François Mauriac, journaliste: les vingt premières années, 1905-1925 (review)

This volume provides the most substantial collection to date of François Mauriac's early critical writing and journalism. It presents some forty-six articles out of a total of more than three hundred published in the twenty-year period before his breakthrough as a novelist thanks to works such as Genitrix (1923) and Le Désert de l'amour (1925). John Flower's Introduction offers a thorough and substantial biographical account of the occasionally faltering initial stages of Mauriac's career as he attempted to establish himself as a writer. He contributed literary reviews and articles for various Catholic journals, including Les Cahiers de l'amitié de France and La Revue hebdomadaire, and more politically oriented pieces for the conservative press, including the Journal de Clichy, Le Figaro, and Le Gaulois. By the end of the collection, in 1925, we find Mauriac contributing short review articles to the Nouvelle Revue française, having finally, after several years of trying, come to the attention of the literary avant-garde led by André Gide and Jacques Rivière. Flower's edition provides a very useful insight into Mauriac's aesthetic, cultural, and political preoccupations as they took shape during the first decades of the twentieth century, although it would have been helpful to have some account of the rationale behind his selection of articles. The collection also serves more broadly as an interesting example of right-wing perspectives on France at the time. For, despite some flirtation with the progressive social Catholicism of Marc Sangier's Sillon movement, Mauriac's writing of the period, as Flower notes, is defined by his conservative instincts. Hostile to parliamentary democracy, he is convinced of the privileged role Catholicism must be given in shaping French society. His conservatism is manifested too in his critique of more avant-garde forms of contemporary culture, as he takes issue with Guillaume Apollinaire's defence of cubism in 1919, and expresses unease over the emergence of the 'jazz-band', 'dont il ne faut pas dire de mal parce que des raffinés en raffolent' (p. 237). For those familiar with his work, there is nothing especially revelatory in these articles. Indeed, they serve mainly to confirm the impression of the early-career Mauriac as something of a young fogey. They are nevertheless important for our understanding of his subsequent trajectory as a journalist, particulary when, in his articles for the Nouvelle Revue française, we see a sharpened mood of contrariness and intellectual independence that foreshadows the surprisingly radical positions Mauriac will adopt in later years, during the Spanish Civil War, the Occupation, and the Algerian War, a radicalism derived in part, arguably, from his increasingly confident sense of his place in the French cultural order. In sum, this collection allows us to appreciate how Mauriac became interesting almost despite himself, and in defiance of the conservative predispositions that informed his initial interventions in the fields of literature, culture, and politics.