Louis Martin-Chauffier

Louis Martin-Chauffier, real name Louis Martin, (24 August 1894, Vannes – 6 October 1980, Puteaux) was a 20th-century French journalist and writer and a Resistant.

Louis Martin-Chauffier started medical studies and, after his father's death, passed the École nationale des chartes entry competition, where he was received in 1915. During the First World War, however, he was mobilized as an auxiliary doctor. He resumed his studies in 1919 and became an archivist-palaeographer in 1921, the year of his marriage with Simone Duval (1902–1975), translator and novelist. He was then appointed librarian at the bibliothèque Mazarine, then at Florence (1923–1927).

In 1922, he published his first novel, La Fissure. During the 1920s, Louis Martin-Chauffier wrote four novels before abandoning this genre, which he did not return to until 1950.

He also collaborated with the publishing house Au sans pareil (), where he published avant-garde authors such as Blaise Cendrars, writing a presentation to Philippe Soupault as an appendix to Histoire d'un Blanc, or signing the preface of Aspects de la biographie by André Maurois. He also realized translations of classics (Aristophanes, Dante, etc.) for illustrated luxury editions; In the 1930s, he began the first edition of the complete works of André Gide (1932–1939) and worked for more than fifteen years on a study devoted to Chateaubriand, published in 1943 under the title Chateaubriand ou l'obsession de la pureté.

He also had a journalist activity: while being a librarian, he gave articles to various magazines, in particular to La Revue critique des idées et des livres, close to the Action française, then became a religious chronicler for Le Figaro.

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