Le Silence de la mer

Jean Bruller joined the Resistance alongside Pierre de Lescure, tasked by the Intelligence Service with building a network of intelligence and escape routes for agents and British airmen. Once the network was discovered, the two men began writing for a clandestine communist review, La Pensée libre, which sought contributors of all political persuasions. Lescure wrote a story of his own and urged Bruller — who had retreated into silence in his village of Villiers-sur-Morin — to do the same. The silence proved too heavy to bear: within a few weeks the illustrator became a writer and produced Le Silence de la mer. The text was finished by the end of summer 1941, and Vercors gave it its first reading to his friend: “for more than an hour he remained impassive… At last he raised his head, looked at me with clouded, moist eyes, and said: ‘I have not felt such emotion in a long time.’”

Publication remained to be arranged. Under a pseudonym, naturally — one already chosen: “Jean Bruller was with the Army of the Alps, near Romans-sur-Isère, when the armistice of June 1940 was announced. His gaze fell upon the mountains of the Vercors, in which he saw, with a poet’s foresight, a citadel of Liberty. So the name ‘Vercors’ came to mind when he had to sign, with a meaningful pseudonym, the first piece of French writing inspired by the Resistance” (Jacques Dalloz). Through the printer Ernest Aulard, Bruller found a small workshop in Paris on the boulevard de l’Hôpital, belonging to Georges Oudeville, who specialized in announcements and visiting cards. Bruller envisioned a small-format book of about a hundred pages, carefully finished. Aulard supplied the paper and type. Since the press, a small platen machine, could print only eight pages at a time, the printing took nearly three months: each week Bruller brought eight pages of manuscript, destroyed as soon as they were set, and left with the printed pages, which were stored on the boulevard Raspail, in offices where a friend of Lescure worked, then, after a German search, in a café on the boulevard de la Gare.

By the end of January 1942, the printing was complete. Yvonne Paraf, a friend of Bruller’s, took charge of the stitching, and Vercors himself glued on the covers. The result was a book of real quality, with flawless typography. Bruller had, in his own words, produced “fine work.” In February 1942, 350 copies were made up: 100 for the Occupied Zone, quickly circulated clandestinely, and 250 for the Free Zone, of which 200 were seized by the Germans while in transit to Lyon. No one suspected until 1945 that he was the book’s author — neither Aulard nor Oudeville, nor even his own wife, knew — and the handful of people in on the secret, barely ten, kept it.

Because of this limited distribution — only 150 copies could actually be circulated — the initial impact was at first without sequel. But very quickly, through the many clandestine reprintings that followed — first in London, then in Switzerland, North Africa, the United States, Lebanon and as far as Senegal — Le Silence de la mer became the emblematic text of the Resistance, alongside its poetic counterpart, Éluard’s “Liberté.” The two texts were in fact brought together in issue 4 of La Revue du monde libre, published in London in April 1943.

A very fine copy, in perfect condition.