One
The Use and Abuse of Culture: Maurice Barrès and the Ideology of the Collective Subject
Moralists contradict themselves when they forbid egotism to man and approve patriotism, for patriotism is nothing other than national egotism, and this egotism makes one nation to the next commit the same injustices as personal egotism among individuals.
Saint-Simon, Mémoires
Before the war, well before, there was someone who had presented fascism, who had given it its first expression. It was Maurice Barrès who was the first to see the possibilities and the necessity of merging socialism and nationalism. . . . Here are our origins. We find our riches at home.
Georges Valois, Le Fascisme, (1927)1
For the great majority of French nationalists at the end of the nineteenth century, no matter how extreme their nationalist beliefs and the racism and anti-Semitism they preached, the determination of who was truly French was never exclusively a political, legal, or racial question; that is, it was not strictly a matter of citizenship, ethnic or racial background, or the national origins of one's parents. Of course, if someone did not meet all the "material" and political requirements of the French nation, the question of his "Frenchness" would not even have been raised at all. But a person could meet all of the legal requirements for citizenship, and be seemingly totally assimilated into French society, and still be considered by nationalists to be a foreigner if he were judged not to belong to the "national family," the symbolic unity or spiritual identity allegedly determined by French tradition and culture. Culture in such nationalist contexts could be considered the ultimate determining factor of national identity, a spiritual force more basic and essential (and restrictive) than race in the formation of the French people.
Culture, defined as the most profound expression of an authentic, unified people, could be and was of course used as an explicit political weapon against all those who did not, or who were not allowed to, identify or be identified with the national collectivity. This included all those who ultimately were considered dangerous "parasites" and whose influence the nation would thus have to limit, control, or even eliminate so that the national culture and the people could exist in and as themselves. The "spiritual principle" of culture, whose chief function was to form and unify the French people, to give them a distinct identity, was therefore at the same time a dogmatic ideological force of division, discrimination, and repression when it came to "foreigners," especially those "foreign French" who were considered not to be an integral part of the authentic French spiritual family.
The notion of a homogeneous national culture provided those who were judged to have met the nationalist cultural requirements with (the fiction of) an enlarged rather than a diminished sense of self. A far from insignificant part of the attraction of fascism to numerous French intellectuals and writers in the 1930s had to do with fascism's culturalist aims, its postulation of a collective subject deeply rooted within French culture and tradition that served as the source and model for the individual subject and its fusion with the national community. In this sense, extremist forms of nationalism and even fascism could be considered to be extreme political philosophies or ideologies of the subject, rather than ones that are antithetical to or destructive of its fundamental principles.
One of the most extensive and dramatic elaborations of the links between the philosophy of the subject and extremist nationalist ideology is found in the work of the influential novelist and militant nationalist, Maurice Barrès, whom French literary fascists unanimously acknowledged as an important source and model for French fascism. Barrès, whose early political influences were socialist and populist, emerged during the Dreyfus affair as one of the most powerful extremist, ultranationalist, anti-Semitic, anti-Dreyfusard voices in all of France. His work could be seen to have accomplished a kind of fusion before-the-fact of the different and sometimes contradictory aesthetic-political strategies that French fascists, decades after Barrès, also used, not just to defend an inflated, absolute image of the nation, but explicitly to promote the cultural politics of fascism. Of particular interest are the aesthetic and philosophical concepts and assumptions that support Barrès's notion of culture and that remained unchanged in his work despite the radical shift of emphasis that occurred in it about the time of the Dreyfus affair: a shift from an idealization of the individual ego or self in his early works to the idealization of the nation, seen as a collective, culturally defined subject, in his later, post-Dreyfus-affair works.2
Barrès's vision of France as a unified spiritual totality depends on the myth of an original, authentic national culture, which is presented as the alternative to social and political disharmony and the "decadence" of the nation in modernity. Barrèsian nationalism has its foundation in a subject whose unity is prefigured, always already given in advance through its immediate relation to what Barrès called "la terre et les morts" (the land and the dead). Culture is conceived as a collective subject whose voice manifests itself in philosophy, art, and literature and is echoed in and supported by the voices of model ancestors, and by monuments and memorials, local customs, and the land itself as it speaks to and is symbolically cultivated by its "native sons." The authentic individual subject is at one with itself only inasmuch as it is immediately at one with its past, an aestheticized, collective past that is postulated as an organic unity and that guards in itself the truth—the form or "typology," as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe would say—of both the individual and the collective subject.3
Barrèsian nationalism in fact conforms in its broad outlines to what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, in an article entitled "The Nazi Myth," call the "logic of fascism," and in this sense it can legitimately be considered protofascist. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy make the following claim about fascism and its relation to the philosophical/political question of the subject: "The ideology of the subject (which is a pleonasm), that is what fascism is."4 The claim at first glance seems provocative and even outrageous, for it appears to assert that all philosophies of the subject—whether humanist, idealist, phenomenological, existentialist, even Marxist; whether nominally located on the left, center, or right—are somehow equivalent to fascism. But the word ideology is the key to their claim, for, as they acknowledge, they are using the word in Hannah Arendt's sense as the "totally self-fulfilling (and willfully self-fulfilling) logic of an idea, . . . an explanation of history . . . on the basis of a single concept," one that seeks to be "a total explanation or conception" (293).5 Thus, when the philosophy or metaphysics of the subject is "absolutized," when it is presented as the basis for a total explanation of history and the world, then and only then can it be considered an equivalent of fascism. But even if the metaphysics of the subject does not often realize its absolute, negative potential, it does contain this possibility within it, and for Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy this means not only that fascism should be analyzed in terms of its roots in the history of metaphysics and not treated as fundamentally "irrational" (294), but also that philosophies and politics centered on the subject cannot be considered in themselves to represent radical alternatives to fascism.
If there are important links between the philosophy of the subject and fascism, then Barrès's "religion" of nationalism must be given an important place in the development of fascism precisely because it represents an explicit dramatization of the process of totalization of the subject and the fusion of the individual and collective subjects.6 In this way it also exposes the philosophical premises supporting the extreme form of nationalism at the foundation of what I am calling French literary fascism. Especially important, the ideology of the subject is in Barrès's work—and in the work of his fascist heirs—inextricably intertwined with the ideology of culture and the notion of a unified self, and inseparable from and supported by the myth of a homogeneous, totalized culture.
