Nine
A Literary Fascism beyond Fascism: Thierry Maulnier and the Ideology of Culture
It is necessary to restore to philosophy the taste for blood. It is necessary to restore to metaphysical systems their cruelty, their power of life and death.
Thierry Maulnier, Nietzsche (1935)
Combat [an extremist journal cofounded and run by Maulnier] had its place in our friendships, . . . in the quite fascist, anti-liberal, and at the same time national and socialist atmosphere of those times.
Robert Brasillach, Notre avant-guerre (1941)
[Thierry Maulnier's] journal will fail because it does not take a clear position. Kléber Haedens and Blanchot have been devoured by surrealism. Maulnier by radical and Jewish moderationism.
Drieu la Rochelle, Journal (May 3, 1940)
Thierry Maulnier cannot be overtly Gaullist near Charles Maurras. . . . But it is clear that Thierry Maulnier tends toward Gaullism, that he is flirting with it. . . . It is not for us to know for what reasons Charles Maurras tolerates this individual in his newspaper, any more than it is for us to judge. But for us, Maulnier,. . . traitor to his best friends, is from now on disqualified. . . . It is to be hoped that rogues like Maulnier will be mercilessly chased from the French press.
Le Cri du Peuple (November 27, 1940;
reprinted in Je suis partout [February 7, 1941])
[The fascism of the journal Combat] was a fascism of people who do not die the violent deaths of agitators and rabble-rousers but end their days as members of the Académie Française.
Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left
Of all the writers and critics closely linked to Brasillach and contributing to the L'Action Française, Révolution Nationale, Je suis partout, and other journals of the extreme right published in France in the 1930s, Thierry Maulnier is perhaps the most difficult to categorize. In terms of the two principal political movements with which he was most closely associated—the royalism or integral nationalism of the Action Française and the anti-Semitism and fascism of journals such as Je suis partout—he was considered an independent, if not, eventually, at least as concerns Je suis partout and other collaborationist journals, a dissident and traitor to the cause of fascism. He himself cofounded two journals, Combat and L'Insurgé, in an effort to define and promote the "National Revolution," which was to take the form, as the title of his book from the same period indicates, both of a hypernationalism, a nationalism "beyond nationalism,"1 and a radical spiritualistic socialism, a socialism beyond socialism, at least in its various Marxist forms.
But Maulnier, unlike Drieu la Rochelle, Brasillach, and Rebatet, never directly collaborated with the Germans. Instead, he continued to write literary and philosophical-political articles for L'Action Française during the Occupation. Also, unlike most of his fascist friends and associates from the 1930s, he never overtly declared himself to be a fascist, but he consistently criticized the totalitarian politics of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and the attempts to create fascist parties and movements in France, even as he wrote (until the defeat) for journals supporting or sympathetic to such attempts. And although he frequently contributed to militantly anti-Semitic journals, such as Je suis partout, and remained publicly loyal to Maurras and the anti-Semitic principles of the Action Française until the end of the war, he repeatedly pointed out the limitations and dangers of all biologically determined nationalisms and the folly of making the "Jewish Question" central to any nationalist politics. For these reasons, Maulnier has been ignored or treated only peripherally by almost all studies of fascism and fascist intellectuals in France. For almost all analysts of the period, he is quite simply not considered a fascist at all.2
Maulnier's extreme form of nationalism, which represents a very particular and radical form of literary fascism, possessed what could be called a classical purity. Its radical nature consisted not in striving to implement more extreme totalitarian principles than other nationalisms or national socialisms but rather in claiming to be more consistent, basic, and decisive in its defense of the nation. The "au-delà" or the "beyond" of nationalism often evoked by Maulnier was really a return to first principles, to what he considered to be the origin or essence of both true nationalism and socialism, as well as authentic, "spiritualistic" fascism. His fascism could be considered, then, at the same time an "en-deça" or zero degree of nationalism, a form of fascism that was largely intellectual and uncompromisingly literary. For to a greater degree than any of the other literary fascists treated in this work—except perhaps, and for the opposite reasons, Céline—literature is the key to understanding his politics. It is not just the founding element and model of his entire political-spiritualist enterprise, but it is also the ideal he was unwilling to compromise for any politics, even fascist politics.
Maulnier's politics, no matter how extreme, were in fact firmly rooted in classical humanism. His first major work, La Crise est dans l'homme (Paris: Librairie de la Revue Française, 1932), consists of a series of essays whose main purpose is to redefine and defend classical humanism, to give it such a radical, "modern" form that it could be evoked as an alternative to and cure for the repeated political crises and spiritual decadence of modernity. In this text, Maulnier presents himself as a militant culturalist, writing not on behalf of any specific literary or philosophical movement or political ideology, but on behalf of the spirit itself. Because the ultimate origin of the crisis afflicting modern man and society is not political but spiritual, not outside of man but in him, the combat he calls for to defeat an enemy that is not even being recognized as such cannot be that of an army waging war but that of intellectuals "waging thoughts" (8). Before engaging in politics, then, before undertaking specific social or economic analyses of problems and the political actions necessary to resolve them, a reactivation of the mind and a pure form of thinking are necessary in order to educate the self and understand that the real enemy to be fought is first and foremost the enemy of the spirit. Nothing less than the rediscovery of what it means to be human on the deepest spiritual level constitutes the core of the intellectual-political task that was the aim of Maulnier's first book.
As an essential part of this general project of rediscovering "the human," art and literature have to be rediscovered in their turn, and returned to their "true mission," which is, "in a world liberated from the world, to trace a figure of man limited to his eternal traits" (14). This "figure of man" constitutes the key to Maulnier's radical form of humanism. Man in crisis is always man divorced from this ideal figure or type; it is man divided by multiple and contradictory figures, man defined and determined by less than eternal figures. Man in crisis is man reduced to partial figures, figures determined by social, historical, political, or economic forces, man whose future seems to be already determined by material forces outside of his control.
The first step to recovery is to be conscious of the insufficient nature of this future and to revolt against it: "He who fixes his eyes on the future that is being forged and who can discern in it the denatured, monstrous figure of this future brother whom he will have to resemble can react only with an egoism ready to do anything" (17). Such a revolt will supposedly bring about the eventual return of the one, genuine "figure of man." This is what Maulnier calls "a total defense of man," one that only artists and writers can undertake, because only they can deal with and show the way out of a crisis that both "comes from the spirit and threatens the spirit" (18). Anything less than a total defense of man, anything other than a defense that is primarily spiritual and thus that would not be undertaken in an "absolute way without any possible restrictions" (21), would, for Maulnier, only deepen the crisis. The writer or artist who takes on such an absolute defense, rather than the writer who has his writing serve a specific political cause, represents the true political militant, the militant of the spirit.3
Maulnier was a humanist because classical humanism provided him with a total, ordered figure of man that he held was universal and aesthetic, rather than historical and political in nature, a cultural ideal honed and perfected through time and not just created out of the necessities of the moment. Curiously enough, insofar as it is profoundly aesthetic, such a humanism could also be considered authentically national and social in nature, providing a figure or model for the unification of a people on the most profound, interior level of their being:
Genuine humanism moves toward a constructed and ordered figure of man; it constitutes for us an idea of life and a mode of being with things in which relations are harmonious and stable. . . . It renounces the intelligible perfection of philosophers, and it directs its illuminating efforts toward an aesthetic and moral unity, toward a harmony conscious of interior life. . . . It founds our perfection on integral results, it imposes discipline on us, it is national and social, and it gives us our figure only in uniting us with others. (34)
The aesthetic and moral unity of the figure of man proposed by genuine humanism thus becomes the basis and model for authentic nationalism and socialism, even for their fusion in nationalist or even national socialism.
