Andrée Viollis: A ‘Grand Reporter’ in the Intellectual Resistance,1942−1944

Abstract

The centrepiece of this article concerns a brochure published clandestinely in December 1943, ‘Le Racisme hitlérien: machine de guerre contre la France’; and republished in 1944 by the Éditions de la Clandestinité, Mouvement National Contre le Racisme, Lyon, under the following notice: ‘Nous rééditons ici, sans rien y changer, une de nos publications clandestines parue en décembre 1943. Nous sommes heureux de faire figurer cette fois le nom de l’auteur, l’écrivain bien connu Andrée Viollis, dont la grande voix courageuse prit dès le début notre parti.’ When Andrée Viollis (1870−1950) takes up her pen as a writer engaged in the Resistance, she does so as a seasoned reporter and former international correspondent for the major Paris daily, Le Petit Parisien, who in the 1920s and 1930s reported on civil war in Afghanistan; Gandhi and the anti-colonial movement for independence in India; the torture of political prisoners by the French colonial government in Vietnam; the rise of fascism in imperialist Japan and the incursion of the Japanese regime into China; and the Spanish Civil War, among other events and subjects. She also published four novels and a biography of Madame de Lafayette, but her reputation rests principally on her career as a reporter and international correspondent. Her reporting is characterised by richness of description, dramatisation of interviews, detailed reconstruction of historical and socio-economic backgrounds; and astute, if not visionary, analysis and interpretation of the international importance of the events she covers.