Five
The Fascist Imagined Community: The Myths of Europe and Totalitarian Man in Drieu la Rochelle
Certainly, the figure of Europe, like all geographical figures, is only a myth.
Drieu la Rochelle, Journal (November 23, 1942)
I wish for the triumph of totalitarian man over the world. The time of divided man is past, the time of reunited man is returning.
Journal (June 10, 1944)
My only connection to the Occident, but it is a strong one, is the connection of art. The Occident is artistic and political; it's the same thing.
Journal (October 17, 1944)
Let the ruins of European culture be ruined.
Journal (July 27, 1943)
In dealing with the difficulties involved in defining and understanding the nature and attraction of nationalism, not just in the history of Europe and the developed nations, but for the emerging nations of the Third World as well, Benedict Anderson has claimed that the "cultural artifact" called "nation or nation-ness" should be treated primarily not as a historically or geographically defined material reality but as an "imagined community" (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [New York: Verso, 1991], 4). This means that what for a committed nationalist such as Barrès or Maurras is the "natural" product of specific geographical, historical, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic factors—a collective sense of self that emerges out of one or a combination of such factors as an unquestioned irrefutable given—is for Anderson and a number of other contemporary political theorists a construct of the political imagination, a projection or fiction of community.1
Anderson argues that to say that the nation is "an imagined political community" is not to imply that there are more authentic or real communities of other types that the imagined community has replaced or obscured. Rather, all communities are in some sense imagined (fictional constructs) and therefore "are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined" (6). In fact, as an extreme, uncompromising "style" of imagining the national (or "racial") community, as a style that subordinates all differences and alterity to the organic totality called the nation either by transforming them into functioning parts of the totality or by radically excluding them from it, fascism could be argued to constitute the most extreme, aestheticized form of the imagined community. In the fascist imagined community we see above all the way in which a particular form of imagining, or a logic within the various mechanisms and operations involved in imagining community, when followed to its logical but extreme end, culminates in a totalitarian view of community and the nation. The (political) imagination could even be said to contain within it as a defining characteristic this tendency toward totalizing and totalitarian constructs. Or as Paul Valéry once put it, there is something fundamentally dictatorial in the spiritual faculties themselves, in their need to impose harmony, order, and form on chaos and diversity.2
But just as in the notion of the Kantian sublime—where the imagination is conceived not only as both form-producing and embodied in the forms it produces (its aesthetic-formalist and, in a political context, nationalist characteristics), but also as capable of being pushed beyond itself to present the unpresentable, what is beyond form and the aesthetics of the beautiful—so the political imagination of community can also be pushed beyond and outside the confines and form of the nation to project other, less well formed, undetermined "forms" of the communal. If the faculty of the imagination is fundamental to all nationalisms, as Anderson argues, and if the nation is always in some sense a formed or fashioned fiction, then it should not be surprising that for a writer or theorist intent on emphasizing the potentially unlimited powers of the imagination and the restrictive nature of form, the nation would be considered too narrow and restrained, and too monolithic a context for, or product of, the imagination. The notion of a community beyond form would necessitate a less politically or geographically defined—and thus a more fully fictional, "spiritual" imagined—community than the formed nation, and thus also one even more open to the possibilities of unlimited, unfinalized imagined totalization.
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle stands out within the diversified group of French literary fascists treated in this book because he came to fascism from a decidedly extranationalist position. Except for a limited time, and for strategic reasons having to do with his support of Doriot's ultranationalist, fascist party, the Parti Populaire Français, he remained a proponent of a fascism that was more European than nationalist in form. In Drieu la Rochelle's work, the myth of Europe could be said to realize its full, contradictory imaginary potential, to be the ideal or absolute fiction of a community beyond all formed, determined communities. The attraction of fascism to him was precisely that of the unbounded force of the creative imagination as it works to destroy and transcend the limitations of both aesthetic and political form in order to realize a European spiritual community beyond and of a different type than all national communities, which are determined by the more restrictive and "material" limitations of language, geography, politics, and national culture and tradition.
Drieu la Rochelle's fascism was rooted in a radical critique of all nationalisms, in a refusal to accept the nation as the ultimate origin and end of either politics or aesthetics. To emphasize what he claimed was the socialist side of National Socialism (no matter how badly defined and naive his socialism actually was), however, even to the point of replacing it with a term like Fascist Socialism, certainly did not make him less of a fascist. Rather, he constantly attacked the national community and even proposed that the nation be destroyed in the name of fascism—as long as "Europe," a less determined, still to be formed, and therefore supposedly more fully spiritual community, would replace the nation and function in its place as a totalizing spiritual model and force.3
Drieu la Rochelle did share with the other literary fascists in this book a distrust if not hatred of many aspects of modernity. For he too felt that modernity (and its political expression, democracy) had brought about the devastation of heroic values, of traditional culture and forms of community, and of the geographic and political entity of the nation or homeland (la patrie). He considered this to be an undeniable truth, one neither politics nor art could ignore, for it affected the foundations of both. As regrettable as this devastation was, however, he also saw it as the opportunity for the emergence of more radical forms of art and literature and more revolutionary forms of politics. The death of the art and literature determined by the aesthetics of form would make possible the birth of a new, total art, just as the death of the nation would make possible the birth of a new Europe, and the death of "democratic man" would make possible the birth of "totalitarian man."
In his eyes, nothing manifested more dramatically the death of the nation, and all the myths and "gods" traditionally associated with it, than the devastation of World War I. Specifically, he made the return of a soldier from the war the primal scene of all of his early political and literary texts. It was a scene of the origin of the general feeling of uneasiness, uncertainty, and radical homelessness that he saw as characteristic of modernity. In numerous poems, essays, and works of fiction, he described the French soldier returning "victoriously" from the war to realize not only that the fields of his homeland had been "trampled" and his homeland destroyed, but also that he no longer belonged to it, that he had nothing to fall back on, his homeland having become a place where his "flesh no longer [held] its own" ("Le Retour du soldat" [May 1920], Mesure de la France [Paris: Grasset, 1964], 26). Both spirit and flesh were presented as being irremediably cut off from the land that was supposed to support and nourish them, and the spirit, now homeless, was thus forced to find another home and another "land" and also to take on another form, one not linked to any specific geographical or political site.
