Lucien Bonnafé
in Hommage à Léo Matarasso, Séminaire sur le droit des peuples, Cahier réalisé par CEDETIM-LIDLP-CEDIDELP, Février 1999
Léo, beyond his position as initiator, played a role of guide of inexhaustible fertility. For me, it was an excellent link with my position as mediator of the Toulouse group (known as the K.O. movement or the Flying Trapeze) and the most fertile work in Paris. There, his insertion was dazzling. It was thanks to him, and with him when his schedule allowed it (in fact he worked a lot), that I was able to enrich myself with contacts in the Parisian surrealist world: painters’, sculptors’ and photographers’ workshops, such as at Man Ray’s, on rue Campagne Première, where I met René Crevel, the most enlightening interlocutor in our movement.
And the world of cinema! For our cultural avant-gardism put me in a central position in the innovation that was the Toulouse Film Club, hence the many trips to Paris, as a researcher and bearer of film treasures, and my gratitude to Léo for his inexhaustible support as an advisor, in addition to his hospitality, which allowed me to feel at home by being at home in Paris.
To say that I owe him a lot is too little, when it would be more accurate to say WE to translate his role as a scout, among “our people”, among friends and around them.
In this trajectory, the most brutal times occur.
When circumstances made me the Doctor-Director of the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Alban, in Lozère, when Jacques came to take refuge with me, Léo was just a stone’s throw away, in Aurillac. I am amused, having abandoned my Parisian pseudonym of Julien, to find Léo operating under the name of “Sorel”.
These comradeships became very productive when Eluard, after having published “Poetry and Truth 42” under his own name, and multiplied his Resistance activities, reached the level where poetry had to go underground.
Mr. and Mrs. Grindel, having chosen as a “hideout” to live with the doctor of the insane of Lozere, it is thanks to our faithful Léo, in Cantal, that we had the contact with the person in charge of the Resistance that was René Amarger, printer in Saint-Flour. Hence the intense production of the “French Library”, following the first clandestine edition, which was “Le musée Grévin” of François la Colère (Aragon).
I remember the conversation at my home during which Léo proposed a print run on special paper, numbered copies (“Exemplaires de tête”, as Lucien Scheler called them) intended to honour the financial contributions of the bibliophiles of the Resistance. And the memory of this major responsibility, the search for the adequate paper, the link with the printer, is for me “very Léo”. It is indeed him whom the owners of the luxury copies of “seven poems of love in war” must thank, because he is the main initiator.
I have emphasized our bonds in these brutal times because, for me, they say even more than the solidarities of youth and its great discoveries and revolutionary virtues. I say “revolutionary” because, in a world that speaks as it lives, and feels and manipulates “revolution” at the level of its intellectual means, it is better that humans passionately committed to resist the inhuman do not allow themselves to be contaminated by the pejoration of the idea of “revolution” that holds sway, and do not give up their resistance to the inhuman.
Léo, for his part, never gave up on this resistance.
It is not the least of his merits to have been, around him, a great source of resistance to the worst inhumanity, racism.
Bonnafé, Lucien