8 November 2013

André Fraigneau: Père Lachaise Columbarium #22

The Hussards was a literary movement the 'members' of which never recognised the term itself, and not did they see themselves as part of a movement. The expression was originally used in 1952 by the writer and journalist Bernard Frank in Les Temps Modernes to describe a group of strongly right-wing writers who were anti-Sartrean and anti-Gaullist. Under this umbrella come Roger Nimier (who published Le Hussard bleu in 1950 and of course inadvertently gave the name to the group of writers), Jacques Laurent, Antoine Blondin, Michel Déon, Jacques Chardonne, Paul Morand, and so on.

But Déon said that neither he nor Blondin would have been writers without the existence of André Fraigneau (1905–91), whose L’Amour vagabond (1949) is seen as something of a sacred text for the Hussards – Blondin, for instance, wrote L’humeur vagabonde in homage to it.

Some people (readers and writers) are attracted to the Hussard style (short, incisive, poetic phrasing) in spite of their politics, and Jérôme Garcin even coined the term 'néo-Hussards' to describe more recent writers such as Patrick Besson, a person who is wholly without the political affiliations of the original Hussards because he still considers himself a kind of communist. (Besson also published the novel Le Hussard rouge in 2011.)

My first post on Père Lachaise is linked below:

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Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise / Père Lachaise Cemetery

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