Francois Mauriac's 'Le cahier noir.' (essay)

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Francois Mauriac's Black Notebook, a little-known but essential essay by one of this century's greatest Catholic novelists, and one of the foremost political journalists of his day. Under the title Le cahier noir this short work was published in the dark days of 1943 by the clandestine Resistance publishing house Les Editions de Minuit (which after the war went on to fame and profit as the publishers of Samuel Beckett and several of the practitioners of the nouveau roman, most notably Alain Robbe-Grillet).

Since by 1943 the Gestapo considered Mauriac (1885-1970) one of its principal enemies among France's intellectual class, he used the pseudonym of Forez. The book hardly reached a wide audience in France, but after it was smuggled to London, where it was immediately translated by a young intelligence officer named Robert Speaight (who later became Mauriac's biographer), it took on a life of its own as one of the Allies' major propaganda essays. In the English speaking world, it offered religious and philosophical reasons for continuing the war. The essay also served as a useful corrective to those who might have been tempted to think that French Catholics had accepted the New Order in France.

Mauriac's shift from the Right to the Left in the late '30s is a paradigm of a larger transformation: the movement of the Catholic hierarchy and Catholics generally in democracies like France, Great Britain, and the United States, from political conservatism and philosophical pessimism to an alliance with the forces of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. In 1943 and 1944, while Charles De Gaulle was in London, Jacques Mantain in New York (as De Gaulle's unofficial ambassador), and Georges Bernanos in Rio, Mauriac remained in France.

Born into a wealthy Bordeaux family, Mauriac migrated to Paris in 1906, married a girl from his own social milieu in 1913 (and soon became a father of four), served despite ill health in the ambulance corps during World War I, and began to find his audience as a writer beginning with the novel A Kiss for the Leper (Le baiser au lepreux) in 1922. Two other major novels of the '20s, The Desert of Love (Le desert de l'amour) in 1925 and Therese Desqueyroux in 1927, enabled him to attain before he was forty what the French hyperbolically call "la gloire litteraire." During the '20s, while his reputation was on the rise, Mauriac was also the subject of constant attacks by a combative priest with the improbable name of the Abbe Bethleem as well as by the editors of the still powerful Catholic daily newspaper, La Croix, run by the Assumptionists. They accused him of using the Catholic world of symbol and metaphor to glorify sin and sinners. When in 1927 the Abbe Jean Calvet published his study of the Catholic revival of the preceding fifty years, Le renouveau catholique dans la litterature francaise, he went out of his way to exclude Mauriac from his approved list of Catholic writers, claiming that Mauriac might indeed be a "Catholic who writes novels," but he was certainly not a "Catholic novelist."

At about this time, Mauriac underwent a spiritual crisis in which he seems to have recognized that criticism of this kind from his "freres enemis," was perhaps in part justified. He took to heart the words of advice given to him by his friend Maritain--that a Catholic novelist ought to "purify the source" of his inspiration before writing-and set about writing novels that would be more edifying. Among the several that he wrote along these lines in the '30s, was Vipers' Tangle (Noeud de viperes, 1933). This novel, along with Georges Bernanos's Journal d'un cure de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1936), is one of the most important Catholic novels in twentieth-century French literature. It shows the workings of grace in the soul of its principal protagonist without his being aware of it, and has lost none of its bite over the years.

By 1933 Mauriac, still not yet fifty, was elected one of the forty "immortals" of the French Academy. The fact that as a journalist he was au enfant terrible of the political Right, did not hurt his candidacy. But then a funny thing happened. When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and Franco declared war on the Spanish Republic, Mauriac joined the voices of the Left in denouncing these events. Beginning around 1937, he also began to make his voice heard as an opponent of Hitler and in particular of Nazi racial laws. His outspoken support of Jews and Jewish causes dates from this time. The traditional Catholic Right was offended by all these positions and would never forgive Mauriac. But by 1939, as professor Jean Touzot of the Sorbonne has pointed out, Mauriac was the foremost political journalist in France precisely because of his independence. He said what he knew to be right and based his opinions unabashedly on gospel values. He apologized to no one.

