Le Flagellant de Séville

Published in 1951, Le Flagellant de Séville belongs to a very particular moment in Paul Morand’s career. Removed from the diplomatic service at the Liberation and settled in Switzerland, he turned to the historical novel, undertaking a book of unusual scale and construction for a writer otherwise known for works celebrating speed, concision and the instantaneous.

The action takes place in Spain under Napoleonic occupation, between 1808 and 1813. Morand stages the conflict between Spaniards who took up arms against the French occupier and those who, out of admiration for Enlightenment France and for Napoleon, agreed to serve the new regime. The underlying subject is therefore occupation, loyalty, resistance and collaboration — with all the ambiguity these words had necessarily acquired for a French writer in 1951.

On 7 September 1949, while still working on the novel at Vevey, Morand himself gave Jacques Chardonne this striking description: he was writing, he said, “a long novel of 500 pages, the ordeal of a Spaniard collaborating with the French (1808–13) out of love for Napoleon.”

The parallel with the 1940s is all the more significant since Morand wrote after his own experience of Vichy. A career diplomat, he had continued to serve under the regime, which appointed him minister to Bucharest in 1943 and then ambassador to Bern in 1944. At the Liberation, his position cost him his post at the Quai d’Orsay; he remained in Switzerland and was not reinstated until 1954. It was during this period of withdrawal that Le Flagellant was written.

Michel Collomb, who included Le Flagellant de Séville among the eight Morand novels gathered in the Pléiade edition, insists precisely on this double level of reading: Napoleonic Spain gives Morand the historical distance through which he returns, without ever naming them directly, to the Occupation, the Collaboration and the Purge. Beneath the historical accuracy of the Spanish narrative, numerous allusions to what Morand himself had known and lived emerge.

The nature of this transposition remains debated. Some commentators have read the novel as an indirect justification of Collaboration; others have stressed instead the book’s ambivalence, and the way Morand distributes reasons, loyalties and blindness between both camps. In his response to Morand’s reception speech at the Académie française, Alain Peyrefitte already noted this ambiguity: while presenting the hero as caught in the “drama of collaboration with the occupier,” he observed that the novelist’s sympathy seemed at times to lean more toward the uncompromising Marisol, hostile to the French, than toward her husband Don Esteban.

The publication of the correspondence with Jacques Chardonne has since made the personal and political background of this postwar work even more apparent, without reducing the novel to a mere roman à clef. Le Flagellant de Séville remains above all a vast historical novel, grounded in extensive documentary research, and one of Morand’s most ambitious attempts in the genre.

Peyrefitte considered it “perhaps [his] most constructed work” and, above all, “the one into which [he had] put the most of himself.” Morand himself readily acknowledged, late in life, the personal stake invested in this “drama of collaboration.”

A very fine copy, beautifully bound by Hélène Alix: trained by her father, the binder Paul Guglielmoni, Hélène Alix (1920–2006) worked with her husband Henri Alix in the workshop they founded in 1947 at 52 rue Saint-André-des-Arts. Until Henri’s death in 1959, their bindings bear the signature “H. Alix.” Hélène then continued the workshop alone, adopting the signature “Alix” by itself, before being joined by her son Jean-Bernard, who in turn took over the workshop in 1985, keeping the same signature.

The early character of this admirable jansenist binding allows it to be confidently attributed to Hélène Alix.

The most restricted deluxe issue of Morand’s fiction.