Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs

Awarded the Prix Goncourt for 1944, though the prize was actually presented on 14 December 1945, the volume contains four stories, two of them devoted to the Resistance (Les Amants d’Avignon and Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs).

Elsa Triolet thus became the first woman ever to win the Prix Goncourt.

The vote, decided in the second round by five votes (Carco, Dorgelès, Larguier, Colette, Rosny fils) against two (Descaves and Billy, who favored Roger Peyrefitte), took on political significance. In the postwar period, as the Académie sought to erase the compromises of some of its members, the choice was seen as a way of “redeeming” itself. Léautaud commented: “The Goncourt jury has hit the jackpot: Madame Triolet is Russian, Jewish and Communist. It’s a prize stitched with red thread!” Elsa Triolet, Aragon’s companion, kept her distance from these controversies: questioned at her home on the rue de la Sourdière, she simply pointed out that her Resistance writings had already moved discerning readers. Public recognition merely extended that impact.

The year 1945, marked by the introduction of women’s suffrage, also gave symbolic resonance to this first female Goncourt laureate. Women had obtained the right to vote in France by the ordinance of 21 April 1944, signed in Algiers by de Gaulle’s Provisional Government, and were able to vote for the first time in the municipal elections of 29 April 1945, then in the legislative elections of October 1945.

Publisher’s wraparound band preserved.

From the “Prix Goncourt” library of Gérard Pouguet, with bookplate.