Affiche originale - "On ne nourrit pas un village avec des ordures" placardée à Céreste.

Original poster – “On ne nourrit pas un village avec des ordures”
("One does not feed a village with garbage")

For a few months now, we have been witnessing a regularised passive hunt for patriots, too highly noticed, it seems, at a time when risking their own life and that of their family's was not a shopfront item.
The odious thing about this way of acting is that it is strangely reminiscent of the Hitlerians. We dishonour, then we wait and see. Regardless of the esteem in which a person is regarded, a police visit always leaves a hint of ambiguity, it is believed. Vigilance more than ever, solidarity.” (7 December 1945 addressed by René Char to Francis Ponge)

The first and only edition of this legendary “Céreste Affair” poster printed by René Char with a very few copies and posted in the small village of Céreste, the heart of his resistance network.
Extremely rare, this poster is absent from all institutions and auction houses. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France itself only has a reproduction offered by Pierre-André Benoit.
The famous placard marks the end of the loving and combative relationship between René Char and the village of Céreste which was nevertheless Captain Alexandre's HQ and the birthplace of one of his most moving romantic adventures with his lover nicknamed “la Renarde” (the Vixen).

It is in fact to this isolated Haute Provence village that René Char moves to organise his Resistance network, the S. A. P. (Section Atterrissage Parachutage) responsible for recovering the deliveries of parachuted weapons in the Low Alps and redistributing them to the Maquis. Being a faithful guest in Céreste since 1936, René Char was able to quickly unite the villagers and even the gendarmes who would protect him and help him build his network.

Forewarned, the Nazis sent a company of SS to Céreste to flush him out, raiding all of the houses and violently interrogating the villagers who all knew Char and his lover with whom he was staying. The heroic reaction of the villagers had a lasting effect on René Char who composed in their honour one of the longest and most beautiful pages of Hypnos:
“the village was besieged, gagged, hypnotized, completely brought to a standstill. Two companies of SS and a detachment of militia held it under the muzzle of their machine-guns and mortars. Then began the ordeal. The inhabitants were tossed out of their houses and summoned to assemble in the central square. [...] Marcelle had come to my shutter to whisper the word to me. [...] Blows reached me, punctuated by curses. The SS had surprised a young mason who was coming back from retrieving some traps. His fright set him up for their tortures. A voice bent over the swollen body shouting: “Where is he? Show us,” followed by silence. And kicks and riflebutts raining. [...] Then there appeared rushing from each street a flood of women, children, old men, going to the place of assembly, according to a concerted plan. They hurried without haste, literally streaming over the SS, paralyzing them “in all good faith”. [...] Furious, the patrol ploughed its way through the crowd and made further off. With an infinite prudence now, some anxious and kindly eyes looked in my direction, passed like a flashing lamp on my window. I half revealed myself and a smile broke from my pallor. I held to these people by a thousand confident threads of which not one would break.
I loved my kind wildly that day, well beyond sacrifice.”

A fusional relationship unites the poet and his adopted village and for René Char in the context of Nazi hate and violence, Céreste represents the living symbol of the humanist values to be defended and the necessity of his fight.
This passion found its incarnation in his Céreste lover: “Marcelle Sidoine becomes for him the very image of Céreste, of this new country in which he digs his mine and intends to bury the galleries from which the reconquest will start. She is the soul of the deep-sided mountain” he writes. That says it all. She will be the lover, the hostess, the steward, the liaison agent. A woman of courage” (in René Char, by Laurent Greilsamer).

Marcelle will also be his weakness and the way by which at the Liberation his enemies from within will settle their accounts with the infamous captain.
Since it is impossible to tarnish Char's heroic reputation, a traitor in his network, Georges Dubois, denounced by Char and turned journalist of a communist body, will find Marcelle to be a perfect target to achieve his revenge. Shown to have diverted laundry bound for the Maquis, Marcelle is tarnished by perfectly orchestrated rumours and sees her house searched by the police.
The supposedly diverted goods proved to be on the contrary a cargo of woollen nightdresses offered by two Marseille members of the Resistance, unravelled and transformed into sweaters for the S. A. P. Maquis by Marcelle and her daughter Mireille.

Although his “renarde” was entirely cleared by the justice, Char remained deeply hurt by the success that the slanderous remarks had with the villagers. His poster is both a last declaration of love for his “glorious village that [he] loves and that these bad people do not” and a letter breaking-up with a Céreste “dishonoured [...] by the vile [...] frogs”.

“The evil” that Char thinks to have “swept away” by this “truth” posted on the Céreste trees will strike harder and “the Céreste affair” will be concluded by the assassination of Gabriel Besson, friend and companion of René Char's maquis.
Breaking definitively with the Communists, the disillusioned resistance fighter will also leave his beloved village for good, even eradicating all traces in the construction of his Œuvres complètes in 1983.
Despite Char's insistence, Marcelle and her daughter whom the poet wanted to adopt did not follow him into the valley. They remained faithful to their native village, in turn both glorious and despicable, and ultimately simply human.

Impossible agreement between ideal and reality, as Char himself already sensed in 1945: “Wasn't it chance that had chosen me as prince that day rather than the heart of this village ripened for me?”