François Mauriac (1885-1970)

The novelist of sin and grace

Mauriac built his entire work around a precise theological conviction: the blackest evil is never the last word on a soul, because God keeps acting within it even in refusal. He formulated it himself in an essay of his youth written in the midst of a spiritual crisis: "Christianity does not accommodate the flesh; it abolishes it."^[5] Far from easy optimism, this conviction was born of a real struggle: Mauriac never pulls his characters back from drowning, he simply holds out to them, throughout the novel, a lifebuoy they remain free to grasp.^[6] But this 1928 formula expresses a crisis, not his definitive doctrine: as early as the 1931 reissue bringing together Souffrances and Bonheur du chrétien, Mauriac himself warned that the earlier text "no longer corresponded to what he held to be true".^[7]

A Christian "torn" between the Enlightenment and the Gospel

Mauriac himself admitted that he did not possess the serene peace of a Jacques Maritain: he envied in his philosopher friend that tranquillity of certainty which he himself never knew.^[8] This permanent tension between desire and law, between the critical intelligence of the age and fidelity to a Catholic childhood, is the keystone of his whole work, and the reason why some Catholics of his time suspected him, wrongly, of indulgence toward the sin he described with such truthfulness.

The journalist as the conscience of France

From his Nobel Prize (1952) onward, Mauriac invented the bloc-notes, a weekly column published successively in La Table ronde, L'Express and then Le Figaro littéraire, in which he committed his pen to the great debates of his time: decolonization, torture, Gaullism.^[9] This was a rare case of a Catholic writer whose moral authority weighed directly on French political life, even influencing, according to historians, the course of the debate on torture in Algeria.^[10]

A Bordeaux childhood in mourning and faith (1885-1898)

François Charles Mauriac was born on 11 October 1885 at 86 rue du Pas-Saint-Georges in Bordeaux, the last of the five children of Jean-Paul Mauriac, a merchant, and Claire Coiffard.^[11] His father died before he was ten, an early bereavement that brings his youth, biographically, close to that of André Gide, with whom he would later maintain an intellectual relationship made of admiration and mistrust.^[12] His mother raised her five children alone "with some severity" and an intense Catholic devotion that left a lasting mark on the writer's imagination.^[13] The child learned to read and write on rue du Mirail with Sister Adrienne, alongside his oldest Bordeaux friend, Martial Piéchaud.^[14]

Grand-Lebrun then the Bordeaux faculty: secondary and higher education (1892-1907)

From 1892 onward, Mauriac pursued his primary then secondary studies with the Marianists, at the Institution Sainte-Marie de Grand-Lebrun in Caudéran, where he formed a lifelong friendship with André Lacaze.^[15] There he completed his secondary schooling (baccalaureate in 1904), then prepared a licence in literature at the Bordeaux faculty (licence obtained in 1906) before leaving Bordeaux for Paris in 1907.^[16] It is from this Christian education marked by puritanism, often, a little hastily, called "Jansenism", that the obsession with the "sin of the flesh" was born which would run through the novelist's entire work.^[17] The Bordeaux of his childhood, the old centre around rue du Mirail near the Grosse Cloche, the Gironde moors, the pines and the vineyards, would ceaselessly nourish the settings of his novels.^[18]

"Christianity does not accommodate the flesh; it abolishes it." François Mauriac, Souffrances du chrétien, La Nouvelle Revue Française, no. 181, October 1928, pp. 461-487^[19]

This sentence, written in the midst of a spiritual crisis, expresses the implicit theology received in childhood: a Christianity of radical demand, with no compromise with the powers of the body. The novelist spent his life exploring, as an artist, its shadow zones and psychological dead ends, after himself distancing himself from this early text, which he acknowledged as early as 1931 "no longer corresponded to what he held to be true", and which Bonheur du chrétien (1929) had already begun to move beyond: "the law of the spirit is the very law of the flesh".^[20]

The École des Chartes and the choice of literature (1907-1909)

After secondary studies in Bordeaux and preparation for the licence in literature, Mauriac moved to Paris in 1907 to attempt the entrance examination of the École des Chartes.^[21] He was admitted the following year, but resigned in 1909: historical scholarship did not hold him, he felt called to literary creation rather than to the working life of an archivist-paleographer.^[22] This choice, renouncing a secure career for the uncertainty of literature, marks the first act of independence of a young man hitherto entirely shaped by his family and his religious upbringing.

