Eight
The Art of Anti-Semitic Rage: Lucien Rebatet's Aesthetics of Violence
[L'Action Française before 1914] was an incomparable newspaper, the finest, without a doubt, ever published in Paris. Everything in it was new. . . . The violence of its language was in perfect harmony with the violence of its thinking. . . .
. . . Who was [Céline], then, really? An anarchist?. . . No. A poet who had the courage to lend his Apocalyptic voice to our most righteous but most dangerous fits of rage.
Lucien Rebatet, Les Décombres (1942)
Finally, always righteously irritated, the most obstinate and the most violent among us, Lucien Rebatet. What an astonishing young man! . . . Always in a rage against men, things, the weather, food, the theater, politics, he established around himself a climate of catastrophe and revolt that no one could resist.
Robert Brasillach, Notre avant-guerre (1941)
Lucien Rebatet, the author of Les Décombres, 1 which had the highest sales of any book in France during the Occupation, was without a doubt the most virulent anti-Semitic voice at Je suis partout. He was also a sophisticated connoisseur of the arts and an accomplished film, theater, and music critic. Some might naively ask how a man with obvious critical skills and refined tastes could have been at the same time a violent anti-Semite and militant fascist. Should not his often proclaimed love of Rembrandt and Mozart, for example, have kept him from being a crude and vicious anti-Semite? Should not his appreciation of the nuances of Vermeer have prevented him from responding as positively as he did to the vulgarity of the Nazi demonstrations, no matter how grandiose? Should not his aesthetic tastes and critical talents have given him some sense of justice and made it impossible for him to defend fascist totalitarian politics and the crimes committed by the Nazis?
I call such questions naive—although understandable, given the way that fascism and anti-Semitism are usually presented as irrational aberrations from the Western political tradition and its cultural norms—because rather than having constituted obstacles or counterforces to his anti-Semitism and political extremism, Rebatet's aesthetic tastes, critical skills, and even what he himself called his dilettantism were necessary and determining components of his commitment to fascism. Even if he claimed at times that an aesthetic appreciation of the political was an impediment to action, even if he committed himself enthusiastically to the "perfunctory," imperfect, inferior art of politics and was willing to make all sorts of compromises in its name (Les Décombres [1942], 660), Rebatet's politics were nevertheless firmly rooted in his aesthetics. The question to be asked of the relation of politics and aesthetics in his writing is not, then, how Rebatet could have loved not only Rembrandt and Mozart, but also Pissaro, Proust, Charlie Chaplin, and Bruno Walter's interpretations of Mozart, and still have been a fascist and anti-Semite; rather, it is how his love and critical appreciation of art, literature, film, and music initially led him to fascism and how they continually pushed his fascism and anti-Semitism to increasingly extreme limits.
Few have ever confused Lucien Rebatet with Céline, but perhaps with the incredible success of the publication of Les Décombres, Rebatet might have thought that he could some day hope to be considered on the same level as the one writer he had ever met whom he considered to be a true genius. Of course, that never happened, and the long novel (1,312 pages) Rebatet wrote during the last years of the war and completed and published while he was in prison after the war, Les Deux étendards (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), has been by and large ignored since its publication.2 Rebatet made a name for himself first as a film and music critic and then as an anti-Semitic demagogue. But his rage against the Jews, like Céline's, was supported by and organized in terms of the same poetics or aesthetics that he applied to literature and art as a critic. In his case, as well as in that of Céline, the "spontaneity" of violent feelings, especially of hatred and rage against the Jews and against democratic institutions—Rebatet claimed that he never had in his veins "a single globule of democratic blood" (Les Décombres, 19)—was not as "mad" as it might at first seem. Like Céline's ravings, his "instinctive" hatreds and rage had a definite aesthetic rigor and coherence to them, and it is that coherence that interests me in this chapter.
As was also the case for Brasillach, Rebatet admitted that the coherence was initially provided by Maurras and the Action Française: "Right after leaving college, I had found in Maurras, in Léon Daudet and their disciples, an explanation and a confirmation of many of my instinctive loathings" (19). Rebatet's constant rage against everything, as his friend and colleague Brasillach described it, was aimed primarily at the limitations of politics. It was a manifestation of his frustration that the social and political worlds—groups, classes, professions, parties, and individual men and women—continued to resist being ordered or formed according to what he argued was the only coherent aesthetic-political vision of the twentieth century: fascism. But unlike other literary fascists such as Brasillach—who Rebatet claimed "came to fascism by way of poetry, which was not, he was going to prove, the worst way to understand it" (44)—Rebatet never seemed to be at ease with the relation between what could be called his aesthetic values and his political convictions. Politics constantly took him away from what he always claimed were his first loves—literature, art, music, and the cinema; and literature and the arts in general were evoked as unblemished ideals when the world of politics continually proved limited, frustrating, incomplete, and unsatisfying to him. In the hands of fascists such as Rebatet, such a mystification of literature and art was indeed a dangerous thing, for it was the motor force of a totalitarian political vision.
In Les Décombres, Rebatet described a trip he took to Germany in 1938 ostensibly to report on the political situation there, and in a scene that reappeared in many different versions throughout his memoirs and in his journalism, he first evoked how attracted he was to what he witnessed in the streets, especially to the energy and spirit of the Nazi youth groups: "Nothing called out for friendship more than the rise of an entire generation of youth who were themselves creating their own order" (71). As attractive to him as Nazi political demonstrations of unity were, this hardened, demagogic, fascist ideologue described immediately after what for him was the high point of the trip: the return to another and deeper friendship and to a place of refuge from the world, which provoked a more profound aesthetic experience of fulfillment and joy:
I had a rendez-vous at Dresden with some illustrious friends: [various paintings] by Vermeer, Rembrandt's from the happy and fruitful years, which are poems of the splendor and blossoming of the senses, scarcely less sublime than the tragedies and meditations of his solitary old age,. . . The Hunt of Reubens, lyrical like Wagner and truculent like Brueghel. The museum guards always chased me out much too soon for my liking from this serene and sumptuous universe. . . . This was certainly dilettantism for a professional journalist, miles from a border whose fate held the world breathless. But I only felt a small amount of remorse. The smile of Saskia and her pink dress spread over the knees of a loving Rembrandt seemed to me far more important than the problem of the Sudetenland. (71-72)
The dilettantism he denounced elsewhere in this same text was in this passage if not defended, at least indulged with few if any regrets. Aesthetic pleasures clearly had to be indulged, for the "joys" of fascist politics and the political demonstrations supporting them were ephemeral by comparison.
For how could Rembrandt and Vermeer not be considered more important than the passing, regional issue of Czechoslovakian national sovereignty and the expansion of the German Reich? How could even the friendship and sympathy felt for the Nazi youth compare with that felt in the presence of Rembrandt's paintings? The problem for Rebatet, given how much he was also passionately involved with political issues, was how similar aesthetic effects of intense pleasure, serenity, and fulfillment could be produced in the political realm, how the two realms could be fused and the same satisfactions found in each; in other words, how historical-political conflicts could be transcended to produce a higher form of politics—politics as a total art.