In his "Examen des Trois Romans Idéologiques" (originally published in 1892),7 Barrès left no ambiguity as to what was the first principle of his culturalist ideology, the fundamental reality in which it was rooted: "Our morality, our religion, our feeling of nationality are all crumbled things . . . from which we cannot derive rules for living, and while waiting for our masters to reestablish certitudes for us, it is advisable that we hold on to the only remaining reality, the Self" ("Examen," 14-15). The Self—almost always capitalized—asserts itself as an irrefutable reality, then, in a world not of Cartesian doubt but of political and cultural devastation, one in which all institutions and systems of belief had effectively failed and in which the nation itself no longer stirred positive feelings. At a time in which Barrès and many others perceived the culture of the present as being in shambles, the Self was not only the last remaining basis for culture, it was the ultimate basis.
Barrès saw the Self as the starting point from which to build a new sense of morality (and politics) and a new feeling of national unity—a new or renewed cultural identity. For such renewal could not occur until the primary reality of the Self had been recognized, nurtured, or "cultivated," as Barrès put it, and allowed to realize itself completely. Empirically, logically, and sociohistorically, as well as emotionally, the Self came and had to come first. Which means that the Self first had to be itself before it could rediscover the harmony that Barrès claimed supported it in tradition and in the underlying reality of culture—culture as a deep structure that made possible the (re)formation of the Self necessary for its own renewal.
To be a Self is not, however, to be oneself, an individual; for the world is a hostile place for the Self, and in the world the Self is, more likely than not, not a Self but an Other, formed by alien, exterior forces. To realize itself as a Self, the Self must work on itself, form itself, and actively and even violently defend itself against the world of others. The Self is thus always struggling against all exterior elements, especially all nonselves, whom Barrès called foreigners or "barbarians," as in the title of his novel, Sous l'oeil des barbares: "Barbarians, that is the name of the non-self, that is, everything that can harm or resist the Self" ("Examen," 23). Barrès's defense of the Self thus consists of a declaration of total war against everyone and everything, for even if those with whom one lives "are in other respects superbly learned, they are for [the Self] foreigners and adversaries" (20). The reformulation and protection of the Self admit no compromises; they constitute a total project with a single principle as its origin and end. The Barrèsian philosophy or metaphysics of the Self must thus be considered logical, coherent, and absolute, for all reality must conform to it or be negated. All others must also identify with it or be violently excluded or repressed as "barbarians" or "foreigners." The Self, in itself, is totalitarian.
Barrès held that the Self constitutes a world, that is, a culture unto itself, which he compared to the world of the Greeks: "In the same sense, the Greeks saw only barbarians outside of the Greek homeland. With contact with foreigners, and regardless of their level of civilization, this people, jealous of its own culture, experienced a strain analogous to that felt by a young man constrained by life to associate with beings who are not of his psychic homeland" (20). The other, the barbarian, constantly menaces the Self and must be "hated" and constantly combated (21), which reveals that the Self is never complete or fully formed but is always in the process of creating itself and defending itself in its war against all others. "Our Self, in fact, isn't unchangeable," argues Barrès. "We must defend it every day and every day create it . . . . The cult of the Self is not to accept oneself completely. . . . It is a culture that is made up of prunings and growth: we have first to purify our Self of all the foreign particles life continually inserts into it, and then add to it" (22). Self-creation is thus an unending process, even if the form or cultural typology of what is created exists prior to its creation as a regulating principle or ideal. A Self is known by the way it cultivates itself and remains faithful to the cult(ure) of itself.
The culmination of the successful cultivation of the Self is presented in Sous l'oeil des barbares, the first novel of the trilogy titled Le Culte du Moi, as a state of intense feeling of plenitude and even ecstasy, one in which the Self "becomes a god" (238), the "principle and universality of all things," and the source of all ideas (230), totally at one with itself, self-made, "totally fashioned according to its own desire" (241). At such moments of self-fabricated plenitude, the main character is presented as being complete, limitless, absolute, or at least he feels or imagines himself to be so. Barrès describes one of these moments of ecstasy as consisting of the "delights of understanding, developing, vibrating, creating harmony between oneself and the world, of being filled with undefined and profound images. . . . The universe penetrates me and develops and harmonizes in me" (243, 245). As lyrical and as solipsistic as such scenes are, they clearly indicate that the passage from individual to collective Self, which the later trilogy develops, is already contained within the logic of even a radically individualistic and emotive presentation of the Self. The absolute principle of the Self cannot be confined to itself and has nothing less than the perfect harmony of the world as an internal element of the Self, and it has the harmony of Self in or as the world as its ultimate project.
In his preface to the 1904 edition of Un homme libre (Paris: Pion, 1921), Barrès describes the hero of this novel, the second in the trilogy, as "a self that is not submitted to anything. . . . Don't submit! That's salvation" (xi). The Self is "saved," that is, "free," only insomuch as it is self-affirming and rejects everything coming from the outside, admitting into itself only that which is truly its own. At the same time, this radical individualism is intimately linked to an activist collectivism. Barrès acknowledged also in the 1904 preface that the novel failed perhaps to "provide the young with a clear knowledge of their authentic tradition," but he also claimed that it did "pressure them to free themselves and to rediscover their own filiation" (xi). The cult of the Self demands that all individuals subordinate themselves to their own filiation, the filiation of the Self that is the Self. In doing so, they will eventually discover their "authentic tradition," the culture of their region and nation, and the collective cultural being underlying and forming their individual being.
In the vocabulary of Barrès, submission is always submission to the other, the sign of a weakness in the Self. Subordination, on the other hand, recognizes the cultural identity that precedes the Self, forms the Self, and is the same as the Self, and that therefore the Self must recognize in order to be itself: "My merit is to have derived from individualism itself those great principles of subordination which most foreigners possess instinctively or find in their religion" (xiv). The religion or ideology of the Self thus supplements in Barrès's thinking the absence of religion and an instinctual identification with race, which he claims other peoples but not the French possessed. The French needed the religion of the Self, the very culturalist nationalism he was proposing, precisely because their collective Self lacked a unique and determining biological or religious foundation. Culture was the French answer to the question of natural origin, with a collective, cultural subject serving as the replacement for the spiritual subject of religion or the biological subject postulated by racism.
