France Between The Wars: A Masterful Trilogy

Author Pierre Lemaitre's Les Enfants du désastre includes three books and two movies that explore a country searching for its moral center.

From the 2017 film Au revoir là-haut: Albert Dupontel as Albert Maillard (left); Heloïse Balster as Louise (center); Nahuel Pérez Biscayart as Édouard Péricourt (right).

Just before we moved to France, Pierre Lemaitre, a French author known primarily for his crime novels, released the first book in a trilogy that has become one of the most acclaimed works of fiction in France over the past decade. Set between the end of WWI and the start of WWII, the books follow a series of loosely-connected characters as they navigate a series of scams that turn their lives upside down while depicting a nation that seems driven by greed and selfishness.

By coincidence, I just finished reading the third book, Miroir de nos peines (Mirror of our Sorrows) the same week I watched the film adaption of the second book, Couleurs de l'incendie (All Human Wisdom) on a flight back from the U.S. Yes, yes, I know this is not the optimal way to experience a movie, but I was eager to see it and it was that or some Marvel movie I’d seen 12 times.

Both were magnificent, if not quite as good as their predecessors. The tragic trajectory of the characters across all three stories, and how they rally to fight back against a range of villains who have learned how to prey on human weakness for profit is recounted with humor and pathos. It is a grim view of France and the French, but epic in ambition.