Given the resistance of the world, the inability and unwillingness of his countrymen to build the fascist city according to what he felt were the best, even if not perfect, plans available, as well as the eventual failure of Nazi Germany to realize the hopes he had for it and himself, Rebatet repeatedly turned back to art and literature for solace and as a way of pursuing the "perfection" found only in them. Throughout his essays, he constantly returned to the solace and beauty offered by art to the connoisseur and critic, even at the risk of "sinning" by dilettantism (Les Décombres [1942], 660). But rather than ever leading him to abandon or retreat completely from politics, this constant evocation of the ideal of art made Rebatet demand at each stage an even more uncompromising form of fascist politics, no matter how "unrealistic" and unrealizable it might have seemed to even the most committed French fascists at the time. Literature and art might have led him into politics, but the limits of politics led him back to literature and art, in terms of which he always projected another, more extreme form of politics.
The lesson of anti-Semitism, learned like many other lessons in "the school of Maurras," became for Rebatet the core of his political and aesthetic education. But a commitment to a more radical form of anti-Semitism eventually distanced Rebatet and others at Je suis partout from their mentor, Maurras, especially after Céline gave anti-Semitism a new life and an entirely new literary form with the publication of Bagatelles pour un massacre. Les Décombres clearly expresses Rebatet's commitment to collaboration and an activist fascist politics; it also testifies to his rejection of Maurras and the classical aesthetics of politics associated with him. What this also meant is that anti-Semitism had clearly become the essence of Rebatet's fascist politics. Rebatet's nationalism was certainly not as developed as that of many other French literary fascists, and his notion of socialism was superficial and practically inconsequential, even when compared to the socialism of other literary fascists. What made him a committed French fascist was predominantly his anti-Semitism, for his deep antirepublicanism had at its base the proposition that democracy was the political system of the Jews. His admiration for the strong leader as the effective means for unifying and stimulating a people to collective (and most often, vengeful) action ultimately made of him an anti-Semitic demagogue on a par with his hero Céline.
However, even as late as 1942, when Rebatet clearly had already made a name for himself in the fiercely competitive area of anti-Semitic diatribe through his political journalism and especially the publication of two special issues of Je suis partout devoted to the "Jewish Question," he warned against the dangers of making the Jews too central, too obsessive a concern, of inflating their power, their capabilities, and the threat they posed for Europe:
It is neither normal nor healthy for a Christian to confine himself to the study of an inferior and exotic race, to live indefinitely in its intimacy. Most anti-Semites end up by falling into Jewish hyperbole. There is no undertaking, no matter how outlandish, of which they judge Jewry incapable. Anti-Semitism is teeming with hallucinating maniacs who see a thousand Jews for every single one. They announce with haggard eyes the invincibility of this minuscule people of cowards and misshapen individuals, all their limbs trembling at the very sight of a gun, barely twenty million Hebrews scattered throughout four continents, of which more than half are stagnating in their ghettos. (Les Décombres [1942], 108)
Unlike Céline, who hallucinated with great lyrical force and saw Jews everywhere, Rebatet argued for a more restrained, "rational" anti-Semitism. Even so, he was just as intent as Céline on resolving the "Jewish Question" once and for all, insisting at the same time how easy it would be to do.3
Rebatet willingly and enthusiastically followed the logic of anti-Semitism to its extreme limits, all the while claiming his anti-Semitism was different in kind and form from that of "hallucinating maniacs." The figure of the Jew was not for Rebatet all-powerful and everywhere, in or behind every writer and group, but the "Jewish Question" was at the core of the most crucial cultural, social, and political problems, and in this way was the founding element, the essence of his fascism. But even his uncompromising politics of race were intimately linked to his desire for a detachment from and a transcendence of politics and the emotional plenitude he claimed to experience in the contemplation of art. Such plenitude could only be realized in the political realm through the destruction of all political limitations, resistance, and compromise; that is, only after the destruction of the political as such. The desire for the total political work of art thus went hand and hand with the desire for the end of politics, for it was only in the atmosphere of total destruction, collapse, and hopelessness, only among the rubble (les décombres) when all political alternatives had failed or been exhausted, that the fascist nation conceived as a total work of art could emerge as the only remaining alternative to destruction, justifying after the fact and compensating for the violence that had completed the process of destruction.
As Rebatet recounted in his memoirs, and as his political writings constantly asserted, the national, fascist revolution he claimed to be assisting was effectively begun in the ruins of both democratic and traditional (royalist) France: "France is covered with ruins, ruins of things, of dogmas, ruins of institutions" (Les Décombres, 9). Since there was nothing left intact from the past to perpetuate, France could emerge from the ruins only with a radically new beginning (with fascism). Rebatet's memoirs proposed to analyze how France had come to be in this state, to identify and denounce those responsible for it—democrats of all sorts, all political parties whether on the right or the left, but behind all of them, the Jews—and finally to outline the form of new life that would emerge after destruction, the way in which a new fascist France could be built.
But the last sentence of the original edition of the book ironically suggests another end, one that would remain within the ruins and rubble and add to them, one that would be without redemption, the end of everything, the end of the end. Such a scenario would make of the person who remained faithful to "the logic of his principles" (Les Décombres, 10), as Rebatet claimed he had always done, "the last of his species," something he also admitted would indeed be a "strange adventure" ([1942], 664), but one that would certainly have its own compensations. To be the "last of the species" is the only remaining "hope" when the desired political or aesthetic ideal cannot be realized. It is the destructive wish the uncompromising fascist is unable to repress when the national revolution proves to be a failure and a fascist state is not constructed out of the rubble of the past but whose plans are destroyed before the building can be constructed. In this configuration, a total art and a total politics are inseparable. Total victory and total destruction are as well.
Rebatet's apocalyptic political rage resulted most often from the frustration of his desire to have the whole social mess cleaned up at once, with one sweeping total action. This meant that those responsible for the mess had to be identified and the actions necessary to get rid of them had to be undertaken immediately and as efficiently as possible—at least in principle. This was obviously the attraction of anti-Semitism. The figure of the Jew could stand for all enemies of the nation and all those responsible for its decadence, and the elimination of Jews from society and politics could represent and serve as a model for all total political solutions. As Rebatet admitted, or rather boasted, in the original edition of Les Décombres, he believed in 1934 (and one could say until at least the end of the war) that the best and most effective form of political action was either to execute or deport all Jews and Freemasons, the internal "enemies" of France:
I was convinced that at the point which we found ourselves only one form of politics would be capable of getting us out of the mess: sign up two hundred thousand guys, the unemployed, communists, kids, dare-devils, stick a uniform on them, give them corporals and submachine guns, get the support of a certain number of officers, execute several thousands of Jews and Freemasons and deport just as many. At fifteen, I advocated summary execution as the only way to purge the world of its grossest insanities and worst bandits. I was quite seriously coming back to this system. ([1942], 32)
Like wiping out a errant brush stroke from a painting, or a nonrhythmic line from a poem, or a discordant series of notes from a symphony, the master artist/political thinker purges the world of the discordance and disharmony he has attributed to all insidious "foreign," antiaesthetic elements. The more violent and total the political solution imagined, the more evident the aestheticist characteristics of the politics. In Rebatet's words, "All it would still take would be a corporal and four men to lead to the galleys, whenever we feel like it, our four hundred thousand moaning and trembling Jews" ([1942], 110). With such a "final solution," the true French nation would finally be created.