The cult or culture of the Self in Barrès's work possesses a rigorous, even dogmatic logic, but the concept that founds the realm in which the Self originates is not reason but instinct. The Self does not first think itself a Self; it feels itself a Self; it has the experience of its own force. Most critics have considered Barrès's instinctual-based "cult of the Self" (and later, his extreme nationalism, or what I would call his "cult of the Nation-Self") an "irrationalism."8 It all depends, I suppose, on what one means by irrationalism. Emotion, feelings, instinctual drives are fundamental to Barrès's thinking, but a rigorous logic derived from the concept of the Self unifies and gives meaning and form to them from their inception. Barrès's overall project—both for the individual and the Nation-Self—was, regardless of the importance of instinct, profoundly "rational"; that is, coherent and even dogmatically logical. For Barrès, there was even a "science of the mechanism of the Self" (Sous l'oeil des barbares 41), which resulted from giving oneself over to and understanding the instinctual, a science that would leave the Self not just at one with but also master of the fundamental instinctual forces constituting it, forces that originate outside of and prior to its existence. As a culture, the Self is rooted in the prerational or extrarational; and as a culture, it imposes or discovers a logic and order in its instinctual, emotive roots and in this way is able to identify with them, make them its own, and simultaneously remake itself in terms of them. There is thus no realization of the Self without the spontaneous and boundless ecstasy or feeling of Selfhood; but there is also no genuine realization of Self without a rational practice predetermining the proper formation of the Self. And the same logic is at the basis of Barrès's nationalism: "Nationalism is not only a product of sentiment; it is a rational and mathematical obligation" (Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme [Paris: Editions du Trident, 1987; originally published 1902], 75).
Barrès chose the Lorraine region as his "native province," and as the privileged model for the collective Self and even the model for the Nation-Self in all his work, but regardless of his personal and psychological reasons for doing this, Lorraine fits perfectly into the logic and culture of the Self already delineated. Lorraine exemplifies the ideal collective Self in Barrès's terms, not because it has remained identical to itself and unscarred throughout the ages, but rather because it "was born by constituting itself as a homeland through an effort against foreigners" (Un homme libre, 98). The "Lorrainian race" is treated as a product not of blood but of this struggle, and the chief character in the novel explicitly identifies with the process by which the people of this province transformed themselves into the "race," the Self they were destined to be: "Through armed struggle, the Lorrainian founded his race; through armed struggle, he heroically tries to protect it" (122). The Self is born occupied by foreigners and is born again when it is able to resist and overcome this "injustice" and in this way become an authentic Self. The province of Lorraine—invaded, conquered, occupied but still resistant, more French than those provinces that have escaped such trials—is thus the ideal model for both the collective and individual Selves. "Race" in this context is not a natural, biological concept, therefore, but a cultural ideal that must be created and then vigorously protected.
The collectivity thus becomes a race (a Self) not by birth or blood but rather through the struggle to rid itself of what is foreign to it and in this way found itself. The individual Self likewise realizes and manifests itself as a Self by waging its own struggle against the foreign and thus identifying with and becoming one with the collective Self, its race. As an identity and through identification, the (individual) Self thus becomes the (collective) Self it was predetermined to be. Barrès's extremist nationalism must therefore also be considered a theory or cult of the Self, an absolute, uncompromising (at least in theory) politics for an uncompromising, absolute, collective subject.
Some commentators have felt that Barrès's extremist nationalism constitutes an antisubjective collectivism and determinism and is thus opposed to the radical subjectivism or egotism—the cult of the Self—of the first trilogy. It is certainly true that Barrès argues in Scènes et doctrines that the Self is never responsible for its own origin, or even the origin of its "own" thoughts or expressions. This argument seems to contradict his earlier statements concerning the necessity for the Self to struggle against everything that is foreign and barbarian, and that does not originate in itself. In his overtly nationalist works, the grandeur of the Self always comes from its ability to be at one with what precedes it, to follow the path indicated by previous generations, and to become an integral part of national culture and tradition:
We are not the masters of the thoughts that are born in us. They do not come from our intelligence; they are ways of reacting in which very ancient physiological dispositions are translated. . . . Human reason is linked together in such a way that we all pass again in the steps of our predecessors. There are no personal ideas. . . . We are the continuity of our parents. This is anatomically true. They think and they speak in us. The entire series of descendants only makes one and the same being. (Scenes et doctrines du nationalisme, 18, my emphasis)
It would be difficult to imagine a clearer expression of cultural determinism than this, in which the individual subject seems to be nothing in itself and has no thoughts that are its own, with its unity and identity, its very being, determined not by itself but by its ancestors. The "cult of the Self" of the first trilogy has thus apparently been replaced in Barrès's nationalist writings and in his second trilogy (Le Roman de l'énergie nationale) by nothing less than the total determination of the Self—what some have claimed is a radical antihumanism and the destruction of the individual subject.9
Such, I would argue, is not the case, for Barrès's nationalist-culturalist determinism has an explicit goal, as we have seen; that goal is not the simple negation of the individual subject but rather the full realization of the Self. It is true that in his later work he argues repeatedly that the individual must founder and be transcended in the collectivity, but it is not in order to be destroyed but rather so that an authentic, fully realized Self can be (re)born: "The individual founders in order to rediscover himself in the family, in the race, in the nation" (19). For if it is true that the slogan of the Barrèsian nationalist Self was not "I am myself" but "I am themselves" ("Je suis eux-mêmes"), it should not be forgotten that the others which the Self is, are not really other, the sign of a radical alienation or heterogeneity at the heart of the Self—as in the case of Rimbaud's famous phrase "Je est un autre"—but are the same as the Self, constituting its deep roots and cultural identity. All culturalisms have some sort of collective self as their ideal or as their regulating principle, and this collective self is not opposed to but is a radical extension or inflation of the individual self, its profound origin, truth, and destiny. Barrès never in fact abandons his cult of the Self; rather, he pursues it all the more dogmatically when it is expressed as a nationalist-culturalist mythology and politics.10
Les Déracinés is the title of the best known and most influential novel not just of Barrès's second trilogy, Le Roman de l'énergie nationale, but of his entire corpus. The novel's chief political and cultural purpose is to draw portraits of both the positive and the negative cultural "types," of those who fit and those who do not fit into the cultural collectivity constituting the nation. The negative type is characterized in the novel as being "deracinated," which is another way of saying undetermined, unformed, unaesthetic. It consists of those selves who suffer from the moral and political disease of being cut off from their regional-national roots and their native culture, and thus from themselves, and who are unable or unwilling to identify with and be associated with the Nation-Self, the ideal collective Self. As Barrès put it, "The fatherland is stronger in the soul of a rooted individual than in that of a deracinated one" (Scènes et doctrines, 70), and this is because to be rooted in the land means to possess the identity of the collective Self and to be identified as a son of the fatherland. The deracinated are both the exterior enemy, the foreigners or barbarians, and the interior enemy, those who in France serve the foreign, either knowingly or unknowingly, and interrupt or postpone the perfect identification of the Self with itself and with its native land and culture.
