Sept jours en été
One of the first 150 copies numbered on the register (no. 26).
A short, dense account of clandestine life, Sept jours en été belongs to the immediate literature of the Resistance. The book appeared in October 1944, only a few weeks after the Liberation of Paris, in Fontaine, a major center of Resistance publishing and of French literature published outside occupied metropolitan France.
From November 1940, Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie led a small group of intellectuals determined to act, among them Lucie Aubrac and Jean Cavaillès. Having gone underground at the end of February 1941, he founded the movement and then the newspaper Libération, whose first issue appeared in July 1941. In November 1943, he was appointed Commissioner of the Interior for the Comité français de Libération nationale. The seven days of the title are those of a clandestine Paris: d’Astier concentrates, in successive scenes, several essential moments of resistance life — meetings with comrades, the caution required in a watched city, the curfew and identity checks.
A first-rate testimony.