André Malraux, the général De Gaulle, and Kylian Mbappé go to the Panthéon by Pierre Azou

Gary: Today’s special episode is by Pierre Azou. Pierre is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University. Having previously graduated from Sciences Po. Paris in Politics and Public Affairs and from La Sorbonne in literature, he works at the intersection between politics and literature — both inside and outside academia. He is broadly interested in the relationship between literature, cinema and politics as it evolved from the start of the 20th century to the present, and more specifically in their interaction when addressing (or giving birth to) extreme phenomena — from the Revolution to climate change to terrorism.

Today’s episode is a fascinating exploration of heroism and greatness in France, which includes André Malraux, Jean Moulin, General de Gaulle, Josephine Baker and Mbappé, among others.

[Old recording playing]: « Entre ici Jean Moulin, avec ton terrible cortège ! »

Pierre: This — if anything — is probably the first thing French people will think of when they hear the name “André Malraux”: the emotional and lyrical highpoint of the funeral eulogy he delivered on December 19th, 1964, for the transfer of Jean Moulin’s ashes to the Panthéon.

Jean Moulin, as you may know, was the main leader of the French resistance during the Second World War. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, he was tortured by the infamous SS chief Klaus Barbie, also known as the “Butcher of Lyon” — but he never talked, and died the death of a martyr.

As to the Panthéon, you might think of it as a Republican temple. In fact, the building was originally meant to be a Church, but the French Revolution, in a typical revolutionary move, appropriated it, replacing the cult of God and saints by that of these “great men” to whom, according to the inscription on its pediment, it is dedicated “with gratefulness”.

In theory, there is therefore no highest honor than to be buried there — or, as we say in France, turning the noun into a verb, to be “panthéonisé”. It means being recognized by the whole nation not only as an example of moral excellence, but, perhaps more importantly, as someone whose life and action were instrumental to the very existence, or survival, of France. Obviously, this is true of Jean Moulin.

With this in mind, it is hard not to get shivers down one’s spine when hearing Malraux’s — “Entre ici Jean Moulin”.

Or wait… is it just me? I showed the clip to my little brother who’s 17, without any prior comments, and his first reaction was, who the hell’s that guy, and, his second one, to mock Malraux’s quavering voice, his old-fashioned nasal tone, and the grandiosity of it all. Is it simply because he missed most of the historical context? Is it simply a generational matter?

Surely a bit of all that. But this points also to a more fundamental problem with the Panthéon — to its “failure”, as the historian Mona Ozouf puts it in a landmark article on the subject, published in the important collective book called Les lieux de mémoires. My point here, as a student of literature and not a historian, will be to examine this failure from the literary perspective of André Malraux — through his quaky voice, and also his quaky life.

For Malraux is part of this romantic tradition, going back in France to at least Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo in the 19th century, which does not make a distinction between literature and life, or between literature and politics. Born in 1901, dead in 1976, Malraux embraces the 20thcentury in the same way Victor Hugo did the 19th — and, like Hugo, Malraux, principally a writer, became a politician later in his life. As the title of his definitive biography by Jean Lacouture indicates, his was very much Une Vie dans le siècle (A Life in the Century. And, as the past century was very much a time of conflict and extremes, so was Malraux’s work and life. As he once put it: “Le monde s’est mis un jour à ressembler à mes livres” – “One day, the world started to look like my books”.

So what is this failure of the Panthéon according to Ozouf? The Panthéon was meant to reunify the country after it was torn apart by the Revolution, replacing God and the King by the Republic, the Patrie (“motherland” in English) , and the People as cementing elements; in Ozouf’s words, it was meant to “invent a new collective memory”. But, in fact, it has itself always been torn apart by the disputed legacy of the French Revolution. Thus, with each of the many regime changes of the 19th century, the Panthéon changed too: Bonaparte used it to honor his generals while also giving it back to the catholic cult as part of his politics of appeasement with the Church, the Restoration turned it back into a full church, the Revolution of 1848 back into a Republican temple, the Third Empire back into a Church… Then, even though the advent of the Third Republic in 1871 finally stopped the pendulum on “Republican Temple”, there remains the question of who gets to be “panthéonisé”. Almost as a warning of how thorny this question was going to be, the first to be panthéonisé, Mirabeau, glory of the Revolution, was also the first to be expelled only three years after his entrance when it was revealed he had worked as a spy for the Monarchy. Ever since, at least when under a democratic regime, the decision to “panthéoniser” someone has regularly prompted fiery debates.This was evidenced once again only two years ago with the panthéonisation of Joséphine Baker: meant to be inclusive because of her gender, her race, and her nationality, it nonetheless prompted accusations from some on the right that the Government was giving in to identity politics, while some on the left complained that the choice of Josephine Baker was just a way to avoid the debate about colonization, which their favored candidate, Gisèle Halimi, a lawyer who supported the fight for independence of Algeria, would have prompted. In other words, with each new attempt to “panthéoniser” someone, it is as if the whole of France’s history is being judged and re-evaluated. Rather than an occasion for the whole “patrie” to come together, it is a means for various “partis” to fight each other. Rather than a celebration, it is a painful interrogation of what France means.