The struggle against deracination has to be as constant and uncompromising as the struggle against "barbarians" in the first trilogy, but it is now overtly both a collective and an individual war, in which the opposing armies are clearly marked and thus easy to identify, attack, and—if it literally is war—eventually destroy. Clearly, one of the explicit ideological purposes of Barrès's overtly nationalist novels was to identify the enemy both outside and within. The Dreyfus affair, to which he energetically devoted himself from just after the publication of Les Déracinés in 1897 until 1902, was for Barrès precisely a war against the "deracinated," in which nothing less than "the life or death for the nation" was at stake (Mes Cahiers, v. 2 [Paris: Plon, 1930], 116). In this war, the enemy identified himself through his support of Dreyfus, and the ally identified himself through his attacks not just on this "traitor" to France but on what he represented: the foreign type par excellence, the Jewish antitype, the extreme opposite of the national type, who represented the greatest threat to national identity and culture.11
Barrès admitted that he was convinced of the guilt of Dreyfus not because of any proof against him but because Dreyfus was Jewish and thus the full embodiment of the deracinated enemy, the negative type:
[Dreyfus is] the deracinated individual who feels ill at ease in one of the plots of your old French garden . . . because he had no roots . . . that associated him strongly enough with the soil and the conscience of France to keep him from looking for his happiness, his peace, his life, in foreign lands. I don't need to be told why Dreyfus betrayed. Psychologically speaking, it is enough for me to know that he is capable of betrayal to know that he betrayed. The gap is filled in. That Dreyfus is capable of betrayal, I conclude from his race. (Scènes et doctrines, 111-12)
The last phrase of the quotation brutally reveals the intimate links between Barrès's nationalism and his anti-Semitism, encapsulating the dogmatic, tyrannical logic that demands that the defense of the Nation-Self entail a war against all "foreigners," but first and foremost against the Jews, representing all those who, according to the culturalist anti-Semite, can never be rooted in and formed by French culture, those who do not have "French tastes."
Barrès's culturalist nationalism postulates a unity of tastes and aesthetic values as a way of distinguishing between the foreign and the native, the deracinated and the culturally rooted, and thus makes aesthetic taste a determining force in politics. To take an especially vivid example, once Emile Zola had been defined by Barrès as a déraciné, his role as a militant Dreyfusard needed no further explanation. "Predestined to be a Dreyfusard" out of "profound interior necessities," Zola was quite simply "not French" (35). Barrès went on to say that Zola, separated from "us" by the Alps, because of his Italian ancestry, remained a "deracinated Venetian" (35). His foreignness was especially evident in his lack of aesthetic sensitivity, with this considered to be as much a political as a literary fault: "Insightful minds have always sensed what was foreign, that is, anti-French in the talent of Zola. Everyone of us, inasmuch as he shares French taste, is disgusted by the clutter of the Rougon-Macquart" (36). And this lack of French aesthetic sensitivity was considered to be precisely the root of Zola's political and cultural insensitivity: "Insensitive to our venerations, which his foreign soul cannot even imagine." Zola thus used Dreyfus as his pretext to take his revenge on France and its sensitivities and aesthetic tastes.
According to Barrès, Zola defended Dreyfus not out of a sense of justice but rather because he and Dreyfus shared the same foreign "tastes," and because both of them were incapable of venerating the "France" of the French. In other words, Zola, just as much as Dreyfus, embodied the principal traits of the Jew for Barrès, and thus they were both instinctu-ally and culturally traitors, no matter what they actually did. And they were even more dangerous than declared enemies because they presented themselves and were accepted by many as loyal Frenchmen. The importance of the Dreyfus affair for Barrès was that it destroyed all such pretenses and identified the true, rooted nationalist French as well as the deracinated—that is, foreign—traitorous non-French French, so that the battle for France and French culture could continue openly and without the possibility of mistaking friend and foe.
But the cultural definition of "Frenchness" also meant that the problem of national identity would be complicated under the best of circumstances, even without an ever-increasing influx of foreigners. For "the common idea" that Barrès claimed originally linked the French to each other in the past had been lost in modernity and could not be restored. Barrès felt that to attempt to create and impose some other unifying idea on the French—that of race, for example—was equally unrealistic:
Certain races succeed in being conscious of themselves organically. That is the case of the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic collectivities, which are more and more on the way to creating themselves as races. (Alas, there is no French race, but a French people, a French nation, that is to say, a politically formed collectivity.) Yes, unfortunately, in the eyes of these rival collectivities, who are necessarily our enemy in the struggle for life, ours has not at all succeeded in defining itself for itself. (62)
If the French could not rely on the concept of race to define themselves, because they were politically and culturally founded rather than biologically formed as a people, then some other means had to be used to avoid their being victimized by those "enemy" nations that had succeeded in "creating themselves as races." Not being a biologically determined people certainly makes the definition and formation of a national identity and a collective Self more difficult, but at the same time, and according to the logic of the Barrèsian notion of the Self and the nationalism derived from it, this ultimately makes for a stronger, more deeply rooted, complex Nation-Self, one born and developed out of the struggle to be a Self.
