Pierre Boujut, born in 1913 and died in 1992 in Jarnac, Charente, was a French writer and poet. A cooper and iron merchant by trade, pacifist, and libertarian, he took up writing in his twenties, launching three successive magazines from 1933 onwards, including La Tour de Feu, founded in 1946. Alongside other poets, he expressed himself on both literary and political levels, mixing the two with enthusiasm, particularly when his son deserted during the Algerian War. Thanks to his poetry, Pierre Boujut maintained epistolary relations from his office in Jarnac with the great writers of the time. He continued to publish La Tour de Feu until 1981.
The cooper-poet Pierre Boujut was born into a Protestant family, which influenced his vocabulary, with the words “soul” and “spirit”, for example, recurring regularly in his writing. He defined himself as "a heretic within the Protestant heresy", and stated that: "It is religion that is ersatz poetry, not the other way around", an idea he often repeated in many forms. Another crucial factor was the untimely death of his father, who was killed in September 1914, at the start of World War I. This event may well have been at the root of his pacifism, which he never abandoned. He grew up alone with his mother, continued his secondary education at the Lycée de Cognac, passed his baccalauréat, and planned to become a teacher. At the age of twenty, he decided to learn his father's trade as a cooper and settle permanently in Jarnac. Six years later, World War II broke out. Despite his opinions, he joined his regiment in the face of the Nazi threat and lived through the French debacle of 1940. Imprisoned in Austria from 1940 to 1945, he drew lessons from this experience that reinforced his sense of fraternity, internationalism, and distaste for totalitarianism. Freed in 1945, he returned to his hometown, where he lived until he died in 1992.
In the 1930s, he founded two "literary journals of humanitarian humanism". Claude Roy, as a neighbor and friend, helped found the first, Reflets;N° 1-16, (Jarnac, from 1933 to 1936) the second, Regains,N° 17-22, (Jarnac, from 1937 to 1939) took its title from the work of Jean Giono.
Apart from his captivity in Austria and a few trips to Paris and abroad, Pierre Boujut spent his entire life in Jarnac. From his office, which became a tourist attraction over the years, he created successive issues of La Tour de Feu and corresponded with some of the best-known writers of his time. In his memoir published in 1989, he mentions André Breton, Georges Duhamel, Romain Rolland, Jean Giono, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. In addition, he was friendly with Gaston Chaissac.Trente et une Lettres à Pierre Boujut, Bassac, Plein-Chant, 1979 and Lettres du Morvandiaux en blouse boquine à Pierre et Michel Boujut, coll. Type-Type, Bassac, Éditions Plein Chant, 1998.
One of the most important dates in Pierre Boujut's life was 13 May 1961, the day his son Michel, then in the army, refused to take part in the Algerian War, fulfilling "all [his father's] thoughts". Michel celebrated the event with a poem, L'examen de passage,Reprinted in Les Mots sauvés, La Tour de Feu n° 96, December 1967, p. 58. in which he unambiguously approved of desertion in wartime. Publication of the text in Louis Lecoin's newspaper Liberté led to the poet being arrested for a time.After his hunger strike in June 1962, a tribute was paid to him in December 1962 with La Tour de Feu no. 76: Reconnaissance à Louis Lecoin. Years later, he would recall his admiration for his son's act of insubordination, who, having become a television producer, film critic, and writer, would recount his desertion in Le Jour où Gary Cooper est mort (The Day Gary Cooper Died).Éditions Payot & Rivages (2011)
Pierre Boujut's life was marked by the calm and regularity of a few rituals: the annual Tour de Feu convention on July 14, trips to Thouars to pick up the latest issue of the magazine from the printer, and vacations to Fouras to write his curiously seasonal poems. His life was characterized by a love of the margins that never allowed him to forget his desire to transform the world. Antimilitarist and libertarian socialist, he remained faithful to the line of conduct outlined in one of the poems of Mots sauvés: "Refuse any relationship with the official world". He stuck to it, and was able to write late in life: "I have known neither misery nor wealth. I have always lived in happy mediocrity and without the slightest jealousy". The only dark spot in this life, which constantly combined the apparent routine of the petit-bourgeois with the stances of the utopian and the inner flights of fancy of the great transparent that he also was: his bouts of depression.The expression is borrowed from André Breton, but diverted from the meaning given to it by the author of the Manifestes du surréalisme. P. Boujut explains this hijacking in issue n° 111 of his magazine, September 1971. At more or less regular intervals, they robbed him of his optimism and energy, but he always came out of them a little more eager to write and to live.Pierre Boujut explains in the supplement to La Tour de Feu n° 148, December 1980: “15 times in 27 years, i.e. 90 months of non-life for 324 of life”.
From 1946 to 1981, his main literary activity was to compile and organize the summaries of the one hundred and twenty-eight issues of La Tour de Feu that he published and contributed to. Alongside his editorial duties, his work as a poet was marked by his warm personality, his concern for authenticity, and his unwavering ethical choices. In 1989, he published Un mauvais français, his most autobiographical book, in which his personal memories and poetic thoughts are interwoven.
