Four
Fascism as Aesthetic Experience: Robert Brasillach and the Politics of Literature
For the leader (Führer), the mass is no more a problem than is paint for the artist. . . . The greatest aim of true politics has always been to form a people out of the mass, and a state out of the people.
Josef Goebbels, Michael (1923)
[The Nuremberg rallies] are the highest artistic creation of our time.
Robert Brasillach, Je suis partout
(January 29, 1943)
Many still find it difficult to accept the fact that a significant number of important French intellectuals and writers were tempted by and committed themselves to fascism during the 1930s and that many collaborated actively with Nazi Germany during the Occupation. It is as if the violence, injustices, and crimes carried out in the name of fascism would necessarily make fascism incompatible with an authentic literary sensibility, as if there were something in the nature of literary texts or speculative and critical essays that opposed them to totalitarian ideologies. A prevalent assumption of both revisionists and antirevisionists alike—that is, even of those intent on condemning fascist writers for their politics—seems to be that if a writer was really a fascist, he could not have been a true writer or critic; if he was an authentic writer or artist, he could not have been a fascist.
Those critics whose chief purpose is to denounce fascism, and all those who were tempted by it, have for the most part refused to take seriously the literary and critical essays of literary fascists and have been reluctant to make the effort to understand how their fascism was rooted in and largely formed by their literary and intellectual interests and commitments. The strictly political condemnation of the activities of literary fascists is thus generally limited by the critics' literary or critical shortsightedness, by their assumption that the politics of literary fascists totally determine their literary activities and that their creative and critical work is thus always a direct and uncomplicated derivative of their ideological commitments—an inferior, politicized, unliterary form of literature and criticism.
It is not difficult, however, to see how a form of revisionism could also root itself in the assumption that the literary and the political are totally separate realms and that one always determines—and in this way reduces significantly the importance of—the other. By simply reversing the privilege given to the political over the literary, the principal argument of those revisionist critics who have attempted to defend fascist and collaborationist writers has been that these writers were not completely (or in any way) responsible for their political actions because they were primarily writers or literary critics. Revisionists thus tend to treat them as naive, impressionistic innocents when it comes to politics, ignorant of the real consequences of their support for Nazism and their denunciations of Jews and all opponents of fascism and collaboration.1 Emphasizing the major fascist writers' alleged contributions to French literature and culture, revisionists might admit that the political actions of literary fascists and collaborators could be judged to have been "mistaken," but they should not be taken too seriously. For their politics are insignificant when compared to the literary achievements and cultural legacy of these "misguided" poets. Literature and the specifically literary side of literary fascism are thus emphasized in order to ignore, excuse, or explain away various writers' commitment to fascism by linking it to, or deriving it from, a more essential literary or critical sensibility.
When opposing this form of simplistic and dangerous rehabilitation of fascist, collaborationist writers, the temptation is great to take the opposite position; that is, to treat the literary-poetic side of their fascism as inconsequential and to emphasize the unjust and criminal political and human consequences of fascism, which are so significant that nothing can mitigate the responsibilities of those who actively defended fascism and anti-Semitism. For some militant antirevisionists, to take seriously the literary-poetic theory and practices of literary fascists is unequivocally to trivialize, legitimize, or explain away their politics.
One of the strongest antirevisionist statements of this sort is a recent pamphlet written by Jacqueline Baldran and Claude Bouchurberg, Brasillach ou la célébration du mépris (Paris: A. J. Presse, 1988), which legitimately denounces recent attempts to transform Robert Brasillach into a literary martyr and whitewash his deep political involvement with fascism and collaboration.2 The authors, in perhaps justifiable anger, take the following position on the relation of the literary and the political in his work and in terms of fascism in general:
Robert Brasillach was a writer; no one would deny it. A poet perhaps. A fascist most definitely. Poet and fascist. Fascist and poet. Should the poet make us forget the fascist? . . . Fascism, in its products, was absolute Evil, death. Fascism was not simply poetic reverie. The association of fascism and poetry falls within the category of deception. (52)
Certainly neither fascism in general nor literary fascism in particular was simply or exclusively poetic reverie, if this means a naive form of romantic escapism. But the assertion that all analyses of the relations between literature and fascism are deceptive because they give the impression that literary fascism was merely harmless literary musing, or that in focusing on "the poet" one inevitably forgets the fascist, underestimates the place of the poetic in even the most ruthless and criminal expressions of fascism. When the poetic is evoked as a formative model for and a fundamental operation of the political, "poetic reverie" can have—and in the context of French literary fascism, it did have—totalitarian political consequences.3
To argue that the fascism of a writer such as Brasillach was profoundly "literary" is not necessarily to mitigate his political responsibilities. It is not to excuse or explain away anything. On the contrary, it is important to analyze the consequences of the fascist aestheticizing or poeticizing of politics and to determine how a mythic and mystifying notion of literature and culture could and did function as a model for politics and provide an aesthetic justification for some of the worst political excesses, injustices, and crimes. I thus treat Brasillach and the other ultranationalist and fascist writers discussed in this book as both writers and fascists: "poets," writers, literary critics and theorists, as well as extremist political journalists, pamphleteers, and demagogues. The fact that a particular vision or myth of literature and art was inseparable from and supported their fascist politics does not mean that they had only limited responsibilities for the consequences of their writings and actions. On the contrary, their political responsibilities as writers or critics are total, and the destructive effects of their "poetic reveries" are primary among these responsibilities. Antirevisionists rightly claim that politics should not be trivialized, especially when it comes to fascism; but neither should poetics or aesthetics.4
For Brasillach and many others on the extreme right, to separate literature and politics was to impoverish each. First, such separation reduced the political to the empty politics of parties and economic influence that they abhorred and constantly denounced. Second, it took away from politics its potential grandeur, its vision of the nation as an organic unity, and its means of creating a radically new social and national "order" in which the true identity of a people could be realized and the creative forces of the nation activated. At the same time, such a separation reduced literature to an irrational, frivolous pastime and cut it off from its tradition and truth, causing it to flounder in what literary fascists considered the empty individualism and decadence of romanticism. The linkage of politics and literature also meant that the literary battles that raged in the pages of newspapers and journals in the 1930s were just as polemical and political as the political battles, for just as much was at stake for both literature and politics in literature as in politics.
Revisionists have attempted to rehabilitate Brasillach as a writer by radically separating his literary essays and novels from his politics in order to emphasize his literary achievements and underplay and excuse his political crimes. This not only flys in the face of all Brasillach's work, but it also contradicts important elements of the French nationalist and fascist traditions he so vigorously and relentlessly defended up to the moment of his death. Brasillach himself never made the claim that his literary activities should be separated from or used to counterbalance his politics. Rather, he defended both the literary and political positions he had taken as being those of someone completely loyal to France and working at all times in what he claimed were France's best interests: a true nationalist, a "patriotic" French fascist.5
Defending France's national interests also meant defending its art and literature as art and literature. Brasillach was at times a violent polemicist, a vicious anti-Semite, and a political demagogue, but in his approach to literature and art he was not in every instance a blatant and crude propagandist, for he did not always judge the merit of works solely on the basis of the political affiliations of their author. It is true that the "gods" of the right such as Maurras, Léon Daudet, Jacques Bainville, and Henri Massis—that is, those most closely affiliated with L'Action Française—were routinely and enthusiastically praised. And this respect for Maurras and his associates continued even after Brasillach broke with Maurras after the defeat and continued to publish Je suis partout in Paris during the Occupation.6 Works by other extremist and fascist writers, however, were just as likely to be criticized for their literary and political shortcomings as those of moderate or even leftist writers. Brasillach criticized Drieu la Rochelle, for example, just as severely as he did André Malraux; and his reservations concerning Celine's work were more serious than those he had of the work of François Mauriac or even Jules Romains.