Marriage to Jeanne Lafon and family life (1913- )

On 2 June 1913, in Talence, Mauriac married Jeanne Lafon, daughter of Marc Lafon, a Polytechnique graduate and paymaster general of the Gironde, and Léonie Bouchard; the two young people had met through a mutual friend, the writer Jeanne Alleman, who published under the masculine pseudonym Jean Balde.^[23] From this union were born four children, all born in Paris: Claude (1914-2008), who would become a writer and private secretary to General de Gaulle; Claire (1917); Luce (1919); and Jean (1924).^[24] His literary beginnings preceded the war: after the poetry collection Les Mains jointes (1909), praised by Maurice Barrès in 1910, then Adieu à l'adolescence (1911) and two novels (L'Enfant chargé de chaînes, 1913; La Robe prétexte, 1914), he was sent to Salonika in 1914 but, declared unfit for health reasons, took little part in the fighting.^[25]

Malagar, a land of writing

In 1927, following a family division of property, Mauriac became the owner of the Malagar estate in Saint-Maixant, in Gironde, the house where his adolescence had ended and which would remain, until his death, the favoured place of his writing and his holidays.^[26] Given by his four children to the region (today the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region), Malagar has become a cultural centre and a place of memory open to the public.^[27]

The first great novels (1922-1925)

After a few youthful attempts, Mauriac found his own voice with a series of brief, dense novels that established his definitive world: Le Baiser au lépreux (1922), Le Fleuve de feu and Génitrix (1923), Le Désert de l'amour (1925), the last earning him the Grand Prix du roman of the Académie française in 1926.^[47] These narratives share the same soil: the provincial Gironde bourgeoisie, its arranged marriages, its family hatreds, and the emotional solitude of characters who seek love without ever managing to name it correctly.

Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927): the trial of bourgeois marriage

The novel opens with these words: "The lawyer opened a door. Thérèse Desqueyroux, in that hidden corridor of the courthouse, felt the mist on her face and breathed it in deeply."^[48] Thérèse has just escaped conviction for attempting to poison her husband, Bernard. A superficial reading would see in this rebellious woman the emancipation of an independent will; but Mauriac refuses both angelism and despair: to the very end, he leaves Thérèse free to grasp or reject the grace offered to her.^[49] The novel was written at the heart of the grave spiritual crisis Mauriac was then going through, whose easing is dated to 1928, under the influence of mentors such as Jacques Maritain.^[50]

Le Nœud de vipères (1932): grace at the bottom of hatred

Considered by many his masterpiece, Le Nœud de vipères takes the form of a long letter which Louis, a wealthy Bordeaux lawyer consumed by angina, addresses to his wife Isa to confess the hatred she has inspired in him for decades.^[51] The novel opens thus: "You will be surprised to discover this letter in my safe, on top of a bundle of securities."^[52] This posthumous settling of scores, since the letter is meant to be read only after Louis's death, nevertheless shifts, in the final pages, into an unexpected movement of forgiveness and openness to grace, which has led generations of Catholic readers to say that this novel is the most perfect illustration of the Mauriac theology of salvation from the depths of evil.

In it, Louis settles accounts with his own: what he earned over years he judges dreadful, that money they would strip him of; and, at moments, a presence that withdraws and softens him, then returns like a flood that covers him. (Paraphrase of the argument of Louis's letter to Isa.^[53])

La Pharisienne (1941): false holiness unmasked

Published in the midst of the Occupation, La Pharisienne stages Brigitte Pian, a rigid devotee who scrupulously observes Catholic precepts but attaches more formal importance to them than real content, and who, fortified by her clear conscience, harshly judges and oppresses those around her under cover of spiritual perfection.^[54] The novel surprises at the time of its appearance: the author, himself a known and practising Catholic, shows the excesses and almost deviant character of an extreme religious practice, in which the will to holiness can become a disguised name for pride, insensitivity and the most destructive of sins, the sin of believing oneself without sin.^[55] The German Propaganda-Abteilung, worried by the book's success, first limited its print run to 5,000 copies; the publisher Bernard Grasset obtained permission to raise it to 25,000 after intervening with the German authorities, and the edition sold out within weeks.^[56] Following this episode, according to several biographers, Mauriac chose to join the Resistance.^[57]

Style and method: "God and the novelist"

Mauriac constantly faced the Catholic novelist's dilemma: avoiding the overly edifying, preachy tone of so-called "respectable" novels, painting evil and vice in their dark truth, not falsifying life, but risking, in doing so, making the flesh, passion and evil he describes attractive in the eyes of an unwary reader.^[58] He was the novelist of sin only because he believed there is no greater grace than hearing the Lord himself say, through the mouth of the priest: "Your sins are forgiven."

