Robert Denoël
Robert Denoël (9 November 1902 – 2 December 1945) was a French publisher of Belgian origin and the founder of Éditions Denoël in Paris. His authors included Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Louis Aragon and Antonin Artaud. He was shot dead in the street in December 1945, two weeks before he was due before the commission investigating publishers who had worked under the German occupation; the murder was never solved.
His greatest success was Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), and during the occupation he took German money and published antisemitic books. His shares passed to his companion , who sold the house in 1951 to a subsidiary of Éditions Gallimard.
Publisher
Denoël was born on 9 November 1902 at Uccle, near Brussels, and moved to Paris after writing for literary papers in Liège. In March 1928 he took a half-share in "Aux Trois Magots", a bookshop at 60 avenue de la Bourdonnais, and the firm, renamed the éditions Robert Denoël in April 1929, numbered Artaud, Roger Vitrac and Eugène Dabit among its first authors. Dabit's L'Hôtel du Nord (1929) was Denoël's first success.
In April 1930 he took as partner the American Bernard Steele (1902–1979), and Denoël et Steele became one of the best-known younger houses of the decade; its "Bibliothèque psychanalytique" series carried the first French Freud, including Malaise dans la civilisation (1934). Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit appeared in 1932; it lost the Prix Goncourt to Guy Mazeline's Les Loups but took the Prix Renaudot and sold about 112,000 copies. Céline followed it with Mort à crédit (1936) and the antisemitic (1937); Steele left for the United States in 1937 and sold his shares the next year.
thumb|upright=0.85|Louis-Ferdinand Céline, photographed about 1936 by Henri Manuel
Occupation
The firm was sealed when the Germans took Paris in June 1940, and 29 of its titles were listed on the of banned books, but Denoël was working again by October. He then ran a subsidiary, the Nouvelles Éditions françaises, which published books imposed or approved by the occupier, among them the antisemitic series "Les Juifs en France" and Céline's ; his reprints included Lucien Rebatet's (1942), the best-selling book of the occupation.
What exposed him afterwards was money: a two-million-franc loan from the Berlin publisher Wilhelm Andermann had cost him 49 per cent of his publishing assets, and the inquiry into his firm ended in a non-lieu. In 1944 he started the Éditions de la Tour, which published Elsa Triolet's Goncourt-winning on Aragon's advice.
Murder
Denoël was shot on the evening of 2 December 1945 beside his car at the corner of the boulevard des Invalides and the rue de Grenelle, where he had been about to change a wheel. He was shot once, from a distance, and there were no signs of a struggle; the police concluded that he had refused a demand at the car and run shouting "Au voleur" before he was shot.
He had been due before the publishers' purge commission on 17 December, and the dossier he had prepared on the wartime conduct of other Paris publishers was never found. The inquiry lasted five years without charges. The house passed to Loviton; Cécile Denoël's suit to annul the sale turned on a transfer dated 25 October 1945 and 757,500 francs said to have been paid two days before the murder but registered only afterwards, and the courts upheld it. Denoël was buried on 11 December 1945; few publishers came.
Legacy
Denoël was spoken of with Bernard Grasset and Gaston Gallimard among the publishers of his generation; the historian Jean-Yves Mollier has called his murder the "number one enigma of the twentieth century", and Staman's book was filmed for French television in 2011 as . His house survived as an imprint of Gallimard, known for the science-fiction series and for L'Infini, the review Philippe Sollers founded there in 1983.