Le petit roi de Chimérie

First edition, one of 20 numbered copies on Japan paper, the deluxe issue.

Spine slightly sunned, otherwise a very good copy.

Preface by Léon Bocquet.

René Maran's second novel, published in the wake of the controversy surrounding the 1921 Prix Goncourt awarded to Batouala and its preface denouncing the abuses of colonial rule, Le Petit Roi de Chimérie occupies a singular place in the author's work. Subtitled a tale, the book moves between fable and satirical utopia, portraying the tribulations of princes and nations caught up in conflicts evocative of the Great War.

Léon Bocquet's preface continues a defence of Maran already undertaken in several press articles published between December 1921 and 1922 (La Renaissance d'Occident, Le Monde nouveau, Le Monde colonial), drawing upon the same letters from Maran, cited as evidence of his integrity and patriotism.

The very genesis of the book bears the imprint of this attachment to France. In a letter of 10 March 1915 addressed to Bocquet, Maran, then stationed at Mobaye and recently bereaved of his mother, expressed his wish to join the front and risk his life for France. Bocquet would later describe the work as an "hymne de foi envers les destinées de la France éprouvée". This patriotic commitment, documented here by the circumstances in which the book was written, reflects a broader constant in Maran's life: his refusal to be confined to any single camp. A colonial administrator who denounced the abuses of the system at the cost of his position, he would, twenty years later during the Occupation, refuse to write the anti-French articles demanded of him by the German authorities; he subsequently remained aloof from the Négritude movement, although Senghor regarded him as one of its precursors.

An atypical figure among artists of African descent, Maran resisted every form of ethnic or cultural essentialism. Yet this independent intellectual, free from allegiance or communal affiliation, consistently proclaimed one absolute and unwavering loyalty: a patriotism of which this unclassifiable work, poised between fairy tale and satirical utopia, offers an early and luminous expression.