Alongside Le Rempart, Aux Écoutes, and Le Journal des Débats, L’Insurgé was one of the journals to which Blanchot contributed most continuously. We must see things in this light: during these years, Blanchot was above all a man of the press, of the newspapers rather than journals, let alone books.
L’Insurgé Politique et Social was launched on January 13, 1937. It was a weekly publication of eight large-format pages, financed by Maulnier, Maxence, and Blanchot—who seem to have been the stockholders—as well as by Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil, scion of a rich industrial family. The first issue was placed under the sign of Vallès and Drumont, who were quoted on the front page in a column named “Portraits of the Insurgent”—which would last only two weeks—alongside extracts from Proudhon and Bakunin. Thierry Maulnier provided the first editorial: “France must be reconquered,” a watchword that was explained by the central article, “The Coming-Together of the Corrupt,” with its elegant subtitle: “The radicals, the moderates, and the corporations are preparing a new administration. All those who are corrupt will feature in it: Mandel, Reynaud, Flandin, Chautemps, Boncour.” The inner pages bore two articles by Blanchot: one, “Indictment against France,” continued the line of the editorial; the other, “From Revolution to Literature,” launched a column headed “Readings of the Insurgent.”1 Maurras, who was in prison at the time, immediately expressed to Maulnier his discomfort at this anti-French cursing. To no avail: The tone had been set and would remain; it would remain as the extreme point reached in journalism by this group of “dissidents,” who were mostly xenophobic, anti-Semitic, antidemocratic, unionized, and corporatist. The frequent publication of L’Insurgé, its rhythms, its irony, its violence, would make it the attack dog of Combat, the public face intended to spread its national-syndicalist ideas among the masses. The contributors were often the same, but the weekly paper, being closer to events, was able to give space to the muscular vivacity of a commentary that was passionate, immediate, off the cuff. The links between L’Insurgé and La Cagoule, a terrorist organization run by Eugène Deloncle, were weak but nevertheless real. Lemaigre-Dubreuil belonged to both, and the paper’s editorial team occupied the former offices of the revolutionary group in the Rue Caumartin.2
Not a week passed without the editors attacking the policies of Blum, that “social-traitor” and soon enough “social-executioner,” the servant of capital, purveyor of liquidity to the middle classes, robber of the people, and assassin. Caricatures by Ralph Soupault underlined the journalists’ violent language. For instance, Blum was depicted sitting on a pile of coffins, a seven-branched candelabra in his hand, commemorating February 6, 1934, “the day the Popular Front was born.” After the events at Clichy on March 16, 1937, when the police killed five workers who were protesting against a meeting of the Croix-de-Feu League, Soupault drew Blum, stiff, evil-looking, nightmarish, his hands dripping with blood (there was also a pool at his feet), his cruel gaze interrogating the reader, and the caption reading: “Who said I don’t have any French blood?” “Vulgar anti-Semitism” was playing on the whiff of accusations leveled at an allegedly deicidal people.
The violence of L’Insurgé would remain purely verbal. Even so, on several occasions this violence got the publication into hot water with the law. On March 3, a front-page article by Michel Lombard attacked Blum and Thorez, “these two government crooks who have assassins in their charge.” The journalists’ hatred focused on “the Israelite” and “the Soviets’ man,” to whom they preferred French fascists and members of the League. The article was preceded by an editorial, which accused “Maurice Thorez’s men” of the assassinations of Manuel Marchon, a member of Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français, and Maurice Creton, a member of La Rocque’s Parti Social Français. These insults and accusations were accompanied by a threat: “Blum and Thorez will have to pay for the blood that they have caused to be spilled,” and also by a call for summary, illegal vengeance: “It will soon be necessary . . . that the French themselves serve justice, given that the government is incapable of doing so.”3 The reaction to this was not long in coming. The next morning, the police searched the paper’s premises and seized the remaining copies. The managing editor, Guy Richelet, a young student in Action Française, was charged with being responsible. The main editors, Maulnier, Maxence, Blanchot, Haedens, and Soupault, decided that they would “take responsibility for the article in question in order to accompany [their] colleague in court.” This sacrifice was made joyfully; L’Insurgé of March 10 bore the headline, “Blum charges us as guilty / Thank you! . . .” with the subtitle reading, “Prison is less ignominious than the Légion d’honneur.” The charge for “incitement to violence and murder,” which was the cause of such pride for the editors, was dated March 13. Maulnier chose as his attorney a famous jurist, who would also represent Céline: Maître Tixier-Vignancourt. On March 24, the undersecretary of state to the prime minister, Marx Dormoy, had another issue of the paper seized, the one containing the bloody caricature of Blum, but also an article that led to a second charge. However, the affair was slow moving. The government made threats without following them up. The editors grew indignant and renewed their provocations. The six men charged demanded to appear before a magistrate. On June 16, an article by Henri Fallier attacked Vincent Auriol, the finance minister. On June 18, the paper was seized once again and Henri Fallier was charged with “demeaning the nation’s reputation.” But in actual fact, Henri Fallier was a collective pseudonym, and this time nineteen journalists claimed to have collaborated on the article. For the six main figures, this was the third time they had been charged. Ultimately the affair would lead to nothing except Richelet’s appearance in court on September 18, a process in which Dormoy, who by then had become minister of the interior, took only an indirect interest.