Before the war, the differences between Rebatet's form of French literary fascism and German National Socialism were by and large the same as those of the other contributors to Je suis partout. They were all attracted to certain aspects of Nazi Germany but still considered it a potential threat to France; they admired Hitler and appreciated the staged demonstrations of national unity, but at the same time they resisted what they all argued were the overly systematic, overly romantic aspects of German National Socialism. They thought they had much to learn from Germany, especially in terms of its anti-Semitic principles and policies, but they still felt that Nazism was profoundly foreign to French political and aesthetic tastes. This is revealed in an article from a series on Alsace that Rebatet wrote in which he even called the members of an Alsatian pro-Hitler political group "the enemies of [his] country," even if he shared many beliefs with them. He also argued that "these citizens of the French State are guilty of high treason" ("Que se passe-t-il en Alsace?: Chez l'ennemi," Je suis partout, No. 395 [June 17, 1938]). A fascism that was more German than French was thus in 1938 still unacceptable to him.
In another article written in 1938, Rebatet forcefully distanced himself from other French admirers of Hitler and from racially based theories of anti-Semitism and argued, as Brasillach and other graduates of the "school of Maurras" also did, for a more "rational," French form of anti-Semitism:
There are in our country a half-dozen imbeciles and naive people, numb with admiration before German force, who imagine that some sort of international of the swastika could save Europe. That's to misunderstand the Germans who punish their Jews for the greatest benefit of their own country but who aren't at all unhappy to see them carry with them into our country their corruption and will not hesitate to use them against us if they have the occasion. . . . It is desirable that anti-Semitism remain less instinctive, more measured than that on the other side of the Rhine. ("Vienne sous la croix gammée"—Les Juifs ont voulu l'Anschluss: C'est à cause des Juifs que les Viennois l'ont accepté," Je suis partout, No. 406 [September 2, 1938])
The stupidity and naïveté of those people who before the war simply admired Hitler without seeing the danger his policies presented for France, and the problems that would come with an overly instinctive, unlimited anti-Semitism, of course were replaced after the defeat by an ever-increasing acceptance or even admiration on Rebatet's part of these very attributes. It was a change that had been taking shape in Rebatet's work for quite some time, well before the debacle of the war and well before it was acknowledged openly. The notion of a controlled, "rational," ordered violence was transformed into that of total "aesthetic" violence, just as Maurras's classical notions of art and politics were rejected for a more modern version of totalizing aesthetics and totalitarian politics.
When Céline's Bagatelles pour un massacre appeared, Rebatet responded with great enthusiasm in his review of the text, admitting to having read it aloud and recited it in chorus with friends at Je suis partout. Rebatet was clearly fascinated and moved by the brutal force of Céline's words, and he attempted not only to experience them more fully by reciting aloud passages from Bagatelles, but he sought also to capture some of their force in his own style of writing and speaking. One could easily imagine why someone so attracted to violent polemics and the power of words and the voice might also be interested in the power of the radio to broadcast political invective, and this might very well explain why Rebatet accepted a position at the Journal de la Radio at Vichy at the beginning of the Occupation.4 But as important as the use of the radio might have been for the rise of fascism, Rebatet and other French literary fascists were still much more men of the printed word, the musical composition, and the painted or filmed image than of the radio, which Rebatet in fact called "a strange animal" (Les Décombres, 552). Literary fascists greatly preferred the printed page to the airwaves for making their voices heard.
In fact, Rebatet admitted that he was disillusioned by his experiences with the radio at Vichy and had been mistaken in believing that a radio voice could be the authentic (fascist) voice of France: "Radio, when one hears it from afar, possesses a singular eloquence. I had thought I heard in it the voice of a new France, quite feeble but honestly oriented. I arrived at the source of this voice. I found a service surrounded with enemies" (Les Décombres, 547). The eloquence and political authenticity of radio, then, was just another political illusion and not what it seemed to be from afar. At its source, it was as corrupt and unreliable a tool as the Vichy government itself, which pretended to speak for the National Revolution and the New Order but came to represent more and more in Rebatet's eyes the continuation of the politics and corruption of prewar, republican France. Rather than amplifying and broadcasting his authentic, revolutionary voice in an effort to help "remake the soul of the French" (554), he claimed his voice was severely constrained and his invectives censored, or as he put it in describing what he was forced to say: "We had already diluted our wine with so much water that it been turned into weak jug wine" (555). He felt that radio constrained the violence and thus the authenticity of the fascist voice to such an extent that it weakened and distorted it rather than amplified it. "Radio talk" was not for Rebatet, because it was just talk; he wanted something more substantial, more composed or "aesthetic," to be produced by and as his voice.5
The scene of reading Céline's pamphlets aloud in a group is, of course, a tribal scene, one more closely linked to clans or primitive societies chanting their founding myths and denouncing their enemies. It is also a scene of the mythic constitution of a people, one whose implications Jean-Luc Nancy analyzed in La Communauté désoeuvrée—a scene, as Nancy shows, which had profound links to the myth of literature and to literature as myth.6 In terms of the specific issues raised by the work of Rebatet, the technologies and techniques (and myths) of film, music, art, and literature were much more pertinent to his aesthetics of politics than radio was. Rebatet was very proud of the force of his voice and his ability to stir up a crowd, and he often boasted that he had "the biggest mouth" of all the members of Je suis partout. This was undoubtedly why he was chosen to end the meetings and rallies they organized during the Occupation and to cry out with all the anger and force his voice could convey at the end of his speeches: "Death to the Jews! Long live the National-Socialist revolution! Long live France!"—as he did in a meeting at the Salle Wagram organized by Je suis partout in January of 1944 (reported in Je suis partout, No. 649 (January 21, 1944]). But his pride was in a voice that needed no amplification, no modern technology, to be effective and to reach its listeners, a voice that emanated directly from him, and that political cliques and tepid collaborationist governments could not censor. The fascist voice Rebatet wanted to "broadcast" was one that ideally would not need the airways to be disseminated, one that filled up whatever space it was emitted in and was immediately received by the crowd that made it its own, a voice that spoke for and represented, that brought together and thus formed, the National-Socialist collectivity by giving it a figure to hate—the Jew—and an alternative figure with which to identify—Hitler, or the speaker or writer (Rebatet) as his replacement—and most of all, a model, a style (a tone), and a form for its rage.
In spite of his profound admiration for Céline's anger, Rebatet nevertheless frequently acknowledged before the war, perhaps in part in deference to Maurras, that he had reservations about Céline's form of writing and what he called its "foreign" rhythm, thus using an argument against Céline that Céline himself frequently used against the Jews: "I dream of a Céline more profoundly penetrated with the ancient Latin cadences, still having the radiant health of the Rabelaisian verb" (Je suis partout, No. 374 [January 21, 1938]). He considered Céline's discourse to be at times too "Nordic" in its cadence, not quite measured or musical enough for his French (Latin) ear, not aesthetic (classical) enough for his French tastes.
But he also felt that this unmeasured quality was also the force of Céline's discourse and therefore should not in any way be constrained, even for aesthetic reasons: "You don't debate with the elements, you don't ask a storm to have the rhythm of a symphony; a purer and more dependable Céline would not have projected the incredible cries of Bagatelles." The absolute principle of force at the basis of literary-fascist aesthetics and politics thus, as in the case of Drieu la Rochelle, pushed art and politics beyond the constraints of form. Rebatet's dilemma was how to retain art as the model for politics without diminishing the seemingly extra-aesthetic force and violence of anti-Semitic cries such as Céline's (and his own), how to conceive of and practice a pure, unrestrained aesthetics of violence. Céline's work tipped the balance for Rebatet and moved him far enough away from Maurras and the Action Française that there could be no return to what he had come to believe was their ineffective, overly "rational" anti-Semitism and their classical and restrictive aesthetics of politics. It also moved him for similar reasons closer to Hitler and to a deeper admiration for and acceptance of what he called the "eloquence" of "total solutions."
