Fighting France

Wharton brings empathy, passion and a novelist's eye for detail to this series of essays on France at the outbreak of World War I.

Wharton wrote in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, that Fighting France sets out to describe 'the impressions produced by those dark and bewildering days of August 1914' as war broke out in Europe. These articles were published in 1915, while America still officially held a position of neutrality in the War. Wharton fits into a French tradition of 'auteurs engagés' - socially committed writers who put their name to a cause. More than a personal record of Wharton's relationship with her adopted home, Fighting France is a passionate call to action to the US.

In fact, the essays go beyond recording the events at the outbreak of war, and answer the wider question 'What is France like?' Wharton has a keen eye for unremarked details in everyday lives. She is able to translate these details into wider-reaching conclusions on the French national character and on human nature in general.

Wharton is best known as a chronicler of American upper-class social mores in novels like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. Here, she sets out to capture the mood of a whole country, rather than a narrow slice of high society. But there are certain similarities in the elegiac tone Wharton adopts in these essays and in her novels to lament a way of life under threat. 'The only death that Frenchmen fear is not death in the trenches but death by the extinction of their national ideal,' Wharton writes here. Wharton lived in France from late 1906 until her death in 1937 and felt a great deal of respect for the country's spirit and values. Her affection for France's 'intellectual light and moral force' and her fear for their future make Fighting France a powerful and engaging tribute.