Roger Stéphane

[1] After the Liberation he became a literary critic, author and journalist, acknowledged during his final years as a member of the Paris left wing intellectual establishment.

As a teenager, partly as a reaction to the tide of populist nationalism sweeping over western Europe, he became a fervent communist, frequenting left wing literary circles in Paris.

[5] In May 1942 Roger Stéphane, as he was known to resistance comrades and, subsequently, to posterity, was arrested and held in Fort Barraux which had been converted into an internment camp, but he managed to escape on 16 November while undergoing a hospital visit to La Tronche.

It was Stéphane who arranged the arrest of Pierre Taittinger and the dismissal of the prefects (regional administrators) appointed by the "Vichy" puppet regime.

Familiars included Roger Vailland, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, Louis Aragon, François Mauriac, Georges Simenon and Marcel Jouhandeau.

As an eloquent exponent of decolonisation, during the Indochina War he had his own taste of the inside of the vast Fresnes Prison for three weeks, in connection with "Exchanges of intelligence with the enemy".

[9] During the postwar years Roger Stéphane consciously withdrew from the limelight, indulging in what his biographer, Régine Deforges, termed as "la passion d'admirer", talking and writing relatively little about himself.

Much later, towards the end of his life, Tout est bien (All is well), is a chronicle of personal disillusion which won him renewed attention from the general public.