Retour de Barbarie

A journal of return and moral insurrection: released from the stalag in December 1943 after more than three years of captivity, Raymond Guérin returned to Paris to find literary life carrying on “as if nothing had happened.” Guided by Jean Paulhan and Gaston Gallimard, he saw Camus, Sartre, Queneau, Chardonne and his fellow prisoner Henri Cartier-Bresson again. To Henri Calet, he confided: “I feel like a ghost, a phantom. I no longer have a place in this stifling, fascized world.” Back in the Southwest, he recorded the exhilaration of the Liberation, then his disillusionment at certain scenes of the purge, which he judged spineless, closing the notebook on a stark, unadorned lucidity: “There is only one true thing in life: puppets. Everything else is nonsense. Art included. […] The finest theater in the world […] is found in the subway. But it seems the inhabitants of a city like Paris know neither how to listen nor how to look.”

A central text for gauging Guérin’s uncompromising position, Retour de Barbarie is also a biographical document of the first importance: the book bridges the stalag years and the final phase of his work (Guérin died prematurely in 1955).

The testimony of a writer little inclined to compromise with his times, brought back into view through the work of Jean-Paul Kauffmann and the Bordeaux publisher Finitude, this text contributed to the rediscovery of the “dark meteor” of French letters.