In January 1931, Blanchot gave his first text, a book review, to La Revue Universelle. He would provide two more, and this slim collection would represent his only contribution to a journal closely associated with Action Française. In fact, very quickly he would enter the dissident movement and publish in several of its journals. He took the chance to develop his political opinions by writing several articles published in 1932 and 1933. Founded in July 1905, La Revue Française Politique et Littéraire for a long time reflected the two major concerns of Action Française: “politics first,” the famous motto of Maurras, and the equally predominant interest in literature. From 1930 to 1933, the journal’s final three years would be turbulent ones.
First and foremost, this was a review comprising a mixture of literary, popular, and satirical elements, aimed at the provincial Catholic bourgeoisie (one column offered its readers “gossip from all over”). It included adverts and illustrations, not least on the cover page, which was often given over to festivals in the religious calendar or to the seasons of the year. February 1931 saw the appearance of the title: “Beware of negroes [nègres].” At the beginning of June, the journal ran a special issue on Joan of Arc, three weeks before announcing the start of summer with an image d’Épinal, a simplified folk-themed woodcut, beneath which Blanchot’s name featured for the first time (a sign of his standing, since not all authors in that edition figured there); his contribution was an article on François Mauriac.
In November 1930, the journal’s readership was gradually falling away and a relaunch was attempted (although it still had six or seven thousand readers). The editorship was given to Jean-Pierre Maxence, who took things in a new direction, aiming to be more intellectual, heroic, and impertinent. He brought with him his collaborators from the Cahiers and welcomed the young dissidents of the Maurrassian movement, whom he had recently met: Maulnier, Bardèche, Brasillach. In 1931, the paper changed from weekly to fortnightly publication. The cover picture was abolished, replaced by the table of contents, presented in a very austere—even ugly and forbidding—way. Maxence and his faction worked alongside the old team until June 1932, not without disagreements; the journal then became a monthly, taking up 160 pages, and claimed the patronage of Maurice Barrès’s “superior journalism.” The layout changed once again, as did the way the journal was organized. After an editorial by the manager and editor, Antoine Rédier, the box at the top of the front page heralded texts by Brasillach, Fabrègues and Maulnier . . . but also cameos by Emily Brontë and Rainer Maria Rilke. Further articles were provided by Maxence, Francis, Bardèche, Pelorson, René Clair. Little by little, with the onset of the economic and political crisis in France, the unrestrained attacks and the positions adopted became harsher. They were revolutionary, antiparliamentarian, anticapitalist, a forewarning of the days of unrest ahead: “in a year, riots,” Francis wrote prophetically in February 1933. In April, an issue appeared on French youth featuring members of the new team and directors of Ordre Nouveau (Aron, Dandieu, Daniel-Rops). In August, the journal disappeared for financial reasons.
Of the four articles published by Blanchot, the latter two, which showed a certain political breadth, appeared under the aegis of the new team. They were subject to more demanding intellectual scrutiny, which chimed well with their author’s austerity and with the strategy of confrontation with the Ordre Nouveau team. Blanchot was chosen by Maulnier and Maxence to reply to Aron and Dandieu, which was a vote of confidence in him. In the special issue of April 1933, his “Marxism against the Revolution” followed the article by the two leading figures in Ordre Nouveau, “Marxism and Revolution”; and he reviewed Le monde sans âme by Daniel-Rops with an objective, critical strength lacking from the mocking piece on the same author in La Revue Universelle.
