Georges Blond

Georges Blond (Jean-Marie Hoedick, 11 July 1906 – 16 March 1989), was a French writer who was born in Marseille and died in Paris. A prolific writer of mostly history but also other topics including fiction, Blond was also involved in far right political activity.

Early years

Blond initially came to attention as a disciple of Alexis Carrel, and when reviewing Carrel's book L'Homme, cet inconnu for the journal Le petit dauphinois commented that Carrel was one of the few writers who would genuinely alter who people thought of themselves. He became noted as a sympathiser with fascism during the mid-1930s. His works regularly appeared in L'Insurgé, a literary journal for writers on the far right edited in the late 1930s by Thierry Maulnier.

Second World War

A qualified naval engineer, Blond enlisted in the French Navy during the early stages of the Second World War but following the Battle of France was interned in the United Kingdom. Already strongly anti-British, Blond was embittered by his experiences and following repatriation he took up his pen against Britain, publishing the highly critical book L'Angleterre en guerre: Recit d'un marin francais in 1941. As a result of works like this Blond was one of only a handful of French political writers adjudged acceptable by Nazi Germany and as a result his books continued to be in print under the Vichy government.

He became a writer for the collaborationist journal Je suis partout, although Blond was associated with a "soft" tendency led by the likes of Robert Brasillach and Henri Poulain towards the end of the Second World War. In contrast to the "hard" tendency of Pierre-Antoine Cousteau and Lucien Rebatet, Blond's group wanted to de-emphasise associations with Nazism and instead concentrate on literature, sensing that Nazi defeat was imminent.