Despite becoming relatively disaffected by the time the journal folded, in summer and autumn 1937 Blanchot wrote two articles, one on foreign policy and another on literature, in almost each issue of L’Insurgé. The twenty-eight political texts always appeared in the same very prominent place, at the top of the page, divided into two columns and in a separate box, underneath the title “Liberate France.” In this collective enterprise of calling for a national revolution, Blanchot was clearly a lieutenant relative to the leaders in charge of the front page, Maxence and Maulnier.4 The “Readings of the Insurgent” column, in which thirty-seven articles appeared, was his own. This underlines well enough how strong his position at the paper was. And this strength was matched on the page by strong phrasings and incisive rhetoric able to paint the smallest incident or event in the light of his thinking and its “national-dissident” worldview. These texts formed something like a serialized thriller, in which the narrative logic grows stronger week after week, the same characters coming back to fill out their own roles in a series of adventures. There were few surprises, however: the only things to change were that these characters became more starkly depicted, which led to a certain monotony, despite the esthetic, violent depictions. Blanchot’s diplomatic thriller constructed no story, instead repeating for almost six months the same analysis no matter what events took place. This allows us to see that over this relatively short period, his reasoning became both more coherent and more emphatic and, in becoming more emphatic, also became more self-satisfied.
Its first principle was that the carelessness of the democratic era leads to an identity crisis, to lamenting one’s own downfall. “For eighteen years France has been debasing itself” (393); “For fifteen years we have done everything possible to try to lose our status as a world power capable of victories” (400); “Fifteen years of ideological foolishness during which a growing number of treaties have cluttered the streets of Geneva like dead leaves” (409); “Is it not the last straw for a great people to be weakened, divided, separated from its destiny?” (408). The weakness, cowardice, and fear present in democracy had split apart the nation’s power. They allowed it to agree to everything, to be proud of nothing, to accept even death (Clichy); they allowed for egotistical and short-sighted compromise, immense complacency, hypocritical silence, lack of self-respect, the sickness of keeping up appearances, all that can be called the complex of the moderates (following on from Combat, Blanchot was still attacking them). The perversion of democracy lay in its principle of representation. Whatever the precise circumstances of the elections, little by little the government elected superimposed its own image over that of the nation, while each day its weakness progressively sapped the citizen’s self-image, alienating the image of a national subject contained within him. How was it still possible to be French, if to be French was to be Republican, if to be French was to be Blum? Blanchot tried to show “the reader the mirror of his shame” (435). Self-hatred became a principle of how dissident ideas should be communicated, however reprehensible it was for Maurras. Blanchot’s very first article for L’Insurgé argued that the Frenchman’s self-image of satisfaction, pride, and everyday victories was in fact an image of vanity, cowardice, and weakness: it provided “an excuse for their passivity and an alibi for their nothingness” (411). The desire for individual well-being (salut) was premised on this false construct of the imagination, on this “tragic misunderstanding” (399), thanks to a race to the bottom (“When a nation falls apart, there comes a moment when the national instinct which usually helps it be preserved in fact helps to destroy it,” 396). And the desire for individual well-being, or simply the need for it, led those who were lacking any will to power to call on the Other in order to escape from this narcissistic flight from ideals. This Other, representing the worst for Blanchot at the time, appeared in the guise of the foreigner (the Jew, who was said to appropriate capital) and of the communist (who worked for a system which appropriated and denatured revolution). Such were the bases of his redoubled violence, his persistence against Blum, in whom the two figures of the Jew and the communist were united, and who was said to have appropriated the economy, the national revolution, democratic practices. Blanchot argued that Blum was insinuating himself into the heart of the image of French identity, imposing himself as a new ideal of the French self (“France is Blum. Everything that Blum says and does is our responsibility, the dishonor of it weighs upon us,” 395). In Blanchot’s logic, which had reached this degree of blindness, a purification was necessary, over and against these false identities. Vilifying Blum allowed a reappropriation to take place: an authentification, a disalienation, even an exorcism. “In each of us there is an accomplice of Blum’s treason, and horrible though this might be, a second Blum and a second Viénot” (397).5
