Paris 2015: Antoine Blondin, Cimetière du Père-Lachaise #5

'Antoine Blondin
1922 – 1991'

Antoine Blondin was the son of the French female poet Germaine Blondin (1887–1965) and also wrote under the pseudonym Tenorio and was associated with the Hussards. His stint under occupied France between 1943 and 1944 with the Service du travail obligatoire (STO), in an Austrian synthetic rubber factory, inspired his first novel L'Europe buissonnière (1949), which won the prix des Deux Magots and gained the attention of Marcel Aymé and Roger Nimier. Other noted novels of Blondin's include Les Enfants du bon Dieu (1952), L'Humeur vagabonde (1955) and Un singe en hiver (1959). His drunken exploits particularly around the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area were fondly remembered. The novel Monsieur Jadis ou l'École du soir (1970) is autobiographical.

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