In the article from Je suis partout (No. 406) on Austria after the Anschluss, which I have already mentioned, Rebatet described in essence the dilemma faced by French literary fascists before the war, and in doing so he also provided the aesthetic solution to the dilemma. The problem of the military threat posed by Nazi Germany to France and other Latin countries was represented figuratively as the problem of how the sound of the boots of the German soldiers marching through the streets of Salzburg interfered with what ideally was and could still be a perfect aesthetic synthesis of the Germanic and the Latin; that is, if the presence of Jews in the city had not in large part already corrupted this city and its art:
In this ravishing place, which reconciles by its light and by the art of its most illustrious son the Latin spirit and the Germanic spirit, one hears today the noise of boots that have come from the north. This is not the ideal accompaniment for Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or The Marriage of Figaro. But one cannot forget that Israel, corrupting everything it touches, was in the process of Juda-icizing Salzburg. . . . The relative Hitlerization of Salzburg, is it worse than its Jewification?
The answer for Rebatet, of course, was that the "relative Hitlerization" of Salzburg and all of Austria was necessary. And if this was true in Austria, one could ask why it would not have been the same for France, if France too was being "Jewified." No matter the threat posed by Hitler's armies to France, when the choice facing a country was between Hitlerization and "Jewification," an anti-Semitic fascist such as Rebatet would obviously choose the former, so that the synthesis of the Germanic and the Latin that had been achieved in the music of Mozart and was present in the light of Salzburg could be appreciated once again with a minimum of interference, and so that the synthesis they represented could be recreated on the political level as well.
Jews thus represented for Rebatet, following a long nationalist literary tradition, the destruction of the ultimate form of art and the politics modeled after it. Hitler, on the contrary, was presented as only a momentary interference in the aesthetic harmony of Salzburg, which was necessary in order to eliminate an even more radical interference. In order to be a French Hitlerian—and not what Rebatet called an "imbecile" and a traitor—a situation had to exist or be created in which all political choices could be limited to these stark alternatives. For Rebatet and the most extreme French fascists and collaborators, this meant taking a "pacifist" stance before the war and pointing out the folly of war, and then during the Occupation claiming that a total commitment to the Nazi cause was the only way to save Europe and France from an even worse fate. The price for not becoming "relatively Hitlerian" (and then totally Hitlerian) was the destruction of France; the price for total collaboration was always presented as being minimal.
The restoration of Salzburg's special light and the "de-Jewification" of its music accomplished by the Anschluss had for Rebatet only one somewhat regrettable consequence: the loss of one conductor of merit. "The departure of Mr. Bruno Walter, Jew, talented Mozartian, is unfortunate, but there are in the Reich ten batons equal to his and who have proven it." If Mozart's music could survive the loss of Bruno Walter, then Austria could survive the sound of Nazi boots in its streets—and by implication, France could as well. In a similar vein, in a series of articles on Germany written in 1937, Rebatet defended Nazi anti-Semitic legislation and attacks on "decadent art" by claiming that the loss to the arts was minimal:
Germany lost a half-dozen original films, two or three fairly considerable novelists. But at this price it was able to rid itself, through a truly exemplary operation of the moral and aesthetic police, of all the trash of substandard Freudism, of the most corrupted expressionism, of pseudo-naturalism. . . . Racists have held that it is incompatible with "German honor" that innovations in the five-year Judeo-Russian style,.. . pathological monstrosities of Jewish-surrealist painting,. . . have been able to pass as expressions of the German soul. . . . The racists are absolutely right" ("L'Allemagne a-t-elle faim?" in Je suis partout, No. 325 [February 13, 1937])
The supposed resolution of the "Jewish Question" in art and in politics could in this way be used to justify any political action, no matter how violent, because it was always considered to be for the greater good. The injustices it produced could be ignored, because in purely aesthetic terms they were considered inconsequential.
At a time when the explicit politics of Je suis partout were militantly anti-Semitic, hypernationalist, and fascist, but at the same time anti-Hitlerian, articles such as Rebatet's revealed that the seeds for the change to a pro-Nazi politics had been planted long before the war: in the name of the survival of art and with the model of the arts as a support, and with anti-Semitism as the driving force.7 Anti-Semitism was Rebatet's principal political contribution to the paper, the area outside of art, music, literature, and film where he claimed expertise and began to be acknowledged as an authority and a power with which to be reckoned. In the two special issues on the Jews that he put together for Je suis partout—"Les Juifs," no. 386 (April 18, 1938), and "Les Juifs et la France," no. 430 (February 17, 1939)—Rebatet attempted to carve out a space for an anti-Semitism located somewhere between (or bringing about a synthesis of) Maurras's and Céline's versions of anti-Semitism, at the same time "rational" and extreme, aestheticist and activist, ordered and violent.
In his article on the Jews and Germany from the first of the two issues, Rebatet insisted especially on how the Jews after World War I had supposedly invaded the intellectual and cultural life of Germany in the same way that they had taken control of the revolutionary movements.
Jews had monopolized, in the space of twenty years, all of the intellectual activity of Germany. In publishing, the theater, film, music, holding almost all of the levers of control, they themselves made reputations, and there were reputations made only for Jews. . . . They had the moral and financial control of almost all of the cinema. Only the so-frequent incapacity of the Jew for original artistic creation does not allow us to cite in music or painting any names known to the general public. ("Les Juifs et l'Allemagne")
Time and time again in his writings, Rebatet came back to this same point, the abyss between the absolute control Jews were accused of having over the arts and culture in general, on the one hand, and their incapacity to create, on the other.8 Like Drumont and Céline, he made of this incapacity the essence of the entire "Jewish Question." Accused of being incapable of originality, the Jew was placed in the role of the parasite, exploiter, and ultimately destroyer of the original and the creative. In politics, this translated into an equation between Jews and communism in terms of political oppression and control, and between Jews and democracy/capitalism in terms of economic oppression and control.
The one talent Rebatet begrudgingly attributed to the Jews was that "in the field of music [they were] excellent interpreters. That was one of the rare domains in Germany where they held a place that was justified, although still too exclusive." As long as there were strict controls on the Jews' participation in the arts, rather than so-called Jewish control of the arts, Rebatet, in 1938, would have been willing to let Jewish musicians play for his and others' enjoyment. A strict division had to be maintained, however, between creativity and imitation, invention and exploitation. The place of Jews was clearly to serve, and nowhere had they served better than in performing the great music of the Western—that is, for the anti-Semite, the "Aryan"—tradition. Nowhere were Jews less threatening (less "parasitic") to art and more its ally than in the field of music; that is, as long as they submitted themselves totally to the music they played and interpreted it faithfully. In almost every other area, Rebatet believed that their gift for interpretation and imitation had led to the corruption of politics and culture, a loss of taste, and the replacement of true aesthetic values by artifice and mimicry.
