(Paris, 1901 - Créteil, 1976.) Writer and politician, André Malraux was born under the sign of the scorpion, the very sign of death. Almost nothing is known of his childhood:he was brought up by women, he received a religious education from which he would later break away in a movement of revolt very inspired by Nietzsche, he was marked for life by the inexplicable suicide of his grandfather in Dunkirk.
At 18, he is a dandy. He came close to literature by publishing minor works, he frequented the Cubists, he married his first wife, Clara Goldschmidt:he shared the rage for life that gripped France after the First World War. And he wants to succeed.
In 1923, he left for Indochina. His goal:the temple of Banteaï-Sreg in Cambodia, from where he brings back statues and bas-reliefs that he intends to resell in Europe. The colonial administration did not hear it that way. Malraux is arrested in Phnom Penh, tried and sentenced. Warned by his wife, Parisian circles are moved:Mauriac, Gide, Breton, among others, appeal in his favor. Malraux obtained a reprieve the following year and returned to France.
He has already published a few works marked by the Flemish fantasy and the zeitgeist of the 1920s:Lunes en papier, in 1921, Pneumatic rabbits in a French garden, in 1922, Written for an idol with a trunk in 1924, and d 'still others.
His stay in Cambodia taught him about Indochina. He kept returning there, and found himself in Saigon, where he organized the Jeune Annam movement in the company of Nguyên Pho, and created the newspaper l'Indochine, then L'Indochine enchaînée, where he took a stand against the colonial exploitation and defended the aspiration of indigenous peoples to freedom.
Weakened by illness, he nevertheless had to leave Saigon and return definitively to Paris where, in 1926, he gave La Tentation de l Occident, the first of his great books. He still published a few minor works of the same genre as the first ones, but ended the cycle in 1928 with Royaume farfelu.
The same year appeared The Conquerors, epic of the strike of the Chinese coolies of Canton. The success is enormous. In a few months, Malraux becomes one of the spokespersons of the revolutionary far left. He did not join the Communist Party, but he was one of the best defenders of the Soviet experience and Comintern policy. He still published La Voie royale, partly inspired by his visit to Cambodia, traveled the world from India to the United States, publicly debated with Trotsky on The Conquerors and the revolutionary strategy of Moscow, and finally published, in 1933, La Condition which earned him the Goncourt Prize and an international reputation.
In the collective adventure, even though it places great emphasis on people's will and their desire to live, Malraux has found an initial response to the challenge thrown at him by fate and to the absurdity of a world that finished believing in God.
Fascism, however, threatens to overwhelm Europe. He is in power in Germany and Italy. After yielding to the prestige of chimeras in an air raid over Yemen, in search of the remains of the capital of the Queen of Sheba, Malraux resolutely commits himself, no longer to writing, but to political action. . He meets Trotsky, leads the fight for Dimitrov's release, chairs the Thaèlmann Committee, becomes a member of the presidium of the International League against War and Fascism. It was under these conditions that he wrote The Time of Contempt (1935), that he went to Moscow to the first congress of Soviet writers, spoke in public on numerous occasions in order to defend everywhere the cause of dignity and nobility of man.
In July 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out. Malraux rushes to Madrid and puts himself at the service of the threatened Republic. Months before the creation of the International Brigades, he organized and commanded the Espana squadron, took part in the first battles of the war, in Medellin, Madrid, Toledo and Teruel. It was from this irreplaceable experience, from his meditation on war and courage, that he drew his novel L'Espoir in 1937, which he later adapted for the screen.
However, Malraux's intimate break with the communist movement dates from Spain:he did not accept Stalinist methods, nor the assassination of the anarchist leader Andreu Nin in Barcelona. The German-Soviet pact of 1939 enshrined Malraux's estrangement and then definitive hostility.
As soon as the Second World War broke out, he joined an armored unit. Taken prisoner in Sens in June 1940, he escaped five months later and immediately went to the free zone. He wrote to General de Gaulle in London to put himself at his service:the letter, unfortunately, never reached its destination.
