SAINT-POL ROUX ASSASSINATED!

par Dominique Rabourdin

The following text was published in the March 21, 1991 issue of l'Evénement du jeudi, under my signature (I collaborated there regularly) followed by 24 others. This publication was followed by a tract on red paper (reminiscent of the famous Lettre ouverte à M. Paul Claudel of July 1, 1925) with this time 64 signatures. These signatures, collected in urgency, are those of members of the Actual association around Jean Schuster, of Phases members around Edouard Jaguer, of Belgian surrealists around Tom Gutt and Marcel Mariën, of collaborators of the literary pages of l'Evénement du jeudi and various interested parties.

It was a matter of recalling the antecedents of the painter and theoretician Marc Eemans, ephemeral member of the Belgian surrealist group for a little more than a year between 1927 and 1929, but who later became an unconditional champion of National Socialism and its secular arm, the Gestapo, between 1933 and 1944. In the name of a "Symbolist Documentation Center", Marc Eemans, for the fiftieth anniversary of the poet's death, had taken the initiative to have a plaque affixed to the house inhabited by Saint-Pol-Roux for two years in Saint-Hubert, in the Ardennes; to erect a stele with a citation from SPR; to inaugurate within the framework of the Redouté cultural center, a "SPR cabinet"; and finally to publish and present thanks to the funds he had collected a non-commercial booklet, but where the name of René Rougerie, Saint-Pol-Roux's publisher, appeared; and finally to organize a colloquium.

This initiative scandalized Marcel Mariën, publisher in 1972 of Magritte's Manifestos and Other Writings, who had then recalled in his preface the role played by Eemans during the occupation. Several passages of this preface were the subject of legal action brought by the "former Nazi Marc Eemans' (later beneficiary of an amnesty!) to obtain their suppression. Eemans was dismissed from his request. Tom Gutt, Mariën's lawyer, never forgot afterwards to kick Eemans's ass every time he saw him in a public place... This whole affair is detailed by Xavier Canonne - signatory of the tract - in his book Le Surréalisme en Belgique.

In 1987, Marc Eemans returned to the forefront by maneuvering to participate in the exhibition La Femme et le surréalisme organized by Erika Billeter at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne. This participation was violently criticized by Edouard Jaguer and José Pierre in their text Un asticot dans le vacherin published in January 1988 in issue 5 of Docsur, a publication intended for ACTUAL members. Marc Eemans was not discouraged and sought, by paying homage to Saint-Pol-Roux, the opportunity to resume in surrealism the place from which he had been excluded. Marcel Mariën and Tom Gutt did not hear it that way. The following text comes from my collaboration, as an ACTUAL member, with Tom Gutt. The signatories come from different, and often opposed, camps. Gutt did not maintain good relations with most of the former French surrealists, no more than with the members of Phases (including the Belgians). This did not prevent anyone from signing Saint-Pol-Roux assassinated!, Marc Eemans succeeding in making unanimity, against him. In a letter addressed on April 9, 1991, a few weeks after the publication, to "Monsieur Jean Schuster and Co.", he was indignant at the "repeated defamations of which he had been the object for some forty years on the part of a quarter of leftists always or almost always the same", defining himself as "a Belgian citizen without a criminal record, enjoying all his civil and political rights' and recalled in conclusion that "defamation is, according to Belgian laws, an offense liable to judicial prosecution".

Paris, March 16, 2010 Dominique Rabourdin