"Souffrances du chrétien": the cry of a torn man

In October 1928, Mauriac published a resounding essay in La Nouvelle Revue Française, Souffrances du chrétien, a cry of pain and indignation, a revolt of his whole being against what he then perceived as the tyranny of a religion that systematically pits spirit against flesh.^[59] The text confronts head-on the question that would haunt his entire work: if suffering can be redemptive, is love, even happy love, not also an inexhaustible source of pain? But the essay does not stop at this painful observation; it already answers as a Christian, giving pain a meaning: suffered in imitation of the crucified God and in union with him, it lets us share in his agony and cooperate in the redemption of the world. (Paraphrase.^[60]) A year later came the positive reply, Bonheur du chrétien (NRF, 1929); the two texts were brought together by Grasset in 1931 under the title Souffrances et bonheur du chrétien, Mauriac noting by then that the first "no longer corresponded to what he held to be true".^[61]

"Dieu et Mammon" (1929): answering Gide without choosing

Dieu et Mammon is an essay first published in 1929, Mauriac's reply to the questions André Gide had addressed to him as an epistolary challenge, following the publication of La Vie de Jean Racine (1928), Gide pressing Mauriac to choose at last between God and his human passions.^[62] In it, Mauriac explains at length why he cannot renounce a grace received from his childhood education, and faces his own contradiction without claiming to overcome it.^[63] It is the founding text of what critics would call his permanent "torn" condition between the novelist of the flesh and the Christian of childhood, a tension Mauriac would never resolve through theoretical synthesis, but would transform, novel after novel, into literary material.

Maritain's call for pure art and Mauriac's reply

In 1927, in Art et scolastique, the philosopher Jacques Maritain had called on the Catholic novelist never to connive in any way with the evil he depicts.^[64] This text sparked a substantial philosophical debate between the two men on the place of evil in art and literature. Mauriac went through a grave spiritual crisis in 1928 and often confided that he envied Maritain his peaceful serenity; their friendship, founded on mutual respect and a shared intellectual concern for Catholicism, lasted more than forty years.^[65] An abundant crossed correspondence between Maritain, Mauriac, Claudel and Bernanos, published under the title Un catholique n'a pas d'alliés, shows how these four great figures of the Catholic revival, united by faith, remained divided on major political and religious questions: the condemnation of Action française, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of antisemitism.^[66]

The accusation of Jansenism

Mauriac's orthodoxy was doubted by many Catholics, even after his election to the Académie française (1933) and his Nobel Prize (1952).^[67] Some critics judged certain novelistic emphases theologically questionable: the omnipresence of sin, the idea that no lasting and happy human love could be possible, a valorization of suffering that seemed to exist for its own sake, and what they called the "reversibility of merits".^[68] The Catholic press of his day denounced in turn his "immoralism" and his "Jansenism", reproaching him for exposing the believing reader to doubt about the paths of salvation.^[69]

Ignispedia receives this accusation with the nuance it deserves, distinguishing three things: the moral rigorism of his Bordeaux upbringing, the literary use of "Jansenism" by critics, and the doctrine condemned under that name. Neither the expiatory reading of Christ's death nor the communion of spiritual goods (the "reversibility of merits" properly understood) are Jansenist in themselves: they are Catholic doctrines (CCC 614; 1474-1477). Condemned Jansenism, properly speaking, rests on two precise theses: irresistible grace, a grace which the will of the predestined could not resist, and restricted predestination, salvation reserved to a small number, independently of man's free cooperation. Yet Mauriac's published work expounds neither: his insistence on the weight of sin and the slowness of conversion reflects a moral rigorism inherited from his upbringing, not adherence to the condemned doctrine, and his explicit theology, that of Souffrances et bonheur du chrétien (1931), insists on the contrary on man's free cooperation in his own redemption.^[70]

La Pharisienne: the harshest charge against devotion without love

Mauriac's most theologically daring novel remains La Pharisienne (1941), in which the author, a recognized practicing Catholic, unsparingly exposes the deviations of a rigorist piety that judges, oppresses and gives itself a good conscience.^[71] Far from attacking faith, this novel defends its authenticity against its most dangerous counterfeit: holiness that takes itself as its own object, rather than letting itself be pierced by the love of God and neighbor.