"The humanist schema of our destiny," claims Maulnier, is "more true and alive" than that provided by contemporary society "because it has been freed from a vulgar subjectivity." The humanist schema or aestheticized figure of man in itself transcends all class divisions, which means "that on a certain level of consciousness words like bourgeois and proletariat can be forgotten" (40). Maulnier's notion of humanism, one that is also "beyond common humanism which does not reach the total truth of our essence" (41), thus restores man to himself and provides a model for total man. The "new man" suggested by the classical humanist schema has the decided advantage over the "new man" projected by the "common," that is, subjectivist, humanism of liberal democracy or the materialist "new man" of communism, because it allegedly has all of Western history to support it. It is the oldest, most carefully fashioned and thus universal (spiritual) of all "new men."
Maulnier argues repeatedly that humanism is the only genuine alternative to both Marxist collectivism, which he calls "the barbaric name of a barbarity" (183), and democracy, which "devours man body and soul" (193). He believes that both reduce man to material, economic forces at the expense of his unity and spirituality and thus are equally dangerous. He asserts that "democracy is a collective Caesarism," while "socialism is a collective capitalism," with the only hope of successfully opposing these "monstrous menace[s]" being a complete "intellectual recovery. It is a question of imposing a notion of complete, non-disfigured man, of recognizing the proper place of the individual and society in reality and to restore them ideally in their order, a question of restoring them positively in their unity" (194). The intellectual, spiritual recovery Maulnier is calling for thus cannot take place unless the classical humanist model for man is given priority over all "disfigured" democratic and socialist models. This also means that a form of classical aesthetics should be given priority over all forms of modern politics.
Maulnier's spiritualistic nationalism was French only insomuch as "Frenchness" could be equated with the figure of the universal and the truly human, which, in classical humanist terms, means with Greece. The more a civilization resembled Greece, the more it retained the beauty and truth of Greece, and the less disfigured and the more human it was. Like his mentor, Maurras, Maulnier thus privileged the classical concept of art and literature over all others, but his notion of the classical or total vision of man, and of Greece as the origin of Western civilization, was as much if not more indebted to Nietzsche than it was to the father of the Action Française and Integral Nationalism. His vision of Greece and the aesthetics he associated with it were more Dionysian than Apollonian, an aesthetics of force and violence more than of formal, fashioned, Apollonian beauty.
In his Nietzsche (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), Maulnier treats Nietzsche both as the great modern theorist of classical tragedy and as a supreme tragic figure himself. Nietzsche is tragic (and poetic) in his attempt to "resuscitate the drunkenness of the Greeks, not their moderation," but only as long as he opposes "the morality of affirmation, . . . the only tragic morality, the tragic ideal of purity, . . . a Racinian purity" (47), to the divisions of life. The authentically tragic (French) Nietzsche is "the model tragic thinker in whom passion alters thought, in whom the path from flesh to metaphysics is the shortest. He gives us miraculous access to the precise and fatal point of our being where body and mind seem to be hardly separated at all" (23). And this lack of distance or opposition between the material and the spiritual serves as a model for what in Maulnier's mind is the primary "political" (aesthetic-metaphysical) problem of his time: "It is necessary to restore to metaphysical systems their cruelty: their power of life and death" (24). "It is important to create a world where tragic existence is possible" (55). The seeds for a Nietzschean or "tragic politics" are thus in place.
The tragic (anti-German) Nietzsche is presented by Maulnier as the anti-nationalist thinker par excellence, but his is an antinationalism that represents at the same time a more demanding, more radical, "cruel" form of nationalism, a European nationalism beyond sectarian nationalisms.
Nietzsche no longer recognizes the homeland as anything except a form of suffocation. This European does not search for the means for communion and peace in the destruction of all homelands. He doesn't condemn in homelands their tragic reality, the possibility of fighting, the demand for sacrifice. . . . He doesn't ask them to be less demanding or hard; the new homelands he reserves for men are perhaps even more demanding and hard. (69)
Thus, in Maulnier's reading, which closely resembles that of Drieu la Rochelle in its attack on the restrictive, suffocating spiritual effects of the nation or homeland, Nietzsche's criticism of existing, "common" nationalisms is that they do not demand enough of the nation or its people, that they are too self-contained and self-satisfied in their claims to be homelands. Starkly put, "common nationalisms" are not tragic, not really nationalist enough, because they are still too much under the influence of political forces foreign to the authentic spirituality of man. They are not sufficiently human.
In a manner that recalls Barrès's war against the foreign and the barbarian in the name of the Self, but also Drieu la Rochelle's myth of Europe, for Maulnier, the "superior," or tragic, individual must "occupy his part of the universe without taking on or weighing himself down with foreign values" (70). This helps explain why superior "European man" is at the same time destructive of existing, compromised nationalisms and radically alone: "To destroy national communions is to isolate oneself and not unite oneself with others. . . . European man is tragic man opposed to man linked to and assisted by national cultures: he is man alone" (70-71). The "beyond," as concerns the nation, is thus a state of radical isolation from all immediate, historical and cultural supports and obligations, a radical, total freedom that seems on the surface, as in the case of Barrès's early work, to be diametrically opposed to any concept of nationalism, even the most extreme.
The tragic individual moves toward the destruction of all values, spiritual as well as material, individual as well as collective. This destructive, individualist "nihilism," however, does not constitute an end in itself but rather clears the stage for a radical confrontation of the individual with the irremediable and catastrophic foundation of his being: "Genuine tragedy demands that the world be freed from invented values, that the scene be empty for beings liberated and bound only to themselves, for irremediable acts, unavoidable catastrophes. Nietzschean nihilism is nothing other than a heroic humanism" (82). The more violent and destructive that tragic nihilism becomes, the more heroic and humanist it is considered to be.
Nietzschean "superior man" is beyond good and evil precisely because he is aesthetic and tragic; that is, in Maulnier's terms, unwilling to compromise when it comes to the integrity of passion. According to Maulnier, the truth of classical art and all "great art in general" for Nietzsche is that art is
a mode of expression different from life, more perfect than life whose awkwardness, insignificances, and stammerings it ignores. No one, perhaps, got closer to defining the lively value of classical discipline, which claims to make passion more ardent and more intelligible, not mutilate it or moderate it. A style of life, a classical style consists thus not in restraining life but in maintaining it, by a skillful and severe constraint, at its height and the point of its most expansive intensity. Such a constraint allows for a more exposed, more essential, more violent existence. (169)
Maulnier thus argues that passion, desire, and will are more intense and violent, and more essential, when they are constrained or formed, and that this type of formal constraint and intensification of force constitutes the defining characteristic of the classical. In this sense, the Nietzschean notion of a pure and extreme aesthetics of force can be realized as a maximum of intensity or violence only within the constraints of classical form—the Dionysian realizing itself fully only through the Apollonian.
