Les Derniers Beaux Jours

The final volume of Béraud’s trilogy of memoirs (after La Gerbe d’or and Qu’as-tu fait de ta jeunesse ?) covering the Great War and its aftermath, through to the 1940 exodus and armistice. It includes portraits of Clemenceau at Saint-Vincent-sur-Jard, Galtier-Boissière, Robert Dieudonné, Robert de Jouvenel, Léon Deffoux, Roland Dorgelès and Pierre Benoit.

A “born polemicist, who drifted from the far left to the far right without clearly realizing it” (J. Galtier-Boissière), Béraud was the editorialist of the newspaper Gringoire from 1928 to 1943, leading forceful and widely noted campaigns against Stavisky, Great Britain, Germany and Nazism, the Front populaire and communism. Devastated by the defeat of 1940 and settled in the unoccupied zone, he supported Pétain’s policies and was “the most fiercely anti-German among the Marshal’s supporters” (P. Bonardi), while his editorials were also violently anglophobic, anti-Gaullist, antisemitic and anti-Bolshevik.

“Sentenced to death in 1944 for collaboration with the enemy after a summary trial, he was pardoned by General de Gaulle and his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Struck by hemiplegia, he was granted conditional release in 1950 and spent his final days in his small house on the Île de Ré.” (Thierry Bodin, in Collection Henri Béraud, Alde, 2015).

Fine condition, with all margins.