Abstract EN:

According to studies of personal writing, the Memoir's long tradition has been in decline since Chateaubriand. Was the Memoir only the prehistory of personal writing? If the genre of " Capital Lives " did in fact experience a period of decline at the beginning of the century, the defeat of May-June 1940 and its aftermath reestablished a civil war climate conducive to a renewal of the writing of collective events. During this period the Memoir rediscovered its true function : to be the narrative reconfiguration of a life's memorable events, transmitted in the hopes of illuminating the motives of individuals engaged in the course of History. Four major models may be isolated: the militant in the case of Victor Serge, the leader in the case of General de Gaulle, the intellectual in the case of Simone de Beauvoir, and the writer-man of action in the case of André Malraux. The particular status of this genre in the 20th century comes from the fact that, in spite of the great stability which the Memoir owes to a sociocultural need and framework, its borders remain in flux. Superimposed under the same term we find four distinct modes interacting in a complex fashion. The Memoir is at once a generic category, a discursive practice, a model of composition and the ego-historic pole of the self narrative. Moreover, due to its situation between history and literature, the Memoir underwent extensive questioning in the course of the 20th century. Although archivally-oriented historians have favored other documents over memoirs, recent scholarly interest in the history, politics and theorization of memory has attracted new interest to the genre. Finally, the generic variations of writers like Marguerite Yourcenar, Céline, Louis Aragon or André Malraux have established the Memoir's literary value--of which Malraux's Antimémoires are certainly the best proof.