Afterword
Literary Fascism and the Case of Paul de Man
DEMONIZING fascist writers and demeaning their intelligence and literary-critical skills are certainly not effective ways of understanding fascism and its attraction for a vast number of writers and intellectuals. But those who have taken the opposite tack and emphasized predominantly (or exclusively) the literary or critical talents of exemplary fascist writers, or the complexity of their work, have most often ended up excusing or mitigating the political responsibilities of literary fascists and obfuscating the particular nature of their fascism. As I have demonstrated in various ways in the course of this book, when it comes to literary fascism, it is never possible to separate the literary from the political, for even formalist or aestheticist concepts of literature that stress the autonomy and organic integrity of literature and art were used to support totalitarian forms of politics. To take the literary fascists' essays on literature and art seriously and to analyze them critically is not in this case to evoke the literary interests of fascist writers as a way of protecting them from their political responsibilities, but rather it is to confront the particular nature of their fascist politics. To say that a certain form of fascism is literary, therefore, means that it cannot be effectively analyzed and criticized on political grounds alone, given that it has profound roots in art and literature.
Recent controversies surrounding the extent of Martin Heidegger's commitment to Nazism, and the nature and implications of the young Paul de Man's collaborationist journalistic activities during the early years of World War II, have brought many of the issues at the very center of literary fascism into the forefront of intellectual debates and given them an interest and urgency that they have not had for quite some time. In both instances, the debates have often been partisan and polemical, with the demonizing of Heidegger and de Man and the condemnation of all of their work clearly the goal of many of the most polemical and distorted attacks on their prewar and wartime writings and activities. Crucial issues have been obscured by the desire of some to indict all of those interested in Heidegger's work and to attack and dismiss all of de Man's later critical work and especially that which is associated with deconstruction. But responses to such attacks, with rare exceptions, have also been unnecessarily polemical and defensive. The result has been to perpetuate the battles over these two figures and to escalate a general cultural war being waged over how best to understand the nature of the relation of art, literature, and intellectual and cultural activities in general with totalitarian and racist politics. Also at stake in the debates is the determination of the relation that art, literature, criticism, and theory have today with both past and new forms of extremist politics.1
Polemical battles obviously obscure more than illuminate the issues dividing the various factions and are soon forgotten as intellectual fashion moves on and becomes concerned with other issues, figures, and controversies. It would certainly be better, however, if the polemical battles surrounding the cases of Heidegger and de Man did not end up being simply forgotten but were instead transformed into more productive critical discussions. For underneath the violence and hyperbole of polemics, and distorted by them, in this case as in others, important issues are always at stake. In these particular cases, one such issue is the role of literature and aesthetics in the elaboration of fascist politics. My hope is that French Literary Fascism can play a role in the development of critical approaches to the general problem of the literary or aesthetic roots and dimensions not just of fascism but of politics in general, and in this way help to clarify important aspects of both Heidegger's and de Man's temptations with extremist nationalist and fascist politics.
