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A man of letters, Pierre Brisson took over Le Figaro in 1934, compromised by François Coty’s fascist sympathies. He imposed a team of writers who brought back the newspaper’s dignity and then tried to keep its publication going, in Lyon, between 1940 and 1942. When Vichy censorship became more pressing, Brisson thought of scuttling Le Figaro and maintaining the publication of its literary pages only: two issues of the Figaro Littéraire came out in November 1942. At the Liberation, assisted by Maurice Noël, Pierre Brisson relaunched a literary weekly, sold separately from the daily and put out by an autonomous editorial staff. The Figaro Littéraire was created in April 1946 in response to the Communist party takeover of many cultural newspapers and to defend the theory of art for art’s sake in opposition to the proclaimed engagement of the intellectuals. But how can one respond when refusing to participate in the battle? Or how does one oppose without committing oneself? This was the problem the weekly faced in the first years of its existence and of the Cold War. It put in place avoidance strategies (defense of writers from socialist countries, debates on the processes of purification) before finding its heroes (Koestler, Kravchenko, Rousset or Rougement) and entering a strategy of counter-engagement.
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