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Léon Werth (1878 in Remiremont, Vosges – 13 December 1955, in 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. == Biography == 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 Frédéric Rauh. 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.〔Heuré, op. cit., p. 145〕 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),〔Heuré, op. cit. Werth, Léon, ''Caserne,'' Editions Viviane Hamy, Paris, 1993.〕 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.〔Heuré, op. cit.〕 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.〔Cru, Jean Norton, ''War Books,'' trans. by Stanley J. Pincetl, Jr., San Diego State University Press, 1988, p. 163.〕 Werth was an unclassifiable writer with an acid prose, who wrote of the inter-war period as well as advocating against colonialism (''Cochinchine'', 1928). He also wrote against the colonial period splendor of the French empire, and against Stalinism which he denounced as a leftist deception. He also criticized the mounting Nazi movement. In 1931 when he met Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, it was the beginning of a very close friendship. Saint-Exupéry's ''Le Petit Prince'' (''The Little Prince'') would be dedicated to Werth. After the Fall of France, during its occupation, the Werths remained in France despite offers by the Centre americain de secours in Marseille to help them emigrate. In July 1941 Werth was required to register as Jewish, his travel was restricted and his works banned from publication. His wife, Suzanne, was active in the Resistance, crossing the demarcation line clandestinely more than a dozen times and establishing their Paris apartment as a safe house for fugitive Jewish women, downed British and Canadian pilots, secret resistance meetings and storage of false identity papers and illegal radio transmitters. Their son, Claude, continued his studies first in the Jura and then in Paris, later becoming a doctor.〔Heuré, op. cit. pp. 251–258〕 Werth lived poorly in the Jura Mountain region, alone, cold and often hungry. ''Déposition'', his diary, was published in 1946, delivering a damning indictment of Vichy France. He became a Gaullist under the Nazi occupation and after the war contributed to the ''Liberté de l'Esprit'' intellectual magazine run by Claude Mauriac. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Léon Werth」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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