Henri Béraud was a French novelist and journalist.

Life

Henri Béraud was the son of a baker. In 1903 he began his work in journalism.
He joined the satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné

Le Canard enchaîné

Le Canard enchaîné is a satirical newspaper published weekly in France. Founded in 1915, it features investigative journalism and leaks from sources inside the French government, the French political world and the French business world, as well as many jokes and humorous cartoons.-Early...

in February 1917, recommended by Paul Vaillant-Couturier

Paul Vaillant-Couturier

Paul Vaillant-Couturier was a French author, journalist and politician. He studied history and law but very early, in 1912, he began writing...

, and Roland Dorgeles

Roland Dorgelès

Roland Dorgelès , was a French novelist and a member of the Académie Goncourt.Born Roland Lecavelé , he spent his childhood in Paris....

. He renewed his old friendship with Albert Londres

Albert Londres

Albert Londres was a French journalist and writer. One of the inventors of investigative journalism, he criticized abuses of colonialism such as forced labour. Albert Londres gave his name to a journalism prize for Francophone journalists.- Biography :Londres was born in Vichy in 1884...

, whose talent had been revealed at the beginning of the war. He also wrote in Le Crapouillot

Le Crapouillot

Le Crapouillot was a French magazine started by Jean Galtier-Boissière as a satiric publication in France, during World War I. In the trenches during WWI, the affectionate term for le petit crapaud, "the little toad" was used by French soldiers, the poilus, to designate small...

, by Jean Galtier-Boissiere

Jean Galtier-Boissière

Jean Galtier-Boissière was a writer, polemist, and journalist from Paris, France. He founded Le Crapouillot and wrote for Le Canard enchaîné.-Bibliography:* Croquis De Tranchées. 1917...

.
He published stories, a short series (L'angoisse du mercanti ou le compte du tonneau in 1918), a study on Lyonnais humor, and especially polemical articles against the Parliament, the Académie française

Académie française

L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...

, Government, antirepublican officers, Action Française

Action Française

The Action Française , founded in 1898, is a French Monarchist counter-revolutionary movement and periodical founded by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois and whose principal ideologist was Charles Maurras...

. He was also an international reporter at the Petit Parisien and Paris-Soir, from 1934 - 1944.

He later became known as one of France's best-selling novelists and reporters, and won the Prix Goncourt

Prix Goncourt

The Prix Goncourt is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year"...

 in 1922. He was virulently Anglophobic

Anglophobia

Anglophobia means hatred or fear of England or the English people. The term is sometimes used more loosely for general Anti-British sentiment...

 and to a lesser extent antisemitic. These factors led him to support Vichy France

Vichy France

Vichy France, Vichy Regime, or Vichy Government, are common terms used to describe the government of France that collaborated with the Axis powers from July 1940 to August 1944. This government succeeded the Third Republic and preceded the Provisional Government of the French Republic...

. He did this by contributing pieces to Gringoire

Gringoire (newspaper)

Gringoire was a political and literary weekly newspaper in France, founded in 1928 by Horace de Carbuccia , Georges Suarez and Joseph Kessel....

, indicating his hatred of British forces and criticism of the Free French, although he also censured Nazism.

His aid of the Vichy government caused him to be sentenced to death in 1944, but several writers, including François Mauriac

François Mauriac

François Mauriac was a French author; member of the Académie française ; laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature . He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur .-Biography:...

 intervened on his behalf. The sentence was commuted by Charles de Gaulle

Charles de Gaulle

Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces during World War II. He later founded the French Fifth Republic in 1958 and served as its first President from 1959 to 1969....

 to life imprisonment. By 1950 he was freed for health reasons. He died eight years later.

Legacy

On 14 July each year, a ceremony is organized, at the tomb of Henry Béraud, followed by a symposium on writers, in Saint-Clément-des-Baleines

Saint-Clément-des-Baleines

Saint-Clément-des-Baleines is a commune in the Charente-Maritime department in southwestern France. It is situated on the Île de Ré.-Population:-References:*...

 (Ile de Ré

Île de Ré

Île de Ré is an island off the west coast of France near La Rochelle, on the northern side of the Pertuis d'Antioche strait....

), ("Writers cursed and politically incorrect", as called the Association of Friends of Rétaise Henri Beraud, being more right-wing, and other right-wing anarchists).
These writers include: Henri Béraud, Alphonse de Chateaubriant

Alphonse de Châteaubriant

Alphonse Van Bredenbeck de Châteaubriant was a French writer who won the Prix Goncourt in 1911 for his novel Monsieur de Lourdines and Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française for La Brière in 1923....

, Robert Brasillach

Robert Brasillach

Robert Brasillach was a French author and journalist. Brasillach is best known as the editor of Je suis partout, a nationalist newspaper which came to advocate various fascist movements and supported Jacques Doriot...

, Jean de La Varende, Henry de Monfried, Andre Fraigneau, Leon Bloy

Léon Bloy

Léon Bloy , was a French novelist, essayist, pamphleteer and poet.-Biography:Bloy was born in Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac, in the arondissement of Périgueux, Dordogne. He was the second of six sons of Voltairean freethinker and stern disciplinarian Jean Baptiste Bloy and his wife Anne-Marie Carreau,...

, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

Pierre Eugène Drieu La Rochelle was a French writer of novels, short stories and political essays, who lived and died in Paris...

, Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French writer and physician Louis-Ferdinand Destouches . Céline was chosen after his grandmother's first name. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and...

, Pierre Gripari

Pierre Gripari

Pierre Gripari was a French writer.-Life:Born to a Greek father and a French mother, he was orphaned in 1944 and had to interrupt his studies and support himself with various jobs....

, and Jacques Chardonne

Jacques Chardonne

Jacques Chardonne is the pseudonym of French writer Jacques Boutelleau...

.

Works

• L'École moderne de peinture lyonnaise (1912)
• Le Vitriol de Lune (1921, prix Goncourt 1922)
• Le Martyre de l'obèse, (prix Goncourt 1922)
• Lazarus, Albin Michel, 1924
• Ce que j'ai vu à Moscou, Les Éditions de France 1925
• Le Bois du templier pendu, Les Éditions de France, 1926
• Ce que j'ai vu à Berlin, Les Éditions de France, 1926
• La Gerbe d'or, Les Éditions de France, 1928
• Ce que j'ai vu à Rome, Les Éditions de France 1929
• Qu’as-tu fait de ta jeunesse ? (1941)
• Les Lurons de Sabolas (1932)
• Ciel de suie (1933)
• Faut-il réduire l'Angleterre en esclavage (1935)
• Les raisons d'un silence, Inter-France, 1944
• Les derniers beaux jours, Plon, 1953
• Portraits de contemporains.
• Retour sentimental vers Alphonse Daudet, 2001
• Écrits dans Gringoire (1928–1937), 2003
• Au Capucin Gourmand
• Le Flâneur salarié
• "Rende-vous européens", Les Éditions de France, 1928