MAURICE DRUON, who has died a few days sort of his 91st birthday, was a second World War hero and co-author of The Partisans' Song, the hymn of the French Resistance. A long-serving member of the Académie française , Druon was known as an ill-humoured champion of conservative causes in later life.
The French newspaper Libérationcalled Druon an "old reactionary, young Resistant", noting that he "redeemed himself beforehand".
Druon's father, Lazare Kessel, was an actor of Jewish Russian origin who shot himself in the heart when Druon was two. His mother married a notary from northern France, René Druon de Reyniac, who raised Maurice as his own. When Druon learned of his father's suicide at the age of 18, he wrote that he was plunged into "a terrible anxiety crisis" and became "haunted by suicide".
Druon was a cadet at the cavalry school in Saumur when the Germans invaded France in 1940. He and fellow cadets held them back for two days at the Loire, staging a dramatic cavalry charge. The Germans accorded the vanquished cadets military honours and gave them safe passage to the unoccupied zone.
With his uncle, the writer Joseph Kessel, Druon walked across the Pyrenees, travelled to Portugal and on to London, to join Gen Charles de Gaulle's Free French. Druon idolised de Gaulle. "Tall and straight in his uniform, he seemed to me like a medieval knight, majestic and determined," he wrote.
In London, Druon and Kessel worked for a French-language, short-wave radio programme that was broadcast by the BBC to occupied France. Their boss, Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie, sought a theme song for the programme, saying "You only win wars with songs; La Marseillaise, La Madelon(of first World War vintage)". Anna Marly, a guitarist and singer of Russian origin wrote the stirring music of The Partisans' Song, and on May 30th, 1943, Druon and Kessel penned the lyrics. "Friend, do you hear the black flight of the crows on our plains? Friend, do you hear the deaf cries of a country in chains?"begins the song, which is known to all Frenchmen.
The Partisans' Songwas widely sung as a symbol of France's battered unity after the liberation. In 1954, the Viet Minh turned it against their French colonisers at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Diehard supporters of l'Algérie française belted it out on the barricades in 1960. Joan Baez sang it in New York in 1973, the Red Army choir in Paris in 1976, and Yves Montand in Jerusalem in 1986.
Druon was only 30 when his 1948 novel Les Grandes Familleswon the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary award. Among the characters in this scathing account of life in Paris's rich business class are a member of the Académie française and a would-be academician who curries favour with him. Druon wanted to join the Académie from the age of 10.
Like Alexandre Dumas before him, Druon employed ghost writers to complete the six volumes of Les Rois maudits(The Cursed Kings), about the royal courts of France and England before the Hundred Years War. The saga was twice made into television series, earning a fortune for Druon. He joined the Académie in 1966. Aged 48, he was its youngest member. As Pompidou's culture minister in 1973-74, Druon threatened to cut subsidies to left-wingers, saying: "People coming to this ministry with a begging bowl in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other will have to choose."
He served one term as a Gaullist deputy for Paris. From 1985 until 1999, he was the "perpetual secretary" of the Académie.
Druon once said his favourite word was the verb "to conquer", but he lost most of his battles of the last 30 years.
When the Académie finally admitted its first woman writer in 1980, Druon predicted that "soon there'll be 40 broads knitting during discussions on the dictionary". He opposed feminine versions of nouns such as "minister", and tried to prevent Valéry Giscard d'Estaing - an old political adversary - from entering the Académie.
He campaigned unsuccessfully to have the Tuileries palace, destroyed by the Commune in 1871, rebuilt.
Yet France treated Druon with indulgence when he died. At his funeral at Saint-Louis des Invalides church, President Nicolas Sarkozy called Druon a "great writer, great Resistant, great politician and great soul".
Maurice Druon: born April 23rd, 1918; died April 14th, 2009