Le Grand Troupeau [with:] Refus d'Obéisance

Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1937. First editions. Large paper copies, no. XXIX of 109 and no. XII of 15 on vergé Lafuma watermarked nrf, for the Bibliophiles de la Nouvelle Revue Française. 267, [5]; 93, [3] pp. 2 vols. 4to. Original printed wrappers. Fine copies. First editions. Large paper copies, no. XXIX of 109 and no. XII of 15 on vergé Lafuma watermarked nrf, for the Bibliophiles de la Nouvelle Revue Française. 267, [5]; 93, [3] pp. 2 vols. 4to. Giono's Great Novel of the First World War. One of the great French novels of the first world war, and Giono's favorite among his own books, which only appeared in English translation in 1969, entitled To the Slaughterhouse. Edmund White has observed that this "powerful novel against war ... shows the horrors of the front but also the hardships of the home front - the untended (or confiscated) livestock, the loneliness, the physical demands of running a farm without men or only with feeble old men."
Large paper copy, one of 109, with a large paper copy of Giono's personal statement against war, Refus d'Obéisance [Disobedience], first published in in the journal Europa in November 1934, comprising four chapters dropped from the published text of Le grand troupeau (1931). This copy, one of just 15 large paper copies, includes a loosely inserted printed card, dated Manosque, December 1936: "même si mes amis politiques s'inquietent dans cet acte d'un individualisme suspect, je refuse d'obeïr a la guerre [I refuse to obey war] Jean Giono".