Without a "natural" concept of race to provide an identity for a people inevitably split apart in modernity and continually faced with the necessity of recreating and reunifying itself, some other unifying principle had to be discovered or invented. It was in fact tradition that in Barrès's work performs exactly the same function as race in racist theories, enabling the French to be preformed and providing cultural rather than racial typologies of what it is to be French. Tradition enables modern Frenchmen to have roots in a past origin, before separation and division; an origin that all the French supposedly carry within themselves as their cultural endowment—in their spirit, their unconscious, or their soul, rather than in their blood. Tradition thus provides the French with the myth of a homogeneous culture, a spiritual homogeneity, to supplement the absence of racial homogeneity.
Not being a race did mean that the French had to be more attentive to their indigenous traditions than a people preformed as a race. If a race was uprooted, cut off from its traditions and its land (from "la terre et les morts"), oppressed by foreigners, even "decadent," it could still in principle try to remake itself by reaffirming what in it made it what it was in spite of its temporary loss of Self: its "blood" and its racial identity. Tradition, for a strictly racially determined nationalism, might be a sign of the people, a storehouse of the myths that indicated the identity of the people, but it was never the source of that identity. Without the ultimate determination of race, the French could not afford to stray too long or too far from the land and its traditions, or to remain deracinated and thus victim to foreign ideas, traditions, and tastes, for they had nothing else on which to found themselves, nothing "biological" to make them what they were and to serve as the determining principle under which they could remake themselves.
This also meant that the "pollution" or "corruption" of French tradition, culture, and taste constituted as radical a threat to the being of the French as the intermixing of races was for racists. Without a homogeneous culture and purified tradition to carry on as an instinctual endowment and with which to identify, the French people, quite simply, would no longer exist as such and would not be able to remake themselves in the future. Only a closed, integral cultural tradition could guarantee the (re)making of an integral people.
What exactly roots individuals symbolically in the land? What makes them essentially French, if it is not their blood and if the French nation continues to agonize over its identity, having lost two of its provinces (Alsace and Lorraine) to Germany and being unable to provide the explicit support and energy that would guarantee its own being? What would make it possible for certain individuals to overcome the radical deracination imposed on them by the disruptive forces of modernity, by the military and political losses suffered by their country, and by their education, and to return to "the land and the dead" and thus to themselves? What would make it possible for France, no matter how severe the losses and crises it has endured, to rediscover and remake itself as a unified culture? In terms of the portraits given of the seven young men from Lorraine at the start of Les Déracinés, the primary answer to such questions is that it is clearly some specific living link to the past—to tradition and to the land, which persists in them as a living force—that will eventually "save" some of them and provide a model for how France could overcome the crisis of its identity and thus save itself.
The necessary link to the past is narrative and aesthetic, for authentic culture is maintained in the family narratives passed on from generation to generation, in the voices of ancestors retained in the present, and in the aesthetic sensibility and taste inherited from cultural models. The most solidly rooted of Barrès's characters in Les Déracinés and other novels all have master storytellers as close relatives and thus have in themselves, in their unconscious being, a storehouse of narratives that constitutes what they are or should be. Their eventual return to the land and the dead, and to their predetermined Self, will take the form of a reaffirmation of these narratives and will determine who and what they are. The greatest danger to modern France, a country characterized as being in full identity crisis, therefore, is represented by the alternative counternarratives that threaten to displace the local and national master narratives from their dominant position and make the deracination of the French definitive. In Les Déracinés, Barrès recounts the struggle against foreign narratives and in this way provides a narrative model for resisting and compensating for the displacement or destruction of family and national master narratives in general.12
In Les Déracinés, the first important "foreign, cosmopolitan" threat to the students from Lorraine before they leave for Paris is represented by their lycée professor, Paul Bouteiller, a republican and "Kantian," who is described as having "neither soil, nor society, nor, so he thinks, prejudices" (85). Bouteiller is depicted in the novel as preaching moral abstractions and Kantian universalism to the students as a way of transforming them into citizens of the Republic who identify with "humanity" rather than true Frenchmen who have roots in the soil of France and identify with their own ancestors and themselves. His influence on the students is not really due as much to the universalist doctrine he teaches, however, as to his seductive, "poetic" powers and the way he reveals to his students "the great secrets of poetic melancholy" (76). The narrator describes him as a "sorcerer of long ago but with a modern appearance" (92), a professor intoxicating his students with "the faraway Oriental perfumes of death, filtered through a network of German thinkers" (81), transforming them into "citizens of humanity, emancipated, initiates of pure reason" (97), like "captive balloons of varied and brilliant colors . . . who aspire to fly away, to rise up, to disperse without a destination" (98). Les Déracinés first exposes the dangers of the "Oriental perfumes" of German thought—German thought that is thus characterized as non-European, feminine, seductive, and deadly—and then provides "authentic" national narratives and myths to dissipate the scent of the foreign and the feminine and to reroot the students in the masculine solidity of the land and the solidarity of an indigenous people.
Of all the negative figures in Barrès's novels—that is, all those who embody the foreign and encourage the process of deracination—Astiné Aravian in this novel is undoubtedly the most interesting and complex, mainly because she is so seductive and powerful a figure, surpassing all others through the force of her stories and the power they have to counter the regional-nationalist tales and myths presented by the novel as a whole as positive formative models. Astiné, first of all, not only represents in her stories but also embodies in her person everything that is seductive and dangerous in "the foreign," in cosmopolitanism. Coming from the "Orient"—she was born in Armenia—she has traveled throughout the world, seemingly without roots in any one homeland, and is a hybrid mixture of cultures and traditions. This kind of uprooted existence is dangerous for anyone, but especially, the highly intrusive and judgmental narrator reminds us, for women and children: "It is bad to have little children and the souls of women travel. The best are of one countryside alone" (130). Women are thus presented as being more susceptible than men to the attractions of cosmopolitanism, that is, "the dangerous faculty of borrowing the tone and the allure of each milieu" (131), with the inevitable result that they sacrifice "[their] own manner." And what is even worse, we are led to conclude, such hybridization of tone and allure is extremely attractive to young men who have not traveled, for "cosmopolitan" women such as Astiné easily lead astray those who cannot resist their "exotic" charms.
