Lettre aux Anglais
One of 100 réimposé copies, printed on Bouffant paper, numbered and signed by the author (no. 62).
Bernanos’s first book published in Brazil, preceding Le Chemin de la Croix-des-âmes and Monsieur Ouine (both 1943), Lettre aux Anglais was published by Charles Ofaire, a Swiss exile and head of the powerful Atlantica Editora, whom Bernanos had met at one of his lectures in Rio.
Bernanos wrote this expansive book — a “grand chemin” work, as the Pléiade editors call it — while gathering his notes for Le Chemin de la Croix-des-âmes: “Here Bernanos gives himself room and ease: he speaks of the future of the world to the citizens of the world, and his apocalypse has not yet exhausted its revelations. For beyond the conflict of 1939–1945, he foresaw the universal war in which we now find ourselves, a fight to the death between man — or what remains of him — and the inhuman powers of man and ideology.”
The book is dedicated to his son Yves, who would join the Free French Forces in London in 1942 and take part in the Allied landings in Normandy.
A copy in a strict, locally executed contemporary binding, from the réimposé printing.
Discoloration to the covers.