Gaston Riou was born on January 7, 1883. He is a native of the CÉvennes, the region from which are derived three of the most distinguished among modern French psychologists, Melchior de VogÜÉ, Auguste Sabatier, and Paul Bourget. The CÉvenole family from which he springs played an active part in the wars of religion. On the mother’s side he is related to Jacques de Vaucanson, the leading French mechanical engineer of the eighteenth century, and also to Majal DÉsubas, the last Huguenot martyr, executed at Montpellier in 1747. Thus by family tradition he is liberal, nonconformist, and republican.

Propagandist by temperament, he devoted himself at an early age to the study of Christian origins. In 1905, at the Sorbonne, he wrote a thesis upon the De unitate of St. Cyprian. His first published writings dealt with the modernist movement of Loisy, Murri, and Tyrrell, and they attracted considerable attention in Italy and in Germany. The ardour which inspired them was very different from the rabies theologica. The young author, though Calvinist by conviction, adopted an attitude remote from partisanship, his view being, “Whatever is Christian, is ours.” He insisted upon the need for a new synthesis, embracing at once the ancient faith and the actual conditions and the social life and thought of our day. He contended that the non-Roman churches scattered throughout the world might well constitute the embryo of a new Catholicism. But above all, in this writer simultaneously republican and Christian believer, was manifest the earnest desire to reconcile the France of ’89 with the Christian ideal and the longing to witness and to assist in the renovation of his country. Writing of him at this period, M. Emile Faguet, a noted French critic, declared: “His ardour, his fire, his impetus, the rush of his blood, are all instinct with the passion of patriotism.”

In the year 1913 this admixture of religious uneasiness and nationalist hope found expression in a volume entitled Aux Écoutes de la France qui vient, which from the first attracted widespread attention. Above all, this work embodies faith in France, and the leaders among the younger men of the country rallied round him who had ventured to proclaim this faith. M. Jean Finot, editor of the Revue des Revues, bestowed upon Gaston Riou the title of princeps juventutis. Since then, with the coming of the war, all France has regarded the Ecoutes as a work of prophecy. We read in it the phrase: “Silently and studiously an Élite is in process of formation. The members of this Élite are united, as it were, in heroic friendship, for they are all animated by a single passion, the desire to renovate their country, and they are all inspired by the same faith, simple and strong. When others despaired, they did not despair. They are confident that a splendid morrow, worthy of the finest epochs of our history, is now germinating in the furrows of our motherland.”

Nor was it in France alone that Aux Écoutes de la France qui vient attracted attention. In Germany, Karl Lamprecht, the great pangermanist historian, devoted two lectures to it at the royal court of Dresden. In Zukunft Maximilian Harden exclaimed: “The publication of such a work suffices to prove that je-m’enfichisme [the Gallio spirit] is dead in France, and that young France is turning away from the scepticism of the masters of French literature.”

Riou collaborated with Bergson, Henri PoincarÉ, and Charles Gide in the publication of a historical study, Le matÉrialisme actuel, an attempt to summarize the tendencies of contemporary thought. Of this volume a critic declared: “For France it celebrates the close of the age of negativism, and heralds the opening of an epoch of lyrical effort, of affirmation, and of activity.”

When war broke out, Gaston Riou had just returned from a journey in England, Scotland, and Wales. He went to the front among the first, took part in the fighting in Lorraine, and was mentioned in dispatches. He was wounded in the battle of Dieuze, was taken prisoner, and passed eleven months in a Bavarian fortress. This was not his first visit to Germany. A year earlier he had been sent there on an official mission, and he is personally acquainted with many Germans of note.

The fruit of his imprisonment is Journal d’un simple soldat, which we are now publishing as The Diary of a French Private. In its native land the success of the book has been extraordinary, and the sternest of French critics have with one voice declared it to be a permanent addition to literature. Paul Bourget, Emile Faguet, Camille Mauclair, and Maurice Donnay all speak of it as a masterpiece.

TO GUGLIELMO FERRERO