Les Forêts de la nuit
One of the printed review copies.
Accompanied by: an autograph letter signed to one of the Prix Goncourt jurors, thanking him for his support (dated 18 December 1947); and 1 loose leaf (half-title of the trade edition) with a signed presentation inscription to Max-Philippe Delatte (“en toute sympathie”), dated 8 December 1947.
Prix Goncourt, 1947. A young alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure from Béarn, Jean-Louis Curtis (1917–1995) won the prize for his first novel, Les Forêts de la nuit, an account of the Occupation years. Mingling Resistance fighters, collaborators and those who simply waited out the war, the novel 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 Curtis in a passage of La Carte et le Territoire (Prix Goncourt 2010), citing two of his books, La France m’épuise and La Quarantaine, as remarkably successful accounts of the sense of loss accompanying France’s transition from a traditional to a modern society.
The award to Curtis was also notable for its turbulent context. Sacha Guitry and René Benjamin, reinstated on the jury after a suspension, challenged the Académie’s legitimacy and set up 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 lasted only a single year, in 1947: a lawsuit brought the venture to an end, 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, for the second consecutive year after Gautier in 1946. The novel achieved wide circulation and launched a lasting literary career for Curtis, culminating in his election to the Académie française in 1986; he was also received into the Académie de Béarn in 1987, and remains one of only four Prix Goncourt laureates elected to the Académie française, alongside Thierry Sandre, Joseph Peyré and Paule Constant.