No writer has ever played such a large and varied role in our national life as Andre Malraux did in the life of 20th-century France. If Ernest Hemingway, after writing his novels of exotic disenchantment, had gone on to lead a battalion up Omaha Beach, and then served two terms in Eisenhower’s Cabinet, he might qualify. But the very impossibility of imagining such a career for Hemingway – or any American writer, no matter how adventurous – suggests the distinctively Gallic nature of Malraux’s achievement. Only in France, perhaps, could one man accumulate the literary reputation, the intellectual influence, and the political power Malraux enjoyed from the 1930s through the 1960s. To read Olivier Todd’s newly translated biography, “Malraux” (Alfred A. Knopf, 542 pages, $35), which appeared in France in 2001, is to marvel at a culture where politicians, businessmen, and socialites defer to the traditional authority of the man of letters.

Whether that deference was justified, in Malraux’s case, is another question. Malraux won France’s highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 1933, when he was just 32 years old; for decades, he was a perpetual contender for the Nobel Prize. Yet his worldwide literary reputation now seems to rest on just two novels – “La Condition Humaine” (known in English as “Man’s Fate”), his story of the Chinese revolution, and “L’Espoir” (known as “Man’s Hope”), set during the Spanish Civil War. His other productions – novels, memoirs, essays, and many works of art history – are generally unknown in America. Even his major books are much more seldom read and discussed today than they were a generation ago.

Malraux’s legend has declined even more precipitously than his literary standing, and for some of the same reasons. During his lifetime, Malraux was known as the rare man of letters who was also a man of action. In the 1920s and 1930s he seemed to live the revolution that most Western intellectuals could only write, read, and dream about. Edmund Wilson, who helped to make Malraux’s reputation in America, may have written a classic study of Communism in “To the Finland Station,” but Malraux was actually there – in Shanghai, when the Kuomintang and the Communists fought for control of China; in Spain, leading a squadron of Republican pilots against Franco’s Loyalists; in France, organizing Resistance activities during the occupation.

In his 20s he was in Vietnam, running an anti-government newspaper; in his 70s he planned to lead a group of volunteers in the Bangladeshi war of independence. No wonder Malraux seemed like a latter-day Byron at Missolonghi, or like Lawrence of Arabia, whose biography he once planned to write. As Mr. Todd says, his only peers during his lifetime were Sartre and Camus, but while they were acknowledged as great writers, “Malraux, in addition, became a myth.”

But as Mr. Todd shows, for the first time in such great and irrefutable detail, myth is exactly what most of Malraux’s exploits were. Few biographers are so completely, eagerly, and at times vindictively devoted to debunking their subject as Mr. Todd. When one considers the scale and success of Malraux’s deceptions, it is easy to understand why.

Malraux, it turns out, was not a commissar in the Kuomintang, and never witnessed the revolutionary events he wrote about in “La Condition Humaine” and “Les Conquerants” (“The Conquerors”). In fact, while he spent time in Asia in the 1920s, he barely set foot in China; instead, he was in French Cambodia, plundering Khmer temples for artworks to sell to European collectors. (He and an accomplice were convicted and given a suspended sentence.)

Malraux was in Spain during the Civil War, helping to funnel French planes and pilots to the Republicans, despite an official embargo. But he was never wounded in combat, as he later said. He did lead an improvised volunteer brigade in the last months of World War II and fought dangerous battles against the retreating Germans. But he did not join the Resistance until March 1944, and never held the high rank he consistently claimed.

The pattern that emerges from Mr. Todd’s detective work is one of exaggeration, rather than wholesale fabrication. There is no gainsaying Malraux’s intrepidity, ingenuity, and personal bravery. It is not every novelist, or every soldier for that matter, who could have accomplished what Malraux did in Spain or occupied France. But he was not content with mere accomplishments, longing in stead to give them the shapeliness and grandeur of feats. Malraux seems less like an ordinary braggart than like a novelist of himself, willfully erasing the boundary between art and life, what was and what should have been.

This does not, of course, make his falsehoods less reprehensible. Lying occasionally for personal advantage is vice, but lying consistently in order to create a distorted image of reality is propaganda, or ideology, and there is something balefully ideological about Malraux’s life and work. It is a shame, in fact, that Mr. Todd’s zest for exposure leads him to disperse his energies, and the reader’s, in tracking down his subject’s trivial private falsehoods, when it is his public and political falsehoods that make Malraux such a monitory example.

Indeed, Mr. Todd can be so sarcastic, so sneeringly judgmental, that the reader is sometimes tempted to sympathize with Malraux. It is one thing to expose Malraux’s lies about China and Spain, on which his reputation rests. But must we be scandalized by the fact that, as Minister of Culture during De Gaulle’s 10-year presidency, Malraux sometimes exceeded his departmental budget? Should we be disgusted, as Mr. Todd’s choice of words so obviously intends, by the way Malraux “ate thick, grilled red meat and gobble[d] down mille-feuilles”? And what is the point of adding, when his mistress testifies to her sexual satisfaction with Malraux, the vague and leering footnote: “Not all of Malraux’s partners were as appreciative in this do main”? Perhaps in France, where Malraux is still enough of an idol to need demolishing, this kind of vehemence seems justified; it does not travel well.

If Malraux is still significant today, it is not because he was a bad husband, or got into debt to his publisher, or didn’t pay enough attention to his children, though all of these allegations of Mr. Todd’s are doubtless true. Rather, Malraux’s importance lies in the example he provides of intellect seduced by ideology. From the time he started writing, in the mid-1920s, until World War II, Malraux was one of the most prominent fellow travelers among Western intellectuals. His novels glamorized Communist violence in China and Spain, helping to create a seductive myth of the revolutionary as a man of noble violence, austere idealism, and iron will. Such a man is Garine, the proto-existentialist hero of “Les Conquerants,” who declares: “I don’t love mankind. I don’t even love the poor, in other words the people I’m going to fight for. … What I want – are you listening? – is a certain form of power.”

By selling this potent combination of Nietzsche and Marx, egotism and scientism, Malraux played his part in the dangerous coarsening of what Auden called “a low, dishonest decade.” The ideological power of Malraux’s fiction came from just that element which led true Marxists, including Trotsky, to despise it: its transformation of Communism from a materialist “science” into a personal ethic, or even just a lifestyle. This made Communism appealing to Western intellectuals, who had little knowledge of actual conditions in the Soviet Union but could enjoy the dream of becoming paladins of the Revolution. Malraux turned into a Gaullist anti-Communist after the war, but on balance, as one obituary quoted by Mr. Todd says, “Malraux made more Communists than he unmade.”

In short, one might say, Malraux helped to make evil chic. In “La Condition Humaine,” he even tempts the reader to admire and identify with the fanatical Ch’en, a suicide bomber: “To his amazement, he found himself possessed by a radiant exaltation. Everything became simple. His anguish had vanished. … His tense voice was charged with a savage certainty, but he seemed much more to possess his exaltation than to be possessed by it.” Today, when the liberal order is again threatened by such “savage certainties,” Malraux’s mystifications seem more relevant, and more worthy of challenge, than ever.