Spring 1921: with their usual humor, the Dadaists organize a false trial of Maurice Barrès. The indictment is presented as follows: “The problem is to know to what extent a man can be held guilty whose desire for power leads him to champion conformist ideas most contrary to those of his youth. Comment the author ofA free man could he have become the propagandist of The Echo of Paris ?”
To this happening chaired by André Breton we meet Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Jacques Rigaut… If these avant-gardists attack Barrès, it is because they regret the evolution of the man they see as an old reference. It must be remembered that Barrès was not always a notorious anti-Dreyfusard, then the cantor of the homeland, “the earth and the dead”. He had anarchist leanings before taking the side of order. In the 1880s, the writer with Stendhalian egotism was for a time the idol of a certain youth. Not having his tongue in his pocket, he liked to make fun of the two thought leaders of the time (Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Taine) with an irony announcing that of Arthur Cravan. Marcel Proust saw in him “a deadpan Chateaubriand” when Albert Thibaudet found in him an air of resemblance to the Grand Condé. In 1921, water flowed under the bridges: the former literary rebel was a venerable academician, also a deputy for Paris. In 1923, he died. His novels are gradually disappearing from the collective memory and we only remember, and still very vaguely, his political positions.
A hundred years later, another academician, Antoine Compagnon, wanted to bring this once-important author back into the spotlight by devoting a fascinating collective book to him, In the shadow of Maurice Barrès. An approach that he explains to us as follows: “After the celebrations of the centenary of Proust’s death in 2022, I was involved in the 150th anniversary of the birth of Colette. It disturbed me that there were so many things for Colette, and nothing for Péguy, even though he was born like her in 1873. I said to myself that the 100th anniversary of Barrès’ death should be marked a little. So I proposed this little volume. And I insisted on of Antoine Gallimard so that his house reprints the Folio of Uprooted – which is the case this fall. Jean Borie made a version at the end of the 1980s. It didn’t sell very much. But since Gallimard had the book in its collection, a reprint was worth it…”
As Compagnon points out in his introduction, Barrès was very well published until the 1960s, when Bernard de Fallois included several of his titles in the Livre de Poche catalog, in the same way as Proust, who was taking off. May 68 and the evolution of society were fatal to an old French writer who could only fall into disuse. Compagnon also notes an important point: the posterity of Barrès could have been very different if he had been historically published by Gallimard. Former pillar of the house, the sulphurous Drieu la Rochelle has entered the Pléiade. Linked to Plon and Emile-Paul Frères, Barrès could not count on this anointing, as it is true that Gallimard has exercised a sort of monopoly on our literary history for a century.
“An amateur, in politics as in art”
Here’s to the editorial cooking questions. How can we explain more deeply the “cancellation” of Barrès that Compagnon speaks of? His unforgivable fault remains his famous sentence said in 1899, in the middle of the Dreyfus affair: “That he is capable of betraying, I conclude from his race.” Without excusing it at all, let us point out that Barrès renounced his anti-Semitism in 1917 with an ecumenical essay, The Various Spiritual Families of France. In In the shadow of Maurice Barrès, Michel Winock, author of a chapter, writes: “His artistic temperament lends itself poorly to sectarianism.” And he adds further: “His Notebooks and his romantic work testify to a sensitivity which protected him from fanaticism.” An opinion shared by Compagnon: “Barrès is above all an aesthete: he never had very firm opinions. It’s not a weather vane, but it varied. Although he was a nationalist, he always remained Stendhalian. We’re talking about an amateur, in politics as in art.”
A great admirer of Barrès, André Malraux formulated this point differently in an interview given in 1968: “He was a corporal in politics while in the field of literature he was a general.” From Saint-Simon to Chateaubriand, the list is long of great French writers who were unable to forge the destiny in politics that they hoped for. As Compagnon tells us: “The MP Barrès had some enthusiasm, like his campaign for scientific research in the early 1920s, but he has no political record…”
Barrès’ trajectory can recall that of Paul Morand, a generation later: these two travel-loving writers embodied youth for a time before getting lost in risky ideological choices. In his book as well as during the interview he gives us, Compagnon raises an interesting question: when you start to slip up, you might as well be a die-hard. For what ? “We could seek to make Barrès worse than he was to give him the appeal of absolute evil. The maneuver was successful for certain writers whose ignominy was highlighted. Thus, we have, if not rehabilitated, at least made a Léon Daudet or a Lucien Rebatet exciting, because of the excess or the abjection of their writing, or even Céline or Maurras. But there is no reason to go that far with Barrès…”
The paradoxical drama of Barrès
To conclude, Compagnon is asked what, in his opinion, is the worst risk of cancellation for a writer, between ideas and private life. Gabriel Matzneff fell for the second reason. As for Michel Houellebecq, his right-wing attitude caused him problems, but if he is currently going through a bad patch, it is more because of his pornographic film shot in the Netherlands. What to say about Barrès? “His private life is irreproachable, the academician answers us. There is the suicide of his nephew, an apparently platonic passion for the poet Anna de Noailles… No sexual scandal in his file. Perhaps that is what would make it interesting, on the contrary! Take Colette: the fascination she currently exercises is largely linked to her free life, to her divorces, to her relationships with women and young people… There is a curiosity about that, so that it is non-existent in Barrès. Barrès is the son of a provincial rentier, a rentier himself. He does not have the character of a bohemian character”
Here is the paradoxical drama of Barrès: he is considered unfrequentable, and, at the same time, he is too smooth to enjoy the credit of the accursed, in the manner of a Rebatet, whose reissue of Rubble at Bouquins had been a bookstore success in 2015. While the announced and postponed publication of Céline’s pamphlets will sooner or later end up seeing the light of day in Pléiade, Barrès is inexorably moving away. It remains to reread it. To those who would be tempted, Compagnon gives this advice: “In my opinion, we must start by The Uprooted, taking advantage of the reprint in Folio. I remain faithful to what the great Barrésian Aragon said, who saw it as the model for his book The Communists. The Uprooted, it is the novel of a generation, and the novel of adolescence. There are a lot of reasons to go back there as a priority.”
In the shadow of Maurice Barrès
Collective work under the direction of Antoine Compagnon.
Gallimard, 171 p., €18.
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