The French soldier who for Péguy and Barrès went to war to save the homeland and the spiritual values of France and Western civilization returned from war in Drieu la Rochelle's work only to find that he had saved nothing, that all of the nationalist myths for which he had fought were empty. Everything in fact was reversed, for the nation and people who were in principle victorious had achieved a victory that was "anonymous," not really theirs, a victory "forsaken with shame like a defeat" (29-30). The soldier's country was no longer his, no longer even French; it was a foreign land occupied by foreigners: "The abandoned space was filled with the flesh produced by mothers of other countries. Behind us, in each house, in the place of someone who died or someone who was not born, there was a foreigner. He was alone with the women" (26-27). To return home was to return to a place where "the land and the dead"—and even the unborn—were foreign and where the values of the homeland no longer had any real function. Drieu la Rochelle made of this radical homelessness a process of deracination even more extreme than that depicted by Barrès, and one that in fact could not (and should not) be reversed or overcome, at least not within the narrow geographical and cultural parameters of the nation itself.
In La Comédie de Cbarleroi (Paris: Gallimard, 1934), a collection of short stories depicting his experiences in the war and containing perhaps his best writing, Drieu la Rochelle insists on a theme that recurs constantly in his work: that modern warfare is inhuman and devastating rather than heroic, and that in it there can be no victors. War itself, rather than providing the means for overcoming modernity and reasserting traditional values, manifests the worst aspects of modernity. The "warrior" of the past, standing up for and defending his nation and his people, carrying the values of Western (Christian) civilization on his shoulders—the figure of the soldier that, for example, Péguy constructed and in a sense died for—no longer had any meaning. For the soldier of modern wars spent most of his time flat on his stomach: "War today is to belying down, sprawled out, flat on one's stomach. Previously, war was men standing up. War today is all the postures of shame" (40). To stand up and fight in a modern war was immediately to die, not as a hero but as one of the millions of anonymous casualties annihilated by modern technology.
In modern war, men never see the enemy that kills them and never meet in the hand-to-hand combat that for Drieu la Rochelle characterized the essence of true war and the true, mythical warrior.
Men did not rise up in the midst of the war. . . . They did not meet, they did not collide, become entangled or embrace each other. Men were not human, they did not want to be human. They tolerated being inhuman. They did not want to transcend this war and rejoin the eternal war, the human war. . . . They were defeated by this war. And this war which defeated men is bad. This modern war, this war of steel and not of muscles. This war of science and not of art. This war of industry and commerce. . . . This war made by everyone except those who were making it. This war of advanced civilization. No one won this war. . . . I sensed that. I sensed Man dying in me. (71-72)
With the soldier, the ideal itself of Man thus died in the first completely modern, profoundly inhuman war. Science, technology, industry, and commerce had all made it impossible for war to be "human," for its violence and destruction to be transcended and reach the level of the eternal war of "Man," the "war of art," that is, of myth. Drieu la Rochelle's war against war is directed here not against the myth of war but against the reality of war that he discovered was so far removed from the myth, so foreign to it, that the myth of a human war and the notion of Man it supported no longer had any status except to indicate a mythical past from which one was irremediably separated.4
In La Comédie de Charleroi, as in all of his work from the period before 1934 and his conversion to fascism, Drieu la Rochelle dramatically presents modern war as the sign that the myth of nationalism had ceased functioning positively. And within the general category of nationalism, he includes fascism, which he claims conceives of war as the privileged way of unifying the nation and resolving internal and external conflicts. He thus attacks fascists for misrepresenting war: "War is no longer war. You will see this one day, fascists of all countries, when you have thrown yourselves flat against the ground, with shit in your pants. Then there will be no more plumes, gold medals, spurs, horses, trumpets, or even words, but only an industrial odor that eats out your lungs" (81). But if nationalism and the myths associated with it were already dead, Drieu la Rochelle was clearly searching for alternative myths that would be able to replace those that had died and that would embody once again the warrior values no longer present in war or in the nation. Clearly he did not see fascism at this time as a real alternative, because it was still primarily determined by nationalist myths. He was thus proclaiming the death of fascism soon after its birth, portraying it as old and outdated even before it had reached maturity.
In spite of all the critical comments he made about modern war in his texts, the experience of war for Drieu la Rochelle cannot be considered totally negative. For war also produced exceptional moments of self-realization that continued to serve as models for the actualization of the positive myth of "Man." At very rare moments, in the midst of death and destruction, the soldier, as if drawn out of and beyond himself by a superior force, is able to get up from his prone position and be miraculously transformed. He is no longer an anonymous, isolated, defeated inhuman entity but is now full of force, exalted, fulfilled, pushed to the limits of human experience before being pushed beyond them. At these moments and these moments alone, the soldier becomes truly human and alive, initially not even recognizing that he has acted, but eventually becoming fully conscious of himself and his force:
All of a sudden, something extraordinary happened. I got up, got up from within the dead, within the larvae. I knew what grace and miracle meant. There is something human in these words. They mean exuberance, exultation, blossoming—before meaning exudation, extravagance, drunkenness. All of a sudden, I knew myself, and I knew my life. This strong man, this free man, this hero, so this was me. So this was my life, this thrust that was never going to stop. . . . Who was this who suddenly burst forth? A leader. Not only a man, a leader. . . . A leader is a man at his fullest; a man who gives and who takes in the same ejaculation. I was a leader. (67-68)
No matter how anonymous, horrible, and degrading war could be, it could also produce an individual who was not a passive victim but a leader, a man free of all constraints and having the most intense experience of the force of life, a unifying force that through the man's actions creates a community of action around him.
