Francois Mauriac's 'Le cahier noir'

...He must fight on in Mauriac's Le cahier noir deserves to be ment...

...voice heard as an opponent of Hitler and in particular of Nazi racial laws...

...He also lashes out at those Frenchmen in Catholic attitudes...

...Two other major nov- elected one of the forty "immortals" of the els of the' 20s, The Desert of Love (Le desert French Academy...

...Mauriac and his wife, So that He Will Regain Hope," this short seen at Austerlitz Station transporting the four children and the maid, all moved essay marked Mauriac's complete passage Jewish children out of the city one dark to the ground floor where they would re- from the Right and Center Right to the morning...

...It shows the workings Catholic hierarchy and Catholics gener- served despite ill health in the ambulance of grace in the soul of its principal proally in democracies like France, Great corps during World War I, and began to tagonist without his being aware of it, and Britain, and the United States, from po- find his audience as a writer beginning with has lost none of its bite over the years...

...he used the pseudonym of Forez...

...He argues that once (about fifty miles from Bordeaux) and by ground that Le cahier noir appeared in you despise man, you can abuse individthe fall of 1940 a German officer and his 1943...

...His outspoken support of Jews and Jewish causes dates from this time...

...It was published in Paris 1941 to 1943, as the resistance to German the first issue of Le Figaro appeared on in 1941, sold 40,000 copies in three months, occupation grew, an unlikely alliance de- August 25, 1944, the day on which Paris and was violently attacked by Drieu La veloped between two groups that had pre- was liberated, Mauriac wrote the front-page Rochelle, the leading collaborationist in- viously been enemies in France: traditional essay on De Gaulle and his achievement, tellectual...

...recognized that criticism of this kind from London, where it was immediately trans- -Francois Mauriac his ` freres enemis," was perhaps in part lated by a young intelligence officer Le cahier noir justified...

...El Commonweal 23 April 1993: 23...

...But by 1939, as professor Jean Touzot of the Sorbonne has pointed out, Mauriac was the foremost political journalist in France precisely because of his independence...

...keep a low profile, especially since his ical pessimism of Nazi ideology and quotes When the war came in 1940, Mauriac name was being regularly mentioned in Goethe and Grimm as kindred spirits...

...The God that they published his study of the Catholic reviv l profit as the publishers of Samuel Beckett serve, this God who has given them a of the preceding fifty years, Le renouveau and several of the practitioners of the nou- heart capable of knowing him and lov- catholique dans la litterature francaise, veau roman, most notably Alain Robbe- ing him, hardly turned himself away he went out of his way to exclude Mauriac Grillet...

...His watched and waited...

...This was sym- Le premier des notres ("The First among Vatican II spirituality, the accumulation of bolized by De Gaulle's flag: the traditional Us...

...Since God remembered...

...Later, during the cold war, manipulations of others for their own spir- color with a crucifix added, the so-called when so many of his Communist allies itual good, La pharisienne is Mauriac's Cross of Lorraine...

...The the right to flee from man by taking At about this time, Mauriac underwent book hardly reached a wide audience in refuge in God, Christians are called a spiritual crisis in which he seems to have France, but after it was smuggled to upon to find God in men...

...In the English speaking internationalism and cosmopolitanism...

...When of the Pharisees...

...The demarcation line French broadcasts on the BBC as one of quarrel is not with the German people but between occupied and free French zones those Frenchmen who represented the true with the ideology that has temporarily ran right through his property at Malagar spirit of France...

...The deserves for his political positions during Pharisees who had welcomed the abysmal Christian, he argues, cannot withdraw this period...

...It is against this back- taken over their nation...

...They acshort work was published in the dark days the ease way out and succumb to in- cused him of using the Catholic world of of 1943 by the clandestine Resistance difference, symbol and metaphor to glorify sin and sinpublishing house Les Editions de Minuit Especially _for Christians, indif j`e r- ners...

...France to had displayed against Nazism...

...They saw the book as an him is still "a seamless garment" (he had recent study of this period, Past Imperfect allegory of their own political and social invented this term in 1938 when referring (University of California Press), begins to situation, in which they were now being to the place of Jews in French society and restore to Mauriac the recognition that he forced to do penance for the sins of the he continues the metaphor here...

...It has become a classic text for the merits through private devotions, and the Republican and anticlerical French tri- French people...

...He apologized to no one...

...Ostensibly dealing with pre- Catholics and Communists...

...The was in London, Jacques Maritain in New eral that he wrote along these lines in the essay also served as a useful corrective to York (as De Gaulle's unofficial ambas- '30s, was Vipers' Tangle (Noeud de those who might have been tempted to sador), and Georges Bernanos in Rio, viperes, 1933...

