Le Silence de la mer

For the film, see Le Silence de la mer (film).

The sparsely decorated cover of the first edition of Le Silence de la mer.

Le Silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea) is a novel written in early 1942 by Jean Bruller under the pseudonym Vercors. It was published secretly in Nazi-occupied Paris. The book quickly became a symbol of mental resistance against German occupiers.

Plot summary

In the book, Vercors tells of how an old man and his niece show resistance against the German occupiers by not speaking to the officer, who is occupying their house. The German officer is a former composer, dreaming of brotherhood between French and German nations, deluded by the Nazi propaganda of that period. He is disillusioned when he realises the real goal of the German army is not to build but to ruin and to exploit. He then chooses to leave France to fight on the Eastern Front, cryptically declaring he is "off to Hell."

Adaptations

The book was translated into English by Cyril Connolly and published in 1944 under the title Put out the light.

An English language adaptation called The Silence of the Sea was transmitted by the BBC TV service on 7 June 1946 as part of their first evening's programming following the resumption of TV broadcasting after the end of World War Two.

A film, Le Silence de la mer, based on the book and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, was released in 1947, with a further version directed by Pierre Boutron released in 2004.

A second English-language TV adaptation was broadcast by the BBC in 1981, and a stage version by John Crowther was performed by The Heywood Society in the theatre at Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1985, with the (presumably ironic) title Talking in the Night.

See also

• Code Name Melville
• French Resistance
• Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
• Les Éditions de Minuit
• Suite Française, another novel with a German composer/officer character quartered in a French home during World War II.
• Vichy France