Abstract: This magisterial book was published in 1974, divided into three parts: “The Witnesses”, writers who had passed from “journey log to novel”; “The Years of Change : 1939-1933”, when a “crisis of spirits” spread through the novel, as diagnosed by Paul Valéry, and when novelists (Rolland, Giono, Céline) denounced the war with force. From 1934 to 1939, novelists (including Aragon, Romains, and Martin du Gard) examined the meaning of history and the possibility of the decline of the West.