In other words, Brasillach's early extremist and subsequent fascist political allegiances did not mean that he considered all fascist or extremist writers allies or all moderate, republican, or even socialist writers enemies—in terms of their literary writings. The works of "political allies" could fail to measure up to his critical standards just as easily as those of "enemies" might in part succeed, sometimes in spite of their political commitments. A canon dominated by nationalist writers certainly existed for literary fascists, but it was not as rigid and politically dogmatic as one might have imagined.
However, Brasillach's desire to respect the integrity and autonomy of literature, to acknowledge its complexity and the diversity and richness of its history, and his refusal to always reduce literature to its immediate political context in no way counter or undo the political ends of literary fascism. Literary fascism was rooted in a developed and far from simplistic defense of the unity, autonomy, and integrity of literature in order to consider it an expression of or even a principal support for the unity and integrity of the French nation and people. French literary fascists all claimed that some of the important signs that a nation was "alive," open to the future, and creatively exploiting its "spiritual" resources—and thus ready to enter the "New (that is, fascist) Order"—were the richness and autonomy of its culture, the originality of its art, and the disruptive poetic force and beauty of its literature. These same aesthetic principles were directly applied to politics, for fascism was defined by Brasillach and others precisely as the "new poetry" of modernity; that is, as the new aesthetics of the political—as politics finding its truth or authentic, "revolutionary" mission in the form of a total (totalitarian) aesthetics.
Brasillach's general approach to literature was derived explicitly from Maurras, and it retained the fundamental characteristics of Maurras's extremist nationalist, antiromantic, classical poetics and politics: what I have called an antiromantic organicism. But unlike Maurras, Brasillach was not dogmatically antimodernist for either aesthetic or political reasons. Unity and integrity constituted the primary and fundamental principles of his approach to literature; but in the modern period, he felt that the predetermined, formal unity of classical art and poetics could no longer be considered sufficient. Instead, he believed that the unity of the work should be treated as a dynamic, creative process of the will interacting with language and cultural matter, not as an application of predetermined linguistic or rhetorical forms to matter.
In an early article on Léon Daudet, the son of Alphonse Daudet and the codirector with Maurras of L'Action Française, Brasillach stressed approvingly the primary place of the law of unity in both the aesthetics and politics of Daudet. He admired the way in which aesthetic unity served as a model for political unity, and the will to unity of the artist served as the model for the will to unity of the political theorist:
In the aesthetic order, the search for concordances constitutes also its own victory. He for whom everything is linked in this world . . . will find that the unity of a work will appear in an even stronger way. He will not construct this work around an isolated fact or a mass of facts without relation, but around a complex totality that great laws bind together. [Daudet] has devoted himself to the search for these laws, even in a world as supple and as variable as the human universe and the historical universe. . . . [He] has thus attempted to discover the laws of identity and relationship necessary for politics. ("Léon Daudet: La Pluie et le sang" L'Action Française [September 15, 1932])
The search for the poetic or aesthetic unity of the artwork thus leads to the search for an analogous unity in the sociopolitical universe. The laws of identity and relationship are considered the basis for both literature and politics. Even if these laws do not have the same exterior form in each area, they are based on the same organicist principles and the same aesthetics.
The laws of unity should be sought and discovered in the literary or historical material itself; that is, they should originate in and reflect the mass of variables of each universe. The specific form of the law in each case does not preexist its discovery or the process of its formation; what does preexist is only the will to discover such a law of unity, for the belief that such a law can and should be discovered makes possible its discovery. This aesthetic will-to-unity would, in Brasillach's later work, no longer be a sign of true, "Integral Nationalism," but it would be defined specifically as the essence of fascism: "It's that we want French unity and that the word 'fascism' does not mean anything else but the union in fasces of all the forces of the nation" ("La Conjuration anti-fasciste au service des Juifs," Je suis partout, no. 549 [February 7, 1942]). In this sense, fascism is the form that the radical, absolutist, nationalist poetic organicism of the Action Française took in the hands of younger disciples such as Brasillach when it was applied to the social world as a modern, revolutionary version of Maurras's political will-to-unity. Literary fascism is thus not literary organicism per se but its extension and application to the political, its use as the model for the national-socialist revolution.
Brasillach argued that the health of the nation (and or as the work of art) depended on the counterbalancing of authority and freedom, but that the counterbalancing and equilibrium should be clearly more weighted on the side of the hierarchy, integrity, and unity of tradition and authority than on the forces that would rearrange the balance in some other way and at their expense. In Maurras's case, the equilibrium was guaranteed by the king and traditional hierarchy and authority. In Brasillach's case, it came to be guaranteed in the modern world by the fascist dictator and the unique party he formed and led. The leader and the party were to have the responsibility of forming, mobilizing, and unifying the nation just as the poet forms the poem. In doing so, they were not simply to perpetuate the past but to give the people a new form; that is, they were to form nothing less than a new work, "a new human type" ("Pour un fascisme français," Je suis partout, no. 588 [November 6, 1942]).
There is nothing passive about such an aesthetics, even if the notions of order, hierarchy, and totality dominate it. On the contrary, since the totality of the work is not given in advance, it must be formed as part of the struggle against all those forces that work to destroy it and all the "abstract"—that is, idealist or formalist/aestheticist—totalities ready to act in its place. In an article entitled "Le Polémiste" and devoted to Maurras, whom he calls the "master of French nationalism," Brasillach claims that Maurrasian aesthetics have to do with "beauty itself [la beauté propre]," and that they constitute an "aesthetics of combat" (L'Action Française [June 16, 1938]). He defends the polemical and even violent quality of Maurras's work by characterizing it as "a well-ordered violence," a fusion of different forces "which come together and stir each other up in the struggle, just as the peak of a beautiful fire rises up from a well-ordered hearth." In the same article, he compares the form of Maurras's polemics to the highest form of drama, to that of Shakespeare and Corneille. He argues that what is felt in Maurras's writing is the "shock that true beauty gives to passion," a "muted tension of the phrase in which the brusque flash of an image seems to explode." What is essential in Maurras's ideological stance, what constitutes even "the truth" of his politics, then, is its beauty, defined not in strict formalist terms but as a controlled or ordered violence, which is rooted in and serves both aesthetic and political totalization. The ultimate test and value of political action are not the changes it brings about in society—although these are certainly not irrelevant—but the force and "beauty" of its manifestations and effects, whether they are "politically" successful or not. Beauty not political efficacy eventually turns out to be the ultimate norm for political as well as aesthetic judgment, even where Brasillach's later commitment to fascism is concerned.
