CARCO (Francis). - Lot 59

CARCO (Francis). Born in Nouméa (New Caledonia). 1886-1958. Poet and novelist. MS autograph signed "Francis Carco de l'Académie Goncourt". S.l.n.d. [Paris, 1945]. 9 pp. 1/2 in total, in-8 on green wove paper, numbered in blue typographer's pencil ("1 à 4" and "1 à 5"). A few scratches and pencil corrections. ACCOUNT OF THE TRIAL OF ADMIRAL JEAN-PIERRE ESTEVA BEFORE THE HAUTE COUR DE JUSTICE IN MARCH 1945 BY FRANCIS CARCO IN THE FORM OF A PROSODIC NARRATIVE ENTITLED "IMPRESSIONS D'AUDIENCE". Jean-Pierre Esteva. Born in Reims in 1880. Died in 1951. As a young officer in the First World War, he was assigned to the Mediterranean fleet. Promoted Rear-Admiral in '29, became Vice-Admiral in '35. Took command of the Southern Naval Forces. After the June 1940 Armistice, he joined Marshal Pétain, with whom he became very close. He was sent by the Vichy government to Tunisia, where he put French air bases at the disposal of the Germans. Arrested in September 1944, his trial opened on March 15, 1945, before the High Court of Justice recreated by ordinance of the provisional government in November 1944 to try the Head of State, the Head of Government, Ministers, Governors General, senior civil servants, military personnel, etc.Having married Eliane Négrin, a young woman of Jewish origin, Francis Carco was forced into exile after the first anti-Jewish decrees imposed by the Vichy government were enforced. The couple fled France and took refuge in Switzerland's Valais region, where the Carcos met Jean Graven, a professor of law at the University of Geneva who, after the war, was charged by the United Nations with the prosecution and extradition of perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity, a term he is credited with coining. He was the Swiss nation's official representative at the Nuremberg trials. Was it under his influence that Carco went to the Esteva trial?...On the first day of the Esteva trial before the High Court of Justice, Carco describes in a few lines not the courtroom as one would expect, but the luminous color of the seats, which reminds him of Tunisia, the country where the admiral perpetrated his crime....... Is it in memory of the Avenue de Carthage and its café terraces that the seats we've been assigned are made up of a double row of folding chairs in a rather unexpected pistachio green? That would be pushing the taste for local color a little too far. However, against the austere backdrop of the Esteva trial, this green is worth savoring, as its presence helps to evoke the atmosphere of Tunis. Resident General Admiral Esteva, referred by the Indictment Division to the High Court of Justice on the 7th of last month, takes his place with a guard at the bench from which he will have to answer for the charges against him (...) Carco's gaze then turns to the accused himself, who sports military or honorary crosses and medals ...vThis is a man with his plaque of commander (grand officier) of the Order of the Legion of Honor, his military medal, his Croix de Guerre with palms, the five bronze stars he wears on his sleeves, this is a man of nearly sixty-five (bald) who, very dignified, will demand (of his judges), to come out with his forehead high (as is his right, he says) from this room where he must, for the moment, appear as the defendant. Bald and bearded, without his gleaming gold cap, he looks less like a great sailor than a (good man) wealthy bourgeois (from the belle époque) whose good faith protects him (from the worst) from any compromise. Carco immediately judges from the attitude of the President of the High Court towards the defendant that ...It is between these two men that the drama unfolds. You can feel it right from the start. A drama that goes far beyond the person of the accused to take on wider, more appalling proportions. Indeed, neither the instructions Esteva received when the Axis troops landed in Tunisia, nor his eagerness to help them against the Allied forces, constitute in the eyes of the First President the very substance of the trial (...) It's Vichy we're talking about. Of its government, which was unable, or rather unwilling, to extricate itself from the Reich's deadly embrace. (The rest counts for little. Lamiral protests all he wants.) And it's all there, (the hour of reckoning is approaching) for this first hearing, the abject betrayal, (in Tunis), the (inexpiable) crime, the price of which will have to be paid one day.In the second part of the text, Carco takes up the essential question posed by the first President to the Public Prosecutor, an ethical question that often gives rise to debate ...Victim or accomplice?... the first President had said of Esteva. The de