Nietzsche's own "tragic fall" consists precisely in his having chosen at the end of his life what Maulnier calls primitive barbarism over classicism and civilization, which amounts to having chosen the wrong form of unification and model for the synthesis of force. In this way, he prepared the way for a limited and inferior form of nationalism or fascism, a German National Socialism rather than a truly classical, tragic, French-Greek ultranationalism.
Tempted by a new synthesis, this German mind, unbalanced in its essence, doesn't resist the temptation to reunite in a faisceau the forces that are the enemies of destiny and man and, for tragic combat, magisterially opposed to them. Innocence is now his goal. In this way the image of the great civilized man of the Caesar type tends in the last works of Nietzsche to disappear before barbarian instinct. . . . The barbarian type triumphs, even the idea of civilization is progressively reduced to that of degeneration, . . . the idea of culture is replaced by the idea of corruption, as that of purity is replaced by savagery. A naive romanticism attempts to discover superior human types in primitive societies. (237-38)
This point where Nietzsche retreated from the tragic is also in Maulnier's political schema where National Socialism can be linked to Marxist and fascist forms of socialism. Maulnier's principal criticism of both fascism and communism can thus be seen to be rooted in his critique of the later Nietzsche. He considered neither to be a genuine nationalism—a true fascism or socialism—because neither was classical, that is, tragic or humanist enough—having rejected tradition for myth, rationality and order for primitivism, classical purity for savagery.
Nietzsche's retreat from the aesthetics of tragedy into German romanticism thus also constitutes the fall of classical humanism, and this fall is characterized by a loss of intensity and violence within both the aesthetic and political realms. If, as I have suggested, this is the point where Nietzsche's work can be used to support German National Socialism, then it is clear that an important aspect of Maulnier's subsequent critique of Nazism is that it was not combative, not violent enough, at least not on the spiritual level. Its aesthetics were so "monistic" that they practically destroyed creative force and conflict, reducing the intensity of true combat to an empty, formalist notion of communion.
Humanism is in fact sacrificed for a monistic aesthetics of the world, tragedy for cult, combat for communion, and the authentic tragic ideal, founded on the existence of an irreducible human value in conflict with nature, has been resolved. . . . We have already remarked how German this all is, as is German everything that unbalances two irreconcilable experiences toward synthesis. (254)
Maulnier is unwilling to give up the principle of combat, even for "perfect" communion, unwilling to give up a tragic aesthetics of conflicting intensities for the aesthetic-political resolution of forces. In theory, at least, Maulnier's criticism of fascism was that it did not go far enough, that it accepted romantic mythology for "the authentic tragic ideal," and by being in this way too aestheticist—and thus not "fascist" enough—it failed to awaken the nation and Europe to their authentic tragic destiny.
Maulnier's Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 1936) develops further the notion of tragic humanism presented in his Nietzsche and reveals with more precision how a radical form of classical aesthetics can have a founding, formative role in the elaboration of a nationalist politics "beyond nationalism." In his introduction to Racine, in a double and contradictory strategy, Maulnier both separates Racine from the French nation as an existing political entity and roots him profoundly in "tradition," the ground that supports any true national culture or civilization. Racine's theater, strictly speaking, is not French, then, because it has none of the trappings of the French nation and therefore no value as a nationalist symbol or rallying cry. "It is not possible," Maulnier asserts, "to drape Racine's characters [unlike Corneille's] in any national costume, to give them the hair, or the build, or the profile of a people or a race, to put in their hands flags or emblems" (14). Literature and culture, on the one hand, and nationalist politics and social concerns, on the other, are completely separate things, located on entirely different levels: "Racine is not social. France can consider him as an incomparable success of its culture, not as a stimulant of energy, a national guide, a worker of its unity. If France is one day enslaved, it is not a tragedy of Racine that will give birth to an uprising for independence" (13). In order for Racine's theater to be treated on its own terms, it must in fact be cut off from all explicit trappings of the nation, from all immediate social influences, and from politics as such. On this level, Maulnier's is one of the least directly political approaches to drama imaginable.4
At the same time, Maulnier asserts, Racine is also the most profoundly nationalist of writers, the best representative of the nation, "the purest of our writers,... a national genius" (25). Maulnier's Racine constitutes his attempt to save Racine, French classicism, and thus a certain idea of France, from being classified as formalist, aestheticist, or abstract; that is, from being treated as irrelevant to modernity and its political and cultural crises. Maulnier criticizes what he calls the "stupid worshipers of French clarity and French order" for having "done the greatest harm to France, the greatest harm to the spirit" by equating what he calls a "mutilated, abstract, formal classicism" with France and thus acknowledging that French civilization was and is "incapable of authentic experience and creative virtue" (23-24). Above all, he wants to put an end to the "legend of an Apollonian France" and replace it with that of a "Racinian France." His notion of the "new Racinian man" is critical of formalist classicism but remains nevertheless profoundly classical, with authentic classicism defined as the moment when "the greatest vital fervor and the supreme blossoming of creative energies coincide with the triumph of formal perfection" (24).
Maulnier's analysis of Racinian tragedy sheds much light on why he felt it was necessary to pursue the question of the nation and of the national culture "beyond nationalism." For beyond the geographic, political, and cultural limitations of France lies the truth of France and all other European nations: Greece. Beyond the exterior trappings of French culture, French society, and the French people, can be found (Western) civilization and Man as such. Ultimately Racine is considered a national genius, the purest, example of French genius because he is not French but "Greek": "Faced with the simplicity of Racine, one should not think of how French he is but how Greek he is" (155). This means that no nationalism that defines itself entirely in terms of existing nationalist practices, myths, institutions, or values can do any better than repeat the mistakes of those who reduce French classicism completely to formal order and the law of the three unities and thus give a truncated version of the nation and of man. Maulnier the literary-critic and Maulnier the political-theorist demanded something more from both literature and politics, from both classicism and nationalism.
What Maulnier's aesthetics demand and what Racine provides him with is nothing less than a model for the perfect, dynamic unity of form and force, of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, of "inspiration and technique, . . . the delirium of creative energy and the order instituted by the intelligence" (20). Classicism in this sense is a radical aesthetics of force, an uncompromising, delirious plunge into the abyss of madness, excess, instinct, and pure energy, which at the same time is lucid and rigorous self-consciousness, order, and mastery. Classicism is the extreme culmination of civilization, the telos or ultimate destiny of all cultures, which is at the same time a return to the origin, to being in itself before it is separated, divided, dispersed, an origin where "fervor and the formal principle, from their birth, . . . form each other, penetrate each other, coincide with each other." Classicism constitutes an origin presided over by a classical god who is simultaneously "an invigorated, humanized Apollo, present at the very source of energies, desires, lyricism, and a Dionysus who, during orgies themselves, knows his form and law" (23). The force, energy, or instinct of classicism is what Maulnier calls a "civilized instinct" (26), a force that has realized its full intensity by being formed.
