In his novel Capitaine (2018) prize-winning writer and publisher Adrien Bosc traces the improbable voyage of a cargo-ship crammed with intellectual titans, considered “undesirable” by the Vichy regime, and hunted by the Nazis, from Marseille to the Americas via Martinique in 1941. The story of these personalities on board the Capitaine-Paul-Lemerle, covers some very similar ground to renowned historian Eric Jennings’s recent book of non-fiction titled Escape from Vichy: the Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (2018), which follows this as well as many other transatlantic crossings during World War II. This event, co-sponsored with the Center for Excellence at the OSU Department of French, will shed light on intellectual life in France under Nazi occupation, the exile of scholars, artists, and thinkers, some of them French Jews, other German dissidents, or Spanish Republicans, as well as on the complex relationship between fiction and history.