La Tour de Feu At the Liberation, La Tour de Feu succeeded its two predecessors, Reflets and Regains, with issue no. 23, in other words, without interrupting the numbering system began in 1933.In this section, when references mention only the journal number, they are accompanied by the corresponding subtitle. In the aftermath of an unprecedented conflict, the new "internationalist magazine of poetic creation"This sub-title was “infinitely important” to Pierre Boujut, . delivered several messages of fraternity and hope in mankind. In this respect, the titles of the issues at the time are particularly explicit: Silence à la Violence (1947), Contre l'Esprit de Catastrophe (1948), and Droit de Survivre (1948).Respectively n° 24/25, 26 and 27. Thereafter, Pierre Boujut maintained, against dogma, dialectics, fascism, and scientism of all kinds, the long-standing notion of "living contradiction",On this subject, see pages 132 to 137 of no. 82, La Treizième revient, June 1964, and in particular note 2, p. 133. a notion echoed in the philosophical work of Stéphane Lupasco. This led to numerous polemics and generally heated debates, notably at the informal Congrès of La Tour de Feu, held every year in mid-July in Jarnac, in the chai on rue Laporte-Bisquit and on the banks of the Charente.
The magazine bears the imprint of these debates and is the most important part of Pierre Boujut's work, even if some issues were conceived by others. Thanks to his work, the texts become clearer, respond to each other, and complement each other. There's no need to take seriously the burlesque slogan coined by the cooper-director to realize that he knew how to create, on a given date and from a wide variety of texts, a most homogeneous whole without betraying the intentions of the authors concerned.
Edmond Humeau, a libertarian and internationalist, was not content with committed texts and repeated attacks on dialectical thought.1907-1998. See no. 114, L'Humeaudière, June 1972 and Edmond Humeau's Poésies complètes, published by Éditions des Voirons, in three volumes: L' ge noir (1977), Plus loin l'aurore (1979) and Le Temps dévouré (1982).Like Déplons le drapeau du monde, published in n° 26 and 93. Similarly, Fernand Tourret built up a brief but highly original body of work, rooted in collective memory, from which he drew words that had been forgotten and charged with history.1899-1988. See La Tour de Feu n° 108: Fernand Tourret, December 1970, and Branle des petits seigneurs du Pays de Thelle, Éditions Plein Chant, Bassac, 1981. Both publications contain a bibliography. He used archaisms with a highly personal sense of language and a love of concreteness that cut across his experience, concerns, and extensive culture.Fernand Tourret is the author of L'outil, in collaboration with Paul Feller. Photos by Jean Boucher and Klaus Grunewald, Éditions Albert de Visscher, Brussels, 1969. Last revised edition, with photos by Philippe Schlienger: Epa/Hachette, 2004. Finally, Adrian Miatlev was probably the most gifted of Pierre Boujut's friends.1910-1964. See no. 90, Adrian Miatlev tel qu'en nous autres, June 1966, as well as Le Sens de la marche, choice of poems and presentation by Edmond Humeau, Robert Morel éditeur, 1972. For a complete bibliography, see Adrian Miatlev by Pierre Boujut, Poètes d'Aujourd'hui, no. 255, Éditions Seghers, 1989. During his lifetime, he published unconvincingly with two major Parisian publishers, but his talent seemed to blossom with La Tour de Feu. He wrote poems with a pessimistic yet invigorating vision of life, marked by failure and great energy. Above all, he exchanged letters with his friends, characterized by verbal invention and an unrivaled sense of formula. His pronounced taste for paradoxes, blend words and motivated neologisms make his correspondence unique. His charismatic personality, and his death in 1964 at the age of 54, made him one of the magazine's myths.
In its day, La Tour de Feu praised its "great men" (Krishnamurti, Henry Miller, and Stéphane Lupasco).Nos. 36-37, Krishnamurti, Spring 1952.No. 47, Henry Miller, Autumn 1955. Certainly, three issues were devoted to Antonin Artaud and no less than nineteen to Adrian Miatlev's correspondence. For thirty-five years, nearly five hundred and fifty authors, from the most prominent to the most obscure, were published, while the editorial board was renewed over time.
Pierre Boujut never neglected his hometown or the Charente region. Two issues of the magazine were devoted to Jarnac et ses poètes and La gloria cognaçaise.N° 29/30, Jarnac et ses poètes, winter 1948-1949. Reprinted in n° 117, March 1973. In addition, other issues bore traces of their provincial origins.The theme of a cahier was generally defined and adopted at the annual congress, hence certain titles which in fact mask a more general reflection: L'Appel de Jarnac, n° 38, summer 1952, La Grammaire de Jarnac, n° 80, January 1963, Le Tarot de Jarnac, n° 121, March 1974. This was no trace of chauvinism on the part of the Jarnac cooper, but rather a defiance of fashion and a refusal of Parisianism, a refusal explicitly formulated with L'alliance des villages and subsequently reaffirmed many times over.N° 43, L'Alliance des villages, 1954. However, such a stance did not exclude authors living in Paris or the Île-de-France region: for a long time, they had a meeting place in the capital, where they met with varying frequency.There was the Saint-Claude on boulevard Saint-Germain, Chez Catherine near Place des Vosges, and Maurice Alezra's La Vieille Grille in the 5th arrondissement.