Today, Victory in Europe Day, marks the anniversary of the end of World War II on the Eastern European Front on 8 May 1945. We are delighted to share the video-recording (hosted on Cambridge University Library’s YouTube channel) of the talk on the Chadwyck-Healey Liberation collection (1944-1946) we gave on 19 March, as part of the 2024 Cambridge Festival, in partnership with the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics.
This year will mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings and the Liberation of France from German occupation, at the end of the Second World War. As part of the ongoing promotion of and research into Cambridge University’s Library Liberation collection (1944-1946), we have been delighted to shed light on Sophie Dubillot’s AHRC-funded collaborative (Cambridge UL and Open University) PhD project: ‘Ce n’est pas une blague: Purposes and Limits of Visual Humour in Early Post-War France (1944-46)’ and on the Liberation Collection (1944-46) Visiting Scholarship at Cambridge UL, whose first recipient will be announced in the next few weeks. We would be very happy to welcome you on Tuesday 19th March, 5-6pm at the Faculty of Divinity on the Sidgwick site, for Sophie Dubillot and Irène Fabry-Tehranchi’s talk on the Liberation collection: Illustrated books and humour in Cambridge University Library’s Liberation collection (1944-46), as part of the Cambridge Festival (you can register here).
This talk will examine a selection of the Liberation collection’s illustrated works (ranging from deluxe fundraising anthologies to commemorative works, clandestine printing and poetry), as well as humorous drawings representing struggles (such as restrictions, housing issues, and missing family members), in an ideologically divided country in dire need of reconstruction.
Irène Fabry-Tehranchi
Two years ago, Cambridge University Library acquired a satirical pocket-size (but 3 meters long, once unfolded) Panorama of the Franco-Prussian war by Percy Cruikshank (1870) (8000.e.354). This work is a good complement to the library’s Collection of 1870-71 Franco-Prussian caricatures from a British perspective. In a talk taking place on Thursday 7 March from 5-6pm in the University Library’s Milstein room, as part of the Cambridge History of Material Texts seminar, we are going to present Cruikshank’s panorama and contextualise this work within the author’s creation of other comic cartoons produced in the concertina format.
![Panorama of the Franco Prussian War, painted by PC [Percy Cruikshank], London : F. Platts, 185 Fleet Street EC, & Mann Nephews, 39 Cornhill E.C., [1870-71].](https://i0.wp.com/languagecollections-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/20220705_150334a.jpg?w=341&h=284&ssl=1 "20220705_150334a")
Continue reading “Percy Cruikshank’s Panorama of the Franco-Prussian war (1870) in context”
We are delighted to share the new webpage designed by the University Library Research Institute (ULRI), for the AHRC-funded doctoral award on France and the Second World War, a collaborative project of the Open University and Cambridge University Library.
The PhD candidate, Sophie Dubillot, previously contributed to this blog pieces on the French résistante Madeleine Riffaud and the collaborationist Auguste Liquois; the résistant priest Père Jacques de Jésus (who inspired Louis Malle’s 1987 film Au revoir les enfants) and Julien Unger’s Le sang et l’or : souvenirs de camps allemands (1946).
Sophie is using material from the Chadwyck-Healey Liberation Collection and the abundant press of the Liberation period to examine humorous drawings in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in France (1944-46). Her project aims to examine visual humour’s forms, functions, and limits at a time when the French had to negotiate the delicate post-war transition back to peace. Sophie’s research focuses on how humour served to redefine the French nation in the early post-war period and how different influences on the drawings encouraged or stifled particular voices.
Irène Fabry-Tehranchi
We recently wrote a blog post about a recently catalogued collection of Nazi propaganda. Among these items were some specifically anti-British and anti-American publications which are well worth examining. For instance, the humorous graphic concertina leaflet (leporello) L’Olympiade 1941 (CCC.26:4.620) by Apis (pseudonym for Jean Chaperon, 1887-1969) makes fun of the Allied defeat in Greece, presented in the guise of a failed competition of the British team at the aptly named ‘Olympic games’, under the gaze of Jupiter. In the first two vignettes, a group of Tommies landing in Greece are welcomed with enthusiasm by a young man in traditional Greek costume. But very quickly, the challenge turns sour: the British run away from the German enemy and their best performances consist in their speed at taking flight (running, marathon, jumping, rowing and swimming). The grim outcome is death: “Morts à l’arrivée”.