Given de Man's own obvious national-aestheticist literary orientation at the time he wrote for the collaborationist Belgian newspaper Le Soir, the fact that he had positive things to say about almost all of the literary fascists treated in this book, and most important, because he focused on the same literary and political issues that concerned them, the case of de Man is especially relevant to the problems I have treated here. In his articles written from December 1940 through November 1942, like many of the French literary fascists before the war, he defended not Nazism per se but a particular form of literary fascism that was oriented first and foremost toward affirming and defending the autonomy of literature from history and politics. The principle of national political autonomy that he also supported was itself dependent on such literary autonomy. His literary goal was clearly to defend the integrity of French and Belgian literature and to keep each literature from being destroyed by or simply assumed into Nazi cultural politics; his political goal was to defend the relative autonomy and integrity of Belgium and to prevent it from being divided and to prevent Flanders and Flemish culture from being swallowed up into a greater German Reich. But his overall goal was at the same time to ensure that French and Belgian literature and the Belgian nation had a place within the "New Europe" being created by the victories of the German army and Nazi cultural and political policies. This meant that both the relative autonomy of Belgium within a Europe dominated by Nazi Germany and that of the Flemish and Flemish culture within Belgium itself were the political stakes of his defense of the autonomy of (a nationalist form of) literature.2
De Man's interest in and support of fascism were especially evident in those articles in which he praised the indigenous national characteristics of Mussolini's "national revolution" and treated Italy's realization of its "new grandeur" as a model for Belgium's own national regeneration.3 His views were even more explicit in those articles in which he described the positive changes accomplished by Nazi Germany, defended the "revolution" brought about by Germany's victories in the war and the positive future for Europe that it promised, analyzed the causes and effects of the defeat in France, urged collaboration with the Germans as the only realistic political strategy, argued for a certain form of Belgian nationalism within a Europe dominated by Germany, or pursued the questions of national identity, nationalism, and national literature or art in general. This is not to say that de Man was a member of any fascist party, or a Nazi, but it is to locate his journalism in the context of the literary and political movements of the extreme nationalist and fascist right, which defended fascism as being in the national interests of their country.
Compared with the writers I have treated in this book, however, the young Paul de Man must certainly be considered a minor, almost insignificant figure. At the time of the war, he was too young to have been as widely published or as well known as the French literary fascists I have considered or as a Belgian fascist such as Robert Poulet, and he was much less directly concerned with the practical politics of fascism than even they were. His "case"—which is of interest only because of the stature he gained in the United States long after the war—reveals rather how widespread the influence of such literary and political ideas were, how great a temptation they constituted, and how acceptable they also were outside a militant fascist or pro-Nazi context. I return to de Man's wartime journalism to conclude this book because it dramatically reveals, in the case of a critic who after the war was associated with forms of criticism diametrically opposed to the major premises of literary fascism, the seductive power of particular literary ideals and the dangers of their political application.
Over the course of the two years during which they were written, the wartime articles maintained a fairly consistent ideological position. In its broad lines, the position was that of a right-wing nationalist who was sympathetic to fascism and at the very least tolerant of important aspects of (a certain mystified version of) National Socialism. It seems hard to deny—although some have tried—that the writer of these articles, like Drieu la Rochelle, Brasillach, and others, had placed his confidence in the "future of Europe" promised by the "fascist revolution," which meant that he had confidence in and supported the general Nazi cultural and political project for Europe, even if at the same time he also distanced himself from other aspects of Nazism. What interests me especially is the literary dimensions of his political involvement.4
De Man's approach to art and literature in all of the essays, even when he was arguing for a certain form of literary-aesthetic autonomy, cannot be separated from the questions of nationalism, national identity, and the future of Europe under Nazi domination; that is, from all of the most important political issues of the period. It is true that de Man often stressed that literature and art have their own history and are thus autonomous, and unconnected to the "surface" upheavals of social and political history. In a manner similar to that of Maulnier, de Man attempted in many of his more directly political articles to define what was lasting and thus beneath the surface of current events, and he constantly criticized those who confused surface and depth. In terms of the historical-political surface, art and literature were not treated as being political, and thus de Man's defense of their autonomy could in principle be considered a way of distancing himself from and even countering some of the political excesses of National Socialism and fascism: that is, book burnings, literary and artistic censorship, and direct party involvement in or control of literary-aesthetic production and distribution. And yet de Man also argued in these articles that literature and art, because of their autonomous histories, were the deepest expressions of the true identity or interiority, first, of an author, and then, by extension, of a people or nation. In this way they were linked to a more profound cultural history, one rooted in the land and tradition, and thus of long duration. In this way, art and literature on a profound level supported a nationalist politics that was closely related to if not identical with the politics of literary fascism in general.
