François Mauriac

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The French author François Mauriac (1885-1970), a fervent Catholic, is best known for his novels, usually set in Bordeaux or the Landes district of southwestern France, with their central themes of faith, sin, and divine grace.

François Mauriac was born in Bordeaux on Nov. 11, 1885, of a prosperous middle-class family. He lost his father in infancy, but the influence of his mother, a stern and puritanical Catholic, pervades his literary works. Educated at a Catholic school and at Bordeaux University, Mauriac moved to Paris in 1906, determined to become a writer. He published his first volume of poems in 1909; more poetry and two novels followed before he was mobilized as an army medical orderly in 1914. He was invalided out 3 years later. From 1920 date Mauriac's most productive years as a novelist, his novels including Le Baiser au lépreux (1922; A Kiss for the Leper), Genitrix (1923; Genitrix), Le Désert de l'amour (1925; The Desert of Love), and Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Thérèse ).

About 1928 came a religious crisis in Mauriac's life, with a corresponding change of emphasis in his works. Earlier he had been criticized for portraying sinners more attractively than believers in the narrow, provincial, middle-class families of his novels, where, as all sexuality implies sin, love and happiness become impossible. Now he began to stress the possibility of divine grace, even for the hardened atheist and family tyrant who is the hero of Le Noeud de vipères (1932; Vipers' Tangle), the most successful of the later novels. In 1933 Mauriac was elected to the French Academy. Other works of this period include biographies, more poetry, and religious essays.

In the late 1930s Mauriac found politics coming to the forefront of his attention: he denounced Gen. Franco's insurrection in Spain and later, after the German defeat of France in 1940, helped the cause of the French Resistance with his pen. After the Liberation he continued to write hard-hitting political articles in several newspapers. More novels, stage plays, volumes of criticism, memoirs, and diaries brought Mauriac's total number of books to over 60. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1952, Mauriac became, after De Gaulle's return to power in 1958, one of the President's most passionate supporters. Mauriac died on Sept. 1, 1970.

Mauriac's fictional world is that of his childhood and adolescence in the Landes region in the period about 1900, which he evokes with poetic intensity; his primary theme, the clash between sin and the desire for religious salvation. "I try to make the Catholic universe of evil palpable, tangible, odorous." This powerful creation of atmosphere and shrewd psychological insight - if perhaps in a somewhat narrow field - have brought Mauriac an extremely high reputation as a novelist.

Further Reading

Books devoted to Mauriac include Martin Jarrett-Kerr, François Mauriac (1954); M. F. Moloney, François Mauriac: A Critical Study (1958); Cecil Jenkins, Mauriac (1965); and J. E. Flower, Intention and Achievement: The Novels of François Mauriac (1969). There are discussions of Mauriac in Martin Turnell, The Art of French Fiction (1959); Conor Cruise O'Brien, Maria Cross (1963); and Philip Stratford, Faith and Fiction (1964).

Additional Sources

Simon, Pierre Henri, Mauriac, Paris: Seuil, 1974 1953.

Speaight, Robert, François Mauriac: a study of the writer and the man, London: Chatto and Windus, 1976.

Mauriac, François (1885-1970). With Bernanos, the major French Catholic novelist of the 20th c. Mauriac concentrates upon the hypocrisy and materialism of his class, the provincial bourgeoisie, and observes the struggles of those who refuse to conform, often at the risk of their own souls. The reconciliation of this heroic intransigence with salvation is the continuing theme of his fictional work.

He was born in Bordeaux, into a rich Catholic bourgeois milieu, with interests in timber and wine and property in the Landes, and this milieu becomes the essential locus of much of his later fiction. After a Catholic education in Bordeaux, towards the end of which he was influenced by both Barrès and Jammes and became briefly attracted to Marc Sangnier's Sillon movement, he moved to Paris in 1907, to study for entrance to the École des Chartes. In 1909, however, he left the École to devote himself to literature, initially through journalism and poetry, in the collections Les Mains jointes (1909) and Adieu à l'adolescence (1911), and experiments with fiction, in L'Enfant chargé de chaînes (1912) and La Robe prétexte (1914). In 1913, he married Jeanne Lafon, and his first son, Claude, was born in 1914 [see above]. Rejected from the army on medical grounds, he served briefly until 1917 as a medical auxiliary in Salonica with the Red Cross.

