L'Ordre du jour

"History is a spectacle," declares Éric Vuillard in L'Ordre du jour, Prix Goncourt 2017. This short narrative-fiction points to several episodes in the early stages of the Second World War.

It opens with a meeting, on February 20, 1933, where 24 German industrialists are received by Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler, who became Chancellor a month earlier. Purpose: to finance the Nazi party's campaign for the parliamentary elections. What follows, the madness of war, is described through the prism of the spiral of small causes, of missteps that turn grotesque, but with gigantic consequences of horror and destruction.