The Thibaults

This is the one. The Thibaults follows two brothers, Jacques, the rebel, and Antoine, the doctor, across the years leading up to and through World War One, set against the backdrop of a prosperous Parisian Catholic family slowly coming apart.

Why Start Here

It’s the full portrait. Martin du Gard wasn’t interested in heroism or ideology as abstraction; he wanted to show exactly how real people, with their contradictions, their professional lives, their love affairs, encountered historical catastrophe. The result is one of the most complete pictures of pre-war Europe in fiction.

The early volumes read like a rich family novel. The final volumes, set during the war, are harrowing in a way that feels earned because you’ve come to know these people so deeply. The transition is masterfully handled.

What to Expect

A long, demanding, ultimately devastating work. Martin du Gard’s prose is precise and unsparing, he doesn’t prettify anything. Readers who stay the course will find one of the great fictional reckonings with what the 20th century did to European civilization.