In an article entitled "Après les journées culturelles germano-flamandes. Le destin de la Flandre" (September 1, 1941), de Man argued that Flanders should not be incorporated into an "artificial" German community but should be allowed to remain independent, "between the French and German blocks." He began his article by claiming that the ultimate test of whether a people could really be considered worthy of being considered a nation was if it had an art or a culture that was entirely its own:
Among the criteria thanks to which one can determine whether a certain geographic area merits the name of nation, one of the most important is the existence of a specific culture, or, more precisely, of an art which belongs to the inhabitants of the country. This is a primordial factor—itself resulting from a great quantity of historical, racic [raciques], etc., components—among all those that permit one to determine whether yes or no a people has a nationality worthy of being respected. (Wartime Journalism, 139)
De Man's point, of course, was to defend Flemish autonomy by showing that Flanders did have an art rooted in the land and belonging to its people and thus had a nationality "worthy of being respected." The autonomy of a nation's art and literature was the ultimate sign of the autonomy and grandeur of its people, and it was also the best argument a cultural or literary nationalist could make that a people should be allowed to maintain itself in the "New Europe" as a semiindependent nation. What he called "rack" factors were not totally determining in the making of a people, but they certainly constituted an important component of its general historical-cultural constitution.
Of all of the articles that addressed the issue of the autonomy of art and literature, there is ample evidence that, for de Man, literary autonomy and the question of national and "racic" identity were intimately tied together and supportive of each other. This means, among other things, that de Man considered literature to be historical and political in the strongest sense of the terms, not in terms of the "surface" of history and politics, but in terms of the alleged origin and truth of each in the profound cultural identity of a people. It is the same argument that both Brasillach and Maulnier constantly made in their respective defenses of French nationalism, and in at least Brasillach's case, in his militant support for a French form of fascism.
The reservations that de Man expressed in various articles about the total German domination of Europe his hopes that Nazi Germany would not attempt to destroy the national identities of other countries and peoples certainly did not amount to an opposition to Nazism. The relative autonomy he proposed for Belgium and Belgian culture—which he presented as a fusion of Germanic and French cultural and "racic" traits—was officially acceptable to the Nazis during the period he wrote and was even for a time encouraged as a way of ensuring peace in the occupied countries. Collaboration did not necessarily mean—at least not during the period de Man wrote for Le Soir having to give up one's nationalist principles and actually become a militant Germanophile or a Nazi. It meant supporting the political and "cultural revolution" undertaken by the Nazis, and this could be done in the name of the nation, race, national order, or traditional authority, or even literature and art. The grounds for de Man's support clearly situated him within a diversified group of Belgian and French nationalists and fascists who were willing to collaborate with the Germans. Some of them would later find themselves in disfavor with the Nazi occupiers, but at the start of the war they were supported by the Nazis and encouraged to publish. The question of German nationalism in all of de Man's articles, as well as the related questions of Belgian and Flemish specificity and autonomy, and the question of national identity in general, as concerns literature and politics, or literature as the most profound expression of politics, cannot be separated from the fascist context of the times and from de Man's specific literary and political associations and models.5
Even if he criticized aspects of the work of the various fascist and collaborationist writers about whom he wrote, de Man never questioned or distanced himself from the essential elements of their fascism. For example, in his numerous references to Brasillach, he never distanced himself from his anti-Semitism (or from the anti-Semitism of any of the other French fascist writers he discussed). De Man reviewed Brasillach's Notre avant-guerre on August 12, 1941, and he stated that he admired the fact that Brasillach showed no traces of "bad conscience" for the defeat, since he thought France never should have fought Germany in the first place: "Brasillach knows perfectly that he lived happy and luminous days [during the period 1920-1940] . . . and that he has nothing to regret in this period which ends however in a catastrophe for his country." De Man did consider Brasillach's "political sense" to be questionable in certain instances, because his true vocation was art and literature, not politics, but he also claimed that Brasillach's "enumeration of anecdotes," even if they often were "partial and superficial . . . and miss the heart of things," nonetheless are "always amusing" (Wartime Journalism, 130-31).
