De la louange à la souveraineté. Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets

Autograph manuscript by the author, 4 and a half octavo pages, published in the June 2, 1943 issue of the Journal des Débats.
Complete manuscript in very dense handwriting, with numerous deletions, corrections and additions.
Literary chronicle published on the occasion of the publication of Servius et la fortune by Georges Dumézil. The complete typescript is included.

By devoting his study to Dumézil's work on Servius, Blanchot established a crucial milestone in the evolution of his own thought, the passage from political conviction to literary engagement.
This reflection on sovereignty indeed led the former Maurrassian to reorient his value system, subjecting the prince's power to the people's benevolence: "La louange des hommes est une divinité sous le patronage de laquelle se place le souverain choisi par la voix publique" ["The praise of men is a divinity under whose patronage the sovereign chosen by public voice places himself"].
Starting from this legitimation of the sovereign by the poet's word and his alienation by the "puissance du blâme" ["power of blame"], Blanchot evolved toward a magical power of speech, first for the sovereign's use: "son pouvoir royal (...) n'est réel que par la maîtrise qu'il a sur les mots" ["his royal power (...) is real only through his mastery over words"]; then "dépassant toute forme d'échange. [La poésie] est par excellence ce qui est donné, ce qui manifeste le don des dieux en assurant le crédit des hommes." ["surpassing all forms of exchange. [Poetry] is par excellence what is given, what manifests the gift of the gods while ensuring the credit of men."]
Maurice Blanchot's position was now perfectly established: he did not sacrifice Politics for Letters, he affirmed the predominance of the literary over the political and henceforth devoted his entire life "to literature and to the silence that belongs to it".


Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published 173 articles on recently published books in the "Chronicle of intellectual life" of the Journal des Débats. In half a newspaper page (approximately seven octavo pages), the young author of "Thomas l'obscur" took his first steps in the field of literary criticism and thus inaugurated a theoretical work that he would later develop in his numerous essays, from "La Part du feu" to "L'Entretien infini" and "L'Écriture du désastre". From the first articles, Blanchot demonstrated an analytical acuity far exceeding the literary current events that motivated their writing. Oscillating between classics and moderns, first-rate writers and minor novelists, he established in his chronicles the foundations of critical thinking that would mark the second half of the 20th century. Transformed by writing and by war, Blanchot broke, through a thought exercised "in the name of the other", with the violent Maurrassian certainties of his youth. Not without paradox, he then transformed literary criticism into a philosophical act of intellectual resistance to barbarism at the very heart of an "openly Maréchaliste" newspaper: "Burning a book, writing one, are the two acts between which culture inscribes its contrary oscillations" (Le Livre, In Journal des Débats, January 20, 1943). In 2007, the Cahiers de la NRF brought together under the direction of Christophe Bident all the literary chronicles not yet published in volumes with this pertinent analysis of Blanchot's critical work: "novels, poems, essays give rise to a singular reflection, ever more confident in its own rhetoric, delivered more to the echo of the impossible or to the sirens of disappearance. (...) Not without contradictions or sidesteps, and in the feverish certainty of a work that begins (...) these articles reveal the genealogy of a critic who transformed the occasion of the chronicle into the necessity of thought." (C. Bident). Autograph manuscripts by Maurice Blanchot are extremely rare.