Now painful interrogation is what Malraux is all about.

According to him, interrogation is the essence of the novel: “Even though each paragraph of a novel is an affirmation, a great novel is always a question”. It is the essence of the novel because it is the essence of civilisation: “A civilization defines itself both by the questions it asks itself, and by the questions it doesn’t ask itself”. And it is the essence of civilization because it is the essence of mankind: “Man was born on the day when, in front of a corpse, he whispered: Why?”. What does it mean to always interrogate? It means to refuse to accept things as they are, to never satisfy oneself with the given, or, as Malraux puts it, to “find in ‘accusation’, rather than ‘justification’, the fundamental dignity of life’. Obviously this makes it very difficult to accept any kind of greatness, to celebrate a fixed idea of France, or to come together with anyone. No surprise, then, that Malraux was first known as an anarchist and an adventurer when he rose to prominence in the 1920s — he was notably jailed in Cambodge for stealing statues and artworks from the temple of Angkor. If he later became close to the communist party (a so called “compagnon de route”, or “fellow traveller”), it was not because he embraced the communist credo, but rather because it was for him the main way to oppose the rise of fascism — a fight which also led him to join the international brigades during the Spanish War, which is the subject of one of his most famous novels, L’Espoir(Man’s hope), and the Resistance during the Second World War.

But then, if Malraux is all about revolt and “accusation”, why did he stay with De Gaulle after the war was over? As De Gaulle founded the 5thRepublic in 1958 and became its first President, as he came to represent authority and the cult of France, how could Malraux, the former anarchist, accept to become his minister of culture? Why did he, the former anti-fascist activist, remain one of the most loyal supports of a man whom the youth of 1968 would accuse of being a fascist himself?

The answer to these questions lies in the Panthéon — in Malraux’s speech for Jean Moulin.

For if we manage to find the coherence of Malraux’s trajectory in spite of the apparent contradiction, that would mean that the Panthéon can overcome its apparent failure: that would mean it is possible to find unity in division, in interrogation.

To do so, I suggest we turn once again to my litte brother. Not that he knows anything about Malraux. But he knows a lot about Kyllian Mbappé, the soccer player.

Where Josephine Baker failed, Kyllian Mbappé succeded. During the last Soccer World Cup, he became the symbol of the nation, a unified nation, and a kind of cult developed. His influence, or even direct presence in people’s lives, is precisely of the kind the founder of the Panthéon hoped their great men buried there would achieve. Yet obviously the creators of the Panthéon would not have expected a soccer player to do the job… But Malraux, I want to suggest, may very well have.

Rather than with the definition of France, then, this has to do with the definition of greatness. In her article, Ozouf explains the Panthéon’s conception followed an ideological shift that took place in the 18thcentury: the “great man” replaced the “hero” as the model to follow. The hero was primarily a military figure: the great man is primarily a civilian one. The hero was a man of the sudden exploit: the greatness of the great man is a cumulative one, built over time. The hero was only a public figure: the great man is also great in his private life, his greatness is interwoven with every aspect of life. Thus, the revolutionary Marat, in his list of the 6 types of great men worthy to enter the Panthéon, names only one warrior, while the five others are: “the philosopher who enlightens the nation, the legislator who gives it good laws, the judge who applies them with integrity, the orator who defends the oppressed, the merchant who brings prosperity”. The hero is more show, the great man, more substance. All this led Voltaire – who would be panthéonisé in 1791 – to believe that “the great man trumps the hero”.

To this, I believe Malraux would retort: “But, in a time of extreme political polarization, the great man needs the hero”. In line with the opposition sketched above, he defines heroism as “simply the capacity, common to all men, to outdo oneself in particular circumstances and at a certain time”: the hero is the man of the momentary exploit, not of cumulative time like the great man, of performance and not of substance. Why is he necessary to him — and to us?

