The Forests of the Night the war as it really was, as James Kirkup observed, an "acid portrait of those who played at being members of the [French] Resistance". The novel's theme and title come from the opening lines to William Blake's poem "The Tyger": "Tiger, tiger, burning bright - in the forests of the night." "The Forests of the Night" was translated in 1951 into English by Nora Wydenbruck; it has not been re-printed since. Francis is the son of the Comte de Balansun, whose family resides in the French town of Saint-Clar, near the Pyrenees. Francis, in the beginning of the novel, skips
The Forests of the Night fighters who took up arms or committed acts of civil disobedience and noncooperation. They were opposed by a few collaborators, or bad apples, who supported the occupation. The mythology of a nation of resistors would be seriously discredited and revised in the early 1970s through the work of historian Robert Paxton, but Jean-Louis Curtis's 1947 novel was one of the first to raise some doubts, to expose cracks in the lie, thus winning it the attention of France's literary establishment and earning it the Prix Goncourt. "The Forests of the Night" was the first post-war novel to portray France during