Disintegration, fragmentation, romantic individualism, and pluralism all constitute a major obstacle to aesthetic integrity; they threaten as well the political integrity of a people. But in literary fascism it is not a question of just any unity at all, for following Maurras, Brasillach questions the unity projected by "idealism"; that is, socialist, revolutionary idealism, on the one hand, and romantic, literary idealism, on the other. From Brasillach's perspective, one of the most serious criticisms that can be made of any political thinker or any writer is that he is abstract, and that the aesthetic and/or political unity or form of his work consists of an application of a preexisting unity—whether formal or ideological—to the specific and diversified material of the historical-political or aesthetic realms. This means that the aesthetics and politics of Brasillach's literary fascism are always twofold: most often, a violent attempt to destroy all abstract, formalist-idealist totalizations, and then, the reunification of the disparate elements of the political and literary-aesthetic realms in terms of their "real," as opposed to their ideal, integrity or identity. In the political realm, this "reality" consists of the (re)fashioning of the identity of a people rooted in the land, tradition, and authentic national values; in the literary realm, it is the expression of the unity and organic integrity of the national language and the creative heritage or genius of the people itself as they are manifested especially in a national literature.
Without ever being raised overtly, the principal questions that haunt Brasillach's work on literature are: How much destruction of tradition can be allowed without risking the destruction of the very bases of nationalism and fascism? How much can a work be constituted by violent forces and disruptive forms and still remain a work) In other words, what is the "proper relation" of the "fascist revolution" in literature and in politics to tradition and form? It is first in terms of literature that Brasillach attempted to answer these questions. In an article on the nineteenth-century poet Lautréamont, he defended Les Chants de Malador against the possible charge that it might be an example of "degenerate art." He ironically admitted that "Mr. Goebbels, if he knew the work, would probably not like it," but he defended "its immense critical significance" and considered it in no way "barbarian" but, on the contrary, "a highly civilized work, . . . based on the knowledge and parody of an entire literature." Rather than being "the symbol of every disorder," as he said it was considered after the First World War (a reading encouraged, he claimed, by the Surrealists' praise of it), Brasillach argued that it was, rather, "a kind of defense of true classicism by way of the absurd" ("C.-J. Odic: L'Ombre à la Barraquer; Lautréamont: Oeuvres complètes," L'Action Française [April 7, 1938]). Lautréamont in this way represents for Brasillach a model for true literature (and politics): because of his intimate knowledge of the entire history of literature, he is able to parody the modern manifestations and aberrations in this tradition in order to return to a more authentic form of tradition in a renewed, reinvigorated, truly French ("fascist") classicism.
An entire view of history and literature underlies such comments about the nature of authentic literary classicism: what is most radically "new" and aesthetically and politically harmonious for Brasillach is not the simple adulation of the past, but the reemergence of traditional values by means of a revolt against and a parody of the emptiness of the present and the resulting reestablishment of a more authentic link with the past. As Brasillach argues, "Through an irony that I greatly appreciate, the most revolutionary movements [here, surrealism] need tradition, and everything that the postwar period believed it invented actually dates from the other prewar period."7 What he calls tradition is the historical continuity that exists in spite of the imaginary or surface breaks and reversals that "revolutionary movements" are thought to have inserted into history. For Brasillach, the true "revolution"—that is, the fascist revolution—ensures both in literature and in politics a profound, historical continuity, which in fact consists of a constant reawakening and recreating of the truth carried on in tradition. Such continuity is the work not only of great leaders with a vision of the future, but also of gifted youth, of "children" and poets such as Lautréamont, who break with the "present" in order to provide more substantial and revolutionary links with the past—and revolutionary possibilities for the future.
Literature, then, for Brasillach, should not be considered a simple reflection of historical-political forces, for it has an autonomous history of its own. Truly "revolutionary" writers always reveal their understanding of literary tradition and their appreciation of it within their work. They are not so unduly influenced by the demands of the present, even the most pressing political demands, that they let them determine the style and content of their work. It could even be said that for a literary fascist such as Brasillach, writers on the most profound levels of their work should resist the exigencies of the present and devote themselves to literature and not to politics, particularly if devoting themselves to politics means following a party line or a fixed ideology and having it regulate and determine their approach to literature or the form of their writing and its relation to tradition. The ultimate political sense of literature for literary fascism would be, then, not primarily what it says explicitly about the politics of the present but how it relates to tradition and the past; and more specifically, how it relates to and exploits the resources of the national language and culture to reawaken the creativity and "genius" inherent in them.
Stéphane Mallarmé is an interesting example, for his work represents a serious problem for Brasillach, perhaps more serious than that of any other writer he treats. And it is also through his analysis of Mallarmé's work that the most extreme contradictions of his approach to tradition and language come to the fore. Brasillach cannot deny the importance of Mallarmé's poetry and poetics for the history of French literature and for its future. At the same time, he sees great risks for poetry, for the French language, and for the nation in Mallarmé's radical experimentations with language and form. Brasillach is thus led by his own logic into a seemingly insolvable paradox: he approves of and supports the legacy Mallarmé leaves (chiefly as it comes through Valéry), and at the same time he distrusts and attacks its radical implications for language and literature, and, more specifically, for the integrity of the national language and culture. Mallarmé's case is one in which important aspects of a writer's poetic practice and his poetics themselves have contributed to the revitalization of the "national tradition" and thus cannot be simply dismissed out of hand if one claims to respect the vitality of tradition. Yet, at the same time, his work radically challenges the notion of a national language and the nationalist politics such a notion supports. There seems to be no way to resolve the contradiction: to save Mallarmé and his poetics, on the one hand, and to save the integrity of the national language, on the other.
Brasillach's solution is really no solution at all. Unlike Maurras, who condemned Mallarmé as the last and most dangerous, irrational, "barbarian" romantic, Brasillach split Mallarmé's work in two, praising the poet while condemning the writer of prose. He agreed that the poet should be treated as part of a long and glorious French tradition, but he maintained that the very same risks Mallarmé took in his poetry, and which served to revitalize poetry and tradition, acted against the unity of language in his prose:
This "alchemist" of the French language, as Thierry Maulnier calls him, if he is part of a very ancient tradition, he is certainly the most lucid representative. His long effort, his theories on art, his brilliant aesthetics . . . were rewarded by several mysterious, pure, and rich verses which are unique in our language, even without forgetting Racine, Baudelaire, and Nerval. But this reward had its counterbalance, of which Mallarméan prose makes us aware: he really acted against the French language. One is stupefied in reading his letters not by their obscurity but by the sins committed against language.8
These sins against language—and the religious vocabulary must be taken seriously—were also considered sins against the nation. If Mallarmé's prose, as Brasillach claimed, is quite simply "impossible," it seems inevitable that its destructiveness would ultimately have to infiltrate his poetry as well. Brasillach decided that the price was too great to pay for such innovations, and that the French language itself (and thus French poetry as well as prose) was being threatened.
Even if "obscurity . . . is one of the essential traditions of our poetry," argues Brasillach, "it has to be adapted to the clarity of syntax." A clear, coherent syntax is precisely what is missing from Mallarmé, according to Brasillach, and its destruction is the principal sin he commits. He refuses to adapt the obscurity caused by the "disintegration he patiently pursues, the inversions and finery of his style," to the underlying clarity of syntax. He refuses to adapt the freedom allowed one level of language to its traditional foundation in the order of syntax, to make poetic freedom and even obscurity serve, rather than undermine, the values and structure of the national language and the nation itself. Brasillach believed that this is why Mallarmé, "the magnificent adventurer, the alchemist of language," was also the poet who "most endangered the sense itself of our genius." National genius—and for Brasillach, true genius, no matter how eccentric or seemingly individualistic, is always a product and sign of the collectivity of the nation and national language—is always menaced when its fundamental unity is attacked.
