See also: Messages (song OMD), Message (homonymy)

Messages was as from 1942 the principal review of “lyric Resistance” prepared to Paris even during the Occupation. Directed from 1939 to 1946 by Jean Lescure, which told some in 1998 the course in Poésie and Liberté, Histoire of Messages (Editions of the IMEC), it published the most important writers of the French literature of the 20th century.

Messages 1939

In 1936 Jean Lescure, secretary of Giono works out the project and directs the first two numbers of the “Books of the Contadour”. In 1937 its doctor, Jean Huet, having entrusted his medical check to him “Diagrams”, it makes it print on the “Presses of the Owl” by a young Austrian, Walter Ulh, and places it at Jean Flory with the Protestant Bookstore of the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Walter Uhl finances simultaneously a modest review, “Messages”, animated until there by the poet André Silvaire, and then asks Lescure to take it again in a new form by supporting it by a collection of plates.

Wishing to join poetry and philosophy of poetry to it, Jean Lescure prepares in 1938, helped by his friends Geoffrey Stutfield and Jean Vagne, met in Contadour, a first book of “Messages” which appears at the spring of 1939 pennies the title William Blake , with translations, studies (in particular of Herbert Read) and a poem, written under the sign of Blake, of the philosopher Jean Wahl. In a second Metaphysical book, and poetry , composed with the assistance of Jean Walh, of the studies of Gaston Bachelard (“Urgent poetic and metaphysical”, text which will direct its reflection towards the imaginary poetic one) or of Wahl côtoient poems of Éluard (begun again in 1942 in “the open Book”), accompanied by two photographs of “the Headstock” of Hans Bellmer, or T.S. Eliot.

The realization of a third book, “Current trends”, with texts of Albert Béguin, Éluard, Jean Attic, Pierre Emmanuel, Pierre Jean Jouve, Pierre Reverdy, Roland de Renéville, was stopped by the events.

Messages 1942

Indignation in front of the revival of NRF by Drieu La Rochelle gives in 1941 to Jean Lescure a “mobile” to take again the publication of “Messages “, to engage it in literary resistance and to make “anti-NRF”. He thinks thus a moment to entitle it “Books of the New French Poetry”, NPF, by imitating some the initials and the drawing but only the subtitle “Books of French poetry” will remain. Jean Lescure then exposes his project to Jean Paulhan which supports it at once, while, from the Southern zone, Pierre Emmanuel adheres to it. Alexandre Astruc ensures the secretariat quickly of it. Four books of " Messages" appear in 1942.

The first, Elements , prepared as of November 1941, gather in March 1942 of the texts of Pierre Emmanuel, Jean Grenier, Jean Follain (extracted from “Canisy”), Guillevic (extracted from “Terraqué”), Benjamin Fondane, but also Raoul Ubac and Lescure itself. As in the following numbers, of the “chronicles” a third of the book occupies, echoing the reviews not only of Paris but, prohibited in northern zone, that of the south, of Lyon, of Avignon (“Poetry 41” of Pierre Seghers) or of Algiers (“Fountain” of Max-pol. Fouchet) and quoting the poets put at the index, such Aragon. Under the title “Color of the time” of the provocative short notes take for targets Drieu La Rochelle, Cocteau, Abel Bonnard.

The second, Dramatic of the hope , is prepared in April 1942. Not to be subjected to the censure, it is antedated. The synopsis is composed of it of texts of Paul Claudel, Éluard (started from “Poetry and Truth 1942”) and of Raymond Queneau (“Dino”), Jean Tardieu (extracted the “invisible Witness”), Francis Ponge and Loys Masson. Exercise of the purity , third book joining together two texts of Jean Lescure and Raoul Ubac, appears, again antedated, lasting the summer 1942.

To circumvent the censure, Exercise of silence , fourth book gone back to December, from where by prudence the title of “Messages” disappears, is carried out, with the assistance of Ubac and Georges Lambrichs in Brussels. It contains in particular, beyond letter with Ancelle of Baudelaire, communicated by Paulhan, and of letters of Jarry, the new poems of Éluard, the texts of Bachelard (“dumb declamation”), Tardieu, Audisio, Queneau (“the Explanation of the metaphors), Lambrichs, Marcel Lecomte, Frénaud (extracted the “King-Magi”, qaui will be published in 1944), Michel Leiris (extracted from “High Evil”), Lescure (extracted the “Poems metaphysics”), Sartre (“Death in the heart”), Georges Battle and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte.

