Léon Werth

Origins and early life

Léon Werth was born at Remiremont in the Vosges on 17 February 1878 into a Jewish family of the local middle class: his father Albert Werth was a cloth merchant of that Jewish community, while his mother Sophie came from the minor Picard nobility and was not Jewish.

Work and career

He was a brilliant scholarship pupil, failed the École normale by refusing its discipline, and became in Paris the secretary of Octave Mirbeau and then a critic and novelist of his own: La Maison blanche (1913), which Mirbeau said deserved the Goncourt, Clavel soldat (1919), one of the first French novels to describe the 1914 war from the ranks and against it, and books on Bonnard, Van Gogh and Matisse when their painting was still contested.

He was an anarchist by temperament, anticolonial — his Cochinchine of 1926 is a rare denunciation of French rule in Indochina — and hostile to every party. In 1931 he met Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, twenty-two years younger, and the two became close friends. This fiche states plainly the reason his life turned in 1940: the Vichy racial laws made him, as a Jew, a hunted man, and he spent the war hidden in the Jura at Saint-Amour while his wife Suzanne stayed in Paris.

Before that he wrote 33 Jours, an account of the exodus of June 1940 on the roads of France; Saint-Exupéry took the manuscript to New York, wrote a preface for it and could not get it published, and the text was lost until 1992. From New York Saint-Exupéry addressed to him the Lettre à un otage and dedicated to him The Little Prince — 'to Léon Werth when he was a little boy' — the most famous dedication in French literature, written for a friend hiding from the police of his own country. Werth survived, wrote Déposition, his war journal, and died in Paris on 13 December 1955.