The anti-Semitism attributed to Blanchot is one element among several within this logic of purification. Unlike a number of his close associates, he would never make it the direct object of his reflections. It is a theme that arises only at certain points, as a rhetorical tool allowing for eloquent oratory and for various insidious touches, and so a rhetorical tool that had in that sense come to appear common or banal (and this in itself is a terrifying fact). In terms of clear-cut statements, the instances of anti-Semitism that can be imputed to Blanchot in L’Insurgé come to a total of two: “[Blum] represents exactly what is most deserving of scorn for the nation he is addressing, a backward ideology, an old man’s mentality, a foreign race” (399–400); Blum is labeled a métèque, a suspect foreigner, with his main characteristics being “cosmopolitan instincts, an unvirile temperament, a taste for flimsy rhetoric” (435).6 Anti-Semitism featured in this discourse only as an exhibit in the cause of supposed eloquence. It was an easy way of attacking Blum, a conscious and controlled slip, one that was rarely used, and it could not conceal the confusion and embarrassment that this friend of Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Lévy, and Georges Mandel had to confront when faced with his own internal contradictions, in this far-right milieu from which he was soon to dissociate himself.
Much more than the Jew, the figure of the Russian was the object of all Blanchot’s obsessions. Most of the texts in L’Insurgé, like those of his previous journals and newspapers, attack “Soviet rottenness” (457). Communism was said to be governing France, now a “Bolshevized nation” (439). The government was obeying Moscow’s orders, pushing the country toward war, “a war that would not be our own” (396). The treaty subjugated both France and the League of Nations to communism: “it is in Geneva that pacifism and internationalism best serve Soviet designs” (452). At this time, anticommunism blinded Blanchot so much that it took precedence over his refusal of fascism and Nazism, which was expressed much less radically than four years previously for Le Rempart.
While Blanchot believed that “for our country, Germanism represents the greatest danger and Bolshevism only increases this peril,” he immediately added that “these distinctions, which proceed from a just political reason, would not have meaning or reach if they did not clash profoundly with the nature of the regime.” Indeed, “the regime is such that it cannot do anything against Germany without giving the impression of being influenced by Moscow’s agents” (463–464). Blanchot strove to show that Hitler was right in all regards (on the League of Nations, on Bolshevism, on “the right for his people to live”), but for the wrong reasons (“his plans for domination”). The more he represented reason, the less likely France would be to believe him and the more dangerous he would become (“it is because today Germanism has won out against France that France has never been more threatened by Germanism”). Being vigilant regarding Hitler demanded a sane national reaction. “France can still save itself, not by superficially moving closer to Germany, but by profoundly moving closer to itself” (401–404). The military and diplomatic strategy that Blanchot drew from this was nonetheless a shocking one. The Spanish civil war was in full flow, and he believed that there had to be no hesitation in opposing the Spanish rebels, in order not to “get drawn in to Hitler and Franco’s game” (398). It was necessary to refuse all “blackmailing of opposition to Hitler” (454). And this led Blanchot to underplay Germany’s attacks. In truth, he always saw communism as the worst enemy. Instead of using the necessity of opposing Hitler as a way of blackmailing people into supporting the Spanish Republicans, Blanchot attempted blackmail based on an anticommunism that was not afraid to pull at the heartstrings in its speechifying: “Therefore let the French be warned: against their security, against the security of their children, and against peace, the most formidable and the most criminal of plots is being planned” (454). The disaster, the tragic situation, seemed close to him: signing a treaty with the Soviets had led France into a “dead end,” that of submission to one or the other version of state totalitarianism.
Blanchot’s impossible diplomacy gave at once provisional and strategic expression to his paradoxical patriotism, which accepted that it was necessary to recognize the present decline.
