On the 17. June 1940, a nineteen year old in the South of France listening to the Declaration of Surrender of a short time before at the head of the government ordered Marshal Pétain. The young followers of the Action française is horrified. What were now, after the Hero of the First world war, had refused the summons of his idol Charles Maurras, nor that the greatness of France could only save in weapons gear? So the boy Daniel Cordier breaks just decided to search this weapons speed. North Africa is the first target, but to London, the ship brings him to training as a soldier of the “Free French” under General Charles de Gaulle.
Helmut Mayer
editor in the features section, responsible for New non-fiction books.
F. A. Z.
The young admirer of Maurras solubilisation of his right Beliefs and will of the democratically saddle solid follower of the General. A political education, which finds its continuation in a Mission in the French surface two years later. Cordier is with the radio operator and personal Secretary of a man he knows by the end of the war under his Code name. It is none other than Jean Moulin, to undertake its work, the various resistance movements on a common discipline under de Gaulle’s leadership and with the collusion across the political spectrum-in order to prepare, he watched, day after day, close to Moulin in June 1943, the Gestapo arrested and tortured in the Interrogation death.
From the Résistant to the gallery owners
this work as the Secretary of Moulins Cordier told until very late in detail. He was almost ninety, when his book “Alias Caracalla” appeared, in which he linked the history of its own with his research on the resistance to a lively and detailed chronicle. One reads there that the revered “patron Saint” – Moulin had not chosen about a Tarnexistenz as a gallerist in nice – gave him art-historical literature. In fact, Cordier was after the war, a major collector of contemporary art and, from 1956, for eight years one of the most interesting Parisian gallery owners, was some time also a branch in Frankfurt.
A painting by Nicolas de Staël was, for him, Initiation into the “so-called ,abstract’ painting,” not been, he summed up, of course, closely. In retrospect, the artists that he put through, such as Henri Michaux, and especially Jean Dubuffet, but also a number of lesser-known names that claim today, however, their position as. In 1964, he not was adopted as a gallerist, because he is the organization of work of the trader was willing to sacrifice his Passion. From the seventies on he gave the national museums, a large number of works.
working in the archives
the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1989 devoted to these donations, a large exhibition was his Name, of course, already from others known. Because as the end of the seventies, accusations emerged, Jean Moulin was a Communist, a Crypto, had made Cordier to work in the archives. It is a multi-volume biography of his patron, which allowed them to because of the methodical, safe handling of the sources, contemporary historians of recognition arose.
“Alias Caracalla”, which received one of the prestigious French literary awards, and also for a television film was adapted, Julian Jackson put out recently from the point of view of the historian and biographer of De Gaulle as a great book. But it includes only four years of the life of Cordiers, and is in talks to let this know that a sequel is already several hundred pages were written. But don’t you appeared a few years later, but a narrow Band, the tells in a touching and yet sober way, of the éducation sentimentale of the young people who falls in love with a spirit-run boarding school in a classmate.