Eventually, de Man did distance himself from Brasillach, but he did so not because he was against collaboration or critical of Brasillach's overtly fascist political orientation or his anti-Semitism; rather, he criticized Brasillach's lack of political sophistication concerning what he had experienced when he had visited Germany in 1937. De Man chastised Brasillach for "a lack of political sense" in a very specific instance; namely, when he manifested "a certain terror before the 'strange' nature of this demonstration [that of the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg]." He went on to criticize Brasillach for not understanding the "sudden importance of the political in the life of a people" (613). De Man's criticism of Brasillach, who was certainly one of the most visible French collaborators and outspoken literary fascists, might indicate his own "independence as a thinker," as some have claimed, but it was an independence that moved him in this instance at least even closer than Brasillach to an explicit defense of Nazi Germany. A sympathy for important aspects of Nazism (and its aesthetics of politics) was thus "declared" here and elsewhere; and even though this did not make de Man a Nazi, it did show that he had been more sympathetic to important elements of National Socialism than his defenders have generally been willing to admit.
In fact, in this article de Man even misrepresents Brasillach's position in order to claim that Brasillach did not understand the true political sense of what he had witnessed at the Nuremberg Party Congress of 1937. For Brasillach was not as negative as de Man implied, and in fact he had given a very lyrical description of the demonstrations at Nuremberg and had admitted that he "had never seen a more prodigious spectacle in [his] entire life" (Notre avant-guerre, 278) and had been profoundly moved by it. In his description of the Congress, however, originally published in 1937 and republished in slightly revised form in Notre avant-guerre in 1941, Brasillach did resist the form of this "new politics"—or what he called this "poetry, all of which is certainly not for us [Frenchmen]" (285)—on nationalist grounds; that is, chiefly because it was German and thus foreign or "strange" to the French. Brasillach felt that France needed an indigenous, French form of fascism, a new French aesthetics of the political that would produce its own form of poetry and politics. His main point was that the French should not be forced to accept in a servile fashion a poetry and a politics originating elsewhere.
Brasillach was thus defending French political and aesthetic autonomy on nationalist grounds, and this would in no way interfere with or counter his commitment to fascism or collaboration. In fact, his defense of national literary autonomy supported his commitment to collaboration. Here and elsewhere, Brasillach's position was practically indistinguishable from that taken by de Man in his newspaper articles, where an acceptance and admiration for particular aspects of Nazi Germany go hand and hand with the desire for a relative autonomy for his own nation in the realms of art, literature, and politics. In numerous other articles, de Man himself emphasized the cultural and literary-aesthetic differences between the French and the Germans, as well as between the Belgians and the Germans, in order to argue for the specificity of the French and Belgian situations. De Man's criticism of Brasillach revealed that his own defense of a separation of literature and politics even more profound than that proposed by Brasillach was compatible with a greater understanding of and sympathy for "the sudden importance of the political in the life of a people" under Nazism—or at least with a greater acceptance of Nazi Germany in which Nazi politics and "poetics" were not considered foreign or "strange" but familiar.
In many of his articles, de Man showed himself to be sympathetic and supportive of basic nationalist-fascist principles, pro-German (which at the time meant pro-Nazi, no matter how nuanced, complicated, and even "nonconformist" one tried to make the "pro"), and, in at least two articles, overtly anti-Semitic. The two articles were the much discussed "Jews in Contemporary Literature" (Le Soir [March 4, 1941], in Wartime Journalism, 45) and the one entitled "People and Books: A View on Contemporary German Fiction," published in an even more militantly profascist Flemish journal, Hat Vlaamsche Land (August 20, 1942, in Wartime Journalism, 325-26). The author of these articles was certainly not a militant anti-Semite in the style of Céline or Rebatet, but at the very best he was insensitive to, or at the worst supportive of, the incredible injustices already suffered by the Jews at the hands of the Nazis in Germany (as well as at the hands of occupying and indigenous forces in France and Belgium)—insomuch as that was the price one had to pay to become part of the "New Europe" and to save literature and art from non-European influences. He was indifferent to or simply against all real political opposition to Nazism, fascism, and anti-Semitism and accepted with only minor reservations the future for Europe that Germany proposed in the name of the superiority of a racially determined notion of culture.
