(JOYCE, James). ~ [International Protest against the serial publication of Ulysses in the United States by Samuel Roth, French language version]. Paris, 2 February, 1927.
Folio broadside (345 × 210 mm). Very pale browning, folded twice (vertical and lateral creases), light all-over creasing, minute tears to the extremities of each crease and a very small hole to their intersection in the middle of the sheet. Overall, well-preserved and presentable.
The rare French version of this famous international literary and artistic protest against the piracy of James Joyce’s Ulysses by Samuel Roth in the United States. Published simultaneously with the English Language edition the petition was subscribed by 167 literary and cultural figures, including Wyndham Lewis, E. M, Forster, Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Virigina Woolf, and T. S. Eliot as well as leading figures in the French intellectual landscape: Gaston Gallimard, André Gide, Julian Green, André Maurois, Francis Viéle Griffin and Paul Valéry. Other international signers included Italo Svevo, Thornton Wilder, Elliott Paul, Thomas Mann, Maurice Maeterlinck, Knut Hamson, Luigi Pirandello and Havelock Ellis, as well as Irishmen Sean O’Casey, Liam O’Flaherty and Seumus O’Sullivan.
It was released to the press on Joyce’s birthday and later reprinted in the April 1927 issue of transition. The text of the English version is attributed to Ludwig Lewisjohn and Archibald Macleish with significant contribution from Joyce himself. The French text is, however, quite different while retaining the principal argument that Roth’s appropriation of Ulysses was unauthorised, incomplete and without payment to the author. Both versions contain the same list of names, in identical settings, with only the introductory paragraph reset for whichever version was printed second. As far as we are aware there has been no bibliographical attempt to discern whether the French or English version was primary, perhaps arising partly from the extreme rarity of the French version (we have located copies only in the Quinn collection at New York Public Library and the Universities of Illinois, Notre Dame and Yale).
‘The sensationalism surrounding Ulysses in the media and the absence of international copyright law in the 1920s encouraged “bookleggers” such as Samuel Roth (1893–1974), who serialized the novel in his magazine Two Worlds Monthly without Joyce’s consent. At that time, foreign authors had to publish their work in America in order to secure a US copyright; this was impossible for Joyce, however, since Ulysses was banned. Roth skirted the ban by censoring the text himself, mangling it in the process. With little recourse, Sylvia Beach and Joyce started a petition that called on American readers and media outlets to boycott all of Roth’s ventures. Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and André Gide were among the scores of eminent signatories. The statement appeared in newspapers and was issued as a broadside. (The Morgan Library).
‘Newspaper and trade publications reporting on the Protest included open letters, letters to the editor, and personal requests from Joyce’s supporters. There were interviews with and statements from Joyce himself, Beach, and signers of the Protest such as Hemingway, Pound, T. S. Eliot, Manuel Komroff, and Arnold Bennett. The very mention of famous signers such as D. H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, W. B. Yeats, Hugh Walpole, Robert Bridges, and John Masefield—the New York Times article on the Protest named all of these—could not help but raise eyebrows. Certainly the signature of Albert Einstein, considered a special prize by Joyce, lent immediacy, authority, and authenticity’ (Gertzman, “Not Quite Honest: Samuel Roth’s ‘Unauthorized’ Ulysses and the 1927 International Protest.” Joyce Studies Annual, 2009, pp. 34–66).
In the short term the petition proved largely unsuccessful: in 1928, Joyce and Sylvia Beach obtained an injunction barring the American from advertising Joyce’s name, but no more. Roth pirated Joyce’s entire novel the following year, issuing the first American edition of Ulysses under the false imprint of ‘Shakespeare and Company, Paris.’ The so-called ‘International Protest’ is the first example of such an orchestrated international artists’ petition, a form of concerted activism used since to considerable effect throughout the twentieth century and beyond ― seen in its most recent form in the authors’ protest against copyright violation via Artificial Intelligence.
The broadside is accompanied by several newspaper clippings from American papers and journals reporting the lifting of the ban on Ulysses in 1933 and the publication of the authorised Random House edition. Also included is the 4-page prospectus for the first edition of the book in French, published by Adrienne Monnier at the Maison des Amis des Livres in January 1929, complete with the mounted portrait of Joyce.