Army of Shadows

Originally published in Algiers in 1943, Joseph Kessel’s Army of Shadows is one of the first books to have been written about the French Resistance. Now available in paperback, Contra Mundum Press is proud to present the first new translation in over 70 years, and the first edition since Jean-Pierre Melville’s iconic 1969 film.

 

“What, then, when it comes to recounting the story of France, an obscure, secret France, which is new to its friends, its enemies, and new especially to itself? France no longer has bread, wine, fire. But mainly it no longer has any laws. Civil disobedience, individual or organized rebellion, have become duties to the fatherland. The national hero is the clandestine man, the outlaw. Nothing about the order imposed by the enemy and by the Marshal is valid. Nothing counts. Nothing is true any more. One changes home, name, every day. Officials and police officers are helping insurgents. One finds accomplices even in ministries. Prisons, getaways, tortures, bombings, scuffles. One dies and kills as if it’s natural. France lives, bleeds, in all its depths. It is toward the shadow that its true and unknown face is turned. In the catacombs of revolt, people create their own light and find their own law. Never has France waged a nobler and more beautiful war than in the basements where it prints its free newspapers, in its nocturnal lands, and in its secret coves where it received its free friends and from where its children set out, in torture cells where, despite tongs, red-hot pins, and crushed bones, the French died as free men.”

The son of Samuel Kessel, a Jewish physician of Lithuanian origin, Joseph Kessel lived in Argentina during his early life and was then taken to Orenburg, on the Urals, where his parents lived from 1905 to 1908, before returning to France. His first work, La steppe rouge, was a collection of short stories about the Bolshevik Revolution. After The Crew (1923), he published Mary of Cork, The Captives (recipient of the Grand Prix for the Novel from the Académie Française in 1926), Nuits de princes, Les Coeurs Pure, Belle de Jour (made into a film by Bunuel), Fortune Square (which was the fictional version of his report Slave Market), The Children of Luck, as well as a biography of Mermoz, the heroic aviator who had been his friend, and other books. Kessel belonged to the crew that Pierre Lazareff had gathered at Paris-Soir, and which comprised the golden age of the great reporters. A war correspondent from 1939-40, after the defeat, he joined the Résistance (Carte network) with his nephew Maurice Druon. It was also with him that he secretly crossed the Pyrenees to London and joined the Free French Forces of General de Gaulle. In May 1943, the two men composed the words of the "Song of the Partisans," destined to become the rallying song of the Resistance, and Kessel published, in tribute to its fighters, The Army of Shadows (made into an iconic film by Jean-Pierre Melville). He would end the war as an aviation captain in a squadron that flew over France at night to maintain links with the Resistance and give it orders. Upon the Liberation, Kessel resumed his activity as a reporter, traveled to Palestine, Africa, Burma, and Afghanistan. It is this latter country that inspired his novel masterpiece, Les Cavaliers (1967). Kessel was elected to the French Academy on November 22, 1962. He died seventeen years later on July 23, 1979.

Rainer J. Hanshe is a writer. He is the author of two novels, The Acolytes (2010) and The Abdication (2012), and a hybrid text created in collaboration with Federico Gori, Shattering the Muses (2017). His second novel, The Abdication, has been translated into Slovakian (2015), Italian (2016), and Turkish (2017). He is the editor of Richard Foreman's Plays with Films (2013) and Wordsworth's Fragments (2014), and the translator of Baudelaire's My Heart Laid Bare & Other Texts (2017). Hanshe has also written numerous essays on Nietzsche, principally concerning synesthesia, incubation, and agonism. He is the founder of Contra Mundum Press and Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics. Other work of his has appeared in Sinn und Form, Jelenkor, Asymptote, Quarterly Conversation, ChrisMarker.org, Black Sun Lit, and elsewhere. Hanshe is currently working on two novels, Humanimality and Now, Wonder, and In Praise of Dogs, a photojournalism project with Harald Hutter.

Stuart Kendall is a writer, editor, and translator working at the intersections of modern and contemporary design, visual culture, poetics and ecology. His books include The Ends of Art and Design, Georges Bataille, and twelve volumes of translations of poetry, philosophy, and visual and cultural criticism. His edited or co-edited works include Clayton Eshleman: The Whole Art, Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, and a special issue of Boom: A Journal of California devoted to contemporary California design. Jerome Rothenberg praised his version of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh poems as the "exemplary version for our time." Stuart has advanced degrees in philosophy, comparative religious studies, and comparative literature bringing a transdisciplinary and transcultural approach to contemporary design practice. He has taught at SUNY Stony Brook, Boston University, Stanford University, and the California College of the Arts and given lectures at colleges, universities, conferences, and colloquia around the world.