Abstract
While Paul Valéry's criticism in the years 1920 focused on the commercial value of his work (the relationship between actual work and the price of publications), it also concerned his intellectual value. This offensive against the work itself, which still has echoes today, was deployed in particular against poetic collections and came mainly from neoclassicism and the extreme right, two movements often linked at the time.
Henri Clouard compared Valéry's writings to Gongora's baroque, and Alfred Droin to " un vase vide ". Valéry was accused of creative impotence.
In 1925, Valéry's election to the Académie française was narrowly defeated : a whole conservative clan opposed him. In his 1927 acceptance speech, Valéry rekindled the controversy with a thinly veiled persiflage of his predecessor, Anatole France. Even Albert Thibaudet praised Valéry's accession to the Académie in an ambiguous or, to say the least, clumsy manner, describing the event as " funiculaire " du " pic Mallarmé " : a colorful way of describing Valéry's access to Mallarmé's difficulties, but also a certain degradation of the poetic ideal.
Subsequently, periodicals such as L'Œuvre and L'Action française railed against the hermeticism of Valéry's poetry, which had become a commonplace of literary criticism, a hermeticism that perhaps cost him the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The arguments against Paul Valéry during his lifetime were of three types :
1) impotence : Valéry would write too little and be the subject of too many editions ; a follower of pastiche (an aspect assumed in La Jeune Parque), he would lack creative power ;
2) l'hermétisme de pacotille : Valéry would hide very simple things behind an artificial and snobbish hermeticism : he would profane the sublime vocation of poetry by turning it into a mere work on language, a den of crossword puzzles ;
3) Valéry is a sub-Mallarmé, " un rare pour tous " (Le Crapouillot) : Léon Daudet felt that he was simply Mallarmé's " cimetière marin ".
Of course, these arguments contradict each other : Valéry is accused of being both obscure and facile. But these arguments were concentrated in Aragon's Traité du style in 1928, and were regularly taken up in the 1940s and 1950s. Aragon compares Valéry's literature to the Thérèse Humbert affair, which had made headlines at the beginning of the 20th century - a kind of poetic Panama, a value built on emptiness.
