The Aesthetics of Hate

Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France

Sandrine Sanos

• Editore: Stanford University Press
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804782838
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Storia
• Categoria: Storia francese

The Aesthetics of Hate examines the writings of a motley collection of interwar far-right intellectuals, showing that they defined Frenchness in racial, gendered, and sexual terms. A broad, ambitious cultural and intellectual history, the book offers a provocative reinterpretation of a topic that has long been the subject of controversy.

In works infused with rhetorics of abjection, disgust, and dissolution, such writers as Maulnier, Brasillach, Céline, and Blanchot imagined the nation through figures deemed illegitimate or inferior—Jews, colonial subjects, homosexuals, women. Sanos argues that these intellectuals offered an "aesthetics of hate, " reinventing a language of far-right nationalism by appealing to the realm of beauty and the sublime for political solutions.

By acknowledging the constitutive relationship of antisemitism and colonial racism at the heart of these canonical writers' nationalism, this book makes us rethink how aesthetics and politics function, how race is imagined and defined, how gender structured far-right thought, and how we conceive of French intellectualism and fascism.

1

“ THE CRISIS IS IN MAN”

The Nation, the Self, and Cultural Politics in the 1930s

Those were years exemplary of paradox and surprise.

—Jean-Pierre Maxence, Histoire de dix ans, 1939

We were eighteen; our minds were somewhat confused, we felt rather disgusted with the modern world—and had a certain innate bent to anarchy.

—Robert Brasillach, Notre avant-guerre, 1941

Cultures of the Anxious Modern

In 1937, far-right essayist and intellectual Thierry Maulnier boldly declared: “We must win back our universe!”¹ Maulnier was, in the mid-1930s, a well-respected literary and political critic. A graduate of the prestigious École normale supérieure, he had begun his journalistic career—as many on the far right did—in the pages of Charles Maurras’s monarchist and ultra-nationalist L’Action Française. By the time he penned this heartfelt call, Maulnier was regarded by many as the natural heir to Maurras: he was a young man whose wide-ranging literary culture matched his reactionary political commitment. His articles appeared in a far-right magazine he had helped create the previous year and coedited with Catholic conservative Jean de Fabrègues, who shared his revulsion at the decadence the postwar era had unleashed. The magazine’s name, Combat (Struggle), proclaimed its editors’ intent. By 1937, when the Spanish Civil War dominated the news and the Popular Front had come to power, Maulnier had already published several collection of essays that took literature and politics as their central topic. Their titles hinted at the radical discontent he experienced: his essays claimed “The Crisis Is in Man,” pondered “Socialist Myths,” and announced “France, Tomorrow.” ² Maulnier devoted much of his energy in the 1930s to offering a critique of the chaos and decadence he claimed to have observed around him. Such critique infused his insistent call for a revolution of a particular nature, an aesthetic as well as cultural and political revolution that would come from a new generation of far-right intellectuals.

Thierry Maulnier was not alone in this endeavor. His words formed the rallying cry for a group of young men who, in the years 1930 to 1935, expressed themselves in more or less short-lived journals and magazines of high intellectual caliber but little readership, with rather austere names that hardly hinted at their content.³ They were trained in the ideas of far-right and conservative nationalism and aspired to cultural and political prominence. Ranging from ultra-Catholic journalists Jean de Fabrègues and René Vincent to novelists Robert Brasillach and Georges Blond, music and film critic Lucien Rebatet, energetic polemicist Jean-Pierre Maxence, and the lesser-known but no less dedicated Pierre-Antoine Cousteau and Pierre Monnier, they were a motley collection united in their disgust with the postwar world in which they had come of age. They sharpened their words in little-read newspapers and magazines: Les Cahiers (the Notebooks), Réaction pour l’Ordre (Reaction for Order), La Revue Française (the French Journal), La Revue du Siècle (the Journal of the Century). These young men achieved intellectual and political recognition in the late 1930s with the polemical newspapers they created: from the intellectual magazine Combat (Struggle) to the controversial L’Insurgé (the Insurgent), and the refashioning of weekly newspaper Je Suis Partout (I Am Everywhere). They explained that, in this decade, the 1930s, it was necessary—urgent even—to find a solution to the “confused search” that had pervaded the postwar years and had consumed their youthful undertakings.⁴

