The Anti-Capitalist Power of Jean de La Ville de Mirmont’s Fiction

Writing in the pages of Le Figaro littéraire 53 years after his friend, Jean de La Ville de Mirmont, was buried alive by an artillery shell in the trenches of Verneuil in late 1914, François Mauriac made the following remark:

it is strange to hold in my hands a new edition of my friend’s works, stranger still to learn new things about a man I loved, a man whom I thought I loved—things that he didn’t confide in me, or worse, things that I had gradually forgotten, as if Jean had never stopped dying inside me over the course of the last half-century. . . For instance, I never knew, or perhaps had forgotten, that Jean de La Ville had lost several brothers and sisters as a child, or that he’d once tried to commit suicide by swallowing ink. . . .Had he lived, what would we have meant to one another? Would he have had a literary destiny? For the twenty-something de La Ville, just as for the forty year old Charles Péguy, the war was quite simply a relief. Yes, it was the most horrible war the world had ever seen, where millions of young men murdered one another, but they also saw it as their destiny’s final terminus, a means to suddenly give their dead-end, onerous lives some heroic meaning.

Mauriac, now unfairly under-read himself, placed Jean de La Ville de Mirmont (1886-1914) firmly at the center of France’s lost generation of World War I, alongside André Lafon (1883-1915) and the aforementioned Péguy (1873-1914). The flower of those generations perished in the trenches of France and Belgium from 1914 to 1918, like the rest of their European counterparts.

By the time of his heroic death—a week after receiving a citation for bravery and being recommended for promotion from sergeant to lieutenant—Jean de La Ville de Mirmont appeared to be inexorably headed for the literary dust-pile of oblivion. His career cut short at 28, he simply hadn’t produced much; his entire output comprised a single novella, Les Dimanches de Jean Dézert (The Sundays of Jean Dézert); a collection of eight short stories; and a very slim volume of poems, L’Horizon chimérique, which was published posthumously, although four poems from that book were famously set to music by Gabriel Fauré.

To most people who didn’t know him, or of him—which meant most of the French literary establishment outside of François Mauriac’s small circle—nothing about Jean de La Ville de Mirmont’s life appeared particularly noteworthy, especially in the milieu of early 20th century aspiring literati. He was born in 1886 into a Protestant family in the southern city of Bordeaux, where his father was a professor of classics at the university, as well as a local government official. His schooling was both undistinguished and unproblematic. Later, following a move to Paris, he passed the examination for an entry-level post in the French public service and began working for the Bureau de l’Assistance aux Vieillards, investigating welfare claims.

He was firmly grand bourgeois: educated, upwardly mobile, and unburdened by necessity, if not quite by the boredom of employment. As he made clear to his father in a letter dated November 16, 1912, Jean’s career choices were uncomplicated by any notions of social advancement: “I only entered the civil service in order to have an easy job which would guarantee me an income, and to dedicate myself to other pursuits.”

Literature was Jean’s passion. This was made immensely clear in his novella’s early pages, in which he used his own life as the model for his caricature of Jean Dézert:

Jean Dézert never talked about his family. I knew he had come into the world in a large city in the South-West. There was a Protestant Cemetery on the other side of the street. These tidbits of information will prove useful in our character study of Jean Dézert. At the very least, they will help us to understand the roots of his patience and his soul’s resignation, as well as the modesty of his desires and the sad sloth of his imagination, all because—and make sure you take note of this—Jean Dézert had never once gone on a long journey in his dreams. Had he ever thought there was a star somewhere where everyone loves one another?

In a sense, everything was too neatly laid out for both Jeans, and therein lay the problem. The stultifying boredom and alienation of capitalist life oppressed the young de La Ville de Mirmont to the point that it made him fantasize about other worlds, or rather any world except the one we happened to be cursed to live in.

While his early verse had been lyrical and opaque—as the era demanded—this was a sentiment de La Ville de Mirmont transported from his poetry to his prose. In an early poem, “Attitudes II,” he had written, “Nous étions nés, je crois, pour toute autre planète” (“We were born, I believe, for an utterly different planet”). This ethereal out-of-placeness accompanies our unlucky everyman Jean Dézert on his fatuous tour of the French capital, with all its easily-accessible amusements and opportunities for self-improvement, none of which affirm his belief in the worthwhileness of life.

Here then, perhaps, lies the real genius of this surprisingly endearing novella: Jean de La Ville de Mirmont analyzes Jean Dézert in the mocking style of Balzac’s Physiologies, but simultaneously connects his Parisian slacker to the hapless men without qualities so beautifully encapsulated by Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, Robert Musil’s Ulrich, or even Camus’s Meursault, albeit without L’Étranger‘s racist overtones. Jean de La Ville de Mirmont instead blends the two approaches, voicing his disdainfully pessimistic outlook on modern life through the most admirably straightforward, sardonic language, defying the typical French novelist’s need for elegance.

The dark confines of existentialism are plainly sketched out in Jean Dézert. Indeed, while Jean believes his job does not define him, he is essentially the bureaucrat of nothingness: his job matters little to him and all avenues for bettering his lot appear to require so much sincerity and effort that it only serves to depress him further. Nothing relieves Jean Dézert’s boredom—not his affair with Elvire Barrochet and the friendship offered by her kind father, nor his Sunday escapes where he gives himself up to the certainty of modern advertising: the leaflets and fliers people hand him on the street. He also fails to find solace in Paris’s barber shops, spas and trendy, healthy restaurants. The holy trinity of sex, booze and suicide eventually fails him, too.

Unlike Mersault, however, he does not kill anyone, nor does he wish to. Yet unlike Gregor Samsa, the hand of magic won’t intervene to alleviate the dreadfulness of reality, either. As it happens, no transformation occurs in the pages of The Sundays of Jean Dézert and its anti-hero remains nothing but a passenger:

He thought of life as a waiting room for third-class travelers. From the moment he purchased his ticket, there was nothing left for him to do but watch men pass him by on the platform. An employee would let him know when the train would depart; but he was still clueless as to its final destination.

As Jean de La Ville de Mirmont explained to his mother in a letter dated November 3, 1912, Jean Dézert “is doomed by his own lack of imagination, but he is resigned to his mediocrity. I will aim to ensure this little novel encapsulates all the horrors of Sunday crowds, the pitifulness of the middling lives of petty employees who go roller-skating and go look at the bicycle races in the Bois de Vincennes. It,” he continues, “is not a naturalist novel at all, but rather an allegorical fantasy about the people whom Cervantes said served only to increase the number of the living.”

As global capital increasingly mechanizes the means by which human beings are reduced into mere cogs of the progress-hungry machine, The Sundays of Jean Dézert, here translated for the first time, deserves to find a wider audience than it did when the author self-published it before dying in the war to end all wars. Jean Dézert is still alive and well among us—in fact, his tribe grows in number—even if his author isn’t.

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Jean de La Ville de Mirmont’s The Sundays of Jean Dézert is out now, with a new translation by André Naffis-Sahely, from Wakefield Press.