It is certainly hard to suddenly lose pride in being French and to build patriotism not on the awareness of a glorious past and the feeling of contemporary grandeur, but on the feeling of shame and debasement. But it would be harder still to give oneself, via a dishonest admiration of oneself and amidst universal derision, supreme reasons to have disdain for oneself when the moment of final disaster comes. (394)
In a time when patriots are named Thorez and Blum, we are proud to be anti-patriots ready to recognize our country only when they have made it once more worthy of its past, equal to its glory, and, so many years after the armistice, victorious at last. (429)
While Maurras would accuse Blanchot of antipatriotism, it was in fact a paradoxical antipatriotism, a superpatriotism, patriotism pushed to its breaking point, which explains the maniacal intransigence of his proposals on diplomacy (as well as their rapid collapse into utter silence). “In order to fight Germany, we must support Franco” (465). The logic of paradox was pushed to its absurd breaking point. He wrote of “intervening with as much strength as possible in Franco’s favor, supporting him all the more given that he is also supported by Germany, fighting Germany not by fighting Franco, but by fighting for France and by making his victory not the victory of Germany, but the victory of France” (466). Trying to play Hitler’s high-stakes game was not the best solution at such a time.
Here Blanchot was addressing “true French revolutionaries.” He called for a national-revolutionary diplomacy that was still undefined and was powerless to adopt a position in relation to any particular ideology, whether this be democracy or communism, both of which had broken apart “France as it was, as it no longer is,” or whether it be fascism or antifascism, “meaningless entities.”7 He believed that national-revolutionary diplomacy had to intervene in the space between this disaffected glorious identity and this lack of meaning. And there was nothing more to it. This strategically dubious engagement quickly led his aggressive, repeated laments over spiritual and national disintegration into a dead-end.
July 14, 1937, was the first time that the column “Liberate France” did not bear Blanchot’s signature.8 He would not write it again. In October, he would also suspend his literary column. Only one exception—albeit a major one—would be made to this detachment: on October 27, he returned on the final page of the final issue with an article, in its own separate box, arguing for a “revolutionary diplomacy.”
This final issue, which had only six pages, was concerned with justifying the decision to stop publishing, “as part of an effort to refine and broaden our actions.” Yet precisely the opposite came about. The editors only put forward political and strategic beliefs in order to mask the real reasons for the closure, which were financial and personal. The newspaper was in good health, with two thousand subscribers and twenty thousand loyal readers, but Lemaigre-Dubreuil had withdrawn his funding, finding the paper too anticapitalist. The collective of L’Insurgé, writing a front-page article, declared its intention to return to the original ideological line: that of an anti-Marxist, pacifist, and above all antidemocratic and anticapitalist nationalism, perhaps as a final defiance of its funder. It would therefore entertain no affiliation with any political party, whether closely or at a distance; nonetheless, since August its regular attacks on La Rocque had easily allowed its position to be understood. In a context of the breakup of both parties and leagues, of activists feeling let down (both by how the country was changing and by the decisions of their leaders), it was necessary to work toward broadening one’s actions. This was to be done “in relation to the tasks that our actions must fulfill”; but we must instead underline how demotivated Blanchot, perhaps Fabrègues, and certainly Maulnier were. The latter had never had more than a limited interest in L’Insurgé, given that his salary was paid by Action Française and his ambition was dedicated to Combat and to his books. In July, Maulnier had written to Maurras: “I have decided to leave [L’Insurgé] fairly shortly.”9
In fact, L’Insurgé had always operated contrariwise to its apparent strategy, something it had in common with most of the mouthpieces of Maurrassian dissidence. When questioned by readers at the end of January, Maulnier and Fabrègues had refused to recognize any interdependence between the journal and the new newspaper, even clarifying “that Combat, a polemical, documentary, and doctrinal journal, stands to one side of all political activism, and is independent of all groups and all other publications, due to both the wishes of its founders, and the way it is run.” This was a clear assertion of their elitism, and of thought’s dominance over action in their eyes. In this light, how are we to interpret L’Insurgé’s declaration that it was changing direction, if not as the weak version of a rebellious agitprop trying to place itself beyond the reach of its own terror? This is what the most extremist members of the two editorial teams had understood, having already departed for more hard-line publications such as Je suis partout. Nothing would come to anything, to any concrete action; paralysis reigned.
