Notes to the Chapters
Introduction
1. In their preface to their detailed and dispassionate study of French policy toward the Jews during the Occupation, Marrus and Paxton describe their book as one that "explores the indigeneous French roots for the antisemitic measures adopted by Vichy after 1940" (xiii), and they convincingly show how "Vichy measures against Jews came from within, as part of the National Revolution," and why they should be considered "autonomous acts taken in pursuit of indigenous goals" (13), rather than acts the French were forced to perform by a ruthless occupier. The chief goal served by Vichy France's actions against the Jews was cultural homogeneity: "Vichy's antisemitism . . . was part of a larger national effort to replace with homogeneity the enfeebling disunities of the 1930's. French political cultures from the Left to Right—from Jacobism to integral nationalism—have traditionally perceived cultural pluralism as dangerous. . . . Vichy leaders set about to restore the homogeneity that they imagined to have been the traditional state of France. . . . It was not a happy time to be different in France" (366). See also Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940-1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); and for Vichy's legacy, see Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
2. For one of the most exaggerated presentations of this position, see Bernard-Henri Lévy, L'Idéologie française (Paris: Grasset, 1981).
3. Benjamin writes in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken Books, 1969]): "Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. . . . The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. . . . Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation of the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art" (241—42).
4. In "The Nazi Myth," trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry, v. 16 (Winter 1990), Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe analyze Plato's condemnation and exclusion of myth in terms that will be especially pertinent for an understanding of the literary-aesthetic dimension of fascism: "Myth is a fiction in the strong, active sense of 'fashioning' or, as Plato says, of 'plastic art': it is, therefore, a fictioning, whose role is to propose, if not to impose, models or types . . . by means of which an individual, or a city, or an entire people, can take possession of itself and identify with itself" (297, translation modified). In Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), Lacoue-Labarthe claims, in a similar vein, that "the political (the City) belongs to a form of plastic art, formation and information, fiction in the strict sense. This is a deep theme which derives from Plato's politico-pedagogic writings . . . and reappears in the guise of such concepts as Gestaltung (configuration, fashioning) or Bildung, a term with a revealingly polysémie character (formation, constitution, organization, education, culture, etc.)" (66).
5. See for example, Zeev Sternhell, La Droite revolutionäre, 1885-1914: Les Origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978), and Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (Paris: Colin, 1972); Robert Soucy, Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barrès (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), and French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924-1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Michael Curtis, Three Against the Republic: Sorel, Barrrès, and Maurras (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962); Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat, Je suis partout 1930-1934: Les Maurrassiens devant la tentation fasciste (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1973); and in spite of his recent revisionist publications, Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, and National Socialism, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966).
6. See William R. Tucker, The Fascist Ego: A Political Biography of Robert Brasillach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), for a meticulous presentation of Brasillach's life and politcal ideas.
7. See Pierre Hebey, La Nouvelle Revue Française des années sombres (Juin 1940-Juin 1941): Des Intellectuels à la dérive (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
Chapter One
The Use and Abuse of Culture: Maurice Barrès and the Ideology of the Collective Subject
1. Valois, a dissident member of the Action Française, was the founder of Le Faisceau, the first overtly fascist party in France.
2. The shift in emphasis is evident in the titles of Barrès's two trilogies: Le Culte du Moi and Le Roman de l'énergie nationale. The first trilogy consists of Sous l'Oeil des Barbares (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1888), Un Homme Libre (Paris: Perrin, 1889), and Le jardin de Bérénice (Paris: Perrin, 1891); the second, of Les Déracinés (Paris: E. Fasquelle, 1897), L'Appel au Soldat (Paris: E. Fasquelle, 1900), and Leurs Figures (Paris: Pion, 1902). In this chapter, I shall be quoting from a recent paperback edition of Les Déracinés (Paris: Gallimard ["Folio"], 1988). Unless an English translation is indicated, all translations from the French throughout this book are my own.
3. See Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), where Lacoue-Labarthe discusses the power and function of myth in Nazi ideology: "It is a 'power' [puissance], the power that is in the gathering together of the fundamental forces and orientations of an individual or a people, that is, to say the power of a deep, concrete, embodied identity. . . . [The power] is that of the dream, as the projection of an image with which one identifies through a total and immediate commitment. Such an image is in no way a product of 'fabulation,' to which myth is ordinarily reduced; it is the figuration of a type conceived both as a model of identity and as that identity formed and realized" (93-94).
4. Trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry, v. 16 (Winter 1990), 294; trans, modified.
5. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), Hannah Arendt argues: "An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the 'idea' is applied. . . . The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same 'law' as the logical exposition of its 'idea.'. . . The movement of history and the logical process of this notion are suposed to correspond to each other, so that whatever happens, happens according to the logic of one 'idea'" (469). Arendt calls the application of this logic "the tyranny of logicality" (473).
6. Zeev Sternhell, in Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1985), gives an invaluable, detailed presentation and analysis of Barrès's political evolution, insisting on the significance of his particular contributions to an extreme form of French nationalism that Sternhell also argues served as a foundation for various forms of French fascism decades later. Sternhell describes Barrès's nationalism as "a complete vision of man and the collectivity; . . . its goal is to give the French back their authenticity and, in making them hear the voice of blood, to reestablish the compromised unity of the nation . . . . [It is] a new religion possessing its own mysticism and rejecting in its totality the world as it is" (24).
7. The "Examen" was republished in a later edition of Sous l'Oeil des Barbares (Paris: Pion, 1922), and I shall quote exclusively from this edition.
8. Even Sternhell, who goes to great pains to explain the logic of Barrès's views and the coherence of his system, considers him ultimately to be an irrationalist: "Reality for Barrès is fundamentally irrational; escaping totally from reason, it can only be felt" (Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français, 314).
9. Robert Soucy, in his study of Barrès, Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barrès (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), takes the opposite position from the one I am taking here and claims that Barrès's extreme collectivist or nationalist position in the second trilogy constitutes an antihumanism and represents, in spite of what Barrès himself claims, a radical break with the first trilogy and Le Culte du Moi. In discussing the movement already evident in the first trilogy toward what I have called the collective or Nation-Self, Soucy claims that it represents "a reversal not a continuation of his former position" (71). And yet Soucy has to admit the "reversal" is evident almost from the start, at least by the time of Un homme libre, the second novel of Le Culte du Moi.
10. In much the same vein, Zeev Sternhell argues that it is possible to "discern already in Barrès's very first period the germs of his future nationalism" (Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français, 36).
11. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue in "The Nazi Myth" that in Nazi racist ideology, "the Jew is not simply a bad race, a defective type: he is the antitype, the bastard par excellence. He has no culture of his own. . . . His form is formless. . . . The Jew is not an opposite type, but the very absence of type" (307).
12. The grandfather of one of the principal characters, Maurice Roemer-spacher, for example, is presented as the source, model, and guarantee of his grandson's eventual rerooting in the land. The grandfather is described as a "type, a storehouse of generations," and an excellent storyteller, for "in his stories, one follows the movements of a soul living on the border" of France (103—4), and thus one that has lived through the greatest national agony and knows the costs of the invasion of the foreign and the necessity of resisting it.
13. See, of course, on the problem of the positing of "the Orient" as the other of "the West," Edward W. Said's Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). I am indebted to Elizabeth Constable, who, in a paper she wrote for one of my graduate seminars, first drew my attention to the importance of narrative in the formation of national identity in Barrès, as well as to the significance of "foreign stories" as the most basic threat to the mythical national community, a danger best represented by the seductive character and stories of Astiné Aravian, the full mythical embodiment for Barrès of the "Oriental woman."
14. The narrator also interjects that Astiné understood that it was her destiny as an "Oriental woman" to die tragically and that she undoubtedly preferred this "noble destiny" to old age and obesity: "Would she have wanted to get old? Oriental women [les Orientales] get so heavy!" (427).
15. Barrès in his journal in fact denounced the political effects of Hugo's writing and saw Les Déracinés as a counter to Les Misérables, serving the same function for nationalism as it had served for republicanism: "It was Les Misérables, Les Châtiments, that brought down the Empire. As Les Misérables provided the manure in which radical, republican thought was born, I would like Les Dé-racinés. . . . " (Mes Cahiers, v. 2, 163)—unfinished in the text.
Chapter Two
The Beautiful Community: The Fascist Legacy of Charles Péguy
1. Bernard-Henri Lévy's sensationalist work, L'Idéologie française (Paris: Grasset, 1981), which was one of the first and remains the most extreme example of an ever-increasing number of studies whose principal goal seems to be the denunciation of canonical literary and philosophical figures, accepts the "fascist version" of Péguy without question. Lévy attacks Péguy and everyone else, whether on the left or the right, that he can fit into a long French nationalist and socialist tradition, which he claims is from its origins predominantly anti-Semitic and which leads for him directly and unproblematically to fascism and collaboration. As "the French ideology" goes, so, for Lévy, goes Péguy and almost all of the rest of French literature, thought, and culture.
2. Jacques Derrida, in "Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name," trans. Avital Ronell, in The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Schocken, 1985), formulates the problem in the following way: "We shall ask even why it is not enough to say: 'Nietzsche did not think that,' 'he did not want that,' or that he he would have surely vomited it, that there is falsfication of the legacy and interpretative mystification going on here. We shall ask why and how what is so naively called a falsification was possible (it was not with just anything)" (23-24; trans, modified). Later, Derrida adds: "The future of the Nietzsche text is not closed. But if, within the still-open countours of an era, the only politics calling itself—proclaiming itself—Nietzschean will have been a Nazi one, then this is necessarily signficant and must be questioned in all of its consequences" (30-31 ).
3. For example, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle claimed that "it makes little difference who invented fascism. France has played an important role in it: the France of Sorel, of Péguy, of Barrès, of Maurras, the France of Proudhon" (Chronique Politique [Paris: Gallimard, 1943], 192).
4. Even though Rey does not mention it, one of those "mutilating" Péguy's work to make it fit into a collaborationist context was Péguy's own son Marcel. In Le Destin de Charles Péguy (Paris: Perrin, 1946; originally published in 1941 ), Marcel Péguy presented his father as both the inventor of national socialism and a racist: "He moved close to certain old French socialists; I mean socialists who had died before socialism was definitively corrupted by Marxism and Jewry. . . . My father clearly aimed with the socialist city for the institution in France of a national socialism." He then added in a note that the term "national socialism" belonged primarily to the French: "I use this term because until further notice it seems to me the property of the French in general, and mine in particular" (89-90). The following description made of another of his father's texts is even more direct: "Jeanne d'Arc is a racist manifesto. At no moment does France appear to Jeanne as a political combination but rather as the land of a certain race. . . . What is rather particular in the racism of Jeanne (which is, of course, the racism of my father) is that it is an essentially Christian racism" (102-3). Of course, a father cannot control what a son will do in his name any more than an author can control what his readers will do. But it is still not insignificant, no matter how exaggerated and misleading certain of Marcel Péguy's claims could be shown to be, that Péguy's fascist legacy passes in part by way of his own son.
