Malraux ascends to French civic heaven

LIKE the hero of one of his novels, Andre Malraux was determined to leave the scar of his passage on earth. He was a man of action as well as a man of letters, an "ecrivain engage" before the existentialists made it fashionable. An anti-colonialist before decolonisation, an anti-fascist in the early 1930's, Malraux was gifted with a rare historical prescience.

Next Saturday the 20th anniversary of his death, Andre Malraux's ashes will be taken to the Pantheon, where France has buried its great men since the 1789 revolution. President Jacques Chirac will read a eulogy to the former Minister of Culture and his coffin will lie in state for two days while Parisians file past in homage.

It is an ironic end for a man of rebellious spirit, who was often a controversial figure. After studying oriental languages, Malraux travelled to Asia. He was arrested in 1923 for pilfering statues and bas-reliefs from an ancient temple near Angkor in present-day Cambodia, but was freed when French writers mounted a campaign on his behalf. Malraux's love for the orient included a fascination with opium. In his 1933 Prix Goncourt winning novel Man's Fate, he described the feelings of an opium user as "a desolation which approached the divine". Death is a constant theme in Malraux's work. "Man is the only animal who knows he is going to die," he often said. For him, art was "anti-destiny", a form of salvation which enabled man to transcend his own mortality.

Born to a poor grocer's family ink the Paris suburb of Bondy, Malraux was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt; his father had abandoned them when he was just two years-old. At 20, he met Clara Goldschmidt, the wealthy German Jewish woman who would be his wife for 26 years. With Clara, Malraux in 1925 founded an anti-colonialist newspaper, Indo-china in Chains. He joined an underground Communist movement, the precursor of the Viet Cong. The 1927 Communist revolution in Shanghai provided the subject for Man's Fate.

Two days after the Spanish civil war broke out in 1936, Malraux joined on the Republican side. Before the international brigades were set up, he scavenged a few aircraft and established the "Espana" squadron. He flew a dozen combat missions himself, and briefly saved Madrid for the Republicans by bombing the road from Medellin. The experience yielded Man's Hope, Malraux's novel about the Spanish war, which he later turned into a film.

The greatest passion of Malraux's life was General Charles de Gaulle, for whom he abandoned the left forever. In 1958, de Gaulle made Malraux his Minister of Culture. It was through his advocacy for State promotion of the arts that the grocer's son from Bondy would "leave his scar". "The State is not made to manage art, but to serve it", Malraux often said.

"Malraux considered culture an important instrument of politics", Mr Bernard Spitz of the French Culture Ministry told The Irish Times. "He believed that culture fosters knowledge and tolerance. By making culture accessible to the largest number of people, he thought he was creating a democratic society worth living in."

Convinced that art belonged to everyone, not just rich Parisians, Malraux built dozens of Maisons de Culture around the country. He also pioneered the idea of international exhibitions.

It was Malraux who first sent Leonardo's Mona Lisa abroad against the protests of Louvre curators. Other European countries followed suit. "Everywhere there is a Minister of Culture in Europe it is", thanks to Malraux," Mr Spitz said.