In addition, Astiné's stories and the mythical names they evoke both possess the force of "the origins of history" and are linked to the formation of her young lover's imagination and dreams: "[Sturel's] imagination was created with stories of these legendary sites"; they represent "a magnificent thread which links him to his past and his first dreams" (157). The stories of "the Orient" threaten the singularity of the Lorrainian-French origin more than any other foreign forces, even more than the abstractions of Kantian philosophy, because they have a powerful seductive power that is related both to a tradition even older than that of France or Europe and to an original, legendary non-Lorrainian origin and past in the imagination of the young Lorrainian himself—to "his first dreams." The imagination of Sturel is thus presented as being divided, and as being infiltrated with foreign legends from the start, which makes the task of reestablishing profound links and identifying with his own "land and dead" a contradictory process in which the imagination must struggle against itself in order to overcome what originally activates and stimulates it. As both stimulus and obstacle, the seductive, imaginative, feminine force of "the Orient" can be neither simply affirmed or negated. It is as necessary to the process of rerooting advocated by the novel as it is excessive and disruptive of it.
On the way to the discovery and (re)creation of self, at the very origin of the imagination, the problem of "the Orient" (and especially "the Oriental woman") is a necessary, internal element of "the Occident's" relation to itself. At the same time, "the Orient" is presented as the culmination of the foreign—so dissimilar from Europe and its "Greek origins" that it threatens the life and identity not just of Sturel but, insomuch as he is presented as being typical of modern youth, of the French nation as a whole. In Barrès, "the West" (and more specifically, France) exists as a unified subject and possesses a cultural identity that is manifest in its master narratives and myths only by means of the suppression, negation, or appropriation of "the Orient"; that is, of all the non-Greek origins that France ("the West") carries in some sense within itself (within its own imagination and identity) from the start.13
"The Orient" is thus the imaginary means by which "the Occident" either rediscovers itself or loses itself, a necessary imaginary stimulus that always risks taking the national imagination outside and beyond itself. Astiné's stories and Astiné herself possess all the "prestige of poetry" (171), which is described as being a stronger and more original force or stimulant than philosophy, even when "poetically" presented by a gifted "sorcerer." For the foreign in poetry is even more dangerous than the foreign in philosophy or politics; it always works for the wrong, foreign ends and turns one away from the "realities and interests of French life" (171). It is described as having the same effects on Sturel's consciousness that "a virus [would have] in his blood" (170), as being a "poison" that could be resisted only by a mature, healthy organism, not an "organism in disorder" (171).
The mature, healthy, rooted body (individual or national) would risk very little in having limited contact with foreign poisons and could even benefit from consuming them, for they would stir up the body's own indigenous creative imagination and thus have a positive effect on it. Astiné, for example, is described as "an admirable book," and the narrator of the novel, who intervenes constantly in the narration to explain, anticipate, and judge, clearly sympathizes with Sturel when "he eagerly poisons himself with her words" (173). As a kind of muse, Astiné acts as a catalyst for Sturel's own imagination and creative energies. Sturel thus gains from his experiences with this exotic other because he is ultimately able—or the novel presents itself as being able even if he is not—to neutralize her foreign, poetic toxicity.
Only the body and spirit whose hereditary detoxification system has been weakened or not sufficiently developed, however, is susceptible to the full negative effects of the poison. Thus, positive myths and models are needed to restore the system to health in order to direct all energies to their proper nationalist ends and ward off the toxicity of the foreign. Les Déracinés presents two model scenes in which the goals of Barrès's aestheticized nationalism are dramatized and which serve as models for the "spontaneous" unification of the French people. The first of these scenes occurs at the tomb of Napoleon. Napoleon is the figure in the novel—and in the imagination of much, though not all, of the extreme nationalist right—who serves for the young men as a model of what could be called a national-aesthetic energetics. It is not strictly speaking the historical-political figure—the great general, the emperor, the absolute ruler or dictator, and certainly not the spiritual heir to the Revolution—after whom the students model themselves, as they all have serious differences with various aspects of his politics and the institutions he founded; rather, it is the imaginary, mythical figure they honor. Napoleon's tomb is described as "the intersection of all the energies named audaciousness, will, appetite. For one hundred years, imagination, everywhere else dispersed, has concentrated itself on this point. . . . Level out history, suppress Napoleon; you annihilate the condensed imagination of the century" (259). In the figure of Napoleon, all the disparate and conflicting creative energies of the nation are fused together in the supreme image of a national aesthetic Self, the product of the collective imagination of an entire people.
In creating an image of Napoleon by spontaneously synthesizing and identifying with the different literary and aesthetic representations of him, the students in turn create themselves: "Napoleon, our heaven, by means of a noble impulse, we create you and you create us" (262). The model or type in terms of which they aspire to mold or create themselves is admittedly one they have created (imagined) from the many versions and figures with which art and literature have provided them. In the complicated logic of cultural typologies, the original and the model are each dependent on the other for existence, where culture creates the individual and the group only because both have recreated it, responded to its formative energy, and modeled themselves after it.
In a nation where a universally accepted political idea of unity is lacking, and where race is not a determining factor in the creation of the nation and its people, the legendary figure of Napoleon supplements these lacks. He is referred to as "the Napoleon of the soul" (262) and given the title "PROFESSOR OF ENERGY" (263). "That is his definite physiognomy and his decisive form, obtained by superimposing all of the figures of him that specialists, artists, and different peoples have traced" (264). More powerful a figure than their lycée professor, Bouteiller, as effective as Astiné in stimulating the students' imagination because he is already mixed in their imagination with the work of artists, the figure of Napoleon represents nothing less than the guarantee of their own being and that of the nation, the aesthetic foundation, model, and stimulus for cultural unity and self-creation. The mythic Napoleon is thus the ultimate national counterfigure to both the abstract, republican universalism of Bouteiller and the exotic, "Oriental" cosmopolitanism of Astiné.