5. In Le Mécontemporain: Péguy, lecteur d'un monde moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), Alain Finkielkraut also attempts to rescue Péguy from attacks such as Lévy's, by defending not his practice of writing but his view of culture. Like Rey, Finkielkraut praises Péguy's distrust of modernity and attacks what he calls the injustice of all attempts to "condemn Péguy and banish his work from culture" (19) by associating it with extremist forms of nationalism and with anti-Semitism. Finkielkraut's principal claim is that Péguy was never a xenophobic nationalist but a humanist, that he always spoke in the name of a plural and nonexclusive, humanistic culture, a "we" consisting of a plurality of voices, rather than a rationalist, politically defined, singular "humanity" (150-51). Péguy, in Finkielkraut's interpretation, "never gives up the cause of humanity for that of the nation" (159)—even in his most nationalistic texts. To make such an argument, Finkielkraut, like Rey, has to ignore or pass over very quickly all of the texts that extremist nationalists and fascists quoted in order to make Péguy an important precursor of French fascism. Finkielkraut's claims for Péguy are in fact just as inflated as Lévy's; they are just their extreme opposite.
6. All references to Péguy's writings are to the recently published three-volume edition of his Oeuvres en Prose Complètes, edited by Robert Burac (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1987, 1988, 1992), which replaced the earlier Pléiade edition, edited by Marcel Péguy.
7. Péguy's project here explicitly echoes that of the nineteenth-century historian he most admired, Jules Michelet. "No occasion should be lost . . . to proclaim again that Michelet is the very genius of history, first of all, because it is true, and, second, because it bothers so many people and because it's such a huge ordeal for our great friends, the moderns" ("Clio: Dialogue de l'Histoire et de l'âme païenne," v. 3, 1028). In his preface to Le Peuple (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1974; originally published in 1846), Michelet criticizes all previous portraits of the French people for lacking "a sense of the grand harmony," for not seeing that "the family, work, the most humble life of the people all have in themselves a sacred poetry" (63). He claims that the true goal of history in not narration or analysis but resurrection (73), specifically the resurrection of the unity of the people and the nation: "One people! One homeland! One France! We shall never become two nations. . . . Without unity, we die" (75).
8. This is why Péguy attacked Jean Jaurès the most severely of all political figures, because, for Péguy, he represented the worst aspects of this double game: "This is what makes the responsibility of Jaurès in this crime, in this double crime, in this crime to the second degree, the greatest. He among all others, he at the head of the operation, was a politician like the others, worse than the others, a sneak among sneaks, a deceiver among deceivers; but he pretended not to be a politician. This made his noxiousness the greatest. This made his responsibility the greatest" (91). In "L'Argent" (February 1913), he excuses himself for even referring to Jaurès at all, for his is "a name that has become so basely filthy [ordurier] that when I write it to send it to the printers I have the impression of fearing that I shall fall under the jurisdiction of some penal code or other. Jaurès, the man who contaminated radicalism, socialism, and Dreyfusism" (v. 3, 798).
9. In "Our History," Jean-Luc Nancy, referring to the wartime writings of Paul de Man, asserts that if a political position can be defined as a "national-populism of the spirit, it is not a racism" (in Diacritics, v. 20, no. 3 [Fall 1990], 99). At the extreme limits of each position, this may of course be true, but I would argue that there is much more overlapping of the two positions, much more intermixing of spirit and blood in both spiritually and strictly racially defined "national-populisms" or national-socialisms than Nancy's comments imply. The line between them is most often very difficult to draw; each position borrows substantially from the other, even if each also opposes itself to the other in terms of particular issues. The difficulty in separating the spiritual from the racial becomes even more difficult if we follow Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis of fascism and his argument that "racism—and anti-semitism in particular—is primarily, fundamentally, an aestheticism" (Heidegger, Art and Politics, 69).
10. Alain Finkielkraut attempts to free Péguy from his own militaristic nationalist arguments by claiming that the material roots of spirituality in his work are accidental rather than essential. He claims that "the idea [of freedom] takes on the countours of place, and place appears as the receptacle or the pinnacle of support of the idea. The spirit impregnates, without losing any of its sprituality, the vines and hillsides of the countryside of France. Far from choosing the solidity of the earth rather than the ether of freedom, Péguy sees freedom land [literally, come to earth (atterir)], and this discovery leads him to place himself in the service of his country" (Le Mécontemporain, 89).
11. The only exception to the general rule that a spiritual people can exist only because the temporal had been measured off and secured, argued Péguy, appeared to be the Jews: "The Jews from the time of their dispersion appear to represent an example, and the only one, of a spiritual race being carried on, prolonged, growing without the support of a temporal and, in particular, a military armature, without the support of a state, and, in particular, an army. It is perhaps true" (905). He went on to add, however, again stressing the uniqueness of the case of the Jews, that "Israel, all things considered, for its dispersion took and had to take the world that Rome had made, the world that everyone else took. And it is in no way rash to say that Israel continued a spiritual city of temporal dispersion in the same form of world, in the same mold of world, in the same cradle of the world in which Christianity founded a spiritual city of temporal unification" (906).
Chapter Three
The Nation as Artwork: Charles Maurras and the Classical Origins of French Literary Fascism
1. For a detailed history of the Action Française, see Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalistn and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962); for a study of the influence of Maurras on various nationalist and fascist thinkers who were at one time or another linked to the royalist movement, see Paul Sérant, Les Dissidents de L'Action Française (Paris: Editions Copernic, 1978); and for studies of the Action Française as an important precursor of fascism, see Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966), 29-141, and Zeev Sternhell, La Droite Revolutionäre 1855-1914: Les Origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978), 348-400.
2. Quoted in Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat, le suis partout 1930-1934: Les Maurrassiens devant la tentation fasciste (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1973), 344. This is undoubtedly the most detailed study of the influence of Maurras's ideas on the most important and influential of the journals that were at their inception sponsored by the Action Française but which eventually moved away from Maurras and became militantly pro-German, fascist, and collaborationist.
3. This is the title Maurras gave to a collection of essays he published in 1941, in which he defended Pétain and his politics of collaboration because he argued they were in the best interest of France: "We have only one slogan: France. We are neither German nor English. We are French. FRANCE ALONE [LA FRANCE SEULE] or, if you prefer, ONLY FRANCE [LA SEULE FRANCE]" (La Seule France: Chronique des jours d'épreuve [Lyon: Lardanchet, 1941], 118). During his trial for collusion with the enemy, which ran from January 24 to 27, 1945, Maurras repeatedly argued that he had never collaborated because he had always been a Germanophobe. His support of Vichy and the politics he proposed during the Occupation had as their unique goal, he claimed, to protect France from further German interventions: "I have explained to you in great detail that I asked the legitimate [i.e., Vichy] French authorities to act energetically to keep the Gestapo from intervening. I wanted to avoid the intervention of the foreigner" (Le Procès de Charles Maurras [Paris: Albin Michel, 1946], 26). He also claimed that he had repeatedly urged a rapid and severe repression of all dissidents only "to reestablish order, so that counter-terrorism would not be born" (26).
4. Even Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, in spite of his serious reservations concerning important elements of Maurras's approach to literature and politics, nevertheless wrote the following "Religious and Political Testament" (dated September 15, 1939) in his journal: "I die a Maurrasian, with the regret of not having served Maurras and the Action Française better. If I only had made myself worthy of being the successor of Maurras" (Journal: 1939-1945 [Paris: Gallimard, 1992], 84). An entry of October 26, 1939, further emphasizes Drieu la Rochelle's paradoxical, but far from completely negative relation to Maurras: "But also while distrusting certain Maurrassian right-wing fixations—even if on the whole I adhere to the philosophy of Maurras, to his lively reasoning . . . which accounts at the same time for nature and society, the divine and the human—I am very much up in the air, very isolated" (109). Repeatedly during the period of the war and the Occupation he wished in his journal that Maurras would die, so that the image of the Maurras of the 1920s would not be destroyed by the writings of the Maurras of the 1940s. For example: "What a shame that Maurras and Daudet did not die around 1925" ([May 18, 1940], 203); and "Will Maurras finally have the tact to die?" ([June 21, 1940], 246).
5. The title of an article written in 1901 on the socialist leader Jean Jaurès, "Mademoiselle Jean Jaurès," indicates what Maurras thinks of Jaurès and socialism in general: "By Mademoiselle Jean Jaurès you will have understood, as I have intended, the orator Jaurès in person, the 'Mademoiselle' placed there to indicate the sex of his mind [esprit]. . . . His mind combines the weaknesses and the seductions of the feminine mind" (in Enquête sur la Monarchie [Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1924], 499). Maurras goes on to argue that socialism, as a manifestation of the disorderly feminine mind, in spite of the long French socialist tradition, is quite simply not French: it is "rejected by the nature of the French soil, of the French people" (517).
6. During his trial after the war for collusion, to show his utter contempt for the authorities trying him, he repeatedly referred to the Republic as "la femme sans tête [the headless, in the sense of brainless, incompetent, woman]" and to the prosecuting attorney as "Monsieur l'avocat de la femme sans tête." The term, he claimed, surprisingly enough, was taken from a friend of his old enemy Jaurès: "Do you know how the socialist Marcel Sembat, a friend of Jaurès, called the Republic? You don't know? I'm going to tell you: he called it 'the brainless woman.' Well, the brainless woman certainly conceived the organization of this trial. It's incoherence and madness" (Le Procès de Charles Maurras, 50).
7. In a note at the end of Romantisme et Révolution, Maurras quotes an article he wrote on the death of Mallarmé and sketches the following movement of the supposed decline of syntax and style in the history of French literature: "Before [Chateaubriand], syntax and style, that is, the genius of the French language and the thought of the author, were in first place. Thanks to him, they have fallen to second place, having given up their place to vocabulary. The consequences of this revolution were continued not just in Hugo and his contemporaries but even in the work of this belated Romantic whom we have just lost, M. Stéphane Mallarmé (Revue Enclyopédique du 15 octobre 1898)" (272).