...tain before he was forty what the French But then a funny thing happened...

...When in 1927 the Abbe Jean Calvet (which after the war went on to fame and ence is impossible...

...Among the sevical reasons for continuing the war...

...The fact that as a jourDAVID O'CONNELL is professor of French and de l'amour) in 1925 and Therese nalist he was an enfant terrible of the pochair of the department at Georgia State Desqueyroux in 1927, enabled him to at- litical Right, did not hurt his candidacy...

...But the disorder we find our- Bethleem as well as by the editors of the one of the foremost political journalists of selves in is our business: it concerns still powerful Catholic daily newspaper, La his day...

...INDIFFERENCE IS IMPOSSIBLE' Frangois Mciuriuc's'Le cahier noir' DAVID O'CONNELL Ir his year marks the fiftieth an- hyperbolically call "la gloire litteraire...

...From mid- name a symbol of the Allied cause...

...When 22: 23 April 1993 Commonweal Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and Franco declared war on the Spanish Republic, Mauriac joined the voices of the Left in denouncing these events...

...University in Atlanta...

...So, far from having certainly not a "Catholic novelist...

...Beginning around 1937, he also began to make his...

...He took to heart the words of adnamed Robert Speaight (who later became vice given to him by his friend MaritainMauriac's biographer), it took on a life of that a Catholic novelist ought to "purify its own as one of the Allies' major prop- the source" of his inspiration before writaganda essays...

...from the Resistance years migrated to the most religious and most profound novel...

...Born into a wealthy Bordeaux family, campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, Mauriac's shift from the Right to the Mauriac migrated to Paris in 1906, mar- 1936), is one of the most important Left in the late ' 30s is a paradigm of a larg- ried a girl from his own social milieu in Catholic novels in twentieth-century er transformation: the movement of the 1913 (and soon became a father of four), French literature...

...And the Word became flesh and "Catholic who writes novels," but he was enemies among France's intellectual class, lived among us...

...ing-and set about writing novels that world, it offered religious and philosoph- In 1943 and 1944, while Charles De Gaulle would be more edifying...

...eth century and symbolizes a major change the barbed wire of Nazi censorship...

...Mauriac's stature as a patriotic the name of human values...

...It reminds us of the personFrenchman reached a new height in this chose to assume human form through the al courage displayed by one of the most year, for readers marveled that he had Incarnation, the believing Christian, he ar- important Catholic laymen of the twentibeen able to get a book like this through gues, really has no choice in the matter...

...This novel, along with think that French Catholics had accepted Mauriac remained in France...

...In these conditions Center Left, .and expressed a huge men- This essay and the patriotic conduct that Mauriac wrote what some would call his tal shift that was simultaneously taking went with it during the war made Mauriac's greatest novel, La pharisienne (Woman place among French Catholics...

...Georges Bernanos's Journal d'un cure de the New Order in France...

...niversary of the publication Goethe in his old age, on the thresh- During the '20s, while his reputation was of Francois Mauriac's Black old of eternity, no longer wanted to think on the rise, Mauriac was also the subject Notebook, a little-known but about the world of politics, or what he of constant attacks by a combative priest essential essay by one of this called a "disorder of error and vio- with the improbable name of the Abbe century's greatest Catholic novelists, and lence...

...from the bloody history of humanity, from his approved list of Catholic writers, Since by 1943 the Gestapo considered but on the contrary plunged himself into claiming that Mauriac might indeed be a Mauriac (1885-1970) one of its principal it...

...The traditional Catholic Right was offended by all these positions and would never forgive Mauriac...

...Under the title Le cahier noir this us and we will he cowards if we take Croix, run by the Assumptionists...

...defeat of the previous summer and who from politics and retreat in disgust into his Although largely forgotten today, were now in control of the Vichy govern- own private world...

...Written in the dark days of 1941 and ual human beings, treating them like anentourage were billeted on the second tentatively titled "To a Man in Despair, imals, and he refers to the cattle car he had floor of his home...

...Mauriac's essay states the case for com- Soviet side of the national debate, Mauriac But to many Frenchmen in the summer and mitted, socially conscious Catholicism, would not follow them but opposed fall of 1941, the book was read as a com- which today represents the Catholic cen- Marxism with the same virulence that he mentary on their condition, or as a roman ter in the Western democracies...

...He said what he knew to be right and based his opinions unabashedly on gospel val- Now more and more, Mauriac had to who had been seduced by the philosophues...

...litical conservatism and philosophical pes- the novel A Kiss for the Leper (Le baiser By 1933 Mauriac, still not yet fifty, was simism to an alliance with the forces of au lepreux) in 1922...

...Tony Judt's de l'occupation...

...main until 1944...