Title: Francois Mauriac on Race, War, Politics, and Religion
Description: Nathan Bracher's François Mauriac on Race, War, Politics, and Religion: The Great War through the 1960s consists of a selectin of some ninety editorials penned by the Catholic novelist and intellectual François Mauriac, who received the Nobel Prize for literature and who was admitted to the Académie Française in 1933. As is often the case for prominent writers and intellectuals in France, Mauriac becaome active in political punditry early in his career, at the time of World War I. Intensifying notably in the tumultuous yeras of the 1930s, this activity continued to expand during the next five decades. After 1952, Mauriac's editorials came to represent the most important dimension of his intellectual activity. He was, to cite the prominent journalist and intellectual Jean Daniel of Le NOuvel Observateur, France's most distinguished and formidable editoralist of the twentieth century.^

Bracher's book provides for the first time an opportunity for English-speaking readers to discover the incisive power, passionate humanity, and historical perspicacity that made his voice one of the most resonant in the French press. Mauriac's public stances on events left nobody indifferent. He was the first to denounce torture in Algeria, and he was the most eloquent in appealing to the heritage of humanism left by Montaigne and the Sermon on the Mount. The editorials collected here morever offer a series of striking perspectives on the most dramatic events that France had to confront throughout the twentieth century, from World War I, to the rise of Fascism and the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, to the various episodes of World War II, on to the Cold War, the strains of decolonization in the 1950s, and the reign of Charles de Gaulle that coexisted with the upheaval of the 1960s.^

Mauriac's gripping editorials enable the reader to revisit these historical moments from within and through the eyes of a French Catholic intellectual and writer who approaches them with passion, commitment, and remarkable lucidity. -- from dust jacket.
Subjects: History, France, history, 20th century