Serving the works of "Aryans" meant interpreting them either as a musician or as a critic. Each of these functions Rebatet considered derivative but positive, while at the same time dangerously close to the negative function of corruption. He argued in the second special issue on the Jews that there were in fact two kinds of imitation: "successful imitation," which protected and dramatically demonstrated the beauty of the work, and a decadent form of imitation, which corrupted it by offering artificial facsimiles in the place of the real thing and by encouraging these secondhand creations to be taken as original. He wrote, "[Jews] are more or less skilled imitators, often excellent commentators and interpreters, or unfortunately formidable corruptors. The Jew imitates well, criticizes with subtlety the works of other people, but he realizes very few original creations, and above all he corrupts a great deal" ("La Corruption des esprits," Je suis partout, No. 430 [February 17, 1939]). The contradictory logic at the heart of the anti-Semitic denunciation of imitation is nowhere more evident than it is in this essay. The more successful the imitation, the more dangerous it is to the original because it can be confused with it, and thus the more threatening its powers to corrupt, to have commentary taken for originality, mere performance for genius, criticism for creation, and ultimately artifice for art. True art, for the literary anti-Semite such as Rebatet, always began where imitation ended, even in the form of skillful Jewish interpretation and artifice.
According to Rebatet, "The agility of [their] mimetism" had supposedly permitted certain Jews to perform definite services for German music, which indicated that they deserved to be granted exceptions from Hitler's policy of total exclusion. But this same mimetic agility made them dangerous enemies of art and of the people of art, for the unrestrained, uncontrolled mimetism that eliminated all distinctions between the original and the copy would eventually bring about the destruction of art and the originality and integrity of the people through universal métissage. In the sociopolitical realm, this meant that Jews were not always recognized for what they were but were indistinguishable from "true Aryans." For this reason, on June 6, 1942, a day before the edict was to go into effect, Rebatet applauded the Nazi decree requiring that Jews in the Occupied Zone wear the Star of David to identify them in public:
Between the Aryan and [the Jew], it's a decisive struggle. Aryans cannot leave such an enemy free to conceal themselves. The yellow star imposed on them is a national consequence of Judaic duplicity. . . . The Jewish star serves to correct this oddity, which is that a human species radically opposed to peoples of White blood, from all eternity unassimilatable into this blood, is not always discernible at first glance. ("L'Etoile jaune," Je suis partout, no. 566 [June 6, 1942])
He acknowledged that the decree and a supplementary, visible sign, a yellow star, were in fact necessary in order to distinguish the indistinguishable, to mark the limit between the original Aryan (and his "White blood") and the Jewish mime (and his "non-White" blood). In art as in society, a visible border had to be drawn in order to protect the original, which was not in itself and on its own, "at first glance," any different from its "inferior" copies.
Rebatet used the supposed destruction of French art by Jewish painters as an example of the destruction of the "French spirit" in general and as an analogy for the destruction of the French nation. What happened in art inevitably happened in society: the disintegration, the decomposition of the authentically French elements of both tradition and of modernity:
[Modigliani, Pascin, Kisling, etc.] come together in the same involuntary task of disintegration. Their colors are a decomposition of the French palette, their form is dismantled or fugitive, their intellectual ornateness takes the place in their work of plastic intelligence. Their pseudo-stylization, its contact with life, is no more than a arbitrary deformation, and ends up as caricature. . . . Nothing is further from the admirable line of French arts, from Chartres to Auguste Renoir. The Jews of the "Paris School" lived off its remains. They invented nothing. They demolished Cézanne, ruined his colors, coolly pastiched the Douannier Rousseau, grossly aped the ingenious Van Gogh. ("La Corruption des esprits")
The danger of this form of imitation—pastiche and caricature—consisted in its great seductiveness, especially for those, like Rebatet himself, who had rejected academic art and were looking for revolutionary alternatives. Hitler's mistake was to have gone too far and condemned all modern art, even Impressionism, as decadent and degenerate; that is, "Jewish." In the field of music, Hitler had also erred in not recognizing the service musicians such as Horowitz had made and could continue to make on behalf of German music. Rebatet drew the same line as the Nazis did between authentic and degenerate or decadent art; he simply drew it within the realm of modern art, not between modern and traditional art. In fact, when it came to art, he was a more rigorous anti-Semite than Hitler, since he wanted to restrict the use of the term "decadent" to those modern paintings that actually were painted by Jews or were from schools or movements dominated by Jews, those that in the eyes of the connoisseur, not the politician, deformed and demolished art.
Until the outbreak of the war, countering Nazism by offering a better, French version of fascism and anti-Semitism was an unquestioned principle of the politics of Je suis partout, and for a brief period—the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact—even the "Hitlerites" of the journal, such as Rebatet, openly attacked Hitler not just as a potential threat to France but as an enemy and traitor to the West. In "Pour un art occidental" (Je suis partout, No. 471 [December 1, 1939]), Rebatet claimed that it was the Jews associated with what he called "Bolshevik art" who had done the most damage to French art by attacking "all the hierarchies, all the traditions that are the humus where a national art grows. . . . All that is demolished, thrown into the fire, at the same time and in the same way as all the truths of politics," to be replaced by "grimacing apings, unformed daydreams, abortions." He asserted that by making a pact with the communist devil, Hitler had put himself in the position of the ally of the "invaders from the Orient" and thus of the enemies of Western art. In this way, Hitler had become, in spite of his anti-Semitism, an ally of the Jews.
Rebatet also asserted in this article that "the inexpiable fault of Germany is to have betrayed the Occident, our own as much as the admirable German Occident of Holbein, Bach, and Mozart, by bringing barbaric Europe right up to the Rhine." In an attempt to "save the West, whose heart is [France]," Rebatet thus attacked the barbarism of Hitler on two fronts. The first concerned Hitler's foreign policy and his new links to Soviet art and politics and thus to the nihilistic destroyers of Western aesthetic values. The second had to do with German internal affairs and Hitler's removal of all modern art from Germany's museums, which Rebatet called an effect of Hitler's "neo-Academicism." In both cases, Rebatet's defense of art meant clearly separating himself from Hitler's cultural politics, which he felt could have the effect of destroying German art and thus its people, in the name of what he considered more radical and consistent aesthetic and political anti-Semitic principles.
By the time of the war, however, his extreme cultural anti-Semitism was for the most part indistinguishable from the religious, metaphysical racism he had constantly opposed. With the defeat, he easily transformed his Maurrasian-influenced nationalism and anti-Germanic stance into active collaboration with and unmitigated support for Nazi Germany. As he asserted in the concluding section of Les Décombres, the continuation of the war had made it impossible for him, for all of those in France who truly believed in the national revolution, not to work actively for a German victory:
I wish for the victory of Germany because the war it is waging is my war, our war. . . . I don't admire Germany for being Germany but for having produced Hitler. I praise it for having known how . . . to create for itself the political order in which I recognize all my desires. I think that Hitler has conceived of a magnificent future for our continent, and I passionately want him to realize it. ([1942], 605)
The conditions producing the stark, ultimate choice between survival and extinction—that is, between Hitlerization and "Jewification"—had now been realized in history, and there certainly was no doubt as to which alternative Rebatet had chosen.
