« Une seule pensée » / « Liberté »
It was Éluard himself who gave this manuscript to the director of Fontaine, Max-Pol Fouchet, during his secret visit to Paris in May 1942.
The two titles under which this poem circulated during the war, in France and around the world, both appear on this manuscript: “Une seule pensée” (struck through); “Liberté.”
The initial title “Une seule pensée” is struck through and replaced by “Liberté.”
The leaves had been mounted by Max-Pol Fouchet on light card, then on rigid boards (separately preserved), so that they could be framed and hung on either side of a portrait of Éluard in his possession (cf. no. 44 and photograph p. 77). The imposing frame stood in the small sitting room at 43 rue Lys-du-Parc in Algiers, above the small daybed-bookcase of the director of Fontaine, as shown by two photographs taken in Algiers, dating from late 1943 or early 1944.
Careful study of these photographs, precious and irrefutable evidence for the history of the document, reveals, on the one hand, that the photographic portrait of Éluard is not yet inscribed by the poet, and, on the other, that the manuscript of the poem, signed by him, does indeed bear both titles, the first one struck through. This confirms that by May 1942 Éluard already had the idea for the new title, before he settled on it definitively in the autumn, “on the printer’s stone,” as Noël Arnaud put it, during the printing of Poésie et vérité 1942.
As early as summer 1941, Paul Éluard seems to have conceived the idea and written a few stanzas of the future “Liberté,” probably at first intended as a love poem for Nusch, whose legendary genesis Sabine Boucheron has traced (Langage et société, no. 97, 2001, pp. 71–97). In a lecture on “occasional poetry” delivered on 17 January 1952 and published in La Nouvelle Critique in April, the poet said that “in composing the first stanzas […] I thought I would reveal, in conclusion, the name of the woman I loved, to whom this poem was dedicated. But I soon realized that the only word I had in mind was the word liberty. Thus, the woman I loved embodied a desire greater than herself. I confused her with my most sublime aspiration. And this word, liberty, throughout my poem, existed only to immortalize a very simple, very everyday, very deliberate will: that of freeing ourselves from the occupier.”
Whatever the poem’s origin, by autumn 1941 the pamphlet Sur les pentes inférieures (cf. no. 3) had drawn the attention of the Germans and the Vichy authorities to such an extent that Éluard decided, after spending New Year’s Eve with Georges Hugnet, to leave Paris in early January 1942 and live in semi-hiding with the Zervos couple at the hamlet of La Goulotte, near Vézelay, where he stayed with Nusch until 15 March. It was there, at the end of the winter of 1941–1942, that he put the finishing touches to what would become the quintessential anthem of the French Resistance.
Between 7 and 22 May of that year, during the only trip he made to mainland France that year, Max-Pol Fouchet saw Éluard three times: “I wanted, before anyone else, to meet Paul Éluard. I admired him and knew what his struggle was. To me, judging from his poems, he represented a Resistance not limited to the immediate event, though he suffered from it terribly, but conscious of the future of mankind. I went to see him. At once I felt the fascination he exerted through the gravity, indeed the beauty, of his face, the nobility of his tone. The almost constant trembling of his hands matched that of his voice. This trembling of the fingers may have resulted from an illness, I do not know, but that is not how I interpreted it. It seemed to me to express an approach toward the secret of things and beings, toward their fragility. Those trembling hands moved me even more than his gaze. For the young man I was then, Éluard appeared as ‘the’ poet. His serenity, too, when we spoke of events, surprised me. This first meeting was like a lake of calm, of certainty.” (Un jour je m’en souviens, pp. 87–88). After a second meeting in a restaurant on the rue de Grenelle, where Éluard spoke to him “of the inevitable victory of the Allies, of the certain defeat of the Germans,” he gave him leaflets and clandestine printed matter; then, at the third meeting, he entrusted him with the text of “Liberté,” the two small leaves that Fouchet carried folded with him to Algiers — the precious and emblematic manuscript offered here.
These are the two leaves from which the mythical poem was first published, in the June 1942 issue of the review Fontaine (cf. no. 5), under the telling title “Une seule pensée,” the only way to escape censorship at a time when Éluard already preferred “Liberté,” as shown by the striking-through of the original title and its replacement by the symbolic word.
The manuscript text is rigorously identical to the printed text, except that the two words désirs and souvenirs, in the antepenultimate and penultimate stanzas, appear in the plural, attesting to the earlier date of this version. These words appear in the singular in the publication of the poem opening the pamphlet Poésie et vérité 1942 (cf. nos. 12 and 13).
The two chronologies below list the 7 known autograph versions and the 10 publications of the poem, under its various titles, between 1942 and 1944.
“UNE SEULE PENSÉE” TRANSFORMED INTO “LIBERTÉ”: AN EXCEPTIONAL DOCUMENT.