JACQUES LOMBARD (1926-2017): French Africanism of the Third Generation

Jacques Lombard, born in Paris in 1926, was a member of that generation of Africanists,2 who had been educated by a selective public school system of the pre-war period. Students wore a blouse and the image of the French Empire adorned the walls of the classroom.3 A generation that had hardly known the leftist Popular Front and for whom neither jazz or surrealism, nor Proust or Gide had been major events unlike for the previous one. They grew up with the series of Thibault, finished by Roger Martin du Gard (1940), Pasquier by Georges Duhamel (1945), and Hommes de bonne volonté by Jules Romains (1946). Malraux, Céline and Cendras had been installed in the literary Pantheon, Sartre and Camus not yet. This generation saw very French films in cinemas4 that from 1960 on would be swept away by other very French films of the Nouvelle vague.