We think we know everything about him: the adventurer, the anti-fascist writer, the General’s companion, the man who welcomes Jean Moulin to the Pantheon. A recent biography allows us to discover another Malraux, grappling with his own myths, and in his intellectual continuity.
It is an ambitious undertaking that of Perrine Simon-Nahum: not only the writing of an intellectual biography of André Malraux where we would be content with a connection between the work involved and the life of this great intellectual, but the writing of a full intellectual biography, integrating the philosophical background and the writings on the art of the author of Hope.
When we talk about Malraux (1901-1976), the images jostle: the talented young adventurer imprisoned in Indochina for trafficking in Khmer art statues, for whom the entire intellectual Paris (Breton, Gide, Paulhan, Mauriac etc.) petitions in 1925, the anti-fascist fighter of the Spanish War at the head of his squadron, the novelist of The Human Condition (1930) and Hope (1937). Also the resistance fighter, as late as he was committed, from March 1944. And then again the figure of a political turning point: the meeting with de Gaulle, the commitment of RPFthe Ministry of Culture. The melodramatic lyricism, the visionary posture, the praise of Jean Moulin in 1964. Kaleidoscopic images, whose unity struggles to appear, further blurred by the television images of an old man with a face distorted by tics, speaking of art with passion.
The author takes into account the important biographies of Malraux already available, and in turn retraces, in the first part of the work, the main stages of his itinerary, before devoting the second and third parts to a more interpretive investigation, probing the way in which Malraux created his character (based on the biographical essay by Jean-François Lyotard), the way in which this construction was received and returning to “ the man of commitment “.
The author confirms the observation already made by several previous biographies of a certain mythomania of Malraux, perceptible both in his ability to construct his own biography in a romantic way (and the rapprochement with Chateaubriand that the criticism of the 1960s, mentioned p 149, had operated well) and in its desire to successively connect itself to great myths. “ Malraux, writes Perrine Simon-Nahum, was inhabited by myths that he had constructed himself, myths created by illness, myths of history » (p. 145). It is certain that here we hold the key to his fascination with communism, of which he especially admires the mobilizing power, capable of raising individuals above themselves and transforming their lives into destiny. This fundamental perspective, which makes human finitude insurmountable, also explains the writer’s adherence to Gaullism, both because de Gaulle offers a modern figure of heroism, and embodies a national myth. With perhaps, finally, more ease in giving the latter an acceptable concrete answer… Mythomaniac and mythophagous, not only with no taste for fabrication, but in an aspiration to greatness which is one of the keys to his fascination for de Gaulle, Malraux thereby expresses a desire to rise to the height of the major issues of his time, to subjectively join the community – the suggested rapprochement with Barrès seems very effective from this point of view.
Perrine Simon-Nahum shows this well: André Malraux is ultimately, unlike Raymond Aron and François Mauriac, missing out on anti-totalitarianism, one of the great struggles of the century, prisoner that he is of his fascination for the great men, in particular for Mao, and perhaps also for political voluntarism. Aron, who is the subject of a sustained comparison with Malraux in the volume, has accepted a tear: in him, there is a keen sense of tragedy and a fidelity to critical reason. This comes at the cost of a formidable tension, which surfaces everywhere in his work, but which the link with the academic world helps him to cope with. The author of The Human Condition does not have this recourse, its legitimacy is above all literary, its world is that of the figure, of the story, not of cold analysis. And myths are great stories that depict universal anxieties and hopes.
By following in the footsteps of Malraux, a Malraux who does not feel the need to justify his distance from communism, but who, like Georges Sorel, moves from one myth to another, the “ Eternal France » revealed to him during his captivity in 1940, the reader can have the feeling of a sort of structural limit specific to Malrucian commitment. Wanting to enter History through myth, isn’t that ultimately, for an intellectual, the surest way to miss out? ? We find p. 159 a beautiful formula: “ Certainly, Malraux was in history. But his work is linked to history like that of Michelet, namely that history figures there as destiny “. No wonder in these conditions that the need for disenchantment and the relativization of politics find no place there: “ In this sense, if Malraux embodies the XXe century, these are its first 70 years. The last third of the century, placed under the stature of Solzhenitsyn, seems to push Malraux into the grave » (p. 158).
And, in the end, we have the feeling that this beautiful and ambitious intellectual biography puts us on the path to a more general key to reading: for this consumer of myths consumed by skepticism, a supreme myth is necessary, a myth which he truly believes. For Malraux, this would be the myth of art. Of this timeless art, which gives us direct access to communion with humanity of all times. Malraux thus once again becomes a crucial witness of the XXe century: the one which, through the exhaustion of the great political myths, would seek a sort of metaphysical refoundation of humanity.
This intellectual biography is part of the development of the history of intellectuals. The latter has seen the development of several major currents since the 1880s: a history of commitments, highlighting generational solidarity and making it possible to identify networks and major currents, launched by Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, a social history intellectuals illustrated by Christophe Charle, and a story emphasizing editorial support, with the work of Jean-Yves Mollier. Relying largely in part on the first, maintaining a more complex relationship with the other two, the more traditional genre of intellectual biography has come back into favor, in particular because it corresponds to the need to take into account a refined way the ideological issues, to develop a historical approach to ideas, whereas the history of ideas is rather, in France, left to philosophers, even literary people or jurists.
For a truly historical approach to intellectual biography, Malraux is a “ good customer »: no risk, in this case, of embarking on a scholastic presentation constructing an artificial logical coherence, since there is, obviously, no Malrucian philosophical system, but a thought assuming the risk of great intellectual bets. In short, it is the real challenge posed by Malraux to history which is taken up here: when a man does not separate his thoughts from his life, when the vision which haunts him is also determining in each of his public acts, when these acts are themselves always recaptured by his own discourse, the historian must roll up his sleeves and hold both ends of the chain, he must account for the prosaism of life while following his hero down to the most high speculation. Let it reflect the continuing tension between the creative effort of the artist and a man with difficulty in living, struck several times by destiny.
Malraux wanted to be in History and escape it. Facing death and transcending it, thus finding a form of eternity. In a certain way, it is because of this quest that the torn life of André Malraux, placed under the sign of existential anguish, is so difficult to grasp. The ideas are as if scattered on the ground of History. And they become graspable by the historian, they truly exist for him, sufficiently for their story to be told, because men live from them. Existentially and socially, unconsciously and rationally produced, consumed, transformed, transmitted, they are present, intertwined at every moment with the most concrete issues. And history has its say in guiding us in this indissoluble matter.