The experience of exultation of the hero-leader, no matter how brief in the general experience of war, serves in Drieu la Rochelle's earliest works as the principal characteristic of the ideal human type, even as the reality of war is being denounced. Man at his fullest, man truly realizing his force and spiritual capacities, man knowing himself in action with others, this is the myth of total man that remains a constant in Drieu la Rochelle's work, no matter what his specific political affiliations or his relation to fascism were.
The idea of total man is thus born in the death of the traditional myth of the nationalist warrior in the First World War, just as the idea of Europe as a spiritual community is born in the death of the nation as apolitical-cultural community. At the end of the war, in the "unique anguish" each country confronted with the realization of its narrowness (Mesure de la France, 98), in the absence of any spiritual authority able to resolve or even situate effectively the conflicts, divisions, and decadence of the modern world (104), Drieu la Rochelle saw modern man facing fundamental, profound dangers, which politics alone could not resolve:
From now on, there is only one total problem. The man who thinks and whose spirit transcends all the distinctions that are no longer alive, perceives only one danger but it is immense, made up of all the evils that can induce decadence in all parts of the human being. Behind all these petty political or social questions which have become obsolete, we can see appear a great questioning of the foundations of everything, of our customs, of our spirit, finally of our civilization. . . . It is here that [one of the countries] must stand up and pronounce the words that will resolve the enigma of the "modern" and assure common salvation. (97-98)
Drieu la Rochelle is here clearly calling on France—and if not France, then some other country (Italy, Germany?)—to take on the role of the hero and leader, as the soldier did in La Comédie de Charleroi, and ensure its own salvation by transcending itself as a nation, and by its actions overcome the isolation of all nations by creating a European spiritual community. He is demanding a change more profound than either a political revolution or restoration: what he called another Renaissance (115), the rebirth of Western man in modernity. For only such "total, spiritual solutions" could possibly overcome the death of man and the total devastation of the present.
Drieu la Rochelle looked to literature and art rather than politics for models for such total solutions. He was especially attracted to theories and practices that he considered autonomous and, as he said, that had not lost "the sense of the absolute"; that is, that did not follow or were not determined or limited by any particular political ideology or aesthetic theory. The most profound and authentic spiritual model was necessarily the least practical, least directly political model. In his three letters to the Surrealists, the first published in 1925, the second two in 1927 (collected in Sur les écrivains [Paris: Gallimard, 1982]), Drieu la Rochelle revealed both what had originally attracted him to the revolutionary literary movement of surrealism and what had also eventually led him to denounce it. What he admired most was the Surrealists' unwillingness to compromise with outdated literary doctrines, nationalist sentiments, or political determinations. What he attacks in these letters is their choice of a political position, communism, and also of a defined aesthetic strategy: "Now you double your art poétique with the support of a political line according to a procedure periodically used by literary hacks in France" (47). Drieu la Rochelle argues that art should remain autonomous, free of all formalist and political determinations, in order to realize itself fully. Politics should follow art in order to fulfill itself spiritually, not the reverse. The only thing as bad for the writer as serving a political cause was following an art poétique.
The only hope Drieu la Rochelle saw in the Surrealists' political affirmations had to do with a statement they made that directly contradicted their adherence to communism: "For us, salvation is nowhere." He held that the sense of the absolute in literature could only come from the recognition that there was no salvation, that no "little literary doctrine" and no little or big political doctrine could do more than exacerbate the decadence of the contemporary situation by accepting passively one of its determining aesthetic theories or ideologies and thus adding to its divisiveness. On the contrary, Drieu la Rochelle demanded that the writer plunge into the empty decadence of modernity and assume it fully, for only in the rejection of all "little" or partial solutions, only through a negative metaphysics or aesthetics, could an absolute, total spiritual solution be envisaged. Only if salvation is nowhere can salvation be found outside all the places politics and aesthetics had previously located it: neither in art nor in politics as distinct entities or fields but in their fusion in a total Art. For it is only in such an Art, and not in life, he claims, that one truly lives: "The arts, Art in general, exist so that man can live, so that he can realize life. . . . Art for me is the most forceful way to live" (56-57). Art is a higher form of life, one in which force is not limited by restrictive forms but is potentially infinite, creative of form rather than dependent on it.
The attraction of surrealism had to do solely with the destructive forces it produced, for it was only out of an initial destruction of all political and aesthetic limits that affirmative forces had the possibility of emerging: "Your way is the denunciation of literature, of art, because of the need you see to recharge literature, art, with their full moral and human sense. . . . I have always thought . . . that you were opening the way for future affirmations. And I put a lot of hope in that pending fecundity" (78). The Surrealists, in a sense, were not surrealist enough, however, for he argued that they settled for much too little in both the aesthetic and political realms.
In a text from the same period, Le ]eune Européen (1927), in Le Jeune Européen suivi de Genève ou Moscou (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), Drieu la Rochelle claimed to be looking for alternatives to what he called the sterile collectivization offered not only by communism and fascism, two political movements that he saw as following the "same atrocious ideal" (98), but by surrealism as well. Fascists, communists, and Surrealists were all considered to be "impotent" in terms of the fundamental threat posed by modernity: "Narrow fascisms, babbling communisms, hysterical surrealisms, . . . you are the feeble harbingers of a terrible weakness" (99). The Surrealists' choice of a political commitment to communism simply reflected their literary commitment to questionable aesthetic practices and theories, especially "automatic writing," which were already indications of their willingness to compromise with the politics and aesthetics of modernity.5
If he saw the Surrealists as being mistaken in their choice of communism, Drieu la Rochelle at this time did not see fascism as an alternative. As he argued in Genève ou Moscou (1928), where fascism came up short was in the way it remained rooted in and limited by its own nationalist foundations. In rejecting fascism for democratic socialism, Drieu la Rochelle was assuming that democracy could overcome its own nationalist foundations, and that it would accept what he called the "nomadism of money and of the spirit from which no one can escape" (154) and resist the temptation to try to recreate the mythical grandeur and integrity of the nation before nomadism.
