André Derval offers the biography of the centenary of the birth of Michel Ragon (June 24, 1924 – February 14, 2020), this unclassifiable French writer, art critic, literary critic and architectural historian. In the Nantes quarterly review 303, André Derval explains why and how he wrote this biography.
The researcher worked on Robert Massin, the graphic designer for Albin Michel editions. The latter was linked to Michel Ragon and put him in contact with André Derval. After the death of Michel Ragon in 2020, his wife Françoise Ragon asked André Derval to write a biography for the centenary of Michel’s birth.
With a certain complicity, Derval agreed to write a portrait of the writer. To do this, he drew on the author’s work, his correspondence, but also his library, which for a researcher is teeming with information. It ultimately delivers a detailed analysis, from which three stages emerge: the learning from its birth to 1953, the construction from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, and the fullness until the 2010s.
Libertarianism and anarchism
Born on June 24, 1924 in Marseille, Michel Ragon moved to Vendée very early with his family. At the age of 8, he lost his father and went to live in Nantes with his mother. It was in this city that he learned about painting, literature and poetry. Vincent Rousseau publishes in the magazine 303 several extracts from his first poems and his reading journals (more than 200 titles per year). Employed in the service of the prefecture, Michel Ragon was allegedly threatened with arrest and had to leave his post – unless it was to flee the Compulsory Labor Service imposed by Nazi Germany during the Occupation of France. He returned to Nantes once the Second World War was over, then settled in Paris.
In 1945, in the capital, he frequented proletarian writers, led by Henry Poulaille, whose stories he had discovered (Daily bread et The Wretched of the Earth: 1906-1910) in Nantes. Ragon, curious and passionate, rushed to meet his favorite writer once he got to Paris. A bond between the two men was born: Henry Poulaille entrusted him with the editorial duties of a proletarian literature review and introduced him to literary circles. Michel Ragon writes a dictionary book on literature, People’s Writerswhich serves as the basis for most of his publications on proletarian literature. At the same time, still through Poulaille, he began to frequent libertarian circles thanks to the bookstores where he then worked.
He collaborated with the anarchist press (Le Libertaire, Défense de l’homme and later La Rue) and adopted anarchist thought, from which he never deviated, as evidenced by two of his main books on the subject: the novel The Memory of the Vanquishedwhere Ragon depicts most of the anarchists he met grappling with the history of the 20the century – the Russian Revolution, then the Spanish Civil War –, and The Libertarian Wayan essay full of empathy on the anarchist movement. These encounters open up other perspectives for him. He meets artists of the CoBrA movement (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) and is passionate about contemporary art. This is the third axis of the writer’s essays, which allows him to experience a certain success, as evidenced by his twenty books published on art.
Bits of autobiography
The year 1953 was a turning point in Michel Ragon’s career. After several difficult years, he became a second-hand bookseller in Paris, first on the Quai de la Tournelle then on the Quai Malaquais. He is designated as secretary of the corporation. Its clubs become a meeting place for writers. They also offer him the freedom to choose opening hours and to continue his discovery of contemporary art (painting, sculpture, drawing). They give him time to write and travel. This is the period when Ragon launches into literature; his first novels evoke simple people and sometimes contain scraps of autobiography, as in Funny jobs or A place in the sun.
Little by little, he became passionate about architecture, of which he created a history that remains a reference. He then abandoned the docks and began lecture tours on art and architecture for various public organizations. He questions the relationships between man, the city and public health, several of his books raising the question of the social conditions of housing and the functions of town planning. Finally, he was appointed teacher at the National School of Decorative Arts.
The 1970s offered him recognition. Nevertheless, Ragon does not depart from his attachment to libertarian ideas and remembers his childhood in Vendée (My mother’s accent). He builds a personal work around his origins. The Vendée uprising is at the heart of several of his novels and essays, such as Cholet’s red handkerchiefs or 1793 – The Vendée insurrection and the misunderstandings of freedomin which he attempts to resolve the contradictions between the message of freedom brought by the French Revolution and the counter-revolutionary character of the insurrection.
This Vendée uprising represents the refusal of Parisian centralization. This cycle, however, leads to a certain disillusionment in the author, who sees himself as the object of recuperation. He then preferred to return to his favorite subjects: proletarian literature and anarchism.
A man with multiple interests, Michel Ragon illustrates this polyphony of popular culture, of which his biography and review offer a fine overview.
Source: www.slate.fr
