Coming from a Nobel Prize–winning novelist whose literary chronicles and political editorials had for more than twenty years left no one indifferent amid France’s raucous debate, such modest words sound disingenuous in a French context. Contrary to what is the case in the United States, where change, the abandonment of Old World ties, and the conquest of new frontiers are inscribed into the national mythology, the past matters, and matters greatly, in contemporary France. From the picturesque rural landscapes sculpted by countless generations of human habitation to the venerable walls of chateaux and cathedrals woven into the urban habitat,...

One only has to read a few of Mauriac’s editorials to observe that history permeates his writing, informs his position on virtually all subjects, and constantly provides the essential frame of reference. The past is everywhere present in the Bloc-notes, as Mauriac filters his perception of current events through a vast repertoire of figures and episodes from French history. In the preface to the first volume, he specifically identifies history as the nexus of his writing. Changing moods may have directed his attention in a number of directions, just as pressing political concerns may have compelled him to engage in...

The Bloc-notes emerged out of the relative obscurity of the rather exclusive literary readership of La Table Ronde and into the national limelight when Mauriac decided to join Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Françoise Giroud and the rest of the editorial team of the weekly news magazine L’Express in November 1953. Mauriac strongly supported Pierre Mendès France’s efforts to conduct a peaceful decolonization of Indochina, Morocco, and Tunisia, then went on to speak out forcefully against torture and oppression in Algeria. The colonial conflicts touched his keen sense of national identity by calling into question the underlying notions of civilization and history....

Winock’s pithy sketch admirably summarizes the astonishing role that Mauriac assumed as France’s premier editorialist of the 1950s: throughout the Bloc-notes we find Mauriac passionately engaged by history, that is, by the universal drama unfolding since the dawn of humanity as well as by day-to-day developments shaping and reshaping the contemporary world. Using frames of reference decidedly different from those of Sartre, Mauriac constantly “situates” events past and present all while “situating”² himself and his readers with respect to history, as he chronicles political developments, recounts tumultuous moments of the past, and pronounces judgment on the humanity or inhumanity of...

It is now a commonplace to observe that throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Mauriac’s intense activity in the French press largely eclipsed the literary production that had established his renown as a novelist depicting stark sexual, social, and spiritual conflicts among the bourgeois Catholics of the Bordeaux region. Weighing in on the side of the Spanish Republicans fighting against Franco, Mauriac quickly appeared as a prominent voice in French politics and culture during the last years of the Third Republic and went on to become the most widely read editorialist of the Fourth Republic.¹

While his detractors attributed this...

One would be hard-pressed to find a writer who took history more seriously than does François Mauriac in the Bloc-notes; as one of the first to identify the particular significance of new developments (as attested by his precocious commentaries on subjects as diverse as the literary début of Françoise Sagan, the beginning of hostilities in Algeria, the sudden eclipse of a rural provincial world, or the advent of television in the political arena), he invariably places the here-and-now sub specie aeternitatis,¹ seeing each event as the latest turn in a drama unfolding since time immemorial, charging the present with the...