Drieu la Rochelle repeatedly claimed, against all forms of nationalism, that "there is no fatality" in the relation between man and place, no rational necessity for what emerged out of such a relation. What occurred at the origin of nations was rather the result of a "fortunate encounter" (157) that should be celebrated inasmuch as it initially produced powerful creative forces. These forces were not a defining characteristic of a people, but rather indications of the energy of the act of creation itself, the unrestricted, boundless interaction of spirit with matter and place. Unlike Barrès, who made of the instinctual origins of a people in the land the destiny or fatality of the individual; or even Péguy, who made the "silent" relation of the people with the land the origin and end of all spirituality; Drieu la Rochelle argued that the chance encounter with the original homeland represented a stage to be overcome. All nationalisms that made of the homeland an end rather than a beginning were restricting the very energies and creativity the homeland had originally produced. Only a spiritual patrie beyond the national homeland could once again be the site of such original creativity and force.
He believed that as long as a homeland was not yet determined as a nation and its boundaries and identity remained fluid, as long as its force was unrestricted by identifiable cultural norms, it would remain a purely spiritual, creative force. "The homeland breathes fully in the men's souls and they do not know it yet. They do not name it, or if they do, its name designates a growing, receptive reality. It calls to everything, nothing is excluded" (159). The force of this unnamed, unmeasured, and unmeasurable homeland was the force of the unformed as well, the moment before form when force reigns and forms have not yet achieved finality. It was the moment before art and politics, therefore, the "Dionysian" moment of pure explosive and chaotic invention. All true art and all true politics, for Drieu la Rochelle, have their ultimate origin and end in this moment before the institution of the nation and before the determination of aesthetic form. Drieu la Rochelle was thus an antinationalist for the same reasons that he was an antiformalist, for nationalism and formalism were for him two sides of the same coin—each in its own way restricting and repressing; that is, forgetting the creative force of the origin. He believed that all great art and all great politics should recall, open onto, and renew this original, disruptive force of the origin before the actual formation and determination of the nation and the work of art.
The only positive act a homeland (and the nation) could perform, in fact, was to die—that is, become mythical—in order to retain the "magic" and spiritual force of its birth and infancy, and this is what Drieu la Rochelle wished for France: "I dream of a France that will soon be in heaven: its essential lesson can no longer be to teach me to be French but more than ever to be a man" (163). France must die as a political entity, as a nation, in order for it to achieve its true spiritual place. The only good nation is thus a dead, spiritual homeland. Europe represents the death of nations, their entry into a higher form of spirituality, a more fully imaginative imagined community. Nationalism, even in its fascist form, had no future, for not only was it an ideology from the previous century, but it was, like Marxism, based on antispiritualist premises, even when it claimed to be defending spiritual values.6
In Genève ou Moscou, Drieu la Rochelle's polemic against nationalism also leads him to raise the question of race. Given the anti-Semitism of his later works, it is interesting to see that in this work he links racism to nationalism and criticizes it on exactly the same grounds. Racists, he argues, "if they think they escape from the overwhelming belief in the determinism of place, are deluding themselves. What they take away from place, they transfer to blood. They accomplish only a futile displacement within the limitations of the same determinism" (166). In fact, he even claims that racism is not just a form, but the most restrictive form, of the determinism characteristic of all nationalisms: "Formidable doctrine, that of race, which is in appearance more supple than that of homeland but which excludes all hope even better than it" (167). In Genève ou Moscou, Drieu la Rochelle argues that racism is nothing less than the most serious obstacle to the realization of the spiritual entity called Europe.
As this work calls for the end of nationalism, it foresees and demands the end of race and racisms as determining spiritual and political factors as well. Drieu la Rochelle argues that all peoples, no matter how separate they might seem to be, would eventually lose their integrity and be fused together, and the proof he gives of this is the case of the Jews: "The Jewish race is going to founder with all the other races and all of the concerns of the nineteenth century. . . . Homelands are only encounters in the immense adventure of the spirit. Freedom opens up before us" (168). The fusion of all races and peoples is thus the very sign of the freedom of the spirit, for no people or race can resist the inevitable mixing and exchange of places. Freedom is what always opens up outside of the restrictions of place and race, and the spirit dies when it is confined to either. The nomadism of the spirit is thus its greatest strength.
In L'Europe contre les patries (Paris: Gallimard, 1931), Drieu la Rochelle even argues that racial purity never existed: "Celts, Germans [Germains], these are words to designate almost identical groups in which for already thousands of years primitive races were mixed together. Races, they already did not exist in those days, which is all the more reason for this to be true today" (61). To base any theory on the singularity of a people or the purity of a race is thus to project a regressive myth of the origin that restricts rather than fosters the freedom of the spirit. The new Europe could be made only if what he calls the "old doctrines" of nationalism and racism were first defeated, for it could be built only on their ruins.7
Drieu la Rochelle provocatively asserts that "France [and by extension, all other nations] should be allowed to die. Stop covering it with flowers" (29). And addressing Germans he proclaims, "I don't care about France; if you still care about Germany, too bad for you" (24). He goes on to warn Germany, however, that any project to dominate Europe, to unify it by force under the control of one nation, would be doomed to fail:
You will never have hegemony over Europe. No one was ever able to have it. . . . Europe is made up of courageous peoples. Every attempt at hegemony, the day it is declared, immediately provokes a coalition. And if the impossible occurs, if you were to conquer, your victory would immediately provoke a terrible recurrence of all the various nationalisms. One cannot kill nationalism through the triumph of one of them. (15-16)
For a future collaborator, statements both about the death and rebirth of France and the warnings to Germany are highly significant. Even if the warnings would seemingly make it difficult to support German hegemony in Europe, the desire for the death of France certainly offered a justification for collaboration long before the fact, a justification that had nothing to do with the presence of Nazi troops in France, with National-Socialist ideology, or with fascist politics as such, but rather with the inevitable course of history, which was allegedly in the process of eliminating a used-up political remnant of another era, the nation-state. He could even rejoice in the defeat of France, because it was seen as the deathblow to the "old civilization" and the myths associated with the traditional notion of a national homeland.
