Dominique de Roux

In April 1974, at the time of the Carnation Revolution, de Roux was the only French journalist present at Lisbon, and probably one of the foreigners with the most direct access to General Spínola. He devoted years to assist the Angolan opposition leader Jonas Savimbi to deal with international press and foreign ministries, as well as to conduct guerrilla warfare. This contribution gave impetus to his final works: Le Cinquième Empire published two weeks before his sudden death at age 41, of a heart attack linked to Marfan syndrome, and the posthumous La Jeune fille au ballon rouge et Le Livre nègre.

After listening to poets and writers of the beat generation (especially Claude Pélieu, Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman) and meeting with Gombrowicz, to whom he devoted an essay and a book of interviews, he revealed the possibility to leave Paris. Two traumatic events happened: the censorship of his collection of aphorisms Immédiatement (1971) at the request of Roland Barthes (called a "shepherdess") and Maurice Genevoix (presented as a "writer for field mice") and the takeover of L'Herne by Constantin Tacou in favor of financial maneuvers later in 1973.

In 1966, the publication of his essay La Mort de L.-F. Céline inaugurated the publishing house that he co-founded with Christian Bourgois, named after the latter. Meanwhile, L'Herne added publishing to its activities. At thirty, de Roux became a prominent figure of French literature, omnipresent and rough in his polemics, especially against the Tel Quel group.

In 1960 he married Jacqueline Brusset, daughter of Gaullist deputy Max Brusset. Their son Pierre-Guillaume Roux was born in 1963 and later became a publisher.

In 1960 he published his first novel, Mademoiselle Anicet, and redeveloped his review in the final form of the Cahiers de l'Herne, a collection of monographs devoted to ignored or cursed literary figures, including articles, documents and unpublished texts. After volumes on René-Guy Cadou (1961) and Georges Bernanos (1962), he penned books about Borges, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Ezra Pound, Witold Gombrowicz and Pierre Jean Jouve. He directed books devoted to Burroughs, Pélieu, Henri Michaux, Ungaretti, Louis Massignon, Lewis Carroll, H. P. Lovecraft, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Julien Gracq, Dostoyevsky, Karl Kraus, Gustav Meyrink, Thomas Mann, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Arthur Koestler and Raymond Abellio, who imposed L'Herne on the French literary scene.

In the late 1950s de Roux created several language courses in Germany, Spain and England. Upon his return to France, he founded with several friends (including his brother Xavier de Roux, his sister Marie-Helene de Roux and Jean Thibaudeau) the mimeographed bulletin L'Herne, where he published his "Confidences to Guillaume", a chronicle of lyrical cynicism addressed to his geranium. He served in the French military.

Dominique de Roux (17 September 1935 – 29 March 1977) was a French writer and publisher.