Écrire ses mémoires au XXe siècle: déclin et renouveau (review)

In this exemplary work of literary history and genre analysis, Jean-Louis Jeannelle re-evaluates a hitherto neglected body of writings. His starting point is a paradox: the contemporary obsession with memory and commemoration has not produced much scholarly interest in the genre of memoirs, yet this mode of writing has continued to flourish. After an excursus on the fate of the genre after Chateaubriand (whose Mémoires d'outre-tombe represent both the crowning achievement and point of exhaustion for the genre in the nineteenth century), the first three sections of the book chart the stages of the genre's evolution in France from the fin de siècle to the present: a period of decline during the Third Republic ('Le Temps du souvenir'); a movement of re-legitimization after 1940 ('Le Temps du mémorable'); the emergence in the last third of the twentieth century of a memorial paradigm that brings a new dimension to the genre but also threatens it with dissolution ('Le Temps de la mémoire'). Categories under consideration include the writer's memoir and its deconstruction (Gide, Valéry), fictive memoirs (Yourcenar's Mémoires d'Hadrien, Martin du Gard's Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort), fascist memoirs (Brasillach, Rebatet, Drieu la Rochelle), Resistance memoirs, Holocaust testimonies, and communist narratives of de-Stalinization and disillusion. The book's fourth and final section develops an intensive definition of the genre's sociological, discursive, and narrative parameters before outlining an extensive category of 'egohistorical' narratives. The book contains particularly illuminating commentaries on André Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, and Elie Wiesel. However, Charles de Gaulle is the towering figure of the study: his Mémoires de guerre, which reconfigure national memory via the story of an individual vocation, serve both as the focal point of Jeannelle's historical account (they are credited with a key role in the genre's renewal) and as a model of the genre's rhetorical and narrative features. Memoirs, as defined here, tell stories of memorable lives ('Vies majuscules'). They project a public image, develop a discourse of legitimization, and negotiate a space of consensus. They exist in reciprocal relation to other kinds of life writing but remain distinct from both introspective autobiographies ('Vies réfléchies') and survivors' testimonies ('Vies bouleversées') (p. 375). Offering far more than a historical survey, Jeannelle's book engages the relations between personal and collective memory (Bergson, Halbwachs), memory and history (Nora), human historicity and historical narrative (Heidegger, Ricoeur), and action and the public sphere (Arendt). Memoirs appear both as a stable model and as a highly variable set of practices, conditioned by the changing role of memory in contemporary culture. Jeannelle makes a powerful case for the genre's enduring literary and historical significance: memoirs orient a generation's apprehension and imagination of the past by delineating an intermediate space between lived experience and historical reconstitution (pp. 385-93). Reaching beyond memoirs, Jeannelle argues for a poetics of 'genres effectifs' (p. 323) — factual genres that have received inadequate attention from literary critics and narratologists. Bridging the gap between literary and historical scholarship, the book concludes with a salutary appeal to critics to renew their horizons of study.