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Georges DARIEN

Gottlieb Krumm, Made in England

R.A. Everett & Co, London 1904, 12,5x19cm, reliure de l'éditeur.

Georges DARIEN
Gottlieb Krumm,
Made in England
R.A. Everett & Co | London 1904| 12.5 x 19 cm | publisher's binding
First edition of an extraordinary rarity published in London and written in English. The French edition, translated by Walter Redfern, only appeared in 1984.
Publisher's binding in glazed brown calico, spine ends lightly rubbed, without significant damage, illustrated first board.
Small and light dirt marks on the second board, small sections of paper missing due to the fragility of this featherweight laid paper.
Exiled with the majority of the French anarchists following the enactment of the "Lois scélérates" in 1893 and 1894, Darien travelled to Belgium and Germany before settling in London where, like Jules Vallès twenty years earlier, he stayed for many years. His life during this stay in the British capital remains a mystery but it is here that he wrote his masterpiece Le Voleur and his famous pamphlets La Belle France and L'Ennemi du Peuple. It is in this context that the polyglot writer composed this entire novel written in English. Like Le Voleur, Gottlieb Krumm, in the cosmopolitan London of the Entente Cordiale, depicts intelligent and unscrupulous German immigrants who get rich thanks to intense and very varied criminal activity. However, unlike the characters of his contemporary Maurice Barrès, Darien's foreigners are not a horde of naturally inclined barbarians to the destruction of an idealised national identity. On the contrary, these are men without a real prior identity and who, when confronted with the bourgeois society, will embrace all weaknesses and exploit all resources. Fraud, scams, blackmail, fires, prostitution, Gottlieb Krumm does it all to make a fortune and get to the top of London's finance and business. The height of Satire, Georges Darien does not allow any critical recoil towards the actions of his characters since it is the anti-hero himself who ironically tells his story in English blended with foreign idioms and obscure metaphors.
Confidentially published for a London audience who did not know him, this
irreverent novel was probably not successful at the time and the copies of this first and only edition published seem to have very quickly disappeared. We have only identified four copies in international institutions (British Library, National Library of Scotland, University of Oxford, Australian National University) and no copies for sale.

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