Henri Barbusse

Henri Barbusse (Asnières-sur-Seine, 1873 – Moscow, 1935) was a French novelist, journalist and communist activist. He wrote in the years of the Great War and the revolutions that followed, and his name became linked to front-line literature and to the idea of a workers' culture. He is remembered above all for Under Fire, one of the first novels about the war written from direct experience of the trenches.

The son of a French father and an English mother, he spent his childhood in a small town before moving to Paris in 1889 at the age of sixteen. He began as a poet, and his first collection, from 1895, sits within the orbit of Symbolism. Around 1908 he published Hell, a neo-Naturalist novel that broke moral taboos of its day and brought him some notoriety. His real fame came with Under Fire in 1916, which won the Prix Goncourt. Before the war he had been a pacifist, yet in 1914, aged forty-one, he enlisted. Pulmonary damage and exhaustion took him away from the front in 1915, and the book drew on that experience to voice his growing hatred of militarism.

After the war his writing took on a clear political direction. In 1918 he settled in Moscow, married a Russian woman and joined the Bolshevik Party; in 1923 he joined the French Communist Party. Clarté (1919) follows an office clerk who, serving in the army, comes to see the imperialist war as a crime. He edited periodicals such as Monde and in 1933 headed the World Committee Against War and Fascism. His support for the Soviet regime became total. In 1935 he published Stalin, a flattering biography that became a canonical text for French Stalinists but drew criticism for its cult-like tone. He was also an Esperantist.

He died in Moscow in August 1935 of pneumonia, while working on a second biography of Stalin, and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. His legacy is mixed. Many critics regard Under Fire as a landmark of war literature and an early influence on writers such as Remarque and Hemingway; others see his militancy as having cost him literary independence. In December 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, the Henri Barbusse Battalion was formed in his honour as part of the XIV International Brigade.