Bernard Groethuysen & Alix Guillain, Letters 1923-1949 to Jean Paulhan & Germaine Paulhan
Bernard GroethuysenGermaine PaulhanJean PaulhanThis correspondence only contains Groethuysen's letters, Paulhan's letters have been lost.
Also read the text by Françoise Simonet-Tenant.
“History should give us a vacation. We would take the opportunity to get back to life.”
Bernard Groethuysen (1880-1946), philosopher of German origin, disciple of Dilthey, shared his life, from 1904, between Berlin and Paris where he conducted research on the French Revolution. A little before 1910, thanks to Bergson, he met a translator and journalist at L'Humanité, Alix Guillain (1876-1951), with whom he lived in a free union in the phalanstery of artists at 9, rue Campagne-Première, just like Jean Paulhan and his partner Germaine. The two friends worked from 1920 on La Nouvelle Revue française, of which Jean Paulhan took over as director in 1925. They introduced Hölderlin, Kassner, Büchner, Kafka, Buber, Musil… In 1927, they founded together the “Library of Ideas” collection. published by Gallimard, inaugurated by Bernard Groethuysen's major essay, Origines de l'esprit bourgeois en France, "our first child", he wrote to Paulhan.
In his last letter from Germany, dated July 22, 1931, Groethuysen expressed some concern: “History should give us a vacation. We would take the opportunity to get back to life.” His wish remained a dead letter... In August 1932, sensing the rise of Nazism, he settled permanently in France: he was naturalized in January 1938, shortly after the arrival of the Popular Front which included Jean Paulhan on the list of the socialist mayor of Châtenay-Malabry, who was none other than Jean Longuet, grandson of Karl Marx... “When I told him, writes Jean Paulhan in his tribute posthumous to Groethuysen, written in 1946: “Do you think there will be many people like you in your classless society?” he replied to me: “That society is classless, it is not only inevitable, it is very important. Whereas I do not at all want there to be people like me.”… A new war arrives: the Paulhans must leave their house, their garden, their animals, which the Groethuysens take care of. After the defeat of Germany, the philosopher still dreams of utopia, but cancer tears this generous and subtle spirit from general affection, on September 17, 1946.
“Groethuysen’s work interested me, he was interested in mine,” Paulhan confided to Ponge. This volume shows their affectionate friendship, based on working together for the NRF. But it is also a document on the intellectual and political networks of the interwar period: Maria Van Rysselberghe and Gide's friends, Princess de Bassiano and the Commerce magazine, Paul Desjardins and the Décades de Pontigny, Henry Church and the Mesures magazine, Alix Guillain and the Communist Party, Aline Mayrisch and the Colpach group...
“I have not known another man,” wrote Paulhan, “for whom an idea, even if it was obviously false or absurd, from the moment a man had invented it, had such a price. He said: “It’s an idea” in a gourmet tone. This is because he thought that the truth having once been reached in the course of time (by Hegel and – as far as its application to the modern world was concerned – by Marx), it only remained for us to form ideas – more or less pleasant, curious, touchingly weak. (Death of Groethuysen in Luxembourg, 1969).
Edition established, prefaced and annotated by the historian Bernard Dandois, who published little-known texts by Groethuysen (Philosophy and History, Albin Michel, 1995) and studies on his relations with Paulhan (Paulhan, Le clair et l'obscur, Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, Gallimard, 1999), Malraux and Sartre.
Collection “Correspondences of Jean Paulhan”
Publication: March 23, 2017
46 black and white illustrations. Appendices (“Tributes to Bernard Groethuysen and Alix Guillain”). Index of names and titles cited.
Edition: 500 copies, printed by Imprimerie Renon (Ruelle-sur-Touvre), on Olin Regular Ivory 90 g paper, under cover filled with Nettuno Oltremare 215 g paper from Papeteries Fedrigoni.
13 x 21.5cm. 240 pages.
Public sale price: €30
ISBN: 978-2-912222-55-8
Publisher : Claire Paulhan