André Salmon, Journalist

From the Spanish Civil War to Liberation

Abstract

For years, several specialists have questioned the damnatio memoriae that has dogged the writer, poet and journalist, André Salmon, who, nevertheless, played an essential role in poetry and aesthetics, and was a considerable influence on the world of arts and letters during the first decades of the twentieth century. In this article, I propose a few different areas of research that help us trace the origin of this literary oblivion, which even today is difficult to understand. Tracking these clues, scattered over different sources—periodicals, books, or even court documents—I have reconstructed the contexts for the various reasons that André Salmon lost his rightful place (either large or small, time will tell) in the history of French letters. Thanks to the few but significant sentences written by Salmon in his memoirs, and above all, thanks to the courage of a small group of literary and art specialists on this common path, I have been able to find meaning in certain clues, strewn like pebbles in a fairytale, from the memories and commentaries dedicated to this author since the 1930s. It is an itinerary marked by a precise series of chronological steps that allow me today to better understand André Salmon the person and the strange fate of his literary career.