Voyages de Montesquieu. Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets.

Autograph manuscript by the author of 4½ pages in-8 published in the September 8, 1943 issue of Journal des Débats.
Complete manuscript with very dense handwriting, containing numerous deletions, corrections and additions.
The complete typescript is included.
Literary chronicle published on the occasion of the publication of Les Voyages de Montesquieu, prefaced by Marcel Arland.
This artificial collection of Montesquieu's travel notebooks gives Blanchot the opportunity to praise a form of "natural" writing, "pure of all concern for readership". These intimate notes indeed testify to an art of "concision [which] delivers [facts] to us naked, pressed by the meaning that illuminates them" and which, from "considerable material [drew] only a small book, discreetly reduced to the essential."
Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published 173 articles on recently published books in the "Chronique de la vie intellectuelle" of Journal des Débats.
In half a newspaper page (about seven octavo pages), the young author of "Thomas l'obscur" takes his first steps in the field of literary criticism and thus inaugurates 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 his first articles, Blanchot demonstrates 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 establishes, in his chronicles, the foundations of a critical thought that would mark the second half of the 20th century.
Transformed by writing and by the war, Blanchot breaks, through a thought exercised "in the name of the other", with the violent Maurrassian certainties of his youth.
Not without paradox, he then transforms literary criticism into a philosophical act of intellectual resistance to barbarism at the very heart of an "openly Maréchaliste" newspaper: "To burn a book, to write 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 sure of 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 necessity of thought." (C. Bident).
Autograph manuscripts by Maurice Blanchot are extremely rare.