Jean-Louis Bory

Two months later, Flammarion published his first novel, Mon village à l'heure allemande, which won the Prix Goncourt with the support of Colette.

In 1948 he was assigned to the Paris region and was able to collaborate at the La Gazette des Lettres with Robert Kanters, Paul Guth and François Mauriac.

But in 1955, he chose to follow his friend Francis Erval to L'Express, which was the mouthpiece of Pierre Mendès France, to whose politics he was increasingly attracted.

Moreover, in 1956, he broke with the Communists on Soviet intervention in Hungary against which he signed a petition with Edgar Morin, Gilles Martinet, Jean-Marie Domenach, and Georges Suffert.

Thus, in 1960, when his editor Rene Julliard proposed he sign the Manifesto of the 121, he did not hesitate and found himself suspended from the professorship he had held at the Lycée Henri-IV since 1957.

The following year, he gave up teaching and his work at La Gazette des Lettres to devote himself to journalism and literature.

But joining the broadcasts of the program Le Masque et la Plume in 1964 provided him with an audience that contributed to his success as a citic.

And the group he gathered in Méréville in 1964/1965—François Nourissier, Hervé Bazin, Jean d'Ormesson, Georges Suffert, Louis Pauwels—marked a turn to the right.

Famous for the jousting between him and Georges Charensol, and Aubria Michel (alias of Pierre Vallières) at Masque et la plume, he defended the cinema of the Third World, especially African and Arab.

Defender of an "alternative" culture, he was often aggressive towards films of the "Boulevard", made for mere entertainment or wide distribution, those that did not challenge the taboos of morality and social life or our habits of seeing and thinking.

As management was sorry to see him systematically ignore the big budget movies and those popular with the general public, it exerted a gentle pressure by creating a less militant competitor.

He ended at the Homosexual Liberation Group, always opposing those traditional constraints that weight most heavily on the working class and the marginalised.

Falling into a deep depression in August 1977, he re-emerged during a remission period that lasted from October 1978 to February 1979 and offered him the opportunity to publish an amusing portrait of Cambaceres in 1978.