On the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, we are delighted to introduce Marie Puren, the first visiting scholar who received funding from the Penchant Foundation to carry on research on Cambridge University Library’s Chadwyck-Healey Liberation Collection. Marie Puren studied at the Ecole Nationale des Chartes and Sciences Po Paris; she wrote her PhD on French writer and publisher Jean de La Hire (1878-1956) and studied the mechanisms of conversion to collaboration in French publishing during the Second World War. She is now an Associate Professor in History and Digital Humanities at EPITA, an Engineering school in Computer Intelligence based in Paris. Marie will be based in Cambridge until the end of July 2024 and you can read here her research project entitled: “From one propaganda to another? The new editorial and literary landscape in post-war France (1944-1946)”. It will involve data mining works of fiction in the Liberation collection.

At the end of the Second World War, the French book market was swept by a wave of innovation. The “Resistance” literature enjoyed considerable success: the French were eager to read authors from the Resistance and books written in hiding. People read “une littérature sur la Résistance faite par des résistants […] une littérature d’acteurs et non d’auteurs” (Simonin, 1994). The intellectual and political context was favourable to the emergence of numerous publishing houses, which competed with the established publishers accused of collaboration and benefited from the literary renewal of the Liberation. The immediate post-war period was unique in that politics and literature were intimately intertwined; more precisely, the pressure of politics on literature forced intellectuals to become involved and to orient their choices by promoting the political positions legitimised by the Resistance.

Under the provocative heading of our title, we will look at a period that saw the emergence of a new “cultural policy” for books. Jean-Paul Sartre even denounced a “nationalisation of literature”, in direct reference to the economic nationalisation policy of the Gouverment provisoire in France. While its methods, objectives and values were in no way comparable to the control of the book market between 1940 and 1944, this new policy – embodied by the authors themselves, the Conseil national des écrivains, and more broadly by the political authorities – also saw books as a powerful medium for disseminating an ideology. Books, the main means of escape during the Occupation, had penetrated many French homes, making them a particularly appropriate vehicle for convincing the French, especially as they became the preferred way of putting the traumatic events of the war into words after the Liberation.

Literature was given a new role: to help rebuild a “national consciousness” that had been damaged by four years of Occupation. Books could thus be seen as “instruments of persuasion” for those who wanted to contribute to this redefinition. Gisèle Sapiro speaks of the “over-politicisation” of literary issues at the Liberation (Sapiro, 1999). The discourses developed in the underground by Resistance writers also permeated this post-war literature, in which authors took up and developed the formulas and images forged in opposition to collaboration and occupation. This strategy of “counter-propaganda” continued after the war, and even intensified as the Resistance came out of hiding and the number of narratives multiplied.

Based on the Liberation Collection, we will be looking at how Resistance literature was used to rebuild “national consciousness” in the aftermath of the war, and how it was used to gain acceptance for a new political project. There have already been studies of the literature of this period, but most of them have focused more on literary issues, while others have analysed the conditions of production of this literature. Our project is to study this question by focusing on the texts themselves, while examining them in the light of the political and editorial context in which they were produced. Our approach also involves not just working on a few selected works (the best-known or the best-sellers) but on a vast corpus of representative texts, which will not leave out a popular production largely ignored by work on this period.

Thanks to the Liberation Collection, we will be able to build up a homogeneous corpus that is representative of this literature from a literary, editorial and historical point of view. For example, the collection brings together both series from popular collections and works by the biggest names in “committed literature”. (literature engagée). With this project, we will not only be highlighting the specific contributions of this collection, but also filling a gap in research concerning the history of books and literature.

For this Visiting Scholar Programme, we have chosen to focus particularly on fiction. This is because fiction is the best way of penetrating the “collective imagination”, because best-selling novels – and we would add popular literature – are better able to reflect the dominant ideology and the imagination of the readership at a given time. It is also because many writers choose fiction to talk about their experience of the war and use it as a means of developing and disseminating the collective memory of the conflict.