Roger Caillois, another important writer of the time, who was a friend of Malraux, has the answer: “There comes a time”, he writes, probably with Malraux in mind, “when the individual suffers from being stuck in a state of conflict”. And then, “any solution seems desirable to him to escape this conflict, even if it is dangerous or violent”. In other words, the more divided we are, the more polarized we are, and the more we need something, or someone, to unify us, to overcome this conflict. But, as we have seen with the panthéonisation of Josephine Baker, precisely because of this polarization, the more we look for this someone or something to unify us, and the more difficult it becomes, because the intense scrunity only reveals more divisions. And this is where the hero comes in — they break this paradoxical vicious cycle. Caillois writes: “Stuck in conflict, the individual appoints the hero to replace him. The hero is the one who breaks rules, but, under the light of greatness, he seems unconditionally justified. Thus, the hero resolves the conflicts in which the individual is stuck”. The hero can be “unconditionally justified” precisely because, having no substance of their own, they are entirely defined by their exploit, by the fact they are “breaking the rules” of normality; they don’t require of us to “agree” with them, simply to rally them. And everybody can do so. To the extent they don’t mean anything, heroes can mean anything to anyone.They are but the empty vessel of our aspirations and projections. They are great to the extent they are small.

This is true of the General de Gaulle. In the “particular circumstances” of the Second World War, he “outdid” himself, as Malraux puts it, not by putting forward a new political program that, but simply by “breaking the rule”, as Caillois puts it, that is to say by refusing to just do what a general in the army of Pétain should do. This is why Malraux joined him — not because they shared the same political views, or the same conception of France. Malraux joined De Gaulle the hero, not De Gaulle the great man. The same is true of Mbappé during the World Cup, France rallied not Mbappé the great man, but Mbappé the hero: someone who outdid hisemf on a special occasion, in special circumstances, who “broke the rules”, in this case the rules of normality. Mbappé is to my litte brother what De Gaulle was to Malraux.

Of course, I’m being a little playful and provocative here. But the parallel should not even be that surprising. Indeed sport, and notably soccer, became a mass activity precisely at the start of the 20th century — and many were the writers of the time, including some close to Malraux, who saw in it as a substitute for traditional warfare after the First World War had turned war into somethin else entirely, into industrial war (I refer you here notably to Johan Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens).

Now all this might sounds great when it comes to my little brother, but on a political level this comes with a danger. From two sides.

First, because the substance of heroism lies in its performance, it is easy to fake it. This is definitely the troubling side of Malraux in his quest for heroism: he was a compulsive liar. When he told stories, he liked to say: “This is neither false nor true, this is lived (vécu)”. Thus, many of the elements of the legend he carefully crafted about himself have now been debunked, notably thanks to the work of another biographer, Olivier Todd.  For example, in the bibliography attached to the original edition of another important novel of his, La Condition humaine, Malraux claims to have been a commissary of the Kuomintang for Cochinchina and Indochina in 1925, but in fact at that time he was in Saigon with no political contact, and his knowledge of China was extremely limited. Similarly, after the War, he exagerated his role during the Resistance. I could give other examples. Did Malraux use his heroism to promote his writing, or did he use his writing to promote his heroism? This is where literature and politics merge.

The second side of the danger is that, if any individual can fill up the empty hero with his projections and aspirations, if anybody can fake his way into heroism, then so can a political party. In other words, heroism is easily instrumentalized. Some would say that’s what Macron did with Mbappé, using his heroism to further his own political narrative. Some would say that’s what De Gaulle did with himself, using his war status as a hero to grab power after the war was over. Maybe Malraux was wrong to stay with De Gaulle after the war, as he didn’t realize that the hero had turned into a politician. Some would agree here and disagree there, and obviously the consequences of each instrumentalization will vary depending on the political context. But what’s important here is the logic at play.

For when the two dangers come together — when you have at the same time a fake heroism, and a political instrumentalisation of heroism — well, that’s one way to define fascism: Hitler and Mussolini were fake heroes who made a people tired of conflicts believe in their heroism, but who had nothing else to offer them than this empty heroism. Hence, by the way, why fascism is self-destructive.

But then, how can we distinguish between a “good” heroism and a “bad” heroism? Was De Gaulle a hero who saved France, or, as the youth of 1968 claim, a fascist? Was Malraux a great writer or a fake? There are two answers to this final question.

First, there is Malraux’s answer, which is also De Gaulle’s, and Macron’s — for yes, Macron is definitely an inheritor of this tradition. It is the answer of French universalism. Why did De Gaulle launch the Resistance rather than join Pétain? Because he believed with Malraux that, “while England has never been as great as when it stood simply for itself, France had only been great when it was considered to be so by the rest of the world”. Why did Macron choose to “panthéoniser” Josephine Baker? Because, I quote from the speech he delivered at the Panthéon for her, “born American, nobody was more French than her”. And, linking together these two quotes, why did Malraux side with communism against fascism in the 1930s, rather than the reverse? Because, he said, “communism is open to the universe, whereas fascism is closed”. Remember his definition of heroism: someone “outdoes hisemf”. Similarly, what differentiates the “greatness of France” from the fake heroism of fascism is that it constantly “outdoes itself” by welcoming unto its fold external, foreign element, by standing for the whole universe. That is the spirit of the French Revolution.