It was the memory of a youth influenced and troubled by the political disorders and cultural effervescence of the 1920s that fueled this young intellectual generation’s search for a dissident politics that they conceived as an irrepressible desire for truth. As one of its leading figures, Catholic writer Jean de Fabrègues, observed, “When faced with the poverty of what the modern world has to offer us, we find ourselves gripped by a tragic sense of uneasiness.”⁵ With similar language, fellow journalist René Vincent explained in 1935 that their desire for a radical (far-right) politics had emerged out of the disconcerting and confused postwar years:

The uneasiness of 1920 was born under the sign of the post-war disorder; it was, in a certain way, the product of this disorder; it nonetheless expressed a loud dissatisfaction with this very disorder, [and] a categorical refusal of this unfair state of affairs[; it was] a confused search whose troublesome nature some were dangerously inclined to, but in any case, a true search, an unconscious and sometimes blind undertaking, but an undertaking [geared] toward higher values [that were] truer than the ones celebrated by this century.⁶

In the face of the “tragic sense of uneasiness” brought about by the modern world, these young intellectuals claimed action must be urgently undertaken. The modern (namely, the “crazy 20s”), as they experienced it, had produced a pervasive anxiety.

Why did they experience the modern—postwar culture and aesthetics—with such anxiety? (For the words “anxiety” and “disquiet” reappeared obsessively in their writings on the topic of the “après-guerre.”⁷) The war had been a momentous event that had decimated the generations of fathers and older brothers they paid homage to and yet were haunted by. They had not experienced the Great War, as most had been born at the beginning of the century. But its long-lasting cultural, social, and political effects convinced them that a “new order” was necessary. Their elders spoke about it as an event that marked a radical rupture: nothing would ever be the same. The war, though, had not just brought about death, mutilation, and violence. The years of conflict had also brought about seemingly unstoppable social, technological, and cultural change. This young generation met these changes with an “uneasy” anxiety tinged with excitement. They did not simply reject the modern, but felt a profound ambivalence toward it.

As they said repeatedly in the pages of the numerous magazines and newspapers they wrote for, the anxiety lay in the dangers of losing oneself and succumbing to the temptation of the disorder of decadence. They explained their “categorical refusal” as an instinctive reaction to such disorder, an almost “unconscious” undertaking, rather than as the rational and reasoned programmatic reaction of oppositional far-right politics. The “unconscious and sometimes blind” endeavor that drove their political engagement had infused their own politics: it had done so because, they argued, it had allowed them to experience the “tragic” urgency of their undertaking. They had begun their political reflection “from their own very concrete and immediate anxieties.”⁸ They wrote and acted out of intimate knowledge rather than distant observation. In short, the foundations of their sense of self were at stake in this changing world.

Historians have usually explained the “anxiety” and “refusal” that this generation of far-right intellectuals evoked as the expression of their political analysis: those terms were simply the affective responses of writers and journalists who were steeped in a long-standing far-right politics and who, like their elders, railed against socialism, capitalism, democracy, and parliamentarism. In doing so, they denounced a “bourgeois age” that was corrupt and decadent and that had given the nation a “sordid face” and a “motionless and fixed mask.”⁹ Yet, as has also been noted, the denunciation of bourgeois “capitalist lies” was not confined to this far-right generation but permeated the atmosphere of interwar France. The very terms of these writers’ arguments and analyses must therefore be taken seriously, for the sentiments they articulated were rooted in the cultural and political discourse of the 1930s. We do not fully grasp the significance of their expressions of disgust and refusal unless we situate these intellectuals not just within a political genealogy of far-right ideas but also within the larger context of 1930s French cultural and aesthetic debates. This chapter provides an overview of how categories of civilization, race, gender, and sexuality infused contemporaries’ debates and discussions and how these young intellectuals engaged and responded to them.¹⁰ From the beginning, they conceived of this moment as unstable, uncertain, and “in crisis.” In turn, that rhetoric of “crisis”—admittedly a recurring feature of French political debates—was infused with a different emphasis and legitimated their literature and political endeavors, allowing them to craft a place in conversation with their political forefathers and, more strikingly, against and with their contemporaries.

