Alphonse de Chateaubriant and the Politics of French Literary History

Abstract

Over the past two decades, two phenomena have combined in Europe and the United States to revise the study oftwentieth-century French literature and to cloud a once-clear and widely accepted representation of French literary history from the inter-war years to the present. The most widespread of these phenomena, whose impact has been felt not only in the study of French literature and culture in the broadest sense, but in political and legal scandals and controversies as well, is of course France's obsession with its Vichy past. So pervasive and tenacious has been this obsession that in 1987 the historian Henry Rousso diagnosed it as a 'syndrome' a label that has stuck with it ever since. To get a sense of the impact of the Vichy Syndrome, one need only consider the attention given the trials for crimes against humanity of Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier, and Maurice Papon, or the scandal surrounding revelations of the extent and duration of then President Fran<;ois Mitterrand's service to Vichy following the publication of Pierre Pean's UneJeunesse fram;aise: Fram;ois Mitterrand 1934-1947 in 1995. To gage the impact of Rousso's Syndrome on cultural studies or 'les sciences humaines', one need only consider the fact that more historical studies produced in France in the 1990s dealing with the nation's long past have dealt with Vichy (and its legacy) than with any other period. Along the same lines, studies ofliterary collaboration with the Nazis have multiplied, as have at least in some quarters efforts to rehabilitate right-wing writers whose reputations suffered as a result of their pro-Nazi or pro-Vichy stances. Atthe same time, interest in extreme right-wing and fascist intellectuals has intensified, certainly in the United States, as a result of the de Man and Heidegger Affairs of the late eighties. The complicity of both men with Nazism not only marked the retreat of deconstructive formalism, it brought a new focus to fascist intellectuals and artists and placed a much higher premium on the analysis of historical and ideological context in the discussion of virtually all writers and their works. Largely as a result of the convergence of these two trends, on both sides of the Atlantic the works ofjascisant, pro-Vichy, and anti-Semitic French writers such as Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, LouisFerdinand Celine especially in his role as pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic pamphleteer and most recently, Paul Morand, have achieved greater visibility and notoriety while raising