Paul Valéry and Modern Tyranny

In 1922, the former director of the Havas News Agency, a certain Edouard Lebey, died in Paris. The man who had been Lebey’s private secretary for more than two decades, handling his correspondence and personal affairs, reading aloud to him for hours from novels and travelogues, suddenly found himself out of a job, at the age of fifty, with a family to support and no other qualifications than being a famous poet. From Lebey’s death until the end of his own life, in 1945, Paul Valéry did what he could to transform his literary fame into an income, turning out essays, speeches, prefaces, and limited editions of his work seemingly on demand. His celebrated dialogue Idée fixe (1932) was written on commission for an association of surgeons; he was even accused of forging his own original manuscripts in order to sell them multiple times, a joke truly worthy of this master of self-reference, if joke it was in the face of simple financial necessity. The accusation, in any case, caused the prices of his manuscripts to plummet on the rare books market. So when Antonio Ferro, the Portuguese propaganda minister, offered the poet 2,400 escudos for a preface to his book Salazar: Portugal and Its Leader, the only second doubts that likely crossed Valéry’s mind were the ones with which he opens his short essay: “I know nothing about practical politics, where I presume one finds everything I flee.”1