Les Lettres françaises
| Les Lettres françaises
|
|
|---|---|
| description | Literary magazine |
| language | French |
| First edition | 1941 |
| Web link | LesLettresFrançaises.fr |
Les Lettres françaises were a literary magazine related to the Parti communiste français in France .
The publication was founded in 1941, when Jacques Decour and Jean Paulhan were the founders . It was initially a secret magazine of the French resistance movement . Employees included Louis Aragon , François Mauriac , Claude Morgan, Edith Thomas, Georges Limbour, Raymond Queneau and Jean Lescure.
After the liberation and until 1972, Les Lettres françaises were financed by the PCF under the direction of Louis Aragon. Pierre Daix acted as Aragon’s long-time employee . The publication, which is of high quality, got caught up in the implications of the beginning Cold War when, on the basis of false documents from journalist and Soviet agent André Ullmann, it published the renegade Soviet officer Viktor Kravchenko as an American spy and his 1947 book "I chose freedom" as Disinformation.
Kravchenko sued the magazine for defamation. The Kravchenko trial was considered to be the “ trial of the century”; around 100 witnesses appeared, including Margarete Buber-Neumann , who convincingly demonstrated the reality of the Soviet coercive system ( Holodomor , Gulag ) described by Kravchenko . The magazine was subsequently convicted of defamation in April 1949. The outcome of the proceedings brought by David Rousset against the magazine in 1951 was similar , in which Alexander Weißberg-Cybulski appeared as a witness.
Les Lettres françaises took a stand against the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which resulted in the cancellation of numerous subscriptions from institutions in the Warsaw Pact area. The magazine went into serious loss and had to be discontinued in 1972, but it is currently being published again as a regular supplement to L'Humanité .
literature
- Pierre Daix: Les Lettres françaises, jalons pour l'histoire d'un journal, 1941–1972 , Tallandier, 2004.