Abel Jean Désiré Bonnard (; 19 December 1883 31 May 1968) was a French poet, novelist and politician. One of the ministers of National Education under the Vichy regime, he was tried and convicted for collaborating with Nazi Germany.
Biography Born in Poitiers, Vienne, his early education was in Marseille with secondary studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. A student of literature, he was a graduate of the École du Louvre.
Politically, a follower of Charles Maurras, his views evolved towards fascism in the 1930s. Bonnard was one of the ministers of National Education under the Vichy regime (1942–44). The political satirist Jean Galtier-Boissière gave him the nickname "la Gestapette,"Olivier Mathieu, Abel Bonnard, une aventure inachevée, Mercure, 1988, p. 188. a portmanteau of Gestapo and tapette, the latter a pejorative French slang term for homosexual. The name, along with the homosexual inclinations it implied, became well known.Jean-François Louette, Valéry et Sartre, in Bulletin des études valéryennes, éd. L'Harmattan, 2002, p. 105, on line He was a member of the committee of the Groupe Collaboration, an organisation that aimed to encourage closer cultural ties between France and Germany.David Littlejohn, The Patriotic Traitors, Heinemann, 1972, p. 222
Bonnard was one of four members expelled from the Académie française after World War II for collaboration with Germany. Bonnard was condemned in absentia to death during the épuration légale period for wartime activities. However, he had escaped to Spain where Francisco Franco granted him political asylum.
In 1960, he returned to France to face retrial for his crimes. Bonnard received a symbolic sentence of 10 years banishment to be counted from 1945, but dissatisfied with the verdict, he chose to return to Spain where he lived out the remainder of his life.
Bibliography
1906 Les Familiers 1908 Les Histoires 1908 Les Royautés 1913 La Vie et l'Amour 1914 Le Palais Palmacamini 1918 La France et ses morts 1924 Notes de voyage : En Chine (1920-1921), 2 vol. 1926 Éloge de l'ignorance 1926 La vie amoureuse d'Henri Beyle 1927 L'Enfance 1928 L'Amitié 1928 L'Argent 1929 Saint François d'Assise 1931 Rome 1936 Le drame du présent : Les Modérés 1937 Savoir aimer 1939 L'Amour et l'Amitié 1941 Pensées dans l'action 1992 Ce monde et moi (selection of aphorisms, posthumous)
Honours
Officier of the Order of the Legion of Honour (1919, stripped in 1945) Croix de guerre 1914-1918
References
External links L'Académie française