8. This is not to suggest that all organicism leads or is equivalent to political totalitarianism, for Maurras's organicism is of a very particular neoclassical type. It is his application of certain organicist principles to politics that makes his aesthetics a model for literary fascism, not the organicist principles in themselves. For an eloquent "defense" of the critical, nontotalitarian, even postmodern implications of a version of literary organicism that would have to be considered diametrically opposed to Maurras's version, see Murray Krieger, A Reopening of Closure: Organicism Against Itself (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
9. In his study of Heidegger's politics, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe analyzes the stakes of the organic determination of the political in terms that apply as well to Maurras as to National Socialism: "In its essence the political is organic. We must allow the terms to resonate doubly here and hear the ergon that lies beneath the organon. This is where the truth of what is called 'totalitarianism' is concealed. To say that the political is organic does not simply mean that the State is conceived simultaneously as 'living totality' and as artwork. The State is still too abstract a notion, which is to say that it is too separate a reality. . . . The essential organicity of the political is in reality infra-political, if not indeed infra-social (in the sense of Gesellschaft). It is the organicity of the community, Gemeinschaft,... a natural or 'physical' determination of the community which can only be accomplished and revealed to that community by a technè—if not by technè itself, by art" (68-69).
10. Maurras had nothing but scorn for the word "individual" and considered it to be, strictly speaking, inhuman: "If we speak of French workers and laborers, we do not say individuals. This dog is an individual. This elm is an individual. . . . For a Man, for a Worker, for a Frenchman, I use the only appropriate term, I say that he is a person" (Mes idées politiques, 268).
11. That is why when the Pretender, the Duc de Guise, in November of 1937, affirmed that no identity existed between the Action Française and the royal house, it had little if any effect on Maurras's political position. As Eugen Weber shows, "the Action Française replied with protestations of complete devotion and the suggestion that it was largely the influence of bad advisers on the Pretender's staff that explained the blow" (Action Française, 404); but when the break was reaffirmed, Maurras persisted in his royalism without the support of the Pretender. Weber also argues that "the royal excommunication of 1937 hurt the Pretender far more than it did the Action Française. . . . Most old royalists were indignant that the Comte de Paris should dare to treat Maurras this way. . . . The royal condemnation was approved by those who condemned Maurras already, not all of them friends of royalism" (408).
12. Maurras wrote an article in the Petit Marseillais of February 9, 1941, with "La Divine Surprise" as its title: "A poet. . . said that when Poetry has just realized all the points of its consummate perfection, when it has reached even the sublime, something still is missing from it if it has not produced what could be called The Divine Surprise. . . . It's in the same sense that he spoke of the "divine part" of the art of war. Well, the divine part of political art has been reached by the extraordinary surprises that the Maréchal has given us. We expected so much from him, we could and we ought to expect everything. To this natural expectation he was able to add something. Afterwards, nothing more was missing" (quoted in Eugen Weber, Action Française, 447). Weber is certainly right to claim that for Maurras, "without its ever being actually said, Pétain took the place of a king, and to Pétain the royalists transferred the loyalty they had heretofore reserved for the Pretender" (Action Française, 446).
13. In a letter written on September 8, 1944, just before he was arrested, Maurras even claimed that Pétain could be considered to have "resisted": "There is no more firm résistant than he in France, nor certainly outside of France" (in Lettres de Prison [Paris: Flammarion, 1958], 8). In the project for a letter to be written to France Soir while he was in prison, Maurras claimed that he too was a heroic member of the true Resistance: "I did everything bad I could [to the Germans], and I never hid it. Not content to 'resist' them, using the word in fashion, I made war on them with my pen for four years, an offensive war in all its forms and in all respects. . . . On the rare occasions when a member of the Action Française had the misfortune to turn to collaborationism and philokrautism, he was automatically kicked out, and he was told this to his face" (55-56). The first part of the statement was of course self-serving and absurd, equivalent to Pétain's defense of his own "resistance" to Hitler; the second part was basically true.
14. See chapter 25 of Eugen Weber's Action Française, "The Divine Surprise" (442-56), for a description of the importance of the Action Française for Vichy France, and especially pages 136-233 of Robert Paxton's Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940-1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972) for an analysis of the nature and effects of Vichy France's "National Revolution," of exactly what it owed to Maurras and where it differed from his views.
15. Marrus and Paxton in Vichy France and the Jews describe the Statute in the following terms: "The law was virtually constitutional in scope. It assigned, on the basis of race, an inferior position in French civil law and society to a whole segment of French citizens and to noncitizens and foreigners living on French soil. The Statut des juifs began by defining who was Jewish in the eyes of the French state, and then excluded those Jews from top positions in the public service, from the officer corps and from the ranks of noncommissioned officers, and from the professions that influence public opinion: teaching, the press, radio, film, and theater.. . . The law, finally, promised that a quota system would be devised to limit Jews in the liberal professions" (3). "[It] went farther than the German ordinance [for the Occupied Zone] of the previous week. Where the German ordinance defined Jewishness reticently by religious practice, the Vichy statute spoke bluntly of race. The Vichy Statute was also more inclusive. . . . [It] included in its definition those with only two grandparents 'of the Jewish race' in cases where the spouse was also Jewish" (12). Marrus and Paxton also argue that "any simple notion of German Diktat can be dismissed summarily. . . . Years of scrutiny of the records left by German services in Paris and Berlin have turned up no trace of German orders to Vichy in 1940 . . . to adopt antisemitic legislation" (5).
Chapter Four
Fascism as Aesthetic Experience: Robert Brasillach and the Politics of Literature
1. For example, Robert Brasillach's close friend and brother-in-law, Maurice Bardèche, was the most persistent of the many revisionists defending Brasillach: "How could this peaceful man, this 'scholar,' this writer whose entire work expresses the goodness, the love of beings, which was in fact his chief aptitude, how could he have been involved in this tempest, carried along at the center of this night in which the winds blew? . . . Nothing prepared Robert Brasillach for politics, and I don't believe I am falsifying the truth by saying that at the beginning of his literary life, it didn't interest him" ("Introduction," Ecrit à Fresnes [Paris: Plon, 1967], 12). For Bardèche, Brasillach was never a "political leader, but rather a carefree young man who took great pleasure in throwing snowballs" (18). Bardèche's testimony is, of course, more than suspect, not only because of his close relationship to Brasillach but because he continued to defend fascism after the war and himself remained an unrepentant revisionist and anti-Semite. In the same "Introduction," Bardèche claims that Brasillach's trial was the way "the Jews and the Popular Front settled their quarrel with Je suis partout." In explaining why Brasillach was executed, he points out that "the director of General de Gaulle's cabinet was Georges Boris, a Freemason and Jew" (40-41).
2. The unsigned material that appears on the back cover of the recent Plon editions of Brasillach's work describes him in exactly these terms: "The tragic destiny of Robert Brasillach, victim at the age of thirty-five of one of the dramas of the Purge Trials, brought an end to a career that was one of the most promising. . . . His work expresses the love of life, a sensibility for tenderness, friendship, courage facing life, the poetry of beings and feelings. . . . If he is still remembered, it is not only because of this death that is today regretted, it is because young people are pleased to discover in his books an image of themselves and of what they want to be" (Notre avant-guerre [Plon: Paris, 1981]).
3. Brasillach's literary talents and his critical skills were in fact very much in question during his trial for collusion with the Germans. The prosecutor, Marcel Reboul, evoked his "misuse" of these skills as one of the principal proofs of Brasillach's treason, as if his real crime were to have betrayed French culture: "Brasillach possessed to the highest point the sense of penetration of texts that a vast erudition and the perfect knowledge of classical rules gives. . . . In an affair of this kind, confronted with an accused of this intellectual quality, . . . it cannot be a question of attenuating circumstances" (in Jacques Isorni, Le Procès de Robert Brasillach [19 janvier 1945] [Paris: Flammarion, 1946], 126). Reboul added later that "Brasillach's treason is above all an intellectual treason. It is the treason of pride" (146). But Jacques Isorni, Brasillach's lawyer, evoked these same skills and talents in order to defend him: "How, Mister Commissioner, can you claim that he betrayed France, he who so profoundly penetrated the soul itself of France? Brasillach . . . is a part of the literary glory of France, a part of the glory of France" (173). Isorni then asked rhetorically: "Do civilized peoples execute their poets?" (177). And later in his defense, he asserted that "one does not betray his country by ensuring its intellectual or literary primacy" (187). Isorni con-eluded his plea by saying: "You are going to judge a young man, a pure man, a great writer, a poet. . . . Justice does not have the right to execute souls. It is not possible that this great mind [esprit] of which the most illustrious writers have spoken will be extinguished forever" (208-9).
4. Brasillach himself contributed to the creation of his own "mythical" status as a victim of the Purge Trials by comparing himself to another "poet-martyr," André Chénier, the poet on whom Brasillach himself worked while in prison and with whom he clearly identified in the months before his execution: Chénier, victim of the Terror of the Revolution; Brasillach, "martyr" of the terror of the Liberation and especially of the communist elements of the Resistance. In two texts written while he was in prison and published in Ecrit à Fresnes, Brasillach makes an explicit connection between his own situation and that of Chénier. In his "Journal d'un homme occupé," he writes: "Decidedly, the First Republic had on its hands for eternity the blood of André Chénier and the blood of Lavoisier. The Fourth Republic wanted to exceed it" (60). And in his lyrical text entitled "Chénier," Brasillach describes how he read this poet: "It is in fact in a cell on death row in the prison at Fresnes, with my ankles linked together by a lead chain, that I assiduously read Chénier. The coldest of Januarys easily brought back to life for me the ancient Thermidor of revolutionary carts, and in a world in flames, the eternal return had brought back many similarities" (471).
