François Lachenal

Francois Lachenal, 1996

François Paul Lachenal (born May 31, 1918 in Geneva ; † August 22, 1997 , ibid) was a Swiss diplomat and publisher . During the occupation of France by Germany from 1940 onwards, he played an important role in the publication and distribution of the works of the French literary resistance against Nazism . He was the son of the Geneva government councilor Paul Lachenal .

biography

Under the patronage of the Swiss writer Edmond Gilliard (1875–1969), François Lachenal co-founded the Cahiers Vaudois, together with Paul Budry and Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz ; In October 1940 he helped found the literary magazine Traits (1940–1945) in Lausanne , which opposed the “new order praised by Hitler ”. In the late 1930s he met Pierre Seghers and Pierre Emmanuel in Switzerland , with whom he had connected. At the end of 1941 they each sent him a poem (on the subject of the murder of the hostages of Nantes and of Châteaubriant), which, however , are published in the literary magazine Traits without their signature ; these are the first anonymous poems of the Resistance to be published.

Although François Lachenal is in Basel, where he passed his law exams, and is writing a dissertation on Le Parti politique. Prepared for public policy , in 1942 he was appointed attaché to the Swiss embassy in Vichy , which, after the occupation of the free zone, represented the interests of Great Britain, the United States and numerous countries that were at war with Germany. After arriving in Vichy on November 21, 1942, he stayed in France, where he was transferred to the Swiss consulate in Marseille within a few months in the spring of 1943 and as vice-consul to Lyon in the summer of 1944 until he was nominated in Berlin in October .

Immediately after his arrival in Vichy, following the poems published in Switzerland, Lachenal published the Cahiers du Rhône in France , which were founded in 1941 by Albert Béguin ( Alain Born , Loys Masson, Paul Éluard ). He continues to bring manuscripts into Switzerland in his luggage or in those of his diplomatic colleagues that cannot be published in France, and transports the volumes printed in Switzerland to France and circulates them there. In December 1942 he met Pierre Emmanuel in Dieulefit, France, and Pierre Seghers in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon , who introduced him to Emmanuel Mounier , Loys Masson , André Frénaud and Alain Borne , Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon .

In the period before his arrival in France, Lachenal and Jean Descoullayes set up the project to publish a volume of militant and anonymous poems that resembled those that Emmanuel and Seghers had sent for Traits in the publishing house Éditions des Trois Collines . He mentions this project to Seghers, who in turn informs Éluard about it. The poems collected by Seghers and the poems recorded by Éluard and Jean Lescure later form the volume of poems L'Honneur des poètes , which in France was even published on July 14, 1943 by the banned publishing house Éditions de Minuit.

At the beginning of 1943, Lachenal also plans to reissue Vercors ' Le Silence de la mer with the Trois Collines publishing house , which from that year was under his direction and that of Jean Descoullayes in Geneva . Since the Swiss censors requested that some words be omitted, Lachenal and Descoullayes secretly published the work in the spring of 1943 in the specially created edition à la Porte d'Ivoire , a name suggested by Jean Starobinski . They also published Poèmes français in it , adding eleven more anonymous poems to L'Honneur des poètes to the “ common inventory ” proposed by Seghers .

At Easter 1943 François Lachenal met Jean Lescure at Pierre Emmanuel's in Dieulefit , who was preparing Domaine français (Messages 1943). He suggested that Domaine français be published by Trois Collines . Most of the manuscript returned to Lachenal by Lescure in Vichy was taken to Switzerland in autumn 1943 by the Minister of Hungary in Vichy, HE Bakasch Besseniey; the missing texts followed in the luggage of HE Hiott, the Minister of Romania. Domaine français , the most important work in this field, which "combined all that there was in France in terms of very important different literary statements" in such a way that "the French literature collectivement had the honor of resistance", was printed in December.