Mallarmé's "sin" is thus the sin of betrayal, for by distancing himself from his own language and culture, he becomes, in Brasillach's view, a foreigner in his own land and by implication a traitor to his language and country:
But perhaps the attention he gave to words and to the connections of words entails its own dangers: for he ended up setting sounds in place as if they were sparkling, but not always pure jewels, without always being concerned with the real song of our language. Desirous of being the creator of his own dialect, he ended up placing himself even further away from the common homeland, even in order to write the simplest letters, the simplest discourses, and becoming a foreigner in his own nation.
Brasillach thus decides that on the deepest level of language poetry cannot be totally separated from prose, and this results in a condemnation of the consequences of Mallarmé's poetics in general, at least when not held in check by the unity of tradition and syntax. Willing up to a point to acknowledge the importance of Mallarmé's disruptive, experimental poetics, Brasillach nevertheless finds the risks to language to be too great when the order of syntax is not respected. Without the support of this fundamental order, language is threatened with anarchy, by "foreign dialects" that endanger its integrity. "The real song of [the French] language," Brasillach maintains, could thus be lost forever if it is corrupted to too great an extent by the foreign, discordant sounds of a poet such as Mallarmé.
Similar nationalist-linguistic criteria are used by Brasillach to judge the work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and a similar though inverted contradiction is evident in his analysis. In an article in L'Action Française (June 11, 1936), on Céline's Mort à crédit, Brasillach again focuses on both the positive function of radical forms of the revolt against tradition in literature and the limitations that have to be imposed on all revolt to keep it from becoming totally destructive. In this light, he considers Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit to be "a strange work, unpleasant and attractive at the same time," a "revolt" that contained elements that were "both new and sincere." And yet, even though Brasillach does not want simply to condemn and exclude this work from the national heritage, he cannot quite bring himself to welcome it into the literary homeland either. He describes it as a "strange monument, an unknown menhir planted in French soil that for better or for worse one has to explore." Voyage au bout de la nuit is ultimately considered a curious attraction whose source is not known (and thus is not truly or originally "French") but is "planted" in the soil of the French language. The nationalist critic is forced to live with it, visit it as a national curiosity, and perhaps even marvel at its strangeness. In this way, it can become part of the national heritage, a kind of prehistoric, "pre-original" exteriority within the territory of the French language, but one, Brasillach still cautions, that should not be visited too often or given too much attention or importance, for fear of fragmenting the territory by opening it up even further to "foreign elements" and thus further disrupting the integrity of the language.
Brasillach is less positive about Céline's Mort à crédit, this "monster," which he has to force himself to read. Here, he considers that Céline, encouraged by the success of his previous novel, has gone too far and entered into a "domain where literature is untenable," where he "shamelessly devotes himself to the intoxication of literature." Bored by the monotony of the style of the book, feeling smothered by the "garbage" with which the book is filled, Brasillach claims that his nose cannot take "so much excrement on each page of the book." His judgment is that this work will have no heritage, that it is not art and not French, and therefore that it will be (and should be) quickly forgotten by the French:
One does not write in order to create such an artificial and false world, even if it is adorned with the colors of reality. I believe that Mr. Céline, who possesses a powerful talent and perhaps a kind of genius, condemns himself more and more by the style he has adopted, by the assiduous decomposition of language and forms to which he abandons himself.
Céline's "sins" are ultimately the same as those of Mallarmé, even if committed in a very different style and linked to very different aesthetic ends. He, too, is condemned for undoing the integrity of language and form, and for being an enemy of true aesthetics and thus of true (nationalist) politics as well. And nothing, or almost nothing, can compensate for the decomposition of the national language and the destruction of its cultural forms.
In 1936, these sins seemed to Brasillach to be unforgivable. Two years later, however, with the publication of Céline's first anti-Semitic pamphlet, Bagatelles pour un massacre, which Brasillach reviewed in L'Action Française on January 13, 1938, Céline is transformed from a potential enemy of the nation into the author of what Brasillach calls an "enormous book, this magnificent book [which] is the first signal of 'the revolt of the natives' " (la révolte des indigènes). In spite of the fact that its "revolt [could be considered] excessive, more instinctual than reasonable, and even dangerous," Brasillach defends it because, as he says, "after all, we are the natives." Céline is brought back into the nationalist fold not in spite of his excesses against the Jews and against the French language, but because of them. Céline thus provides an image of "the natives" by giving voice to their "original" though far from rational or logical hatred of the "non-native."
Natives are allowed to be excessive in the cause of the native land; natives are even allowed to provide ammunition to the enemy by their diatribes against the enemy. "Reasonable people will tell me"—and Brasillach always argued that he was a reasonable person and that his anti-Semitism was rational and not instinctual, animalistic, or violent—that " 'Jews will look for and quickly find in this book the best arguments against those who attack them.' And I am, in principle, of the same opinion." Brasillach even goes so far as to suggest that such a work could easily be imagined to have been written by a Jew, because in its "extravagances," it serves to "discredit anti-Semites." And yet, in spite of all these dangerous excesses and the fact that he feels that Céline's "overview of literature is false"—not an insignificant observation for a literary critic such as Brasillach—he admits to having been "royally amused" by the book and is sure that it will bring "joy and consolation" to the readers of his column. Explaining away and justifying the excessive, instinctual anger and violence of Céline, keeping a distance from it while enjoying it, this was Brasillach's way of putting it to use for the cause of his "more rational" form of anti-Semitism. It was in fact a way of justifying (as being amusing) the most violent forms of anti-Semitism by having them serve a supposedly "rational" purpose. But just as important, it was a way for Brasillach to justify his own anti-Semitism by opposing it to its more violent, "instinctual" ally and by claiming it had a moderating effect on it.
While Brasillach was editor of Je suis partout, the newspaper published two special issues on the Jews: no. 386 (April 15, 1938) and no. 430 (February 17, 1939). Both were organized by Lucien Rebatet, and both sold exceptionally well and were reprinted. The first claimed in bold and underlined print next to the title that it was a "RIGOROUSLY OBJECTIVE ISSUE" and, Brasillach added in "La Question juive," his own contribution to it, that the purpose of the entire issue was to transform instinctual hatred and give it a rational purpose:
We do not want to kill anyone; we do not want to organize any sort of pogrom whatsoever. But we do also think that the best way to prevent the always unforeseeable reactions of an anti-Semitism of instinct is to organize an anti-Semitism of reason. . . . We would like this issue to serve to discern the motives of this instinctual reaction and to transform it into a rational decision.
Brasillach presented his role as that of a moderate, judicious, almost detached observer, who was simply trying to channel the potentially dangerous (though, for him, understandable and valid) instincts of his people into more rational channels and thus protect his country, and also, he claimed, the Jews, from the worst forms of violence and injustice that instinctual hatred could inspire. His goal was not to negate violence or instinct but give them a "higher" aesthetic and political purpose, to make disruptive, irrational force a component of organic, rational form.