In Les Décombres, Rebatet no longer had any reservations in proposing that France imitate Nazi Germany's racial policies and even go further than them. He argued not just for the removal of Jews from public functions but also for the violent destruction of their works, even, as a last resort, those he himself loved:
Jewish spirit is in the intellectual life of France a poisonous weed that must be pulled out right to its most minuscule roots. . . . Auto-da-fés will be ordered for the greatest number of the Jewish or Judaic works of literature, paintings, or musical compositions that have worked the most toward the decadence of our people. . . . There would be no objection, in my opinion, to a great musical virtuoso from the ghetto being authorized to come play for the entertainment of Aryans, as exotic slaves did in ancient Rome. But if this were to become the pretext for an encroachment, no matter how small, of this abominable species on us, I would myself be the first to smash recordings of Chopin and Mozart by the marvelous Horowitz and Menuhin. . . . I am partial to Camille Pissaro, the only great painter Israel, that incredibly anti-plastic race, has produced. I would be ready to decree the incineration of all his canvasses, if it were necessary, so that we would be cured of this nightmare. ([1942], 568-69)
To save true European art, some art would have to be destroyed and some artists excluded—to save one people, another people would have to be destroyed. The logic was that of extermination; the "dilettante" in politics and connoisseur in art had followed the logic of his hyperaestheticism up to the point where the survival of an entire people was at risk, especially given that pages before in the same work he had claimed that "Jewry offers the unique example in the history of humanity of a race for which collective punishment is the only just kind" ([1942], 566). And until he fled France with the retreating German army, Rebatet's cries of vengeance and destruction were made with ever-increasing frequency.
By 1942, Rebatet had come to consider the war against the Jews to be total, without limits on the battlefield or within French society itself. It was no longer primarily an ideological war or a war of national defense, but it had now become a war between the forces of métissage (mixed breeding)—that is, Jewish or communist, or Jewish-communist forces—and the forces of the "White race," with nothing less than the survival of the latter at stake.
The divisions of American Negroes and the Kalmouk divisions were spilling out over Europe. Among the hordes, the swarm of Jews. There would soon be millions of half-breeds [métis], which is the dream of the Jews, all of the Occident similar to the Jews, the White race condemned to die. Yes, an entire race can thus be attached to a few threads of destiny, when it has multiplied diabolically its sins against itself. The German has not only saved European civilization. He has perhaps also saved the White man. (622)
The material costs of the war were inconsequential, the loss of lives irrelevant, as long as the "White man" could be said to have been saved, his spirit and his blood restored to their original "purity," and the threat of métissage overcome once and for all. In this vein, National Socialism had become for Rebatet "Aryan Socialism": "National Socialism or fascism is the advent of true socialism, that is, Aryan Socialism, the socialism of builders, opposed to the anarchistic and utopic socialism of the Jews" (651). Fascism and anti-Semitism in this way had fully realized their aesthetic-mythical function and had become not just political options but metaphysical obligations.
If Rebatet never tired of reading Céline aloud in chorus with his friends, he also never tired of writing about the dangers of an immanent apocalypse, of claiming over and over again that unless drastic actions were taken immediately, the end would be in sight, always closer than it was before: "France is in danger of dying, even more today that two years ago on the Meuse River" (650). And as the end of National Socialism approached, the severity of the actions he proposed increased proportionately:
But one shouldn't forget, revolutions are not baptized with holy water. They are baptized with blood. . . . Death is the only punishment that the people understand. Death alone imposes forgetting on the enemy. . . . He who would tomorrow shoot five hundred agitators, generals, tight-fisted employers, and Gaullists of high rank, would provoke, he can be assured, the most satisfying psychological shock imaginable. This useful operation was not taken right after the armistice. But the iniquities accumulated by Vichy, even more than those of 1940, call out for the scaffold and the gallows. ([1942], 654)
In fact, almost everything called out for the scaffold and the gallows, because the only chance left for the success of the national revolution, for the victory of Nazi Germany, for the implementation of fascism in France, for the defeat of the Jews, was the elimination of all enemies, both military and cultural, political and spiritual. And the number of enemies continued to grow every day. Demands to punish, kill, execute, and make them pay dominated Rebatet's writing until the end of the war. The demands overwhelmed the little political analysis contained in his writings; he had explicitly become what he had always implicitly been, given that the distinction between his own position and that of the militantly pro-Hitler, "maniac" racist and fascist was from the beginning specious and practically irrelevant. He had become the caricature of the Hitlerian imbecile he had previously denounced.
As the war began to go badly for the German Army, Rebatet enlarged the scope of the apocalypse in a series of articles in the early months of 1943. No longer was it simply a question of the survival of France, but now for him it was all of Europe, the entire "Occident," that was menaced if the German army failed: "It would be for our continent, the annihilation of order, the end of everything" ("Découverte de Berlin," Je suis partout, No. 601 [February 12, 1943]). For Nazi Germany to be presented figuratively as the champion of the Occident, England and the United States had to be dismissed—"The triumph of the Anglo-Saxons on the European continent is a Mother Goose fairy tale"—and the war had to be represented as a bloody drama ultimately between communism and fascism, between the East and the West:
On one side, then, there is the force of the West, the countries in the world who, by their social structure, are the closest to ours.. .. On the other side, it's a terrifying unknown, the Asia of the Steppes with its cruelty and serfdom, a regime that we know could only have been built through terror. . . . It's the Red International. Behind it, there are legions of Jews, the creators of Marxism. . . . We are in fact at the threshold of the Apocalypse, . . . this war of continents is moving to an apocalyptic scale. . . . Western civilization . . . has only one protector, the German army. ("La civilisation devant la guerre," Je suis partout, No. 603 [February 26, 1943])
Rebatet continued in this vein up to the very end of the war, and after the debarkation of the Allied troops in Normandy, he referred to the Battle of France, in an article fittingly entitled "Au delà de la Bataille," as "The Battle of the Occident. . . . It's a last act, the one in which the peripeteia are being accelerated to bring on the denouement" (Je suis partout, No. 672 [June 30, 1944]). The last act, like the previous acts and peripeteia leading up to it, was now cast as tragedy, the fall of "the West" becoming a noble, meaningful act that contradicted or transcended history and gave meaning to it "beyond" any battles or the outcome of the war as a whole.
Living the apocalypse of the West (over and over again) had become the ultimate sign of fascist political correctness; that is, the indication that one's principles were right and just, even if, or rather, because one's cause was being defeated. For even if Rebatet pretended to the end that he believed Germany would not, could not, lose the war, in his articles the way for giving transcendent meaning to loss had been prepared from at least the end of 1942.9 Certainly by the end of 1943, in articles such as "L'Espoir est fasciste," Rebatet had already begun to prepare the way for the last act and the "triumph" of fascism in its defeat:
Were we, at the end of a European catastrophe, to perish, our arms in our hands in the last battalions of the Occident or by drinking fearlessly the hemlock of the just, we would take along with us the conviction of having fought for the only principles that were reasonable and redeeming. (Je suis partout, No. 631 [September 10, 1943])
In fact, when the time came to die in battle or drink the hemlock of the just, Rebatet did nothing of the sort, but fled for his life. His own "triumph" would have to come as a novelist, not as a martyr to the fascist cause he had served and for which he claimed he was prepared to die.