It was in the 1920s that Mauriac's literary reputation was established. A mondain writer, with close contacts with the group who frequented the night-club Le Bœuf sur le Toit, such as Cocteau, Radiguet, and Rigaut, he was also closely allied to the Right, under the influence and friendship of Barrès, writing for the right-wing Le Gaulois and with intimate links with Maurras and Action Française. His first novel to obtain major recognition was Le Baiser au lépreux (1922), followed closely by Le Fleuve du feu (1923), Génitrix (1923), Le Désert de l'amour (1925), and Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927), all of which, in the claustrophobic geography of the South-West, explore the constraints of the bourgeois family, the search for love and individuality, and spiritual barrenness.

From 1928 to 1931 he suffered a major religious and personal crisis, stemming from his inability to reconcile sexuality and Christianity; his subsequent work exhibits a more positive perspective on the issues raised in the fiction of the 1920s, beginning with the novel Ce qui était perdu (1930) and continuing with Le Nœud de vipères (1932), Le Mystère Frontenac (1933), and La Fin de la nuit (1935), a sequel to Thérèse Desqueyroux, in which the heroine moves closer to salvation. This novel was the subject of Sartre's famous attack on Mauriac, in ‘M. François Mauriac et la liberté’, in which he accused the author's God-like narratorial stance of preventing the freedom of his characters: ‘Dieu n'est pas romancier. Monsieur Mauriac non plus.’ Mauriac had already pre-empted this criticism to a certain extent in essays such as Le Roman (1928) and Le Romancier et ses personnages (1933); he attempted to rectify it with the first-person narration of the implicitly anti-Vichy La Pharisienne (1941).

Elected to the Académie Française in 1933, Mauriac was still firmly on the Right but, like Bernanos, was moved to adopt a left-wing stance by the Spanish Civil War. A courageous member of the literary Resistance during the Occupation and a fervent Gaullist, he was a prominant left-wing intellectual during the Fourth Republic and was one of the founder members of the editorial board of L' Express, adopting an uncompromising opposition to French use of torture during the Algerian War. With the return to power of de Gaulle in 1958 he became the chief literary apologist of the Fifth Republic, through his column Bloc-notes in the Figaro littéraire. His final years were marked by a return to the novel, with L'Agneau (1954), and particularly Un adolescent d'autrefois (1969) and its posthumous sequel, Maltaverne (1972).

A distinguished journalist and author of important diaries and memoirs, Mauriac is outstanding as a practitioner of a form of realist fiction which carries acute psychological analysis of the claustrophobia of provincial bourgeois society to metaphysical significance.

[Nicholas Hewitt]

Bibliography

• J. E. Flower, Intention and Achievement: The Novels of François Mauriac (1969)
• J. Touzot, Mauriac avant Mauriac 1913-1922 (1977)
• J. Lacouture, François Mauriac (1980)

Mauriac, François (fräNswä' mōryäk'), 1885-1970, French writer. Mauriac achieved success in 1922 and 1923 with Le Baiser au lépreux and Genitrix (tr. of both in The Family, 1930). Generally set in or near his native Bordeaux, his novels are imbued with his profound, though nonconformist, Roman Catholicism. His characters exist in a tortured universe; nature is evil and man eternally prone to sin. His major novels are The Desert of Love (1925, tr. 1929), Thérèse (1927, tr. 1928), and Vipers' Tangle (1932, tr. 1933). Other works include The Frontenacs (1933, tr. 1961) and Woman of the Pharisees (1941, tr. 1946); a life of Racine (1928) and of Jesus (1936, tr. 1937); and plays, notably Asmodée (1938, tr. 1939). Also a distinguished essayist, Mauriac became a columnist for Figaro after World War II. Collections of his articles and essays include Journal, 1932-39 (1947, partial tr. Second Thoughts, 1961), Proust's Way (1949, tr. 1950), and Cain, Where Is Your Brother? (tr. 1962). Mauriac received the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Bibliography

See his memoirs (1959, tr. 1960); study by C. Jenkins (1965).

Quotes:

"Human love is often but the encounter of two weaknesses."