ÉLUARD, Paul (1895-1952)

ÉLUARD, Paul (1895-1952)

Autograph poem signed « Paul Eluard »
N.p.n.d. [1944], 1 p. in-4° on graph paper
Draft manuscript with several corrections
Typographical pencil annotation on top right corner

A moving poem, one of Éluard’s most celebrated, composed in reaction to the torture of women who had their heads shaved during the purge at the Liberation of France in the summer of 1944

« En ce temps…

Comprenne qui voudra
Moi mon remords ce fut
La malheureuse qui resta
Sur le pavé
La victime raisonnable
À la robe déchirée
Au regard d’enfant perdue
Découronnée défigurée
Celle qui ressemble aux morts
Qui sont morts pour être aimés

Une fille faite
Pour un bouquet
Et couverte
Du noir crachat des ténèbres
Une fille galante
Comme une aurore
De premier mai
La plus aimable bête

Souillée et qui n’a pas compris
Qu’elle est souillée
Une bête prise au piège
Des amateurs de beauté

Et ma mère la femme
Voudrait bien dorloter
Cette image idéale
De son malheur sur terre

Paul Éluard »

By verbally denouncing the treatment reserved for women with shaved heads, targets of a last-minute and sometimes opportunistic patriotism, Éluard plunges us directly into the extrajudicial violence of the purge. In Raisons d’écrire, he explains the reasons that drove him to compose this poem: “Angry reaction. I see again, in front of a hairdresser’s shop on Rue de Grenelle, a magnificent head of women’s hair lying on the pavement. I see again pitiful idiots, trembling with fear beneath the laughter of the crowd. They hadn’t sold France, and often they hadn’t sold anything at all. In any case, they didn’t lecture anyone. While the apostle-faced bandits, Pétain, Laval, Darnand, Déat, Doriot, Luchaire, etc., left. Some even, knowing their power, stayed quietly at home, hoping to start again tomorrow.”
Éluard thus puts his fame to use with this incredible text, with its immense posterity, soberly entitled « Comprenne qui voudra » [Understand who will]. As Olivier Barbarant and Victor Laby explain, the poet “thus gives the ‘shorn’ the status of a Thisbe or a Juliet: that of the lover condemned to love despite the laws of men and the hatred of society” (Paul Éluard, comme un enfant devant le feu, éd. Seghers, p. 236). For it is indeed the love embodied by the one who is “soiled,” which prevails for Éluard, beyond the violence. Faced with the pack, the poet tries to restore dignity to “the reasonable victim.”