In "People and Books: A View on Contemporary German Fiction," de Man distinguished between two groups within postwar German literary production: foreign authors who produced non-German, nonaesthetic art, and true German authors who produced authentic art:
The first of these groups celebrates an art with a strongly cerebral disposition, founded upon some abstract principles and very remote from all naturalness. The theses of expressionism, though very remarkable in themselves, were used here as tricks, as skillful artifices aimed at easy effects. The very legitimate basic rule of artistic transformation, inspired by the personal vision of the creator, served here as a pretext for a forced, caricatured representation of reality. Thus, [the artists of this group] came into open conflict with the proper traditions of German art which had always and before everything else clung to a deep spiritual sincerity. Small wonder, then that it was mainly non-Germans, and specifically Jews, who went in this direction. (Wartime Journalism, 325)
De Man contrasted this first group of Jews and other "foreigners" with the properly German group "which did not give in to this aberrant fashion." And he went on to say that "by not giving in to this temptation these writers have not only succeeded in producing an art of abiding value but also in securing the artistic future of their country" (325-26). The authentic artist was also, as an artist, the authentic patriot, the true nationalist.
It should be noted that, contrary to what Samuel Weber argues in "The Monument Disfigured," de Man not only separated the Jews from the truly German, the sincere, and the natural—as Weber acknowledges (Responses, 416-17)—but also from what he declared was true art, which was artifice but of a genuine aesthetic kind. This was why de Man's defense of the autonomy of art and literature in his articles in terms of nationalist principles cannot be separated from his two explicit expressions of anti-Semitism, because for de Man, as for almost literary fascists, the Jews represented the foreign, the unnatural, and the unaesthetic or anti-aesthetic in literature and art. At best he believed they were capable of "tricks," "skillful artifices," and "caricatures" of art and its "proper tradition." In other words, de Man thought that true art began where such "Jewish" tricks ended. A defense of art and literature on aesthetic grounds thus entailed an exclusion and denunciation of Jewish mimicry and suhterfuge in art, and of all "foreign" theories and techniques that turned art away from itself and its authentic national destiny.
The second explicitly anti-Semitic article written by de Man, "Les Juifs dans la littérature actuelle," has been much more frequently cited in the polemics surrounding the discovery of his wartime journalism. As many of his defenders have rightly claimed, in it de Man did explicitly condemn certain effects of "vulgar anti-Semitism." It was the starting point for his discussion of the nature of literature in general and the role of the Jews in the creation of modern literature in particular. But it cannot be considered even an implicit criticism or démystification of anti-Semitism, because de Man replaced "vulgar anti-Semitism" with a more sophisticated version of anti-Semitism, which, despite its sophistication, was rooted in exactly the same myths as the vulgar version. The lethal mythology of the Jew that supported all forms of anti-Semitism remained intact in this article. What was demystified was a certain "vulgar notion" of modern literature and of the history of literature, both of which in their genuine forms, de Man argued, had nothing to do with this mythology or with the Jews in any way.
De Man claimed that the "vulgar anti-Semitism" that equated modern art and literature with the "degeneracy and decadence" equivalent to being "enjuivé" was in large part the responsibility of the Jews themselves, who "contributed to spreading this myth" and "glorified themselves as the leaders of literary movements that characterize our age." Even though de Man immediately claimed that this myth had a "deeper cause," he in no way discredited it, for the explanation of the "deeper cause" was no less anti-Semitic than assigning to the Jews themselves the responsibility for "vulgar anti-Semitism." The deeper cause that explained the "error" of vulgar anti-Semitism was the assumption that literature was simply a product of its time and that therefore the modern novel and poetry were a "monstrous outgrowth[s] of the world war." De Man certainly rejected this "monstrosity," but nowhere did he distance himself from the even more vulgar, monstrous, and unjust idea that, as he put it, "Jews have, in fact, played an important role in the phony and disordered existence of Europe since 1920." He simply did not agree that modern literature had its origin in this disorder, and for that reason he argued that it could not be considered "enjuivé." His rhetorical ploy thus consisted in his attempt to save literature from Jewish influence and the "disorder" for which Jews had allegedly been responsible throughout Europe. De Man did not, however, make the slightest effort to distance himself from the worst aspects of literary fascism and anti-Semitism. Saving modern literature and culture meant quite simply "losing" the Jews, ensuring that their negative influence was kept at a distance from true literature.