Is "the Catholic novelist" an oxymoron? Sartre against Mauriac

On 1 February 1939, in issue 305 of La Nouvelle Revue Française, Jean-Paul Sartre, then little known to the general public while Mauriac was the author of seventeen novels, published a famous article, "M. François Mauriac et la liberté", devoted to the novel La Fin de la nuit.^[72] Sartre reproached Mauriac with depriving his characters of all true freedom, by using an omniscient narrator who knows and dictates their most intimate thoughts, thus reducing the novel to an excessive hereditary and social determinism.^[73] The article ends with a formula that became famous: "God is not an artist. Neither is Mr. Mauriac."^[74]

"God is not an artist. Neither is Mr. Mauriac." by Jean-Paul Sartre, "M. François Mauriac et la liberté", La Nouvelle Revue Française, no. 305, 1 February 1939^[75]

This criticism bears first on a precise point of novelistic technique: the use of the omniscient narrator and the weight given to heredity and social background, which would leave the characters only an apparent freedom.^[76] The answer is not to dismiss it as "atheist", but to distinguish two orders: the freedom of the character within the narrative and the theological freedom of the soul before God. That a novelist knows and shows the conditionings weighing on his creatures is not equivalent to denying their inner freedom, any more than divine foreknowledge abolishes that of men. Beyond the technical disagreement, a real difference of anthropology remains: on one side, a freedom without nature or grace; on the other, a wounded freedom that is never wholly enslaved.

In 1936, Mauriac published with Flammarion Vie de Jésus, a 284-page work that claims to be no scientific, historical or critical exegesis, but a spiritual meditation following the spiritual meaning of the Gospel step by step.^[77] The book is as much the testimony of a believer as the text of a writer, carried by flashes of faith and the literary art that characterize Mauriac at his best.^[78] This undertaking, which other great Catholic writers of his generation would also attempt, shows how much the generation of the Catholic literary revival sought, through literature, to make the voice of the Gospels heard again by a cultivated but dechristianized readership.

On 1 June 1933, Mauriac was elected to the Académie française in seat 22, succeeding Eugène Brieux, on the first ballot with twenty-eight votes.^[79] He was received on 16 November 1933 by André Chaumeix, whose reply, full of praise, did not refrain from a veiled criticism that became famous: hailing in Mauriac a "great master of bitterness", Chaumeix said he had almost mistaken "the Gironde for a river of fire, and Guyenne for a nest of vipers" (speech of 16 November 1933; fragments cited separately).^[80]

The allusion, learned and cruel at once, plays on the titles of Le Fleuve de feu (1923) and Le Nœud de vipères (published in 1932, one year earlier), proof, if any were needed, that Mauriac's darkness troubled even the heart of the institution that had just honored him. In 1934, the house of Cartier engraved intertwined serpents on his academician's sword, in direct reference to the novel.^[81]

During the Occupation, Mauriac chose intellectual resistance, condemning "the excess of humiliated prostrations that served as policy for the men of Vichy".^[82] He contributed to the first issue of the clandestine Lettres françaises in 1942 and published clandestinely, in 1943, under the pseudonym Forez, Le Cahier noir, with the Éditions de Minuit.^[83] Begun at the very start of the Occupation under the provisional title Lettre à un désespéré pour qu'il espère, the work stigmatizes the attitude of Marshal Pétain and of French people who accepted collaboration with the occupier; its final version bears the trace of notes taken successively during the dark years, revealing a growing indignation against a culture of renunciation, leading its author from despair to anger and then to active opposition.^[84]

In the last ten years of his life, Mauriac found in General de Gaulle the statesman matching his wishes, embodying the values for which this "torn Christian" had fought.^[85]

An invented genre, a direct influence

The 1952 Nobel Prize marks, for Mauriac, the starting point of a new career: he devotes himself almost entirely to journalistic work, often polemical and political, through the weekly column he invents and names bloc-notes, published successively in La Table ronde, L'Express, then Le Figaro littéraire from 1952 to 1970.^[86] The reference edition, established by Jean Touzot and prefaced by Jean-Luc Barré, gathers these columns in two volumes with Robert Laffont, in the "Bouquins" collection (2020): volume 1 (1952-1962) and volume 2 (1963-1970).^[87]

Denouncing torture during the Algerian War

From his very first bloc-notes, Mauriac tackles the colonial question and places it at the heart of his political struggle, in the name of Christian humanism and a patriotism without complacency.^[88] The articles he published had a real influence on the course of political life, especially during the Algerian War, when Mauriac condemns torture: from 5 November 1954, in L'Express, the day after All Saints' Day, he has only one cry: "The police must be stopped from torturing."^[89] Though far from indulgent, Mauriac speaks as a Christian in the name of justice and charity, convictions that inspire his fight for decolonization and against all forms of oppression and discrimination.^[90]

De Gaulle, the Fifth Republic and the "torn Christian"

