Dalhousie French Studies -1- Yourcenar, Sartre and the Limits of Authenticity: Re-reading Mémoires d’Hadrien from an Existentialist Perspective Dionysios Kapsaskis arguerite Yourcenar has always been perceived as an outsider to the literary and intellectual scene of her time. Even at the height of her fame, in 1970, Maurice Nadeau wrote: “Sans doute, Marguerite Yourcenar prend-elle malaisément place dans le grand courant qui, après la guerre, porte les romanciers français vers de nouvelles terres, à l’aide de nouvelles méthodes d’approche” (Nadeau 57). Ten years later, in 1980, the distinction of becoming the first académicienne failed to trigger a critical reassessment of Yourcenar’s persona and work. As recently as 2014, in an article in Le Magazine Littéraire, in the context of a dossier dedicated to Yourcenar, Bruno Blanckeman confirmed that “elle reste hermétique aux avant-gardes de son siècle” (Blanckeman 93). Perhaps paradoxically, the author encouraged this perception of her work by distancing herself from her contemporary intellectual currents on several occasions. For example, in a 1987 interview, a few months before she died, she was asked whether she had “des contacts avec les existentialistes, par exemple Sartre, Camus, Blanchot, ceux qui ont donné le ton […] à la culture d’après-guerre en France”. Yourcenar replied as follows: “Pas énormément, parce que je trouve toute cette littérature beaucoup trop intellectualiste, beaucoup trop dialectique; et dans un moment où il serait si important de voir de près et de s’intéresser à la réalité des choses, elle tourne le dos aux choses” (Yourcenar, Portrait d’une voix 366). This is a fascinating statement in that it weaves together issues of historical urgency (in the aftermath of the War) with philosophical questions (such as the need to turn to the things themselves), while simultaneously making a case against literary abstraction in post-War French literature. This article will argue that, for all their dismissive character, statements such as this should not be construed as signs of insularity, but as expressions of Yourcenar’s informed engagement with the theoretical debates of her time. As a case in point, in what follows, I will identify the presence of an existentialist thread in Yourcenar’s magnum opus, Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951), and I will analyze it with selective reference to Jean-Paul Sartre’s fiction and philosophy of that time. I will propose that Yourcenar employs existentialist notions that enjoyed wide currency at the time, such as authenticity and freedom, in order to test (and ultimately confirm) the resilience of the classical humanist tradition after the Second World War. In the last part of this article, I will address some of the criticisms concerning her putative reluctance to confront humanism’s aporias and the ethical ambiguities to which the humanist tradition gave rise. In an interview published in 1972, Yourcenar sweepingly dismissed existentialism, Marxism and structuralism as “ideologies [qui] durcissent le passé” (Rosbo 56). Her point was that abstract thinking, fashionable as it was in French intellectual circles, failed to do justice to the complexity of history and lived experience. Already in 1951, in a letter to Constantin Dimaras, her co-translator of Greek poet Cavafy, she was keen to dissociate Mémoires d’Hadrien – then in the course of becoming a literary success – from what she called “[l]es systèmes psychologiques en vogue,” namely, “[le] démonisme mystique d’un Dostoïevski, [les] complexes freudiens, ou […] l’existentialisme”. She added that these theories were infiltrated by a “notion chrétienne du péché […] privée de […] la notion du libre arbitre et celle de la Grâce”. To these theories, Yourcenar opposed her own neoclassical idea of a harmonious and serene humanity, “une image plus tranquille et plus égale de l’homme, sans rehauts, sans ombre portée” (Yourcenar, D’Hadrien à Zénon 37- 38). M