At bottom, De Man's text takes literally and uses some of the most blatant anti-Semitic clichés, for de Man consistently characterized Jews as "a foreign force," so foreign that if they were to live "in a Jewish colony isolated from Europe," European literature would not lose anything essential, for the simple reason that Jews had never contributed anything to literature that had to do with its "true" (that is, European) identity. There is no way this article can be considered a "demystification" of any important aspect of anti-Semitism, for it is totally determined by the "myth of the Jew," which the worst anti-Semitic literature perpetrated. The denunciation of "vulgar anti-Semitism," as we have repeatedly seen, was the favorite strategy of literary fascists, even of militant anti-Semites such as Rebatet. Its purpose was always to situate the form of cultural anti-Semitism being defended on a "higher" spiritual and rational level.
In fact, de Man's article suspiciously resembles an article published only eleven days before his own in which Drieu la Rochelle had made an almost identical argument with reference to the same authors. The title of Drieu la Rochelle's article is "De Ludovic Halévy à André Maurois ou l'impuissance du Juif en littérature" (Je suis partout, no. 500 [February 21, 1941]), and as the title of the article indicates, Drieu la Rochelle also asserted that the influence of Jews on French literature had been minimal because modern literature had been able to defend itself against their negative influence: "With a little distance we can see that the Jews have not contributed very much to France in the area of letters and arts." The list of names Drieu la Rochelle cited as proof of the inferiority of Jewish writers was almost the same as de Man's: André Maurois, Henri Bernstein, Tristan Bernard, and Julien Benda, but he added Porto-Riche and J. Richard Bloch as further proof.
Unlike de Man, Drieu la Rochelle did discuss the case of Proust, but he attributed Proust's greatness to the "French peasant blood" that he claimed flowed within him. By dropping the reference to Proust, de Man eliminated from his own text the most "vulgar" aspects of Drieu la Rochelle's anti-Semitism, evident in comments such as the following: "Crossbreeding [métissage] produces some rare but precious results: Proust, Bergson [who had a quarter of Aryan blood]. The slightest drop of our peasant, artisan blood permits them sometimes to achieve true form. But to obtain a Bergson or a Proust—whom I would be curious to reread before ranking them among the greatest French writers—how many fanatical Bendas, or boring J. Richard Blochs, or mediocre Maurois one has to be subjected to!" De Man's article, as much as Drieu la Rochelle's, however, clearly defended the authentic works of modern literature by opposing them to the works of "inferior" Jewish writers. In each case, the defense of modern literature consisted in separating authentic literature from the negative, antiaesthetic influence of Jews.6
The chain linking de Man's overtly anti-Semitic articles to his many articles on literature and nationalism is quite explicit. For it is not possible to ascribe to the Jews the primary responsibility for the sociopolitical "disorder" in Europe before the war and not have this affect one's approach to literature, even if literature in all instances is not directly determined by sociopolitical forces. It is impossible to see the Jews as a foreign, non-European presence within the various nations and not conclude that their absence would be beneficial to the development of national unity and autonomy and thus to the development of an autonomous and truly nationalist literature. If art and literature were designated to play an important role in the rediscovery of the various national identities and in the development of a new "European Order," then certainly it could not be argued that de Man was interested only in defending the cause of literature and had little if any concern for politics as such. As was the case for the literary fascists treated in this book, his defense of literature constituted in itself the basis for his politics.