What changed with Drieu la Rochelle's explicit commitment to fascism? At first, that is, in 1934, when he declared himself to be a fascist, nothing essential in terms of his model of the imagined spiritual community and his overall project for the creation of a unified Europe. Nothing, or very little, in terms of his critique of nationalism and by extension his critique of racism. Very little, surprisingly enough, in terms of his attitude toward Italian fascism and German National Socialism. But everything changed in terms of the specific political means to be used to create the new Europe, and thus in terms of his own relation to a French form of fascism that would supposedly differ in important ways from both its Italian and German counterparts by being less nationalist and more "socialist." Fascism, first of all, provided him with the schema of a historical process in which the movement toward European unity was seen as a natural necessity, the next step after the full realization and then death of all nations.
"Unité française et unité allemande" (in Socialisme fasciste) illustrates this dialectical logic by constructing a Socratic dialogue of sorts between a professor and a student, with the student—who in a curious, ironic reversal of roles occupies the position of Socrates—serving as the spokesperson for Drieu la Rochelle's own views concerning the limitations of all forms of nationalism and the possible basis for the destruction of nationalism and the unification of Europe. The student succeeds eventually in convincing the professor that there is no real natural or biological basis for the delineation of the boundaries of a nation, and that a nationalism based on "blood and language" (Germany) is no better and no worse than one based on "natural" geographical boundaries (France). Both are ultimately justifications for the fact that every state needs limits for its own nationalist political reasons, and that these limits are always fabricated and arbitrarily and often violently imposed, consisting of restrictive imagined constructs rather than natural or historical realities.8
The student's point is twofold: on the one hand, he argues that the French, and any other people, if they recognize the arbitrary nature of their own borders and the imaginary characteristics of their national myths, can feel no superiority over other peoples and other forms of nationalisms. And on the other hand, he asserts that were they to accept the principle of the arbitrary nature of all national boundaries and myths, they would see that they had nothing to fear from a Germany that was simply trying to establish itself as a nation and accomplish what France and other modern nations had already accomplished. "The Germans are in the process of accomplishing their national unity. . . . The Germans are late, because they are in the middle of Europe, enclosed on all sides, and thus for them it is more difficult, but it is the same principle, the reason of State. An irrational reason" (198). No nationalist principle, therefore, could be considered a solid base on which to found a total, that is, European politics; none constituted an end with which to orient a true fascist socialism; none was sufficiently imaginative. And what nationalisms lacked in imagination, they always made up for with violence. But arguments such as these are now no longer being marshaled against fascism but are rather being presented from a perspective that views it sympathetically. In its "foreign" or nationalist forms, fascism is seen as a necessary stage in the fulfillment and then disappearance of the nation. In its "French" or European form, fascism is presented as the stage after nationalism.
This text indicates that Drieu la Rochelle was in principle willing, or at least he found it amusing to imagine and assert that he was willing, to pay almost any price so that European unification could be accomplished. If "linguistic imperialism is the limit of Germany, the Alps of Germany," then Germany should be allowed, should even be encouraged to establish its borders in this fashion, for the Anschluss itself could be considered a positive step in the direction of not only German but also European unification: "I am for the Anschluss and, if need be, for the suppression of Belgium and Switzerland. After that, we will see more clearly in Europe. . . . And Europe will not be far from being made" (197). If Drieu la Rochelle could make such a statement in October 1933, the original publication date of this essay, it means that in a sense he had already made his decision to collaborate. For to him, any force that suppressed borders, no matter the costs to the people caught in the Anschluss, was a positive force, because it was helping to realize the general project of a unified Europe: "All means are good; I can just as well make use of the means that the Hitlerian revolution offers me as any other means to proceed toward the suppression of borders in Europe" (199). The myth of Europe had now taken on its most radical and terrifying implications, for it meant that potentially everything was possible. European federation was anything but a modest proposal.9
In "Mesure de l'Allemagne," written in March 1934 after a trip to Germany, Drieu la Rochelle claimed that what disturbed him most about Nazi Germany was not the extremism of its political project, or the dangers it posed for surrounding countries, but rather the moderate, aestheticist, formal character of its entire enterprise:
What I saw in Berlin penetrated me with a kind of terror and despair. I saw confident and brave youth but committed to very feeble goals. . . . At bottom, they are heading toward a spiritual, aesthetic conception of society. Everyone must work to make Germany a harmonious totality, a closed limited whole which satisfies itself, which revels in itself. Everyone lives only to take pleasure in the whole. It's certainly a civilization that can develop under the sign of cinema. It's a static ideal. Listening to the Germans speak of their dynamism doubles me up with laughter; no, it rather makes me smile bitterly. . . . In reality, Germany is in the process of becoming completely static, it is in the process of finding its stasis in finding its national foundation. (Socialisme fasciste, 210-12)
These comments, as reassuring as they tried to be concerning the potential threat to France posed by Nazi Germany, indicate clearly that Drieu la Rochelle saw his own version of fascism, and his own spiritual conception of society, to be much more radical, dynamic, and uncompromising than the Nazi version and the "feeble goals" it established for its youth.
To focus too intently on the whole is to sacrifice the dynamism of the parts for the whole, to sacrifice the productive conflict of forces for formal, "aesthetic" national integrity. It produces an integral but static civilization, and Drieu la Rochelle even claimed that it produced a formal, aestheticized totality, a surface aesthetics of the image under the sign of the cinema, rather than the dynamic "total" aesthetics of force he associated with literature in his critique of surrealism and nationalism. Unlike Brasillach, film was not for Drieu la Rochelle a positive metaphor for politics, or a model for the experience of immediacy, or for the dynamic fusion of the individual and the group. More "conservative" than Brasillach (and Rebatet) in his misgivings about the technology or "art" of cinema, he was at the same time less classical and more "radical" in his literary and political aspirations and tastes.
