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André Malraux
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André Malraux (3 November 1901 – 23 November 1976) was a French author, adventurer and statesman, and a dominant figure in French politics and culture.
aux was born in Paris. His parents separated in 1905 and eventually divorced, and he was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, Berthe and Adrienne Lamy. His stockbroker father committed suicide in 1930.
At the age of 21, Malraux left for Cambodia with his new wife Clara Goldschmidt.
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Encyclopedia
André Malraux (3 November 1901 – 23 November 1976) was a French author, adventurer and statesman, and a dominant figure in French politics and culture.
Biography
Malraux was born in Paris. His parents separated in 1905 and eventually divorced, and he was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, Berthe and Adrienne Lamy. His stockbroker father committed suicide in 1930.
At the age of 21, Malraux left for Cambodia with his new wife Clara Goldschmidt. In Cambodia, he undertook an exploratory expedition into the Cambodian jungle, and on his return was arrested by French colonial authorities for removing bas-reliefs from one of the temples he discovered. Banteay Srei. (The French government itself removed large numbers of sculptures etc from already discovered sites such as Angkor Wat around this time.) Malraux incorporated the episode into his second novel, La Voie Royale.
Malraux became highly critical of the French colonial authorities in Indochina, and in 1925 helped to organize the Young Annam League and founded a newspaper Indochina in Chains.
On his return to France, he published The Temptation of the West (1926) an exchange of letters between a Westerner and an Asian comparing aspects of the two cultures. This was followed by his first novel The Conquerors (1928), then by The Royal Way (1930) which drew in part on his Cambodian experience, and then by Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine). For La Condition Humaine, a powerful novel about a communist uprising in Shanghai, he won the 1933 Prix Goncourt.
In the 1930s, Malraux was active in the anti-Fascist Popular Front in France. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War he joined the Republican forces in Spain, serving in, and helping to organise, their fledgling air force. His squadron called "Espana" became something of a legend after his claims of nearly annihilating part of the Nationalist army at Medellín. According to Curtis Cate, his biographer, he was lightly wounded twice during efforts to stop the Falangists' takeover of Madrid, but Hugh Tomas denies that fact. He also toured the United States to raise funds for the Spanish Republicans. A novel drawing on his Spanish war experiences, Man's Hope, (L'Espoir) appeared in 1938.
The types of aircraft, however, sent to Spain by France, through Malraux's contacts, were classed as obsolete by the standards of 1936 and that was the decision of the French Ministry of Defense on the fear that modern types would have easily fallen into the hands of the Germans fighting for Franco. This has created the impression that Malraux acted actually as an agent of the Popular Front government and in particular, its minister P. Cot who was a strong anti-fascist but who's prime minister Leon Blum has chosen a cautious diplomatic approach to the problem. They were mainly Potez 540 bombers and Dewoitine D.372 fighters. The desperately slow Potez 540 did not survive even three months of air missions, making some 80 knots only against the enemy fighters running at above 250 knots. Again only few of the fighters proved to be worthy, some even delivered intentionally without guns and/or gun-sights and then they too were surpassed by much modern types introduced by the end of 1936 on both sides. Malraux was the first and the last attempt of the French government to support the Spanish Republic air force.
It is known that pictures with Malraux standing next to some Potez 540 and even inside one of them in a pilot's costume have circulated widely by the Republic government as a proof that France was actually on their side, especially at a moment when France and G. Britain declared officially as neutral to this conflict. It is known, however, that Malraux was not a pilot himself and has never flown a plane despite carrying the - apparently honorary - title of the Squadron Leader of 'Espana'. (Malraux, it is worth noting, never claimed, at any time in his life, to have piloted an aircraft. The allegation that he did is one of the many myths that has grown up around his life - the result probably of careless, sensationalist journalism. He was, however, a very active participant in the Republican cause - when many other intellectuals stayed home in France and debated 'engagement' as a philosophical issue... His commitment to the Republican cause was, like that of many other foreign volunteers, purely personal: there was never any suggestion that he was there somehow at the behest of the French Government. He was, of course, painfully aware of Republicans' inferior armaments - the outdated aircraft were just one aspect of the problem - and part of his activity included a trip to the U.S. to raise funds.)
Malraux's motivations behind his involvement in the Spanish Civil War are questioned by Antony Beevor in The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. Quoting from the Russian State Military Archive, Beevor raises suspicions that "he had recruited the pilots and technicians himself in France. Most of them have come here in order to make good money." In Beevor's own words, "Malraux stands out, not just because he was a mythomaniac in his claims of martial heroism - in Spain and later in the French Resistance - but because he cynically exploited the opportunity for intellectual heroism in the legend of the Spanish Republic."
Other biographical sources, including those who knew Malraux personally in Spain, would however cast serious doubt on these views. Here, as in many other instances, accounts of Malraux's life tend to vary considerably and the reason is not far to seek. His active involvement in major historical events of his times brought him determined adversaries as well as strong supporters, and the resultant polarization of opinion has unfortunately affected the objectivity and reliability of much that has been written about his life. (The Russian Military State Archive, for example, would be a very doubtful source for reliable comment about Malraux's activity in Spain since he had been openly critical of some of the policies of the Stalinist regime of the time.) It is worth adding that Malraux's extremely eventful life (quite unlike that of the stereotype French intellectual whose life is confined principally to his/her study or a Left-Bank cafe) has tended to distract attention from what is far more important - his achievements as thinker and writer. Biographies of Malraux have become a minor industry; sound, informed analysis of his thought is quite rare.
