Introduction

Abstract

Neither conventional biography nor literary study, this book summons the author César Fauxbras as a historical witness. In so doing it treats his writings primarily as historical documents, rather than as the objects of literary analysis. The goal is to use these texts to illuminate Fauxbras’s age. Both as an author and as a political activist, Fauxbras is relatively unknown. The person behind this literary pseudonym was Kléber Gaston Gabriel Alcide Sterckeman (1899–1968).¹ What is initially exciting about Fauxbras is the extraordinary variety of his writings about contemporary events which are so richly inscribed with insight and experience. These writings might be grouped into three chronological phases. What first prompted him to write was his time as a sailor in the French navy during the Great War, only finally being discharged in 1921. Based on his knowledge and experience of the sea, he wrote two novels: Jean Le Gouin (1932) about the French Mediterranean fleet during the u-boat campaign, and Mer Noire (1935) about the naval mutiny in the Black Sea in April 1919.² A second phase opened after his maritime fiction when Fauxbras authored two novels that attempted to capture the spirit of the 1930s: one about unemployment and the second about the political crisis of the late Third Republic.