Le Monde chrétien
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Maurice Genevoix, avec le bien sympathique souvenir d'André Malraux.”
Le Monde chrétien is the seventh volume in the “La Galerie de la Pléiade” series, and forms the third volume of the Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale trilogy. Through photographic reproduction — a rich iconography of more than 500 photographs — Malraux brings together works of art in a common space, allowing them to be compared and analyzed independently of their original context.
A discreet but precious testimony to an intellectual bond between two men drawn together by their shared experience of war, their reflection on the transmission of memory, and their place in French public life — one at the head of the Ministry of Culture, the other soon to become perpetual secretary of the Académie française, and a member since 1946. Their dialogue continued well beyond this inscription: in the 1960s, when Malraux became Minister of Culture, it was Genevoix who was entrusted with the mission of reviving the memory of writers who died for France, notably through the committee for the literary memory of the Great War. Malraux, for his work and his action, entered the Panthéon in 1996; Genevoix followed him there twenty-four years later, with Ceux de 14, in keeping with the idea of an invisible museum of human greatness that Malraux had envisioned. They are the only two twentieth-century writers to be interred in the Panthéon.
A remarkable provenance; a skillful restoration to the spine.