The German occupation and the Vichy regime would force these dissidents to abandon this paralysis, and this, which needed time, would lead to further faux pas, to doubt, aimlessness, and complacency—for some, it would lead to periods of silence. Thierry Maulnier’s letter of July 1937 to Maurras, already quoted, stated, “I intend to abandon fairly shortly my contributions to L’Insurgé and at the same time, all political activities, because those that correspond to my thinking are running into difficulties that I had not properly gauged.” We cannot make judgments about disappointment, weariness, or resignation, but we can at least state something that Maulnier did not perceive but that Blanchot would come to know for himself: these “difficulties” did not signal simply a failure [défaut] of strategy, but the failing of thought itself.
Did he recognize this at the end of 1937? The suspension of L’Insurgé preceded the end of Blanchot’s contributions to Combat by only two months (he would supply only two more articles, in November and December). He continued working for the Journal des Débats and for Aux Écoutes, but his clearly defined engagement in the most virulent circles of the far right stopped definitively at this point. The sworn enemy of Brasillach at the heart of these dissident groups, he also distanced himself from Maxence and Maulnier, thus putting an end to any risk of his own positions being conflated with those of fascism, Nazism, or anti-Semitism.10 This breaking point proved suffocating, much more than it allowed for any breakthroughs. Blanchot’s journalistic activities continued, but his thinking would henceforth develop through literature. The few articles of 1938 to 1940 bearing his name looked at Sartre, Nerval, or Lautréamont, and there seem to be good reasons to think that these years were more intensively dedicated to writing Thomas the Obscure.
Even at this dead end, even on the cusp of withdrawal, he felt that he owed loyalty to lost fraternity, and the rhetoric of a spirited defense made the task easier. “France, Nation to Come,” Blanchot’s November 1937 contribution to Combat, which opened the issue, took its themes from his final piece for L’Insurgé, of October 27, on France as a “nation to be built.” They were written concurrently and featured the same arguments, though in different terms. The editors of Combat placed Blanchot’s piece prominently, thus suggesting that it was the culmination of a mode of thinking, even as this thinking was preparing to plunge into silence.
Blanchot’s last text for Combat, however, can be read as a farewell.11 Such a reading clearly draws on the fiction of biography, but it also indicates how much such fictions can tell us about reality, for instance Blanchot’s political evolution after the war. The article discusses dissidence, a weapon in the service of purity, but a double-edged sword. This form of “extreme thought,” of awareness and reflection in this “reactions factory that parties represent,” was also a “momentary good fortune for a revolution in ferment.” This revolution was a mode of opportunism, an aborting of action, a paradoxical mode of belonging, a catastrophic postponing of any break from ideological submission. How can a call such as that of the article’s title be made, then, namely the call for dissidents to exist? We must recognize dissidence as “the demand that can lead one to oppose all parties.” This attitude recalls to some extent 1933’s demand for refusal, which would return in 1958—against De Gaulle who, precisely, was attempting to adopt a position above party politics. But for Blanchot “to oppose all parties” was neither to “declare oneself above all parties” nor “to take up once more the vulgar watchword: neither left nor right.” This clearly signifies his resistance to French fascism (the watchword was that of Valois in 1926). Instead, to do so was a utopian demand, and most of all a demand for thought that Blanchot would make his own for the rest of his life, whether at this stage, by ceasing his activities at Combat (although we can have serious doubts about this) or a few years later (fulfilling, perhaps without realizing it, the rule that he set out in the final lines of this call for dissidence: “the true form of dissidence is one that abandons a position without ceasing to retain the same hostility for the opposing position, or even abandons its position in order to accentuate this hostility”). Perhaps Blanchot was a dissident among dissidents, retaining for a while his various aversions to democracy, parliamentarianism, capitalism, and communism. Perhaps he was already abandoning nationalism, having criticized the nation too much, and thus illustrating the law of dissidence that he had just formulated: “The true dissident nationalist is someone who foregoes the traditional formulae of nationalism, not in order to move toward internationalism, but in order to combat internationalism in all its forms, among which feature economics and the nation itself.” The latter two entities would later become the frequent object of his critiques. The anti-internationalist and antinationalist nationalist, the anticapitalist and anticommunist communist: Such were the types of dissident to whom Blanchot was appealing in December 1937. The factors that would establish the revolutionary demand for movement and for friendship in the 1960s could serve, at this stage, only as a way of thinking clearly about a personal dead end. This inertia was also the beginning of withdrawal, the crisis that would set his thinking to work.