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THREE WEEKS AFTER the deliverance of Tunis, Gide left for Algiers, which had been liberated in November 1942. He would spend the remainder of the war there, except for brief trips to Morocco and the Sudan, finally returning to Paris in May 1945. A guest of the Heurgon family,1 Gide soon found himself at the heart of a literary and intellectual circle made up of the many French writers who had flocked to the city since its liberation by the Allies the previous fall. The new arrivals included novelist André Maurois, pilot and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Jean Amrouche, a young journalist who had followed Gide from Tunis to Algiers and encouraged the older writer in his newfound Gaullist fervor (Fouchet 126–27; Heurgon-Desjardins 6). Longtime Algiers residents in Gide’s circle included Max-Pol Fouchet, founder of the literary resistance magazine Fontaine, and Edmond Charlot, whose Éditions Charlot would publish Gide’s Attendu que . . . and Pages de Journal during the writer’s stay in Algiers. Algiers was more than a vital center for literary and cultural life: the coming of Charles de Gaulle—within days of Gide, coincidentally—and the founding of the Comité Français de Libération Nationale made it the new capital of Free France (J II: 962; Sagaert, Notes [J II] 1469). Just weeks after the writer and the general arrived in Algiers, friends arranged for them to meet at a dinner party. Their conversation was awkward at times, and Gide worried that his persistent defense of novelist André Maurois—who continued to support Pétain—had lessened the general’s opinion of him (J II: 965; Mauriac, Conversations [Fr.] 266). The reverse was true for Gide’s view of the general: having recently read and admired some of de Gaulle’s writings, Gide came away from their interview highly impressed (J II: 964). “He is certainly 107 FIVE Repositionings Pages de Journal and Thésée called upon to play an important role and he seems ‘up to it,’” Gide wrote in his diary the following day: “I shall not find it hard to hang my hopes on him” (J 4: 221).2 This chapter examines the first year of Gide’s Algerian stay, a period in which the author reexamined his early wartime views and positioned himself to take his place in postwar France. I look first at the serialization of Gide’s 1940–1943 Journal in L’Arche, the Gaullist literary monthly that Gide cofounded in 1944. These diary excerpts aroused fierce condemnations from members of the communist resistance. Gide responded by editing future versions of his Journal so as to give a picture of swift, uncomplicated evolution from defeatism to support for the resistance. The chapter concludes with a reading of Thésée—a reworking of the Theseus legend that Gide composed in Algiers in the spring of 1944—as an allegory of Vichy’s defeat and an attempt on Gide’s part to ally himself with the Gaullist resistance. REEMERGENCE ON THE LITERARY SCENE From the moment the press reported that Gide was safe in liberated Tunis, there was a renewed interest in the writer as a potential spokesman for the Allied and resistance causes.3 Because Gide frequented the English literary and political elite in Algiers and was a friend of Pierre Viénot, a prominent member of de Gaulle’s London staff, the British pursued him at least as energetically as did the French. Novelist E. M. Forster’s 1943 “Homage to André Gide,” commissioned by the British Council, enhanced the British perception of Gide as a significant voice of opposition to the Vichy regime. Forster portrayed the French writer as a major opposition figure, citing Gide’s denunciation of abuses in the Soviet Union and the Congo as evidence of his intellectual independence and “indifferen[ce] to authority”: “How natural, that, to-day, such a mind should be with the Free French!” Forster exclaims. His paean concludes in lofty but somewhat exaggerated terms: thanks to his intellectual fervor, says Forster, Gide “has stood out like a light house amidst the storms of war and the fogs of collaboration, and has become a beacon to his colleagues overseas” (1–2). British Foreign Office staffer Stewart echoed Forster’s view: in a May 1943 memo, he informed a colleague that Gide “showed considerable moral courage in the articles he wrote in the ‘Figaro’ [. . .] since the French collapse.” This memo reinforced the perception of...

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