La Nation contre la race

First edition, in two volumes, of the series Commentaires sur la guerre des Boches. Copies numbered on Arches laid paper for both volumes, from the tirage de tête.

Printed wrappers lightly soiled, spine and margins of the front cover of the first volume sunned, slight tears to the spine ends, corner creases to the leaves, and an ink stain in the margin of the first volume. A few passages highlighted in pencil in the first volume. The second volume is untrimmed, with full margins throughout.

Autograph inscription, dated and signed "S." from André Suarès to Ventura García Calderón, on the front free endpaper of the first volume: "A Mr. V. Garcia Calderon, votre deuil redouble nos sympathies. S. 7 - IX - 1916 [your grief doubles our sympathy]".

This text by André Suarès, a graduate of the École normale supérieure, written and published in the midst of the war, seeks to discredit Wilhelmine Germany both intellectually and morally. The very title illuminates a central opposition: the nation, conceived in the French tradition as a political and voluntary community, versus race, a biologizing category mobilized by pan-Germanist thought and certain German theorists to justify a hierarchy of peoples and the Reich's expansionist ambitions.

This copy, enriched by an autograph inscription to the Peruvian writer and diplomat Ventura García Calderón, attests to the mutual esteem between authors committed to the French cause. The son of a Peruvian statesman exiled in France, Ventura García Calderón was born in Paris in 1886; he left the capital at an early age before returning to settle there in 1906 and spending most of his life there, dividing his time between a diplomatic career and literary life. The message Suarès left him in this volume refers to the tragedy that had just struck his recipient's family: Ventura's brother, José García Calderón, an artist and writer enlisted in the French army as a balloon artillery observer, had been killed in May 1916 at the Battle of Verdun.

Another affinity shared by the two writers: in that same year, 1916, both published texts devoted to Miguel de Cervantes - Suarès with Cervantès, and García Calderón with Une enquête littéraire : Don Quichotte à Paris et dans les tranchées. Although the latter deals with a literary figure who has since become timeless, the work is very much of its moment: it examines the French reception of Cervantes and his hero in the midst of the war, seeking to gauge the resonance of a Spanish figure within the French national imagination, including among the troops.

A copy presented to a Peruvian Francophile, bearing the mark of his twofold grief - for France, his adoptive country, ravaged by the conflict with Germany, and for his brother, who had just perished at Verdun.