Les Éditions de Minuit (, Midnight Press) is a French publishing house. It was founded in 1941, during the French Resistance of World War II, and is still publishing books today.
History
Les Éditions de Minuit was founded by writer and illustrator Jean Bruller and writer Pierre de Lescure (1891–1963) in 1941 in Paris, during the German occupation of northern France (by November 1942, German forces occupied all of France). At the time, the media and all forms of publishing were controlled and censored by the Nazi occupiers. Les Éditions de Minuit was started to circumvent the censorship. It was an underground publisher until the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944.
Le Silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea) (1942) by co-founder Bruller (who wrote under the pseudonym Vercors) was the first book published. Distribution, as with other Resistance texts, was based on being passed from person to person.
Le Silence de la mer was followed in 1943 by Chroniques interdites (banned newspaper columns, various authors), L'Honneur des poètes (The Honour of poets) poetry collected by Paul Éluard, Le cahier noir (The Black Notebook) by François Mauriac, and Le musée Grévin (The Grévin Museum) by Louis Aragon.
A small group of printers joined Bruller and de Lescure, and together they risked imprisonment and death to publish works by some of France's greatest authors (who wrote under pseudonyms).