French Literary Fascism

This is the first book to provide a sustained critical analysis of the literary-aesthetic dimension of French fascismthe peculiarly French form of what Walter Benjamin called the fascist "aestheticizing of politics." Focusing first on three important extremist nationalist writers at the turn of the century and then on five of the most visible fascist intellectuals in France in the 1930s, David Carroll shows how both traditional and modern concepts of art figure in the elaboration of fascist ideologyand in the presentation of fascism as an art of the political. Carroll is concerned with the internal relations of fascism and literaturehow literary fascists conceived of politics as a technique for fashioning a unified people and transforming the disparate elements of society into an organic, totalized work of art. He explores the logic of such aestheticizing, as well as the assumptions about art, literature, and culture at the basis of both the aesthetics...