When the war came in 1940, Mauriac watched and waited. The demarcation line between occupied and free French zones ran right through his property at Malagar (about fifty miles from Bordeaux) and by the fall of 1940 a German officer and his entourage were billeted on the second floor of his home. Mauriac and his wife, the four children and the maid, all moved to the ground floor where they would remain until 1944. In these conditions Mauriac wrote what some would call his greatest novel, La pharisienne (Woman of the Pharisees). 1t was published in Paris in 1941, sold 40,000 copies in three months, and was violently attacked by Drieu La Rochelle, the leading collaborationist intellectual. Ostensibly dealing with preVatican II spirituality, the accumulation of merits through private devotions, and the manipulations of others for their own spiritual good, La pharisienne is Mauriac's most religious and most profound novel. But to many Frenchmen in the summer and fall of 1941, the book was read as a commentary on their condition, or as a roman de l'occupation. They saw the book as an allegory of their own political and social situation, in which they were now being forced to do penance for the sins of the Pharisees who had welcomed the abysmal defeat of the previous summer and who were now in control of the Vichy government. Mauriac's stature as a patriotic Frenchman reached a new height in this year, for readers marveled that he had been able to get a book like this through the barbed wire of Nazi censorship.

Now more and more, Mauriac had to keep a low profile, especially since his name was being regularly mentioned in French broadcasts on the BBC as one of those Frenchmen who represented the true spirit of France. It is against this background that Le cahier noir appeared in 1943. Written in the dark days of 1941 and tentatively titled "To a Man in Despair, So that He Will Regain Hope," this short essay marked Mauriac's complete passage from the Right and Center Right to the Center Left, and expressed a huge mental shift that was simultaneously taking place among French Catholics. From mid-1941 to 1943, as the resistance to German occupation grew, an unlikely alliance developed between two groups that had previously been enemies in France: traditional Catholics and Communists. This was symbolized by De Gaulle's flag: the traditional Republican and anticlerical French tricolor with a crucifix added, the so-called Cross of Lorraine.

Mauriac's essay states the case for committed, socially conscious Catholicism, which today represents the Catholic center in the Western democracies. France to him is still "a seamless garment" (he had invented this term in 1938 when referring to the place of Jews in French society and he continues the metaphor here). The Christian, he argues, cannot withdraw from politics and retreat in disgust into his own private world. He must fight on in the name of human values. Since God chose to assume human form through the Incarnation, the believing Christian, he argues, really has no choice in the matter. He also lashes out at those Frenchmen who had been seduced by the philosophical pessimism of Nazi ideology and quotes Goethe and Grimm as kindred spirits. His quarrel is not with the German people but with the ideology that has temporarily taken over their nation. He argues that once you despise man, you can abuse individual human beings, treating them like animals, and he refers to the cattle car he had seen at Austerlitz Station transporting Jewish children out of the city one dark morning.

This essay and the patriotic conduct that went with it during the war made Mauriac's name a symbol of the Allied cause. When the first issue of Le Figaro appeared on August 25, 1944, the day on which Paris was liberated, Mauriac wrote the front-page essay on De Gaulle and his achievement, Le premier des notres ("The First among Us"). It has become a classic text for the French people. Later, during the cold war, when so many of his Communist allies from the Resistance years migrated to the Soviet side of the national debate, Mauriac would not follow them but opposed Marxism with the same virulence that he had displayed against Nazism. Tony Judt's recent study of this period, Past Imperfect (University of California Press), begins to restore to Mauriac the recognition that he deserves for his political positions during this period.

Although largely forgotten today, Mauriac's Le cahier noir deserves to be remembered. It reminds us of the personal courage displayed by one of the most important Catholic laymen of the twentieth century and symbolizes a major change in Catholic attitudes.

DAVID O'CONNELL is professor of French and chair of the department at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Goethe in his old age, on the threshold of eternity, no longer wanted to think about the world of politics, or what he called a "disorder of error and violence." But the disorder we find ourselves in is our business; it concerns us and we will be cowards if we take the easy way out and succumb to indifference.

Especially for Christians, indifference is impossible. The God that they serve, this God who has given them a heart capable of knowing him and loving him, hardly turned himself away from the bloody history of humanity, but on the contrary plunged himself into it. "And the Word became flesh and lived among us." So, fitr from having the right to flee from man by taking refuge in God, Christians are called upon to find God in men.