Around the mythical, aestheticized figure of Napoleon, the young deracinated students become united in a common but still unformed spiritual cause and recognize the common essence they all possess as a reflection of this national type:
They recognize each other as brothers. They shake hands. Impassioned cries burst from their lips. Subjugated to the play of such powerful forces, stirred up by their admiration and solidarity, they are ready to accept any authoritative speech. . . . They leave Napoleon behind and return to themselves, for whom they are responsible. It is enough to say Emperor; and his grand name, which creates individuals, forces them to say: I, We. (273)
When the national umbilical cord has been broken and the young Lor-rainians, removed from their land and their ancestors, find themselves in a hostile cosmopolitan environment, scenes of unification such as this are necessary in order to recreate in a new, invigorated form what has been lost through deracination. The legendary Napoleon, his name and title alone, produce the emotional experience of an "I" that is at the same time a "We," thus reestablishing in microcosm the ideal community, its collective energy, and most important, its enthusiasm.
Ultimately, then, in the novel, the enthusiasm felt around the tomb of Napoleon serves to highlight once again the primary and essentially imaginary cultural, aesthetic nature of the national identity. It is not a narrow political identity that can be constituted by the formation of a nationalist party, but a metaphysical-aesthetic identity to be created only through a total transformation of the political realm and of the French themselves. Napoleon, an imaginary composite figure from the already legendary past, inspires energy and unity, but the enthusiasm the students feel at the moment of collective identification is also limited. As the narrator indicates, the purpose of their enthusiastic identification with each other remains undetermined, and thus their energy and unity are easily dissipated.
Around what? For what end? . . . Something imaginary, like the figure of Napoleon in 1884, cannot give to juxtaposed unities the faculty of acting together. Good for motivating certain individuals, this great legend cannot give any consistency to their group or inspire any resolutions. (277)
The fact that there is no living figure (or idea) around which to rally makes the students' reactions at Napoleon's tomb only a first step in their process of recreating themselves into a collective, truly national "we." The real figure that could give unity and substance to their group and inspire resolute action is still lacking, and "without a national man, . . . a leader" (279), they and France will lack consistency and durability.
The establishment of the national man and leader, however, cannot come before the unification of the group or collectivity. In the context of the novel, the temptation of having the dictator serve as a solution to all the problems of national disunity is rejected. It is considered by the narrator to be a sign of the "illness" of disassociation itself: "When they try to group themselves in terms of the primitive mode of the clan, when they are haunted by the Caesarist idea, it's an instinct of sick people" (283). What must come first, what is the only truly serious problem, "is to reconstruct the damaged national substance" (283), defined as "the true foundation of the French, . . . a common nature, a social and historical product possessed . . . by each one of us" (281). All narrow, political questions have to be considered secondary in terms of this primary, essential question: how to recapture, recreate, return to the "common nature" of the French people, the historical-cultural endowment each "true" Frenchman inherits at birth. The restoration of the "national substance" must be given priority over politics and must determine the truth of the political in general. No nationalist politics, no matter how energetic and absolute, can thus be effective if the cultural foundation of the Nation-Self has not first been restored.
The priority Barrès gives to the cultural does not make his form of nationalism (or the French forms of fascism modeled after it) less extreme or violent than nationalisms that give priority to practical political issues. On the contrary, it makes his nationalism more uncompromising, since the cultural ideal it pursues is presented as being extrapolitical or prepolitical, absolute, and, in this sense, "natural." In this way, culture replaces nature and serves as the justification for the most violent and radical forms of exclusion. In the novel, in the name of the ideal of cultural rootedness and unity, "foreign elements" from inside as well as outside the group are eliminated, and the violence necessary to accomplish the elimination or even extermination of the foreign is presented as inevitable, necessary, and ultimately the responsibility of no one, because it is a product of the absolute "natural" law of the survival of the collectivity.
Not only must the seductive power of those outsiders who have "foreign tastes" or who "poison" the consciousness of French youth with exotic, foreign poetry and narratives be neutralized, but those within the collectivity who are considered foreign because of their class origins and lack of aesthetic-cultural sensitivity must also be eliminated. From within the group of the principal characters in Les Déracinés, the two with working-class or serf origins, Racadot and Mouchefrin, will be expelled and will be driven into a poverty and misery greater than any their ancestors ever knew, because their origins prevent them from sharing with the others a commonness of feeling: "The totality was held together only by the university serving as a vice. . . . They shared among themselves neither sentiment nor even simple pleasantness. The instinctual mechanism of this collectivity tends to expel the Racadot's, the Mouchefrin's, to throw them out into the proletariat, to degrade them" (394). The same aesthetic-instinctual mechanism that unifies also punishes, expels, and does away with those who do not fit, and cannot be made to fit, within the community—those who lack the common substance of Frenchness within their instinctual and sentimental endowment. The community of sentiment is ruthlessly exclusive and uncompromising.
The murder of Astiné that Mouchefrin and Racadot commit in desperation justifies their punishment and even serves the ends of the community from which they must be expelled. The consensus of the group is that they must be destroyed as wild animals are when they offer a threat to a community: "They should not be allowed to multiply to poison everything. . . . Society must slaughter them, as it does wolves and wild boars in the forests of Neufchâteau during the winter" (461-62). This is the terrible punishment the community must carry out, but it is made easier by the fact that Racadot and Mouchefrin have by their condition and their act already been reduced to an inhuman state: "Mochefrin is not a man, he's a submerged being, an elusive, creeping thing. . . . He's a reptile" (473). One can regret, as Sturel does, that two of the seven Lorraini-ans fail in this way, but their failure is also the possibility of success of the group as a whole. Even Sturel at the end acknowledges this inevitable "fact": "In our little group's attempt to raise ourselves up, it was certain that there would be some waste. Racadot, Mouchefrin are our ransom, the price of our becoming perfect. I hate their crime, but I persist in seeing them in terms of me as sacrificed" (493). The elimination of all those whom the national imagination can figure as sacrificial waste products of the group, as "reptiles," promotes the re-creation and guarantees the survival of the collectivity. The ideology of the Self demands ultimately the sacrifice of all "inhuman," foreign elements within the collectivity that interfere with its full realization or implementation.
