Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, sociology, and related fields.
They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.
Among them are newly acquired books that should be useful to TU students who are interested in literature, French culture, Chinese history, ASEAN studies, and related subjects.
Man’s Hope and Man’s Fate are historical novels written by the French novelist, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs André Malraux.
Born in Paris, Malraux was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle as information minister (1945–46) and subsequently as France’s first cultural affairs minister during de Gaulle’s presidency (1959–1969).
The TU Library collection includes several books by and about André Malraux.
Man’s Fate is about the failed communist insurrection in Shanghai in 1927, and the problems facing the revolutionaries.
The Shanghai massacre of 12 April 1927, the April 12 Purge or the April 12 Incident as it is commonly known in China, was the violent suppression of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organizations and leftist elements in Shanghai by forces supporting General Chiang Kai-shek and conservative factions in the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party or KMT).
The journalist Christopher Hitchens, while noting that Malraux had spent almost no time in China, claimed that the novel
pointed up the increasing weight of Asia in world affairs; it described epic moments of suffering and upheaval, in Shanghai especially (it was nearly filmed by Sergei Eisenstein).”
Man’s Hope is based on Malraux’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War.
The Spanish Civil War was a military conflict fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists.
Republicans were loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic, and consisted of socialist, communist, separatist, anarchist, and republican parties. The opposing Nationalists were an alliance of monarchists and conservatives led by a military junta led by General Francisco Franco.
Malraux remains a controversial figure because in 1921 he was caught trying to smuggle artifacts out of Cambodia’s ancient temples.
Yet he is still widely praised as a critic of French colonial authorities, and a freedom-fighter for non-French people in Indochina.
A 2020 article in the Khmer Times notes that Malraux
received special permission from the authorities to explore the Banteay Srei site.
However, their true plan was to search for artifacts and items that could be sold to art collectors and museums.
They had some bas-reliefs removed from the temple and took them back to Phnom Penh, where they were immediately apprehended by the authorities. The arrest was ordered by none other than George Groslier, the Cambodian Scholar, and founding director of the National Museum of Cambodia, who would later contemptuously refer to Malraux as “le petit voleur” (the little thief).
“Upon inquiry, he became convinced that this temple was – legally speaking – abandoned property,” Langlois says.
The trial took place in Phnom Penh on July 16 and 17, 1924. Malraux was sentenced to three years in jail and five years banishment from the colony, while Chevasson received an 18-month jail sentence. However, Malraux appealed in Paris and was released, without serving any jail time.
An article in the London Review of Books adds:
More reprehensible than mythmaking was his earlier expedition, with his first wife Clara, to excavate Cambodian antiquities with a view to selling them in the United States. ‘In a sense,’ his biographer Jean Lacouture admitted to me, ‘they were thieves.’ And indeed, they were apprehended. Malraux was tried and convicted, although his sentence was later suspended after protests from Paris, organised partly by his wife. At the time, however, he was only twenty and almost penniless – much more a dilettante than a plunderer. His adventure led on, moreover, to his running an anti-colonialist newspaper in Saigon. Without that experience, he would probably never have written The Conquerors or, five years later, his Gon-court Prize-winning novel Man’s Estate.
Malraux’s subsequent role in the Spanish Civil War against Franco has also been questioned, largely because he threw in his lot with the Communists – although he continued to criticise them elsewhere. But he did raise money for the Republicans; he did organise the España air squadron; and he did risk his life. Equally, he brought back from the conflict the novel Man’s Hope (L’ Espoir) and the film based on part of it. In Herbert Lottman’s view, ‘he was most effective in Man’s Fate (La Condition humaine) and in The Conquerors, both set in a China he didn’t know, in whose revolution he had not participated, least in Man’s Hope (L’Espoir), about a Spain he knew and fought for.’ […]
Malraux’s role as Minister for Culture was no less controversial. The Maisons de la Culture that he established in the provinces are now generally seen as expensive fiascos. Professor Marc Fumaroli of the Collège de France recently published a polemical book, L’Etat culturel, attacking the whole idea of French government backing for the arts as championed by Malraux – a self-glorifying state policy, he argued, dating back to the 1789 Revolution and to the nationalist propaganda of Stalin’s and Hitler’s régimes. What was more, Fumaroli told me, Malraux ‘managed to destroy not only the traditional edifice of art education but also the Commission Nationale des Bâtiments de France’ – both, in Fumaroli’s eyes, useful buffers against the overweening state. Malraux was also blamed, almost universally, for removing France’s great film library, the Cinémathèque, from day-to-day control by its eccentric, disorganised and brilliant founder, Henri Langlois. […]
I used to see Malraux, in his later years, attending De Gaulle’s majestic press conferences. Grim and solid, racked by nervous tics, he looked like some great Medieval abbot, possibly unfrocked. ‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Jean Lacouture: ‘He had the face of a heretic priest. The man who invented great heresies could have the same face, the same passion and the same troubles, the same haunted face.’
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)