The model of an ideal tragic culture, as we have seen, is Greek culture, the culture of "the only people in the world that was naturally and instinctively poetic," a people who had "the secret of living its poetry, the secret of a constant and diffuse poetry, qualifying and transfiguring its daily life" (156). In Maulnier's Nietzschean sense, the highest, the absolute political calling of a people is thus to become a people of art. But a people of art is not, however, a people of aesthetic pleasure, tranquil harmony, or naive innocence. A people of art is first and foremost a people of force, of poetic possession in the mystical or demonic sense of the term:
Poetry is one of the essential rites in the magic of an art that has as its object the creation of fervor. It is tragic animation itself, the way of the possession that tragedy maintains on the spectator, the instrument of the famous catharsis, which is not a moral purification of the passions but the movement by which the subject is rid of itself. (162)
The individual subject is rid of itself, of course, by being drawn into and possessed by the collective subject of delirium. The highest, "most civilized" form of poetry is also the most violent, destructive, and deadly form.
Racinian tragedy, the embodiment of the highest values of civilization, is thus necessarily bloody: "The poetry of Racine is never where fatality, blood, and suffering are not; it is not pure of cruelty" (165). "Racine knows only one way, it is the way of the knife. . . . He knows only the place of the truly fatal vein. . . . He leads his heroes to the temple, not to be absolved but to be slaughtered" (167-68). Poetic or tragic man, man at his most civilized, then, is not a "man-for-life but a man-for-death" (167). At the source of the poetic is the violence of the loss of self, of death, the ultimate fatality from which no one escapes. And it is not just tragic poetry, the highest form of poetry, that is rooted in such violence and in the radical dispossession of self in the name of poetic possession, and thus a higher, poeticized form of self-knowledge. In principle, all authentic poetry is violent, for a poetry devoid of cruelty and violence is an abstract, formalist, aestheticist poetry, a nonpoetic poetry. A people and a culture without violence are thus also a people and a culture without poetry. All authentic, "tragic" politics must also possess the supreme poetic virtue of violence and be the expression of being at its ultimate limits, of being-for-death.
But if violence is essential to the poetic, it alone cannot determine it. The character who is subjected to violence must remain conscious of his ordeal, for "lucidity is also one of the sovereign characteristics of Racinian humanity. There is not one character of Racine in whom violence and suffering abolish even for a single instant the acuity of his intellectual awareness" (177). What attracts Maulnier to Racine is precisely the fusion of violence and lucidity, the ultimate expression of force and poetic form, neither existing without the other: "The heroes of Racine are lucid only in violence; and they are poetic only in violence" (182). Racine's "exceptionally hard and brutal art, unique in the period for its savagery" (182), consists in fact of a perfect fusion of extremes: of the original, barbaric violence of existence, on the one hand, and of the most "civilized," lucid experience of such violence, on the other.
The goal of tragic art is not to moderate the brutality or savagery of these violent forces but rather to give them form, and to allow them to give form to themselves. The "purity" of Racine's art is "not just of art and style and form, but of man given over to the greatest and most dangerous sentiments, without anything changing their violence or composing an equilibrium. No artist ever established such an exact coincidence of being and its fundamental forces" (216). Such a coincidence of being and force, form and delirium, the civilized and the barbaric, thus constitutes the paradoxical purity of art—its highest, most uncompromising form. The coincidence of extreme force and perfect form is thus the essence of the poetic work itself, but it is also the essence of a new type of humanity, "the totally new and totally living humanity which comes out of [Racine's] work" (270). Racinian man thus represents a poetic, tragic, but not aestheticized humanity, a humanity that has been fashioned through the lucid confrontation with its own origin and limits, with the savage and destructive forces that are nevertheless productive. The question that underlies all of Maulnier's political essays is how society can be reconstructed in terms of these same poetic-tragic principles and violent forces.5
The Greek or Nietzschean Racine in this way constitutes a beginning, a point of departure, for Maulnier's pursuit of a nationalism beyond nationalism and a theory and practice of literature that would embody and serve as a model for such an ultranationalist, absolute, spiritualistic politics. In his Introduction à la poésie française (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), a text which was first published as a series of articles in Je suis partout but which seems on the surface to be far removed from the partisan and extremist politics of the late 1930s, Maulnier elaborated a vigorous defense and illustration of French poetry, both of what makes it truly French and what makes it truly poetic. The text is an extended polemic against French romanticism and a defense of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, but it also constitutes a defense of all poetic theories and practices that attack and attempt to destroy the prevailing formalist aesthetics and poetic practices of their time. In fact, it even undertakes in its treatment of the modern period a vigorous defense of surrealism in the name of the poetic-cultural ideal of the fusion of classical form and revolutionary violence.
Even though Maulnier severely criticizes its formalist limitations, surrealism also serves as the model of an authentic revolutionary poetic movement, a violent, combative movement against the "common rationality" that limits poetry to "the materials supplied by the ordinary transparent consciousness." In this way it points to "a procedure of the spirit which belongs to poetic activity of all times," which means that "every poetic work whatsoever can in a certain sense be called surrealist" (19). But if every authentic poetic work can be called surrealist in its capacity to go beyond the transparent and the known, surrealism as such limits itself by misunderstanding the higher form of poetic rationality onto which its own procedures open. "The weakness of surrealism was not just to forget everything rational that subsists in the hidden universe in which it believes it is fleeing rationalism, but also to forget everything miraculous which subsists in the universe of clarity" (17). Just as the constraints imposed by classicism made possible the actualization of violent intensities and were their expression, so the rational is considered the most "miraculous" (perhaps even, the most surreal) element of the poetic universe, present only when rationalism as such has been left behind.
As was the case in his analysis of Racine, Maulnier first separates poetry from the exterior, material manifestations of the French people and nation, and from the physical and geographic characteristics of France. And in this, France and French poetry are unique:
If the poetry of foreign peoples can appear as the very song of these people,. . . French poetry is completely separated from the biological work of France; it is the skillful utilization of the most elaborated material of our culture. English or German poetry encompasses England or Germany, while French poetry ignores France, shows itself incapable of successfully making use of French tradition, French legends, French concerns, the geniuses of French soil. (32)
When it comes to poetry and the spiritual in general, biology and geography, blood and soil are certainly not determining factors. The vocation of French poetry is more spiritual than that of other countries, for unlike other poetries, which are expressions of the people, its land and history, "French poetry is first of all poetry, . . . its nature is to be essentially literary" (33). And this militant nationalist cannot be any more explicit as to what being essentially literary means: "The homeland of French poetry is less France than literature" (33). Nation, homeland, and even tradition and culture in their narrow nationalist sense, are irrelevant terms for the study of French poetry. What is most French about it is that it is so little French and so completely literary, at least on the surface.
