Maurice Blanchot probably went to Paris in 1929, at more or less the same time as Emmanuel Levinas. In June 1930, he sat for a further degree, the Diplôme d’Études Supérieures, at the Sorbonne with a dissertation entitled “The Skeptics’ Conception of Dogmatism.”1 The following year, 1931, marked his first collaborations on newspapers and journals of the far right.
He also undertook studies in medicine at Sainte-Anne Hospital, specializing in neurology and psychiatry, without ever defending a doctoral thesis, and perhaps without ever beginning his training as an intern. He might have crossed paths there with Jacques Lacan. Throughout his life, he would remain readily conversant with medical interpretations, which he would use to help his friends, not to mention himself.
He can be imagined to have had a relatively comfortable life in Paris. His position writing editorials for the Journal des Débats, the ultraconservative daily of the “two hundred families,” would soon grant him a regular salary, which would often be augmented by other income related to other roles in the press, which he held at the same time.2 Friends reported seeing him in a splendid, very expensive car. According to other reports, however, Blanchot did not have a car, at least not in 1937, since his “habit of taking taxis all over Paris” was strikingly unusual.3
These years of comfort, perhaps of luxury, were also the years when a global crisis was setting in, the world was drifting into fascism and marching inexorably toward war. At the beginning of the decade, France was still relatively prosperous and still had the best army in the world. Briand’s foreign policy was reassuring, just like Poincaré’s economic and fiscal policies. The pacifist dream, born of the First World War, still seemed possible. But from 1932 onward the country was unable to escape the depression. Dragged down by the fall in foreign trade, the decline of diplomacy on the international stage, posturing among government departments, the Stavisky affair, and antiparliamentarian feeling, the victory and then failure of the popular front, and the Munich crisis, France would experience upheavals continuously until the war.
Our aim here will not be to reconstruct an epoch, in a few pages, with the distortions that are unavoidable in any quick, summary representation.4 We need only recall the great divergence in accounts of the period, for instance in the novels of Céline, the scandals of Bernanos, the notebooks of Sartre, the articles of Bataille or the confessions of Leiris, cubist and surrealist paintings, the films of Renoir or the photography of Kertész. Between the obsession with breakdown and pleasure (whether gentle or violent), between personal and public life, between destinies shared and friendships undone, it is impossible to argue that this was a stable period. This period will not escape the responsibility of having ultimately consented—on a massive scale, and blindly, without being able, knowing how, or wanting to think it through—to what led to the unthinkable. Today we must at least attempt to think this period’s insufficiency, its disorder, its ignorance, we must attempt to explain its hybrid legacies and tortuous dissidences, and to recognize how it normalized violence to a shocking extent.
Blanchot arrived in Paris brilliantly cultivated; his rightist elegance and his rural origins were such that for several years he would still prefer the “true traditions of la France profonde.”5 The Parisian Blanchot of the early 1930s could only direct himself, among the bewildering range of possible encounters, toward circles of the far right; these circles brought together, hierarchically, ladies and men, intellectuals and students. L’Étudiant Fran-çais would unite Philippe Ariès, Pierre Boutang, Robert Brasillach and Claude Roy (Nizan too, briefly). The figures this movement looked up to were Barrès, Drumont, Péguy, La Tour du Pin. A spiritual leader since the Dreyfus affair, Charles Maurras was editor of Action Française; Jacques Bainville and Léon Daudet assisted him. An influential political player, which was strongly represented in parliament, the League also had an eponymous daily of its own. Beyond this, it financed La Revue Universelle, an austere bimonthly publication created in 1920, which was edited by Bainville and Massis, and carried articles by the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, the novelist André Maurois, and the critic André Rousseaux. Friendships and acquaintances were common in the daily, philosophical, or literary press: from Temps to the Journal des Débats, from Esprit to Je Suis Partout, from the Revue des Deux Mondes to Nouvelles Littéraires and the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF). Anger, resentment, and a reactionary spirit that sometimes saw itself as revolutionary brought political leaders and students together. Slogans whipped things up; the aristocratic mindset ennobled one, gave one authority, legitimacy. This easy combination proved attractive to the secretly held nihilism and the impatience for glory of young Romantics who did not know their own minds and would not discover that they were Romantics until some later date. While little by little the 1930s would heighten differences and consciousnesses, the legacy of the 1920s was instead one of possible consensus between extremes, the search for agreement or for unnatural solutions to put an end to the crisis. Friendships were free and easy, ideologies were diffuse: Malraux wrote a preface for Maurras and corresponded tempestuously but at length with Maulnier, whom Paulhan approached in view of a collaboration at the NRF, which in turn ran articles by Arland and Thibaudet that viewed favorably the anti-Semitic pamphlets of Céline or Bernanos. The aspiring reactionary-revolutionaries put together the sort of cocktails that justified all kinds of mixtures. Claude Roy’s memory of what they read is as follows:
