Les Editions de Minuit
| Founded | 1941 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Jean Bruller and Pierre de Lescure |
| Country of origin | France |
| Headquarters location | Paris |
| Publication types | Books |
| Official website | www |
Les Éditions de Minuit (French: [lez‿edisjɔ̃ də minɥi], Midnight Press) is a French publishing house which has its origins in the French Resistance of World War II and still publishes books today.
Les Éditions de Minuit was founded by writer and illustrator Jean Bruller and writer Pierre de Lescure (1891–1963) in 1941 in Paris, during the German occupation of northern France (by November 1942, German forces occupied all of France). At the time, the media and all forms of publishing were controlled and censored by the Nazi occupiers. Les Éditions de Minuit was started to circumvent the censorship, and so was an underground publisher until the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944.
Le Silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea) by co-founder Bruller (who wrote under the pseudonym Vercors) was the first book published (1942). Distribution, like other Resistance texts, was by being passed from person to person.
Le Silence de la mer was followed in 1943 by Chroniques interdites (banned newspaper columns, various authors), L'Honneur des poètes (The Honour of poets) poetry collected by Paul Éluard, Le cahier noir (The Black Notebook) by François Mauriac, and Le musée Grévin (The Grévin Museum) by Louis Aragon.
A small group of printers joined Bruller and de Lescure, and together they risked imprisonment and death to publish works by some of France's greatest authors who wrote under pseudonyms). The authors included Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, Jacques Maritain, François Mauriac, Jean Paulhan, André Chamson, André Gide, and the first unabridged French translation of John Steinbeck's The Moon Is Down (Nuits noires).
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