Pierre Béarn

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Pierre Béarn (15 June 1902 - October 27, 2004). was a French writer. He was born Louis-Gabriel Besnard in Bucharest, Romania.

He is known to Anglophones for his poem "Couleurs d'usine":

Métro boulet bistrots mégots dodo zero

(trans. "Subway work bars fags (cigarettes) sleep nothing")

A personality of multiple facets, at one time a journalist, novelist, poet, fabulist and humanist, Pierre Béarn became a centenarian on June 15, 2002. From the age of 9 years he began writing in French slang, his "natural" language.

His father having died prematurely, at the age of 14 he became a mechanic in order to financially support his mother. This working life inspired the poem from which came one of the May 1968 protest slogans "métro-boulot-dodo" ("subway-work-sleep") that denounced the shocking workers’ conditions at the time.

While commanding a trawler to aid the French evacuations in 1940, he was captured and was detained in the concentration camp at Aintree. His poems from that point onwards centred on the sea and the war.

After the war he took a post as a press attaché in Africa. In 1969, he created a quarterly magazine for himself alone: Le Lien (The Link). In 1975, he withdrew to Montlhéry where the peace allowed him to write many fables.

In 1998, the first volume of his complete works was published: L'arc en ciel de ma vie (The rainbow of my life). This was followed in 1999 by volume 2, 300 fables d'aujourd'hui (300 Fables of Today). The third volume, Couleurs charnelles (Carnal colours), was released just months before his death on October 27, 2004; during his 103rd year.

While generally ignored by the wider public, Pierre Béarn received a number of literary prizes such as the Prix de Verlaine (1940), the Grand Prix International de Poésie awarded by General de Gaulle in 1971, the Grand prix de l'Académie française in 1981 and again in 1995 for his fables. He was also decorated with the Médaille de la Résistance for his participation in the liberation of Paris in 1944 and Légion d'honneur in 1990 by François Mitterrand. He was also named Officier du Mérite national in 1995 by Jacques Chirac and Commander in the order of the Arts and Letters in 2000, by the minister of Culture, Catherine Tasca.