Battle and Leiris, present in all the following books, having joined with Queneau elder “Messages”, Bachelard, Eluard and Paulhan, one then starts “to speak in our small world about a “Messages group”. Except in Messages” Lescure will write. But “what joined together us admitted extremely well that what differentiated us that is to say what allured us more”. At this point in time a leaflet, “Name of God! ”, written in 1943 by the Surrealist young people of the Hand with feather , whose Christmas Arnaud and Jean-François Chabrun, and signed by Magritte, is caught some with “Messages”, particularly in Bataille, which is treated of priest, Ubac and Éluard.

French Field , Messages 1943

While Lescure helps Éluard to gather the texts, signed pseudonyms, of “the Honor of the poets”, clandestinely printed on July 14th, 1943, it forms as of the end of 1942 the project of” another anthology, but whose works would be signed and the absolutely normal publication”, joining together “all that France had of more famous in the various expressions of the literature”. It was a question “of making “collectively” assume with the French literature the honor of insubordination”: “what was to then make proclamation, it was the quantity of representative writers gathered”.

The project leads to the “design of a compilation of texts whose world Nazi (or Vichyste) would be quite simply “absent”, as if the History already held for no one and nonwhich occurred this small accident of its course and connected on a past where there did not exist, a future where it would not appear more”. It was to be a question of “the art of the literature (...) and not of a tool manufactured to answer the literature of kindness of Collaboration”.

With the support of Paulhan which transmits a score of the texts, of Éluard which brings about fifteen there, but also of François Lachenal, attached near the embassy from Switzerland in Vichy, the collection joins together under the title “French Field”, a presentation of Lescure, 57 names and will take into account 446 pages. Opening, at the request of Eluard, on poems of Aragon (“the pink and the reseda”), the collection, composed of four parts, present in the two first, around “the idea France” and of the French language, the texts of François Mauriac, Pierre Jean Jouve (begun again the Wood of the Poor ), Albert Camus (extracted from “the Plague”), Loys Masson, Jean-Paul Sartre (“the Age of Enlightenment”), Pierre Seghers, Elsa Triplet, Jean Cassou then of Claudel, Guillevic, Charles Vildrac, Jean Cayrol, Georges Hugnet, Georges Lambrichs, Pierre Emmanuel, Henri Michaux…

The third part of “French Field” more particularly joins together the familiar ones of “Messages”, Paulhan, Éluard, Queneau, Tardieu, Ponge, André Frénaud, Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, Bataille, Leiris, Lescure and Bachelard. The last, asserting the spiritual heritage of the classic authors and modern of the French history, gathers on Christine de Pisan, Descartes, Diderot, Stendhal, Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Maupassant, Zola, Péguy, Proust, Sartre, Eluard, Picasso, of the studies of Gide, Valéry, Benjamin Fondane, Georges Duhamel, Philippe Soupault, Romain Roland, Ferdinand Alquié… the work is completed on a poem of Saint-Pol.-Russet-red , transmitted by Éluard. Malraux and Tank, engaged in the maquis, could appear in the synopsis, neither Roger Martin of Gard, nor Reverdy.

Lescure in July 1943 decides to make print “French Field” in Switzerland where François Lachenal made known to him the Editions of the Three Hills. September 3rd it gives to him to Vichy the essence of the manuscript, dated August 23rd, entrusted to the ministers of Hungary and Romania which convey it to Geneva. The work, printed in the last days of December 1943, exceeds the ten editions before the release of Paris.

Messages 1944

Before even the forwarding of texts of “French Field” in Switzerland, a new book is in preparation at the beginning of 1943, entitled Sources of the Poetry , which, in margin of any political drift, brings back “Messages” to its initial vocation, while endeavouring, whereas “the rhetoric of propaganda invaded its speeches all poetry right-thinking person” (p. 293), “to make so that all escapes the circumstances from it, or transcends them”. “It was enough to continue to show that our adhesion with Resistance was founded on the identity which we recognize between freedom and poetry, so that one did not go without the other. The party that we take to defend “initially” poetry arranged us quasi “primarily” in the rows of those which, against the Nazism, affirmed an invincible vocation of freedom”.

