Publication "Albert Thibaudet, a city of books"
Albert Thibaudet Henri Bergson Jean Paulhan André Gide Paul Valéry
Mémoire de la critique, Bernard Baillaud, 20 février 2026
Albert Thibaudet, for whom Jean Paulhan was, along with Leon Bopp, one of the literary executors, is the most important critic of the interwar years and also the most current: the essential part of his work has been republished over the last twenty years. He was a student of Bergson, close to Gide and Valery, and one of the most respected columnists of the NRF. He left landmark books on Thucydides, Flaubert, and Mallarme, and was a lucid observer of French political life. In the eyes of his contemporaries, he appeared as a new Montaigne, building his city of books, his library tower in Tournus, Burgundy.
This volume invites readers to enter that library, whose composition we know thanks to an auction catalog, but even more to enter Thibaudet's inner library, that of a "multilateral" man open to the most diverse tendencies. Literature from every era, French and foreign alike, but also philosophy, history, politics, cinema: around fifteen studies account for the extreme variety of its shelves. They are complemented by an anthology bringing together about ten of the critic's own articles, rare or unpublished, including an important set devoted to Proust.