This answer displeases both a lot of people on the right, who would like to return to a more traditional idea of France, notably by putting an end to immigration, and a lot of people on the left who see in French universalism nothing but a covert form of racism and imperialism. But for them, there is a second answer to be found in Malraux — the one they will find themselves in his 1933 novel, La Condition humaine. This is the novel that earned him him the Prix Goncourt, and fame. Set during the 1927 Shanghai insurrection, which saw the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek violently put down the opposing communist party, it follows a set of characters from both sides, exploring the interplay between their personal and political lives — with a view to understand, rather than to take sides. Indeed, the novel is fundamentally apolitical, as is clear from its title, derived from a quote by the 17th philosopher Pascal “Imagine a number of man in chains, and all of them sentenced to death; each day some are slaughtered, while the other see their own condition in theirs, and, looking at each other with suffering and without hope, wait for their turn. That is the image of the human condition”. Yet, against this dreary backdrop, two things remain possible. First, interrogation: in this novel, everybody questions everything all the time, and it is up to the reader to make up their mind as to who they would follow — the narrator does not guide them. And second, heroism as we defined it, which, for the duration of a scene, transcends everything. This is Katow, a member of the communist cell, who, taken prisoner by the nationalists, sees that a horrible death awaits him: one after the other, prisoners are being thrown in the furnace of a train. We are in Pascal’s metaphor. But Katow has a on him a pill of cyanide that will grant him a quick and easy death. He is about to swallow it, when he looks at the man sitting next to him, someone he has never met, and who doesn’t even speak his language. He is shaking with fear. So Katow, without a word, with just a touch of the hand, gives him his pill. And is taken to the furnace. Where is this hand of Katow pointing towards? We don’t know. But we know that, if we want to go anywhere, we have to take it first.

I’d like to conclude with one of the most famous passages of the Condition humaine. Malraux may very well have just copied it for the funeral eulogy to Jean Moulin that we started with. It’s the passage where Kyo, another communist, reflects on his own death as he’s about to swallow his own cyanide pill. I’ll read it in French first, before giving you the translation.

Il aurait combattu pour ce qui, de son temps, aurait été chargé du sens le plus fort et du plus grand espoir ; il mourrait parmi ceux avec qui il aurait voulu vivre ; il mourrait, comme chacun de ces hommes couchés, pour avoir donné un sens à sa vie. Qu'eût valu une vie pour laquelle il n'eût pas accepté de mourir ? Il est facile de mourir quand on ne meurt pas seul. Mort saturée de ce chevrotement fraternel, assemblée de vaincus où des multitudes reconnaîtraient leurs martyrs. Comment, déjà regardé par la mort, ne pas entendre ce murmure de sacrifice humain qui lui criait que le cœur des hommes est un refuge à morts qui vaut bien l’esprit ?

He had fought for what in his time was charged with the deepest meaning and the greatest hope; he was dying among those with whom he would have wanted to live; he was dying, like each of these men, because he had given a meaning to his life. What would have been the value of a life for which he would not have been willing to die? It is easy to die when one does not die alone. A death saturated with this brotherly quavering, an assembly of the vanquished in which multitudes would recognize their martyrs. How, already facing death, could he fail to hear this murmur of human sacrifice cry ing to him that the heart of men is for the dead as good a refuge as the mind?

We may disagree with the particular meaning that Kyo gave to his life, that is to say with communism. Yet, whatever we believe in, it is hard to avoid the question: What would have been the value of a life for which he would not have been willing to die? And it is hard not to answer it with a “brotherly quavering” in one’s voice.

When it comes to the Panthéon, my argument here, in contrast with Mona Ozouf’s conclusion, can be summed up as follows: the Panthéon is dead — long live the Panthéon!

Greatness may have deserted its walls, but it may still be found in a heroism that is well and alive, running in soccer fields. For my little brother, even if he doesn’t know it, the spirit of Malraux lives in Mbappé. Yet, I don’t think my little brother would be ready to die for the idea of France, or of the world, that Mbappé stands for. Mbappé is an empty hero: it’s on us to fill him up, collectively. Not an easy task. Lucky Malraux and his quavering voice are here to help us.