5. At his trial, Brasillach's lawyer tried to show that Brasillach had always remained a patriotic French nationalist by insisting on the fact that he broke with Je suis partout when he felt that its support for Nazi Germany was harming France. Brasillach, himself, gave this version of the break between what he calls the "two parties at Je suis partout": "The first, consisting of myself and two or three friends, supported a politics of Franco-German collaboration but demanded that this politics be above all a French politics. The others were . . . 'ultras.' They wanted to go way beyond the politics of Vichy, they wanted an extremely active politics with Germany" (Le Procès de Robert Brasillach, 60-61). Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat argues that the origins of the crisis at Je suis partout dated at least from the previous year, but he supports for the most part Brasillach's version of the split: "Two groups at the heart of the Je suis partout team were opposed. The first, favoring the 'ultras' of collaboration, the P.P.F. of Jacques Doriot and then the Milice of Joseph Darnand, decided to remain faithful right to the end to fascist ideology and to Germany in its collapse. They accused the other group of being tepid. The latter, with Brasillach, remained closer to traditional nationalism, more supportive of Maréchal Pétain. It refused the politics of disaster and was skeptical of the extremists" (Je suis partout, 1930-1944, 366). See also Michel Laval, Brasillach ou la trahison du clerc (Paris: Hachette, 1993), for a dramatic account of Brasillach's trial and the political controversies that have surrounded it ever since. Laval points out that Brasillach's claim that it was out of principle that he broke with Je suis partout was refuted at the trial by showing that Brasillach continued to write for other collaborationist journals and never retracted his active support not just for collaboration but for fascism and National Socialism as well. For a good biography of Brasillach, see William R. Tucker, The Fascist Ego: A Political Biography of Robert Brasillach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
6. Brasillach naively hoped that Maurras would approve of his decision to continue publishing Je suis partout in Paris under the German occupation, but even after Maurras violently condemned the newspaper, Brasillach refrained from replying in any direct, polemical way. His criticisms of Maurras were fairly gentle and indirect and invariably preceded by an admission of what he and others owed to Maurras. For example, in "De l'Epopée aux Décombres" (JSP, no. 579 [September 4, 1942]), Brasillach argues that "to have been 'cleansed' in your youth of all democratic ideas is a gift that prepares you especially well for understanding the new world, even if [the Action Française] tried to instill in you at the same time several prejudices against this world." But having acknowledged this great "gift," he then proceeds to lament the positions taken by the Action Française during the Occupation: "Even its doctrine became feebler: what was the anti-Semitism of 1942 compared to that of 1912?"
7. Just before the outbreak of war in France, Thierry Maulnier, in "Sur la Prochaine 'Après-Guerre'" (Je suis partout, no. 485 [March 8, 1940]), gave a more developed justification for such a view of literary history as a continuity more fundamental than any surface disruption caused by war or social unrest. He argued that "great collective upheavals, great disasters, do not always play the role in the evolution of minds that one would be tempted to give them. The activity of the man who writes books, paints, or composes escapes in large part from the imprint of events. . . . Contrary to a widely accepted but crude idea, it is not great destructions that bring in great creative novelties." This meant for Maulnier that what was called the "postwar" period was on its most profound level really an extension of the "prewar" period: "As for the totality of its products, the postwar period is not the product of the war, but of the prewar period, whose continuation, after an interuption, it becomes."
8. This article has an interesting history. It appeared twice in Je suis partout, the first time as "A Propos de Mallarmé," no. 498 (June 7, 1940), and the second, in a slightly revised form (with the explicit references to Maulnier eliminated, even if the title he gave to Mallarmé is now the title of Brasillach's essay), in the next issue of the paper, no. 498 bis (February 7, 1941), as "Mallarmé, alchimiste du langage." Because of the defeat, Je suis partout was not published in the interim period, and when it did reappear in occupied Paris, Brasillach and the rest of the editorial board denounced Maulnier and the others who had published issue no. 498 as traitors, because they made no mention of the fact that the director and editor had been arrested. This marks Brasillach's break with his friend Maulnier as well as with Maurras and the Action Française in general. It is not without interest that the break is indicated by the double publication of an article on Mallarmé, which attempts to separate his poetry from his prose, what enriches the national language from what risks destroying it.
9. To my knowledge, Brasillach mentions the deportation of Jews from France only once in his columns from Je suis partout, and then it is to agree that the separation of children from their parents who are being deported is unwise—not because it is cruel and unjust but rather because it is not rational for the State to keep any Jews at all, young or old. "The Archbishop of Toulouse protests against the measures taken against the stateless Jews in the unoccupied territory. . . . He speaks of the brutalities and separations of which we are all ready to disapprove, because it is necessary to free oneself of the Jews in block and not keep the little ones. Here humanity is in agreement with wisdom" ("Les Sept Internationales Contre la Patrie," Je suis partout, no. 582 [September 25, 1942]). Brasillach also criticizes the archbishop for not naming those he considers the real culprits responsible for the brutalities: "But he forgets to say that these brutalities are the work of police AGITATORS who want to make the poor Aryan idiots feel sorry." This practice was in fact soon stopped because of general public sentiment against such separations. Vichy had to ask for and finally received permission from Germany to send the children with the adults, which meant of course that the children also accompanied their parents to the gas chambers. See Marrus and Paxton's Vichy France and the Jews, especially 263-69, for an analysis of this change of policy.
10. Gerhard Heller, in Un Allemand à Paris 1940-1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1981), a memoir clearly written to give as positive a picture of his own role at the Propaganda-Staffel as possible, claims that he heard Brasillach take a very different position on what should be done with the Jews. He quotes Brasillach as having said: "They should all be killed, even the little children" (90).
11. In Heidegger, Art and Politics, Lacoue-Labarthe argues in much the same way that Germany itself looked to Greece for such a model of self-formation: "What the German imitatio was looking for in Greece was the model—and therefore the possibility—of a pure emergence, a pure originality: the model of self-formation" (79). In relation to the German imitatio, Brasillach is proposing that France, in order to be itself, imitate a model of self-formation that is itself an imitation of a model of self-formation which is projected as being that of the Greeks.
12. In Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), Alice Yaeger Kaplan considers Brasillach primarily from the perspective provided by the Histoire du Cinéma (Paris: Denoël, 1935), which he coauthored with Maurice Bardèche. Kaplan shows how, for Brasillach, "moviegoing constitutes a rite of friendship, an aesthetic experience against which political experience is later measured. . . . It is as film that fascism calls for unmediated experience and only with film that men can follow en masse, as though creators; and yet the debt of fascism to film must be denied, because ideological activity must be understood by the fascists not as created but as the most natural, the most spontaneous, of experiences" (151). See also Mary Jean Green, "Fascists on Film: The Brasillach and Bardèche Histoire du cinéma," in Richard J. Golsan, ed., Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992). The importance of film as a model for political experience is undeniable. But the French literary fascists in general not only acknowledged but praised the aesthetic, "creative" side of fascism, for it was this "creativity" that was considered the most natural side of man and the highest form of politics In any case, the debt of fascism to film, art, and literature is often overtly proclaimed by them all.
13. The prosecutor at his trial gave great importance to statements such as this, as have almost all commentators of Brasillach's work and life, from Sartre on. See Chapter 6 for an analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre's claim that such statements represent the proof that collaboration was a profoundly unmanly, un-French, homosexual act—in "Qu'est-ce qu'un collaborateur?" in Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1976; originally published in 1945).
Chapter Five
The Fascist Imagined Community: The Myths of Europe and Totalitarian Man in Drieu la Rochelle
1. See also Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), and E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Gellner argues that the idea that the nation is a fact of nature or a historically inevitable destiny is mythical: "Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent . . . political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-exisiting cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-exisiting cultures: that is a reality" (48-49). Hobsbawm also stresses what he calls "the element of artefact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations" ( 10), in his study of the problem, but he tends to see Anderson's notion of the nation as an "imagined community" as something that fills "the emotional void left by the retreat or disintegration, or the unavailability of real human communities and networks" (46), which is to limit seriously the impact of imagination and myth by rooting them in the space once occupied by the genuine and the real. For a more nuanced approach to the problem, see Etienne Balibar, "Racism and Nationalism" and "The Nation Form," in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991).
2. See Paul Valéry, "L'Idée de dictature"—originally published in 1934—in Regards sur le monde actuel (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). Valéry relates this dictatorial aspect of the spirit to the aesthetic faculty, one which in pursuing an "ideal" of order or justice reduces men to the status of figures appropriate for being combined together and "makes of human society a sort of work in which it recognizes itself. There is something of the artist in the dictator and something aesthetic in his conceptions. He must fashion and work his human material and make it appropriate for his designs. . . . In this way, the (political) spirit . . . achieves under a dictatorial regime the plenitude of its development" (99-100).
3. The collection of essays that Drieu la Rochelle published in 1934 to announce his conversion to fascism is entitled precisely Socialisme fasciste (Paris: Gallimard, 1934). Robert Soucy, in Fascist Intellectual: Drieu la Rochelle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), argues that Drieu la Rochelle's " 'socialism' was more rhetorical than real, an antiestablishmentarianism which masked a basic economic traditionalism" (117). "It was a strange kind of socialism, . . . if it was a socialism at all, denouncing Marxism as decadent and related only tangentially to past French Utopian socialisms. . . . Drieu's socialism stemmed from his revolt against bourgeois materialism and hedonism, not from compassion for the hardships of the working classes or a desire to improve their economic well-being: he was essentially interested in 'spiritual' regeneration" (115).
4. In Mesure de la France, Drieu la Rochelle argues that war became modem and thus inhuman with the invention of gunpowder: "Modern war was already at the time of Napoleon and even before, really since the use of gunpowder, which was the first serious attack carried out by industrial practices on the fundamental institutions of humanity, a simple machine to destroy the most robust bodies,. . . the systematic carnage of generations of males" (128). World War I simply realized the full potential of modern war for carnage; it did not invent it.
5. For Drieu la Rochelle, the literary compromise of the Surrealists, in their attempt to "discredit fixed literary form," consisted in their faith in and commitment to words as ends in themselves, and he considered what he called their attempts at "automatic writing" and other experiments to "drown words in words, . . . to wash them of all their tired and dried up significations" (78), a failure. "In abandoning yourselves to the race of your pen, you give yourselves over to the worst literature, that which is made of, which rots of memory. . . . If there is a bourgeois decadence, you are the most decadent of bourgeois writers" (78-79).
6. Drieu la Rochelle polemically linked Marxists and nationalists together by claiming they grew out of the same source: "Nationalists are certainly of their century, that is, the last century. Their sect in the nineteenth century grew out of the same source as that of Marxists. There is a definite kinship, within limits, between men such as Marx and Taine, who both descend from Hegel, whose teaching they corrupted. And the grandsons are cousins in spite of the dissimilarity of the transplants: Maurras and Mussolini, on one side, Lenin, on the other" (Genève ou Moscou, 163).
7. Drieu la Rochelle claims that no book more than Barrès's Un homme libre represents not just the narrowness but also the attractiveness of nationalism for a previous era: "It's a manual of exclusiveness which is locked up in its own logic; it's a secret poem, with an incredible attractiveness. This book was superb for twenty years; it's a book we should burn today" (Genève ou Moscou, 172). He also calls Barrès's writing "pure poison," and his political actions to restore France to itself, "the gestures of an embalmer of death more than of a doctor who wants to help revive life" (173-74).
