Trauma

In defeat and under Nazi occupation, France had undergone deeper shocks than the world at first realized. Last week two symptoms of France's neurosis appeared in the form of literary awards.

Reverend Anarchist. The 100,000 franc ($830) Pleiade Prize went to a 33-year-old Catholic priest, Jean Natal Grosjean for his metaphysical poem Terre du Temps. Father Grosjean sings: "Anarchy is order between persons. All the rest is merely commerce." He scorns the church's philosophic mainstays, Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, and dislikes Catholic poets Charles Peguy and Paul Claudel. Instead, anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and pagan poet Arthur Rimbaud are Father Grosjean's favorites. He says: "I have no political ideas, but if political practice reflected the purity of theory I would be an anarchist. I believe the path of progress that is natural and beneficial for man is toward an anarchist community. Some day I may leave for New Zealand,* where it should be easier to put these ideas into practice."

Asked what his ecclesiastical superiors think of his notions, Father Grosjean made a most unecclesiastical reply: "They aren't all imbeciles." He gave an example: "At Mass, when I was ordained, I lauded the father of one of my friends. He was an old anarchist. My anarchist pals had asked me to do it. The bishop of Strasbourg was delighted."

Terre du Temps (whose subject matter is biblical lore) is heavily tinged with gloomy Existentialism (TIME, Jan. 28), like much else in contemporary French thinking. Father Grosjean sighs: "Despair is necessary for success."

Underground Economist. The Theophraste Renaudot Prize went to David Rousset, for his L'Univers Concentrationnaire, a graphic, harrowing description of life in Nazi concentration camps in France. Rousset was a diligent researcher in TIME'S Paris Bureau before the war. After the occupation, he adopted the somewhat more exciting work of organizing anti-Nazi groups inside the German Army. A spy got into Rousset's organization and all the Germans were executed, but the Gestapo could not find evidence linking Rousset with the plot; he got off with a year and a half in five concentration camps. The U.S. Army liberated him from the last one.

More successful than his venture into military mutiny was a clandestine newspaper which Rousset published during the war. His researcher's soul was annoyed because the Germans falsified business statistics and economic facts. To keep French businessmen from making mistakes, he operated a sort of underground Wall Street Journal.

Rousset lost 90 pounds in the concentration camps, but he is back to normal now and his English wife calls him "mon gros"

*Like that of most Frenchmen, Father Grosjean's political geography is confused: Socialist New Zealand is one of the last places in the world where his philosophy would have a chance.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.