For literary fascists such as Brasillach, the treatment of all Jews as foreigners was a neat, respectable "aesthetic" solution to the threat the Jews supposedly represented to national integrity and identity. Its political consequences could hardly be considered neat or respectable, however, in spite of what Brasillach and others might have argued. In the second special issue of Je suis partout on the Jews, Brasillach, in "Les Français devant les Juif," defined in some detail the specifics of the proposal he supported for a special statute for the Jews in France and, more important, outlined how to define a Jew. He first affirmed that the writers at Je suis partout were "not at all prejudiced and not racist,. . . not xenophopic," chiefly because they were willing to admit that not everything that individual Jews had accomplished was evil or dangerous. They were capable of acknowledging that certain scientific discoveries made by Jews had served the common good, and they were even willing to applaud Charlie Chaplin (whom Brasillach called a "half-Jew") and Yehudi Menuhin, as well as to admire Marcel Proust (also a "half-Jew"). In spite of his admiration for the achievements of certain "exceptional Jews," however, Brasillach insisted that the fact that all Jews were foreigners "must entail its consequences, all its consequences. There is nothing terrible or vexing about them." This, of course, could be argued only if the only alternatives to such a statute were pogroms, massacres, and other even more extreme forms of injustice and persecution, and only if the necessity for the exclusion of Jews was the unquestionable principle from which one started. Brasillach opposed all forms of spontaneous, uncontrolled, "instinctual" violence against the Jews, not because he was concerned with protecting the Jews, but because he feared the consequences of such violence for the nation. "Persecutions have always been the product of peoples who were anarchistic and insecure about their power," he wrote. Order and reason had to reign, even or especially when it came to anti-Semitism.
On June 2, 1941, Brasillach took the next logical step. The Jewish "foreigner," who in his earlier piece was in principle as welcome in the country as any other foreigner, explicitly became—what he or she in fact always was—the declared enemy of France: "We continue to treat the Jewish problem as we have always treated it, without any sentimentalism. We are not barbarians and butchers. . . . It is necessary to resolve the Jewish problem because the Jew is the foreigner, he is the enemy, he pushed us into war, and it is just that he pay" (Je suis partout, no. 514). To be free of sentimentalism is to be willing to make the enemy pay for his crimes, but Brasillach was most often vague as to what he meant by "pay."9 But as late as March 19, 1943, in an article entitled "La Guerre et la paix" (Je suis partout, no. 606), Brasillach, who was so well informed about so many other things, seemed willfully ignorant about the true fate of deported Jews and wrote in support of a statement made by Goebbels to the foreign press about Germany's desire for a "humane" solution to the "Jewish problem": "Many will be quite surprised, that is for sure, to read in this declaration sentences in which Dr. Goebbels evokes a 'humane' solution to the Jewish problem . . . in order to eliminate the international Jewish poison. That also has its importance." The reference to the Jews as a poison reveals more about his position, of course, than any claim to want a "humane solution to the Jewish problem."
Brasillach claimed, in a text written while in prison, "Lettre à un soldat de la Classe 60," that when he learned about the "extent of the anti-Jewish measures" taken by the Germans, he was against them. He added: "I am anti-Semitic, and I know through the study of history the horror of Jewish dictatorships, but it seems to me and has always seemed to me inadmissible that families have been separated, children discarded, deportations organized, which could have been defended if they hadn't had as their goal, hidden from us, death, pure and simple. This is not the way to resolve the Jewish problem" (Ecrit à Fresnes, 137). Brasillach's illusion—assuming he was sincere here and not lying to save his own life—an illusion that he certainly shared with many other French fascists, was that because he did not know or approve of the mass extermination of the Jews, because he thought it "inadmissible" when he found out about it, he in no essential way contributed to it. One cannot, however, constantly denounce the Jews and praise Goebbels for his "humane solution to the Jewish problem" and not accept some responsibility for the injustices and criminal actions taken against Jews by the Nazi occupiers with whom he collaborated and the Vichy government he criticized for not going far enough in its own anti-Semitic legislation and practices. Even if he had not even heard rumors of the fate of the Jews after they had been deported—something that is difficult to believe—Brasillach had to have known of their treatment in camps in France and the conditions on the trains taking them to the death camps. Quite simply, like many others, all this did not concern him, and he was satisfied to believe whatever Goebbels and others said, no matter how much it was contradicted by all evidence.10
Literary fascists like Brasillach, in other words, wanted to have it both ways. They wanted a nationalist literature that was revolutionary but that at the same time affirmed the primacy of order and tradition. In the same way, they proposed a nationalism that was violently anti-Semitic but that claimed not to propose or support violent, "irrational" solutions to the "Jewish question." They wanted to aestheticize the political while keeping their aesthetics under the control of reason, defined, of course, in terms of political order and authority and modeled after the hierarchy and organic totality of the classical literary work but in a new, modern form. "Instincts," even the most violent kind, thus became "rational" when they served the "New Order"; they were irrational and dangerous when they were destructive of all order, the new as well as the old, and when they were not fashioned into an aesthetic-political work.
Anti-Semitism served the same purpose as the fascist political demonstrations Brasillach admired so much. It constituted an important element in the process of the identification of the "natives" with themselves and was a manifestation of the "revolt of the natives" against the foreign. It was the ultimate sign that one was native. "Reason," especially when it was used to defend or support an extreme form of nationalism, could be violent, animalistic, and instinctual—to use Brasillach's own terminology against him. One of the principal functions of the aestheticizing of politics in literary fascism was to make the identification of a people or a nation with itself (its own image)—as well as the violence against the other necessary for such an identification—appear to be necessary and acceptable, constitutive elements of an ordered, rational aesthetic-political form. Anti-Semitism, nationalism, and the privilege given to a certain form of literature were all inextricably intertwined and served as the very foundation of Brasillach's literary fascism. The Jew, the foreign, and the unliterary or antiliterary all had to be controlled, or even better eliminated, for a true, nationalist form of aesthetics and politics to exist. They were ultimately the same disordering, dissipating, antipoetic, formless enemy.
Before the war, Nazi Germany represented a serious dilemma for most of the younger contributors to L'Action Française. They were attracted to many (though certainly not all) of the changes Hitler had brought about in Germany, but at the same time they had inherited from Maurras a militantly anti-German position. The problem for many on the extreme right before the war was how to relate to what seemed positive in German National Socialism without proposing that France ally itself with Germany or attempt to copy it in a servile manner. Brasillach and other literary fascists felt that Maurras's position during the Occupation was unrealistic and even foolish, given the possibilities they saw for France in the "New Fascist Order" that Germany had created in Europe. Preferring the fascism of Italy, Spain, or Portugal to the National Socialism of Germany, Brasillach, after the Montoire meetings during which Pétain pledged collaboration with Hitler, nevertheless moved to an enthusiastically pro-German position. The transformation in his politics was especially evident in his judgments of the aesthetic dimensions of German politics, specifically of the particular form of the Nazi aestheticizing of politics and its possible relation to the aesthetics and political form of a truly indigenous French fascism.