8. The student claims in fact that nationalist myths are nothing more than "G-strings" covering over both the absence of natural or historical determining factors and the violence and power of the state: "The principle of France and the principle of Germany are the same: the reason of State. Except vital principles are always covered by a G-string that is an image. Here, natural limits or mutual consent (with kicks in the ass), there blood and language (with kicks in the ass)" (193).
9. Drieu la Rochelle also argues that compared to the violence and the number of people killed as part of France's own history and struggle to determine its national borders, Nazi Germany had done very little, and the way to ensure that Hitler would not imitate his French predecessors was simply not to oppose his actions: "The French could also recall that to establish these limits [their national boundaries], they turned Europe upside down under Louis XIV, the Convention, and Napoleon, who together killed millions of men. Hitler is still far from having assassinated as many as any of these monsters. We could perhaps save him the trouble of a deplorable imitation of them" (198).
10. Drieu la Rochelle wrote in his journal during the battle for France that he was a prophet of history and that he could therefore clearly see that history was on the side of the Germans: "I am not a Germanophile, I am a prophet and philosopher of history. I see the present role that fatality and fortune and the laws of human nature have given to the Germans" (Journal 1939-1945 [Paris: Gallimard, 1992), [May 29, 1940], 225). After the defeat, he immediately became disillusioned with the Vichy government and saw it as too conservative and not forceful enough. Vichy was "a rough compromise between democracy and fascism. They grossly imitate fascism without taking from it its virtues and assuming almost all of its inconveniences. An authoritarianism without authority, an auto-cratism without autocrats, without manly impetus" (Journal [July 13, 1940], 266).
11. Drieu la Rochelle admits in Récit secret (Paris: Gallimard, 1951) that he held Hitler responsible for the destruction of fascist Europe: "I restrained myself from indicating too overtly in my own writings all the scorn that I felt for Hitler who was losing Europe just as much as his enemies" (29). In his journal, he frequently blames the Germans and Hitler himself for not living up to fascist ideals: "The Germans are not at all revolutionary and have been completely left behind by events. Hitler no longer does anything but make war; he no longer has any political plans for Europe. I have known this for a year and a half" (Journal [March 5, 1943], 335). As early as April 22, 1942, he asserts that he "no longer believes in collaboration" (Journal, 294).
12. Much of the latter part of Drieu la Rochelle's novel, Les Chiens de Paille (Paris: Gallimard, 1964; first published in 1944), consists of a justification for the actions of the principal character of the novel, Constant, who is described as a heroic traitor. The model evoked in the novel for his apocalyptic vision and of the literary-religous traitor is, as in Drieu la Rochelle's political essays, Isaiah. But the figure of Judas also haunts and tempts Constant as the biblical model for the political traitor. Judas is presented as a necessary force in the dialectic of history and spirituality, and if he brings death, destruction, and eternal condemnation on himself, it is with the possibility of salvation for humanity: "Now, betrayal is a job of the greatest utility in the human comedy. It is the gear system that allows all of the wheels to contribute to the same movement. Traitor, traditor, translator, transmitter. . . . Judas is an indispensable, necessary character. Without Judas, the universe does not stir, without Judas, God neither leaves nor returns to himself. Without Judas, no opening, no window. . . . One can acknowledge that Judas did more than any other man for the salvation of humanity because he accepted not only transitory torture but also eternal torture" (115-17).
13. Drieu la Rochelle describes a meeting with his friend Malraux in Paris before Malraux had joined the Resistance: "Saw Malraux in Paris. He no longer believes in anything, denies the Russian force, and thinks that the world has no meaning and is heading toward the most sordid solution, the American solution. But that's because he himself has renounced being anything but a literary hack [littérateur]. Will he be great enough in this order to justify himself? But literature can no longer justify anyone. Advises me to do as he does. Sure" (Journal [May 8, 1943], 345).
14. For a presentation and analysis of Drieu la Rochelle's suicidal tendencies, see once again Robert Soucy's Fascist Intellectual and perhaps the most serious and complete biography of Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre Andreu and Frédéric Glover's Drieu la Rochelle (Paris: Hachette, 1979).
15. For example, see Etiemble, "L'Ecrivain et la collaboration," in Hygiène des lettres, II: Littérature dégagée (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), who argues that "Drieu, however, was not vile: his death saves him and allows us if not to absolve him completely (for there are his quasi-denunciations of Emmanuel and Aragon), at least to judge him less severely" (192).
Chapter Six
Literary Fascism and the Problem of Gender: The Aesthetics of the Body in Drieu la Rochelle
1. Republished in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, III (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). See Denis Hollier, Politique de la prose (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), for an analysis of Sartre's version of literary-nationalism and his criticism of writers who are "outsiders."
2. Sartre is just one of many examples of the characterization of French fascists as being predominantly homosexual. In his long interview with Patrick Modiano, Emmanuel Berl, for example, explains the attraction of fascism in the 1930s to a number of French intellectuals in the following way: "It didn't represent anything serious in public opinion, it was limited to small circles, to little cells. . . . They had an idea of the 'leader,' of a guy who could represent France without everyone laughing at him. . . . In this fascination with the leader and with force, there was also much latent femininity, a certain form of homosexuality. At bottom, in most of these fascist intellectuals—I'm thinking of Brasillach, Abel Bonnard, Lau-breaux, and Bucard—there was the unconscious desire to get buggered by the S.S. They were not at all models of Aryan beauty, you know, these fascist intellectuals. . . . I always thought that these fascist intellectuals did not have the physique of their ideas. They wouldn't have lasted one minute in a ring with the Jewish boxer Max Baer" (Interrogatoire [Paris: Gallimard, 1976], 73-74).
3. Volume 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans, by Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Volume 2, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
4. Theweleit acknowledges a great debt to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's L'Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), and the debt is certainly evident in his frequent use of terms such as "desiring-machines" and "deterritorialization." But because of the very particular and limited application of their critical apparatus to fascism, I would claim that Theweleit owes much more to Reich and even to Marcuse than to them.
5. Theweleit's post-Reichian, post-Marcusian Utopia of desire is one in which through a certain type of orgasm—here, too, there is a norm—all traces of fascism are destroyed and even gender differences are undone through a "pleasurable commingling" determined by what in the entire work is related to the unbounded, flowing traits of feminine desire and sexuality: "If human beings were to begin to achieve release through orgasms in which they experienced the other, the diverse and the different as equal, they might well become non-fascists. (Anti-fascism is no more than a political position that can be taken up at will; it has little signification for the defascizing of our lives.)" (v. 2, 104).
6. Kaplan's view of Theweleit is, however, more positive than my own. See her essay, "Theweleit and Spiegelman: Of Men and Mice," in Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989). For a feminist analysis of the implications of the instability of the notion of "female" (and thus also of "male"), see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
7. For example, in "PPF, Parti du corps vivant" (August 1937), he claims that Doriot's party was intent on restoring the health of the nation: It is "the political movement that goes the most openly, the most radically in the direction of the great revolution of behavior, in the restoration of the body—health, dignity, plenitude, heroism" (Chronique politique 1934-1942 [Paris: Gallimard, 1943], 50). He also argues that "Doriot will create a France in which the thousands of young couples who each season rush off to the primordial pleasures of skiing, kayaking, camping, and swimming will be at ease. With him, the France of camping will defeat the France of cocktails and congresses" (55). In fact, he presents Doriot as nothing less than "our champion against death" (58).
8. Like the narrator of La Comédie de Charleroi, Drieu la Rochelle went off to fight in World War I with a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in his pocket, and even though he admits that he never had a "philosophical mind" and that his readings of Nietzsche, therefore, were anything but analytical or philosophically rigorous, Drieu la Rochelle acknowledges that "it was toward this life [Nietzsche's], toward this work, toward this name that [his] intellectual sensibility had always gravitated" ("Encore et toujours Nietzsche," Je suis partout [March 3, 1939]; reprinted in Sur les Ecrivains, 92). And the Nietzsche that especially interested him was the one who revealed a mysticism at the heart of Greek genius that was equal to its rationalism, the Dionysus who was always beside Apollo (93).
9. See Alice Kaplan's discussion of what she calls "abortion anxiety" in Drieu la Rochelle (Reproductions of Banality, 101-7).
10. This novel was originally published in a censored version in 1939 and then republished during the Occupation in 1942, with the censored parts restored and with a new preface by the author. All quotations from the novel and the preface are from the reedition of the 1942 edition in Gallimard's Folio Collection (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). In his preface to the 1942 edition of the novel, Drieu la Rochelle presents the novel predominantly in terms of its decadence: "[Decadence] alone explains the terrible insufficiency which is the foundation of this work. This novel appears insufficient because it treats the terrible French insufficiency and treats it honestly, without looking for equivocations or alibis. In order to show insufficiency, the artist must limit himself to being insufficient" (16).
11. See Susan R. Suleiman, "Ideological Dissent from Works of Fiction: Toward a Rhetoric of the roman à thèse"(Neophilogus, no. 60 [1976], 170-73), and Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality (99-100) for an analysis of the ideological function of the most negative of the female characters presented in the novel.
12. In the novel, only one of Gilles's lovers, Pauline, becomes pregnant, and he awaits the birth with great pride and high expectations. But to save the life of Pauline, when a cancer is discovered, the baby is sacrificed: "The operation was a success. The doctors took out along with the child, this full promise of life, an enormous embryo of death. But death had not been uprooted. Cases of cancer in thirty-year-olds are rare and thus mortal" (567). And Pauline's death is tied explicitly to the unproductive future of France: "France was dying while Pauline was dying" (603).
13. These essays were collected near the end of the war in Le Français d'Europe (Paris: Editions Balzac, 1944), and the page numbers given here refer to this edition.
Chapter Seven
Literary Anti-Semitism: The Poetics of Race in Drumont and Céline
1. The History of Anti-Semitism, v. 4, "Suicidal Europe: 1870-1933," trans. George Klim (New York: Vanguard Press, 1985), 31.