De Man's inclusion of the name of Kafka on the list of great modern writers whose work was fully rooted in the "authentic" history of literature, and not the expression of artificial, foreign (Jewish) interests, does seem to counter or at least to complicate his general assertion concerning the inferiority and foreignness of Jewish writers in general.7 References to Proust in other articles, which were uniformly positive—although it should be noted that by omitting Proust from this article, de Man excepted him not only from the category of Jewish writers of the second rank but also from the category of authentic European writers—also seemed to indicate that, for de Man, there were clearly exceptions to the general rule that authentic literature and foreign, "Jewish influences" did not mix. If a limited number of exceptional writers had in the past been excluded from Europe for being Jewish, it would seem that he felt that modern literature would have suffered, even if he argued that literature would not suffer from such an absence in the future, given the "mediocrity" of the writers he cited.8 But as we have repeatedly seen, most literary fascists (even militant anti-Semites like Rebatet), who like de Man were attracted to modern literature and extremist forms of nationalism and even fascism, were in general willing to acknowledge the contributions of a limited number of exceptional Jewish writers and artists at the same time that they were denouncing the negative influence of "Jewish aesthetics" on art and literature. The exceptional Jewish writer or artist was obviously one who did not write (or paint or compose or play music) like a Jew, but rather like an "authentic" Frenchman, Belgian, or German.
It was quite common for literary fascists to love Proust and demean or even hate the Jews. Literary interests and tastes that did not conform to strict Nazi racist politics, or in the case of the French, Vichy cultural politics, supported their radical nationalist, fascist politics rather than countered them. The important point in the case of de Man is, as his two anti-Semitic articles show, that there was clearly no place for Jews in the future he and other Belgian and French nationalists envisioned for literature, no place for a people without a "national identity" (except a negative one), whose writings were a "foreign influence" that continually threatened the identity of the various European peoples and nations and their literature as well, even if the various national literatures had been strong enough in the past to resist this threat.
Hope for literature was thus on the side of the continual resistance to the foreign, and even if de Man did not make anti-Semitism the explicit cornerstone of his own approach to literature and politics, he constantly praised those who did. For example, in one of his entries for the Bibliographie Dechenne—for which he continued to write until March 1943, and after he stopped writing for Le Soir—de Man characterized Lucien Rebatet's anti-Semitic best-seller, Les Décombres, as "an immense pamphlet of brilliant vigor and verve," a work that rightly attacked the evils of democracy and presented hope for the future in its view of the total destruction of the past:
Lucien Rebatet, like Robert Brasillach, is one of the young French intellectuals who, during the period between the two wars, strove to combat with all their forces a politics [the politics of parliamentary democracy] whose catastrophic character and nefarious orientation they understood. . . . Each in his turn, all those guilty of having caused the current French decay, regardless of the milieu or party to which they belong, is passed in review and executed in a few lapidary and definitive sentences. But this great work of destruction also contains constructive elements: in trudging through the ruins of a dilapidated period, Lucien Rebatet also dreams of reconstructing: and that is undoubtedly why his ferocious book ends with words of hope. ( Wartime Journalism [September 1942], 366)
Rebatet's hope was for a fascist Europe dominated by Nazi Germany in which France, having itself become fascist, would play a major role. The primary group that he held responsible for the "nefarious character" and "decay" of modern France was of course the Jews; and in praising the hope of fascism that Rebatet held out for the future, de Man was defending the links Rebatet himself had made between literature and art, on the one hand, and fascism and anti-Semitism, on the other.
If aspects of de Man's approach to literature can in fact be shown to constitute a defense of its autonomy from immediate historical-political forces and interests, as many have argued, if his defense of the political and cultural integrity of Belgium can be shown to manifest an openness to a certain form of heterogeneity (but only as concerns the alternative, either France or Germany, not in terms of what is considered "non-European"—that is, neither French, nor German, nor Belgian), then it is also important to analyze carefully what ends both this defense of literary autonomy and this form of nationalism serve. A limited heterogeneity can and in these articles does serve extreme right-wing nationalist interests. A defense of the autonomy of literature can and here does serve a political position that is much more supportive of fascism than it is opposed to it, and that even makes important concessions to the anti-Semitism at its base, all in the name of an interest in and a commitment to the future of modern literature.
