François Mauriac: The Making of an Intellectual (review)

Edward Welch studies Mauriac not simply as a 'Catholic novelist' who wrote editorials, but as a key figure in postwar French politics and culture. Propounding a Bourdieusian sociology of literature and the press and arguing that Mauriac's trajectory is emblematic of socio-economic evolution, Welch focuses on dominant cultural paradigms exploited to the author's advantage. Mauriac first sought recognition from salons and the Académie Française, nineteenth-century bastions still holding the key to literary success in the early 1900s. When he finally became famous with Le Baiser au lépreux in 1922 and election to the Académie in 1933, the Nouvelle Revue Française and literary entrepreneurs such as Gallimard and Grasset had firmly established an 'autonomous pole' of production, relegating the 'heteronymous pole' of the Académie and the salons still under the power of the dominant classes to the dustbins of literary history. Mauriac's turn to contestatory journalism began with his outcries against the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Sartre's 'execution' of Mauriac the novelist in 1938, claims Welch, led him to engage more intensively in politics, first with Le Cahier noir for the Resistance, then with devastating condemnations of torture and oppression in the 1950s. Presenting Sartre as a 'totalising intellectual,' the 'central' element in the reconfiguration of the intellectual and literary scene in France, Welch asserts that Mauriac's prominence in the 1950s exemplified Sartre's notion of the committed writer. Seeing Mauriac's 1952 Nobel Prize as crucial in legitimating his editorial voice, Welch stresses the socio-political reasons for L'Express's support for Pierre Mendès France's drive for reform and modernization. At the same time, the Nouvelle Vague and the rise of consumer society were displacing the longstanding habits of a Catholic and agrarian vieille France. Several factors brought intellectuals under the public spotlight in the 1950s: incisive editorials, trendy images of St Germain des Près 'existentialists', and the arrival of mass media and 'the image culture'. Mauriac was more a product of his age than of his genius, argues Welch. Although Mauriac remained prominent throughout the 1960s, Welch relegates him to the 'arrière-garde', dismisses him as a Gaullist 'myth-maker', and claims he was an intellectual only between his veer to the left in 1937 and his support for de Gaulle from 1958 on. Welch nevertheless acknowledges that 'our sense of the social and cultural mechanisms at work in the artistic realm comes as much from Mauriac himself as from a Bourdieusian reading of his career' (p. 184). Welch sheds welcome light on the sociology of publishing shaping Mauriac's itinerary. His approach is sometimes reductive: facts not fitting into Bourdieu's paradigms are simply ignored, glossed over, or discounted. Welch's portrayal of Sartre as an intellectual superstar single-handedly reconfiguring the intellectual arena contradicts his insistence that authors and their aura are fabricated by socio-economic forces. Finally, neither Sartre's obfuscation of Stalinist oppression nor his knee-jerk advocacy of any and all anti-establishment violence have withstood the test of time, whereas de Gaulle's Fifth Republic and Mauriac's politics have been largely vindicated.