Calling readers together against the Nazi occupation: Éditions de Minuit and the public between complicity and editorial policy in the clandestine literature of the Resistance

In the early 1940s, on the fringes of the military Resistance in German-occupied and state-collaborationist France, another form of Resistance began to take shape, a literary Resistance, which proposed itself clandestinely as a unanimous response to and condemnation of the occupiers and their policies. Thanks to literary personalities such as Jean Bruller and Pierre de Lescure, among others, a cultural Resistance was born through the essentially clandestine publication of novels and poetry collections: a smuggled literature whose publication had at times an almost virulent character, as in the case of Le silence de la mer, and which represented a unanimous response to occupationist censorship, curbing its filters in order to reach the widest possible portion of the public. This contribution therefore aims to present the relationship that was established between clandestine literature published during the Occupation and its readers: the shared situation, the common goal and the same enemy represented, for authors, publishers, and readers alike, a single horizon to which they could turn through the written and read word. The readers, who were also clandestine, responded to an editorial call that, with its language, gave rise to a feeling of Resistance that never waned, also and above all thanks to the immeasurable contribution made by clandestine literature, its authors and their great complicity with the readers who relied on them and, at the same time, supported them.