André Chamson

During the Second World War, André Chamson helped protect the treasures of the Louvre. As a curator he was given responsibility for large parts of the museum's collections, which were evacuated and hidden in châteaux across France to keep them from the occupying Germans. He later joined the armed Resistance, rising to the rank of major. After the war he became one of France's most honored writers and the director of its national archives.

He was born on June 6, 1900, in Nîmes, in the south of France, around one in the morning, at the time preserved in astrological records. His family were Protestants from the Cévennes, the rugged mountains north of Nîmes, where Protestant communities had resisted royal persecution for centuries. His Sun is in Gemini, with Mercury, Neptune and Pluto also in Gemini, all in his third house, tied to writing, language and one's native ground. Gemini is the sign of the writer, and a third-house Gemini cluster describes a life devoted to language and to the landscape of home. Chamson's novels, including Roux le bandit and Les Hommes de la route, are rooted in the Cévennes and its people.

Venus in Cancer, in his fifth house of creativity, describes a tender attachment to memory and heritage. Cancer is the sign of roots and ancestry, and Chamson returned again and again to the history of his Protestant forebears, notably in his late novel La Tour de Constance, about women imprisoned for their faith in the eighteenth century.

His Moon is in Virgo and falls in the sixth house of duty and routine, describing a meticulous, conscientious nature. Chamson trained at the École des chartes, France's school for archivists and historians, graduating in 1924, and he brought a scholar's care to everything he did.

Saturn, retrograde in Capricorn, occupies his tenth house, the sector of public standing. Saturn in Capricorn in the tenth is a classic placement for a long career in institutions and positions of authority. Chamson served as a curator at the Petit Palais, president of PEN International from 1956 to 1959 and director of the Archives de France from 1959 to 1971. In 1956 he was elected to the Académie française. In 1968 he presided over the Cannes Film Festival jury.

Mars in Taurus, in his second house, describes steady persistence, and Jupiter and Uranus in Sagittarius, in the eighth and ninth houses, suggest a broad, principled outlook and a capacity for courage in crisis.

He married Lucie Mazauric in 1924, and their daughter, Frédérique Hébrard, became a novelist. He died in Paris on November 9, 1983. The Gemini planets made him a writer; the Saturn in his tenth house made him a guardian of France's memory.