René Char

Standing six-foot-four, Char joined the Parisian Surrealists in 1929 before breaking away to anchor his verse in the sun, stone, and rivers of his native Provence. In 1940, refusing Nazi occupation, he organized and commanded the parachute drop zones of the Armée Secrète in the Basses-Alpes under the code name 'Capitaine Alexandre'.

His war notebook Feuillets d'Hypnos (1946) presented dense, diamond-hard aphorisms written between guerrilla missions. Albert Camus called his collection Fureur et mystère (1948) 'the most surprising work of our poetry since Illuminations'.