Blanchot’s intransigent diagnosis of spiritual decadence was shared by Daniel-Rops’s book, and he recognized the strength of the author’s thought and the dignity of his writing, which best marked the resistance of spirit in a disordered universe. This recognition was couched in an elegant, reserved hauteur, which with its measured paradoxes was already an identifying characteristic. “This luxury that we retain, when what is essential is under threat, is a fine mark of culture, and what an homage given to true honor!”1 The syntax is neatly ordered, the adjectives balanced, exophora and anaphora are present in classically accepted proportion, while lyrical culmination is also retained in a perfectly anapaestic alexandrine (“quel hommage rendu à l’honneur véritable!”). This austere purity of style was the first quality that Maxence and Maulnier recognized in Blanchot. The order of thought as it protested against the disorder of matter, the tranquility of spirit as it prevailed over the errors of history—this was the first political and literary necessity that the young dissident leaders approved of in Blanchot and that he himself faithfully affirmed in Daniel-Rops. Blanchot insisted that it was necessary to safeguard the cultural grandeur of spirit, which he saw as uniting Massis, Bloch, Aron, and Maxence, against the spiritual degradation of a “soulless world,” against the materialization of spirit; it will be noted that at the very moment that Bataille was criticizing the idealism of all materialism, Blanchot was criticizing the materialism of all idealism: this speaks volumes about how much separated them at the time.2 He reserved special praise for Thierry Maulnier, for both intellectual and strategic reasons: his ideas on Marxist materialism, which “destroys the Revolution on which it draws,” because it is an imitation, perversion, and recasting of the capitalist model, closely followed those of Maulnier.3 This interest in Soviet Russia (“it alone provides the perfect expression and explanation of our times, and it alone could justify them, if it did not condemn them in the most terrible way”) allowed him to extend the purview of Maurrassian dissidence as well as to adopt a position opposing Daniel-Rops, who did not accept that this dissidence was important.4
During all these years, for Blanchot Marxism would remain a despiritualizing and dehumanizing enterprise, and therefore a betrayal of the idea of revolution.5 He barely referred to the French Revolution, not only because he was loyal to the monarchist tradition but also because he believed that no true revolution had yet taken place. He needed to show that true revolution would not simply add disorder to disorder, would not simply limit itself to being a “prophecy without power.”6 Refusing the world as it is allowed for no objections or renunciations, it condemned one to restlessness. The revolution had to impose itself as the “sudden passage from the impossible to the necessary,” breaking its way through and imposing its “inalienable and incoercible presence,” even and especially if the revolution always appeared to be anything but possible and necessary, and was therefore much more likely to be necessarily alienable and coercible.7
Stalinism falsified the essence of revolution by falsifying that of refusal, since refusal only led to “the most unforgiving slavery in a society where refusal is totally inconceivable,” and since it led to an impasse between “historical materialism that reduces [revolution] to the endpoint of a necessary process and economic materialism that changes it into slavery.”8 This thought is not without interest and, with a little more Hegelianism, could have led Blanchot at this early stage to think the end of History. However, idealism, which was dialectical up to a point, reduced revolution to refusal, a refusal that was at once sovereign (“subordinate to no condition, except to the condition of not refusing oneself”), violent (“the way to refuse such a way of organizing the world is not to hold it in disdain, but to strike it down”), ecstatic (“throwing [man] into a true death and completely outside himself”), without any allegiance to anarchism or nihilism (“refusal is absolutely foreign to all true negation, to all absence, to all nothingness”), but also purely verbal and without any practical articulation.9 For Blanchot, refusal had no essence beyond its spiritual property (“the rebellious spirit searches stubbornly, amidst these defeats and these deaths, for something proper to it, that gives it expression”—something like terrorist purity).10 Unable to define it in any other way, he closed the debate on a note of pure intellectual strategy, choosing in this properness of spirit an advanced form of personalism (“refusal . . . shows [the rebellious spirit] to be a personal existence whose accomplishment is the ultimate object and the guarantee of refusal itself”).11 This was a friendly act of conciliation with the members of Ordre Nouveau and beyond them, with Mounier and Esprit, whose thinking was based on this concept.
Condemning the abandonment of revolution as a clear utopia, condemning Marxism for providing a counterimage of revolution, in this article Blanchot formulated what was nothing more than a statement of principles: revolution is the sustained refusal, in all its demands and excesses, of any form of spiritual disorder. This text did not set out to prove that this spiritual disorder called for antiparliamentarianism or anti-capitalism. But the absence of any critical or programmatic elements allowing the “sudden move from the impossible to the necessary” allowed refusal to be caught in the trap of its own condemnations. While refusal would remain Blanchot’s determining political attitude (in 1958, he would even place his return to politics under this sign), this was not—as some have stated—due to sheer persistence in his thought, but due to the desire to orientate or articulate it differently, to affirm it by taking it beyond the dead end into which spiritualist thought had led it.
This same critique of Marxism led Blanchot to contribute to the final issues of Réaction, a journal that existed in an extremely chaotic and ultimately ephemeral way (1930–32), edited by Jean de Fabrègues, Maurras’s former secretary and someone close to Maritain. This journal allowed great freedom of expression, at times being very far removed from Maurrassian orthodoxy. Of all the dissident journals of the time, it was perhaps the one that most allowed this freedom of expression. It set itself apart from the literary judgments of the “master” and from his anti-Semitism. It aimed to explore other approaches to economic disorder and to place Christian politics in the foreground.
