An unpublished work by Jean Giono, long considered lost, has just been published

A history researcher found a travel diary of the Provençal writer, who died in 1970, an account of a long walk in Haute-Drôme.

An unpublished travelogue by Jean Giono, long considered lost, appears Thursday October 3, 2024 after sleeping in court archives for more than eighty years. “Walking trip in Haute-Drôme“, published by Busclats, a collection by Gallimard, recounts a journey made by the author of Hussar on the roof in July 1939.

Giono mentioned this notebook without specifying where it had gone astray. And the experts no longer hoped to read it one day. But while doing research for a dissertation devoted to the special section of the Paris Court of Appeal, an exceptional jurisdiction set up during the Nazi occupation, history researcher Antoine Crovella came across this text kept in the Archives national.

In 1941, Giono was one of the targets of this jurisdiction created to repress activists of the Communist Party, then banned. The Manosque writer had, like many avant-garde authors of the 1920s and 1930s, had affinities with the party. But he broke up with him in 1936.

Jean Giono, a former soldier of the First World War and ultra-pacifist, disapproved of people taking up arms to defend the Republicans in Spain. The novelist is implicated in an obscure affair surrounding a supposed communist group in Landry (Savoie), which in reality he does not know. His travel diary is one of the proofs showing that he never went to this village. It will not be returned to him by his judges.

Paradoxically, at this time, Giono was a sympathizer of the Vichy regime, which satisfied his pacifism. In July 1939, he recorded his impressions of the Nyons region, which he traveled with a view to a novel which would appear in 1951, The Great Paths. Between the notes on the beauty of the landscapes or the story of his meetings with the inhabitants, which constitute almost this entire “trip”, we note a passage characteristic of the anti-Semitism of the 1930s, when Giono sees an airliner.

“Imagine the cabin with its passengers, no doubt bankers or fashion models, tailor models or Madame Grünbaum something or Madame Rothschild or oil merchants“, he writes. Antoine Crovella comments on these lines: “Giono’s approach – literary and political – is intended to be anti-modern, defending the peasant – and the fantasized values ​​of the land attached to him – against the powerful and internationalism.”