André Malraux
born Nov.
3, 1901, Paris, France
died Nov. 23, 1976, Paris
French novelist, art historian, and
statesman, who became an active supporter of
General Charles de Gaulle and, after de
Gaulle was elected president in 1958, served
for 10 years as France’s minister of
cultural affairs. His major works include
the novel La Condition humaine (1933; Man’s
Fate); Les Voix du silence (1951; The Voices
of Silence), a history and philosophy of
world art; and Le Musée imaginaire de la
sculpture mondiale (1952–54; Museum Without
Walls).
Life
Malraux was born into a well-to-do family.
The details of his early life and education
are obscure, however. At the age of 21 he
left France in search of a Khmer temple of
whose discovery he had read in an
archaeological bulletin. Plunging into the
Cambodian forest, he reached the temple,
which was not then being considered for
restoration. He had some bas-reliefs removed
from it and took them back to Phnom Penh,
the capital of Cambodia. Arrested at once
and sentenced to imprisonment, he appealed
to Paris and was released. Malraux’s
mistreatment in jail by the French colonial
authorities turned him into a fervent
anticolonialist and an advocate of social
change. While in Southeast Asia he organized
the Young Annam League (the precursor of the
Viet Minh, or Viet Nam League for
Independence), became a leading writer and
pamphleteer, and founded a newspaper,
L’Indochine Enchaînée (“Indochina in
Chains”). Crossing to China, he apparently
participated in several Chinese
revolutionary incidents and may possibly
have met Mikhail Borodin, the Russian
communist adviser to Sun Yat-sen and then to
Chiang Kai-shek.
Malraux was
to return to East Asia several times. In
1929 he made important discoveries of
Greco-Buddhist art in Afghanistan and Iran.
In 1934 he flew over the Rubʿ al-Khali in
Arabia and discovered what may have been the
site of the Queen of Sheba’s legendary city.
After his second return from Indochina in
1926 he published his first novel, La
Tentation de l’Occident (The Temptation of
the West). His novels Les Conquérants (The
Conquerors), published in 1928, La Voie
royale (The Royal Way), published in 1930,
and the masterpiece La Condition humaine in
1933 (awarded the Prix Goncourt) established
his reputation as a leading French novelist
and a charismatic, politically committed
intellectual. Though he captivated Paris
with his exceptional intelligence, lyrical
prose, astonishing memory, and breadth of
knowledge, it was not generally appreciated
that his true life was elsewhere than in the
literary salons or on the committee of La
Nouvelle Revue Française or at literary
congresses.
As fascism,
in the shape of Nazism, rose in the 1930s,
Malraux recognized its threat and presided
over committees pressing for the liberation
of the international communists Ernst
Thälmann and Georgi Dimitrov from their
imprisonment under the Nazis. He
simultaneously eschewed a rigid Marxism,
participated in the Ligue Nationale Contre
l’Antisémitisme (National League Against
Anti-Semitism), and in 1935—before the world
in general had learned that concentration
camps existed—published Le Temps du mépris
(Days of Wrath), a short novel describing
the brutal imprisonment of a communist by
the Nazis. At the same time, he began to
write his Psychologie de l’art (3 vol.,
1947–50; The Psychology of Art), an activity
that bore a relationship to his other
interests, for to Malraux aesthetic ideas,
like the philosophy of action expressed in
his own novels, would always be part of
man’s eternal questioning of destiny and his
response to it.
Upon the
outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936,
Malraux went to Spain, joined the Republican
forces, and organized for them an
international air squadron, becoming its
colonel. After flying numerous aerial
missions at the front, he visited the United
States in order to collect money for medical
assistance to Spain. His novel L’Espoir
(Man’s Hope), based on his experiences in
Spain, was published in 1937. A
motion-picture version of L’Espoir that
Malraux produced and directed in Barcelona
in 1938 was not shown in France until after
the country’s liberation at the end of World
War II.