“This time gave Switzerland, among other tasks, the opportunity to replace the French edition - which made Switzerland a kind of refuge - and for me the opportunity to benefit from my position in Vichy by playing the 'porter', as it was already called, ”Lachenal remarks forty years later.

In July 1943, Éluard, who introduced him to Jean Lescure, suggested to him in Paris that he publish the manuscript Ubu cocu by Alfred Jarry , which Picasso had given him and which had not yet been published ; the work was published in September 1944. At the same time, with Lescure, who had received the appropriate approval from Raymond Queneau , André Frénaud , Georges Bataille and Jean-Paul Sartre , the project of a collection called Domaine de Paris was emerging, however was never completed. Another volume, the Domaine russe, was published in September 1944 and the Domaine grec in June 1947.

In February 1944, Éluard Lachenal entrusted the collection of poems Le Lit la table , which was published by Trois Collines that same year. He also sent him the manuscript of the novel Paille noire des étables by Louis Parrot , which appeared in December under the pseudonym "Margeride", while Les Amants d'Avignon , a novel by Elsa Triolet , appeared in May under the pseudonym "Laurent Daniel" was issued. In the same year Lachenal had the idea of publishing a collection under the name Classiques de la liberté for which “a writer or a philosopher is asked to choose appropriate texts from the work of a classical author and to dedicate a foreword to him”. The project that Jean Paulhan worked out with Bernard Groethuysen , who was to head the collection, was implemented in May 1946 with a first volume presented by Sartre and dedicated to Descartes .

From 1944 Lachenal designed another collection of poems under the name Les grands peintres par leurs amis for Trois collines , starting in December with Pablo Picasso by Éluard, followed in 1946 by Braque le patron by Paulhan, in 1947 by André Masson et son univers by Michel Leiris and Georges Limbour, 1948 by Chagall ou l'orage enchanté by Raïssa Maritain and 1949 by Fernand Léger et le nouvel espace by Douglas Cooper . Lachenal is also editing Éluard's Voir, a group of poems dedicated to painters close to him. Éluard is also to head the Le Point d'Or collection , in which his volume of poetry Le lit la table was reissued in 1946 , followed by Sources du vent by Pierre Reverdy in 1947 and Coordonnées by Guillevic in 1948 .

From 1939 to 1944 he published the "Pages Suisses" together with Jacques Rossel and his brother-in-law Alfred Werner .

From 1953 he had a place on the council of the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim . He founded and organized the Ingelheim International Days (Journées internationales), an art festival devoted to a different theme each year. Lachenal was also very active in the field of contemporary music. He drove regularly to Darmstadt , and at one of his first concerts he met Jacques Guyonnet, to whom he suggested that he go to Darmstadt and meet Pierre Boulez there. His commitment will be of vital importance in the Geneva composer's career. There he also made the acquaintance of the Spanish composer Luis de Pablo , whom he later met again in Madrid when Daniel Garbade performed his opera with Robert Wilson.

Trois Collines publishing house continued its activities until 1965. In total, he published around fifty issues of the literary magazine Traits and around a hundred titles under the Trois Collines and À la Porte d'Ivoire brands , which François Lachenal would have built up between 1940 and 1965. After this time he continued his editorial work in a rather sporadic way, which reflects the correctness of his taste and his commitment to freedom.

François Lachenal entrusted the archives (1940–1965) of these publications, complete collections and correspondence with printers and writers to IMEC . In 1995 an exhibition was organized at the Center Culturel Suisse in Paris that vividly portrays his life as an editor and his role as a smuggler of texts that he had during the war.

At the end of January 1979, Lachenal was taken into custody as a suspected GDR spy on the basis of statements by GDR defector Werner Stiller , but was released on bail on February 21, 1979 and after evaluating the documents Stiller had brought with him, he was fully rehabilitated.

In 1989 Lachenal worked for the exhibition “From Greco to Goya ”, in which the exhibition of the rescued paintings from the Prado Museum in Geneva in 1939 was honored. He was supported by his nephew and painter Daniel Garbade in Madrid.

bibliography

Sources for this article.

