Malraux was born in
Paris. His parents separated in 1905 and eventually divorced. He was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, Berthe and Adrienne Lamy. His father, a stockbroker, committed suicide in 1930.
At the age of 21, Malraux left for
Cambodia with his new wife,
Clara Goldschmidt. In Cambodia, Malraux undertook an expedition into remote jungle areas in search of lost temples. On his return, he was arrested by French colonial authorities for removing
bas-reliefs from one of the temples he discovered,
Banteay Srei.
Malraux became highly critical of the French
colonial authorities in
Indochina, and in 1925 helped to organize the
Young Annam League and founded a newspaper
Indochina in Chains.
On his return to France, he published
The Temptation of the West (1926) an exchange of letters between a Westerner and an Oriental comparing aspects of the two cultures. This was followed by his first novel
The Conquerors (1928), then by
The Royal Way (1930) which drew in part on his Cambodian experience, and then by
Man's Fate (
La Condition Humaine). For
La Condition Humaine, a powerful novel about a
communist uprising in
Shanghai, he won the 1933
Prix Goncourt.
In the 1930s Malraux was active in the anti-Fascist Popular Front in France. At the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War he joined the Republican forces in Spain, serving in, and helping to organise, their fledging air force. He also toured the
United States to raise funds for the Republicans. A novel drawing on his Spanish war experiences,
Man's Hope, (
L'Espoir) appeared in
1938.
At the outbreak of
Second World War Malraux joined the French Army. He was captured in 1940 during the
Western Offensive but escaped and later joined the
French Resistance. He was captured by the
Gestapo in
1944 and underwent a
mock execution. Later he led a tank unit
Brigade Alsace-Lorraine in defence of
Strasbourg and in the takeover of
Stuttgart. He was awarded the
Médaille de la Résistance, the
Croix de Guerre, and the British
Distinguished Service Order.
During the war he worked on a long novel,
The Struggle with the Angel, the manuscript of which was destroyed by the Gestapo after his capture in 1944. A surviving first part, which he entitled
The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, was published after the war.
Malraux and his first wife were divorced in the 1940s. (His daughter from this marriage, Florence (b.1933), married the filmmaker
Alain Resnais.)
Malraux had two sons by his second wife
Josette Clotis: Pierre-Gauthier (1940-1961) and Vincent (1943-1961). In 1944 while Malraux was fighting in
Alsace, Josette was killed in an accident, having slipped while boarding a train. The two sons died in an automobile accident in 1961.
After the war General
Charles de Gaulle appointed Malraux as his Minister for Information (1945-1946). During this post-war period he also worked on the first of his books on art,
The Psychology of Art which was published in three volumes over the period 1947 to 1949. The work was subsequently re-published in a one volume, somewhat revised, form as
The Voices of Silence (
Les Voix du Silence). Malraux became France's first
Minister of Culture in de Gaulle's second government from 1960 to 1969. Among many other initiatives, he created
maisons de la culture in a number of provincial cities and worked to preserve France's national heritage.
In 1948 Malraux married
Marie-Madeleine Lioux, a concert pianist and the widow of his half-brother,
Roland Malraux. They separated in 1966.
During the 1960s Malraux published the first volume of a trilogy on art entitled
The Metamorphosis of the Gods, the second two volumes (not yet translated into English) appearing shortly before he died. He also began publishing a series of semi-autobiographical works, the first of which was entitled
Antimémoires. One of these,
Lazarus, is a reflection on death following one of his own final illnesses. Malraux died in
Créteil, near
Paris, on
November 23, 1976, and was buried in the
Verrières-le-Buisson (Essonne) cemetery. In honor of his contributions to French culture, his ashes were moved to the
Panthéon in Paris in 1996, on the twentieth anniversary of his death.
An international Malraux Society was founded in the United States in 1968. There is also an active association based in Paris - the Amitiés internationales André Malraux.
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