Maulnier argues that, unlike other countries, and especially (Nazi) Germany, France "has never established links between its historical, popular, legendary traditions and its poetic tradition." This results in the radical separation of political manifestations and poetic expression: "Nothing is more prosaic than a French political ceremony. Nothing is more foreign to French life than a French poem" (35). This radical separation is the sign of the pure spirituality of the poetic in France, and thus of its superiority over other poetic traditions. But it also distinguishes French poetics and politics from the poetic-political manifestations of Nazi Germany (and fascist Italy), an aestheticizing or poeticizing of the political that Maulnier considers inferior to the prosaic French version of politics, just as he considers German poetry to be inferior to French poetry. In other words, a poetry too closely linked to historical events, specific national institutions and customs, and popular myths not only is a degraded form of poetry, but it also produces a degraded form of tradition, history, popular expression, and politics. Politics and poetry both suffer from their direct linkage, or from the determination of one by the other, from the explicit poeticizing of the political and the dogmatic politicizing of the poetic.
Maulnier sees the history of French poetry as the movement toward an ever-increasing immateriality, a continual purging of all exterior, non-poetic elements, and this process culminates in the manifestation of the true French national-poetic identity: "French poetry, literary and stark from the moment it began to merit the name French poetry, throughout the centuries has never stopped aiming at becoming more and more literary and stark" (44). For "the most literary people in the world" (43), to be poetic without compromise and to be French without compromise are parallel activities; each consists of a process of stripping away the inessential trappings of poetry and politics and purifying the essential spiritual core of the people. The poetic in its purest form transforms everything within its reach: "The effort of French poetry toward a pure poetry is not the effort to deprive the poem of all content other than poetry, which would have no sense, but to give the poem the power to act poetically on the totality of its content" (49). What ultimately defines a poem as authentically poetic is its ability to act poetically without exterior restraints, to transform the totality of its parts, no matter how apoetic or antipoetic, into integral components of the poem. What defines a people is exactly the same capacity for a people to act as itself and transform the totality of its history, experiences, and even the foreign elements within it into what could be called a cultural or political poem. The poetic and the national, the making of a poem and the making of a people, are homologous acts, and in this way national identity, tradition, and culture are reintroduced into the question of the poetic at its very foundation. Maulnier, the champion of a pure poetry is at the same time Maulnier the ultranationalist, advocate of a nationalism beyond nationalism, of a nationalism that takes the form of a poetic-political act consisting of the total transformation and rebirth of a profoundly literary people.
Maulnier's complicated relation to fascism can be best understood in terms of the aesthetic principles that are at the heart of his radical concept of nationalism and that are derived from his notion of the total poetic act. For example, his collection of political essays entitled Mythes socialistes (Paris: Gallimard, 1936) consists of an extended critique of both socialism and totalitarian nationalist ideologies for being "barbarian"—that is, non-Greek, nonpoetic—and for demanding that intellectual and artistic productions be determined and controlled by material and political concerns. No matter whether it is done in the name of an ideology of the left or of the right, Maulnier denounced the restrictions imposed on the freedom of the mind as the source of all enslavement: "From the enslavement of thought to the enslavement of man, the distance is quickly breached" (6). His attacks were especially aimed at the Soviet Union and at all socialist myths that brought about the "fall of the spirit" (10) by assigning thought the task primarily of "serving primitive masses, crowds, political parties, myths, nations" (12). But Maulnier also severely criticized fascism and National Socialism for their populist characteristics and use of myth, thus linking them directly to communism and the destruction of the spirit.
Maulnier considered populism to be the most degraded form of humanism, the form institutionalized in modernity by democracy. And insofar as they were populist, he attacked Italian fascism and German National Socialism for representing the continuation rather than the reversal or destruction of democracy:
The Italian fascist and German racist movements, which have been too often represented as anti-democratic reactions, are not exempt from certain dangerous affinities with democracy. I mean by that the call they make to the masses, by the respect in which they hold the values revered by the masses, by the concern the leaders have to mix with the masses and let themselves be carried off by them. Hitler is less a leader than a collective myth, the symbol of a community of the spirit and of dreams, a representative man in whom the German crowds recognize their incarnation—fascism and racism representing the most natural, extreme consequences of democracy, the passage from individualist parliamentary and liberal democracy to an authoritarian, religious, total, and devouring collectivism. (56)
Maulnier never deviated from this criticism of Italian fascism and German National Socialism, which is based on his fundamental distrust of the collective will, whether it manifested itself spontaneously or was imposed through the political manipulation of the symbolic manifestations of community and of "representative man." He felt that any political figure or principle originating in or closely associated with the masses represented in fact an extension of democracy and had collectivist, totalitarian, antispiritual (antipoetic) implications identical to those of Marxist forms of socialism.
The renewal of the nation and its people, the national revolution, "has to have its principle and its center located beyond [nationalist collectivism]" (57) in the hierarchies formed by the intellect. It should be led by an aristocracy of independent thinkers, like Maulnier himself, rather than follow or be associated with the passions of the crowd. The problem with all forms of political collectivism, he felt, with collectivisms of the right as well as the left, was that "in order to achieve the complete communion dreamed of by collectivism,. . . because one cannot obtain [it] by raising up the masses, it is necessary, whether one wants to or not, to bring art down in order to accomplish it" (92). To bring art (the spiritual) down to the level of the collectivity, however, was the greatest aesthetic and political sin. Maulnier always condemned any collectivism that moved in the direction of this leveling process for being too materialist—that is, too "democratic"—whether the collective was fascist or socialist in form and whether the collectivity was based on class, race, or even the cultural integrity of a people or nation. The "common" fascist aestheticizing of politics was thus too much of a politicization of art for Maulnier, a utilization of art for political purposes that seriously diminished the scope and effects of both art and politics.
According to Maulnier, once the poetic, the ultimate form of the spiritual, has been established in itself and on its own terms apart from historical-political determinations, it does not "ignore the world but dominate^] it" from above or "beyond" (153). This means that writers and artists should resist what Maulnier considered the "easier" choice of direct political commitments and actions (154) in order to develop the resources of the spirit by artistic creation, and in this way act "politically" in a much more complicated and fundamental, poetic way. "It is good from time to time to remind those who forget, that is by their aesthetic and literary productions, not by their juridical and social natures, that civilizations survive and fight against time" (149). There is a fundamental element of political resistance built into Maulnier's position on literature and culture: it is the resistance of art to its own political determination or to its being used to serve specific political ends, whether they be ends determined by democracy, socialism, or fascism. In the name of nothing less than the "survival of civilization," the intellectual and the artist are required to serve art and ideas before politics and in this way bring about a true, profound spiritual revolution, not just an economic or sociopolitical revolution that would touch only the "surface" levels of society.
