Richard Spiteri
Maurice Ciantar (1915-1990) was a French author, journalist and poet who was born of a Maltese father in the north-west suburbs of Paris. Ciantar died in the Paris region. A document dating from 1951 and which is amongst his papers and manuscripts that are kept by the publisher Du Lérot gives an inkling of Ciantar's Maltese ancestors in the second half of the 19th century.
This particular Ciantar family was related to the aristocratic Ciantar Paleologos. Maurice's grandfather Edward (1832-1892) was from Valletta. During his youth Edward left for Alexandria where he got married to Victorine Lanzon, a young woman who belonged to the already thriving Maltese community of that Egyptian naval port. Edward also got very rich in Alexandria.
In the late 1880s, traces of Edward Ciantar in colonial archives of that period become commonplace. By then he was one of the most successful local businessman and was about to venture into politics. An edition of the Malta Government Gazette for 1887 includes his name in the list of persons eligible to vote for the election of members of the Council of Government and gives his address as 111 Archbishop Street, Valletta, that is the palace with the baroque façade which today houses the police station.
In early 1889, Edward Ciantar was elected vice-president of the Malta Chamber of Commerce. Governor Torrens immediately appointed him member of the Board of Health. That same year Ciantar together with Gerald Strickland, the Chief Secretary to Governor, were conferred the title of "Companions of the Order of St Michael and St George". In 1890 Ciantar was elected president of the Chamber of Commerce. In May of that year he wrote a letter thanking Strickland for appointing him member of the committee planning improvements to Marina wharf.
In 1889, Ciantar got elected by the Borsa di Commercio as member of the Council of Government. This election disgusted Fortunato Mizzi who realized that Strickland manipulated independent candidates in order to hold the reins of power. Mizzi also derided the title of CMG bestowed upon Ciantar. In May of the same year, the president of the Chamber of Commerce played a leading role in launching Politica e Commercio. This newspaper which favoured cooperation with the British administration soon announced the setting up of a new party led by Ciantar and Alfredo Naudi.
However Edward Ciantar, who belonged to an older generation, passed away. And that meant one adversary less for Fortunato Mizzi.
Ciantar had four sons, obviously four musketeers: Henry, Richard, Umberto and Godfrey. The first two were born in 1863 and 1866 respectively in Alexandria. Henry got married to Emma Denaro, the daughter of another prominent member of the Chamber of Commerce. They in turn gave birth to a son as well as two daughters: Gladys (1895-1959) and Yvonne Mona (1903-1954). Those were the days when the real ambition of the Maltese upper bourgeoisie was to marry off their daughters to officers in the British armed forces! Gladys married a major in the British army whilst Yvonne married a Commander in the Royal Navy.
Local newspapers of 1959 give some information about the demise of Gladys. She considered herself a "Paleologue". A couple of days after Gladys's death, a local newspaper gave her full name as: the Noble Gladys de Piro-Cowley née de Conti Ciantar Paleologue. Attending the funeral ceremony was the Honourable Mabel Strickland OBE. After three quarters of a century, the bond between the Ciantars and the Stricklands was as strong as ever.
Meanwhile Henry and Godfrey had set up the company Ciantar Bros. (Malta and London) which was still in business up to the outbreak of World War II. But I would like to turn my attention to Richard Ciantar. In 1896, he left Malta for good. In his application for a passport, he declared he was a painter. The land registry in Valletta gives information about Richard's whereabouts. The money he earned from real estate in Malta permitted him to live comfortably abroad. In 1896 he resided in Nice. By 1898 he was in Paris and soon in the suburbs where he was to settle down.
Years passed. In 1913, Richard Ciantar, at the age of 47, got married to Marcelle, a tall flirty woman aged 21. Marcelle's parents, who were recent immigrants from Romania, were now running a small enterprise in Paris. Surely these were two factors which made them give away their daughter in marriage to a man old enough to be her father. Richard and Marcelle gave birth to Maurice their only son who was sent to the best colleges in the capital. Richard inculcated in his son Maurice a Maltese identity which was boosted with visits paid to the family by Godfrey Ciantar and by Yvonne. However Richard passed away in 1924.
In Paris, the relationship between mother and son soon turned sour. Maurice was not at all interested in working in the retail trade that Marcelle had embraced. In fact Maurice, like his Maltese father, had artistic leanings. At age 17 Maurice left home, led in the capital a Bohemian life and slept in digs. He usually dropped in cafés frequented by Sorbonne students. Soon he got involved in politics and in the summer of 1936 he went to Barcelona, but on witnessing the utter confusion of the revolutionaries, he returned to France after three months only.
Maurice spent the war years in Nice. In Paris, in 1944, he became first a political journalist and then reviewed the music halls and films. Meanwhile he was doing creative writing and his speciality was going to be the autobiographical novel. From 1947 to 1952 he published the Jacques Vorageolles trilogy. The first third of the first volume dealt with the final years of his Maltese father, Richard Ciantar.
Shunned by publishing houses, Maurice now was about to cross a long desert from which he was to emerge only in 1969. In 1966 feeling down, Maurice, in an attempt to get away from it all, signed a contract at the embassy of the People's Republic of China in Paris to work in the translation offices of the propaganda section of the Maoist regime in Peking. Maurice returned to Paris in 1968 with the manuscript of a diary written during the Cultural Revolution. One Thousand days in Peking was an instant hit and was translated in German and in Portuguese. Ciantar's abhorrence of Maoism though made him many enemies in the French capital where the Chinese communist leader was the object of a cult.
From now on Du Lérot publishers opened their doors wide open for Ciantar and accepted to print further autobiographical texts like Maman Salope, Le Journal d'Edouard and Un Bouton dans la rue. The unfinished Proturbe/L'Heure de mon nombril which is a gem in the making was published posthumously.
In the late 1950s and the early 1960s many French citizens of Maltese origin fled from Tunisia and Algeria and headed to mainland France. In Paris, they set up the Association France-Malte. Amongst Ciantar's papers, I discovered a form for membership in this association. Ciantar kept this form which however he never filled in. Ciantar never visited Malta. In his last autobiographical text, he describes himself poring over a tourist brochure of the Maltese Islands. He took special interest in Comino: the belly button. But so late in life, the hour of the belly button could only mean the end of his earthly life.