Pierre Boujut

Pierre Boujut, born in 1913 and died in 1992 in Jarnac, Charente, was a French writer and poet. A cooper and iron merchant by trade, pacifist, and libertarian, he took up writing in his twenties, launching three successive magazines from 1933 onwards, including La Tour de Feu, founded in 1946. Alongside other poets, he expressed himself on both literary and political levels, mixing the two with enthusiasm, particularly when his son deserted during the Algerian War. Thanks to his poetry, Pierre Boujut maintained epistolary relations from his office in Jarnac with the great writers of the time. He continued to publish La Tour de Feu until 1981.

The cooper-poet

Pierre Boujut was born into a Protestant family, which influenced his vocabulary, with the words “soul” and “spirit”, for example, recurring regularly in his writing. He defined himself as "a heretic within the Protestant heresy", and stated that: "It is religion that is ersatz poetry, not the other way around", an idea he often repeated in many forms. Another crucial factor was the untimely death of his father, who was killed in September 1914, at the start of World War I. This event may well have been at the root of his pacifism, which he never abandoned. He grew up alone with his mother, continued his secondary education at the Lycée de Cognac, passed his baccalauréat, and planned to become a teacher. At the age of twenty, he decided to learn his father's trade as a cooper and settle permanently in Jarnac.