At the end of 1935, Fabrègues and Maulnier joined forces to create Combat, which they would edit together for four years. The new monthly publication was launched on January 10, 1936, and appeared regularly until the war, in the form of ten issues of either sixteen or thirty-two pages per year. The editors targeted their readers carefully. The first three issues were sent to former subscribers to the Revue du Vingtième Siècle. By October 1936 there were nine hundred subscribers, by December more than a thousand. The journal would go on to command the loyalty of between two and three thousand readers. Despite this small circulation, it would enjoy a certain prestige and would never attempt to enlarge its readership; growing used to this elitism, it would instead make use of L’Insurgé, a weekly launched in 1937, to spread its ideas more widely.
Combat seems to have come into existence thanks to a convergence of interests and aims on the part of its two editors. Maulnier, who was then becoming increasingly well known, was trying to escape the constraints of Action Française in order to sketch his ideas more freely, putting forward uncompromising solutions. Fabrègues, whose only outlet this now represented, suggested to Maulnier in October 1935 that the two of them react to the League of Nations’ condemnation of Italy, an episode that pushed fascism into an agreement with Nazism. One of the features of Combat was that while it brought together the monarchist tradition with revolutionary violence, in the direct lineage of “dissidence” (whose extreme nature it would underline), it also resisted fascism and “vulgar anti-Semitism,” stating that it stuck to “a reasonable anti-Semitism” that drew on anticapitalism.1 This explains why it would be attacked by Maurrassian loyalists and by the extremists of Je Suis Partout. The journal refused the war that was approaching, welcomed the Munich agreement and, when it was clear that disaster was imminent, declared that it was preparing for the war without enthusiasm or determination.2
Bearing the collective signature “Combat,” the manifesto that opened its first issue gave the intellectual movement the task of “reestablishing a new realism.” This movement had to address historical reality (it was against the idealism limited to “games of pure intelligence”), even as it refrained from rallying to any partisan cause (it was also against any materialism limited to “games of conscripted intelligence”). The era seemed to be condemning thought to powerlessness or submissiveness. Although Marxism had been right to bring intelligent thinking back to reality, it also “increases every day the danger of intelligence soon being subjugated.” This meant that “intelligence should not be placed in the service of the masses, but ought to inform and guide them; it must not follow but rather create the evolution of history.”
We can have our doubts as to whether this was really a question of intelligence; but the insubordinate tone is clear, and it would be the consistent mindset of Combat. For example, the third issue contained a prominent letter, written by Brasillach, to the “cuckolds of the right.”3 The collective and anonymous editorial for April 1936 was entitled “A France That Disgusts Us”; in November of that year, Maulnier could be found asking whether “we shall ever emerge from the abject condition of France.” Fabrègues thought that “Hitlerian democracy” was “a materialist mysticism” (January 1937). Ambitions were far-reaching, even megalomaniac, in texts such as “Reconquering Our Universe,” again written by Maulnier (June 1936).
Each issue contained a variety of short, dense texts, and comprised two columns: “Facts” and “Inventory,” a review of the satirical press. A further column, “Texts to Reread,” was introduced in issue five and presented extracts from Maurras, then from Sorel, Proudhon, and Drumont. Another, “Conversations,” in February 1937 put out a call for pieces by writers “whose works express ideas dear to Combat.” Gabriel Marcel was the first to participate; Ramon Fernandez, Gaxotte, Drieu, Jouvenel followed. A celebratory fifty-year overview of Maurras’s writing was given, and an article by Vincent saluted “Bernanos the Visionary.” Sartre was heavily criticized (although this came after Blanchot had written a dense and overall favorable piece on him in Aux Écoutes); a column signed “Marchenoir pour les ennemis” was created; the short, violent texts of “the Massacre Game” fulminated against Georges Duhamel or “Céline the Jew.”4 Other bylines that the journal managed to include were those of Pierre Andreu, whose roots were in Sorelian trade unionism, Jean-Pierre Maxence, Claude Roy, and for the culture columns, Dominique Aury and Kléber Haedens.
After the two main editors and René Vincent, a further editor, Blanchot was one of the main figures involved in running the journal but, always and already, he did so discreetly: while Combat frequently held public meetings featuring some of its writers, Blanchot’s name only figured once. This was in January 1938, for a “large private meeting . . . in the great hall of the Learned Societies” in the Rue Danton, on the theme of “How to Free the Nation of Money, Free Socialism of Democracy, and Defend Culture against Totalitarian Orthodoxies.” It also featured Maulnier, Fabrègues, and Georges Blond. This appearance of Blanchot’s name is the last in the review, for which he ultimately wrote only eight texts, six between February and December 1936, and two in November and December 1937. Of course, his articles were important, two of them being placed first in the list of contents, and the interruption during 1937 can be explained very precisely by his time at L’Insurgé (which lasted ten months, from January to October). But from January 1938 to July 1939, none of the seventeen final issues of Combat carried a text by Blanchot.
