Item #26497 [Funeral announcement for Paul Eluard, addressed and mailed to Lucien Scheler]. Paul Eluard, Le Comité National des Ecrivains.
[Funeral announcement for Paul Eluard, addressed and mailed to Lucien Scheler]
[Funeral announcement for Paul Eluard, addressed and mailed to Lucien Scheler]
[Funeral announcement for Paul Eluard, addressed and mailed to Lucien Scheler]

[Funeral announcement for Paul Eluard, addressed and mailed to Lucien Scheler]

Paris: Le Comité National des Ecrivains, 1952. Bifolium, 10 5/8 x 16 6/16", printed on rectos only with a black funeral border, and folded once (inner panels blank). Folded once, as mailed, and housed in the original mailing envelope, bordered in black, and addressed to Lucien Scheler, with stamp and frank.

A poignant assocation copy of Eluard's funeral announcement, mailed to the bookseller and publisher who hid Eluard from the Nazi's during the occupation of France. When Eluard died of a heart attack at home in 1952, his funeral was organized by the French Communist Party. The government had refused to organize the event for political reasons, despite the poet's fierce efforts as part of the resistance during the occupation. Eluard had rejoined the party in 1942, when the party was forbidden in occupied France. It was at this time that Scheler hid Eluard, from '42-44, when thousands of copies of his poem Liberté were dropped by British aircraft.

During the period that Scheler hid Eluard, the two combined forces to make Scheler's bookshop a locus of the resistance. Scheler's expertise as an antiquarian bookseller aided him in forging documents for members of the Resistance, and both men included poems to thebook L'Honneur des poètes, and the early issues of the periodical L'eternelle revue was also published from the shop. Item #26497

Price: $450.00

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