French Fascism Research Articles

“Un prophète discret”

Abstract This article analyzes how the French fascist and collaborationist author Pierre Drieu la Rochelle thought critically about the forms and the functions of the modern writer-prophet. In essays dedicated to the cases of D. H. Lawrence and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as to his own ideological and literary trajectory in the interwar years, Drieu defined the true prophet as a writer of decadence, one compelled to narrate and embody the decline of the nation. By assuming this burden, the writer-prophet in turn becomes doomed to be misunderstood or ignored by his decadent contemporaries. This logic of prophecy’s ultimate failure provides a key to understanding the political and literary vision of Drieu’s autobiographical fascist bildungsroman Gilles (1939). Finally, this article considers how Drieu’s linking of prophecy and literary posterity can be seen as anticipating his recent controversial inclusion in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

'Nous aimons les spectacles exotiques': Queerness, Jewishness, and the Performance of Normality in Proust's Recherche

ABSTRACT: The nexus between Jewishness, queerness, and performativity runs throughout Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). I argue that by foregrounding the theatricality of Jewishness and queerness, Proust reveals their social construction. In doing so, he destabilizes the concept of normality, exposing its factitiousness in a seemingly reformed society still dominated by exclusionary dictates. Examining instances of spectacle and unmasking, I demonstrate how the failure of the performance of normality challenges its myth of naturality. Proust's use of a dramatic lexicon to deconstruct identity offers a powerful response to the budding discourse of French fascism.

프랑스 파시즘의 기원을 찾아서 － 민족주의와 파시즘 사이에서 －

본 연구는 두 가지 목표를 갖고 있다. 하나는 지난 2020년 소천한 스테른헬의 역사학의 업적을 프랑스 민족주의와 파시즘을 중심으로 살펴보고자 한다. 역사학계에 던진 스테른헬의 질문과 쟁점들을 둘러싸고 벌어진 핵심 논쟁들을 검토하는 것은 그 자체로 프랑스 파시즘의 사학사를 성찰하는 작업이 될 것이다. 다른 또 하나는 오랫동안 지속되어온 프랑스 파시즘의 기원에 관한 국제적인 논쟁과 쟁점들을 살펴보고자 한다. 이 두 가지는 서로 연관되어 있다. 스테른헬의 역사연구와 서술방식의 검토는 곧 프랑스 민족주의와 파시즘에 관한 연구사를 검토하고 정리하는 작업이기도 하다. 이 연구는 시기적으로 프랑스의 파시스트 이데올로기의 기원으로 주목받는 19세기 말에서 20세기 초에 초점을 맞추고 있다. 이 시기가 중요한 것은 프랑스 파시스트 이데올로기의 뿌리가 자생하는 지적 토양이 배양되고 있었다고 주장하는 ‘스테른헬 테제’ 논쟁의 출발 지점에 해당되기 때문이다. 결국엔 이 연구는 프랑스 민족주의와 파시즘의 역사서술 안에서 스테른헬의 위치를 정립하고자 하는 한 시도라 할 수 있다.

News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945 by Rachel Galvin

Reviewed by: News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945 by Rachel Galvin Jacob Edmond News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945. Rachel Galvin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 384. $78 (cloth); $39.95 (paper). Why does the immediacy of a crisis prompt some to rhetorically distance themselves from the present moment, for example, through an appeal to a historical event? The global COVID-19 crisis has invited analogies not only with past pandemics but also with the experience of world war. Addressing the British people in April 2020, for instance, Queen Elizabeth II invoked her “very first broadcast . . . made in 1940.” However false the analogy, this is not the first twenty-first-century crisis in which comparisons to world war have been drawn. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” was widely circulated and cited online. The poem resonated with many at that moment of crisis not just because of the evocation of New York City and the September date but because 9/11, like Germany’s invasion of Poland, seemed to herald a new era of global conflict. So observes Rachel Galvin in her wide-ranging [End Page 867] epilogue to News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945. In the epilogue, Galvin shows how, after 9/11, a number of US poets turned to the example and poetic strategies of Auden and other noncombatant modernist writers. Twenty-first-century writers, Galvin argues, found in modernist civilian poetry a possible solution to a once again urgent problem: how to write about a conflict that one experiences only at a distance and largely through the mediation of the press? In News of War, Galvin focuses on six poets: César Vallejo, Auden, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Queneau, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. All six wrote about wars through which they lived but in which they did not fight: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Second World War. In the work of the six poets, Galvin pinpoints a shared “ethical” worry about their own lack of “legitimacy” in comparison with those who experienced the war firsthand. This worry “produces a traceable set of formal strategies” (10). The poets deploy strategies that draw into question language’s ability to represent the unrepresentable horror of war and that highlight their own distanced relation to the wars they describe. Their poetry thus functions as both antonym and analogy to the daily news of war. Through this central insight and detailed and illuminating readings, Galvin recasts our understanding of the wartime writing of all six poets. On the one hand, Galvin shows how poetic modes that seem to eschew political engagement in favor of rhetorical play are often, in fact, far more complexly engaged with the politics of war and its representation than might first appear. This insight is particularly valuable in the case of Queneau, whose reputation for formal innovation has tended to overshadow his political engagements, and in the case of Stein, whose formal experimentation has been read as a refusal of political engagement or even as a sign of her support for the Vichy regime and fascism. Both poets lived through World War II in occupied France and produced wartime work that at first glance seems oddly disengaged from the enormity of the conflict. And yet, as Galvin argues, Stein’s repetitions of everydayness in Wars I Have Seen and Queneau’s repetitions of a banal story in Exercices de style (Exercises in Style) are part and parcel of the poets’ engagements with the ethical problem of writing about war. Exercises in Style originally included a parody of a French fascist. The parody’s exclusion from later editions only emphasizes Galvin’s argument: Queneau and other modernist civilian war poets used the distancing strategies of style and rhetoric to negotiate their own distance from the conflict and to address the mediating role of the news, to which Queneau alludes by partly modeling the Exercises on a popular newspaper form: the fait divers. Stein’s work also alludes to and overturns conventional expectations of news and the eyewitness report. Wars I Have Seen contains a series of what Galvin terms “reverse epiphanies...

