Lewis côté français : the war, translations, readers

• Ensign, Lewis arrived at the front on November 29, 1917, his 19th birthday, and served in the villages near Arras.
• On April 15, 1918, he was wounded at Mont-Bernanchon, near Lillers, by a shell that killed his corporal.
• The first French translation of Lewis, *Tactics of the Devil*, was published in 1943 in Neuchâtel; *Narnia* arrived in French in 1952.

The Chronicles of Narnia

In 1917, Clive Staples Lewis was eighteen years old. He had just been accepted into University College, Oxford, but he only studied there for a few weeks: the war was still raging, and he had decided to enlist. As an Irishman, he was not subject to conscription, but he did not want to use that as an excuse. He trained in Oxford itself, in a cadet battalion housed at Keble College. There he shared a room with Paddy Moore, a young man whose mother, Janie, would play an important role in his life.

Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, he was sent to France with the 1st Battalion and arrived in the front line on November 29, 1917, his 19th birthday. In *Surprised by Joy*, his autobiography, he summarized his experience in one dry sentence: he did most of his service in the villages near Arras, Fampoux and Monchy-le-Preux, and was wounded at Mont-Bernanchon, near Lillers, in April 1918.

In the trenches

The sector was then relatively calm. Lewis would write that the real enemies were fatigue and water rather than the Germans. In February 1918, he had what he called “the luck to fall ill”: struck down with trench fever, he spent three “delicious” weeks in the hospital at Le Tréport, on the Normandy coast. He returned to his battalion at the end of February, just before the great German offensive of spring.

On March 21, 1918, the Germans launched their offensive. Paddy Moore, in another regiment, was reported missing and later declared dead during the March fighting. According to a promise the two young men had made, Lewis would take care of Paddy’s mother after the war. He would live with Janie Moore and her daughter Maureen for over thirty years.

Wounded at Mont-Bernanchon

Mont-Bernanchon is the name of the commune; English biographies of Lewis refer to “Mount Bernenchon”.

In April, the Battle of the Lys raged in northern France. The 1st Somerset Light Infantry was engaged near Riez du Vinage, near Mont-Bernanchon, between Béthune and Lillers, in the Pas-de-Calais. On April 15, 1918, Lewis was struck by shrapnel from a shell, probably British and fallen short. He was wounded in the chest, left wrist and left leg. The corporal, Harry Ayres, who had been standing next to him, was killed instantly. Lewis paid him a beautiful tribute in *Surprised by Joy*: as a novice officer, he said he was led by this corporal who had become almost a father to him. His friend Laurence Johnson, another officer, also died of his wounds.

Lewis would only recall two memories of that moment: the certainty, just after being struck, that he was no longer breathing and was going to die, without feeling either fear or courage. He was treated in Étaples, where his brother Warren, also an officer in France, came to see him, and then repatriated to England at the end of May 1918. A piece of shrapnel would remain lodged in his chest until 1944.

What the war left behind

Lewis rarely spoke of the war. He said it seemed to belong to someone else. But it permeates his work. His first book, *Spirits in Bondage* (1919), a collection of poems published under the name of Clive Hamilton, was partly written at the front and is dark. Later, the war returns everywhere: the Pevensie children flee the bombings of London, Narnia has its battles, and in *Tactics of the Devil* the young man whose demons covet his soul dies under the bombs. The theme of the soldier faithful until the end, of the corporal or the king who fights without hope, must owe much to those months in Artois.

Tolkien, for his part, fought on the Somme in 1916, a few dozen kilometers away. The two friends did not yet know each other; they would meet at Oxford in 1926.

Amiens, 2026: a conference on Lewis and the war

This little-known chapter was the subject of an international conference at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne, in Amiens, from June 11 to 13, 2026: *War, Fellowship, and Survival in the Lives and Works of C.S. Lewis and Kindred Spirits*. The choice of location was no coincidence: Amiens is about 70 km from the villages where Lewis fought and less than 40 km from the Somme battlefields where Tolkien fought. Organized notably by Suzanne Bray, of the Catholic University of Lille, a leading French expert on Lewis, and by researchers from Amiens, Belfast and the United States, the conference brought together academics from several countries, with visits to sites of memory of the Great War. Several papers focused on Lewis’s military archives.

Lewis and French literature

Lewis read French. A medievalist, he devoted his first major scholarly book, *The Allegory of Love* (1936), to courtly love, which he believed originated in Languedoc in the 11th century, and to *The Romance of the Rose*. He admired the chivalric romances of Chrétien de Troyes, echoes of which can be found in the kings and knights of Narnia.

Narnia in French

French speakers had to wait a long time to read the entire series. *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe* was published by Hachette in 1952, in the Idéal-Bibliothèque collection, under the title *Le Lion et la Sorcière blanche*, translated by Mme E.-R. Blanchet and illustrated by Romain Simon. *Prince Caspian* followed in 1953. Then nothing for nearly thirty years.

