Maurice Clavel

Maurice Clavel (1920-1979) was a French writer, journalist, and philosopher.

Maurice Clavel was born on 10 November 1920 in Frontignan, Hérault to a family headed by a father who was a pharmacist. This conservative milieu of small shopkeepers in Languedoc led him to be an activist in the French Popular Party (FPP) in his hometown of Frontignan.

A brilliant pupil, he got into the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in the Rue d'Ulm in Paris. There he became acquainted with Trotskyist Jean-Toussaint Desanti and Maurrassian Pierre Boutang. The latter, having been appointed in the Secretariat of Public Instruction, invited him to serve by his side under Marshal Philippe Pétain. Having just gotten his certificate of morale and sociology in Montpellier, Maurice Clavel accepted but was soon disillusioned. While preparing a thesis on Immanuel Kant, he then joined the Résistance (1942). As head the French Forces of the Interior of Eure-et-Loir, he took part in the liberation of Chartres where he greeted General Charles de Gaulle on the cathedral's forecourt.

At the Libération, he denounced the blind epuration and tried to save the heads of Robert Brasillach and Drieu La Rochelle. That did not prevent him from being a fervent activist in the Rally of the French People (RPF) whose acerbic criticism of communism got him to be accused by the French Communist Party (PCF) of being "Goebbels' voice". He then founded with Henri d'Astier de La Vigerie and André Figueras a newspaper called L'Essor. Meanwhile, he wrote plays directed by Jean Vilar like Les Incendiaires (The Incendiaries) in 1947 or La Terrasse de midi (The Noon Terrace) in 1949. But those failed, and as he was torn apart after breaking his relationship with the actor Silvia Monfort, Clavel accepted a professor tenure in the Carnot high school in Dijon.

Barely liked by his superiors, he soon got back to theatrical works when, in 1951, Jean Vilar appointed him as secretary-general of the Théâtre National Populaire. But his new play Malsameda (1954) as well as his first novel Une fille pour l'été (A Girl for the Summer, 1955) turned out to be failures too.