Marseille (AFP)

Haunted by the crash of the war, Jean Giono found refuge in nature and its Provence, wild and solar. An exhibition at the MuCem de Marseille retraces shadows and lights of one of the great French writers of the twentieth century.

Almost all of Giono's manuscripts (1895-1970) are presented for the first time to the public from Wednesday (until February 17, 2020), as well as unpublished historical documents about his passages in prison and letters from some of his friends, like the American novelist Henry Miller.

Three contemporary artists - Jean-Jacques Lebel, Thu Van Tran and Clémentine Mélois-- have created installations echoing the life of the author of Hill, Le Hussard on the roof, The Deserter ...

Born in Manosque (Alpes de Haute-Provence), Giono dropped out of school at 16 to help his shoemaker father. Four years later, he is mobilized for the First World War (1914-1918).

Grimacing faces of horror in the mud of the trenches, destroyed cities, heavy machine gun of time: in a black tunnel, an installation of Jean-Jacques Lebel, "the revolt against the ignoble", opens the exhibition, plunging the visitor in the hell of a war that killed 10 million soldiers.

"The writer Giono was born in the trenches," says the author and curator of the exhibition Emmanuelle Lambert. "We can not understand his work if we do not take into account his experience of the war," adds the one who dedicated a book "Giono furioso".

Like the Syrians who in Duma converted rocket debris into rides in the present war, soldiers from 1914-1918 turned shells into decorative objects, trying to breathe life into these machines of death.

Giono tries to "extricate himself from this darkness by poetry, creation and nature," says Emmanuelle Lambert. "Intelligence is to withdraw from evil," he wrote.

- Ecologist before the hour -

Settled in Parais, his house in Manosque in the middle of the fields, he wrote Regain, the Song of the World. "In style, there is an ecology before the letter," says Jean-François Chougnier director of MuCem.

With his lifelong friend, Lucien Jacques, they organize meetings with young Europeans in the highlands.

One of the merits of the exhibition is to highlight this man, who allowed Giono to be published by major publishers in Paris. The museum Regards de Provence, neighbor of the MuCem, reveals the watercolors of Lucien Jacques, admired by Prévert, his striking sketches of movement of the dancer Isadora Duncan.

But World War II is pointing. Dante's Hell, Bernard Buffet's series of paintings showing bodies disemboweled, decapitated and broken, introduces the conflict in which six million Jews were exterminated.

Giono calls for peace. Accused of encouraging defeatism, he is briefly imprisoned.

He is locked again at the Liberation for having published a text of fiction - "not a pamphlet", underlines Emmanuelle Lambert, in the "antisemitic cloth La Gerbe", and because of a photo report on him in the magazine of the Wehrmacht Signal.

The writer was defended and then whitewashed by resistance fighters and Jews.

"I declare that I owe to Mr. Jean Giono, an extreme recognition for the courage and the eagerness to help me during the moment when I was hunted because of my racial origin", writes Jan Meyerowitz, a Jewish composer, in one of the exposed letters.

Giono will remain in Manosque until his death surrounded by books, paintings and films.

Henry Miller, who admired the "musical effects" of his words, wrote to him: "What a beauty in the description of all the little things ... Keep going, we need you!"

Today, the company of friends of Jean Giono counts hundreds of members until China, entrusts its president Jacques Meny.

In a text for the exhibition, the Nobel JMG Le Clezio quotes Giono in 1936: "The society built on money destroys the animals, destroys the men, destroys the joy". And Clézio concludes: "This is still true today".

© 2019 AFP