This does not mean that Maulnier had nothing to say about economics, politics, and social issues. On the contrary, what the priority and privilege he assigned to the spiritual allowed him to do was to interpret, judge, and criticize contending economic and political theories from an allegedly higher perspective, and especially to point out where they failed in the ultimate task of defending and advancing authentic values. In Au-delà du nationalisme (1938), Maulnier insisted on the necessity of going beyond not only traditional forms of nationalism or the "cult of the nation," which most often served as nothing more than a "refuge, a mystificatory outburst, or, still worse, a veritable diversion" from real social and political problems and the threat of war (7), but also going beyond nationalism in its "revolutionary," that is, fascist and National-Socialist, forms. Maulnier had particularly harsh things to say about the political expressions of nationalism in Italy and Germany, which he basically considered to be too emotive and unreflective to be supported, signs of the weakness of thought and of the spirit, rather than of its strength and development:
The impotency of thought before the real and actual destiny of men has had the result that men, turning away from thought, looked to empirical pragmatism and mysticism for the way to resolve the problems before which their intelligence left them without weapons. The recourse to Action, Race, Blood, to the predestined Leader, to the superior mission of a people, the entire suspect paraphernalia of modern nationalism is nothing but a substitute for failing intelligence, the cry of man in darkness to regain mastery in a world where reason is powerless to guide him. (19)
All the signs of the unity of a people or nation, all the emotive devices used in the process of national identification of a people with its leader and through him with itself, were treated by Maulnier as symptoms of deficiencies within fascism and National Socialism, as emotional, irrational substitutes for true, rational, organic cultural unity.
Maulnier claimed that his spiritualistic view of nationalism was rooted in the deepest levels of history, in what remains historical after surface events have run their course. In this sense, only what negates and transcends history and politics in the usual sense of the terms could be considered truly historical and political: "The genuine historical event is the one that renders obsolete the entire state of things that preceded it. From this point of view, the political transformation of a people achieves its full historical value only to the extent that it goes beyond politics itself" (21). And what goes beyond politics itself, what lasts, is what is inscribed in the mind, what changes the way men think about what occurs in history:
The only forms of society truly lasting are those which, beyond the powerful and passing waves of anger, of fear, . . . place their foundations in the substance itself of minds. The nationalist movements of our time, are they only spasms of national sensibility and the epics of adventurous dictators? Are they the beginnings of a new social era? (21-22)
The question Maulnier asks at the start of Au-delà du nationalisme is thus whether fascism and National Socialism have this capacity to do more than affect the surface of history, whether they have the intellectual (not emotional or political) force to go beyond the strictly historical and political realms and change the way men think about themselves and their society, and, as a result, radically change the way they live.
Italian fascism and German National Socialism were destined to fail, Maulnier decided, not in spite of but precisely because of their "astonishing affective power," which brought about the "sentimental reconciliation of classes and as a result the sentimental unity of the nation." No matter how powerful the immediate emotive effects produced by fascist celebrations of unity, they were of short duration, given that sentiment alone could not ever have a profound, transformative effect on the social structure (37). His criticism of this aspect of all totalitarian neonationalisms (and implicitly of the literary fascism of many of his friends and associates) was thus severe and relentless.6
At the same time, the nationalist doctrine or consciousness that he felt had been lacking in all nationalisms up to that point, and that he had attempted to provide in all his texts from this period, cannot be considered, strictly speaking, antifascist either. In their details, he considered the "reforms of National Socialism and fascism often to be perfectly valuable in themselves, . . . applied to the most critical points of contemporary society" (33). They were simply not sufficient, for they lacked a "general theory of labor in economic life and of the relations of economic life with the totality of collective life" (34), a cultural totality that encompassed and determined both the economic and the political levels of society. In his opinion, National Socialism and fascism were not rigorous enough and did not go far enough in pursuing their political ends, for they stopped short of a total vision and limited themselves to attempting to resolve the more practical problems of social existence and specific social, economic, and political conflicts. Maulnier thus considered their totalitarianism, no matter how extreme and ruthless, to be limited, not intellectually coherent, and in this specific sense, not sufficiently, not spiritually, fascist.
Whatever class allegiances individuals might have, however much they might have been formed by their economic situation and the values inherent in it, Maulnier claimed they always had a more basic, more complete, more immediate and natural allegiance to their national community: "Man adheres to the community, he participates in its historical duration not by 'the product of the material givens of the life of this community' alone, but by a adherence that one could call biological, by a total commitment of his personality, by a vital influence as natural as the penetration of its roots in the soil is for the plant" (60). Even for the most literary and spiritualistic of nationalists, then, as for culturalist anti-Semites such as Maurras, Barrès, Brasillach, and even for absolute "poeticist" racists such as Céline and Rebatet, the original national community was a natural, "biological" unity that preexisted the individual and all social divisions. It was the principle to which Maulnier felt society had to return in order to overcome the divisiveness of liberalism, capitalism, and parliamentary democracy.
In the essays from this collection, Maulnier constantly repeated that human society was not in its essence economic and political but "biological," by which he meant a society "constituted in the course of centuries by the intimate and inextricable collaboration of all of the forces of life" (68). No matter how divided, any society retained its original and "almost invincible force," that of "a common land, blood, and language" (62). Against Marxism, Maulnier will thus constantly evoke this "natural principle," which is the key principle he shared with the neonationalisms he criticized elsewhere, even if, as in the case of the other literary fascists studied, his notion of the true nature of a people was more culturally than racially determined. In a choice among democracy, Marxism, and fascism in terms of the nature of society, he was clearly more on the side of fascism, and his purpose was to provide a more rational and philosophically defensible basis for fascism, for a profoundly culturalist form of fascism beyond traditional nationalisms and existing fascisms and National Socialisms.
The meaning and function of the "biological" needs to be investigated further in order to understand better both what links Maulnier to political forms of fascism and what separates him form them. He clearly felt that the only way to achieve a nationalism beyond nationalism was through a "national revolution," a term in fact that he considered redundant, for all true nationalisms were by définition revolutionary—that is, antidemocratic, anticapitalist—and all true revolutions were nationalist. This was what Maulnier once again called "a fundamental biological fact":
Every revolution that brings along with it progress and the surpassing of the existing mode of life is national by the same necessity that every organized life is stronger than its own metamorphoses. . . . Every valuable revolution will thus be "national" because the national community is the organized social mode of life in the West and as a result the real producer of the dialectical transformations of history. No life progresses by disassociation. (226)
Thus, even if he was most often critical of the fundamental role given to the myths of soil, blood, and race in fascism and National Socialism, it is clear that the national revolution he proposed was at the same time also an extension or radical spiritualization of basic fascist and National Socialist principles, rooted in the myths of blood and soil, not their negation. What fascist countries had accomplished was a totalitarian politicizing of aesthetics and culture; what he advocated was a totally autonomous aestheticizing of politics, with the self-determination of culture as the origin and end of politics.7
In "Il faut refaire un nationalisme en dépit de la nation," Maulnier anticipated the problem that a proponent of the National Revolution would have in the case of war: he could neither be completely for nor against his nation. In view of the alleged corrupt, decadent nature of the Popular Front government and of parliamentary democracy in general, the true nationalist could not hope for victory because "a war in which the victory of France would also be a victory of its repugnant allies would in a short time efface from the earth the most precious values of human civilization, would inevitably efface, in a return shock, France itself. . . . A victory of France risks being a defeat for the human species" (Combat, no. 14 [April 1937]). At the same time, a nationalist could never hope for the victory of the enemies of the nation, no matter how miserable the present state of the nation. The only solution was to act to prevent the outbreak of war and, as the title of the essay indicates, be a "nationalist in spite of the nation, and, so to speak, against it," having a "revolutionary attitude, in the most complete, the most demanding, and the most brutal sense of the word," attempting at all times to do nothing less than "remake France."
