Paul Morand: The Paradoxes of “Revision”

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.