Le musée Grévin

Rare double first edition of this masterpiece of the literature of the Resistance, probably published simultaneously in the northern and southern zone by the two most important underground publishers of the Resistance.

The six-page fold-out cupboard produced in the Parisian cellar of Editions de Minuit is echoed by the equally modest brochure printed on the active resistant presses of Saint-Flour by René Amarger under a yellow cover “falling from wallpaper”. It will be the first creation of the publishing house founded by Aragon and then directed by Paul Eluard, La Bibliothèque Française.

It is moreover around this joint work of combatant publishing that the friendship between the two poets, separated by surrealist quarrels, is renewed. Eluard's first gesture will thus be a literary contribution: Seven poems of Love at war. Published the same year at the “French Library” under the pseudonym of Jean du Haut, this poem will mark the entry into the underground of Eluard.
Although after the war, some considered the pseudonyms of the poets to be transparent, our copy of the “French Library” testifies to the contrary, as shown by its faulty attribution to Eluard by a double handwritten mention at the top of the cover and last poem page. But this confusion also underlines the aesthetic and political proximity of the two greatest poets of the Resistance.
For his part, Louis Aragon opted for the pseudonym of François La Colère, François for humiliated France and Anger against the Vichy regime.

The “Musée Grévin” considered from its publication as “The punishments of 1943”, will remain with Liberty by Paul Eluard, “one of the masterpieces of clandestine literature”. In L'Intelligence en guerre published in 1945, Louis Parrot, wrote about him: “this poem, crossed by dazzling images, is at the same time a condemnation without appeal from traitors, a prayer, an act of time towards their unhappy victims. he paints in avenging terms, the miserable who delivered them to the executioners and evokes the face of so many tortured French women. “
This capital poem is indeed one of the very first public evocations, and the first literary, of the Auschwitz camp: “On the borders of Poland, there is a Gehenna whose name whistles and blows a terrible song. Ausschwitz! Ausschwitz! Ausschwitz! bloody syllables! Here we live, here we die slowly. We call it slow execution. A part of our hearts is slowly dying there. “
One can moreover date with precision the composition of this poem according to this reference to Auschwitz and to the “one hundred women of our country” that Aragon evokes. There was indeed a first mention of the camp in May 1943 in the resistant newspaper La Vérité , but it will only be mentioned “slow execution” in the August 1943 issue of “Etoiles” which evokes for the first time the presence in the camp of the hundred women hostages who have disappeared since their deportation from the Romainville camp in January and whose fate is finally known thanks to the testimony of an escapee just passed on to De Gaulle by the committee of the National Front. A detail also confirms that Aragon becomes aware of these elements by reading this newspaper, since it reproduces the shell of the article to “Ausschwitz”, (which was still correctly spelled “Auschwitz” in the article in The Truth in January).
This poem published just after the publication of the newspaper was therefore urgently composed and inspired by the violent immediate news. Because Aragon, like Eluard, fights with words by creating what Louis Parrot calls “occasional poetry” in the noble sense: “For [Aragon], there is no other poetry than militant poetry. A successful poem is, for him, a fact of war (...), a fight from which the poet can never be absent, since it challenges his freedom, that is to say his very life. “
Very beautiful and precious copies of this major poem of the Resistance published by the two largest French publishers born under oppression.