Retour d’Alsace, août 1914 Témoignage littéraire d’un tragique de guerre en sursis

In Spring 1916, with his Retour d’Alsace, Août 1914, Giraudoux inaugurated the genre of the war memoir. In Retour it takes the form of a journalistic story apparently pieced together from his often reworked field journals, yet already faithful to his evolving poetics, for which the question of style is uppermost. This study, bearing exclusively on Retour d’Alsace, aims to catalogue the dominant traits of a discourse in which we find the Giraudoux of August 1914, on his at once military, literary, and human itinerary, on Alsatian soil.