Les Innocents
Presentation copy inscribed by Carco: “à Camille Bloch, le plus charmant des éditeurs, son ami F. Carco, janvier 1917.”
Chapter XXIV was censored, as was the last line of page 184: in this copy, the author added a manuscript passage at this point.
“Les Innocents was born on 15 February 1915, when a young Englishwoman [Katherine Mansfield] left London and her fiancé to join her lover [Francis Carco], stationed in France at Gray, in postal sector 45 […]. The book nearly never appeared, owing to wartime publishing difficulties and, above all, censorship. On its publication in 1916 by La Renaissance du Livre, the novel’s unwholesome atmosphere shocked the censorship commission, which ordered cuts to the text. Once again, Carco was criticized for his boldness in depicting the dangerous classes […]” (Jean-Jacques Bedu and Gilles Freyssinet, Francis Carco. Romans, Lafont, 2004, pp. 109 & 111).
The book was thus published with, from the third part onward, one chapter censored entirely (chapter XXIV), a second half-censored, and a few sentences cut here and there. In this copy, Francis Carco restored the first censored sentence, which introduces all the sections concerning the battalion: “j’mi engage au Bataillon.”
Talvart notes that copies on Holland and Japanese paper were printed “for the author, and without a limitation statement, in which the suppressed passages were restored, either by hand or by means of pasted slips. In the ordinary edition, blanks are left, each suppressed passage or blank page being marked ‘[Censuré]’.”