We plan to explore two main areas of study. The first will be to redefine the “founding narrative” of the Resistance disseminated by these texts – particularly in mass-market novels – and its roots in Gaullist and Communist memory. We will be looking, for example, at the transformation of the face of the “enemy” (Germans and collaborators), the strategies for simplifying and constructing the narrative, which were particularly prevalent at the Liberation, and the influence that political and press discourse may have had on their content. A second area of research will focus on the causes of the decline in Resistance literature from 1946 onwards. While Marcel Aymé’s Le chemin des écoliers (1946) is particularly noteworthy, other works will be examined to identify a challenge to the “sacred narrative” of the Resistance, in particular through the subversion of this narrative through humour. We will attempt to answer the following questions: is the gradual disappearance of committed literature from the literary scene merely a symptom of public disaffection and the reinstatement of the autonomy of the literary field as a cardinal value ? Or was it also the result of a proactive publishing policy, linked to the ebb and flow of the purge, and the manifestation of a political will to bury collaboration once and for all?

To answer this question, we will adopt an approach based on both the classical methods of historical analysis and those of the digital humanities. With the increasing digitisation of historical sources, innovative techniques for reading historical sources have appeared, in particular those offered by distant reading. The analyses carried out on this corpus will mainly use methods derived from natural language processing. Topic modelling consists of identifying the themes present in a corpus; and this method has proved its worth for diachronic discourse analysis. To carry out this type of analysis, it is obviously necessary to create a corpus of digitised texts. We hope to be able to build up a corpus of between 80 and 100 titles for text mining. This project will help to fill a historiographical gap, with a particular focus on mass-market literature. It will show the specific contributions of the Liberation Collection, and its interest for research. Beyond our own use and analysis, the creation of a corpus of digitised texts will also help to make the collection better known to researchers, who will be able to use these digitisations (on a case-by-case basis) and initiate new projects and work.

References:

M. Atlack, Literature and the French resistance: cultural politics and narrative forms, 1940-1950, Manchester: Manchester University press, 1989. (738:47.c.95.914 )
A. Boschetti, Sartre et « Les Temps modernes », Paris: Minuit, 1985. (184.c.98.1217)
M. Braganca, La crise allemande du roman français, 1945-1949: la représentation des Allemands dans les best-sellers de l’immédiat après-guerre, Oxford, New York: Peter Lang, 2012. (C209.c.8715)
M. Bragança, Hitler’s French literary afterlives, 1945-2017, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. (Electronic Legal Deposit and MMLL library, F5G.G.130)
F. Calin, Les marques de l’Histoire (1939-1944) dans le roman français, Paris, Caen: Lettres modernes Minard, 2004. (701:05.d.7.52)
J. Cantier, Lire sous l’Occupation. Livres, lecteurs, lectures, 1939-1944, Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2019. (C215.c.2197)
C. Chadwyck-Healey, Literature of the liberation: the French experience in print 1944-1946, Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 2014. (Cam.b.2014.25)
S. Corcy, La vie culturelle sous l’Occupation, Paris: Le Grand livre du mois, 2005. (539:1.c.725.234)
P. Fouché, L’édition française sous l’occupation: 1940-1944, Paris: Bibliothèque de littérature française contemporaine de l’Université Paris 7, 1987. (433.c.98.82-)
Y. Hamel, Mémoires et déchirements / la représentation de la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans le roman français (1945-2001), Montréal: Université de Montréal, 2005. (738:17.c.200.33)
F. Moretti, Distant Reading, London, New York: Verso, 2013. (VLE ebooks)
É. Parinet, Une histoire de l’édition à l’époque contemporaine: XIXe-XXe siècle, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2004. (862.d.108)
G. Sapiro, La guerre des écrivains, Paris: Le Grand livre du mois, 1999. (738:47.c.95.1508)
A. Simonin, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1942-1955: le devoir d’insoumission, Paris: IMEC, 1994. (850.c.549)

Marie Puren