André Malraux (1901 - 1976) was a French author, art theorist, adventurer and statesman preeminent in the world of French politics and culture during his lifetime.
Malraux was born in Paris, the son of Fernand-Georges Malraux and Berthe Félicie Lamy. His parents separated in 1905 and eventually divorced. There are suggestions that Malraux's paternal grandfather committed suicide in 1909. Malraux was raised by his mother, maternal aunt Marie Lamy and maternal grandmother, Adrienne Lamy (née Romagna), who had a grocery store in the small town of Bondy. His father, a stockbroker, committed suicide in 1930 after the international crash of the stock market and onset of the Great Depression.
Malraux studied Oriental languages at the École des Langues Orientales but did not graduate. At the age of 21 he left for Cambodia with his new wife, Clara Goldschmidt, a German Jewish heiress whom he married in 1921 and divorced in 1946. (They had a daughter, Florence, born 1933, who married the filmmaker Alain Resnais.) In Cambodia he was arrested and almost imprisoned for trying to smuggle out a bas-relief from the Banteay Srei temple.
As a result of his experiences there, he became highly critical of the French colonial authorities in Indochina and in 1925 helped to organize the Young Annam League—he also founded the newspaper Indochina in Chains.
On his return to France he published his first novel, The Temptation of the West (1926). This was followed by The Conquerors (1928), The Royal Way (1930), and Man's Fate (1933). For the latter, a novel about the failed communist revolution that took place in Shanghai in 1927, and the existential quandaries facing a diverse group of people associated with the revolution, he won the 1933 Prix Goncourt of literature. Included in his non-published work is Mayrena, a novel about the eccentric French adventurer Marie-Charles David de Mayrena, conqueror of the highlands of Vietnam and first king of the Sedangs.
In the 1930s Malraux joined archeological expeditions to Iran and Afghanistan. He founded the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture with Louis Aragon. During the Spanish Civil War Malraux served as a pilot for the Republican forces. He was wounded twice during efforts to stop the Falangist takeover of Madrid. A novel about his Spanish war experiences, Man's Hope, appeared in 1938.
At the outbreak of the Second World War Malraux joined the French Army and served in a tank unit. He was captured in 1940 during the Western Offensive but escaped and joined the French Resistance. He was again captured by the Gestapo in 1944 and although he underwent a mock execution, was rescued by members of the resistance. He ended up leading Brigade Alsace-Lorraine in defense of Strasbourg and in the takeover of Stuttgart. He was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance, the Croix de Guerre, and the British Distinguished Service Order.
During the war he worked on a long novel, The Struggle Against the Angel, the manuscript of which was destroyed by the Gestapo upon his capture in 1944. A surviving opening book to The Struggle Against the Angel, named The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, was published after the war. It would be his final novel.
Malraux had two sons by Josette Clotis: Pierre-Gauthier (1940-1961) and Vincent (1943-1961). Josette was killed in an accident in 1944 while Malraux was fighting in Alsace, having slipped while boarding a train. Both their sons would die in a single automobile accident, seventeen years later.
Malraux met General Charles De Gaulle during the war; after it was over De Gaulle appointed Malraux as his minister of information (1945-1946), a post which he held for ten years. After the war, Malraux turned his back on fiction, preferring to focus on art and aesthetics. He developed the concept of the pan-cultural "Museum Without Walls" in such books as Voices of Silence. He again became minister for information in 1958, and France's first Minister of Culture from 1960 to 1969. In 1948 Malraux married Marie-Madeleine Lioux, a concert pianist and the widow of his half-brother, Roland Malraux. They separated in 1966.
During the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote books about Pablo Picasso, whom he knew well, and Charles de Gaulle, as well as an autobiography (Antimemoires). During this time he also wrote an important series of works on art (La Métamorphose des dieux). Malraux's last political engagement was in support of Bangladesh in its 1971 secession from Pakistan. According to his biographer, Olivier Todd (Malraux: A Life), André Malraux had Tourette syndrome. In 1974 he wrote a moving memoir, Lazarus, of one of his own final illnesses.
Malraux died in Créteil, near Paris from a lung embolism. He was a heavy smoker and had cancer. In 1996, on the 20th anniversary of his death, his body was enshrined in the Panthéon in Paris.
Music Credits: In the desert by Savfk
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