A ceremony takes place late Wednesday afternoon at the Pantheon in the presence of the Head of State for the entry of the writer Maurice Genevoix into the Pantheon.

His grandson, Julien Larère-Genevoix, returns to the microphone of Patrick Cohen on the writing by his grandfather of the famous work "Those of 14", during the Great War.

INTERVIEW

The writer Maurice Genevoix made his entry into the Pantheon this Wednesday at 6 pm, the day of the commemoration of the Armistice of 1918. In 2018, Emmanuel Macron had announced that the academician would make his entry there with the book

Those of 14 , 

which recounts the horror of the war he lived through and in fact brings together five stories: 

Sous Verdun

, 

Nuits de guerre

, 

Au threshold des guitounes

, 

La mud

 and 

Les Eparges

.

His grandson Julien Larère-Genevoix, guest of Patrick Cohen, returned to the conditions under which the writer wrote this famous work. 

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At 24, when he joined the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS), Maurice Genevoix was indeed suddenly plunged into the hell of the trenches.

He was then incorporated as a second lieutenant in the 106th Infantry Regiment and very quickly began to take notes: "One of the teachers, the general secretary of the Ecole normale supérieure, Paul Dupuy, had asked all his students write to him as often as possible so that he is informed, but also to be able to give news to each other, "says Julien Larère-Genevoix.

It is therefore from these letters and a daily notebook that the writer will later be able to write

Those of 14,

"with the confidence he also placed in his memory", specifies his grandson. .

"Speaking for those who are no longer there"

When he begins to write, Maurice Genevoix is ​​a survivor.

Seriously injured in April 1915 at Eparges, in the Meuse, he loses the use of his left hand: "He is going to start writing from his hospital bed because Paul Dupuy comes to see him and tells him that he is He has no choice. He has the capacity because he is still alive and above all he has a duty to do so. He must speak for those who are no longer there ", confides his grandson.

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But his first story, 

Sous verdun,

published in 1916,

is first of all largely censored, as Julien Larère-Genevoix still recounts: "He wants to tell the truth, he means the war as it is. And his story does not please the censors because it should not be to say that the French army panics, that sometimes it is badly organized ... It should not be said either that the conditions are extremely difficult and that the German army seems much better prepared ".

In total, more than 20 sheets are missing at the time of publication of this work.

They could finally be reinstated a few years after the end of the First World War.

For his grandson, in

Those of 14

there is no 

 research of literary effects, no, this book "speaks to us about the soldiers much more than about the war in itself", he assures before finally to quote the extract which he considers the most striking: "We killed you and it is the greatest of crimes. You gave your life, and you are the most unhappy. I know only that: the words that we I said, the faces that we had among the other faces. And your death. You are hardly more than a hundred and your crowd seems frightening to me, too heavy, too tight for me alone. How many of your past gestures would have been. I lost, every tomorrow. And of your living words and of all that was you, I only have me left. And the image of you that you gave me ".