The Meaning of Barresisme

Abstract

SEVERAL RECENT historians of Third Republic have drawn our attention to similarity between forces and ideas which came to surface in Dreyfus Affair and those of twentieth-century fascism. None of complex of ideas anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, racism, irrationalism, state socialism which we now consider as characteristic of fascist position were missing in years 1894-1906 when Dreyfus and Third Republic stood trial for their lives. In streets of Paris gangs of ruffians swarmed about streets attacking Jews and foreigners; and a bloodthirsty, unprincipled and provocative press waged a war in word and deed on Western traditions of political life which foreshadowed later fascist repudiation of these traditions. If late nineteenth century was, as Professor Hayes says, the seedbed of modern totalitarianism, it gave birth to its first noxious but sturdy weed in Dreyfus Affair.* The acknowledged spokesman and political theorist of anti-Dreyfusards was Maurice Barres. Both restless activists like Rochefort and Deroulede and great conservative forces of Church and Army accepted him as an intellectual leader. But his ideas and political tendencies were not what old conservative wing of anti-Dreyfusards thought they were; he did not support a static authoritarianism built about throne, altar and hereditary nobility. Stability and order were not what he sought. Barres rather symbolized realities of a situation in which overthrow of Third Republic no longer meant return to power of French nobility, clergy and high bourgeoisie. He heralded advent of a new type of rightist, activist, And his life, which gave lie to conservatism of very forces which accepted his guidance, demonstrated in its rootless, unceasing destructiveness what is meant by phrase permanent revolutionary. Barres, indeed, exemplifies what modern writers refer to when they talk of emergent fascism of Dreyfus Affair. Like Affair he straddles centuries: while his allies were clerical, aristocratic, basically Christian social groups who viewed him as a nineteenth-century traditionalist, he reached ahead to instruct by word and example Lumpen-proletariat, Hitlers and Goebbelses of recent times.