Morts pour la France. Lettres de condamnés à mort: Origins and cultural production of the 1943 anthology of last letters of the French Resistance

Last letters are an integral part of France's memorial landscape regarding the Second World War. They are part of popular culture, having inspired poetry, pop songs, and graphic novels. To this day, they are read in schools across France and at ceremonies commemorating those executed by the Nazis. They are the subject of controversy (the Sarkozy-Guy Môquet affair) and fanfare (the Manouchian pantheonization). Despite this importance, little scholarly attention has been paid to the first Second World War last letter anthology published in London circa 1943, entitled Morts pour la France : lettres des condamnés à mort . This article explores the circumstances surrounding its publication as an act of cultural production using wartime epistolary, which followed well-established antecedents dating from the First World War. It traces the anthology's memorial origins to the London-based Gaullist publication Les Cahiers Français and then analyses the anatomy of the anthology. Particular attention is paid to the ideological diversity of the letters included, the ordering (by date of execution) of the letters, and the language of the Préface. The presentation of the last letters, it is argued, echoes the First World War rhetoric of the union sacrée —the suspension of partisan and confessional divisions in the name of the nation—to thus incorporate communists, Catholics, and others whose political and religious affiliations were not yet known into a shared language of national martyrdom.