In an article in L'Action Française of December 13, 1934, Brasillach agreed with the position taken by Henri Massis in Débats, the book he was reviewing, that France (and the West in general) had to defend itself against German influences, against the "ancient German paganism [still found in Spengler, Curtius, and Sieburg] that Charlemagne did not undo, any more than the legions of Varus before him." He suggested that the principal faults and dangers of German thought—and this accusation ran throughout the work of all of the contributors to the newspaper—were abstraction and irrationalism:
It is a philosophy, an abstract concept of the world that dominates. . . . This possession by a force without reason, or rather beyond reason as it is beyond good and evil, we find it described by philosophers before being embodied by Hitler. These dangerous types of music are for other peoples, and we will never understand them.
Brasillach's insistence on the strange and dangerous nature of the "music" he heard coming from Germany should not be taken lightly or treated as a simple metaphor. Since he considered German thought and German aesthetics irrational, this meant that German nationalist politics (socialist or not)—especially if aesthetics was alleged to be the fundamental truth of politics—also had to be irrational, disordered, and even anarchistic.
The German aestheticizing of politics represented a threat not just to French nationalism but to aesthetic-political order and unity in general. The French had no ear, Brasillach asserted, and would never have an ear for such discordant, unstructured, emotional music. Thus, French nationalist politics could never be modeled after or dominated by German aesthetics or the German form of the aestheticizing of politics. French literary fascism should not in any way then duplicate German National Socialism but should continually insist on its differences with it. Just as in the case of Mallarmé, the "real song" of the French language was threatened when it was confronted with discordant music of this type.
In an article in which he criticized La Gerbe des forces of the Germanophile and Hitler fanatic, Alphonse de Chateaubriant, Brasillach claimed that it was "puerile" to give oneself over—with a kind of absolute, religious, one could even say in this context, aestheticist respect—to the charm of forces or forms of authority simply because they are powerful or attractive. "I would be the last to deny that [Hitlerian poetry] has its charm in the exact sense of the word. But the distinctive feature of man is precisely to be able to resist charms" (L'Action Française [July 8, 1937]). Brasillach admitted that he respected and was attracted to the explicit manifestations of "the origins of authority, the national organization of human labor, the love of youth, and the sense of honor" that he found in Hitler's Germany. At the same time, he emphasized how Germany had to be resisted, not in spite of but because of its charms, in order for France not to become in any way its slave, not even a slave to its aesthetic charms. French nationalism meant above all the construction of a French "moral force and national force," and in this context, the creation of a French political "poetry" to rival Hitler's. Brasillach's politics and aesthetics, his literary fascism, were thus anything but slavishly German or Nazi in origin. On the contrary, at least until after the defeat, his political position was overtly anti-German and intent on developing an effective counterforce to German authority and domination. Thus would also mean neutralizing the charm and force of German poetry and aesthetics, for these were in an important sense the basis for both the authority and the charm of National Socialism.
It could be said that Hitlerian poetry and the charm and authority of Germany were easy to resist as long as they were considered to be profoundly German and remained confined to German soil and culture. The principal goal of Brasillach's articles on Germany before the war was to ensure that the French did not succumb to the charm of Hitler's "poetry" and try to import it into France in a German form. "When Germany in its turn accomplished its revolution, it gave to the revolution its own personality, which it is not a question of transferring elsewhere," wrote Brasillach. He acknowledged what he called "the sovereign beauty" of Nazi ceremonies, but stressed that they "originate first of all in the consuls of the German land, in old German demons." And if this is not bad enough, he condemned them by associating them with "the lively and barbaric festivities and ceremonies" of Russia ("Introduction à l'esprit fasciste, Part II," Je suis partout, no. 397 [July 1, 1938]).
After the defeat and during the Occupation, Brasillach no longer proposed any significant resistance to Germany or to the "alien" nature of Germany's aesthetics. On the contrary, his chief argument was that France could learn much about itself by appreciating the beauty of the German aestheticizing of the political. In "De la cité de Goethe au nouvel 'axe' de Berlin," a long article published in Je suis partout (no. 507) on November 8, 1941, after he and six other French writers had attended the European Congress of Writers at Weimar as part of the official French delegation, Brasillach claimed to have discovered something more than the "New Germany" during his travels: "It is not only Germany, in fact, that we went to find over there but also our entire age, the unity of our age." In Germany, he now found all of the important elements of the "New European Order," the political and aesthetic unity that was to determine the future of all of the various European nations.
Brasillach also saw in the German manifestations of its own identity the signs of the possible unification of France—the possibility of creating a "New France," one not modeled slavishly after Germany, but a France that had discovered the beauty and power of its own identity and that would thus find its rightful place in the "New Order" of Europe:
One has the right not to like certain forms of the contemporary aesthetic in Germany—for my part, I admit to being extremely sensitive to the beauty and the power of the national festivities—but one cannot refuse to understand the vitality that it embodies, the continuity with the vitality of the past that it symbolizes. And that, we can make it ours, not by a useless copy or imitation but by a more developed knowledge of who we are.
National identity could thus be realized (fashioned and manifested) if the French learned from the vitality of Germany's aesthetics and made such aesthetics their own. An appreciation of and sensitivity to the German aesthetics of politics, Brasillach argued, would not make the French more German, but more French. Rather than the content and form of the images (fictions) of self, Germany offered the model for an aesthetic operation, an aesthetic-political strategy for the self-fashioning of a people, that France could emulate. Only through such an aestheticizing or "fictioning" of politics would France finally be able to form, on its own, the images of itself with which its people could identify and by means of which it could have the sense of being at one with itself.11
One of the principal goals of Brasillach's articles during the Occupation was the creation of a French national aesthetics of politics. His concept of French fascism, his initial support of Pétain and then his criticism of Pétain for not going far enough, his constant praise of Germany, and his various public acts of collaboration (such as speeches given in support of Germany, trips made to Germany, and articles written for German publications) were all related to this goal. More than anything else, it was the aesthetic experience of fascism, the supposedly unmediated sense of community that fascism produced, that interested and attracted Brasillach. This did not make his writings in any way less political; on the contrary, it moved his literary fascism closer and closer to National Socialism and its own aesthetics of politics. The fascist aestheticizing of politics is a profoundly political and totalitarian act in its ends and in the means it proposes to achieve those ends. The means for achieving the ends of the self-formation of a people are in fact already the ends: the process of the "fictioning" of a people is the identity of the people.
Politics during the Occupation thus became the quest for a "French form" for the aestheticizing of politics, a search for a nationalist aesthetics that would serve the same function as the German forms Hitler gave to what Brasillach claimed were the "universal truths" that National Socialism embodied ("Devant l'équivoque," Je suis partout, no. 570 [July 3, 1942]). He felt that the ceremonies of Nazi Germany had lost their "irrationality," their "foreignness" had become less threatening and "strange," and they now represented nothing less than "the highest artistic creation of [his] time." That is why the chief political question for France was how to translate such creations into the French national idiom, how to give a French form and style to the images and identity of a unified people, one already created in Germany but still to be created in France in French terms:
These [aesthetic] elements are definitely Germanic, but they are beautiful because they are supported by universal ideas, the idea of the fatherland, of fidelity, of youth. One will never make me believe that these ideas are foreign to my country and that it cannot also translate them into images in its own style. For there is no great doctrine, no great exaltation of a people, without these quasi-religious visions. The calamity of democracy is to have deprived the nation of images, images to love, images to respect, images to adore—the Revolution of the twentieth century has given them back to the nation. ("Les Leçons d'un anniversaire," Je suis partout, no. 599 [January 29, 1943]).
