Revolution, Work, Resistance: French Personalism's Connections with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Abstract

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's Die Europäischen Revolutionen: Die Volkscharaktere und Staatenbildung (1931) was enthusiastically reviewed at the time by Alexandre Marc (1904–2000), originator of pre-war French Personalism in the Ordre Nouveau group and of a radical wing of Europe's post-war federalist movement. This school of critical thought's concept of revolution found confirmation in Rosenstock-Huessy's ‘favorite book'. Its idea of a civilian work service also had a counterpart in the volunteer work camps Rosenstock-Huessy set up in Silesia, as documented in his previous book, Das Arbeitslager, edited with Carl Dietrich von Trotha, one of his students among future leaders of the Kreisau Circle. As a pro-European activist, Trotha would later cross paths with Marc through another German Resistance network, the Red Orchestra, whose leader Harro Schulze-Boysen had been Ordre Nouveau's ally. Rosenstock-Huessy thus appears at the centre of a little-known web of interconnections between German and French ‘Third-Way’ currents, to be unravelled here.