"To many Frenchmen, the Third Republic simply did not seem worth dying for, when so many of their fathers, brothers and friends had died for it already between 1914 and 1918. This was the mood - the refusal to pursue another Pyrrhic victory - that had been foreshadowed in Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), with its stomach-churning evocation of the slaughter of the last war's opening phase. The same mood inspired the Nobel laureate Roger Martin Du Gard's letter to a friend in September 1936: 'Anything rather than war! Anything . . . even Fascism in Spain . . . Even Fascism in France: Nothing, no trial, no servitude can be compared to war: Anything, Hitler rather than war!'"
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 389
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis-Ferdinand_C%C3%A9line
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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