After his Nobel Prize, the Catholic writer again places his fame at the service of political causes, chairing the France-Maghreb committee on the Moroccan affair, then denouncing torture and pleading for negotiation with the FLN during the Algerian War.^[91] His support for General de Gaulle, constant since the Resistance, culminates in the last years of his life, when he sees in the man of 18 June the political incarnation of his own struggle for a France faithful to itself and to its Christian values.^[92]

In May 1955, the young journalist and camp survivor Elie Wiesel obtains a decisive interview with François Mauriac; a year later, he submits to him the manuscript of a testimony that Mauriac helps have published by the Éditions de Minuit in 1958, under the title La Nuit, with a preface by Mauriac himself.^[93] In it, Mauriac presents Wiesel's testimony as a book apart, beyond comparison with any other. (Paraphrase.^[94])

In his preface, Mauriac seeks to answer Wiesel's text sincerely while situating it within a Christian frame of thought; he perceives nonetheless that Zion has risen from the crematoria and the charnel houses, and that the Jewish nation has risen again from among these millions of dead.^[95] This reading, imbued with his own theology of hope, may have been questioned by some commentators as reflecting a tension between Wiesel's Jewish perspective and the Christian framework in which Mauriac places the Holocaust, but it attests, unambiguously, to the Catholic writer's constant commitment against antisemitism and for the memory of the Jewish people.

Late in life, Mauriac published with Grasset, in the collection of the same name, an autobiographical essay in which he set out what he had believed all his life and what he still believed in his old age: Ce que je crois (1962).^[96] The book opens with a fundamental distinction between believing and knowing:

"What I believe is not the same as what I know: that is a first ambiguity to clear up." François Mauriac, Ce que je crois, Grasset, 1962^[97]

In it he develops a conception of faith less intellectual than loving: faith as assent to what we do not see and love of what we do not feel, making believing and loving one and the same thing, a formula that retrospectively illuminates all his novels. (Paraphrase: only the opening sentence is quoted verbatim above.^[98]) After half a century of novels haunted by sin and doubt, this last major text confirms that Mauriac's faith, far from a mere bourgeois habit inherited from childhood, was a considered allegiance lived out to the end.

François Mauriac died in Paris on 1 September 1970, at the age of eighty-four.^[99] Three weeks before his death, he was still writing notes for his Bloc-notes, published posthumously, in which he recalled, amid post-conciliar doubt, that as long as men remain to believe in the living Bread, nothing will be lost.^[100] His funeral was celebrated at Notre-Dame de Paris on 5 September 1970, in the presence of President Georges Pompidou, received by Mgr Marty, Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, members of the government and many academicians; he was then buried in the small cemetery of Vémars (Val-d'Oise), where his wife Jeanne Lafon owned the Château de la Motte, now the village town hall.^[101]

A Work Still Debated

Mauriac's work continues to divide Catholic and academic critics: some see in it the summit of the 20th-century French Catholic novel, others persist in reproaching it with excessive darkness or thematic and geographical monotony, a reproach Mauriac himself always claimed as deliberate artistic coherence rather than a limitation.^[102] His quarrel with Bernanos, two Catholic novelists equally engaged in political combat through journalism, illustrates this permanent tension within the Catholic camp itself: their political and religious disagreements (condemnation of Action française, Spanish Civil War, antisemitism of the 1930s) are documented by their overlapping correspondence with Maritain and Claudel.^[103]

Malagar Today, a Place of Memory

The Malagar estate, owned by the Nouvelle-Aquitaine regional council, is today a cultural centre devoted to the memory and work of François Mauriac, open to the public all year round and hosting exhibitions, conferences and writing residencies.^[104]

Against moralisms that reduce Christianity to a catalogue of respectable virtues, Mauriac reminds us that no darkness of the human heart escapes the patient gaze of God, and that the truth about sin is never an end in itself, but the necessary road toward mercy. Against skepticisms that would reduce Christian commitment to private life, he shows that a Catholic writer can, without betraying his faith, fight publicly for justice, against torture, against antisemitism, for national reconciliation, without ever confusing that temporal combat with the hope that transcends it. His entire work, from Le Nœud de vipères to Ce que je crois, holds to one and the same promise: no heart, however hardened by hatred or pride, is definitively closed to grace.

• Léon Bloy (1846-1917): the mystical pamphleteer, one of the inspirers of the Catholic revival of which Mauriac is the heir.
• Charles Péguy (1873-1914): the other great Catholic writer of the previous generation, singer of Joan of Arc and of hope.
• Paul Claudel (1868-1955): the converted poet, contemporary of Mauriac and sometimes his debating partner in the correspondence with Maritain.
• Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) and Raïssa Maritain (1883-1960): the philosopher couple, Mauriac's spiritual confidants during the 1928 crisis.