In Les Décombres, Rebatet described a visit he took to the Leopold-stadt ghetto and his reaction on seeing the miserable condition of the Jews living there: "I was floating in a vengeful joy. I was breathing in the revenge of my race. That hour paid me back for two years of humiliation" ([1942], 62). The anti-Semite took great joy in seeing the Jews humiliated and reduced to absolute misery, in witnessing with his own eyes the spectacle of the use of brutal, total power over the Jews, a power with which he identified, and in breathing the same air as that of the Nazi avengers and their victims. The spectacle itself, not what it portended for the future, was what interested him, moved him, and gave him joy and a sense of power and self-fulfillment in the present. As was also true in the case of Brasillach, what moved Rebatet was a perverse aesthetic satisfaction that came from assisting at a powerful theatrical or cinematographic experience, the illusion that the spectator was at one with force itself—in this case, with the forces of oppression and humiliation of the enemies of one's "race." The joy of the collective sense of self that was revealed in such scenes was nothing but the joy of vengeance.
There was always an important audience in France for such theater, whether acted out, written down, or orally presented. Rebatet had learned long before, and the great success of Les Décombres had simply confirmed it, that what his audience wanted to hear from him was a violent denunciation of Jews—that no matter what was happening in the world, the "Jewish Question" could never take second place to historical or political events. He narrated in Les Décombres, for example, that just after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, he was supposed to give a speech on the Jews before a group of members of the Action Française, but because of what had just occurred, he had tried to change the subject:
I thought it good, honest Aryan fool that I was,... to announce that I could no longer do [the planned speech], that the case of the Jews moved onto a secondary level in the face of the news I carried with me. I saw disappointment come over all their faces. . . . [They] had no desire to confront the divisions of Hitler. The hunt for the Jewish enemy seemed to them much more convenient and fruitful. (141)
"The hunt for the Jewish enemy" always replaced the more difficult political questions and offered a seemingly easy solution to the problems faced by France. The hunt covered over and presented immediate solutions for the disastrous political and military situation of France. By the time Les Décombres had been completed, Rebatet's own position had also made the "Jewish Question" the unique foundation of all politics, in fact as well as in principle.
The continual refusal of Vichy France to actively engage in the war on the side of Germany, what Rebatet called Vichy's "restrained" policy concerning the Jews, and the failure of the National Revolution to be truly revolutionary all fueled Rebatet's anger. Until the end of the war he continued to make increasingly extreme political and anti-Semitic statements, as if in defiance of any sort of political realism. It was almost as if this was in fact what he had wanted from the start: for all politics to fail and for him to be practically alone in still demanding a total Nazi victory and the creation of an anti-Semitic, fascist, French state. Politics during the Occupation seemed to be his overriding and unique passion, his "joy" coming exclusively from political theater—from both victory and defeat—rather than from literature, music, cinema, or art.
And yet, in another scene from Les Décombres, which is practically identical to the one discussed at the very beginning of this chapter, Rebatet described his constant desire to flee the world of politics for that of art. In 1939, just after Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia and Italy had invaded Albania, he narrated how, disgusted with the impotent reaction of the French government, he had retreated once again into the worlds of literature and art in an attempt to blot out the real world:
I had had enough. I no longer felt the need to write even a single political line. I took up books that spoke of an other time, other men. . . . I went back to unfinished manuscripts, and I felt like spending entire days strolling through the Louvre before Corot and Cézanne, writing a long story on love and God. What a really fine revolutionary! I agree completely. (143)
The sporadic indifference toward politics manifested in such scenes was, however, the indifference of a political dogmatist, of someone interested only in ultimate questions, total solutions, and aesthetic-political perfection or totalization. After the publication of Les Décombres, and as the war dragged on, the "long story of love and God" was in fact written (Les Deux étendards), and in the last years of the war and while he was in prison, it served the same function as his strolls through the Louvre and other museums at moments of great historical crisis. Writing provided Rebatet with the illusion that he was pursuing an ideal, transcendent perspective on life and politics in an imaginary realm in which the failures of the political could be negated, compensated for, and overcome—or at least forgotten.
In Les Mémoires d'un fasciste, II, left unfinished at his death in 1972, Rebatet repeatedly emphasized the solace he had found in writing Les Deux étendards, especially at the moments of the worst political crises. "Wouldn't this be the most fruitful way to rise above confused, disappointing or unpleasant events?" (11), he rhetorically asked himself at the start of the second volume of his memoirs. In the context of the bitter split between Brasillach's faction and his own at Je suis partout in 1943, he retrospectively referred to his novel as "his only passion, his only ambition" at the time (131), which of course allowed him to follow the ultra-Nazi hard-liners at the newspaper, but "reluctantly." Compared to the Normandy invasion and the ever-increasing danger for all "collabos," he admitted that his pursuit of his novel was "frivolous," but this literary frivolity allowed him "to keep his wits in the midst of events about which he could do nothing" (166). And finally, in an article entitled "On ne fusille pas le dimanche" [They don't execute on Sunday], included in Les Mémoires d'un fasciste, II—the article originally appeared in the journal Le Crapouillot (June 1953)—Rebatet described writing furiously on his novel on what he thought would be the night before his execution: "But by God, I was a writer. I had still a few hours ahead of me to blacken several memorable pages. I had to get to it" (255). The project of the novel and the constant struggle to produce it, if not the reality of the novel itself, permitted him to retreat from the world of events and give meaning and form to himself and his struggle, even at the moments of total political defeat and immanent death.
Rebatet had often praised the "robust and tenacious realism" of Hitler's politics and defended his own commitment to fascism on pragmatic, realistic grounds as well: "The twentieth century would be that of dictators and National Socialism. It served no purpose, except to be left behind, to place ourselves at odds with a current against which we wouldn't have the force to swim upstream. Wisdom was to follow it, in our own way" (Les Décombres, 58-59). By the end of the war, that supposed realism had become something very different: a total faith in a cause that even if lost—and he refused to acknowledge publically that the war was being lost by Germany until the very end—would still prevail and determine the future. His penultimate column for Je suis partout, written after the failed assassination attempt on Hitler, was entitled "Fi-délité au National-Socialisme" and was accompanied by a sketch of Hitler, a swastika, and a sketch of German soldiers. Rebatet finally admitted that Hitler was going to lose the war, but he declared that this was in fact the sign of his greatness and the guarantee that Hitler, and not the victorious Allied forces, would influence the future more, and that Hitler and National Socialism would by losing ultimately triumph:
Let's admit that Hitler is on the point of being defeated. But think then of the monstrous efforts under which he will have succumbed: six years of a latent, ferocious war, conducted by a practically universal financial blockade, by a planetary propaganda system, by incessant diplomatic machinations, by all the churches, all moral systems, all philosophical systems, all the universities; . . . then the real, total war, setting the four biggest powers in the globe . . . in a heterogeneous but monstrous coalition, and at least five years of this infernal war, fought with the most savage and disgusting means, twenty million dead, a continent razed. . . . In such cases, you can be sure . . . it is the vanquished who leaves the most profound traces, who puts his mark on his century, . . . who has a political, spiritual posterity. (Je suis partout, No. 676 [July 26, 1944])
No "realism" (or historicism) dictated such statements, for the current of history had clearly and for some time reversed its course and flowed massively against fascism and National Socialism. Only a total commitment to an aesthetic-political vision that transcended historical-political realities could withstand the current, because it was located in a spiritual or aesthetic realm outside of history.