Brasillach's literary fascism focused on images because the fashioning and the unification of a people were its goal, and there could be no successful unification that did not manifest itself in images, in the fictions of a people that would become synonymous with the people. He believed that democracy had failed to produce images worthy of respect and adoration, and thus had quite simply failed to produce, or "fictionalize," a people.
Literary fascism was thus an art of image-making, for it constituted the transformation of a conflictual diversity of singularities into a unified whole that a people could recognize as itself and identify with. Above all, politics was the aesthetic experience or appreciation of such images, with the people both participating in and observing the process of image-making. Thus the "ideas" of fascism and the aesthetic operations that produced the images and ideas were both claimed to be universal. The question of how a nationalist movement could at the same time be representative of universal ideas—that is, how fascism could be a nationalist movement specific to each country and still represent the unique future of all of Europe—was thus resolved by making the style and form of the images of self autonomous, nationalist problems, while attributing universal truth to the ideas at the foundation of all nationalism and conferring universal beauty on the general aesthetic operations necessary to produce such images.
For Brasillach, it could be argued that the aesthetic experience constituted the most profound level of politics. Whether a political movement succeeded or failed, whether the transformations wrought on the body politic lasted or not, was ultimately less significant to him than the intensity of the experiences of unity. In fact, like a powerful symphonic or dramatic presentation (theater was always a special interest of Brasillach's), a painting, or a film, 12 the aesthetic experience of the political constituted an end in itself and had no necessary duration beyond itself. It could be recalled with nostalgia and reevoked in memory, but basically all truly intense, full aesthetic-political experiences were destined to be "lost" in time. Because of this, Brasillach's discussions of politics and his writings inevitably were a "recherche du temps perdu." His form of literary fascism (and perhaps all forms of French literary fascism) was fatalistic and nostalgic. The most fully realized and most beautiful aesthetic-political experiences were for him always in some sense lost, even as they were being experienced—signs or models of what could be or should have been.
The primary aesthetic experience of fascism was the feeling of unity, the feeling of being at one with one's immediate group and, by projection, with the entire nation: "A youth camp at night, the impression of forming one body with one's entire nation, a totalitarian celebration, these are the elements of fascist poetry" ("Lettre à un soldat de la Classe 60," 142). Such experiences, Brasillach felt, were not only at the very foundation of the production of the "new fascist man," which was the goal of all fascist poetry and politics, but they also produced a feeling of intense joy that was self-fulfilling. This joy was the joy of youth and the outdoors, of participating in collective experiences typical of scouting, armies, sports teams, and youth camps (and even prisoner-of-war camps), the joy of songs and marches. After the joy had ended, what was undeniably left was the memory of the experience itself and the joy it had produced.
In Je suis partout of July 8, 1 9 3 8 (no. 398), in the third and last part of his series entitled "Introduction à l'esprit fasciste," Brasillach focused on what he called the "new human type" created by fascism, and he characterized this new type primarily in terms of its experience of joy:
The outrageousness of the adversaries of fascism is found above all in this total misunderstanding of fascist joy. . . . The young fascist, supported by his race and his nation, proud of his vigorous body and his lucid mind, scornful of the abundant goods of the world, the young fascist in his camp, with his comrades in peace who can become his comrades in war, the young fascist who sings, who marches, who works, who dreams, he is above all a joyous being. . . . I do not know if, as Mussolini has claimed, "the 20th century will be the century of fascism," but I do know that nothing will keep fascist joy from having existed and from having expanded minds through feeling and reason.
Brasillach's emphasis on the experience of fascist joy, which can never be denied or taken away, no matter the success or failure of fascism as a strictly political movement, was not so much a sign of his political cautiousness in 1938 as a statement about what he found essential in fascism and in politics in general: the intense aesthetic experience of immediacy and of being-at-one with others, and actively acknowledging the immanence, commonness, or identity of the collectivity.
In Je suis partout on November 6, 1 9 4 2 (No. 588), under very different conditions than in 1938, in an article entitled "Pour un fascisme français," Brasillach concluded by quoting his comments on joy from 1938. By the end of 1942, optimism about the formation of a fascist Europe, which for at least two years had been supported by German military victories, was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, and it was less certain every day, even for committed fascists such as Brasillach, that the twentieth century would be fascist or National Socialist. What Brasillach held onto, in spite of the worsening conditions in Europe for the continued domination of Nazi Germany, and thus for fascism, was something that could not be denied or reversed because it was a strong aesthetic, personal, though at the same time collective, experience. Quite simply, fascism had been lived as an intense aesthetic experience and that was and would always be its value. It mattered less whether the century would in fact be fascist or whether fascism would produce structural changes in France or Europe of any duration than whether fascism could be said to have produced joy, whether it had affected and moved the individuals who participated in its theatrical-political productions, whether individuals had experienced the totalitarian feeling of "being of one body with the entire nation."
An event even produces a more complete, a more powerful, and a purer aesthetic-political experience if it "fails" in its specific political aspirations, if it is not forced to maintain itself, to institutionalize itself, to give itself a less than ideal form—that is, if it remains as much as possible a purely "spiritual" and aesthetic experience. The violent demonstrations and failed coup d'état of February 6, 1934, which resulted in twenty-six deaths and served as the sign for Brasillach and other French fascists of what could have been, are an excellent example of such an experience:
If the sixth of February was a failure as a conspiracy, it was an instinctive and magnificent revolt, a night of sacrifice which remains in our memory with its odor, its cold wind, its pale running figures, its human groups occupying the sidewalks, its unconquerable hope in a national Revolution, the exact date of birth of social nationalism in our country. No matter that, later, every part of this blazing fire, of these deaths who were all pure, was exploited, by the right and the left. One cannot keep what was from having been. (Notre avant-guerre, 161).
The purity and intensity Brasillach attributed to the actions taken and the sacrifices made by the victims of the failed coup meant to him that the events of February 6, 1934, represented a collective, tragic experience which could not be prolonged in history as such but which had to be memorialized, and perpetuated as myth: "Every year we go to the Place de la Concorde and place violets in front of this fountain become cenotaph . . . in memory of the twenty-six deaths. Every year the crowd diminishes, because French patriots are forgetful by nature. Revolutionaries alone have understood the sense of myths and ceremonies" (161). The memory of the event in the form of memorialization would ensure that the emotive purity of the events remained intact as a purely spiritual, aesthetic experience.
