Jean Giono, a broken writer: the story of a “moral crisis”

Abstract

In the early 1930s, Jean Giono was experiencing what he called a “moral crisis”, which could easily be understood as a depression. His traumatic experience in the trenches of the First World War do not leave him. His relationship to the world changes, and his writing alters in both form and subject matter. First of all, we will try to analyse the causes of this mental crisis, then we will look for traces of it in Giono's work and, finally, we will show how, thirty years later, the melancholy of Juan Ramón Jiménez, into which Giono immersed himself when he read Platero y yo, as part of the adaptation project proposed to him in 1958, brought back to life his war trauma and part of his mental crisis. In trying to understand and define the scope of this moral crisis, we seek to identify its causes and consequences, as well as to determine its importance in Giono's work as a whole.