Under the German Occupation, the French literary field was deprived of the conditions that ensured its relative autonomy. In addition to the repressive measures, the extreme degree of politicization imbued even the most apolitical attitudes with a political meaning. By bowing to outside demands, the agencies of diffusion and consecration (the French Academy, the literary juries) initially contributed to this loss of autonomy. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of resistance that the literary field brought to bear on these external constraints bear witness to the survival of a form of autonomy, even in times of crisis. Despite their geographical dispersal, writers carried on with their dialogues and polemics. Their conflicts were based on pre-existing divisions. Attacks by writers close to the Vichy government and/or the Collaboration on the recognized literature from between the two wars - attacks which, in this conjuncture of crisis, were so many ''symbolic murders'' - had the effect of gathering into a single camp defenders of ''art for art's sake'' and those who, semi-legally or clandestinely, wielded their pens in the service of the homeland. It was by purely literary means that they fought against the subjugation of the authorities of the field to heteronymous logics. The creation of a clandestine literary sub-field was the product of an alliance between writers dispossessed of their means of expression and the French Communist Party, which provided organizational structures with a view to forming a National Writers Front (FNE : the future National Writers Committee). This alliance was only made possible, however, by the literary affinities between the communists and the non-communists of the group. Here, the Gallimard-Nouvelle Revue Francaise network played a crucial role in recruiting the early members. The mediation of the literary field in the writers' relations with policies can still be seen in the correlation between positions in the literary field and political stands which has been established by an analysis of correspondence covering the itineraries of 185 writers active between 1940 and 1944. The field structure (opposition between a pole of limited production and one of major production, between old and young, and the ranking principles characteristic of this space) is indeed the matrix of political attitudes.