This first book of 1944, completed to print on January 12th, opens on an important, “Key text of poetry”, that Jean Paulhan does not wish to sign, “not more than one would not sign a theorem”, writes it. The synopsis presents a poem of Apollinaire, texts of Pongee, Éluard, Queneau, André Souris, Leiris, Tardieu and Lescure. A few months later, in May, a communist leaflet, probably written by Jean Marcenac and decided in spite of the opposition of Claude Morgan, highly attacks Sartre, Camus, Frénaud and Lescure, denounces their claim with Resistance and clandestinity, which is equivalent to “a simple denunciation in Gestapo”.

Not to stop too a long time, by the development of a new collective book, the demonstrations of “Messages”, the two following publications are books of only one author, Archangélique of Georges Bataille, dated April 30th, 1944, then Volonté of impotence of Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, of June 15th, 1944, with foreword of Leiris (begun again in “Broken” in 1992) and of except text of Ubac, which constitutes the tenth book of “Messages” since its creation.

A new number, “Risks and Work”, is simultaneously set up as from February but “as of April, we hardly any more thought of “Messages”. Clandestinity was our work place and the leaflets our means. We knew near the unloading”. Under the title Risks, Work and Modes it will be printed only on April 15th, 1945, presenting “the Desire caught by the tail” of Picasso, of the poems of Eluard, new “Exercices of style” of Queneau, of the texts of Leiris, Mouloudji, Sartre (on Jules Renard), Prévert, Tardieu, Desnos, “Short cuts” (extracted from “the Wound does not close itself”) of Lescure, of the “Poems of lower part the floor” of Frénaud. Is announced in preparation a collective book heading “Commune measures” which will not be carried out.

Messages 1946

“If it were true that from August 19th to 25th we had known a quasi religious exaltation, an insane happiness, a love without edges, that we had believed that it had arrived, that, France finally gathered, times of freedom had come, we must authorize that the festival had fallen down almost at once” Jean Lescure in 1998 writes: “the higher bid in docility posted freedom. Cowardice got dressed in courage. Settlings of score in justice”. “I did not have any more the heart to continue the adventure of “Messages””, remembers it. It on however the occasion in January 1946 to transform into twelfth titrates part of the edition of Chêne and Chien , restored in Queneau by the editor who prepared to put it at the rammer.

Gone back to October the Words and the signs constitutes the last book, double, of “Messages” whose new editorial board, Frénaud, Leiris, Queneau and Lescure, grows rich by the presence of Rene Char. Texts of François Lionnais, Tardieu and Roland Dubillard, of Lescure, Pierre Dumayet, Pierre Desgraupes and Leiris in particular côtoient there “the Poems of little old woman” of Frénaud, the “Pictograms” of Queneau. It is on “the Extravagant one”, poem of Tank, that the history of “Messages is completed”, “a history of literature, the one moment history of poetry in the History, the unexpected meeting”, will write Lescure, “of a metaphysical concept, a lyric topic and a political passion under the same name of freedom”.

Raymond Queneau notes " Newspaper 1914-1965" that Jean Lescure wished in 1954 to start again " Messages" (with itself, Bachelard, Jean Cayrol, Frénaud and Georges-Emmanuel Clancier) but the project does not succeed.

Files of " Messages" , manuscripts and correspondences, were bequeathed in 1998 per Jean Lescure to IMEC.

Judgments

• ” “Messages” is a directed review. Without missing composing with the blade, it works towards an end. Thanks is returned from there to Mr. Jean Lescure and his collaborators. Of all the reviews born since the armistice, I hold it for that which is best held, which has the most behavior. And, of course, I do not speak only about quality about the texts published, but about his spirit.”

Max-pol. Fouchet, 1942

• ” It is at the place even where Z occupied is keep silent that “Messages” starts to speak. It is a great task.”

Jean Paulhan, 1942

• ” It appears to me that “Messages” fulfilled an important function. How to say? It was not alienated, as little as it is, by the political position of its members, but it maintained the freedom inventive of the literature which must continue to be questioned and to dispute itself to be done. He refused with more clearness than all other reviews of the time what was to become the retrograde side and patriotard which led Aragon to the apology for the Rime and of the Sonnet”.

Andre Frénaud

Random links:

Federation of Mongolia of football | Championship of Switzerland of football D2 1949-1950 | Mike Catt | Cognitive neurosciences | Maria Delaperrière