It is with great sadness that we have to report the passing of Maurice Larès on Friday at the age of over 100. He was a pioneer in Lawrence studies. His friend Christophe Leclerc has written the following:
Maurice J.-M. Larès (1926 – 2026) spent his youth in Fontainebleau and lived through the war years in Algeria and Morocco. He studied English and French at the Sorbonne and, in 1950-51, attended the University of Edinburgh (Old College and Minto House) on a Stevenson Exchange Scholarship; it was there that he met his future wife. He taught English at the Sadiki Secondary School (Tunis, 1953-1961) and subsequently at the C.N.E.D. (Centre nationale d’enseignement à distance, Paris, 1961-1991). He had been conducting research on T.E. Lawrence since 1959 and completed a Doctorat d’État in comparative literature at the Sorbonne under the supervision of Professor René Etiemble; his thesis, T.E. Lawrence, la France, les Français (T.E. Lawrence, France, and the French), was published in 1980.
Since then, he published lengthy essays in Relations Internationales, Études Internationales, and Revue Inter-ethniques, and has contributed to the following works: T.E. Lawrence Puzzle and Le Mythe d’Etiemble (Didier Érudition). He participated in the Cérisy-la-Salle symposium in July 1988, presenting a previously unpublished text by André Malraux on T.E. Lawrence, a biographical piece titled Le Démon de l’absolu (The Demon of the Absolute), which was subsequently published by Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Œuvres Complètes d’André Malraux, Vol. II, 1996 and Folio, 2026). His paper from the Cérisy symposium was published in the event’s proceedings in 1989: “Genèse d’un texte malrucien inédit, Le Démon de l’Absolu, unité de l’homme, unité de l’œuvre” (La Documentation française, 1989).
Maurice Larès was also a reserve colonel and interpreter. For twelve years, he directed the Maison de l’Inde (Paris) and subsequently the Victor Lyon Foundation at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. For the publisher Laffont, Maurice Larès has translated numerous works by T.E. Lawrence, including Secret Despatches from Arabia, The Letters to E.T Leeds, The Letters Selected by Malcolm Brown, and others that ultimately were not published: the greater part of T.E. Lawrence by His Friends, T.E. Lawrence to His Biographer Liddell Hart, The Letters to Bruce Rogers, and a significant portion of the Home Letters.
A fuller tribute by Christophe will appear in our next newsletter.