ANDRÉ MALRAUX

If de Gaulle was the leading political star of the French bourgeoisie, then André Malraux was the literary moon which shone in the light of his master's brilliance and for a time served under him as Minister of Culture in the R.P.F. (Rassemblement du Peuple Français) the right-wing party founded by de Gaulle in the interests of national unity.

Considering that Malraux had for so long been a communist or, at any rate, a 'fellow traveller', who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and fought no less ardently against Hitler in the Second World War, it is perhaps surprising that he should have turned coat, so to speak, and joined forces with the nationally-minded de Gaulle in his crusade against parliamentary squabbling and socialist disintegration. But turn he did, and, as his Anti-Memoires attest, France acquired her first and most distinguished Minister of Culture, who was no less determined, in his new capacity, to serve bourgeois idealism than he had formerly been to serve proletarian materialism.

Apart from continuing to write on art, his great peacetime love, Malraux became famous or, depending on one's point-of-view, notorious for his cultural internationalism, an ambitious project designed to place art treasures from all over the world and from virtually any era in museum-like juxtaposition, so that, instead of a national culture perceived in its epochal context, a timeless internationalism would be suggested which was intended to reflect, through apparent contrasts, the essential unity and similarity of great art as a tribute to the Eternal.

Perhaps, after all, such a cultural internationalism is a stage on the road to a truly universal culture of supra-national provenance? If so, then Malraux's project must surely rank as a significant landmark in the evolution of world culture, all the more remarkably so in that it was projected from a Gaullist base. Doubtless, the great French adventurer perceived fresh possibilities for the development of his internationalism in a political compromise with de Gaulle. Power had its consolations!