2. Even the most formally "innovative" of anti-Semities, Céline, has been rightly accused of plagiarism. One of the early negative reviews of Céline's first "pamphlet," Bagatelles pour un massacre, was that of Emmanuel Mounier, founder and director of the spiritualist Catholic journal, Esprit, who claimed that the intention of the book was to "incite people to murder" (Esprit, no. 66 [March 1938]; republished in Cahier de l'Herne: Céline [Paris: Livre de Poche, 1988], 291). Mounier then went on to dismiss Céline's supposed erudition and to accuse him of plagiarizing other anti-Semitic books and brochures. Mounier proved his point by placing in facing columns passages from Bagatelles and almost identical passages from the two brochures in question. Alice Yaeger Kaplan, in Relevé des sources et citations dans Bagatelles pour un massacre (Tusson: Du Lérot, 1987), does an outstanding job tracking down the various sources for both the acknowledged and the unacknowledged quotations in Céline's first anti-Semitic pamphlet.
3. See Bernanos's homage to Drumont in La Grande peur des bien-pensants (1931); in Essais et écrits de combat I [Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1971]). In his introduction, Bernanos raises the question that he feels readers might ask of his essay: " 'What does he want to do with this Drumont?' you ask. Well, I want to honor him, that's all" (45). "I will have completed my task, served in accordance with my forces my old, dead master, if I am able to transmit to some young people of my race the lesson in heroism I received long ago [from Drumont] when I was only a young boy" (56). After the war, in a letter (dated September 2, 1947) sent from Denmark to an American professor of literature, Milton Hindus, and in which Céline is trying to downplay the importance of the anti-Semitism of his previous works, Céline denies having read Drumont, but his characterization of Gobineau is enough to put into doubt his comments on Drumont as well: "I never read Drumont either—only Gobineau in this area, and he is a philo-Semite" (in Cahier de l'Herne: Céline, 414). In L'Ecole des Cadavres, Céline in fact claims that "all Aryans ought to have read Drumont" (35), implying, of course, that he himself had done so.
4. Michel Winock describes La France juive in the following way: "[Drumont's] work constitutes, we wouldn't dare say the first synthesis in the French language—pasting together would be more exact—of modern anti-Semitism, bringing together the anti-Judaic heritage of the Christian tradition, the Judeophobic anticapitalism of popular and socialist levels of society, and finally the racist theses of the new anthropological science. Because Drumont picked up on—regardless of the contradictions!—everything that could stimulate his obsession" (Nationalisme, antisémitisme et fascisme en France, 80-81). Later in the book, Winock argues that Drumont makes of the different forms of anti-Semitism "a totality which has an answer for everything [un tout qui a réponse à tout]" (132).
5. According to Léon Poliakov, this text was "the best-seller of the latter half of the nineteenth century: 114 editions in one year, not counting a short popular version and several 'sequels'" (The History of Anti-Semitism, v. 4, 40). Michel Winock reports that in 1887, just over a year after it had been published, La France juive was in its 145th edition. He estimates conservatively that this means that around 150,000 copies had been sold in a year. A condensed, one-volume edition was published in 1890, and this went through ten editions. In 1914, the complete work reached its 200th edition, with the last edition coming out in 1941 (Nationalisme, antisémitisme et fascisme en France, 118-19).
6. Because one of the most visible traits of Céline's style is his use of ellipses, in order not to confuse matters I have put between brackets—[. . . .]—the ellipses that I have added to the quotations to indicate where I have omitted something from the text. All other ellipses are Céline's own.
7. See for example, André Gide's review article of Bagatelles pour un massacre, "Les Juifs, Céline et Maritain," originally published in the Nouvelle Revue Française (April 1, 1938), in which he criticized all of those who responded negatively to the ravings of the text for having themselves "raved" and missed the point: that it was all just a "joke," that "[Céline] does everything he can to make us not take him seriously. . . . Céline excels in invective. He latches on to whatever he finds. Jewry is here only a pretext that he chose, the dullest imaginable, the most trivial, the most accepted, the one which cares the least about nuances, which allows the most summary judgments, the most enormous exaggerations, and has the least concern about fairness, allowing the most intemperate carelessness of the pen. And Céline is never better than when he is the least measured. He's a creator. He speaks of the Jews in Bagatelles in the same way that in Mort à crédit he spoke of the maggots his evocative force had just created" (Cahier de l'Herne: Céline, 296). Gide thus defends and explains away Céline's anti-Semiti-cism in the name of his creativeness, what he calls his creation of "pitiful jokes without importance, as we hope he will continue to do in the books that will follow. . . . And Ferdinand continues to get angry to the point of the most stunning lyricism; his complaints and his harangue spill out for the greatest amusement of his readers" (298).
8. See "D'une identité à l'autre" in Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977) and the last hundred pages of Pouvoirs de l'horreur (Paris: Seuil, 1980), which are devoted to Céline. All references will be to the English translations of these texts: "From One Identity to An Other," which is found in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); and Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
9. Philippe Muray, in his Céline (Paris: Seuil, 1981), argues along similar lines that the scandal of the pamphlets is profoundly literary in nature, first of all because the "revolutionary writing" of the pamphlets and that of the novels is basically the same: "If [Céline's] racist books created a scandal, it is not so much because they were racist—others held the same opinions and got away with it—but more because they placed a writing considered 'revolutionary' in the service of racist hatred without their being the slightest noteworthy modification of that writing. . . . The pamphlets perfectly exploited the surplus value of the writing of the novels without any break being discernable on the level of this writing" (105). Muray is especially critical of approaches that focus exclusively on either the poetic or the political level of Céline's texts at the expense of the other level, thus denying the way one level intesects with and is dependent on the other: "The Célinian scandal is above all of a literary kind. . . . Everything in him is mixed together. Anyone who would approach his work to analyze or celebrate exclusively his writing, would see the anti-Semitic beast who lies dormant there spring up. Anyone, on the contrary, who would impose on his work a strictly political treatment, would never finish struggling against a technique of language which never stops disintegrating or recomposing the meanings with which it continuously intersects" (12-13).
10. Kristeva describes the abject near the beginning of her study as "a massive and sudden emergence of a foreignness which, as familiar as it might have been to me in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as something separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A 'something' that I do not recognize as a thing. A mass of non-sense that is anything but insignificant and that crushes me. At the border of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, the abject and abjection are my safeguards. The beginnings of my culture" (Powers of Horror, 2; trans, modified).
11. Henri Godard's Poétique de Céline (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), on the contrary, defends the pleasure he claims Céline's texts produce in the reader who is able to read Céline's "liberating writing" as writing, not ideology. "If one of the functions of literature is certainly to make us take pleasure in our language [jouir de notre langue], it is first of all on this account that Céline deserves the place that has henceforth been given him" (30). Godard also claims that all of Céline's most racist and essentialist propositions, even "in their most aggressive form, if they do not become the only subject of discourse,. . . are in a sense defused by the writing that conveys them" (207). What he calls the liberating characteristics of Céline's writing constitute such a fundamental poetic "truth" that even when Céline's formulates his most "negative convictions concerning freedom," he does it in such a way that "everything invites us to define it as a writing of freedom" (207). Here poetics clearly has "defused" and neutralized everything else and made of the most extreme, dogmatic expression of unfreedom the most accomplished poetic practice of freedom.
12. In a similar mode, Philipe Muray, in spite of what he initially claims is the fundamental interconnection of writing and politics in all of Céline's work, ends up trying to save literature and writing on their deepest level from ideological contamination. He claims, for example, that "the pamphlets are written only in appearance, that they are books only in appearance" (Céline, 128), even if the distinction between novels and pamphlets, he also argues, is not absolute or systematically sustainable. It is, however, still "the bad literature of Céline [that] is anti-Semitic," not the good (148). Ultimately, even if he admits that "if there were not two Célines, it was because the Céline of the pamphlets was located inside the other, like the malady of the body inside the soul," Muray still sees Céline's novels as constituting his self-cure from the malady of anti-Semitism: "Slowly, book after book, Céline cures himself by means of his books of his own malady which consisted in wanting to cure otherwise than by disappearing into his books. It's a totally literary tragedy" (229).
13. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe summarizes the portrait of the Jews given by the Nazi racist ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, which Céline in his own style repeats and dramatizes: "[The Jews] are a formless, unaesthetic 'people,' which by definition cannot enter into the process of self-fictioning and constitute a subject, or, in other words, a being-propre (être-propre). It is this unassignable (and formidable) im-properness of the Jews which makes them, says Rosenberg once again, not the direct opposite (a counter-type) of the Teuton, but his contradiction—the very absence of type. Hence their power . . . to insert themselves into every culture and State and then to live a life that is parasitic upon these, constantly threatening them with bastardization. All in all, the Jews are infinitely mimetic beings, or, in other words, the site of an endless mimesis, which is both interminable and inorganic, producing no art and achieving no appropriation. They are destabilization itself" (Heidegger, Art and Politics, 96).
14. In Céline's racist mythology, the Jew was a Negro or a mixture of races: "The Jew is a Negro, the Semite race doesn't exist, it's an invention of Freemasons, the Jew is the product of the crosssing of Negroes and Asiatic barbarians" (Bagatelles, 191-92). The fact that the "Semite race" did not exist never kept him from referring to the Jews as a race, or from representing them in various forms as the enemy race.
15. In a letter to Milton Hindus (June 14, 1947), Céline claimed that "anti-Semitism is no longer possible, conceivable— Anti-Semitism died in a very simple, dare I say, physical way" (Cahier de l'Herne: Céline, 395). But he went on to add that racism, on the contrary, was not dead, but just for the moment dormant, and he claimed it would undoubtedly be revived—to show how little dead his own anti-Semitism was—this time by Jews: "It is time to put an end to anti-Semitism on principle and for reasons of fundamental idiocy, anti-Semitism doesn't mean anything—we shall undoubtedly return to racism, but later and with the Jews—and undoubtedly under the leadership of the Jews" (396).
16. Even as knowledgeable a reader as Alice Kaplan, who certainly has no interest in mitigating the seriousness of Céline's anti-Semitism and the ideological implications of his work, claims that "the biggest problem in writing about any of the critically recognized Céline's is figuring out what technical languages to call upon and which passages to call up in support. If you quote an anti-Semitic passage, chances are you can find another sentence in the same paragraph or chapter, or certainly in the next book, that will contradict it" (Reproductions of Banality, 107). Kaplan's examples of contradiction all have to do with the extension of the accusation of "Jewification" to almost everyone and everything, a radical, total generalization of the figure of the Jew and thus of mimeticism into every realm. As she argues, in the realm of literature, for example, everyone from the most cerebral writers to the surrealists are accused of being "Jewified": "Céline asserts that Jews pervert direct emotion. This seems near enough to the standard racist attack on Jews as hard-hearted, rootless intellectuals. But as one reads on, Jews become indistinguishable from the surrealists, and even from the Soviets. In the course of the text's long lists, everyone becomes 'jewified' until the identification of Jews is impossible" (107).
