La Tentation de l’Occident
Printed review copy.
Signed presentation inscription: “à Gaston Picard, hommage de l'auteur. A. Malraux.”
Published after Malraux’s return from his travels in Indochina, this essay takes the form of a fictional correspondence between a Frenchman traveling in China and a Chinese man discovering Europe: an inquiry into the values of European civilization set within the interwar debates on East and West.
Its title echoes Henri Massis’s Défense de l’Occident, published in 1927, which Malraux would review critically in La Nouvelle Revue française of 1 June 1927.
A journalist, poet and novelist, Gaston Picard (1892–1962) was one of the founders of the Prix Théophraste-Renaudot in 1926, the very year La Tentation de l’Occident was published. The volume was not selected for the prize list, but Malraux would go on to win the Prix Goncourt in 1933 for La Condition humaine.