Read La Guerre des boutons in Frenchwith every sentence explained

La Guerre des boutons by Louis Pergaud was first published in 1912. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under children and young adult. It runs to about 68,200 words.

In this war, the spoils are buttons. And the price of defeat is walking home holding up your trousers.

For generations, the boys of Longeverne and the boys of the neighbouring village of Velrans have been sworn enemies. This autumn, their fearless leader Lebrac comes up with the ultimate humiliation for prisoners: cut off every button, hook and lace, and send them home to face their parents' fury.

Soon both gangs are ambushing and plotting, fighting pitched battles at the edge of the woods, filling a war chest with buttons and building a secret hideout. But victory is never certain, traitors are everywhere, and the grown-ups are never far away.

Louis Pergaud's hilarious, earthy novel of country childhood has become a French classic, filmed by Yves Robert in 1962 and twice more in 2011. Expect plenty of rural slang and schoolboy insults!

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in French. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday French feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.