Paris, Capital of the Debacle: Aragon, Jasieński, and Revolutionary Catastrophism

Abstract

Expressions of desire for catastrophe, imagined as a remedy for bourgeois inertia, are common among writers of the interwar avant-garde. This catastrophism exerts a powerful influence upon their conceptions of political revolution. Whereas the dominant revolutionary force in the period—Soviet Marxism—understood revolution to mean the seizure and wielding of state power by the proletariat, sympathetic intellectuals of the avant-garde tend to conceptualize revolution as the wholesale destruction of the institutions and symbols of capitalist modernity. Here I explore the “revolutionary catastrophism” of the interwar avant-garde through two texts in which the destruction of Paris, an exemplar of the bourgeois order, is evoked: the Polish Futurist Bruno Jasieński’s 1928 novel Je brûle Paris (first published serially in the French Communist daily L’Humanité), and Louis Aragon’s 1930 collage-poem “Front rouge.” Each of these texts represents revolution as a blind, destructive force, akin to a natural disaster. But they also contrast interestingly with much apocalyptically-themed literature because of their utopianism. It has become a cliché to remark that today it is easier to envision the end of the world than a more modest end to capitalism; what these texts propose is that the two might not look so different.