National Socialism and Antisemitism: The Case of Maurice Barrès

Abstract

On 12 May 1898, in the midst of the violent agitation attending the Dreyfus Affair, Maurice Barres presented himself as a candidate for the seat of deputy from Nancy on a platform of 'National Socialism'.1 It was under this banner that he sought a mandate to bar the way to the coalition of the forces of evil-Jews, aliens, Marxists, rootless Kantian intellectuals, moneymen tied up with international high finance, grands bourgeois, and liberals of all kinds-who were eating away at the body of the nation and leading the land to ruin. For many scholars today Barres is only a minor figure in the history of ideas; Professor Stuart Hughes, for example, places him far behind someone like Sorel on the via regia of intellectual history.2 But Barres' contemporaries thought differently. Celebrated writer, important journalist, man of politics, and intellectual leader for a large segment of the younger generation (including for a time even such men as Gide, Aragon, and Leon Blum), Barres was for the men of his generation the model of the engage intellectual and the philosophe, in the eighteenth-century French meaning of the term, the theoretician of that new populist and socialist right that had been taking shape during the last years of the century-a right very different from any that French