A la trace de Dieu

In the bleak winter of a German POW camp, a small circle of engineers, accountants and booksellers gathers around a young French intellectual desperate to keep his mind awake. Jacques Rivière offers them a series of informal talks on God, sketches that become the heart of the book: terse outlines, vivid questions and the raw honesty of a man confronting faith while barbed wire looms outside. The first part reads like a classroom in miniature, each note a stepping stone toward a larger, unfinished apologetic project that the war and his eventual death will never allow him to complete.

The second half opens the prisoner’s journal, a day‑by‑day record that supplies the emotional and spiritual texture behind the lecture fragments. Listeners are invited into the cramped quarters where philosophy meets survival, hearing how Rivière wrestles with the mystery of the divine, the limits of reason, and the stubborn hope that even in captivity, a trace of God can be found.