But there is another and more dangerous foreign element that had to be eliminated, according to what I would call the "natural" law of survival of the national substance and of the culturally fittest: the victim of Mouchefrin and Racadot—Astiné, "the Oriental," the former lover and muse of Sturel. After describing in great detail the agony of Astiné as she is being murdered for her jewelry, the narrator postulates that Sturel, with the wisdom of age, would later come to the correct conclusion that her death was necessary, dictated by her own culture for the realization of her Self, as much as by his culture for the realization of his.14
Sturel will understand later that these tragic circumstances were necessary, atrocious instruments for the perfect biography of Astiné Aravian. He will not admit that any hypothesis could have emerged that would have spared his friend this bloody end... . Sturel well recognizes that such a life, unless it is incomplete and contradictory, would allow only for an outcome where there is vice, horror, and desperate tones. (428)
Sturel will come to understand all this when he fully realizes that for a Self—individual or collective—to realize itself, cultural laws, and the typologies and destinies they determine, must be followed.
The determinism that makes Sturel truly French—the cultural tradition and heritage he carries on in him—also necessitates that his feminine Other, the Oriental woman, fulfill her tragic destiny—the one the West assigns to the Orient—and be sacrificed at the altar of the Same: "He realized that he still loved his Asian; however he judged it to be childlike and against nature to dispute a destiny for which his unfortunate sister was so clearly marked" (437, my emphasis). Nature itself is thus presented as justifying a form of total cultural determinism, which thus makes the law of Western culture the original and indisputable natural law.
To further emphasize the formative power of culture, the narratives of the assassination of Astiné and the trial and execution of Racadot in the last sections of the novel are constantly interrupted because of another death, that of Victor Hugo. If the national body eliminates its "waste products" and foreign elements in the above scenes, the collective outpouring of national sentiment and solidarity that accompanies the death and burial of Hugo constitutes a positive model for the process of self-identification of the national Subject. Sturel moves from one extreme to the other, a witness first to the early stages of an ignominious assassination and then to the spontaneous outpouring of national sentiment and the expression of the unity of nation and Self through the collective eulogization of Hugo, linking the two scenes together and making the first a necessary precondition for the second. The logic of the novel is unambiguous and brutal; the elimination of the foreign and the construction of the Nation-Subject justify any means used to accomplish them.
The popular demonstrations accompanying the funeral of Hugo are presented as a gigantic aesthetic celebration of collective national identity, a spontaneous transcendence of individuality and divisiveness by means of an identification with Hugo as an exalted version of the national Self:
In this barely conscious crowd, some, seeing glory, trembled; others feeling death, hastened to live; others still . . . wanted to fraternize. They did better than that, they became one. This prodigious mixture of enthusiasts and debauched people, of simpletons and simple and sophisticated minds, organizes itself into one tremendous unique being, camped at the feet of greatness. Its front, which it turns toward the casket and which funereal torches light up, is made up of a hundred thousand faces, some base, others ecstatic, but none insensitive. Its breathing was like the noise of the sea. (466)
The scene stands on its own as an end in itself, a heightened state of cultural awareness, of increased sensitivity to and worship of the greatness of the Nation-Self and the individual Self identifying with it, regardless of the petty, base characteristics of the individuals collectivized within its image. The base and lowly have been raised up to a higher, collective, aestheticized level after the foreign and the bestial have been eliminated as waste products.
As in the case of Napoleon, the Hugo who is a "mystical leader" and a principle of unity is an idealized figure distanced from his romantic literary interests and republican political activities.15 The ideal that the masses idolize is an abstract formalist ideal. In loving Hugo, the masses love themselves; they love the figures and types that are the very substance of their ideal (fictional) cultural being as French men and women; they love especially the words that constitute their being. For if Napoleon is given the title of "Professor of Energy," Hugo's title is "Master of French Words."
Above all, words, words, words! That's his title, his force, to be master of French words: their totality forms the entire treasure and the entire soul of the race. . . . It's his legendary side which dominates among the masses and which fills them with love. . . . Yes, it's the mystical leader, the modern seer, and not the romantic, the elegiac and dramatic poet, that the huge crowds accompany. (464-65)
The people of Paris become a collective unity, but one defined linguistically, poetically, and culturally, not biologically; that is, one whose soul and mind are filled with the same words, rather than one whose body is filled with the "same blood."
Hugo, poet and collective cultural ideal, brings everyone back to the origins of the "French race." The force of his poetry is considered essentially mythical, directly linked to the original scene of the emergence of a people:
One is right to listen to his voice as a primitive voice. Words, as his prodigious verbal genius knew how to arrange them, made perceptible innumerable secret threads which linked each of us with nature in its entirety. A word is the murmur of the race fixed throughout the centuries in several syllables. It is the long echo of the rumbling of humanity when it emerged out of its animal condition. One finds the first mysterious awakening of our ancestor, who, standing up on his hind feet, expressed himself. The individual then differed very little from the species, from animality in its entirety; we had not yet separated the moral world from the material world either. Words worked on, assembled, restored in their youthful splendor by Hugo make us participate in this fraternity, this communion. (467-68)
The role of the national poet, of the master of French words, then, is to facilitate the return to the origin, to the moment before division when perfect communion was a natural state, when the "race" was born not in blood but in and as words.
The poetic murmur and arrangement of words in the works of Hugo not only evoke this mythological state of the emergence of the first humans (who are in this scene, of course, already in their essence French), but they are this state itself, insomuch as they make it possible to experience this mythical past and the future reunification of the French, in the present, as an immediate aesthetic experience. In a sense, the sacred words of Hugo, the poet, and the enthusiastic, collective identification with the figure of the poet and his words provide the model for Les Déracinés and for what it attempts to accomplish: the aestheticizing or mythologizing of the Nation-Self in general. Barrès's nationalist aesthetics and politics of the Self culminate in such mythical scenes of unification, which are inseparable from the violent purges of the foreign (of internal and external foreigners) that accompany them. Such scenes would also serve as models for the aestheticizing of political experience of Barrès's fascist heirs decades later.
In no precursor of French literary fascism are the forces and energies associated with the aestheticized, totalized Self more powerfully staged than in Barrès's work. Barrès's extremism in the name of the Self may not be an orthodox or a very sophisticated political philosophy of the subject, but its simplicity and dogmatism were undoubtedly part of its aesthetic and political appeal to literary fascists. It constitutes an absolute, unrestrained culturalist version of the philosophy of the subject, one willing—at least in principle—to go to any lengths to realize what is seen as the unbounded potential of the Self, its power to be itself and the world at the same time, to be total if not totalitarian.