Les Forêts de la nuit

A young student from Béarn at the École normale supérieure, Jean-Louis Curtis (1917–1995) won the Prix Goncourt for his first novel, Les Forêts de la nuit, an account of the Occupation years. Mixing resistance fighters, collaborators and the merely passive, the book stood out for its refusal of moral simplification and its limpid style, which made a strong impression in the immediate postwar years and continues to resonate today: Michel Houellebecq pays tribute to it in a passage of La Carte et le Territoire (Prix Goncourt 2010), where two of Curtis’s books, La France m’épuise and La Quarantaine, are cited as outstanding works on the sense of loss accompanying France’s passage from tradition into the modern world.

The award to Curtis was also notable for its turbulent context. Sacha Guitry and René Benjamin, reinstated to the jury after their suspension, contested the Académie’s legitimacy and created a rival prize — which Guitry dubbed “le prix Jules et le prix Edmond” — awarded to Haedens’s Salut au Kentucky. Only eight jurors took part in the official vote, which crowned Curtis. The dissident prize had only a single edition, in 1947: a lawsuit put an end to the venture, Benjamin died that same year, and Guitry eventually resigned.

This Goncourt, awarded to a thirty-year-old novelist, also confirmed the triumph of the publisher René Julliard, victorious for the second year running after Gautier in 1946. The book achieved wide circulation and launched Curtis on a lasting literary career, culminating in his election to the Académie française in 1986; he was also admitted to the Académie de Béarn in 1987, and is one of four Prix Goncourt laureates elected to the Académie française, along with Thierry Sandre, Joseph Peyré and Paule Constant.