Although he did not endorse the manifesto published in the first issue, in April 1930, Blanchot’s position ultimately suggested a solidarity with it. The dominant idea was simple: order was “the law of Being.” Indeed “order has crushed [men] when they have tried to ignore it.” Thus the “crisis of the modern world” had placed man “under the yolk of the democratic, despotic and tentacular State. Man is nothing but a standardized cog in an enormous mechanism that is chewing him up.” Like Christ, invoked after Maurras at the close of the peroration, we must chase “the moneylenders from the Temple.” Haphazardly, and with sometimes Pascalian overtones, the manifesto nonetheless affirmed its values: for the fatherland and the nation, against democratic decadence; for “the free human person in its natural social settings,” against individualism, statism, and the class struggle; for Thomist rationalism, monarchy, and Christian order.12 To rediscover the lost order would constitute a reaction. “There is an avenue for reality; it is the past. . . . Let us return to the sources of life in order to heal ourselves.” “Intelligence is reactionary.”
For its final issues, in 1932, the journal would welcome contributors from Ordre Nouveau. At this time Blanchot also figured as a contributor, notably stating his position on the technological revolution. Being opposed to any argument for perfectibility as well as to most of the critics of mechanical alienation, he rejected both “ancients” and “moderns,” given that both sought “material causes” for this development without ever making humankind “the master of his failure or of his triumph.”13 Blanchot criticized this predominance of materialist analysis, exceeding as it did the boundaries of Marxism, in the name of a classical thinking of moral conscience and of Christian guilt. It was necessary, he stated, to confront humankind “with his true faults, those that touch his soul” and that make him “lose even the privilege of his death.” Blanchot was calling for the restoration of an order of thought, which, over and above all “directionless pretentions to saintliness” and other mindless (sans conscience) demonizations, would align action with consciousness, consciousness with intention, and intention with submission to a moral authority.
The role of Réaction was taken up by La Revue du Siècle, edited by Jean de Fabrègues and launched in April 1933. It was a monthly title with greater financial resources, which produced two or three thousand copies and reforged links with Maurrassian orthodoxy. Gérard de Catalogne, the director who had had the idea for the journal, added to the group from Réaction that of Latinité, whose members were of a slightly different generation, with differing objectives. This meant that the tone became more academic and the concerns more those of Parisian society. At the end of 1933, a banquet was given in honor of François Mauriac’s election to the Académie Française, thus echoing the gesture of that summer’s special issue containing contributions from Daniel-Rops, Drieu, Halévy, Maurois, Rousseaux, but also Cocteau, Morand, Martin du Gard, and Montherlant. Exchanges of views continued with Esprit and Ordre Nouveau, notably with a dossier in February 1934 where Fabrègues had the final word, discussing what united them: “this whole generation is rising up against the egotism of the bourgeois-liberal world, against materialism, both economic and spiritual, against the impotence of a politics without spirit and without soul.” These were recognizably also Blanchot’s positions at the time.
In June 1933, the journal published a text by Benito Mussolini, “Fundamental Ideas of Fascism.” A note presented the text as follows:
The Revue du Siècle is happy to be able to provide its readers with a first taste of the writings by the Duce that will soon be appearing. They open the volume on Fascism that will shortly be published by Denoël and Steele, authored by Benito Mussolini. Whatever reservations about fascist doctrine the team at the Revue du siècle might have, a document such as this is essential. We thank Denoël for entrusting us with it.
The least that can be said is that the journal made little effort to reprove or criticize Mussolini’s text. Two months earlier, it had presented itself to its readers as “the mouthpiece of the new generation,” concerned with “defending what matters in the natural order: family, profession, nation.” With only the slightest of changes, the slogan would go far.14
Nonetheless, Blanchot came out implacably against Nazism in the May 1933 second issue of the Revue du Siècle.15 His uncompromising firmness against Germany drew on nationalist arguments: “Germany occupies a strange place in Europe that no other country shares: it is not aware of where its borders lie, it does not conceive of itself as a complete form, with the latter’s contours and precise beauty.” This meant that “the national mysticism of national land, as conceived by Barrès, could not exist in Germany,” as Sieburg had put it.16 Paradoxically, in the perspective of a worst-case scenario, Blanchot called for a Europe of Nations, an idea that he hated, as a way to fight against the unhealthy nationalism of pan-Germanism. “As things currently stand, there is no balancing point, no possibility of order and stability, outside the treaty of Versailles. This is demonstrated by Germany’s violent rejection of the treaty, by its furious resistance to its destiny.”17 Blanchot raged against the League of Nations, which was not enforcing even this badly conceived treaty. Representing “the free reign of hypocritical lies and of hot air,” the League of Nations was said to have been created in the image of democracy: “it gives a face to the abuses of a policy that has been unthinkingly confused with morality.”18 The League provided comfort for the dominant political imaginary, the myth of democracy, which “each day is laying us open to events as if to a blind destiny.”19