Clandestine French Literature During the Occupation*

Abstract

IN the summer of 1940 France was physically and spiritually crushed. For months Frenchmen were dazed, groping for an explanation of the catastrophe that had befallen their country, trying to adapt themselves to a life as prisoners within a captive Europe. As for the life of the mind, it seemed to be dead. The publishing houses and periodicals that had remained in the capital were most efficiently appropriated, in many cases, by the Nazis, whereas those that fled across the line of demarcation were permitted hardly more liberty than they would have enjoyed in Paris. During this first period of confusion and uncertainty, some writers attempted to elude the scissors of Anastasie (the French image of censorship) by writing on non-controversial subjects with only an occasional and everso-discreet reference to the events of the day. Thus Andre Gide, in his seventies the dean of French letters, wrote for the Figaro, then in Lyon, a series of Imaginary Interviews which have disappointed many readers smugly seated beside their American fireside because those interviews concern chiefly literary and often even stylistic questions. But, to a careful reader who puts himself in the place of a closely-guarded French writer in 1942, they contain a number of references to the plight of France-even to a couplet of Goethe wilfully mistranslated to refer to an eventual liberation. But the very fact itself of Gide's having to limit himself to such inoffensive topics as grammar and an actress's delivery of Racine formed in itself a sufficient comment upon the times. But it was chiefly in the domain of poetry that the open literature of allusion and double meanings flourished. Recent poetry has tended toward obscurity and nowhere more so, perhaps, than in France where the influences of Rimbaud and Mallarm6 at the end of the nineteenth century have encouraged young writers to be hermetic and difficult, where the Surrealist movement has literally mocked the public. It was a simple matter then for young French poets to say what they wanted to and be sure of being understood only by their initiates. This they did in many new poetry magazines which mushroomed mysteriously all over the country. Chief among them were three: Poesie edited by the poet Pierre Seghers in the little village of Villeneuve-lis-Avignon; Confluences (the merging of rivers, excellent name for a magazine published in Lyon where the rushing Sa6ne meets the mighty