17. In an interesting recent essay on Céline, "Style, Subversion, Modernity: Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Anti-Semitic Pamphlets," Rosemarie Scullion, like Kaplan, argues that the generalization of the signifier "Jew" represents a contradiction in Céline's strategy and weakens the force of his argument: "[Céline's] pronouncements in the pamphlets often overtly contradict themselves and are so ludicrously totalizing that they defy reason altogether, rendering it impossible to gauge precisely or definitively stabilize the author's political identity" (in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard Golsan [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992], 181). In a note, Scullion also claims that, as the "dizzying inventory of the individuals, organizations, political and artistic movements Céline labels Jewish in Bagatelles clearly illustrates, the author scatters the identity to such an extent that the signifier juif is divested of much of its signifying potential" (269, n. 12). I am arguing that in fact the opposite is true: that the signifying potential of the Jew is maximized not scattered through such totalization; it is maximized by being scattered.
18. In Entretiens avec le Professeur Y (1955), the character who speaks for Céline responds to a question about foreign languages in a way that recalls Céline's diatribes against the "Jewification" of the French language in Bagatelles: "There is only one language,. . . one valid language! one acceptable language! the imperial language of this world: our own!. . . the others are gibberish, you understand? . . . dialects that came too late! . . . badly put together, badly polished, buffooneries, raucous or mewing cries for gaudy foreigners!" (107). In Céline's novel Féerie pour une autre fois (Paris: Folio, 1952), which relates the last days of the Occupation and his own detention in Denmark, the doctor who is the main character of the novel claims that "a torturer who would speak French to me, I would forgive him for almost everything . . . so much I hate foreign languages! it's not believable that such gibberish exists! what frauds!" (83).
Chapter Eight
The Art of Anti-Semitic Rage: Lucien Rebatet's Aesthetics of Violence
1. Lucien Rebatet, Les Décombres (Paris: Denoël, 1942). A revised version of this text was published in 1976 as Les Mémoires d'un Fasciste I: Les Décombres, 1938-1940 (Paris: Payot, 1976). References to the original 1942 edition will be indicated in the text. The editor of the new edition, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, claims that even with a shortage of paper, the original edition sold over 100,000 copies. As Pauvert admits in his preface to the reedition, Rebatet cut almost eight pages from the first 536 pages of the original edition and then the entire last section of the book (pages 537-664). The effect of the various changes was to clean up the original version and make it somewhat less violent and less anti-Semitic. For example, when in the 1942 version Rebatet wrote "a little wandering kike [un petit youtre errant]" (105), he changed it in the 1976 edition to "a little wandering Jew" (113). Alice Kaplan is right to criticize Pauvert for not republishing the original text and for letting Rebatet purge the text of its worst references, especially given that Pauvert defends his republication of it in the name of the memory of past injustices that would prevent the reappearance of fascism in the future. Kaplan correctly argues that "by editing—by refusing to publish what is most referentially damning—[Pauvert] is abetting forgetfulness" (Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 140, n. 1). Pauvert is is also abetting a form of revisionism that would argue that the anti-Semitism of French literary fascists has been greatly exaggerated.
2. It is now available again, because Gallimard reissued it in 1991. Its few admirers, however, do constitute a strange and heterogeneous group. For example, Maurice Bardèche, close friend and brother-in-law of Robert Brasillach, fascist and revisionist, in an interview conducted by Alice Kaplan in 1982, expressed the opinion that Rebatet rather than Céline was the greater writer: "I'm not at all fascinated by Céline. . . . Rebatet, he's more interesting than Céline. Except that Rebatet was killed as a writer by those politics. Rebatet first spent five years in prison during which time he wrote Les Deux étendards, a magnificent novel. Then he left prison but no one wanted anything to do with him. . . . He was an extraordinary man, by his culture, the accuracy of his judgment, his verve, his talent; admirably learned about both painting and music" (Reproductions of Banality, 179). Another admirer, Etiemble, had the opposite political convictions, and his highly favorable review of Les Deux étendards, "A Propos de Lucien Rebatet," in La Nouvelle Revue Française (March 1953), provoked Sartre to remove him from the editorial committee of Les Temps Modernes. In the review, after condemning the "stupidities" of Rebatet in Les Décombres, Etiemble asks: "This Nazi, this bastard, how not to admire the writer that he has become?" (reprinted in Etiemble, Hygiène des lettres, II: Littérature dégagée [Paris: Gallimard, 1967], 204). He ends his review by comparing Michel, the main character of the novel, to Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen: "Michel is you, he's me. Michel, he's our youth—he's also Rebatet! He's really Lucien Leuwen" (210). In the same collection of essays, see his attack on Sartre for denouncing his review and excluding him from Les Temps Modernes: "Lettre ouverte à Jean-Paul Sartre sur l'unité de mauvaise action" (142-57). Another surprising admirer of Rebatet is George Steiner, who ends "Cry Havoc," an essay largely devoted to Céline, by praising Les Deux étendards as a "greater work than any of Céline's, with the possible exception of Journey, and one of the masterpieces of modern literature. . . . Unlike Céline's fiction, Rebatet's novel has the impersonal authority, the sheer formal beauty of classical art" (in Extra-Territorial: Papers on Literature and the Language of Revolution [New York: Atheneum, 1971], 45). Steiner considers it a "mystery" in the theological sense of the term that "a profoundly generous imagination, a grasp of the sanctity of individual life . . . [can] coexist with Fascist doctrines and aims of murderous action openly avowed" (46). It is to unraveling the logic of this "mystery," as well as the political role in literary fascism and anti-Semitism of the ideal of "the formal beauty of classical art," that the present chapter and this book as a whole are devoted.
3. He claimed, of course, that the Jews were responsibile for the fact that he and his colleagues had become more aggressive anti-Semites: "My best journalist friends and myself have been treated as mortal enemies by the Jews, who were right to do so. In our group, we once had a traditional mistrust concerning the Jews: nothing destined us to an aggressive anti-Semitism. The Jews, by their works and their proliferation, were the essential artisans of it" (Les Décombres, 25).
4. Alice Kaplan links the scenes of collective readings at Je suis partout to the fact that Rebatet worked briefly for the Vichy Journal de la Radio in 1940, and, with Rebatet as her pretext, she analyzes the relation of "radio talk" and radio technology to fascist discourse in general and suggests how radio "created a need for what it could satisfy—in this case, amplified, telephonic invective. . . . It fostered a notion of the nation as a group of like speakers. . . . Radio is an available interpretive instrument for xenophobic diatribe, for the protection of one imaginary tribe against another" (Reproductions of Banality, 133).
5. Rebatet's other experience with the radio occured in Sigmaringen, Germany, after having fled France with the retreating German army, when he was asked by Jean-Hérold Paquis to work for Radio Patrie, a tool of the Nazis that broadcast into France the news that the French were suffering under the "American occupation" and would soon be liberated again by the Germans. Radio, in this case, once again did not seem to him an appropriate technology for disseminating the true voice of fascism (or his voice), but rather because of what he called the political charade it was being used for, left him (and fascism) without a voice: "The military chronicle, the speciality of Paquis, alas, left me speechless [literally, without a voice]. It was to reedit the grotesque aspects of the old journalist-generals of 1940 who declared that the German armored divisions had made cavalry charges without any strategic importance and that Hitler, being eight days late on his calender, had lost the battle. . . . I preferred working in a factory to participating in this lamentable parody" (Mémoires d'un fasciste, II: 1941-1947 [Paris: Pauvert, 1976], 214).
6. Nancy describes this scene, which he calls the scene of myth, in the following way: "We know the scene: there are men assembled together, and someone tells them a story. These assembled men, it isn't yet certain if they constitute an assembly, if they are a horde or a tribe. But we call them 'brothers,' because they are assembled together, and because they listen to the same story. . . . They were not assembled before the story, it's the recitation that assembles them" ("Le Mythe interrompu," in La Communauté désoeuvrée [Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986], 109). Nancy goes on to argue that "there is a co-implication of the thought of myth, of the mythical scenography, and of the production and staging of a 'Volk' and a 'Reich' in the sense that Nazism gave to these terms. . . . In this sense, we have nothing more to do with myth" (117).
7. In Les Décombres, Rebatet described how he and others at Je suis partout made light of the accusation that they were all "Hitlerites": "Self-righteous people began to speak on the sly of our Hitlerism, which was for us a superb subject for farces. Wagnerian, Nietzschean, anti-Semitic, anti-clerical, knowing in detail the National-Socialist folklore, I was naturally chosen in our group to play the role of the crack S.A. man. I fulfilled my function with resounding Horst Wessel Lied's and'Heil's" (64).
8. Rebatet published an anti-Semitic pamphlet during the Occupation, Les Tribus du cinéma et du théâtre (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Françaises, 1942), which elaborates at great length on this theme, using the cinema as the best example of how an art can supposedly be exploited and ruined if taken over by Jewish interests. Hollywood, of course, was the name that stood for all such "Jewish exploitation."
9. In Les Mémoires d'un fasciste, II, Rebatet admitted that as the situation of the German army deteriorated, the more vigorously Je suis partout supported the Nazi cause: "At Je suis partout we hid our powerlessness by means of a disoriented agitation" (174).
Chapter Nine
A Literary Fascism beyond Fascism: Thierry Maulnier and the Ideology of Culture
1. Au-delà du nationalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1938).
2. The one important exception to the general picture I have just drawn, however, is Zeev Sternhell, who considers Maulnier to be not just one French fascist among many others but rather, along with Marcel Déat and the Belgian Henri De Man, to be one of the most representative and important fascist theorists of the period. In the last chapter of Neither Right nor Left (213-65), which is called "Spiritualistic Fascism" and largely devoted to Maulnier, Sternhell treats Maulnier's antimaterialist, antidemocratic and anti-Marxist political position as one of the purest, intellectual forms of fascism.
