According to “The agenda” (2017 awarded the Prix Goncourt) is Éric Vuillard again a “German” theme. This Time it is not, however, only a few decades previous to the event, such as the Pact of the big industry with a certain “Bohemian corporal,” but a temporally distant Events: “The war of the poor” deals with the figure of Thomas Müntzer (1489 to 1525) and the peasants ‘ war in Thuringia.
The narrative begins with the execution of müntzer’s father by the count of Stolberg to 1500, and by the life stages of your hero then runs quickly: “Finally, he studied in Leipzig, became a priest in Halberstadt, Braunschweig, and then somewhere to the Provost, and after a series of calamities with the common people, Luther’s followers, he crawled 1520 out of his hole, to the preacher appointed in Zwickau.”
Vuillard’s focus on the last five years, 1520 to 1525, in which there is, among other things, in Zwickau, Prague, but especially in Allstedt, Mühlhausen and Frankenhausen had. The also of Luther condemned Spiritualist and Horsemen was defeated along with his army of peasants in the battle of Frankenhausen damning; the “theologian of the Revolution” (Ernst Bloch) was imprisoned and, like his father, executed.
In the sign of great role models
Müntzer is one of the icons of early modern Rebellion, and just as social-oriented, authority-critical counterpart to Luther a popular figure in the socialist historiography. As such, he is also the subject of criticism, and Vuillard defended his “passionate idealists” who “would be mocked by the medicine”. Anyway, “The war of the poor” confirms a turning point in the work of the 1968 in Lyon-born Vuillard, he has initiated a novel of the French Revolution: While novels such as “the Congo” (2012), and “sadness of earth” (2014) from the subjugation of the world told by the Occident, directed “14. July“ (2016) the storming of the Bastille from the point of view of the participants, took a staging of the people, the power of story. Simple, rough Shape size to be traded, heroic, an epic breath through the Text on the left of the democratic goosebumps literature.
Now, therefore, the Thuringian peasants, and the Visionary Müntzer. It is not surprising then, that Vuillard as role models attracts the French Jacquerien of the late middle ages, but religiously motivated revolts in England since the days of John Wyclif. The course room takes a further twelve out of a total of just sixty pages of Text – the ribbon is definitely too thin to be advised cursorily. “The war of the poor”, the effect is strange in the abstract, there are important life stages and those dense scenes, which, if they succeed, the charm of Vuillard’s historical novels.
