[1][2] Edmond Charlot was born on 15 February 1915 in Algiers and died on 10 April 2004 in Béziers, close to where he lived in Pézenas in the south of France in the department of Hérault.

Charlot's first foray into publishing was in May 1936, with a print run of five hundred, a play co-written by Camus, Jeanne-Paule Sicard, Yves Bourgeois and Alfred Poignant called Révolte dans les Asturies.

[5] Charlot's 1936 Méditerranéennes book series was on the other hand eclectic with works by Camus, Audisio, Jean Grenier, and Federico García Lorca and poems by René-Jean Clot.

Loss of freedom was a reality for Charlot as he was imprisoned briefly after publishing a translation of Paris France by Gertrude Stein (who had described Charlot as a dynamic and resistant editor she was proud to work with – "resistant" was a word with a particular resonance for the Vichy and German authorities of occupied France) for what he later described as the "astonishing claim" that he was presumed to be a Gaullist and communist sympathiser.

In 1944, he published and edited L’Arche, a review created by the poet Jean Amrouche with the explicit blessing of Gide and Charles de Gaulle.

[7] The benediction of Gide is illuminating as he was one of the three co-founders in 1909 of the Nouvelle Revue Française, which L’Arche could be said to have culturally replaced during the years of German occupation of France.

Charlot published about a dozen volumes each month, notably the works of Henri Bosco (Le Mas Théotime, 1945, Prix Renaudot), Jean Amrouche (Chants berbères de Kabylie, 1946), Marie-Louise-Taos Amrouche (Jacinthe noire, 1947), Jules Roy (La Vallée heureuse, 1946, Prix Renaudot), Emmanuel Roblès (Les Hauteurs de la ville, 1948, Prix Fémina) and blank verse of Jean Lescure (La Plaie ne se ferme pas, with a lithograph of Estève, 1949).

In 1947 Charlot, who passed to his sister-in-law his first bookshop at Algiers Les Vraies Richesses (English, "Our True Wealth"),[8] started the publication of "ten best French novels" chosen by Gide.

Missing a solid cash reserve, lack of insurance and mistreated by his rivals and exposed to the ferocity and jealousy of the older publishing houses, he floundered" wrote Jules Roy.

Despite the support of the Association des éditeurs résistants, his financial difficulties grew from 1948 and Charlot could not find the capital nor obtain loans, and was forced into debt to reprint and had to leave the Paris base which carried on some further months (1949-1950) under the direction of Amrouche and Charles Autrand [fr].

For the contents of this volume dated 1943 and by a fictional imprimatur was in fact the 1945 report of Tubert to the Assemblée consultative provisoire (following a massacre in the Constantinois – a region of north-eastern Algeria).

The "typographical errors" of the cover are repeated on the title page and were a deliberate effort to disguise the real content and allow the report to be disseminated to avoid the notice of the authorities.

Even under German occupation (Algeria was under the Vichy Government until the Allies captured Algiers with Operation Torch commencing on the night of 7–8 November 1942) the new art was shown.

After his spell in Paris (1963-5) in ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, which was the national public broadcasting service) he opened the gallery Pilote in Algiers where he again set up exhibitions of young Algerian painters such as Baya, Aksouh and Mohammed Khadda.

He had close links with many who went on to be influential in French Algerian radio such as Marcel Amrouche (later chief editor of Radio-Alger), José Pivin (who had a long radio career in France after years in Algeria) and El Boudali Safir (who created programmes in Arabic and Kabyle but also five musical ensembles and helped set up the National Institute of Music).

The day Charlot arrived in Paris he met with Jean Lescure of the "Research Arm" of ORTF who led him to Pierre Schaeffer, its boss.

Some three hundred and fifty public works of Edmond Charlot, of which a great number had been re-edited by other publishing houses, are today researched by book lovers.

In his obituary, the poet James Kirkup described Edmond Charlot as "a man whose life was devoted to international understanding between Arabs and Europeans; an impassioned bibliophile and literary enthusiast who started the careers of many famous authors.

He also defended the idea of "Mediterranean civilisation" as a force for peace and artistic excellence in a world rent asunder by politics and war.