Jean-Louis Jeannelle is a Professor of twentieth-century literature at Sorbonne University. In 2015, he published Cinémalraux (Hermann), an essay on the film work of André Malraux, and Films sans images (Éditions du Seuil, coll.“Poétique”), an account of the unrealised scenarios drawn from La Condition humaine. His previous works include Résistance du roman : genèse de ‘‘Non’’ d’André Malraux (CNRS Éditions, 2013) about an unfinished project of a novel about french Resistance, Écrire ses mémoires au XXe siècle : déclin et renouveau (Gallimard, 2008) and Malraux, mémoire et métamorphose (Gallimard, 2006). He edited several collective works, in particular the Cahier de l’Herne on Simone de Beauvoir (2012). Recently, he published a critical edition of a dialogue about history by Charles Péguy entitled Clio (Flammarion, 2023) and Vies mémorables. Variations littéraires sur le genre des Mémoires de la Libération à nos jours (Hermann, 2024), which could be translated as: Memorable Lives. Literary variations on the genre of memoirs from the Liberation to the present day.
De Gaulle as memorialist: war story and narrative war
Thu 7 NovInvited during the war by Admiral Sir Percy Noble to the operations room in Liverpool, General de Gaulle could only observe the numerically small part played by French forces in the vast military and communications undertaking led by the Allies. How could he make up for the initial deficit (“In France, there was no support and no reputation. Abroad, neither credit nor justification”) in terms of driving force, if not through the power of words? Memoirs can be a weapon: the one whose future lasts the longest.
This conference with Pr. Jean-Louis Jeannelle (Sorbonne University) is organised in collaboration with the department of Higher education and Research from the French Embassy in the United Kingdom.
In partnership with
