Une seule pensée [Liberté].

Approved and authorized by the censorship board in Algiers, the poem appeared here under the title “Une seule pensée,” although Éluard had already renamed it “Liberté” (as shown by the manuscript bearing both titles, the first struck through, which he had given to Max-Pol Fouchet in mid-May 1942). “I assured Paul that I would publish the poem in Fontaine, and even at the head of the review, as an editorial,” Fouchet recounts (Un jour, je m’en souviens…, pp. 89–90). “That’s impossible, he replied, censorship would never allow such a text to be printed […]. To me it was like a challenge. I had to publish ‘Une seule pensée.’” This explains why the editor of Fontaine chose to keep the original title, which he in fact preferred, hoping thereby to outwit the censors: “a German censor stood beside him, but fortunately understood little of our language. The Frenchman began to read the poem. After about ten quatrains, he looked at me, looking annoyed: ‘Ah, I see what this is, it’s a love poem… You poets, you always say the same thing!’ I did not correct him. He shrugged, gave the German a mischievous wink, stamped the proofs with the authorization seal, without reading on to the last quatrain. I left his office, my heart pounding. A miracle, a miracle, I kept repeating to myself. Thus Éluard’s ‘Liberté,’ or rather ‘Une seule pensée,’ was able to appear in Fontaine, as an editorial, not clandestinely — which would have reduced its readership — but in full view” (Ibid., pp. 90–91).

The published text is strictly that of the manuscript given by Éluard, with the two words désirs and souvenirs in the plural (in the antepenultimate and penultimate stanzas).

As soon as this issue of Fontaine reached the unoccupied zone at the end of August 1942, the poem’s last two stanzas were quoted in the weekly Candide on 2 September, shortly before the poem was reprinted in full in London, under the same title “Une seule pensée,” in La France libre of 15 September 1942. Finally, in early October, the group La Main à plume published it in Paris from a different manuscript (in which the words désirs and souvenirs also appear in the plural, although they would be printed in the singular) in the pamphlet Poésie et Vérité 1942, and for the first time under the title “Liberté.”

A legendary document, and an exceedingly rare issue of Fontaine.