Les Hommes de bonne Volonté

Paris, Ernest Flammarion, 1932-1946. Twenty-seven octavo volumes.

First edition, one of 100 numbered copies on Outhenin-Chalandre pure wove paper, the third deluxe paper after 10 copies on Japan paper and 30 on Dutch handmade paper, preceding 1,000 copies on alfa wove.

Volumes I-XVIII and XXV-XXVII are first editions. Volumes XIX-XXIV, first published in New York between 1941 and 1944 by the Éditions de la Maison française during Jules Romains’s wartime exile, are present in their Paris reissues of 1945 and 1946, uniformly printed on the same pure wove paper and incorporated into the numbered set.

Original printed wrappers with integral flaps, entirely untrimmed and preserving their full margins. An excellent set overall, two wrappers with some light soiling.

A handsome and rare complete set in twenty-seven volumes, preserved as issued in one of the principal deluxe paper issues.

Jules Romains devoted almost fifteen years to Les Hommes de bonne volonté. Publication began in 1932 and ended in 1946, the year of his election to the Académie française. Through a multitude of intersecting lives, the cycle encompasses twenty-five years of French society, from 6 October 1908 to 7 October 1933, beginning in the final years of the Belle Époque and ending as new threats gather over Europe.

The vast structure represents the fullest expression of Unanimism, the doctrine conceived by Romains early in the century and developed in La Vie unanime in 1908. The individual never exists in isolation, but belongs to streets, crowds, institutions, professions and political bodies whose collective life acts upon each person as much as each person contributes to its formation. Characters meet, vanish and reappear, creating not merely a sequence of plots but an entire society observed in motion.

Pierre Jallez and Jean Jerphanion provide two lines of continuity through this immense population. The writer and the politician move together through the transformations of their age without ever mastering them. Around them unfolds every level of French society: the bourgeoisie and working classes, intellectual circles, business, the army, diplomacy and parliamentary government. The cycle follows not a small group of heroes, but the gradual formation of a shared historical consciousness.

The continuity of the undertaking was broken by war. After leaving France in 1940, Romains lived first in the United States and then in Mexico. The six central volumes of the final section, from Cette grande lueur à l’Est to Comparutions, were consequently published in New York by the Éditions de la Maison française, one of the presses that maintained free French-language publishing abroad during the Occupation.

This American interval remains materially present in the set. Volume XIX, reissued in Paris by Flammarion in 1945, retains on the verso of the half-title the statement "Copyright 1941, la Maison Française, New-York, N.Y." Within a series restored to uniform wrappers, this single typographical line records the moment when publication of the cycle was forced to leave France before returning.

Flammarion reissued the six New York volumes in 1945 and 1946 on the same deluxe papers as the remainder of the series. The operation reconstituted a complete and materially coherent Paris set despite the geographical rupture in its publication. The present copy thus preserves throughout its twenty-seven volumes the bibliographical continuity that the war had temporarily interrupted.

The final three volumes appeared in 1946, while Romains was still dividing his life between France and Mexico. Elected to the Académie française in his absence on 4 April, he was formally received on 7 November. The completion of Les Hommes de bonne volonté consequently coincided with his return to French literary life, after several years during which the work had continued far from both his country and its original publisher.

A rare complete set on Outhenin-Chalandre pure wove paper, preserved in the original wrappers, untrimmed and with full margins. Beneath the restored uniformity of its twenty-seven volumes remains the visible break of exile: begun under the Third Republic, continued in New York during the war and completed in liberated France, Jules Romains’s vast social panorama carries within its typography the history through which it passed.