André Malraux: 1901–45 and 1945–76

Abstract

A larger than life personality in French literary and political life for over fifty years, André Malraux is one of the most fascinating intellectual figures of the twentieth century, and one of the most private. ‘There is no Charles in his Memoirs’ (Il n’y a pas de Charles dans ses Mémoires),¹ he writes of de Gaulle. Similarly, little is known of André, and any biography is almost exclusively that of Malraux as artist and public personage. In both roles he was nothing if not controversial and the controversy was enhanced by the powerful myth surrounding the first half of his career which has generally distorted the perception not only of Malraux’s politics but also of his whole life. Malraux was an adventurer, a writer of prose poems and literary criticism, a political journalist and orator, a left-wing novelist and militant antifascist, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and a French Resistance leader who, incomprehensibly for many of his admirers and former comrades, became an unconditional supporter of General de Gaulle after the Second World War and eventually a minister of state, having in the meantime abandoned the novel for the philosophy of art and an idiosyncratic form of autobiography.