Maurice Clavel

Maurice Clavel 19201979 was a French writer journalist and philosopher Maurice Clavel was born on 10 November 1920 in Frontignan Hérault to a family headed by a father who was a pharmacist This conservative milieu of small shopkeepers in Languedoc led him to be an activist in the French Popular Party FPP in his hometown of Frontignan A brilliant pupil he got into the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in the Rue dUlm in Paris There he became acquainted with Trotskyist JeanToussaint Desanti and Maurrassian Pierre Boutang The latter having been appointed in the Secretariat of Public Instruction invited him to serve by his side under Marshal Philippe Pétain Having just gotten his certificate of morale and sociology in Montpellier Maurice Clavel accepted but was soon disillusioned While preparing a thesis on Immanuel Kant he then joined the Résistance 1942 As head the French Forces of the Interior of EureetLoir he took part in the liberation of Chartres where he greeted General Charles de Gaulle on the cathedrals forecourt At the Libération he denounced the blind epuration and tried to save the heads of Robert Brasillach and Drieu La Rochelle That did not prevent him from being a fervent activist in the Rally of the French People RPF whose acerbic criticism of communism got him to be accused by the French Communist Party PCF of being Goebbels voice He then founded with Henri dAstier de La Vigerie and André Figueras a newspaper called LEssor Meanwhile he wrote plays directed by Jean Vilar like Les Incendiaires The Incendiaries in 1947 or La Terrasse de midi The Noon Terrace in 1949 But those failed and as he was torn apart after breaking his relationship with the actor Silvia Monfort Clavel accepted a professor tenure in the Carnot high school in Dijon Barely liked by his superiors he soon got back to theatrical works when in 1951 Jean Vilar appointed him as secretarygeneral of the Théâtre National Populaire But his new play Malsameda 1954 as well as his first novel Une fille pour lété A Girl for the Summer 1955 turned out to be failures too From 1955 Clavel started his career as a journalist writing in Combat Protesting among other things against the invasion of Hungary by Soviet tanks in 1956 and the use of torture in Algeria he got involved with leftwing Gaullists in the Democratic Union of Labour in 1959 Meanwhile he went back to teaching as philosophy professor in Camille Sée and Buffon high school in Paris from 1960 to 1963 With Emmanuel Berl he presented a daily radio programme Qui êtesvous Who are you But after the refusal by managers of the radio station to grant Jean Daniel a right of reply about Algeria he resigned The following year after publishing Le Temps de Chartres The Times of Chartres he ceased his regular contribution to Combat However he kept supporting General De Gaulles position on Algeria who entrusted him to engage in a dialogue with Messali Hadj Source Article Maurice Clavel from Wikipedia in English licensed under CCBYSA 30