Jean TOUSSEUL

Jean Tousseul, pen name of Olivier Degée (Landenne-sur-Meuse, 1890 – Seilles, 1944), is one of the most singular voices in French-language Belgian literature of the interwar period. The son of a working-class family, self-taught, he worked in the limestone quarries of the Meuse valley before devoting himself to writing. From 1916 he began publishing his first texts, and during the First World War wrote pacifist articles that earned him, after the Armistice, four months' imprisonment for "defeatist statements". He was arrested on 10 December 1918 in Liège, and it was thanks to an international campaign in which Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse took part that he obtained a dismissal of charges in April 1919. Barbusse wrote the preface to his collection "La Mélancolique Aventure" (1920), marking his entry into French pacifist and proletarian literary networks. A militant journalist for several years (nearly nine hundred press articles in all) he contributed to Barbusse's review "Monde" and was published in Paris by Rieder. From 1927 he withdrew to Machelen to devote himself entirely to his work, of which the five-volume novel cycle "Jean Clarambaux" (1927–1936) represents the pinnacle. Translated into nine languages, he received in 1937 the Prix Triennal de Littérature of the Royal Academy of Belgium for "Le Masque de Tulle". During the Second World War he refused any compromise with the occupying forces, declined the honours offered by Nazi cultural organisations, and saw his "Nouvelles Méditations sur la Guerre" rejected by German censorship. He died of tuberculosis in Seilles in February 1944.