Through the Past Darkly: History and Memory in François Mauriac’s Bloc-notes

2. The Story of History

2 T H E S T O RY O F H I S T O RY L Quel roman plus poignant que celui-là? Quelle histoire inventée l’emporterait en intérêt sur celle que je raconte ici et qui ne s’invente pas? .l.l. Alors nous professons que la lecture des romans nous ennuie et qu’aux plus belles histoires imaginées, il faut préférer l’inimaginable Histoire. (“Préface,” BN II, ) [What novel could be more poignant than that one? What concocted story could evoke greater interest than the one that I tell here, which cannot be made up? .l.l. And so we profess that we are bored with reading novels and that the unimaginable story of history is to be preferred over the most beautiful stories imagined.] One only has to read a few of Mauriac’s editorials to observe that history permeates his writing, informs his position on virtually all subjects, and constantly provides the essential frame of reference. The past is everywhere present in the Bloc-notes, as Mauriac filters his perception of current events through a vast repertoire of figures and episodes from French history. In the preface to the first volume, he specifically identifies history as the nexus of his writing. Changing moods may have directed his attention in a number of directions, just as pressing political concerns may have compelled him to engage in polemics. And yet the basic formula remains constant: .l.l. quelqu’un est là, avec ses idées, ses goûts, ses humeurs, les conditions d’une vie ordinaire, et chaque semaine, il réagit à l’histoire telle qu’elle se fait sous son regard. Cet affrontement de l’individuel et de l’universel , c’est tout le Bloc-notes. (BN I, ; emphasis mine)  L [.l.l. someone is there amid the circumstances of an ordinary life with his ideas, his tastes, his moods, and each week, he reacts to history being made under his very eyes. This confrontation of the individual with the universal is what the Bloc-notes is all about.] In all their apparent diversity, the editorials of the Bloc-notes nevertheless transcend the topical because they participate in history. Recent critical commentary has to a certain extent acknowledged the importance of history in the Bloc-notes. Bernard Cocula speaks of “cette longue méditation sur l’Histoire que constitue aussi le Bloc-notes” (this long meditation on history that the Bloc-notes also forms).1 He further characterizes Mauriac’s editorials as a “product” of historical events,2 and even claims that Mauriac “becomes one” with history in some instances .3 And although Malcolm Scott points out that, like de Gaulle, Mauriac valued the continuity and permanence of French identity as constituted by its rich literary and cultural patrimony and that he considered French history as indissociable with France’s unique geography,4 neither Scott, nor Cocula, nor anyone else has analyzed the rich spectrum of signification that Mauriac creates through his countless invocations of history. This chapter is devoted precisely to that task: we shall first delineate the various senses of “history” operative in the Bloc-notes and then explain how Mauriac situates himself, his texts, and his readers with respect to both past and present events. It will be less a matter of what Mauriac thinks about such and such a topic than of how he conceives, perceives, and represents “history” in his journalism. We shall see that history functions not merely as a décor, nor even as a rhetorical artifice, but rather as the crucial medium through which Mauriac engages his readers and confronts the most pressing issues of his time. From the beginnings of the Bloc-notes in  until its final phase in  and , the historical drama most frequently invoked by Mauriac  T H E S T O R Y O F H I S T O R Y L . Bernard Cocula, Mauriac, le Bloc-notes (Bordeaux: L’Esprit du Temps, ), . . Cocula, Mauriac, le Bloc-notes, . . Cocula, Mauriac, le Bloc-notes, . . Malcolm Scott, Mauriac et de Gaulle (Bordeaux: L’Esprit du Temps, ), –. is the Dreyfus affair.5 A careful examination will allow us to see how Mauriac uses such events as a basic point of reference and how these many returns to the affair are emblematic of his overall understanding of history. At the turn of the century, the Dreyfus affair...