Placard pour un chemin des écoliers
One of a few hors commerce copies on tinted paper, numbered and signed by the poet “exemplaire d'auteur.”
A collection at the heart of René Char’s aesthetic transformation. After the major Surrealist book of 1934, Le Marteau sans maître, Char began to distance himself from Breton and the orthodoxy of the group. Between 1936 and 1938 he wrote Placard pour un chemin des écoliers and Dehors la nuit est gouvernée. The opening text of Placard, the celebrated “Dédicace” to the children of Spain, written in March 1937 amid the bombardment of Madrid — a month before Guernica — marks Char’s first direct engagement with the question of poetic commitment.
Withdrawn from the Cahiers GLM, where it was originally to appear, the “Dédicace” was published here with an illustration by Valentine Hugo, in a large pamphlet sold at the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 International Exhibition, intended to “assert a responsibility in the face of events.” From this point on, the entire collection stands under the sign of explicit political refusal — “Enfants d’Espagne, j’ai formé ce PLACARD… Pardon de vous le dédier. Avec ma dernière réserve d’espoir.” — opening the way to the war books in which History would no longer be mere context but a field of action.