Un surréaliste au temps de la Révolution Nationale

Abstract

After the French defeat of 1940 a few prisoner-of-war testimonies were published, but it was only at the Liberation that members of the Resistanc began recounting their captivity. In 1945 Philippe Soupault published Le Temps des assassins. Histoire du détenu 1234, the account of his incarceration in Tunisia, which he would refuse to republish. A victim of the Révolution nationale, he provides the historian with an account of a Resistance prisoner in the French colonies, a little-known episode of the war. Where as in 14-18 poetry had been his lifeline, in 1945 Soupault, terrified by reality, felt the need to bear witness “sincerely and truly,” without “creating literature, writing a novel.” Like this he would give fresh impetus to the debate about the appropriateness or possibility of being creative by drawing inspiration from unbearable historical experiences. Through the modest accounts of other prisoners, Soupault managed to paint a portrait of Vichy that twenty years later other historians would ratify. How did this viscerally surrealist poet, who aspired not to be a novelist and defined his novels as testimonies, write History? Was he able to bear witness without using artifice? Why then did he place himself under the aegis of Rimbaud by titling his text Le Temps des assassins?