What do we know and what do we think we know? That Freedom would not be its original title, that it was first written for Nusch, the poet’s wife, and that it was dropped in France occupied by the RAF, becoming a kind of poetic anthem of the Resistance.
There’s nothing wrong with this. The reality, however, is not quite that simple. Paul Éluard, during the summer of 1941, was at the bedside of his hospitalized wife Nusch. He begins to write a poem which was to end with the revelation of the name of its recipient. “I quickly realized that the only word I had in mind was Freedom. So the woman I loved embodied a desire greater than herself.he wrote ten years later in Occasional poetry.
The poem appeared in June 1942
Éluard finished writing it in the spring of 42. He entrusted the manuscript to Max-Pol Fouchet who directed the journal in Algiers Fontainewhere many resistance poets publish. After having titled his poem A single thoughthe strikes out this title and replaces it with Freedom.
But the publisher, to escape censorship, restored the original title. The poem appeared in June 1942. At the same time, it is in the contents of a brochure Poetry and truth 42 composed by Éluard for the group La Main à plume, and circulated clandestinely in France where it was widely used.
The Political Warfare Executive, a British propaganda service, noticed it and included it in a review of which 150,000 copies were parachuted into occupied France in May 1943. Included with other war poems by Éluard in the collection At the German Rendezvousit will be the very first title from Editions de Minuit published out of hiding. This reissue, a return to the sources in a way, is followed by an afterword which gives this legendary text all its literary and historical dimension, and allows us to grasp its simple beauty.
Freedomby Paul Éluard, Minuit, 32 pages, 4.90 euros.
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