Along with his declaration of fascism in the various essays collected in Socialisme fasciste, Drieu la Rochelle began to soften his critique of radical forms of French nationalism and to make anti-Semitism and racism important components of his vision of Europe. To think like a European would soon mean for him to think like a racist and an anti-Semite, and even like a nationalist. It would mean that anti-Semitism and racism for Drieu la Rochelle could be separated from the fatalism he attributed to nationalism and could be considered dynamic rather than static aesthetic-political principles—and that a certain nationalism with socialist, European ends could be as well. If all means were good, then even nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism could be used as important strategic weapons for achieving the European ends to which he was committed, as long as they could now be made to serve those ends rather than constitute narrow and conflicting ends in themselves.
In principle, he was still against race as the foundation or determining idea of his ideal imagined community, whether it was the French nation or a unified fascist Europe; so much so, in fact, that he made racism a sign of Jewishness and the foreign. The determination of race by "blood" was pertinent only when it concerned Jews: "There is a biological, anthropological fatality which broadly differentiates Jews from Europeans" ("A propos du racisme" [July 29, 1938], in Chronique politique 1934-1942 [Paris: Gallimard, 1943], 156), but no such fatality supposedly existed when it came to "true Europeans," whose strength resulted from intermarriage among various European groups and from the overcoming of narrow racial, regional, or national determinism. Drieu la Rochelle implied that his principal goal was to keep the "fatality of race" that he associated with the Jews outside of the European and French spiritual communities—which of course was to found those communities in racism.
Another important change in the way in which he imagined community and the political strategies he derived from it was related to the continued success of National Socialism in Germany, and the lack of any signs that Germany was "exhausting itself" in its nationalist efforts toward reunification. The increasing political and military power of Nazi Germany was, for Drieu la Rochelle, as it was for the overwhelming majority of French fascists, at the same time a sign of the success of fascism and a threat to France, the proof that France had to go through its own fascist revolution not in sterile imitation of Germany or in order to become its ally but in order to limit the hegemony of Germany and defend itself against possible German aggression. The alternative was presented once again, as the title of another essay indicates, as being the choice between life or death: "Mourir en démocrates ou survivre en fascistes" (October 28, 1938), and the chief justification for France becoming fascist was, paradoxically, that fascism constituted "the only method capable of blocking and diverting the expansion of fascist countries" [Chronique politique, 193). The best reason for becoming fascist was to divert fascism from a narrowly nationalist course and make it more socialist and more European; that is, less German and in this way more fascist.
With the defeat of France by Nazi Germany in 1940, the reasons for defending a specifically French form of fascism disappeared. The nationalism that was evident in Drieu la Rochelle's essays for Doriot's Parti Populaire Français thus faded into the background, and fascist Europe reemerged as the most complete form of the imagined community, but now also as a justification or pretext for collaboration with the Germans. Drieu la Rochelle was certainly not unique among literary fascists in the way he associated the birth of a new fascist order in Europe with the birth of a "new man," a man who was at the same time warrior, athlete, artist, and thinker, a total man. He, like other collaborators and fascists, presented the victories of the German army in the early years of the war (and even the conquest of France) as the accomplishment of this European spiritual project. All means were good if they could be said to lead to this end.
The details of his argument for the reunification of Europe under Nazi Germany were more complicated, however, than the general picture just presented. One of the principal questions that Drieu la Rochelle felt needed to be answered, since German domination was for him and other collaborators an undeniable and unchangeable reality, was what place France would have in a unified, German-dominated, fascist Europe. Another question had to be answered first, before the place of France in the new Europe could be determined. It was, What is France, or rather, Who or what are the French?
To answer such questions, Drieu la Rochelle always argued that France was not an isolated, singular entity and that the French did not have just one identity or one cultural, geographic, and ethnic background. Rather, they had at least three: Nordic-French, Central-French, and Mediterranean-French. He claimed in "Nouvelle Mesure de la France," for example, that there existed "the properly Frank, Nordic, Germanic France," where at the time of Caesar "Germanic laws and customs ruled." Even though he argued that the contributions of this northern and eastern area had been slighted in the history of France and needed to be recognized, the danger existed that after the Armistice Germany would "extend its racist demands here" and make only it and not the rest of France part of a "Europe reunited around a Germanic core" (Chronique politique, 238-39). In order to prevent this, France had to recognize that Nordic influences were an important part of its identity and that French literature and art were in great part Nordic. In affirming the fundamental French nature of "Germanic," Celtic France, France would acknowledge its profound links with Germany and at the same time its own originality.
Second, Drieu la Rochelle felt that the influence of southern France, had been inflated, especially in the arts. In this way he continued a polemic with Maurras, who he claims had "systematically stifled the importance of the Nordic element" (242). Drieu la Rochelle went so far as to claim that if poetic form could be considered to have been developed in the south of France, the essence of French poetry, its lyrical force, had from the start not been Mediterranean but Nordic:
To deny the Nordic inspiration, as it shines forth through romanesque language and form, would be absurd. . . . The necessity of a Nordic influence in French poetry is unquestionably illustrated by the fact that lyrical force declined in French literature as overly direct Italian or Latin influences became more pronounced. . . . The current of true lyricism . . . begins again only with the poets freed of the influences of the South and who feel the lyricism of the Seine come back to life in them with the contact with Nordic literatures. (241)
In the name of the importance of the Nordic, Germanic component of France, Drieu la Rochelle argued against German racial hegemony and for an idea of France as a mixture or fusion of the various ethnic and regional elements, a play of forces, a balance of force and form, which constituted the true genius and originality of France—as opposed to Germany.
The key to who the French were was "the France of the Seine and Loire," the area where "the profound and original mixture of the Mediterranean contributions and the Nordic contributions was produced" (239). Nothing less than "French genius as it is known emerged from this mixture," he argued, but with its emergence, there was also "the progressive forgetting of the Nordic element and the more and more boisterous recognition of the Mediterranean influences" (240). French genius, therefore, was precisely in the process of losing its greatness and its "Frenchness" by emphasizing one of its components at the expense of the other.
