He studied at the Sorbonne and then made his living in comparative obscurity as a journalist in Paris. In 1895 he brought out a small volume of verse, Les Pleureuses, which received favorable attention, and in 1908 he published his first novel, L'Enfer (The Inferno, 1918).
With the coming of war he enlisted as a private, was twice decorated, and wrote a novel, Le Feu (1916) (Under Fire, 1917), based on his experiences, which won him the Prix Goncourt in 1917 and has been considered one of the best war novels ever written. This was followed by Clarté (1919), a novel with a similar theme. Barbusse was one of the earliest novelists to write of war with stark realism and repugnance, describing the daily persistent horrors of the trenches and the broken families. He became leader of Clarté, l'Internationale de la Pensée, a group dedicated to pacifism, social equality, and intellectual internationalism and founded the World Committee against War and Fascism. He was drama critic for Lettres, Femina, and the Grande Revue, an editor of Commune, and founder of Le Monde. He was also a member of the Ethiopian Defense Committee. An active antimilitarist and a supporter of international communism, he lectured in England, the United States, and Europe. In 1927 he wrote La Russie, based on a trip to the Soviet Union, and also Jésus and Les Judas de Jésus, setting forth the similarities of Jesus' philosophy to that of communism. After writing Staline (Stalin; a New World Seen Through One Man) in 1935 he went to Moscow and died there, Aug. 30, 1935, while attending the Seventh Congress of the Communist International.
Was an active antimilitarist and a supporter of international communism