3. See Jacques Derrida, De l'Esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987), for an analysis of the contradictory sense of the concept of spirit (Geist) in the work of Heidegger, as well as in the humanist tradition that is so often evoked to criticize or condemn Heidegger's work. See especially Derrida's analysis of Heidegger's Rectoral Address (54-73), in which he shows how Heidegger's spiritualization of National Socialism is both the sign of his commitment to it in the form of an attempt to "save it" and at the same time an apparent break with Nazi ideology, for such a "discourse seems no longer simply to belong to the 'ideological' camp in which obscure forces are appealed to, forces that would not be spiritual but natural, biological, racial" (64-65). Derrida argues that the break with biologism and racism is limited and only apparent, however, because it takes the form of an opposition to them that is ultimately rooted in the same "metaphysics of the subject." For Derrida, the Rectoral Address "capitalizes the worst, that is, two evils at the same time: the approval given to Nazism and the procedure that is still metaphysical" (66). Maulnier's even more overtly spiritualistic approach to fascism is caught in the same contradictions.
4. This contrasts with Brasillach's study of the life and work of another neoclassical dramatist, Pierre Corneille (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1938), in which Brasillach describes what he calls "the fascism of Pierre Corneille" in the following terms: "A nationalism pushed to the point of the most vibrant sense of identity, the incarnation of authority in a dominating and absolute figure, and preferably a royal dictatorship, the opposition to liberal ideas, parliamentary government, to the old generations that never understood anything, the hope in youth and in the future, the construction of that future through faith, sacrifice, through everything that lifts man above materialism. . .—these are the bases for what could be called the politics of Corneille. Aren't they strangely contemporary?" (298).
5. Until the war, Maurice Blanchot shared many of Maulnier's violently extremist, tragic-humanist, ultranationalist principles and was a frequent contributor in 1936 and 1937 to Combat, the militantly anti-Blumian, anti-Popular Front journal that Maulnier cofounded and ran. In "Terrorisme, méthode de salut publique" (no. 7 [July 1936]), Blanchot argues that there should be no restrictions placed on the means used to bring down the Popular Front government, which he describes sarcastically as a "beautiful union, a holy alliance, this conglomerate of Soviet, Jewish, and capitalist interests. Everything that is anti-national, everything that is anti-social will be served [by it]." For these reasons, Blanchot feels justified in asserting that "it is good that people who believe they possess total power, . . . who seem truly to be the masters of beautiful French blood, experience suddenly their weaknesses and are recalled to reason through fear. . . . We have to be ready at the same time to do everything, through all means and especially violence. . . . It is necessary that there be a revolution, because you do not reform a political regime that controls everything, that has its roots everywhere; you don't suppress it, you cut it down. It is necessary that this revolution be violent, because you do not draw out of a people as feeble as ours the forces and passions necessary for a renewal by decent measures but by bloody jolts, by a storm that will shake it up in order to awaken it."
6. This is one of the places where I part company with Sternhell, who, I believe, seriously understates and even at times distorts the significance of Maulnier's criticisms of fascism and nazism. Sternhell claims, for example, that "not only did Maulnier accept the Nazi ideology, but he wished to use it as an example for the regeneration of France" (Neither Right nor Left, 234). He also claims that Maulnier's criticism of National Socialism for not developing a serious critique of capitalism "is the only adverse criticism that Maulnier has to make of nazism and fascism" (236). Maulnier's criticisms were in fact numerous and substantial, and the radical spiritualistic nature of his concept of fascism made it impossible for him to accept Nazi ideology as a model for a French ultranationalism "beyond nationalism." This, however, does not necessarily make him less of a fascist, just a different and more demanding kind of fascist.
7. Here, as in many other places, Maulnier's position and strategy could be compared to Heidegger's, his desire to spiritualize fascism and nazism compared to Heidegger's project, during a limited period, to accomplish similar although not identical goals. For example, in his Rectoral Address, "The Self-Assertion of the German University," Heidegger has this to say about the spirit: "The spiritual world of a people is not the superstructure of a culture, no more than it is an armory stuffed with useful facts and values; it is the power that most deeply preserves the people's strengths, which are tied to earth and blood; and as such it is the power that most deeply moves and most profoundly shakes its being [Dasein]. Only a spiritual world gives the people the assurance of greatness" (trans. Karsten Harries, Review of Metaphysics, no. 38 [March 1985], 474-75).
8. Paul Sérant, in Les Dissidents de l'Action Française (Paris: Editions Copernic, 1978), claims, on the contrary, that "it is easy to see that if [during the war] Thierry Maulnier condemns the different partisans of an alliance of France with one of the foreign coalitions, it is all the same toward the Allied forces that his preferences go. The Parisian press was not mistaken, and except for Brasillach who maintained his friendship with him, the journalists of the Action Française who rallied to collaboration didn't hesitate to accuse Thierry Maulnier of 'Gaullism'" (225). I put much less stake in such accusations coming from the most extreme fascists and collaborationists than Sérant does and find no evidence in Maulnier's wartime writings of his alleged "Gaullist" sympathies
Afterword
Literary Fascism and the Case of Paul de Man
1. For essays on various sides of the battle over the nature and implications of de Man's wartime journalism, see especially Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), and Critical Inquiry, v. 15, no. 4 (Summer 1989), which includes "Biodégradables: Seven Diary Fragments," Jacques Derrida's polemical response to various criticisms of his initial essay on de Man, "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War," trans. Peggy Kamuf and originally published in Critical Inquiry, v. 14, no. 3 (Spring 1988), and republished in a slightly expanded form in Responses. See also my own response to Derrida's essay, "The Temptation of Fascism and the Question of Literature: Justice, Sorrow, and Political Error (An Open Letter to Jacques Derrida)," in Cultural Critique, no. 15 (Spring 1990).
2. De Man's articles have been collected in Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). In terms of de Man's support for the "New Europe," see, for example, "Dans nos murs" (August 26, 1941), where he praises a book published by Pierre Daye, previously a member of the Belgian parliament from Léon Degrelle's extremist Rexist Party and a frequent contributor to Je suis partout, for "showing that the present war, besides being an economic and national struggle, is the beginning of a revolution that aims at organizing European society in a more equitable manner" (138).
3. See his reviews of a series of conferences given in Brussels at the Institut de Culture Italienne in March 1941: "Les Systèmes impériaux de la Rome antique," "Le 'Risorgimento' italien," and "La Formation de la jeunesse en Italie" (Wartime Journalism, 48, 50, 54).
4. In Responses, texts by Els de Bens, "Paul de Man and the Collaborationist Press," and Ortwin de Graef, "Aspects of the Context of Paul de Man's Earliest Publications," give a detailed description of the situation of the press in Belgium at this time and its control by the Nazi occupiers. De Man's relation to Raymond de Becker, editor-in-chief of Le Soir from the end of 1940 until he was removed in September 1943, his connection to militant collaborationists such as the Didiers and Les Editions de la Toison d'Or, and finally his involvment with the Dechenne agency (to whom the Germans granted the monopoly of the distribution of dailies and weeklies), where de Man continued to work after leaving Le Soir, all indicate an extended involvement with the collaborationist press and its leaders. In addition to Derrida's essay, see especially Alice Yaeger Kaplan, "Paul de Man, Le Soir and the Francophone Collaboration (1940-1942)," and William Flesch, "Ancestral Voices: De Man and His Defenders," for essays that deal with concerns close to my own. See also Werner Hamacher, "Journals, Politics: Notes on Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism," trans. Susan Bernstein, Peter Burgard, Jonathan Hess, Eva Geulen, and Timothy Walters, in Responses, for a detailed analysis of the complications and contradictions in what he calls the Belgicist position of de Man's wartime journalism and the "politics of realism" that de Man constantly called on to justify collaboration.
5. Werner Hamacher meticulously documents the changing situation of those maintaining a "Belgicist postion" throughout the war, as well as the different versions of this position (see once again "Journals, Politics," in Responses, 441-46). For example, Hamacher describes how Raymond de Becker, chosen editor-in-chief of Le Soir on December 5, 1940, and thus obviously acceptable to the Nazi occupiers, "collaborated with the Nazis in the hope of achieving 'free collaboration' until it became clear to him (very late) that the Nazis were conducting a systematic policy of denationalization. . . . Becker was relieved of his duties as editor-in-chief of Le Soir in September 1943 and was taken into German custody" (445). Even so, after the war, he was sentenced to death by a Belgian court because although he had "supported a politics of national independence and restitution of the state . . . he had betrayed the contents of that politics by linking it to the ideal of a 'new Europe' under German hegemony and by repeatedly taking a position in favor of recruiting Belgians for the German army and for 'labor service' in Germany" (446).
6. In his review of Drieu la Rochelle's Notes pour comprendre le siècle, de Man criticized Drieu la Rochelle's anti-rationalism, his subordination of thought to a broad and superficial historical schema, and his confusion of aesthetic and ethical determinants. He did, however, praise the "élan and conviction with which [Drieu la Rochelle] throws himself into the struggle to create a radically new human [that is, fascist] type. That is an undeniable sign of vitality, all the more promising in a country which has fallen as low as France" (Wartime Journalism, 171).
7. As numerous commentators in Responses have indicated, this list is not originally de Man's, but except for his elimination of the name of Proust from the list, it is a list he took from Aldous Huxley, and one de Man had already used before the war (but in quotation marks and with attribution) in a very different context: in an article on the contemporary English novel that he wrote for the liberal student journal he helped run, the Cahiers du Libre Examen (January 1940); in Wartime Journalism, 17). Much has been written about the importance of the inclusion of Kafka's name in the list given by de Man in "Les Juifs," but the most eloquent and convincing analysis of this list is in my mind that of Werner Hamacher: "The name Kafka, could have and should have decided all of that. It could have and should have been cited—plainly, clearly, unambiguously—as the name of resistance against racist terror; instead it functions, at best, as an anti-anti-semitic allusion. In the ideological-political context of the time, the name Kafka could have and should have been a protest against the division of the world and of literature into the Jewish and the non-Jewish. Only when used decisively—as the name of a decision, clear and discernible to anyone—could the name have opposed that division. Accordingly, in the Belgium of 1941 the name should have been not Kafka but Proust. . . . They were, objectively, names against the politics of black-listing and denunciation of names, through names; but in de Man's article they are not. He participates in ths politics by leaving the significance of the name Kafka unclear and by going so far as to include in his text a second, clearly denunciatory list with names from Maurois to Benda" (Responses, 461).
8. Brasillach, in spite of his militant anti-Semitism, also took a position similar to de Man's in other articles, for he considered Proust to be "a great French writer, one of the greatest French writers. . . . It has been claimed that La Recherche is not a novel, when it is perhaps the only pure novel" (Je suis partout [February 12, 1943]). As for Hemmingway and D. H. Lawrence, other names on de Man's list, both were, for example, favorites of Drieu La Rochelle, who translated and wrote introductions for a novel of each of them. Drieu la Rochelle had also been a friend of Huxley's.