The defense of modern literature undertaken by de Man in many of his articles in Le Soir should not be confused with the counterpropositions, counterstrategies, and countermovements that would have actually constituted an opposition to fascism and anti-Semitism. De Man's critique of the "vulgar" concept of literature should not be confused with the démystification and rejection of anti-Semitism in all its forms. His defense of the dual cultural heritage of Belgium should not be confused with the resistance to the "New European Order" dominated by Nazi Germany. And finally, his argument for the relative autonomy of literature should not be confused with a critical concept of literature whose autonomy would not be dependent on any notion of national, cultural, or "racic" identity. Rather, they all should be seen as supporting elements of his defense of a particular form of literary fascism, of a politics that was fascist because of the way it defended literature and gave the literary priority over the political.
The literary fascists treated in this book, whether they collaborated actively with the Germans during the Occupation or not, were all engaged in a cultural war long before the outbreak of the Second World War. This cultural war had been going on long before they entered it, from at least the time of the Dreyfus affair, and it is a war that clearly is not over yet, given that the questions of nationalism, the militant defense of a national culture or language, and the singularity of national literatures and works of art are still being polemically debated today. The war to which literary fascists were most deeply committed was not initially (or completely) a war fought with Germany or on the side of German National Socialism, but a war fought against all the enemies of French language, literature, and culture, whomever they were determined to be—a war primarily fought against the Jews.
It was always in the name of a "certain idea of France" (or in the case of Drieu la Rochelle, of Europe; and in the case of Céline, of an original "Aryan," natural man) that all of the literary fascists wrote and acted. It was also in the name of literature, art, and culture that they formulated their notions of fascist politics. Their fascism, however, cannot be attributed to one particular concept of literature or art, one literary strategy or tendency alone, for in all cases it constituted an amalgam of not just the aesthetic and the political, but of the traditional and the modern, of a classical aesthetics of form and a post-Nietzschean aesthetics of force, of humanist premises and totalitarian ends, of the defense of the most elevated, abstract, metaphysical, aesthetic ideals and the most mundane, petty, violent, xenophobic, anti-Semitic practices. It was in each case the way in which literature and art were linked to and used as models for politics, rather than any single facet of literature or art itself, that gave form to their fascism. Thus, neither classicism nor Nietzscheanism, neither aestheticism nor culturalism, neither humanism nor antihumanism, neither modernism nor antimodernism, and neither masculinism nor antimasculinism should be singled out as the determining factor in the creation of literary fascism—or, on the other hand, as the unique or best means for criticizing or condemning fascism and anti-Semitism and distancing ourselves from extremist ideologies and racisms in general.
What this also means is that no critical approach to the fascist aestheticizing of politics can legitimately situate itself entirely outside the history and tradition that produced fascism, for that history was so contradictory and multifaceted that it included both the forces crucial for the resistance to and undermining of fascism and those that most actively contributed to the creation and defense of fascism. The amalgam constituted by literary fascism indicates not that all of literature (or all of French, German, Italian or European culture) was somehow primary or exclusively responsible for fascism, but rather that specific approaches to culture and literture had important roles to play in its formation. In any case, a commitment to the organic integrity or the autonomy of literature never in itself isolated anyone from or served as a counter to totalitarian ideologies. In the case of French literary fascism, an extremist form of literary organicism and the arguments made in the name of the autonomy of literature and art were constitutive of totalitarianism and anti-Semitism rather than opposed to them. The ideal of an original, autonomous literature and the related ideal of an integral national culture were in a fascist context nothing less than the founding principles of a dogmatic and ruthless political ideology. It is in this sense that literary fascism represented an extreme aestheticization of politics and a politicization of literature and culture, nothing less than the totalization of the literary as the political.