Les Thibault

novel cycle by Martin du Gard

Also known as: “The Thibaults”

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Article History

Les Thibault, eight-part novel cycle by Roger Martin du Gard, first published in 1922–40. The individual novels that make up the series are Le Cahier gris (1922; The Gray Notebook), Le Pénitencier (1922; The Penitentiary or The Reformatory), La Belle Saison (1923; The Springtime of Life or High Summer), La Consultation (1928; The Consulting Day), La Sorellina (1928), La Mort du père (1929; The Death of the Father), L’Été 1914 (1936; Summer 1914), and Épilogue (1940). The series was published in two volumes in English as The Thibaults and Summer 1914.

This record of the Thibault family’s development chronicles the social and moral issues confronting the French bourgeoisie from the beginning of the 20th century to World War I. Reacting against a bourgeois patriarch, the younger son, Jacques, renounces his Roman Catholic past to embrace revolutionary socialism, and the elder son, Antoine, accepts his middle-class heritage but loses faith in its religious foundation. Both sons eventually die in the war.

This article was most recently revised and updated by J.E. Luebering.