Paul Morand

Paul Morand (1888–1976) was a French writer and diplomat born in Paris whose fiction, essays, and travel writing made him one of the most stylistically inventive French prose writers of the interwar period, and whose active collaboration with the Vichy regime cast a lasting shadow over his literary reputation.

Educated at Oxford and the London School of Economics, Morand entered the French diplomatic service in 1913 and served in London, Rome, Madrid, Siam, and Bucharest, among other postings. His early collections of short stories — Tendres Stocks (1921, preface by Marcel Proust), Ouvert la nuit (1922), Fermé la nuit (1923) — captured the pace, dislocation, and erotic charge of post-war European life in a fractured, elliptical style that was widely admired. New York (1930) and subsequent travel writings extended this cosmopolitan observation. During the Second World War he served the Vichy government, ultimately as French Minister to Bucharest and then Bern, and was condemned by the Comité national des écrivains after the Liberation. His attempt to enter the Académie française was blocked in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle, who exercised his presidential prerogative; he was finally elected in 1968, after de Gaulle's departure. His memoir Venises (1971) is considered among his finest late works.