Abstract
Gisèle Sapiro’s much-praised La Guerre des écrivains (1999) is now available in English over a decade after its French publication and two decades from its partial incarnation in Sapiro’s dissertation thesis. The wait was worth it, as one can only look in awe on the prodigious research that Sapiro brought to this task. Clocking in at a total of 738 pages, credit must go to Duke University Press for aiding the transnational exchange of sociological research in this attractively designed book (perhaps there is a wry wink at one of the subjects of Sapiro’s analysis by using a faux Gallimard cover design for a book originally published by Fayard?). Unfortunately, the 16 pages of photographs of some of the main actors and publications in La Guerre des écrivains are, alas, excised from the English translation. The translation itself is very ably accomplished by Vanessa Doriott Anderson and the late Dorrit Cohn. (The one minor slip-up is that the Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA) figures in the appendix are the revised figures that Sapiro used in her 2002 Poetics article, ‘The Structure of the French Literary Field during the German Occupation (1940–1944)’, but the accompanying descriptions refer to the typography used in the MCA graphs in the 1999 book.)
Sapiro provides a dense historical examination of the multifarious debates, conflicts, and tensions among French writers (for the most part, novelists and poets) during, and shortly after, the Second World War. While she focuses on her stated dates of 1940–1953, pertinent activities outside this range are brought in where necessary to note the historical context to, or the outcome of, literary events. The opening section of the book, ‘The Literary Logics of Political Engagement’, delineates the contours of the French literary field under the German Occupation by examining the literary positions of 185 active writers in the 1940s. Feeding her clusters of social, literary, and political variables into the maw of MCA, Sapiro generates a Bourdieusian structure of the literary field that highlights the divisions of levels of contemporary recognition (or ‘institutional consecration’) and the levels of symbolic capital expressive of the writers’ ‘long term recognition’. All this is designed to confirm the hypothesis that the French literary field exerted its own powerful effects on the positions of writers scrambling to orient themselves to the new dictates of the Occupation: political and literary ‘position-taking’ work in tandem. The resulting polarities in the literary field are then shown to have produced their effects on the discourse used in the denunciations and stigmatization of opponents presumed to be causal agents in France’s downfall. The ‘power relations internal to the literary field made literary “treason” and national “treason” seem like two sides of the same coin’ (p. 157). This opening part of the book concludes with a comparison of the career trajectories of two individuals from roughly the same social backgrounds: Henry Bourdeaux, a popular novelist and lawyer aligned with the Vichy regime; and François Mauriac, like Bourdeaux a French Academy ‘immortal’ and novelist, who ended up aligned with the Resistance. Sapiro suggests that Bourdeaux’s political evolution was the more expected path for someone from this ‘rising provincial bourgeoisie’ background, but that Mauriac’s ‘socially improbable’ trajectory is explainable as a function of the refractive forces exerted on him by the ‘autonomous pole of the literary field’.
The heart of the book is Sapiro’s second section, ‘Literary Institutions and National Crisis’, that surveys the reactions of four pivotal French literary institutions to the Occupation and its aftereffects: The long-standing French Academy; the newer (and rival) Goncourt Academy; the prestigious (in its prewar manifestation) literary journal, La Nouvelle Revue Français (NRF); and the main literary organization of the Resistance, the Comité national des écrivains (CNE). The first three established institutions were racked to varying degrees by the need to accommodate to the pressures exerted by the Nazi takeover of France. Sapiro charts in exhaustive detail the internal conflicts in all four institutions. Positions are redistributed, institutional legitimacy is continually contested, friendships are shattered, odd alliances are formed, and literary genres rise and fall in prestige as the war proceeds. The richness of Sapiro’s account of all this turmoil overwhelms the reader. We are provided with a sense of how the ‘field forces’ of repulsion and attraction pushed and pulled the members of these institutions to move in political directions that fenced them in with regards to their literary options (place of publication or even type of literary product). What we could have used here is some kind of scorecard of the movements, or some help by means of graphic display, to follow the bewildering trails of the numerous participants in the four institutions.
The ‘Literary Justice’ that is meted out to the literary collaborators in the wake of the liberation of France forms the concluding third part of The French Writers’ War. The suicide of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (the despised war-era editor of the NRF) and the execution of Robert Brasillach (editor of the fascist paper, Je suis partout), are the two most famous casualties of this period, but Sapiro is much more interested in showing how the re-establishment of the logic of the prewar literary field (notably via the re-legitimation of the French Academy and the Goncourt Academy) affected the range and degree of accusations launched against the (shifting) list of possible collaborators.
Sapiro’s work will be useful to comparativists looking to see what can be done with the Bourdieusian conceptual and theoretical apparatus in explaining field-fracturing effects of macro-level political crisis. While the number of factors affecting the trajectories of individual writers often make the specific applications of ‘moral capital’ (and other Bourdieusian concepts) seem ad hoc, Sapiro’s work does provide convincing evidence of the structuring effects of heteronomy versus autonomy in generating forces of attraction and repulsion in institutional fields. Let us hope Duke keeps up the good work and provides us with a translation of Sapiro’s follow-up book La Responsabilité des écrivain (2011).