When World
War II broke out, Malraux enlisted as a
private soldier in a French tank unit. He
was captured but escaped to the free zone of
France, where he joined the resistance
movement. His life in the French underground
movement began in the Corrèze département in
south-central France. He was shot and
captured (1944) by the Germans and made to
undergo a mock execution. After his
liberation by the French Forces of the
Interior, he formed a Free French brigade
that he commanded during the 1st French
Army’s campaign against Strasbourg in
Alsace. During this time of trial he
abandoned his earlier enthusiasm for
revolutionary action and Marxism and
rediscovered the sense of promise held out
by Western culture.
On the
Alsatian front he met General Charles de
Gaulle, with whom his destiny was
thenceforth to be linked. He was appointed
temporary minister of information (November
1945–January 1946) in de Gaulle’s first
government and then followed de Gaulle into
retirement, from which he emerged to deliver
brilliant speeches as a national delegate to
the Gaullist Rassemblement du Peuple
Français, or RPF (French People’s Rally).
Withdrawing to his villa at Boulogne in
northern France, he devoted himself to
composing his monumental meditation on art,
Les Voix du Silence, which was published in
1951.
When de
Gaulle returned to power in France in 1958,
he appointed Malraux minister of cultural
affairs in the first Cabinet of the Fifth
Republic. For 10 years he was minister of
cultural affairs and the intimate friend of
de Gaulle. He proved an innovative and
forceful cultural administrator.
Literary works
Between the acts of his dramatic and
absorbing life, Malraux wrote several
brilliant and powerful novels dealing with
the tragic ambiguities of political idealism
and revolutionary struggle. His first
important novel, Les Conquérants (1928), is
a tense and vivid description of a
revolutionary strike in Guangzhou (Canton),
China. La Voie royale (1930) is a thriller
set among the Khmer temples of Cambodia that
Malraux himself explored. Malraux’s
masterpiece is La Condition humaine (1933),
which made him known to readers all over the
world. This novel is set in Shanghai during
the crushing by Chiang Kai-shek and the
Nationalists of their former communist
allies in 1927. Its main characters are
several Chinese communist conspirators and
European adventurers who are betrayed both
by the Nationalists and by emissaries of
Soviet Russia. Each of these complex,
introspective personalities is affected
differently by the tragic fate awaiting him,
but the brotherhood arising out of a common
political activity seems to them the only
antidote to the meaningless solitude that is
the hallmark of the human condition. In the
novel Le Temps du mépris (1935; Days of
Contempt, or Days of Wrath), Malraux tells a
story of the underground resistance to the
Nazis within Hitler’s Germany. Despite
Malraux’s evident Marxist sympathies and his
bitter criticisms of fascism, this was the
only one of his books that was allowed to be
published inside the Soviet Union. From his
experience in the Spanish Civil War, Malraux
constructed his most pessimistic political
novel, L’Espoir (1937; Man’s Hope, or Days
of Hope). This book dramatically re-creates
the first nine months of the Spanish Civil
War.
After 1945
Malraux virtually abandoned the writing of
novels and turned instead to the history and
criticism of art. His Les Voix du silence
was a revised version of his Psychologie de
l’art. Les Voix du silence is a brilliant
and well-documented synthesis of the history
of art in all countries and through all
ages. The work is also a philosophical
meditation on art as a supreme expression of
human creativity and as one that enables man
to transcend the meaningless absurdity and
insignificance of his own condition. Malraux
continued to explore this approach in La
Métamorphose des Dieux, 3 vol. (1957–76; The
Metamorphosis of the Gods). He published his
autobiography, Antimémoires, in 1967. After
the death of his companion, the novelist
Louise de Vilmorin, Malraux lived and worked
in solitude at Verrières-le-Buisson, near
Paris, where he was first buried. In 1996,
on the 20th anniversary of his death, his
body was enshrined in the Panthéon in Paris.
