At the
Liberation,
La Tour de Feu succeeded its two predecessors,
Reflets and Regains, with issue no. 23, in other words, without interrupting the numbering system began in 1933. In the aftermath of an unprecedented conflict, the new "
internationalist magazine of poetic creation" delivered several messages of fraternity and hope in mankind. In this respect, the titles of the issues at the time are particularly explicit: Silence à la Violence (1947), Contre l'Esprit de Catastrophe (1948), and Droit de Survivre (1948). Thereafter, Pierre Boujut maintained, against
dogma,
dialectics,
fascism, and
scientism of all kinds, the long-standing notion of "living contradiction", a notion echoed in the philosophical work of
Stéphane Lupasco. This led to numerous polemics and generally heated debates, notably at the informal Congrès of
La Tour de Feu, held every year in mid-July in Jarnac, in the chai on rue Laporte-Bisquit and on the banks of the
Charente. The magazine bears the imprint of these debates and is the most important part of Pierre Boujut's work, even if some issues were conceived by others. Thanks to his work, the texts become clearer, respond to each other, and complement each other. There's no need to take seriously the burlesque slogan coined by the cooper-director to realize that he knew how to create, on a given date and from a wide variety of texts, a most homogeneous whole without betraying the intentions of the authors concerned.
Edmond Humeau, a libertarian and internationalist, was not content with committed texts and repeated attacks on dialectical thought. Similarly,
Fernand Tourret built up a brief but highly original body of work, rooted in collective memory, from which he drew words that had been forgotten and charged with history. He used archaisms with a highly personal sense of language and a love of concreteness that cut across his experience, concerns, and extensive culture. Finally, Adrian Miatlev was probably the most gifted of Pierre Boujut's friends. During his lifetime, he published unconvincingly with two major Parisian publishers, but his talent seemed to blossom with La Tour de Feu. He wrote poems with a pessimistic yet invigorating vision of life, marked by failure and great energy. Above all, he exchanged letters with his friends, characterized by verbal invention and an unrivaled sense of formula. His pronounced taste for
paradoxes,
blend words and motivated neologisms make his correspondence unique. His charismatic personality, and his death in 1964 at the age of 54, made him one of the magazine's myths. In its day,
La Tour de Feu praised its "great men" (
Krishnamurti,
Henry Miller, and
Stéphane Lupasco). Certainly, three issues were devoted to
Antonin Artaud and no less than nineteen to Adrian Miatlev's correspondence. For thirty-five years, nearly five hundred and fifty authors, from the most prominent to the most obscure, were published, while the editorial board was renewed over time. Pierre Boujut never neglected his hometown or the Charente region. Two issues of the magazine were devoted to
Jarnac et ses poètes and
La gloria cognaçaise. In addition, other issues bore traces of their provincial origins. This was no trace of
chauvinism on the part of the Jarnac cooper, but rather a defiance of fashion and a refusal of Parisianism, a refusal explicitly formulated with ''L'alliance des villages'' and subsequently reaffirmed many times over. However, such a stance did not exclude authors living in Paris or the Île-de-France region: for a long time, they had a meeting place in the capital, where they met with varying frequency. In literary terms, and despite the strong poetic personalities of the members of the editorial board,
La Tour de Feu did not invent new forms. While its poets took advantage of the advances made by
Surrealism, albeit with some reservations, they fought just as hard against
Isidore Isou's Lettrism as they did against the poet-linguists of 1960-1970. In other words, they made classic use of language, privileging certain of its possibilities (
neologisms, revisited
archaisms, annexation of the lexical fields of religion and morality). However, one of the original features of
La Tour de Feu lies in the fact that it has maintained an incessant - because always contradictory - debate concerning the status of the poet in the world and his possibilities for action. This debate, inseparable from a veritable creative profusion, allowed the expression of philosophical and political positions that were constantly debated. It nurtured the utopia of a fraternal humanity, free of all alienation, refusing to sacrifice the responsibility and freedom of each individual to a brighter tomorrow. Such a utopia, developed in the pages of the magazine, could only find expression, on the pain of disappearing as such, during the Jarnac Congresses. Yet, as Daniel Briolet has shown, the dream goal of those who developed it was to influence reality and the course of events. A final peculiarity of
La Tour de Feu: although it ceased to exist in March 1981, a N° 150 appeared in 1991. It allowed the survivors of the adventure to look back and its director to explain why he had interrupted the series begun fifty-eight years earlier. However, Pierre Boujut pointed out: "If La Tour de Feu has ceased to appear, it has not ceased to be". == Influence and posterity ==