By François Lachenal

• François Lachenal (preface by Jean Lescure), Éditions des Trois Collines, Genève-Paris (= L'edition contemporaine. ) IMEC, Paris 1995, ISBN 2-908295-26-1 .
• François Lachenal, Robert Boehringer (sous la dir. De): Ingelheim am Rhein. 774-1974. Boehringer-Ingelheim 1974.

About François Lachenal

• Exposition Resistance – Deportation, Création dans le bruit des armes. Chancellerie de l'Ordre de la Liberation, Paris 1980.
• Lucien Scheler, La grande espérance des poètes, 1940-1945 (= Littérature Française. ) Paris, Temps actuels, 1982, ISBN 2-201-01569-4 .
• Jean Lescure, Poésie et liberté: histoire de Messages, 1939-1946 (= Edit. Contemporaine. ) Editions de L'IMEC, Paris 1998, ISBN 2-908295-38-5 .
• Archives des années noires. Artistes, écrivains et éditeurs Documents réunis et présentés par Claire Paulhan et Olivier Corpet, préface de Jérôme Prieur, Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine, Paris, 2004, ISBN 2-908295-71-7 .
• Robert O. Paxton, Olivier Corpet, Claire Paulhan, Archives de la vie littéraire sous l'Occupation, À travers le désastre. Éditions Taillandier et les Éditions de l'IMEC, 2009, ISBN 978-2-84734-585-8 , pp. 230, 256, 259, 282, 299, 302, 306, 312-315 and 336.

Web links

• Documents by and about Lachenal, François in the Dodis database of Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lachenal, François in the database Dodis the Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland
2. ↑ Éléments biographiques extraits de François Lachenal, Éditions des Trois Collines, Genève – Paris , préface de Jean Lescure, Éditions de l ' IMEC , Paris, 1995 ( Souvenirs p. 15–62 et Histoire de “Traits” p. 67–82) .
3. ↑ “  Traits a été fondé en 1940 quelques semaines après la défaite des armées françaises, en plein assaut de la Luftwaffe sur l'Angleterre. »
4. ^ "L'honneur de la Suisse, et sa haute raison d'être, aujourd'hui, sont de permettre à ceux qui, en France, méprisent glorieusement l'avilissante attente des antichambres, d'élever leur voix d'hommes libres. »
5. ↑ «À cause (…) des recherches policières qu'avaient déclenchées la parution du Silence de la mer , nous dûmes changer d'imprimeur pour poèmes français ; ce n'est qu'au début de l'automne 1943 qu'il parut. »
6. ↑ En 1944 les éditions À la Porte d'Ivoire feront également connaître en Suisse La Marche à l'étoile de Vercors et, sous le pseudonyme de François la Colère, Le Musée Grévin d'Aragon
7. ^ François Lachenal, Editions des Trois Collines, Genève – Paris. Éditions de l'IMEC, Paris, 1995, p. 25
8. ↑ D'autres volumes suivront, de Lucien Febvre sur Michelet en 1946, de Jean Fréville sur Lénine , de Henri Lefevre sur Marx , de Bernard Groethuysen sur Montesquieu en 1947, et de Jacques Debû-Bridel sur Fourier en 1947, de Julien Benda sur Kant , de Jean Wahl sur Jules Lequier et de Claude Aveline sur Anatole France en 1948, de René Berger sur Socrate en 1949.
9. ^ PGB: Ligue vaudoise - La Nation: Un pasteur genevois dans son siècle. Retrieved October 14, 2018 (French). 
10. ↑ Le premier ouvrage des Trois Collines avait été en 1935 and homage to Edmond Gilliard .
11. ^ Andreas Förster: Confederates contra comrades: how the Swiss intelligence service monitored GDR traders and Stasi agents. Ch. Links Verlag, 2016. Google preview pp. 123–125