Should we all spend a decade in the prison? This is what Jacques Benoist-Méchin thought, incarcerated from 1944 to 1954 in Fresnes, then on the Ile de Ré and finally in Clairvaux: “I find that it is a very great privilege in our time to be ten years old without worrying about housing, without taxes, without social security problem, without telephone, without untimely visits, except that we have the visiting room, we know what time One day, my friends who need to work and have time to work, I would put them in prison by special favor. ” Here we find the Dandy stoicism which will characterize Benoist-Méchin until his death in 1983.
Born in 1901, descendant of the baron of Empire Alexandre Méchin, the young Jacques grew up in a bourgeois family whose fortune is stretching. His first vocation is music: he imagines himself a composer. At the same time, at the dawn of the 1920s, he frequented rue de l’Odéon the famous bookstore of Adrienne Monnier. Although they are both homosexuals, Adrienne and Jacques become lovers, she even falls pregnant with him (this is one of the revelations of the book). The child will not see the light of day, and Adrienne will say of Jacques that he is “the least gifted being for the love that can exist”. If feelings are not his strong, he has a taste in literature and talent for foreign languages. Valery Larbaud invites him to help him translate Ulysses de Joyce, associated with Léon-Paul Fargue. But Fargue is a lazy, and Benoist-Méchin must ensure all the job. He frequents Joyce who, on his advice, changes the end ofUlysses (another scoop!). At the same time, eager to have Proust translated into German, the young man met the author of Research. True to his legend, and even to his circus, the latter receives him at the Ritz between 1 hour and 3 am. The “Assyrian mage” is in turn hilly and brittle. Benoist-Méchin will not see him again, but he will remain one of his idols …
Full of intuitions (then just), Benoist-Méchin tries to publish in France Metamorphosis From Kafka – Alas, no editor wants it. This man who holds as many cocteau as from Drieu La Rochelle crosses all the artistic gratin of his time (Diaghilev, Ravel, Stravinsky, Satie, Marie Laurencin, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Arno Breker…). Because he has to earn a living, he works for various media, including the international news service of the mirobolizing William Randolph Hearst (the man who inspired Citizen Kane in Orson Welles). These different experiences between France and America are worth in Benoist-Méchin to interview people as diverse as Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, DH Lawrence or Annunzio, which takes him this mind-blowing sentence: “Saint Francis of Assisi was the first fascist, and I am the last Franciscan.” Benoist-Méchin for his part does not love Mussolini, whom he judges “too tenor napolitan”. His hopes crystallize on another man: Adolf Hitler.
“Demonic fever”
Author in 1936 with Albin Michel of a History of the German army Very noticed, the 30 -year -old goes to the Berlin Olympic Games. He returned to Germany, where he met Leni Riefenstahl, Albert Speer and even Goering. Participating in 1938 in the Foundation of the French People’s Party of Doriot, he then won, according to his biographer, as “an ultra of collaboration”, by joining the Vichy regime as Secretary of State of the government of Admiral Darlan. He reached the Grail on May 11, 1941. In the company of Darlan and Otto Abetz, Benoist-Méchin went to the Berghof to visit the Führer, who made him this impression: “The dominant sensation that emerged from him was an indefinable mixture of isolation and power.”
Even after being dismissed from power by Laval, this collector of rare moments will live other memorable scenes. At the beginning of 1943, among the Morand, he discussed Ernst Jünger, who found him a “demonic feverishness”. At the same period, he dined at the German Embassy with Drieu La Rochelle, Gen Paul and Céline. The author of Bagatelles for a massacrein great shape, argues at the table that the Third Reich is doomed to annihilation – according to him Hitler is dead and has been replaced by a double! Dagging of the ambassador, all the service staff being under the orders of the Gestapo … The end of the war is less picturesque for Benoist-Méchin: accompanied by his mother, with whom he lives, he hides. Until his arrest on September 11, 1944.
Even in prison, this devil of a man attached to the art of conversation manages to make mundane. In Fresnes, he received the final confessions of Brasillach before his execution. He also sentenced to death, Benoist-Méchin is closely pardoned by Vincent Auriol (probably partly thanks to what he knows of the past of General June, not yet Marshal). Sent to Clairvaux, where he is supposed to serve a life imprisonment, he frequented Rebatet and especially Maurras. It was there, in his cell (“Refuge of the dream” according to him), that he prepares a hypothetical second life by fascinating himself for the Arab world. A sentence presentation offers him the freedom after ten years of a imprisonment which he was able to transform into a literary laboratory.
Shadow man in the service of French diplomacy
Barely out, still published by Albin Michel, he signed a resounding return with books on Mustapha Kemal and Ibn Séoud. Paris Match Send it in reporting through the East. Blocked following an intervention by Paul Reynaud, his articles do not appear. Whatever: he pulls it An Arab Springstill a success. Because he knew how to establish good relations with Nasser and Hassan II, he reinvents himself as a man in the shadows in the service of French diplomacy. In July 1974, the last incredible episode of a life that does not lack: Gaddafi summons it to Tripoli! He would like French to translate his speeches with us. If, well after Hitler, Benoist-Méchin sees his new providential man in Gaddafi, the project will not be done. Read and estimated by everyone (notably by Pompidou, Giscard, Mitterrand and Chirac), the erudite writer devotes himself to Longest dream in historya series of seven pounds with a large draw published between 1961 and 1980, devoted to Lawrence of Arabia, Alexandre Le Grand, Cleopatra, Bonaparte, Lyautey, the emperor Julien and Frédéric de Hohenstaufen. In an astonishing archive that we find on the internet, we see it, soon to be 80 years old, on the set ofApostrophesin 1979: Faced with a Bernard Pivot both a patelin and imprecise, Benoist-Méchin, supremely distinguished, explains to the assistance which was really Te Lawrence-as far as he is concerned, we will not know.
Page 152 of his book, Eric Roussel had picked up in three sentences the character’s psychology: “He will never be a money man, the material aspect of his situation will always leave him relatively indifferent. On the other hand, approaching power, even in full defeat, certainly fulfills his most secret wishes. It will be his drama: Housing on a scene which he could not control all the codes, get lost. ” Benoist-Méchin’s sulphurous sides will undoubtedly keep the beautiful souls of our time away from this rich biography. But it will fascinate those who are interested in behind the scenes of the 20th century as much as to the complexity of the human heart.
Until the end of the night. The lives of Jacques Benoist-Méchin 1901-1983. By Éric Roussel. Perrin, 404 p., € 24.90.
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