Continue reading “Anti-Allied propaganda in Cambridge University Library’s Nazi Collection”
I recently catalogued two dozen of Nazi booklets and pamphlets circulating in France in the 1940s. They are an addition to existing special collections of National Socialist literature at Cambridge University Library; and a good complement and forerunner to the more recently donated Chadwyck-Healey Liberation collection (which focuses on French language works mainly published between 1944 and 1946). A first Nazi literature collection in the University Library (CCA-CCC.25) contains a selection of books representing National Socialist Germany and is based on a collection of 750 items, including school textbooks and songbooks, which were acquired in August 1947 through His Majesty’s Stationary Office.
Political songs play an important part in popular culture and are powerful means of fostering and transmitting a sense of community and identity. Songs cross cultures and languages, as we discussed in an earlier blogpost on the French and American songs sung at the Liberation. On 14 July, Bastille Day, we want to shed light on another item from the Chadwyck-Healey Liberation collection: the Chants de la liberté (Liberation.b.130), a wonderfully illustrated collection of songs, accompanied by musical notation, which puts into perspective French political and historical struggles. Each song is accompanied by a didactic note, which provides some historical context.
Les chants de la liberté 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1944 / réunis et harmonisés par Vincent Gambau ; préface de Bracke A.-M. Desrousseaux ; illustrations de Robert Fuzier. Paris : Les Éditions de la liberté, 1945. (Liberation.b.130)
The title of the collection, which echoes the name of the publisher (the socialist Éditions de la liberté, well represented in the Liberation collection), places the Liberation of Paris at the end of August 1944 as the last of a series of revolutions in the history of France (brushing over the fact that the uprising led by the military resistant group FFI, French Forces of the Interior, could only be successful thanks to the arrival of the Allied forces). The editor and harmoniser, Vincent Gambau, specialised in popular, traditional and regional songs. The illustrator, Robert Fuzier, a member of the SFIO (Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière), participated in the Front populaire government in 1936. Engaged in the Résistance and in clandestine publishing, he was arrested in August 1943.
Continue reading “Songs of freedom : “Les chants de la liberté, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1944””
Last year Cambridge University Special Collections acquired, with the help of the Friends of the Library, a notebook of 47 drawings, probably produced by an unidentified soldier towards the end of the 19th century (MS Add. 10300). This acquisition adds to the library’s holdings of primary material relating to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, which ranges from bound volumes of contemporary caricatures (KF.3.9-14, see the earlier blogpost) to directories of caricaturists and their work (such as Berleux’s La caricature politique en France pendant la guerre, le siège de Paris et la Commune, 1870-1871, Lib.5.89.27 and Gallica) and facsimiles of posters produced during the Paris Commune (See Les murailles politiques francaises and Les affiches de la Commune). The interest of the notebook does not lie in the artistic talent of its creator, but rather in the examination of his visual culture, through the identification of the illustrations from contemporary books and prints which inspired his own drawings. The investigation of the sources he used reveals the kind of illustrated material he had access to, which is also key for the dating of the manuscript.
One of the last books acquired through the Liberation collection is Amy Bakaloff’s Sombre est noir (Liberation.b.356), a collection of French poetry written during the Second World War and dedicated to Paul Éluard and Georges Hugnet, a writer and publisher engaged in the Résistance. It includes an engraving signed by Óscar Domínguez and two drawings. It is a rare work, one of 232 copies, some numbered on Annam paper, some on blue vellum, and some on vélin des Marais. Continue reading ““Sombre est noir” by Amy Bakaloff and Óscar Domínguez (1945): war poetry, from anthologies to illustrated collections”
Cambridge University Library recently acquired the French periodical La scène: revue des succès dramatiques, décorations complètes, costumes coloriés, directed and illustrated by Jules Gaildrau and written by his colleague E. Grand, ranging from October 1877 to January 1888 (Rare books, 8000.a.95). The publication (43 issues in total) was intended to appear twice a month; in reality, though, it was more irregular, with fewer reviews in 1880-1882 and 1885-1888 (and no review at all in 1887). It is a very rare set, as far as we know, only held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
La scène is a wonderful source recording the Parisian theatrical life of the second part of the 19th century, telling us of its “dramatic successes”, and including information such as the date and place of the first performance, the names of music directors, costume designers, dressmakers, set designers, as well as those of the actors. Each issue is made up of four pages of text summarising the plot and reviewing the performance of the actors or singers and the staging, with black and white illustrations of the different sets; four pages of advertisements; and a coloured plate divided into four levels featuring the actors in their costumes. The periodical was available for purchase (for 1 franc, and later 1 franc 50) at the head office as well as in bookshops, and customers could pay for subscriptions of three months, six months, or a year. In the later period, advertisements encouraged the retrospective purchase of a whole set of the publication. Continue reading “Performance reviews, pictures and advertisement: La scène (Paris, 1877-1888)”
Languages across Borders 