri Troyat: So many men killed, so many towns burned…for a telegram
Henri Troyat: Thoughts stop with a shock: War!
Henri Troyat: Tolstoy’s visceral detestation of war
Henri Troyat: War, that greatest of political crimes
Henri Troyat: “Will a day ever come when there’s no more war, no more lies, no more tragedy!”
Paul Vaillant-Couturier: The Song of Craonne
Paul Valéry on global conflicts, Europe governed by American commission
Jules Vallès: I hate war and its sinister glory
Roger Vercel: Boats built for men to live in, ships built to kill
Vercors: Are war crimes only committed by the vanquished?
Émile Verhaeren: I hold war in execration; ashamed to be butchers of their fellows
Paul Verlaine: The joy of sweet peace without victory
Voltaire: Selections on war
Voltaire: Armies composed of well disciplined hirelings who determine the fate of nations
Voltaire: Bellicose father or pacific son?
Voltaire: He did not put a sufficient number of his fellow creatures to death
Voltaire: Million regimented assassins traverse Europe from one end to the other, to get their bread by regular depredation and murder
Voltaire: One country cannot conquer without making misery for another
Voltaire: War
Marguerite Yourcenar: Fruits of war are food for new wars
Émile Zola: Selections on war
Émile Zola on war mania: A blind and deaf beast let loose amid death and destruction, laden with cannon-fodder
Émile Zola: Bloody pages of history, the wars, the conquests, the names of the captains who had butchered their fellow-beings.
Émile Zola: Encomiums on labor and peace
Émile Zola: The forge of peace and the pit of war
Émile Zola: Haunted by military matters
Émile Zola: The military, necessary apprenticeship for devastation and massacre
Émile Zola: One sole city of peace and truth and justice
Émile Zola: Prescription for a happy life in the midst of universal peace
Émile Zola: To what field of disaster would it be taken to kill men? what harvest of human lives would it reap?
Émile Zola: Vulcan in service to Mars
Émile Zola: War’s vast slaughterhouse
Émile Zola: Why armies are maintained
Émile Zola: Yes, war is dead. The world has reached its last stage. Brothers may now give each other the fraternal kiss.
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