In 1980, Flammarion revived the series in the Bibliothèque du Chat perché, with the title *L’Armoire magique*, translated by Anne-Marie Dalmais. This was followed by *Prince Caspian* (1982), *Le Voyage de la « Belle Aventure »* (1983) and *Le Fauteuil d’argent* (1984). Three volumes were still missing.

From 2001 onwards, Gallimard Jeunesse finally published all seven Chronicles in Folio Junior, in chronological order and with illustrations by Pauline Baynes. The complete edition in one volume was published in 2005, the year of the film, under the title *Le Monde de Narnia*. The success was immense: in France, the 2005 film attracted more than five million viewers in nine weeks, as announced on the old website in March 2006.

In brief

The French-speaking part of Switzerland was the gateway for Lewis into the French world. The very first French translation of a Lewis book, *Tactics of the Devil*, was published in 1943 in Neuchâtel, by Delachaux et Niestlé, in a translation by B. V. Barbey. In the middle of the war, this small book about the devil’s tricks first reached Swiss readers.

Later, L’Âge d’Homme editions, in Lausanne, published *The Cosmic Trilogy* and *The Great Divorce*. Between 1998 and 2005, Raphaël editions, in Mont-Pèlerin, above Vevey, translated and published seven Lewis books, including *Surprised by Joy*, *The Great Divorce* and *The Four Loves*. The old blog.narnia.ch, launched from French-speaking Switzerland in 2005, and the Espace 2 series of programs devoted to Narnia in December 2005, are part of this tradition.

Lewis today in France

Lewis remains less known in France than in the English-speaking world, where he is one of the most widely read Christian authors of the 20th century. But interest is growing. Scholars like Suzanne Bray and philosopher Irène Fernandez, author of *Mythe, raison ardente* (2005), have devoted important studies to him. Empreinte editions publishes new translations, such as *Miracles* (2018) and *Démoncratiquement vôtre* (2025). And the Greta Gerwig film, expected on Netflix on April 2, 2027, should introduce Narnia to a new generation of French readers.

• timeline —
  • 1917-11-29 — Lewis arrives on the front line near Arras on his 19th birthday (1st Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry). — Fampoux, Monchy-le-Preux (Pas-de-Calais)
  • 1918-02 — Trench fever: three weeks in hospital. — Le Tréport (Seine-Maritime)
  • 1918-02-28 — Return to the battalion. — Artois
  • 1918-03 — German Spring Offensive; Paddy Moore is killed. — Western Front
  • 1918-04-15 — Wounded by a shell during the Battle of the Lys; Sergeant Harry Ayres is killed. — Mont-Bernanchon, near Riez du Vinage, between Béthune and Lillers (Pas-de-Calais)
  • 1918-05 — Treated in Étaples, then repatriated to England (late May). — Étaples (Pas-de-Calais)
  • 1943 — First French translation of a Lewis book: Tactics of the Devil (trans. B. V. Barbey). — Neuchâtel, Delachaux et Niestlé
  • 1952 — First translation of Narnia: The Lion and the Wardrobe (Hachette, trans. Mrs E.-R. Blanchet). — Paris
  • 1953 — Prince Caspian: Return to Narnia (Hachette). — Paris
  • 1980-1984 — Four Chronicles published by Flammarion (Bibliothèque du Chat perché). — Paris
  • 1998-2005 — Seven books by Lewis translated by Raphaël editions. — Le Mont-Pèlerin (Vaud)
  • 2001-2005 — The seven Chronicles published by Gallimard Jeunesse; complete collection The World of Narnia in 2005. — Paris
  • 2005-12-21 — Release of the film The Chronicles of Narnia in France and French-speaking Switzerland; over 5 million admissions in France. — France, French-speaking Switzerland
  • 2026-06-11 — International conference C.S. Lewis 2026 on war (June 11-13). — Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens
  • 2027-04-02 — The Magician's Nephew available on Netflix (no theatrical release in France). — France

See also

• Biography of C.S. Lewis (1) : from Belfast to Oxford, 1898-1931
• Timeline of C.S. Lewis's life
• French editions of Narnia
• J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis
• What to read by Lewis after Narnia
• Annotated bibliography: reading about Narnia and Lewis
• Narnia on the radio: Espace 2 week (December 2005)
• Blog archives (2005-2010)
• From the 1955 book to the 2027 film: The Magician's Nephew by Greta Gerwig
• From the trenches of Artois to the evacuated children of the Kilns: how two wars opened the wardrobe
• From Neuchâtel to our bookshops: eighty years of Lewis in French, and the books still missing
• Eight addresses, eight books: the map of Lewis's works