“The Stavisky scandal is over, the Sarraut administration is beginning. This is completely logical.” After a government that lasted from one February (1934) to another (1936), Blanchot began his contribution to Combat with an article taking note of “the end of February 6” while also, paradoxically, issuing a rallying cry based on that date.5 He took note of it insofar as he denounced what ultimately appeared as Republican “logic” (363): the establishment of invariably transitory and corrupt governments (the Sarraut administration was acting in a caretaker capacity, until the elections in May), containing “the desired number of crazy men, of compromised characters, of traitors and of moderates” (363), under the leadership of a “derisory character,” “whose insignificance condemns him to obscurity,” “slightly tired, slightly discredited, entirely forgotten” (363), and who was precisely what was required in order to put public opinion to sleep and to allow the ruling classes to “hide everything, obscure everything, smother everything” (366). He issued a rallying cry because he believed that these silent maneuvers of power were paradoxically supported by the fuss surrounding the regular memorials for February 6. We can therefore understand that for Blanchot, nothing had happened during the preceding two years. In his eyes, Sarraut took over the premiership not from Laval, but from Daladier, whose time as prime minister had been ended by the riots in February 1934. He denounced the contradictory actions of a “destructive, catastrophic parliament,” which for two years had brought down government after government, and at the same time had “become resigned to being innocent and to approving measures on public safety” (mesures de salut, 364; in 1935, Laval governed via hundreds of laws summarily issued by the cabinet, bypassing parliament altogether). Thus the logic of the Republic was said “to work against its nature and against its own laws” (364). Blanchot was criticizing the contrasting mixture of capitalism and democracy, this incoherent logic of an unstable regime. And he was doing so with self-confident, cunning, and rhythmic phrasing that was sometimes long and sometimes short, that always drew on anaphora and cadence, and whose syntax brought any contradictions to light—this phrasing was capable of tactical hyperbole, of malicious irony, of the well-chosen insult.
This ability to carve out sentences allowed Blanchot to dismiss not only the two years of 1934–36, but fifteen, in an article the following month looking back at the Franco-Soviet pact for mutual assistance that had been signed in May 1935. Having denounced the internal contradictions in the diplomatic policies of the left- and right-wing parties, Blanchot claimed that these “false thoughts show that the unreason and the uncertainties of these last fifteen years still live on” (369). Once again, his accusations were aimed at an “absurd diplomacy” that, having privileged international commitments since Versailles, was returning to a bilateral agreement between two states that had no “interests in common” (369). Blanchot was not wrong to state that the USSR had more interests in common with Germany than with France, that between the former two “secret negotiations are ongoing” (370) and that the Franco-Soviet pact therefore “exposes us to war [with Germany] for no reason,” without giving “any insurance against war” (with the USSR); initially at least, history would show him to have been right (371).
As he was finishing that text, events reinforced both his most lucid and most dubious convictions. On March 7, Germany invaded the Rhineland with thirty thousand soldiers, breaking the treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties. France’s initial reaction was a muscular speech by Sarraut that, thanks to a statement by the military that recommended general mobilization before any armed conflict, almost immediately fell flat. The fear was of contradicting the wishes of pacifist public opinion in the middle of an electoral campaign, as well as of disagreeing with Great Britain and being left without international support. Blanchot wrote about this reaction in his next article, which again tried to show via a series of short, powerful paradoxes, worthy of a campaign speech, how inconsistent it was to have a diplomatic policy that “demands what is impossible and neglects what is necessary” (372).6 It was no longer two or even “fifteen senseless years” (années folles, 375) that had to be forgotten, but twenty-five, because the same system of government had been humiliating the country since before the war. From one article to another, this escalation of rhetoric can be explained by his being exasperatedly aware of an ever more serious threat to national identity. Blanchot thus took issue, in a piece of suicidal logic, not with the external enemy, but first and foremost with the enemy within, “with out-of-control revolutionaries and Jews, whose ideological fury seems to demand the immediate imposition of every sanction on Hitler” (373). With a sentiment of general xenophobia, he condemned what he saw as an unthinking, perverse strategy (“propaganda for national honor put forward by suspicious foreigners,” 374) and denounced, even more than Hitler’s expansionism, the supposed “delirium of verbal energy” (374) of this Jewish-Marxist “clan” (372). He went on to attack “the sentimental reveries of Geneva,” which, aided and abetted by “British Puritanism” (374), had always imposed on France a weak attitude, a nonattitude, nonexistence. What he was also refusing here was idealism and verbalism. What he wanted to say, and what Sarraut would not say, was that “the League of Nations no longer exists” (376). What he declared, by way of a conclusion, was that only two ways out remained: “the regime will continue to move between provocation and capitulation, until it invites war through weakness or until a national revolt puts an end to its abuses” (376). We can guess which solution he preferred; we know which came to pass.
Five days after the “German show of strength,” Maurice Blanchot’s father died. Isidore Blanchot passed away at nearly seventy-seven years of age on March 23, 1936, at 6 a.m., in his house on the avenue Boucicaut in Chalon. He is buried a short walk from there, in the Western cemetery, a little further down the same avenue.