Such an argument was nothing less than a defense of Germany's role in righting the precarious balance that constituted the "genius" of France. "In a Europe largely re-Germanized, the genius of the Seine and Loire can survive and come back alive only in taking full consciousness of the equality of the three elements, that is, in restoring its value to the Germanic, Frank element that had been for too long underestimated, forgotten, and bullied" (240). By conquering France, Germany had given France the possibility of becoming itself once again, of becoming the mixture of the Nordic and Mediterranean that was also the model mixture for the construction of the new Europe. "Re-Germanized Europe" would be a Europe in which German racial laws would not govern and which would consist not of "one Volk" (people) but which would be a fusion of different peoples; a "re-Germanized" France was to be a France not dominated by either Nordic or Mediterannean forces but one in which Germanic elements and Mediterranean elements fused with each other and existed in equilibrium. Drieu la Rochelle's Europeanist strategy of collaboration was certainly evident in such a position: praise, cooperate with, and give due respect to the greatness of Germany and the Germanic components of France, but in the name of a France that "must come alive again in a new Europe" (246), and not in the name of the purity of the German people or the French people per se.
Drieu la Rochelle made another argument in this text to justify his collaboration with the Germans. It was a realist argument based on the historical necessity of revolution: "Germany, in the present century, is one of the incarnations of the revolution just as France incarnated it in an other century. . . . This revolution that Germany proposes to some and imposes on others is necessary for all, just like the French Revolution. The people who fought or who are fighting against Germany need this spiritual reform and this social reform that it represents no less than Germany" (248). With no less conviction than Hegel arguing for the historical necessity of the French Revolution, and of Napoleon who carried it across Europe on the backs of his army, Drieu la Rochelle attributed to the German army and to Hitler the same historical mission: "All this is in the armed mission of Germany. . . . Germany incarnates the necessity of the century" (249). To be against Nazi Germany was then to be against historical necessity itself; to fight against Germany was to fight against the very rebirth that all people needed to undergo in order to become active participants in the new Europe. To be against Nazi Germany was to be against Europe and even against oneself.
The tragedy of the situation in which France found itself, then, consisted not in the defeat itself, but in the fact that the leaders of France did not prevent the war by "making the nation the immediate collaborator of this destiny, rather than making the nation its victim" (251). German hegemony and the National-Socialist revolution it proposed for all of Europe were thus treated as historical inevitabilities—as the destiny of Europe that fascists like Drieu la Rochelle claimed they were able to foresee but which the leaders of France could not or would not admit. Because he argued collaboration with Germany should have started before the defeat, to collaborate after the defeat was simply to try to correct a serious political error and to make up for lost time. He claimed that collaboration should be done out of a sense of history and out of strength, not out of weakness and submission to an enemy.10
By the end of 1942, the optimism associated with the feeling that he was on the side of history gave way to the pessimism and despair of seeing that version of history thwarted and fascism in Europe beginning to be countered and then destroyed. The images that began to dominate Drieu la Rochelle's writing at this time, rather than of a victorious, unified, rejuvenated Europe, were not surprisingly those of failure, civil war, and vengeance—of a final destruction and a last judgment from which no one would escape. The titles of three essays included in Le Français d'Europe, but originally written for Révolution Nationale, after Drieu la Rochelle had given up the directorship of La Nouvelle Revue Française and with it many of his illusions about the inevitability of a fascist Europe, indicate clearly how a feeling of increasing doom pervaded his writing at this time: "Prose morose" (July 10, 1943), "Fatalité française" (July 31, 1943), and "Toujours amer" (September 25, 1943). He seemed to be feeling as much morose pleasure in the impending failure of fascism as he had felt overwhelming joy in its apparent success in the first years of the war.
In his journal, he went even further than in his articles in assigning blame, claiming that "Germans aren't much more fascist than the French" (Journal, [March 15, 1943], 338), and that "[he had] been dead since 1943, when [he] had fully recognized the insufficiency of the Germans, the proof of the exhaustion of Europe" ([March 18, 1944], 373). As was the case before the war, insufficiency rather than the plenitude of force had once again become the dominant theme of his writings, but it now directly concerned the insufficiency of fascism and the fascists' responsibility for the failure to construct a fascist Europe and for the destruction of totalitarian man. In another essay from Le Français d'Europe, "Entre l'hiver et le printemps" (April 1942), Drieu la Rochelle assumed for himself the only function seemingly left to the committed French fascist writer and collaborator. It was to become the prophet not of the historical necessity of fascism but of its pending demise, not of the birth of a new European man but of the death of the fascist, totalitarian man.11
Drieu la Rochelle's model writer was now no longer the revolutionary writer who fused together life and art in a total work but the writer as the prophet of doom and destruction, best exemplified by the biblical prophets. He not only quoted extensively from Isaiah in his essay, "Entre l'hiver et le printemps," but he also situated himself in the place of the prophet predicting the downfall of his own land. He referred to Isaiah in especially glowing terms, calling him a man "who loves and knows force, who sees where it is and where it is not"; these were characteristics, of course, that he constantly attributed to himself. In fact he described all the prophets as the only exceptions to be found within an otherwise decadent people:
These prophets, these are men who have the sense of force among an introverted and weakened people. They are only priests and poets who lament, who insult, who make literature of the defeat of their country, because they know they will not be heard; they do not even want to be heard because they know it is too late and that the time of empires has come. . . . They bury their country and the idea of a local country under a heap of imprecations and execrations. . . . A strange and sorrowful man, the prophet, always hounded in the present and joining together in his detestable words the past and the future, which are, each one, a mockery for his country, occupied, invaded, trampled on by History. (132)
The prophet thus represented the ultimate model of the poet who was considered a traitor to his country, because as a prophet of doom he was never listened to, even though or because he spoke the truth. The writer who wished for the death of his nation and projected the imagined community of Europe as his spiritual homeland had thus become once again the poet isolated from his land and its people, but now without even an imagined spiritual community for which to write. He had become the isolated and scorned poet of the Apocalypse, the only authentic figure of courage and the last remaining witness to the beauty not of birth and poetic force but of destruction and death.12
