Joseph Kessel

Joseph Kessel wrote the anthem of the French Resistance in one afternoon and the novel Buñuel filmed as Belle de Jour. He was born in Argentina to Russian-Jewish parents, spent part of his childhood in Orenburg, and grew up in France - a biography that gave him three languages and no settled country. He flew as an observer in the First World War and reported the rest of the century from wherever it was worst: the Irish troubles, Berlin in the 1930s, Palestine, Kenya during Mau Mau, Afghanistan. He wrote as a reporter who happened to write novels, and the novels are reportage with the names changed - L'Équipage from the air war, Le Lion from Kenya, Belle de Jour in 1928 from an obsession he said he had researched rather than invented. In 1943 he crossed to London with his nephew Maurice Druon, and on a single afternoon the two of them wrote French words to a Russian melody by Anna Marly. The Chant des Partisans was whistled by the BBC as a recognition signal because the tune carried through jamming, and it became the unofficial national anthem of occupied France. He also covered the Nuremberg trials for France-Soir, and reported the birth of Israel in 1948 from both sides of the fighting. His Armée des ombres, written in London in 1943 from what resistance members had told him, is the book Melville filmed twenty-six years later, and it was published while the events in it were still going on. He was elected to the Académie française in 1962. He drank heroically, gambled away several fortunes, and went on filing copy until he was nearly eighty.

• Lived: 1898 CE – 1979 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: writer, journalist