Louis Thomas (writer)

Louis-Auguste-Georges-Marie Thomas (21 April 1885 – 9 February 1962) was a French novelist, poet, essayist, translator and political journalist.

Biography

Born in Perpignan, Louis Thomas volunteered in November 1903 and did 10 months of military service as a medical student; he was then discharged. He founded the magazine Psyché in 1906.

In 1909, he married the mezzo-soprano Raymonde Delaunois. After an ectopic pregnancy, she was unable to have children. As soon as they settled in Paris, the young couple found themselves in the first Parisian cenacle that promoted Debussy's music. Through the Société des Dilettantes, which he had just founded, Louis Thomas organized a concert on December 2, 1909, devoted to works by Claude Debussy.

Louis Thomas enlisted voluntarily in August 1914 and left as a cyclist for the army with the 66th battalion of foot soldiers on August 10. He was promoted to corporal on August 16, then to sergeant on September 7, and was cited in the order of the 111th brigade. He was appointed warrant officer on September 17 and second lieutenant on October 13. He was promoted to lieutenant on July 20, 1915. In 1917, he was in Morocco (where he received a citation) and returned to France at the end of 1918 (2 citations in October and November). He received the Legion of Honor, as a knight, for his military service.

He founded the journal Les Affaires économiques et financières in 1925. He was a contributor to the Revue critique des idées et des livres by Jean Rivain and Eugène Marsan.

Remaining, at his request, a reserve officer, he was, from August 29 to November 9, 1939, a lieutenant in the 205th regional protection regiment in Strasbourg. He was reassigned, at his request, to the 43rd battalion of North African pioneers on February 15, 1940. He was a prisoner of war from June 22 to December 14, 1941.

During the occupation of France by Germany, from January 1941 to the summer of 1944, he became one of the most zealous collaborators of Vichy France. In March 1941, the Germans appointed Louis Thomas as director of the Calmann-Lévy publishing house, renamed "Éditions Balzac", to publish works to the taste of the occupying forces (in 1940, Gaston Calmann-Lévy, then seventy-five years old, had been interned as a Jew. His sons had joined Charles de Gaulle in London).

On October 15, 1949, Louis Thomas was sentenced by the Court of Justice of the Seine to forced labor for life, national degradation for life, and the confiscation of all his property; this sentence was later reduced on appeal to twenty years in prison. He was released on parole in 1951 and moved to Schaerbeek, Belgium where he died in 1962.

See also

• Konstantin Balmont

References

• Llona, Victor (1925). Notes sur Louis Thomas. Paris: Ed du Siècle.
• Martineau, Henri (1922). Louis Thomas. Paris: Le Divan.

External links

• Works by Louis Thomas at Gallica