À travers le désastre

In January 1940, Jacques Maritain left France for a series of lectures at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto.

Caught unawares by the war, he would not return to Europe until 1944, as ambassador to the Vatican. Written for his compatriots trapped by the “disaster” and for the American public to whom he wished to explain his country’s situation, these pages argue that “Franco-German collaboration for the reconstruction of peace in Europe would be a path to slavery.” First printed in New York in October 1941 by Éditions de la Maison française, the text is accompanied, like Le Silence de la mer, by the manifesto-leaflet of the Éditions de Minuit.

A precious copy from the library of Jacques Debû-Bridel, a member of the Conseil national de la Résistance representing the Fédération républicaine, a party of the liberal and conservative right, as well as the Front national formed at the initiative of the Communist Party. He published Angleterre with the Éditions de Minuit in September 1943 under the name Argonne, and later an account of the press’s wartime activity, noting that Yvonne Paraf smuggled the text of À travers le désastre into the northern zone, “in the lining of her travel case, and the stout German woman in charge of the search at the checkpoint spent ten minutes poring over the hotel bill and called Yvonne a capitalist because she had taken a bath (8 francs!), but she never looked at the toilet case. Printed in November 1942, the volume was sewn by Yvonne in her apartment on the rue Vineuse, with her friend Mme Massé, who would become the most assiduous stitcher for the Éditions de Minuit, and Vercors, who glued the covers in the kitchen”…

Very rare, and of perfect provenance.