SubStance

SubStance 32.3 (2003) 43-54

Paul Morand:
The Paradoxes of "Revision"

Marc Dambre

For those who ponder the revisionism that took place among French intellectuals and writers in the 1950s regarding the split between Right and Left, Paul Morand's oeuvre offers a fruitful subject of study. This could seem illogical, for we are talking about a writer who does not consider himself an intellectual, and refused any revision on his own account when he was fired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September 1944, based on his choices and actions as a highly-placed bureaucrat during World War II. The logical challenge (to speak about revisionism from the standpoint of an unrepentant radical) is also a challenge to logic, since Morand's positions—more complex than suggested at first glance, and thus richer—seem linked to paradox. The DictionnaireRobert defines paradox as "Opinion qui va à l'encontre de l'opinion communément admise." In fact, as a recalcitrant Vichyist, Paul Morand places himself against the current of the dominant historical doxa, and sometimes even against the Vichyist minority in which he enclosed himself. The dictionary adds; "Etre, chose, fait qui heurt le bon sens." We see Morand in this second meaning, which clarifies itself in a third one on the level of logic: "se dit d'une proposition qui est à la fois vraie et fausse." The paradox creates a closed circuit, a link between opposites. The reader is sent back to terms like antinomy, contradiction, sophistry.

I will not attempt here to explore the vast domain of political involvement or non-involvement and interpretations thereof. I will also attempt not to follow in the footsteps of readers who have already made great headway in decoding Morand's texts, such as Jeffrey Mehlman. ¹ I will take care not to go down the roads of polemic or rehabilitation. My goal is not to take sides, but to detect a coherence in Morand's writing, from post-war novelist to aging diarist. In fact, his Journal inutile (1968-1976) provides a generic and chronologic counterpoint to the earlier writings, allowing one to measure how much Morand substitutes the division Vichy/Other for the Right/Left cleavage.

It will gradually become apparent that the writer never stopped rehashing and recomposing—directly, via the journal, or implicitly via his fiction—the era 1940-44. He did not revise this past, but looked at it again and revisited it, in order to demonstrate three points: 1) revision characterizes man and the world; [End Page 43] 2) he himself has never changed; and 3) he is on the Right in spite of himself; the border is imaginary.

In the beginning of his exile in Switzerland on the banks of Lake Léman—a result of his disgrace at the time of the Liberation—Paul Morand turned after 1945 toward historical fiction, choosing periods of trouble and individual destinies that suffered from the counter-coup. Before the somber texts like Parfaite de Saligny and Le Dernier Jour del'Inquisition or even Le Flagellant de Séville, he had completed a book in quite a different tone—the adventure novel Montociel, as though, in order to overcome the bitterness of political failure, he adopted the diversion of humor and fantasy. This book deserves our attention; the author was preoccupied with re-editing it in the late 1950s, when Roger Nimier, whom he considered as a son, was his advocate at Gallimard. It's the story of a French sailor who becomes the Rajah of Oudore between Year II of the Republic (1793-94) and 1814. He ends by fleeing in an aerostat, to return to France and to a modest life. Morand seems to give himself a lesson in wisdom: "Le plus bel empire, mon cher comte, n'est-il pas l'empire de soi?" (167). His hero had wrongly thought he was escaping Europe and the prison of family. History has made him encounter misfortune, in the guise of change:

I have seen the face of nations change. A century rich in great events is...