Often cited, starting from immediately after its publication in July 1936, for its revolutionary violence, Blanchot’s fourth article for Combat was also the first that he published after the Blum government was formed. Positions were becoming more deeply entrenched.
How can “the beneficial effects of terrorism” be given a basis in law?1 And how can they be given an immediate basis? How can urgent appeals be made? Blanchot was inviting his readers to enter into the persistence and the insistency of a certain type of reasoning.
This is because since his first articles in Combat, in foreign as in domestic policy, it was the same Republican logic that he had been analyzing, bringing to light, and denouncing. This was the unproductive logic of cowardice, of timidity, which consisted in surrendering to one’s enemies, in flattering them, in seeing their point of view rather than fighting against them. France signed a treaty with the USSR in order to be prepared against Germany (but this did not provide any protection). Parliament chose a weak prime minister in an attempt to keep its corruption from being revealed (it would be anyway, and a scandal would break out). Britain saw no “threat of hostility” in Hitler’s moves (those were Anthony Eden’s words on March 9); Sarraut kept quiet, in order to avoid war (although it would come soon enough). The logic of compromise was that of compromising oneself. Blum had dialogue with the radicals and on his return “took his best propagandists from the classes he claims to be threatening” (377). Once again, there was nothing, nothing but emptiness, nothing happening—nothing was happening except collusion between “pale imitations of reformists and pale imitations of conservatives” (377).
It seems that they are linked together in order to do nothing, destined to neutralize one another by reciprocal concessions; in reality they keep one another afloat in order to do the types of wrong in which each respectively is competent. . . . This is the source of strength of this nothing government that the Blum government is (377).
This government was said to be betraying its social program and forcing its partners, via an “exchange of deceptions” (377), to betray their national program. Blanchot’s logic bases itself here on “reasonable anti-Semitism”: “A fine union, a holy alliance,” he declared to no one in particular, “is what this conglomeration of Soviet, Jewish, capitalist interests represents” (378). Here everything that he hated seemed to join forces against everything he held dear. Once more, and for the same reasons that had pushed parliament to choose Sarraut, “legal, traditional opposition” was powerless, it was “henceforth annulled” (378). Nothing was happening: Nothing could happen. Blanchot drew on this desperately nihilist appraisal, at which he had been hammering away since February, in his attempts to restore the purity of “fine French blood” (379) and the thought of a true revolution. Given that the world of legality had been neutralized, he thought it necessary to smash the law by actions that would be brisk and “if necessary, frenzied” (378) summary, nothing less than a “bloody upheaval” (380) to bring back reason, order, and justice. Morals were above the law. Blanchot was calling for an elitist and, most of all, wholly idealistic terrorism, “the work of a few men and a few groups, which needs neither mass support nor allies, but strong and just ideas, and great feeling” (378). He savored his words, hating as he did a regime that he demanded be “removed,” “brought down” (380). He placed the Sadean purity of his language above the impurity of all forms of decline.
“This is not at all comfortable, but precisely, there must be no taking comfort. This is why at the present time terrorism appears to us as a method of public safety” (le terrorisme nous apparaît actuellement comme une méthode de salut public, 380).
For “when the majority of the representatives of the people are corrupt, gangrenous, we cannot expect any help from them regarding the safety of the nation”; these “enemies within are allied with the enemies without,” and the moderates are in their pay, “always hurrying to caress current public opinion, and no less careful never to throw light upon it, most of all never to confront it.” These few phrases were uttered not by Blanchot but by Robespierre, the leading member of the Committee for Public Safety, the main vehicle, alongside the Committee for General Security and the Revolutionary Tribunal, of the Terror.2 Blanchot’s rhetoric sometimes matched that of Robespierre, celebrating, through the endless back-and-forth of its well-balanced phrasing, “the virtue without which terror is harmful, the terror without which virtue is powerless.”
Blanchot’s sarcasm reached a high point a few months later when he attacked “moderates” for their position regarding the Spanish Civil War.3 He ridiculed their progress in now being capable of “great passion,” they who previously could have been found “disappearing like rats into the holes of total neutrality.” “That was the period when moderates still dared to appear as moderates.” “What is the new titillation?” “As soon as they find an autocrat, they throw themselves madly at his feet” (385–386). The trickery, however, was not only theirs but that of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco; it was not certain that this trickery was allied with reason. Thus Blanchot drew on whatever resources he could: against these moderates “glowing with pride, as if they had uttered a few spicy obscenities” (386), against the dictators but only because they allowed themselves to be “admired beatifically,” finally against the “gang of degenerates and traitors” (387) that was governing the country (this was a variation on the mention of the Jewish-Marxist “clan” that, located at the end of the piece, slips in a dose of decidedly more “vulgar” anti-Semitism).
Blanchot played impressively with antiphrasis, informal digressions, hints of caricature, cutting adjectives, ludicrous metaphors or hyperboles, comic-heroic crescendos, dry oxymorons, carefully selected insults and, as always, grating paradoxes. These varieties of sarcastic phrasing were the vehicles for value judgments that were intolerable and all the more pernicious for being stated coldly. A worker “who puts in overtime constructing machine guns” (385) was said to be more worthy than his fellow worker who attends communist rallies and emits “the most senseless cries, and the most deadening to reason, that have ever rent the air” and who does so in a “gutter drunkenness” (384). Elsewhere in the piece, the reader is told that among the excesses of war, “barbarians who rape” are no more or less to be condemned than “arsonists” or “those who uproot fruit trees” (383).
Blanchot’s rhetorical thunder served the ends of his implacable argumentation. The latter denounced the “dazzling logic” of the Soviets, who wanted France to take the side of the “reds in Spain”; it also criticized the mystifying logic of the French communists, who tried to pass on this message, as well as the cowardly logic of the “moderates,” who beneath a cloak of neutrality were waiting to see which way the wind would turn before giving in to the strongest party (384). This was a worst-case logic that Blanchot would return to in his December article. He stigmatized the moderates’ hard-bitten anticommunism and their timidity in the face of closer enemies (Mussolini, Hitler), with whom they were trying to ingratiate themselves in a cowardly fashion: This was a shameful “caravanserai” strategy, an “utterly empty policy,” which represented a death penalty for national identity (390).
According to Blanchot, it was necessary to put together a true front based on refusal, struggle, and Terror, which would be anticapitalist, anti-moderate, antigovernment. It would be necessary to settle accounts “with a few bullets” (390) directed at the leaders of these “limited, weak, puny” beings, of these “subservient imbeciles” (389). This was a call for murder in the direct lineage of Maurassian rhetoric, a call to purify the “caravanserai,” the nation that had become “French abjection” (391).