Deux Amis - Themes

Themes

Unlike Maupassant's other stories set during the war, Deux Amis is unusual in that it is set in Paris rather than the provinces, where Maupassant spent the war. The tension between Paris and the provinces is hinted at in the story - Maupassant describes how Paris is starving, but that its inhabitants are simply sitting around drinking, unlike the inhabitants of the provinces who have to put up with the war, and the occupying Germans, on a daily basis.

The two French characters are portrayed heroically as brave, stoic Frenchmen who are bitterly opposed to the war. Maupassant uses the characters as mouthpieces for alternative political views - Monsieur Sauvage complains bitterly that the Third Republic would never have declared war and that the war is the result of Napoleon III's meddling, to which Monsieur Morissot replies that Napoleon's government saw war abroad, while the Republic sees war at home, reflecting the opposing Imperial and Republican political factions of France during the Franco-Prussian War. Maupassant also uses the characters as a mouthpiece for his views on the futility of the war; the character's sadness on seeing Mont-Valérien shelling German soldiers reflects this, mourning the pointless loss of life in both countries, and that countless girlfriends, wives, mothers, and children in both France and Prussia will weep for the loss of their loved ones in a pointless war.

Despite mourning the loss of Prussian soldiers, Maupassant maintains his stereotyping of German soldiers in this story. While Maupassant is careful to develop the individual characters of Morissot and Sauvage, he portrays the German soldiers who capture the two, and the soldiers in the restaurant, as faceless men who do not count as individual human beings, but simply as stereotyped representatives of the German race. The officer, like German officers in Maupassant's other works, is portrayed as a cold-hearted, unfeeling, automaton. He feels no compassion for the two men he has executed, and seems unable to empathise with them. The fact that he orders the fish to be fried alive, and that he returns calmly to smoking his pipe after the execution, enhances the image of a cold, inhuman barbarian, an antithesis to the heroic Frenchmen who refuse to betray their fellow countrymen, and pay the ultimate price for their patriotism.