In 1938, Maulnier wrote two articles for Combat that are crucial for understanding his position after the defeat and during the Occupation: "Notes sur l'antisémitisme" (no. 26 [June 1938]) and "Notes sur le fascisme" (no. 30 [December, 1938]). Both can be seen as responses to Brasillach and the dominant tendencies of Je suis partout of this period, especially the first article, which is practically a point-by-point response to Brasillach's contribution to the special issue on the Jews published in April 1938. Not wanting to break totally with Brasillach and Je suis partout, Maulnier began his article on anti-Semitism by making a distinction between "philosophical" and "political" anti-Semitism, claiming that to condemn the first was not necessarily to condemn the second, for even if the philosophical premises of anti-Semitism were invalid, even if the Jews were not "really a power of corruption and enslavement," its political effects were for the most part positive, and thus it could still be defended on nationalist grounds. Anti-Semitism was, Maulnier argued, "a good method for crystallizing revolutionary tendencies."
In justifying anti-Semitism because it had always existed, the anti-Semite was relying on myth to support his beliefs and actions, claimed Maulnier, and he argued that it was necessary to separate the reality behind the myth from the myth itself: "The absurdity of anti-Semitism begins at the point where the anti-Semite begins to attribute to a particular people, a particular race, or a particular spirit the innumerable products of real evolution and history, whether fortunate or unfortunate, and the reason for the evils of humanity." The other side of the myth was the assumption or fear that the non-Jew—it should be noted that Maulnier did not use the term "Aryan"—is always inferior to the Jew and therefore always duped by him: "The non-Jew would thus everywhere and always be destined in the presence of the Jew, to irremediable defeat and faced with Jews he would have only one resource: to profit from their small numbers and eliminate them." Maulnier attacked both the myth of the Jewish people as "a demonic people . . . marching toward the conquest of the world," and the corresponding myth of the "inferiority of the non-Jew," on the general principle that all myths had to be destroyed, especially if they had a long history. Maulnier thus presented himself once again in this article as a ferocious opponent of nationalist myths in general, and therefore of the myth of anti-Semitism, of anti-Semitism as a myth, in particular. True culture had to be based on rational, truly spiritual principles and have nothing to do with such myths.
Like Brasillach and others, however, Maulnier did acknowledge the possibility of an "anti-Semitism of reason" that would not depend on myth, that would not assume that any people was demonic or inferior by nature. It would find, however, he claimed, that in Western societies Jewish minorities possessed a power and influence out of proportion to their numbers, and that they had not been assimilated into the societies they dominated from the outside. "Separated from myths, anti-Semitism finds its valid foundations in two particular traits which distinguish the Jewish element: its ever-increasing power, its irreducible heterogeneity."
Because most anti-Semitism was rooted in myth and intent only on eliminating Jews from positions of power, given that they were projected to be the source of all evil, it " [left] in place the political organization and social structure while partially changing the masters. It [was] therefore the mask of a reformism that [was] as violent as it [was] ineffective." Anti-Semitism was nonrevolutionary or even antirevolutionary and thus in no way was a proper basis for the National Revolution, whose unique goal should be "the suppression of the democratic state and the suppression of mercantile society," which were the bases of the power of Jewish and other financiers. Maulnier thus took what he considered to be a "moderate," "enlightened" position on anti-Semitism in the name of a more radical, revolutionary form of nationalism, and he tried to keep a distance from the anti-Semitic fanatics at le suis partout, such as Rebatet—who also, it should be recalled, claimed to be rational and restrained in their anti-Semitism. He sought to locate the "Jewish question" within, rather than as, the basis for his general political position and therefore criticized any form of fascism—any proposed National Revolution that was rooted directly in the myth of race and a biologically determined people—for being reformist rather than truly revolutionary.
In "Notes sur le 'Fascisme,' " Maulnier attacked the Nazi leaders for giving anti-Semitism and fascism a bad name and for furnishing arguments to antifascists because of their violent persecution of the Jews. After separating Maulnier once again from Nazi racist policies, the article constituted a checklist of what Maulnier supported and could not support in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. It thus was a condensed statement of the kind of fascism Maulnier advocated. He acknowledged in it that he agreed with and admired the following reforms undertaken by "fascist" authorities:
Totalitarian regimes have given the state, as a political instrument, the servant of national destiny, an extraordinary efficacy. They have given . . . to the proletariat an organic participation in community life. They have invented an economic technique which, in spite of its imperfections,. . . has beaten capitalism . . . in the domain of productivity. They have invented a social morality in many respects very superior to the "morality" of democratic states.
These great successes of fascist regimes in the economic, political, and "moral" realms were, Maulnier argued, signs of the "historical value" of fascism, and they made the pillaging of Jewish stores and other injustices, what he called "certain gratuitous absurdities and truly excessive tyrannies," only the "minuscule foam of the waves of history" to which not too much attention had to be paid.
The problem, however, was that not only the enemies of fascism but most of the fascist countries as well were directing a great deal of attention to such "foam" and neglecting the principles that Maulnier argued would make fascism a lasting phenomenon. The fascist countries had failed "to construct values equal to their historical task." In burning books that they considered were opposed to their ideology, Maulnier claimed, the authoritarian regimes "condemn to death that very ideology" that in order to develop had to pass by way of "confrontation, doubt, contradiction"; that is, by conflict with adversaries and their ideas. A fascism that had "declared itself the enemy of intelligence" and proclaimed that "the forces of instinct and violence make history" advocated a false and dangerous path. Fascist countries, each of which claimed to be the premier country in the world, each of which put military values first and tended to organize society according to military structures rather than cultural values, manifested what he called "an infantile barbarism." He thus accused the fascist countries, just as he had accused the later Nietzsche, of falling back into barbarism. Maulnier prefered what could be called a "civilized" form of authoritarianism or fascism—a civilized barbarism?—a reasonable anti-Semitism, an authoritarian state in which the individual was not enslaved by the community, and which had an organized, centralized government that was the expression of the nation as the product of civilization, as an organic, cultural, rather than a strictly political, totality. As Germany and Italy tended toward becoming (assuming they had not already become) "barbaric societies," Maulnier demanded that France not imitate them but become again what it had been in the past and was always destined to be: a true (Greek) civilization.
Maulnier boasted in the preface to La France, la guerre et la paix (Lyon: Lardanchet, 1942), a collection of essays originally written from 1939 to 1942, that these essays revealed that his fundamental principles were the same before and after the defeat, that historical events had not made him change his political position in any important way. His principal argument in the essays was that France had to develop its own path and rebuild itself once again outside and beyond both "democratic and totalitarian myths" (9). Without claiming that the defeat was a good thing for France, Maulnier did accept the general Vichy political line that it was necessary to take advantage of the defeat, because it did have the merit of "displaying the evil [democracy] in full light and chasing from power those who thought only of supporting it or masking it. . . . On this condition alone, the revolution being undertaken can be brought to term" (94-95). Like Maurras, he pretended that even while occupied France would be able "to create its own future, and not receive it from the hands of foreigners," the only way for France to save itself was "to continue to be" (99). The continued existence of the nation (under Pétain) was the fundamental principle he supported and in terms of which he continued to argue for a national revolution. "Neither fascist nor democratic, neither authoritarian nor liberal, neither racist nor anti-racist" (158), France was to be left to itself, to be, in the terms of Maurras, "la seule France."