For more than two years, Malraux then devoted himself to his literary work:he prepared a novel, La Lutte avec l'ange, of which only the beginning will remain, published in Switzerland in 1943 under the name of Les Noyers de l'Altenburq, , and a work on T.E Lawrence, of which only the first chapter will come out in 1946:Was it therefore only that? Inaction, however, weighed on the former colonel of the Spanish Republic:as soon as the Resistance* seemed to him to be seriously structured, he got in touch with the internal forces of Corrèze and Dordogne, and took the name of Colonel Berger. He opposed the Dus Reich division in 1944, was arrested by the Gestapo, released by the liberation of Toulouse; he then created the Alsace-Lorraine brigade which he led into battle in the Vosges, in Dannemarie, in Strasbourg and at the head of which he entered in 1945 in the favorite city of Nazism:Nuremberg.
In 1945, Malraux met General de Gaulle for the first time. It's mutual love at first sight. Malraux sides with the man of June 18*, he will never leave him. The hour of revolution has passed, that of the homeland has come. At the same time, the period of novels ends, but begins the reflection on art, on the dialogue of cultures, on the metamorphoses of the mind, which will henceforth represent for Malraux the highest answers to the challenges of destiny and to the absurdity of life.
In a few years, when he was successively Minister of the Provisional Government* of the French Republic, then National Delegate for Propaganda of the R.P.F,* were to appear in quick succession:La Psychologie de l'art, de 1947 à 1949, Saturne, in 1950, The Voices of Silence, in 1951, and The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture, from 1952 to 1954.
In 1958, the Fourth Republic collapsed under the weight of the affairs of Algeria. General de Gaulle returns to power. André Malraux follows him. He entered the government, where he was first Minister of Information, then, for more than ten years, Minister of State for Cultural Affairs.
In this position, André Malraux deploys a dual activity. As minister, he launched the cultural houses policy, inaugurated a long series of prestigious exhibitions, traveled to Greece and Egypt, had the monuments of Paris whitewashed, proceeded with an inventory of French heritage and encouraged theatre. As a companion of General de Gaulle, he represented France during the accession to independence of countries such as Chad or Gabon, or during official trips to Mexico or Japan. In the name of the government of the Republic, he delivered his most important speeches such as those in Orléans for the celebration of the feasts of Joan of Arc, at the Louvre for the funeral of Braque or Le Corbusier, or at the Panthéon for the transfer from the ashes of Jean Moulin*. The meaning of its action is therefore always the same:to bear witness to France's mission in its task of liberating people, in the face of all oppression and alienation. However, he did not forget that he was a writer:in
1967, Les Antémémoires appeared, not an intimate chronicle, but a great historical fresco.
In 1969, General de Gaulle, defeated in the referendum of April 27, leaves power the next day. Malraux's adherence has always been of the order of personal allegiance. Immediately after Pompidou's election to the presidency, he retired to Verrières-le-Buisson where he devoted the last years of his life to prodigious literary activity, after having tried to intervene in favor of Bengal. This is how Les Chênes qu'on abate appeared in 1971 (his last interview with de Gaulle in Colombey), La Tête d'obsidienne, on Picasso, in 1974, Lazare or the descent to the tomb, at the end of the same year, the last two volumes of the Metamorphosis of the Gods:L'Irréel and L'Intemporel, in 1974 and 1976, finally Hôtes de passage, in 1975.
Destroyed by illness, by exhaustion of a life that has taken him to the four corners of the world, by the smell of death that has prowled around him (suicide of his grandfather and his father, tragic disappearance of his companion Josette Clotis, death of his two half-brothers during the war, then of his two sons in a car accident in 1961), he died on November 23, 1976 and was buried in Verrières-le-Buisson.
His last book, Precarious Man and Literature, a reflection on his art and a desperate meditation on the death of cultures and the advent of randomness, appeared a few months later, in the state of in completion where death left it.