Mon village à l’heure allemande
One of 30 copies on vélin pur chiffon, from the deluxe issue (no. 13).
Jean-Louis Bory (1919–1979), barely twenty-six years old — the youngest winner of the prize — wrote this first novel between May and July 1944 in his native town of Méréville (transformed into Jumainville), while taking part in the Resistance maquis of Orléans and Angerville.
On 14 December 1945, the Académie Goncourt, meeting at Drouant, awarded in succession the prizes interrupted by the war: that of 1944 to Elsa Triolet (Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs) and that of 1945 to Bory for this novel. Rarely has a first book corresponded so exactly to the expectations and wounds of its contemporaries: a chronicle of a village in the Beauce under the Occupation, it spoke to every French reader emerging from four years of war and collaboration.
Success was immediate and massive: more than 300,000 copies sold within a few weeks, praised by Paul Morand and Colette. But this overwhelming triumph weighed heavily on its author. Jean-Louis Bory, a teacher at the Lycée Henri-IV, went on to pursue a career in literary and film criticism. A leading figure of Le Masque et la Plume alongside François-Régis Bastide, he became an emblematic voice of postwar cultural criticism.
He is remembered for the show’s theme music (based on La Fileuse, by Mendelssohn), the little cascade of piano notes that opens the famous program on France Inter. A tune chosen in 1978 by François-Régis Bastide, then the program’s host, to lift the spirits of his fellow critic. It was not enough: in June 1979, overcome by depression, Bory took his own life in his house in Méréville.
A fine copy, very well bound.