The Interwar Period: The Fate and Future of French Civilization

The young far right experienced the novelty of the postwar years paradoxically.¹¹ While modernity seemed to embody, for them, the uncanny experience of dislocation and displacement, at the same time some of them eagerly partook of its most seductive symptoms. In short, they were engaged with what the modern offered in those years, even as many felt ambivalent or condemned its most egregious manifestations. Many loved the cinema and were passionate consumers of its weekly showing, as Brasillach nostalgically recounted in his 1941 memoir, Notre avant-guerre.¹² One of Je Suis Partout’s most dedicated journalists, Lucien Rebatet began his journalistic career as a film and music critic, an occupation he continued under the pseudonym of François Vinneuil in the pages of Je Suis Partout. He reviewed American films, from Charlie Chaplin to westerns, René Clair, and Abel Gance, but also Leni Riefenstahl and most of the Russian cinematic production of those years. Brasillach, who has been characterized by historians as the quintessential “Romantic Fascist,” penned the first encyclopedia of cinema with his brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche, which was translated and distributed by the Museum of Modern Art in 1938.¹³ Their fellow polemicist and editor Jean-Pierre Maxence, who often lamented how, in these postwar years, “people drank cocktails just for the sake of it and practiced nudism out of snobbishness rather than hygiene [while] celebrating that new God, America,” also fondly recalled in 1939 how “cinema had widened horizons.”¹⁴ For this far-right critic enamored with both literature and politics, cinema “changed the art of story-telling by giving it speed and immediate punctuation.”¹⁵ Soon, though, he berated this craze for the cinema as a misguided desire for “scandal,” where everyone in Paris “ran to watch every surrealist film.”¹⁶ As another explained, cinema was truly the expression of “the age of the contingent.”¹⁷

Even when they did not necessarily celebrate those symptoms of modernity, they still participated in the cultural conversations occurring around the seemingly endless proliferation of new cultural forms and activities. They listened to the TSF radio, while participating in Action française’s demonstrations in the Latin Quarter.¹⁸ They eagerly commented on the cultural events of their day. Journalist Lucien Farnoux-Reynaud, one of the 1937 far-right Insurgé’s regular contributors of a column titled “The New World,” had written ten years earlier about the new musical form called “jazz” that had swept through Paris. For him, “the epoch of the jazz band” meant, as historian Jeffrey Jackson has noted, a “broader cultural shift,” which he found disturbing.¹⁹ Jazz was the kind of novelty, according to Farnoux-Reynaud, that signaled the worrisome dominance of “knee-length skirts, neck-length hair, women with men’s coats and cigarettes.” In short, a “confusion of the sexes, an anguish of living, and a feverishness in everyday pleasure.”²⁰ While men like Farnoux-Reynaud felt ambivalent about jazz (as did quite a few critics in those years), many others of these young political journalists were music critics, such as Lucien Rebatet and René Vincent (under the pseudonym Hughes Favart).²¹ Hardly the traditionalists that the older ultra-nationalist far-right generation were when it came to art and culture, these young men were indeed of their time and enthusiastic critics of the cultural politics they saw unfolding before them.

In the early 1920s, celebrating modernity seemed all the rage. It offered a welcome distraction and challenge to the war years, which had shaken the foundations of Western civilization. Strikingly, attention to modernity was marked by an enthusiastic interest in “black culture.” The exoticizing fascination with “blackness”—dubbed in France “negrophilia”—found its way into the work of avant-garde artists as well as into the dance halls, clubs, and bars of nighttime Paris. Artists like Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, and Constantin Brancusi turned to African art as a means to authentically access life (they were following in the footsteps of poet and collector Guillaume Apollinaire). Paris salons seemed enthralled by “l’art nègre,” displaying it on their walls and in their furniture.²² French artists turned to “blackness” as the quintessential embodiment of difference in order to reinvent an exhausted Western civilization, while others returned from colonies with tales and impressions and Parisians met those “members of the African diaspora” who “flourish[ed]” there.²³ And far-right writers like Maxence bemoaned the fact that, indeed, in the 1920s, “differences were being excessively cherished and nursed.”²⁴ New cultural forms were yearned for, and “negrophilia” fulfilled that need, especially for bohemians, artists, and youth eager to experience something different and radically new. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Paris, which since the late nineteenth century had been the refuge of artists, writers, and political exiles. Paris—that “fundamentally imp...