I set up for myself, all alone in the provinces and then in the Latin Quarter, a bizarre concoction of half-baked and self-taught philosophy, a dinner for a young, rabid dog [bouillie pour jeune chat enragé]: I took the critique of democracy from Baudelaire, Georges Sorel, and Maurras, the “cult of energy” from Nietzsche, Barrès, and Stendhal, the revolt against the sedentary from Rimbaud and Vallès, the vague and violent idea of socialism from Proudhon and Malraux, and the permissibility of pleasure from Gide’s Fruits of the Earth.6
The occasional name excepted, this is the reading that we can imagine Blanchot to have been doing at this time, he who fifty years later would recall in Intellectuals under Scrutiny his intimate and subtle knowledge of Barrès’s work.7 This was a period that allowed both ill-tempered splits and the compatibility of opposites, both heated invectives and compromising personal allegiances. Nothing held, nothing hung together. A lack of reflection could lead one to support publically someone who had been sidelined on a personal level. It was possible to shout anti-Semitic slogans before going to dinner with Jewish acquaintances who were perhaps themselves members of the League, as certain naturalized foreigners were. Barrès was given a state funeral in 1923, and Blum recognized his anti-Semitic friend Jaurès as a “guide” and a “teacher.” Like many others, Blanchot found himself in this situation. He was close to Levinas and close to Maulnier. These were the contradictions of the times, borne lightly and irresponsibly: no one knew quite where to position themselves, no one placed real emphasis on doing so. This did not prevent a lofty and strong identity being proclaimed all the more violently.
Action Française, which always united over refusals (of the Jew, of the Republic, of the defeat), albeit amid great heterogeneity and effervescence, still presented itself in an unclear image, at once conservative, reactionary, and revolutionary (this confusion would explain a number of calls for “dissidence,” which would influence Blanchot—the word after all would come from him). The movement still enjoyed a certain intellectual prestige. Its literary beauty and its darkness were still attractive features. But it had found itself being disowned by the two institutions that its dogma sought to serve, the Church and the monarchy, having been condemned by the former in 1926 (a fact that removed the official support of French clergymen and led to the loss of a number of the faithful, of members and readers, beginning with Maritain, who devoted himself to justifying the Pope’s condemnation), and having also been discredited by the latter at the beginning of the 1930s (the count of Paris, then exiled in Brussels, took on independent advisors and spokesmen). Moreover, from 1928 on and above all in 1930, the very heart of the movement was threatened; while Maurras remained seductive, young “dissidents” reproached him, more or less openly, for preaching an activism without actions, limited to the untiring repetition of archaic slogans and a few exploratory disturbances in the Latin Quarter.8 “A huge song and dance built around a fictitious system,” would later be Rebatet’s judgment.9 The dissidence itself, which created a greater stir on the media and political scene, would nonetheless only lead to verbal inflation, being unable to formulate a new political thinking, and while it would call for revolution, terrorism, or fascism, it would be happy to do no more than call for them.
Thierry Maulnier, a phlegmatic, sporty, and brilliant graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, with a stylistics indebted to Nietzsche’s energy and Racine’s purity, would leave his mark on Action Française as the leader and strategist of this youthful dissidence. Born in 1909, two years after Blanchot, he became the figurehead of a new militant, contestatory generation. His newspaper articles paid homage to Pascal and Gide in a way that Maurras could not have endorsed. Even in taking on the lead role in the main dissident journals, Maulnier would always manage to maintain a link to the leader. He did not hesitate in borrowing from Proudhon, Marx, or Sorel as much as he did from Maurras, Barrès, or Fustel de Coulanges. He pleaded the shared cause of nationalist and proletarian violence; his attention to the workers linked up with that of Henri Lagrange, whom Action Française had judged twenty years earlier a heretic. According to Henri de Montety, Maurras “passed all his whims” to his young disciple:10 he would entertain a possible rapprochement with the nascent early-1930s movements Esprit or Ordre Nouveau, as well as that of editing extremist periodicals like Combat or L’Insurgé and, at the beginning of the war, working for Le Figaro. During all these years Maulnier would cultivate a mixture of monarchism, classicism, rationalism, nationalism, ethnocentrism (based on Europeans, and especially the French), of Germanophobia (at once political, military, literary, and ideological), and antiparliamentarianism that would take him, like the entire right-wing Action Française—but him more than others due to his populist and anticapitalist spirit—to a practical dead end. Imprisoned by Vichy and disliked by the newspapers that supported Pétain, he would be linked to networks close both to collaborators and to the Resistance.
