War
War is a very important theme for Maupassant. The writer himself was mobilized from the first year at the university, which he later failed to finish, and participated in the Franco-Prussian war. From this campaign he took out an aversion to any war. Prussian officers who appear in “military” short stories are invaders - limited, cruel, arrogant, disgusting in their arrogance.
The central themes of many of his military short stories are those of heroism and patriotism, but he solves them unconventionally. His characters do not know how to analyze their actions. Feelings that force them to enter the fight and even sacrifice their lives are most often born from the inborn concept of duty and honor, offended by the invaders, or from an instinctive desire to restore justice. Such are the short stories “Boule de Suif”, “Two Friends”, “Uncle Milon”. Different sides of the war and different human characters are also reflected in the short stories “Duel”, “The Adventure of Walter Schnuffs”, “Horror” and others.
Maupassant's attitude towards war is clear: any war is unacceptable to him. The cruelty of the invaders gives rise to retaliatory cruelty, and this terrible vicious circle cannot be broken.
Everyday life
In Maupassant’s stories, a peaceful France of the period of the Third Republic appears before the reader as well. Like many contemporaries, Maupassant treated his reality with disgust, sometimes bitter, and ironic, because he saw in it the dominance of pure-minded and selfish interest, destroying natural human feelings. Depicting the daily life of peasants, the writer shows how hard work and hopeless poverty distort human relations (short stories “Devil”, “Le Horla”).
Money
The theme of money is also developed in short stories about bureaucracy. Maupassant knew this environment very well, because he himself had been an official for many years. Sometimes his characters cause deep pity in the story “The Necklace”, the wife of a small official ruined her life in order to pay money for someone else’s necklace that she lost, and only after many years she finds out that it was fake. She wanted to look at the ball no worse than others, and for this she sacrificed both herself and her husband.
But more often people are led by greed. The thirst for money leads to the loss of human qualities: for the sake of inheritance, a woman decides to cheat on her husband (“Inheritance”); a husband who finds out after his wife’s death about her love affairs is comforted when he realizes that the jewelry presented to her by her lover is genuine and worth a considerable amount (“Jewelry”); the poor woman cripples in the womb her unborn children only to later sell the freaks, but no better is a socialite who, being pregnant, is pulled into a corset to have fun at the balls, and then sends the crippled child out of sight ("Mother Savage") . The theme of money determines the plot of many other of his short stories.