At the outbreak of Second World War Malraux joined the French Army. He was captured in 1940 during the Western Offensive but escaped and later joined the French Resistance. He was captured by the Gestapo in 1944 and underwent a mock execution. He later led the tank unit Brigade Alsace-Lorraine in defence of Strasbourg and in the attack on German Stuttgart. He was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance, the Croix de Guerre, and the British Distinguished Service Order.
During the war he worked on a long novel, The Struggle with the Angel (based on the story of the Biblical Jacob), the manuscript of which was destroyed by the Gestapo after his capture in 1944. A surviving first part, which he entitled The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, was published after the war.
Malraux and his first wife were divorced in the 1940s. His daughter from this marriage, Florence (b.1933), married the filmmaker Alain Resnais.)
Malraux had two sons by his second wife Josette Clotis: Pierre-Gauthier (1940-1961) and Vincent (1943-1961). In 1944 while Malraux was fighting in Alsace, Josette died when she slipped while boarding a train. His two sons were killed in a 1961 automobile accident.
After the war, General Charles de Gaulle appointed Malraux as his Minister for Information (1945-1946). During this post-war period, Malraux also worked on the first of his books on art, The Psychology of Art which was published in three volumes over the period 1947 to 1949. The work was subsequently re-published in one volume, somewhat revised, as The Voices of Silence (Les Voix du Silence). Malraux became a Minister of State in De Gaulle's 1958-1959 government and France's first Minister of Cultural Affairs from 1959 to 1969, serving during all of De Gaulle's presidency. Among many other initiatives, he created maisons de la culture in a number of provincial cities and worked to preserve France's national heritage. In 1960 Malraux launched,as editor, the series Arts of Mankind, an ambitious survey of world art that spans over thirty large illustrated volumes.
In 1948, Malraux married Marie-Madeleine Lioux, a concert pianist and the widow of his half-brother, Roland Malraux. They separated in 1966.
During the 1960s, Malraux published the first volume of a trilogy on art entitled The Metamorphosis of the Gods, with the second two volumes (not yet translated into English) appearing shortly before he died. He also began publishing a series of semi-autobiographical works, the first of which was Antimémoires. One of these, Lazarus, is a reflection on death following one of his own final illnesses. Malraux died in Créteil, near Paris, on 23 November 1976, and was buried in the Verrières-le-Buisson (Essonne) cemetery. In honor of his contributions to French culture, his ashes were moved to the Panthéon in Paris in 1996, on the twentieth anniversary of his passing.
An international Malraux Society was founded in the United States in 1968. There is also an active association based in Paris, the Amitiés internationales André Malraux.
Quotations
"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxies, but that in this prison we can fashion images sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness."
"The art museum is one of the places that give us the highest idea of man.” ("The Voices of Silence")
"There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman."
The quote "What is [a] man? A miserable little pile of secrets" is often falsely attributed to Malraux. The actual quote, "Man is what he hides, a wretched little pile of secrets," is an (until recently) obscure aphorism in the psychiatric community, to which Malraux replied, "Man is what he achieves."
Selected Biographies of Malraux
- Andre Malraux (1960) by Geoffrey H. Hartman
- André malraux: The indochina adventure (1960) by Walter Langlois (New York Praeger).
- Malraux (1971) by Pierre Galante (SBN 40212441-3)
- Andre Malraux: A Biography (1997) by Curtis Cate (ISBN 208066795)
- Malraux ou la Lutte avec l'ange. Art, histoire et religion (2001) by Raphaël Aubert (ISBN 2-8309-1026-5)
- Malraux : A Life (2005) by Olivier Todd (ISBN 0375407022)
- Dits et écrits d'André Malraux : Bibliographie commentée (2003) by Jacques Chanussot and Claude Travi (ISBN 2-905965-88-6)
- The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936 - 1939 (Second edition 2006) by Anthony Beevor (ISBN 0-2978-4832-1)
- André Malraux (2003) by Roberta Newnham (ISBN 9781841508542)
Partial bibliography
- Lunes en Papier, 1923 (Paper Moons, 2005)
- La Tentation de l'Occident, 1926 (The Temptation of the West, 1926)
- Royaume-Farfelu, 1928 (The Kingdom of Farfelu, 2005)
- Les Conquérants, 1928 (The Conquerors, 1928)
- La Voie royale, 1930 (The Royal Way or The Way of the Kings, 1930)
- La Condition humaine, 1933 (Man's Fate, 1934)
- Le Temps du mépris, 1935 (Days of Wrath, 1935)
- L'Espoir, 1937 (Man's Hope, 1938)
- Les Noyers de l'Altenburg, 1948. (The Walnut Trees of Altenburg)
- La Psychologie de l'Art, 1947-1949 (The Psychology of Art)
- Les Voix du silence, 1951 (The Voices of Silence, 1953)
- La Métamorphose des dieux (English translation: The Metamorphosis of the Gods, by Stuart Gilbert):
- Vol 1. Le Surnaturel, 1957
- Vol 2. L'Irréel, 1974
- Vol 3. L'Intemporel, 1976
- Antimémoires, 1967 (Anti-Memoirs, 1968 - autobiography)
- Les Chênes qu'on abat, 1971 (Felled Oaks or The Fallen Oaks)
- Lazare, 1974 (Lazarus, 1977)
For a more complete biography see the site of the
External links
- The site of research and information dedicated to André Malraux: literature, art, religion, history and culture.
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- by Travis Jeppesen
- [Bibliographie]
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