From the collapse of the gold standard to the twilight of idols in André Gide's “Les Faux-monnayeurs” (Counterfeiters)

Abstract

In André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs, counterfeit money and characters flow in a plot based on a circulatory system in which they seem to be interchangeable. Ideas flow as well in the novel, creating a polyphonic intertextuality. Gide plays with his preferred authors, such as Nietzsche, whose claims are looked into in order to create a distance and question them. Such premises are held by cynical characters as well as the protagonist Bertrand, a positive nietzscheanist icon in his will to affirm himself and radically question upper class and religious values. The money counterfeit takes its roots in the collapse of the gold standard in 1914’s France. Gide depicts a world in which all values’ authenticity are shaken, the counterfeit money serving as a metonymy to question Nietzsche’s arguments, often in an ironical way. Nietzsche’s ideas flow from a character to the next and seem to be put to the test.