In his journal, Drieu la Rochelle presented the last months of the war and the Occupation as the negation of everything; nothing had value for him anymore except destruction. He gave a litany of dead or dying ideals in which he had once believed or at least which he had once imagined he could pursue and achieve. Love, politics, and literature had all become things of the past for him. He wondered how he could have wasted so much time on the first two, given that the ideals or myths he had pursued had always been infinitely removed from the reality he had lived. And yet he admited that when his faculty of imagination had failed him or had been rendered inoperable by the pressure of external events—that is, when he could no longer imagine "the body of a beautiful woman" or "an ideal political state" (Journal, [October 18, 1944], 425)—then literature also had died for him because it no longer had any spiritual force. He asserted that "the time of literature and art is close [sic]," and that he did not "believe in literature and [he thinks] the time of literature is gone" ([December 31, 1944], 438; [January 27, 1945], 446—in English in the original). In his mind, the death of both fascism and the myth of Europe had induced the death of art and literature as well, for the ideal of literature as a total work, a myth of literature homologous to and supportive of the fascist myth of the "New Europe," did not survive the death of the community imagined or modeled after it.13
"The total man" he always wanted to be ([February, 3, 1945], 447) also died with the myth of Europe, but because he believed that myths in totalitarian schema do not die without being replaced by other myths, death itself replaced birth as an absolute, as the last myth, the myth of all myths: "Oh death, I do not forget you. Oh life truer than life. Oh unsay-able thing that is beyond life and truer than life. Not beyond but within. It's the core of my being I want to attain" ([October 23, 1944], 426). It could be argued, then, that Drieu la Rochelle never really gave up his fascist totalitarian project, even in his journal when he announced its aesthetic and political deaths—the death of Europe, of fascist man, of art, and finally his own death. Rather, he characterized his literary fascism openly in terms of the apocalyptic project it had always contained within itself, not just because of his own "suicidal" tendencies but rather because the totalitarian aesthetic-political project for both the self and the community was itself destructive and suicidal, bringing the threat of extinction of everything if the ideal of totalitarian man could not be realized.14
In his peroration in the last section of "Exorde," a text included in Récit Secret, Drieu la Rochelle made his final political statement. In the name of the transcendent ideal of Europe, he demanded to be judged and found guilty by the Resistance, for he acknowledged proudly that he (like Judas) was a traitor; and he asserted boldly that in being condemned he would still escape the judgment of those condemning him:
I put myself at your mercy, completely sure of escaping you, the moment past, in time. . . . Be faithful to the pride of the Resistance as I am faithful to the pride of Collaboration. Don't cheat any more than I cheat. Condemn me to death. . . . Yes, I am a traitor. Yes, I had secret dealings with the enemy [J'ai été d'intelligence avec l'ennemi]. I brought French secrets [l'intelligence française] to the enemy. It wasn't my fault if this enemy was not intelligent. I am not an ordinary patriot, a fervent nationalist: I am an internationalist. I am not a Frenchman, I am a European. You are one too, either knowingly or unknowingly. But we have played our cards, and I've lost. I demand death. (99)
Not only was the position of traitor to all forms of politics the only position that did not betray the ideals of the European spiritual community that were still being evoked, but martyrdom was the only way left for him to realize these ideals, to escape from the punishment to be imposed on him, and to transcend all politics. The desire for a death as the traitor who saw himself really as the true European or internationalist, rather than nationalist patriot, was the last scene in this totalitarian scenario, the last possible attempt to perform a transcendent aesthetic-political act.
In the work of Drieu la Rochelle, the ideal of total art and the myth of the unformed spiritual community it supported come before and model, if not determine, his political involvement with fascism. This does not make him less of a fascist or mitigate his political responsibilities; if anything, it makes him, as he wrote in his journal near the end of the war, more of a fascist than the most militant political fascists, more of a Nazi than the Nazis, ultimately even more faithful to Hitlerism than Hitler himself: "I condemn not only the Germans of Paris, cowardly and deceitful liberals, who had always cheated and betrayed those of us who believed in the Hitlerian European revolution, but Hitlerism itself, fascism, organically incapable of engendering that revolution" (Journal [July 29, 1944], 410-11). Fascism, even in its most racist and totalitarian form, thus proved itself organically incapable of giving birth to the total spiritual revolution that Drieu la Rochelle had posited as its fundamental project.
All that was left for the writer who would have liked to have been "great" and to have produced a true, organic work of art but had failed to do so, who would have liked to have acted as a warrior for the fascist cause but was too weak to do so, was to bring about by a final, solitary act the mythical fusion that had been accomplished in neither literature nor politics: "I have always regretted that man is never complete and that the artist cannot be a man of action. . . . I consider it therefore good fortune to be able to mix my blood with my writing and to make the function of writing serious to all points of view" ("Last Letter to His Brother" [August 10, 1944], Journal, 505). In taking his own life, the failed writer and political activist would succeed and ensure that his writing, no matter how flawed, decadent, and insufficient, would be taken seriously as an authentic force.
This particular attempt at death failed, but a later attempt at suicide (March 15, 1945) succeeded, thus guaranteeing Drieu la Rochelle the place he has held in the minds of many ever since: the place of the mythical, heroic, tragic, and thus authentic French fascist. Drieu la Rochelle is the fascist writer many militant antifascists are the most willing to excuse, because he supposedly refused to compromise his principles and took his own life at the end. His is the place of the suicidal writer, the significance of whose politics can eventually be overlooked or at least minimized, not just because the essence of his activities was literary but, more important, because he was willing to pay the price for his political illusions and acts by killing himself.15
Drieu la Rochelle accomplished by his suicide what he had failed to do in his life or his writing. In death he finally became the "complete man"—and thus the complete artist—whom he regretted never having been in life, and whom he felt fascism should have made possible. Having mixed his blood with his writing and made it serious, he thus became for many in death the embodiment of the myth of the heroic writer, a myth that in fact perpetuates the myth of a spiritual "literary" community at the very basis of his political commitments. Fascist man is thus truly born only in death, but the suicidal aspects of literary fascism do not mitigate in the least its totalitarian ambitions. Instead, they confirm them.