The Thibaults
by Roger Martin du Gard
Summary
Antoine and Jacques Thibault grow up under their domineering, devoutly Catholic father Oscar in Paris, and Roger Martin du Gard splits the family chronicle between them almost from the start: Antoine, disciplined and ambitious, becomes a respected physician, while Jacques, more passionate and less willing to conform, runs away as a teenager with a Protestant schoolmate, Daniel de Fontanin, an escapade that gets him locked in a punitive reformatory at Crouy for months. Jacques grows into a committed socialist, drifting further from his family and toward radical politics, while Antoine builds a medical career and a string of affairs, including one with the family's own housekeeper, that never resolve into anything as stable as his professional life. When their father dies, administered a final dose of morphine by Antoine himself to ease his suffering, the brothers are left facing each other across a gap in temperament and belief that the rest of the sequence keeps widening rather than closing.
The novel's longest volume follows the July crisis of 1914 almost day by day, tracking European socialist leaders' failed effort to hold the international working class together against nationalist momentum, and it includes Jacques and his lover Jenny de Fontanin witnessing the actual assassination of the socialist leader Jean Jaurès days before war breaks out. Jacques, refusing to fight, flees to Switzerland on false papers and, with a fellow pacifist, attempts a desperate, symbolic act: dropping antiwar leaflets over the front lines from a small aircraft. Their plane crashes; his companion dies in the wreck, and Jacques, badly wounded and unable to explain himself in time, is shot as a suspected spy by his own countrymen, killed by exactly the nationalist violence he had spent the whole novel trying to stop. The final volume turns to Antoine's own war, ending years later with him dying slowly from gas exposure, recording his last thoughts in a diary addressed to Jacques's young son, the family's whole political argument finally settling on the next generation rather than on either brother.
Reading it means committing to a long, patient family chronicle that turns, without ever losing its intimate scale, into one of the fullest fictional accounts of how European socialism failed to prevent the war it had spent decades warning against.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy's 1937 citation for Roger Martin du Gard praised the artistic power and truth with which he depicted human conflict, an award given largely on the strength of this one long sequence, published across 1922 to 1940 and centered on Summer 1914, the volume that, which carries the family drama directly into the outbreak of the First World War. André Gide, Martin du Gard's close friend for decades, championed the work early, and Albert Camus later named him among the writers he most admired, praising the same patient, documentary method that other critics found airless and overly learned.
The novel's reception split sharply along national lines: French and European readers took to its antiwar argument and its portrait of a failed international peace movement, while English language readers, meeting it in translation just as a second European war was beginning, responded far more coolly, and the book has never held the place in English that French critics still give it.