First editions, first printings. A superb pair of presentation copies - rare in being both made out to the same recipient - inscribed by the photographer on the half-title of each work: "pour Henri Bourrillon, ami de mes amis photographes, Henri Cartier-Bresson" (Images à la sauvette) and "pour Henri Bourrillon ces quelques [crossing out 'Les' in the title] Européens, en hommage Très 'respectueuse'. Henri Cartier-Bresson" (Les Européens). The recipient was the prolific French writer and journalist Henri Bourrillon (1876–1962), better known under his pseudonym of Pierre Hamp, and described by his contemporaries as both "l'écrivain prolétarien" and "écrivain humaniste". The self-taught Bourrillon "left school at fourteen to become a pastry chef working in England and Spain before finding employment with French railways in the north of the country. He gradually rose through the ranks, becoming deputy stationmaster and inspector of works. He was also the head of a textile factory... He pursued studies with Charles Péguy, André Gide, and Charles-Louis Philippe. Hamp's vast experience inspired him to write more than 40 novels, a large number of which are grouped under the title of La Peine des hommes (The Lot of Men) and are close, often quasi-technical, and frequently critical studies of working-class conditions and activities. For example, Marée frâiche (1908: Fresh Tide), describes the fish industry, Le Rail (1912) the problems and factions within the world of the railways, Viv de Champagne (1913) all aspects of wine production, and Le Lin (1924) the treatment of flax and the cloth trade. His books were not always well received by those they described. Le Rail was banned from bookstands in railway stations, and Mes métiers (1930: Kitchen Prelude, 1932), on his experience as a pastry chef, prompted an outrage and a threatened lawsuit... He also produced a number of surveys - on the working conditions of miners, railway men, and children employed in industry... A member of the Socialist Party, an active trade unionist all his life, and a supporter of the Salvation Army" (John Flower, Historical Dictionary of French Literature, 2013, pp. 245-46) All of this enables us to draw together the threads that unite both writer and photographer in their humanitarian approach to life, a shared sincerity in their work and a genuine empathy with the working class and the poor; and while Cartier-Bresson's inscription in Les Européens is playful ("Tres [underlined] 'respectueuse'"), that in Images à la sauvette ("ami de mes amis photographes") seems to be closer to the spirit of "friend of the friends that I have photographed" - that is, humanity itself. On another level Hamp and Cartier-Bresson both had a connection with the textile industry: Hamp had been the manager of a textile factory and Cartier-Bresson's family had been in the thread-making business since the mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps Hamp would have noted in particular the photographer's image of a Russian textile worker alone at her loom in the cavernous interior of a textile works (plate 67 in Les Européens). Of Images à la sauvette Roth writes: "Cartier-Bresson's 'precise organisation of forms' has come to be the standard against which that of all other photographers is measured, and this book is its 'proper expression'. Cartier-Bresson met the writer and publisher Tériade (pseudonym of Efstratios Eleftheriades) in about 1932... Finally, in 1952, he was able to publish Images à la sauvette under his imprint Éditions Verve. The simultaneous publication of The Decisive Moment in New York in July 1952, with a cover by Matisse (who had just had his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art) was a tremendous success". "The Decisive Moment is one of the greatest of all photobooks, and Cartier Bresson repeated its artistic success three years later with The Europeans... [he] is at his best when at his most universal" (Parr & Badger). The photographer would surely have approved of Hamp's reproachful remark, noted by Walter Benjamin in his essay on Paris and Baudelaire: "The artist... admires the column of a Babylonian temple and despises the factory chimney". Cartier-Bresson looked squarely at the factory chimney.
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