Maurice Bardèche was not wrong to argue, therefore, even if his reasons for doing so are highly suspect, that Brasillach never admired Germany more than in the moments preceding its defeat: "If Germany was great, it was not during its period of conquest but by the courage it showed in disaster" ("Introduction," Ecrit à Fresnes, 33). For at the moment of defeat, National Socialism came closer to the imaginary state of total spirituality of the purely aesthetic experience of politics than at any other moment, precisely because at the moment of its destruction as a sociopolitical phenomenon, it could be considered to have achieved a "tragic destiny" and be retained in consciousness as a pure memory or myth. In "Naissance d'un sentiment" (Révolution Nationale [September 4, 1943] ), written after leaving Je suis partout, Brasillach admitted that he had been grieved by all that the German army had recently suffered, and that "from [being] a collaborationist of reason, [he had] in addition become a collaborationist of the heart." This led him to write in the same newspaper several months later that "he had been having an affair with German genius that [he would] never forget. The French of different persuasions have all more or less been sleeping with the Germans during these last years, not without quarrels, and the memory will remain sweet" ("Lettre à quelques jeunes gens", Révolution Nationale [February 19, 1944]). Although Brasillach wrote that he had been "astounded by the destiny of a people who, twice in twenty-five years, saw the entire world join together against it," Brasillach's own "love affair" with the Germans was never more intense than when it was about to end and when he could begin to reexperience it in memory and write about it as a lost plenitude.13
Brasillach lyrically stated that "the last days in Paris under the German Occupation were extraordinary. I shall conserve all my life their memory as that of an unreal landscape" ("Journal d'un homme occupé," 47). For him, the approach of the end only added intensity to the experience, regardless or rather because of its unreality: "We went from restaurant to restaurant in a sweet euphoria of catastrophe, saying to ourselves that tomorrow, we would no longer be there" (50). The literary-fascist aestheticization of politics revealed itself in this way to be not just nostalgic but catastrophic and, as we shall see in the case of Drieu la Rochelle, even suicidal, memory being the only place the plenitude of its "spirituality" could be experienced fully. This also meant that the realization of fascism's true spiritual plenitude could come only after its demise, as it was reconstructed and perpetuated in, and as, art and literature.
The nostalgic, catastrophic aspects of Brasillach's literary fascism are especially evident in his accounts of the liberation of Paris, given that the undeniable experience of euphoria of the people of Paris was denied him, not just because he had to hide to avoid being arrested and could not participate in it, but also because their joy was the negation of his own experience of fascist joy:
Alone, in my room, I experienced a strange emotion. I was now totally cut off from other men. I considered the joy [of those celebrating the liberation] to be naive, tainted with lies. . . . However, this naive people was happy, and this naive people was my own. I did not participate in their joy as I should have. I was not one with them, and I felt strangely dispossessed, heretical, separated. . . . I ought to have been happy, . . . and I remained there, alone and unjustly punished. ("Journal d'un homme occupé," 61).
Obviously feeling sorry for himself because of the "unjust punishment" of solitude, Brasillach, as a nationalist, could not abandon "his people." But he could not participate in their joy or feel at one with them either, for they had abandoned him. Heretic as he was to the religion of the Resistance and the Republic, he could only await his martyrdom to prove by his own death that his heresy was the true nationalist religion and that the people were wrong not to have manifested their unity and joy in fascist aesthetic-political celebrations.
With the defeat of fascism, Brasillach still defended it as a profound experience, for he claimed that "the poetry of the twentieth century" had allowed him to participate in the "exaltation of millions of men, . . . the friendship of the youth of all the revived nations." This, he wrote in prison, is what "cannot die," what "little children who, later, when they are twenty-year-old boys, will learn in somber wonderment" ("Lettre à un soldat de la classe 60," 140). This ultimately was also what he would claim was the universality of the fascist aesthetic (and political) experience, its most important claim on the future. He believed that fascism, which he called in Notre avant-guerre "ce mal du siècle," always succeeded, because even if it failed as a political movement it succeeded as an aesthetic experience that could always once again affect the youth of the future. He considered fascism a political "fleur du mal" waiting in memory (and in literature and art) to be transplanted, to be nurtured, and to bloom again under the right conditions.
Even if naive, aestheticist, and puerile statements can be found in almost all of his essays describing and defending fascism and National Socialism, this juvenile naïveté is misleading. For at the same time he was capable of the harshest attacks against enemies, especially against Jews, Gaullists, and communists; in fact, against any group that opposed fascism or that was judged to be a threat to his fascist concept (fiction) of the nation. In an article entitled "Pas de pitié pour les assassins de la patrie," which perhaps more than any other article Brasillach wrote was responsible for De Gaulle's refusal to commute his death sentence, he demanded that those who in any way supported the Resistance be considered traitors to their country and given the most severe punishments:
What are we waiting for to shoot the communist leaders already imprisoned? And these important bourgeois who at night, discretely cut up metro tickets in the form of Gaullist insignia? For there are not just the communists. . . . Against those who want the death of peace and the death of France, EVERYTHING is legitimate. . . . No pity for those who want to assassinate the country, whatever they are or whoever they are. (Je suis partout, no. 535 [October 25, 1941)
The "boy-scout" and aesthete could at the same time be a vicious polemicist and demagogue. Brasillach's aestheticizing of politics thus revealed its fundamentally violent and vindictive nature, for he considered "everything" legitimate against those who stood in the way of not just the implementation of fascist politics but also the aesthetic experience of fascist joy.
To read Brasillach today is to be struck by the way in which the "high" and the "low" aspects of his aesthetics and politics—the aesthetic ideals and the political violence and vindictiveness—are intertwined. There is no way to separate the two aspects of his writing; nor, I would argue, should one try, either in an attempt to condemn him or in a futile effort to defend him. A sophisticated aesthetic and literary sensibility and a violent, insensitive, and unjust political sensibility are both part of the same mythical and totalizing assemblage of a people, the same process of production and formation of an exclusive national identity that literary fascism attempted to promote and exemplify at the same time. Brasillach's writings help explain why, for many writers and intellectuals of his generation, this mixed and contradictory aesthetics had so much affective and intellectual attraction.
Brasillach's essays also help us understand why fascism must be considered a product of modernity, a fusion of classical and modern aesthetics, rather than an irrational aberration from or a simple reaction against modernity. This means, among other things, that it is not something we dominate or transcend today; it is not something that is simply of the past. In a similar vein, Lacoue-Labarthe argues that something essential about the modern conception of the political is revealed in fascism:
It would be better to learn to stop considering fascism a "pathological" phenomenon (from what extra-social position, asked Freud, would it be possible to make such a diagnosis?) and recognize in it not only (at least) one of the age's possible political forms—and one no more aberrant or inadequate than any other—but the political form, even today, that is best able to enlighten us to the essence of the political in modernity. (Heidegger, Art and Politics, 107; translation modified)
What literary fascism especially reveals is the formative role of art and literature in both the conception and the practice of fascist politics, and the profound interconnection of the aesthetic and the political in the totalitarian process of the formation of a national identity.
Even if we could be sure that the specific content of Nazi and fascist racist mythology is truly a thing of the past—and we obviously cannot be—one of the things that still links us directly today to the issues raised by literary fascism is that there is no guarantee, as Lacoue-Labarthe also argues, that this was the "last aestheticization of the political" (86). We cannot be certain that the identificatory techniques of the aestheticizing of politics, and the exclusions, repressions, injustices, and crimes that accompanied them, will not reappear in some form or other in the politics of the future, or that they are not in any way still a part of the politics of the present. If this is even a remote possibility, then a critical approach to fascism would necessitate not just that we condemn fascism as a totalitarian ideology, but that we also attempt to understand its aesthetic and political attractions. We should examine how and for what ends it was formulated by writers and intellectuals such as Brasillach as a totalizing aesthetics of the political—as both an alternative to and the extreme culmination of the aesthetics and politics of modernity.