Address by Frédéric Mitterrand, Minister of Culture and Communication, on the occasion of the commemoration of the 35th anniversary of the death of André Malraux - inauguration of the exhibition «André Malraux, from yesterday to today»

Please know that I sincerely regret not being able to be with you this
evening for this event in tribute to André Malraux.

For all those celebrating his memory, it is always paradoxical to
to commemorate the “commemorative” par excellence, the one that
steps of the Pantheon, reinvented the magic of the verb, lending the talent
with his pen and the timbre of his voice echoing an elusive grandeur,
which was sometimes called France, humanity or the nobility of the
world.

Behind the writer, behind the minister, I don’t forget the Resistance, the one who
only wore the green and black ribbon of the order of the
Liberation. But as a minister in office, entrusted with the task
unlikely to follow in his footsteps, I will endeavor to return to that
for whom this function was to assume the fact that
negligible is over.” I often keep this phrase for myself.
in memory.

André Malraux is obviously the one who gave the department that we
still called “cultural affairs” not only most of its
but its greatest ambitions: the protection of our
heritage, its enrichment with dations, the deconcentration of
ministry action, support for creators, democratization
cultural... It will have established the essential milestones of a single entity in the world
which he sometimes called the funny thing, a house that counts
today some 30,000 agents, whose action is still being deployed,
one way or another, in the shadow of the Commander’s statue.

I was in Amiens this morning for an important meeting concerning the future
our international cooperation in the field of cinema, in
especially for African cinema, in this House of Culture which was
inaugurated by André Malraux in 1966. On that day, 35 years ago, he
evoked his desire to develop what could be something other than the
politics in the order of mind.”

Behind his sometimes sibylline formulae, there was always this reprophète
who loved to feel the breath of the universal, in each of his
initiatives, in each of his speeches, a breath that always prevailed
on the temporal issues he was putting on his famous little green boxes.

When the bureaucracy starts the machinery of its laws, its decrees,
it is always good to keep this constant concern in mind
from the viewing height.

Those who know the rue de Valois know that in front of the
Minister, there is this photo gallery of all his predecessors since the
creation of the Ministry – such as small black and white sarcophagi
all those who exercised this function. And then we cross the eyes of the
of them. I have always liked the idea that the man at the right of De
Gaulle in Cabinet was a minister certainly not
conventional.

By the time this message is read to you, I am probably still
Senate, to defend the upcoming budget for Culture and
Communication. I think about him, often, in these situations. Upset by
the budget speeches of culture in the National Assembly, he left
quickly his papers for his famous improvisations that
immediately return all members to the galleries. As evidenced
still his collaborators, he always found a way to escape
to remind his listeners, as he did in Dakar, that a
culture, it is the fundamental attitude of a people in front of
the universe.”

He was also the one who took full measure of the finiteness of our actions.
So what does my life say to those gods who lie down and those cities who
lift, to this crash of action that comes to beat the liner as if it were the
eternal noise of the sea, to so many vain hopes, to so many friends killed?"

I would like to warmly greet all the members of the Amitiés
André Malraux and the many volunteers who
work to keep alive the memory of those who never wanted to let go
taken with the universal. The secular imagination is probably
the antidestin, that is, the greatest creation of men and the destiny of
our civilization is the struggle of the two imaginaries: on the one hand, that of the
dream machines, with their incalculable power and the fact that they have
emancipated the dream and, on the other hand, what may exist in front and that is
what I once called the legacy of the nobility
of the world.”

Thank you.