Update June 2025: a revised and expanded version of this post is here.

About twenty years ago, in an essay on Henri Lefebvre, I said that his book on Nietzsche (1939) was on the prohibited ‘Liste Otto’. These were books that had to be removed from sale, and existing copies destroyed, after the German occupation of France. For other reasons now I’ve recently looking at the list – the 1940 version is here – and discover that this is not one of the books on the list. Mea culpa.

As far as I can tell, only two books written by Lefebvre are on the list – there are various iterations from 1940 and through the occupation. The books are Hitler au pouvoir (1938) and Le Matérialisme dialectique (1940). So too was Ca­hiers de Lé­nine sur la dia­lec­tique de He­gel (1938) and Karl Marx’s Morceaux choisis (1934), both of which Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman had edited.

Guterman was Jewish, so this alone would have been enough for inclusion on this list. But Lefebvre’s book on Nietzsche, his Le Nationalisme contre les Nations (1937) and the collection of texts by Hegel he and Guterman had edited (1938) are not on the lists I’ve seen, and nor is their co-authored book La conscience mystifiée (1936).

There is therefore something of an arbitrary nature of the list – there are obviously reasons why the Nazi occupiers would object to those they did include, but those reasons would also seem to apply to ones they did not. The Nietzsche book, for example, is very much written as a challenge to the fascist appropriation.

In looking further into this, though, I went back to the original edition of Critique de la vie quotidienne from 1946. On the page ‘Du même auteur’, Lefebvre lists his previous publications.

There he distinguishes three ways his books were suppressed.

1. seized and destroyed in October 1939 by order of the Daladier government
2. seized and destroyed at the beginning of 1940 by the publisher
3. seized and destroyed at the end of 1940 by the occupying authority, Liste ‘Otto’

Interestingly, he says Le Nationalisme was in the first category; Hitler and Nietzsche in the second; Le matérialisme dialectique and the collections on Lenin and Hegel were in the third. From the lists I’ve seen, this isn’t entirely correct either for category three, but it explains why the Nietzsche book was indeed removed from sale shortly after publication, and why copies are so hard to find today. And presumably the ‘Liste Otto’ did not need to proscribe books that were already banned.

The list of books by Lefebvre ‘En préparation’ is also interesting – only a few of these were ever published, but that’s another story, some of which also concerns censorship.

I hope what I’ve reported here is accurate, but happy to receive additions or corrections.

Incidentally, my 2004 book on Lefebvre has long been available as print-on-demand only, and keeps going up in price. Someone has uploaded a version here though… [final link now fixed, apologies]