Violence et conscience (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), a collection of essays written in 1942 and 1943, consists of an extended diatribe against capitalism, which Maulnier considered to be the principal enemy and destroyer of the arts and therefore of the national community. Not only did "capitalism cut all the channels that had . . . carried on the flourishing of arts and letters,. . . the life [literally, la sève, sap] of the community," but while it was accomplishing this cultural devastation, it also claimed to be the unique support of civilization and accused its antidemocratic opponents of being "the adversaries of civilization" (18). This resulted in " 'spiritual values' being embodied in the most materialist regime that ever existed" (19), and in their being cut off from their authentic spiritualist base. It also meant that the spiritual victims of capitalism—thinkers, artists, and writers—mistakenly rallied to support it, as the capitalist system continued to claim for itself the very values it was in reality destroying (21). To wage a spiritual revolution was to wage the only truly nationalist-socialist revolution, and the only true victory that could come out of the war, therefore, would be "the victory of human consciousness over the powers that were unleashed by a non-dominated social universe." Anything else would constitute only "the victory of one destructive element over the others in the midst of a unique process of destruction," which would be "a victory without historical value" (45).
Neither pro-German, nor pro-Russian, nor pro-American, nor pro-English, but "pro-human," Maulnier presented himself during the war and Occupation as occupying a transcendent humanist position: "There is only one way to make history. It is to make human consciousness and will present and sovereign where Destiny rules. It is to humanize history, to make it human" (48). Specifically, it is to call for the "liquidation of capitalism,... the abolishment of the capitalist structure society imposes on us as a historical necessity" (59). It was also to work toward "saving the values of civilization . . . by separating them from a rotting economic structure, . . . saving authority and property by cutting them off from capitalism" (60). The human, manifested in what Maulnier called a "superior historical consciousness" (59), clearly was not on the side of either capitalism or liberal democracy. At the same time, it did have something, though not everything, in common with fascism; namely, its "opposition to proletarian Marxism . . . and the will to national power" (94). Maulnier was still trying to save something fundamental in fascism, something that none of the various forms of fascism had ever realized but that he continued to insist on: fascism with a human face, fascism as a privileged, total form of humanism, the complete, modern realization of true classical civilization.
The complicated strategy of distancing himself from an ideology that he, on a deeper level and in its ultimate, spiritualistic form, supported, must have effectively succeeded in disguising the nature of his political convictions, for Maulnier felt confident enough in 1946 to publish one final collection of essays from the period of the Occupation. In his introduction to the collection, he characterized his writing from that period as "an act of opposition"(Arrière-Pensées [Paris: La Table Ronde, 1946], 5). But it seems fair to ask, Opposition to what? At the very least, Maulnier's "opposition" constituted a defense of Pétain's decision to sign an armistice in 1940 and collaborate actively with Hitler, as well as an implicit attack on all those who wanted to continue the war in order to defeat Nazi Germany and liberate France by force. But as other essays clearly show, his opposition was also toward those hard-line fascist collaborators whose criticism of and hatred for democracy—which were at least for a time close to his own criticisms—led them eventually to what he characterized as an antinationalist position. "It is in this way that a number of French slipped, almost without knowing it, from the criticism of democracy to anti-democratic passion, and from anti-democratic passion to anti-nationalist passion" ("Contribution à la psychanalyse de ce temps" [November 1943], 63).
Maulnier attacked without naming them militant French fascists, such as Rebatet, who made of the unhappy state of France after its defeat the sign of the great victory of their fascist ideas: "The defeat of France was first of all the defeat of the regime they detested, and without knowing it, their hatred was already directed at France itself, guilty of having been governed by such a regime. France was perishing; they were triumphant (61-62). He still advocated total opposition to democracy, but warned that it should never become too passionate or too triumphant, for if it did, it would pass quickly into opposition to the nation itself, even if it was under the banner of a national socialism. If Drieu la Rochelle constantly criticized fascism for not being European enough, Maulnier criticized it in this way for not being nationalist enough. The differences between them on this precise issue had to do with how each defined the spiritual and what each meant by a cultural, literary-aesthetic community "beyond nationalism." But in no way did their often pointed critiques of the limitations of various fascisms make either less of a fascist. Rather, their views made them demand more from fascism than fascism could ever possibly give.
The "clandestine opposition" Maulnier expressed in his essays during the Occupation was aimed primarily at anything that threatened to limit or destroy French culture, what he—like Barrès, Maurras, and all of the literary fascists treated in this book—considered the essence and ultimate truth of France itself.
Other nations can have, as the principle of their unity, their territory, the form of their work, and, at very least, the relative homogeneity of their blood. Open to numerous invasions, dedicated to very diverse activities, born of ethnically disparate elements, France molded itself into a unique substance only by the slow work of history. It is a nation forged by the hands of man. French civilization has been one of the principal means by which the French nation was made; and the latter is obliged to the first by a debt that cannot be canceled. ("France, fille des arts. . ." [January 1942], 166)
As much as such a position showed Maulnier's opposition to the control of the arts by the fascist state and to censorship based on ideology or racist principles, as much as it might make him appear "liberal" when compared with more politically militant fascists and anti-Semites such as Rebatet, his notion that France was born of the arts and that it was the guardian of civilization and spiritual values in their most developed form did not in any way separate him from the antidemocratic intellectuals and writers of the extreme, fascist right. This was the camp of the literary fascists with whom he had openly collaborated before the defeat and with whom he then collaborated clandestinely and indirectly during the Occupation, even if was by attempting to "correct" and "purify" their nationalism, their anti-Semitism, and their fascism, and to make them even more aesthetic and spiritual.8
Maulnier's ideology of culture, or what could be called his national culturalism, should be considered, as he himself repeatedly affirmed, the basis for an extreme, ultranationalist position, for what Sternhell rightly calls a spiritualistic form of fascism. It was not the fascism of direct collaborators but of someone who attempted both to stand above the politics of the left and the right and to direct the nation and nationalist politics toward the extremist, antidemocratic culturalist position he derived from a radical, Nietzschean form of classical humanism. Maulnier's aesthetics, which were the foundation for an ultranationalist politics, thus represented one of the most uncompromising, rigorous, intellectual forms of literary fascism, a literary fascism beyond fascism. If this made it the "purest form" of fascism, as Sternhell argues, it was because its "purity" was a function of classical aesthetic principles and poetic autonomy. For authentic poetry is already in itself the ideal the political ought to and yet cannot ever achieve: a total, poetic transformation of the material into the spiritual. In this way, Maulnier, of all the literary fascists, most completely elaborated the ideal of an uncompromising, totalitarian form of poetic spirituality that was characteristic of the work of French literary fascists in general and that was the ultimate foundation and model for their politics.