Édith Thomas (1909–1970)

Written by Imprinted Aug 5th, 2013:

Édith Thomas was born in Montrouge, south of Paris, and graduated from the École Nationale des Chartes in 1931. In 1933, her first novel, La mort de Marie (Mary's Death), won the Prix du Premier Roman. A few years later, she quit her job to become a journalist at Ce Soir, a left-wing newspaper close to the Popular Front government. She also contributed to various magazines, for which she covered the Spanish Civil War from the Loyalist side. During World War II, she joined the French Resistance and was the only woman in the organization's Paris network of writers; she wrote a series of clandestine articles and poems that played a key role in countering Nazi and Vichy propaganda. She also joined the French Communist Party in 1942, but left in 1949. After the war, she was appointed a curator at the Archives National in Paris. She became a pioneer of women's history in France, writing books and articles about significant female figures such as Joan of Arc, Pauline Roland, Louise Michel, and George Sand. She was a voluble critic of the French war in Algeria. Among her friends and colleagues were Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Louis Aragon, and Jean Paulhan. Édith Thomas had an intimate relationship with Anne Desclos (pen name Dominique Aury), who wrote The Story of O under the pseudonym Pauline Réage. Le témoin compromis (The Compromised Witness), Édith Thomas's political memoir, was published in 1952. Dorothy Kaufmann wrote her biography, Édith Thomas, A Passion for Resistance (2004).