Les lettres françaises. Numéro spécial consacré au massacre d'Oradour-sur-Glane

Les Lettres françaises. Special issue on the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane


Les Lettres françaises | Paris 1er Août 1944 | 22x27,5 cm | one sheet

First edition of this clandestine journal of the intellectual Resistance, established by Jacques Decour and Jean Paulhan.
A rare copy of this special issue that denounces and raises awareness of the awful massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane, carried out by the «Das Reich» division of the SS on the 10th June 1944. he account of the massacre is followed by an extract of the call to arms by Victor Hugo in 1871 against the Prussian army.
his final issue before the liberation was printed in 20,000 copies, but the fragility of the paper and the conditions in which it was distributed did for almost all the print run.
Les Lettres françaises was one of the most symbolic publications of the Resistance movement. The first issue was composed at the start of 1942 but was never published and was completely destroyed after the arrest of Jacques Decour, a major figure of the intellectual Resistance and founder of several clandestine journals, including La Pensée Libre which ran for only one issue and l'Université libre which ran until the liberation of France.
Les Lettres Françaises ran to 20 issues between September '42 and August '44. The greatest writers of the Resistance wrote for it, anonymously, including Aragon, Eluard, Leiris, Mauriac, Parrot, Queneau, Roy, Sartre, Seghers, Tardieu, Triolet, Vildrac, and others.
Published at the instigation of Paul Eluard and based on an account gathered by Georges Duhamel, this special edition on the eve of the liberation already points to one of the most difficult post-war tasks, that of remembrance. Like the concentration camps, the massacre at Oradour was hidden by the Nazis, who tried to destroy the proof of their crimes immediately after they were committed. Thus, as early as the following day, groups of SS returned to the scene to bury the bodies and wipe away the traces, while soldiers shot anyone who tried to approach the village. The account presented in Les Lettres Françaises also mentions this «precaution«: «anyone who turned up in town was executed»; «they would have killed us if they'd known we'd already been through the town.»
Paul Éluard thus gives the French people an important written and public account of this appalling massacre of an entire village, premeditated and carefully organized by the Waffen SS. 642 civilians, more than 400 of whom were women and children, were burnt in the church or shot during the day of the 10th June 1944, a few days after the Normandy landings. The piecing together of the events of this massacre was a real challenge for the post-war tribunals, which found themselves lacking witnesses, apart from the soldiers who had taken part in the massacre themselves. At General de Gaulle's initiative, the village was left as it was and became a place of memory for later generations.
A rare and handsome copy of this important Resistance journal, giving – in its penultimate issue – a key account of Nazi barbarities.