Rebatet had retreated into his imaginary museum once again, creating an entirely fictional figure of Hitler as a heroic victim and clinging to the illusion of National Socialism as the only ideology "that remains on a human scale and leaves to the life of the individual his prerogatives, his personality." For him, no facts could ever refute such a vision, for it determined the entirety of historical reality in terms of an ideal, imaginary transcendent construct. He believed that if the responsibility for the war and the destruction it had caused could be assigned entirely to the Allied forces, if National Socialism could be argued to provide the best protection of the individual and thus be the only existing authentic humanism, then the defeat of Hitler and Nazism could certainly be argued to be irrelevant and the future of twentieth-century Europe still claimed to be fascist. It was out of formal, aesthetic necessity—that is, because National Socialism was on the scale of and had the shape and figure of man—that Europe would eventually recognize itself in such a figure once again. This was not just political ideology working but rather a hyperideological, ultraaestheticist faith in the formative and transformative powers of a vision that in itself needed to have no direct relation to historical reality to retain its force. Like Brasillach and Drieu la Rochelle, Rebatet's aesthetics of politics were manifested in their most radical form at the moment when the practical politics they had supported had failed.
But even before the defeat of Nazism seemed possible to him, Rebatet always claimed he wanted to be known as a great writer more than as an ideologue or spokesperson for fascism or anti-Semitism. In "Confessions de l'auteur," written shortly after the publication of Les Décombres, Rebatet explained a large part of the unexpected success of the book and his own satisfaction at that success in terms of the care he took in writing it: "I really took a lot of trouble with my Décombres, and especially with the finish, the final touches given to languishing or limping phrases. . . . It's a matter of professional honesty which counts too little today and of which I would like to remind beginning writers" (Je suis partout, No. 588 [November 6, 1942]). Comparing himself immodestly with Flaubert and that writer's concern with style, Rebatet spoke as if he had already entered tradition, as if he were already a recognized great writer giving advice to the young. He described himself as nothing less than a hero of the French language struggling as a writer, just as he had struggled in the political realm, to defend his country and its native tongue, not by imitating Céline (an impossible task, he argued), but by using "the traditional resources of the French language":
Like so many other things in our country, the French language is going to hell. It's time to go back over all its nuts and bolts, to bring it the care not of grammarians . . . but of a good worker, a good artisan. It is necessary to learn or relearn to love this admirable language, as a carpenter loves and caresses a beautiful piece of wood.
Flushed with the success of his book, Rebatet thus attempted to justify the politics of his writings, his outrageous diatribes against the Jews, and his enthusiastic support of Hitler and Nazi Germany, in the name of writing and style. He mentioned the care he claimed to have taken with his own manipulation of the French language, even when it had been necessary "to speak very loud" and "not even be afraid to scream" in order to be heard in the general din. The then unfinished novel, to which he referred in this article as "a work that has so little to do with current events" that "it goes without saying that, . . . with the times as they are, it is on the lowest level of [his] preoccupations," was in fact symbolically the core and support of all his preoccupations.
When he wrote an article in 1944 on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Drumont, he stressed what he claimed was Drumont's importance as a writer as much as his contributions to the history of French anti-Semitism, and in doing so Rebatet clearly drew a portrait of a bestselling anti-Semitic journalist and pamphleteer that he would also have liked to have seen applied to himself:
We would not be celebrating the centenary of Drumont if he had not been first of all a superb writer. . . . There is not one of his pages where a stroke of inspiration does not shine forth, in which one recognizes the artist. . . . Drumont possessed exclusively a humor, a good-naturedness of a Rabelaisian giant, which, linked to his constant faculty of indignation, gave to all his pamphlets a human weight of which we still haven't seen the equivalent except in Céline. . . . Every great pamphleteer has a core of vast goodness in him. If he jumps with fury into the fray, it's through altruism, because he loves his fellow men, his country, because he can't really see them founder, perish, without screaming a warning, without grabbing onto the collar of their robbers and assassins. ("Drumont parmi nous," Je suis partout, No. 663 [April 28, 1944])
This was clearly the scenario Rebatet saw for himself—not that of the tragic political hero dying for his principles and proving their worth and truth by his death, but rather that of the great writer who supposedly never dies but through his writing continues to be remembered, read, honored as a lover of men, a patriot, regardless of, or rather because of, his fury against particular men, groups, religions, or races.
As he placed Drumont in an authentically French literary tradition that ran from Rabelais, to Saint-Simon, to Balzac and then Céline, he was clearly making a place for himself at the summit of that tradition after Céline. The respect for French literary tradition that initially led him to the Action Française and then to fascism and anti-Semitism would in this scenario await him and keep a place open for him. The end of the war was thus, on this imaginary level, anticlimactic and melodramatic rather than tragic, for his long novel still was unfinished and needed to be polished. His true, absolute mission in life still remained to be fulfilled.
Rebatet, the ferocious enemy of all communists, democrats, and Jews, in fact proceeded to take on God and the Catholic Church in his novel with a violence similar to the violence he had used to attack his enemies in his political writings. Michel Croz, the main character in Rebatet's novel Les Deux étendards attacks the Catholic Church in terms similar to those that Rebatet used to attack the Jews, demanding vengeance for the way the Church had allegedly deformed him spiritually, emotionally, and physically: "I hate the religion into which chance had me be born. This hatred is my backbone, my only tonic. If I no longer had any other reason for being, I would want that hatred to be enough for me . . . . I am the cripple who seeks his vengeance and who succeeds at least in reformulating for himself one rule: work at that vengeance, obstinately, toward and against everything" (738). Unlike the version of the novel given by Etiemble and Steiner, who defend it for its "universality" or "classical beauty," and thus for being entirely opposed to the violence and hatred at the basis of Rebatet's fascism and anti-Semitism, in the novel Rebatet simply redirects his anger and finds an expression for it that is not directly political or racist. But as in the case of Céline, the aestheticist principles that supported Rebatet's political anger have not changed. The most striking similarity between his political writings, his memoirs, and his novel is that the spiritual battle in each is absolute, a matter of either life or death, and the ultimate value of the struggle is the struggle itself, regardless of whether one wins or loses. In fact, spiritual (aesthetic) victory is best ensured by political and personal failure, which justifies cries of unlimited vengeance.
The aesthetic-political ideal in question in Rebatet's work was perhaps best and most succinctly described not in his essays on art or politics, but by Michel Croz, his fictional spokesperson in Les Deux étendards, after seeing an especially moving performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro (the exemplary work of art for Rebatet): "What was sublime was the agreement of everything: the genius of the music, the orchestra that was beating as a single body, the set, the costumes, the purest of acting, the voices without a single flaw. An instant of beauty that leaves us not with joy but only with an eternal regret. We caught a glimpse of perfection, but only to know that it disappears right away" (230-31). The immediate disappearance of aesthetic (or political) perfection after it had been glimpsed, of aesthetic-political (and sexual) plenitude after it had been experienced, was precisely what Rebatet was unable to accept and what provoked his greatest anger. Someone had to be responsible for such a loss; someone had to be made to pay for it. In the novel, it is the Catholic Church and its priests; in his literary and political essays, it is, of course, the Jews.
The violence of Rebatet's writings against the Jews during the war is of course blatant, persistent, and undeniable; but what should not be overlooked in the haste to criticize and condemn it is that it was not an isolated trait or peculiarity of Rebatet's work but an integral component of the dogmatic aestheticist values at the very basis of literary fascism in general. Rebatet's form of fascist aestheticism expressed itself both as a sporadic detachment from politics, or a retreat into the aesthetic domain or the "museum," and as an extreme expression of violence in the political sphere that supported absolute, totalitarian political ends. In the case of literary fascism, total aesthetic perfection constituted, therefore, a dangerous totalitarian political ideal.