Maulnier lambasted Surrealism, the roaring twenties (années folles), Morand and Cocteau, since “man needs to rediscover essential, virile, total reasons to live and to die.”11 But he read Marxism closely, refusing its rationalizing totalitarianism, the primacy it gives to economics, its functional pragmatism, its class dialectics, while approving of its theoretical coherence (not shared by any contemporary worldview, he stated), its denunciation of bourgeois capitalism, its analysis of workers’ alienation. In July 1936 he even argued for an extension of the social advantages that had recently been introduced after the popular front had come to power. Hitler’s rise to power in turn frightened and inspired him, and he denounced the cowardly, corrupt powerlessness of the democratic countries’ reaction to it. In his eyes, and for different reasons, communism, fascism, and Nazism shared the same ideology of the masses, of collectivity, a simplified or nonexistent version of the mythical demand, which repressed the spiritualist tendencies of the individual, his one and only real treasure. He took up the notion of the proletariat in order to show that it lacked money, capital, ownership of the means of production, but most of all culture, a national culture. However, Maulnier would never arrive at any true philosophical or political synthesis, beyond arguing for a “path for organic overcoming,” for mystical reunion with a national cultural consciousness and, while waiting for this “revolution,” for “minimum fascism” (the restoration of the state’s political independence, national reconciliation, economic recovery, and cultural freedom). This gives a meaning to the formulation recalling that of Maurras, from whom Maulnier takes up the theory of “reasonable anti-Semitism”: which is to say, an anti-Semitism whose anticapitalist rationale cannot be associated with any form of “vulgar anti-Semitism.”
We should not attempt to downplay the frequency in the press of violent writing and of anti-Semitic opinion, nor to neglect how those media-oriented and ideological ways of thinking influenced one another, nor should we remain blind to how they contributed to making the unjustifiable palatable, nor—last—should we attempt to state that these ways of thinking or the League prevented the worst from happening.12 Nonetheless, a distinction must be drawn between the positions of Action Française’s dissidents and the overt and unchanging demand for fascism by ideologues who were close to it, such as Drieu, who from 1934 onward was calling for all and any syntheses: nationalism, trade unionism, socialism, but also fascism, Nazism, Stalinism (in 1936 he joined Doriot’s French Popular Party); or such as Brasillach and Rebatet, dissidents among dissidents who, at Je Suis Partout, declared themselves supporters of Mussolini, willingly backed Hitler, delighted in anti-Semitism, and expressed disdain for the French people as “scum.”
This was the uncertain, diffuse, and most often violently irresponsible ideological backdrop into which Maurice Blanchot arrived, finding a place, finding a voice and finding strength. Little by little he entered the journals, created friendships, was given positions of responsibility, often as the right-hand man or lieutenant for Maxence or Maulnier. Whereas the young extremists would meet in the bars of Montparnasse or the Latin Quarter, at the Coupole or at Lipp’s, Blanchot adopted a singular profile and took part only sparingly in their festivities.
Each of the different groups, movements, or journals to which Blanchot belonged had its tone or tones, its own forms of engagement, its epoch, its ideologies, its particular strategies. Each had a different approach to the demonstration that taking part in public debate represented. Individual articles cannot be read independently of this precise context, to which they belong, on which they depend, which they influence, and which it is our task to reconstitute. Even if it means spending more time on certain rare, isolated, or unknown texts, we must consider all the possible affiliations, inflections, and orientations of the diverse statements that reveal the certainties and wanderings of a brilliant young 1930s journalist, who was not yet—or not completely—a writer. We must follow the movements of conviction, the way they were displaced and transformed, the real substance of intellectual experience. Blanchot’s political thought was nonexistent at this time; it would only come to exist through the slow, patient, long, and still-latent thought that stems from an intimate experience of death, of writing, which at this time accompanied him like a shadow.