Continental Collaboration: The Transition from Ultranationalism to Pan-Europeanism by the Interwar French Fascist Right

Continental Collaboration: The Transition from Ultranationalism to Pan-Europeanism by the Interwar French Fascist Right

The French Right between the wars: political and intellectual movements from conservatism to fascism

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Notes on the Contributors Introduction PART 1: Political Movements Chapter 1. Collective Psychology, anti-Southern Prejudice and Constitutional Reform in 1930s France: The Stavisky Affair and the Riots of 6 February 1934 Kevin Passmore Chapter 2. Avec une brutalite toute particuliere: Fascist Sympathies, Racial Violence, and the Municipal Police and Gendarmerie in Oran, 1936-37 Samuel Kalman Chapter 3. The Veterans and the Extreme Right: The Union nationale des combattants, 1927-1936 Chris Millington Chapter 4. Pacifism, the Fascist Temptation and the Ligue des droits de l'homme Norman Ingram PART 2: Gender and the Right Chapter 5. Right-Wing Feminism and Conservative Women's Militancy in Interwar France Magali Della Sudda Chapter 6. Gender, the Family, and the Fascist Temptation: Visions of Masculinity in the Natalist-Familialist Movement, 1922-1940 Cheryl A. Koos Chapter 7. Was there a Fascist Femininity? Gender and French Fascism in Political Context Geoff Read Chapter 8. An Overview of Women and Gender in French Fascism Daniella Sarnoff PART 3: Intellectual and Cultural Trends Chapter 9. Our Body Doesn't Have to be Ugly: Physical Culture, Gender, and Racial Rejuvenation in the Croix de feu/Parti social francais Caroline Campbell Chapter 10. Defending Christian Civilization: The Evolving Message of the Parti social francais, 1936-1939 Sean Kennedy Chapter 11. Were French Elites Allergic to Fascism? A Study of the Reception of the 1930s Dictatorships in Three French Periodicals Laurent Kestel Chapter 12. Salvation, Satire, and Solidarity: Right-Wing Culture in Interwar France Jessica Wardhaugh PART 4: Historiography Chapter 13. Beyond Left and Right, and the Politics of the Third Republic: A Conversation William D. Irvine Select Bibliography Index

The French Right

The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy, by Kevin Passmore. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2013. xvi, 391 pp. $136.50 US (cloth). The Aesthetics of Hate: Far Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France, by Sandrine Sanos. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2012. xiv, 369 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). Until recent years, almost every publication about the Gallic right sought to define and interpret French fascism. These works overwhelmingly privileged the study of the extreme-Rightist leagues and parties, concentrating upon their membership and organization, ideology, and activities. Yet in the past decade, various authors have challenged this paradigm, instead seeking to reexamine the history of the non-ligueur Right, variously discussing veterans' organizations, regional movements, and cultural organizations. (1) Recent books by Kevin Passmore and Sandrine Sanos present similar reappraisals, moving beyond traditional portraits of French conservatism and far-Right intellectuals, and thus redefining the terms of intellectual engagement. Kevin Passmore's The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy is a welcome history of French conservatism, a timely reminder that the Gallic Right went far beyond its extreme variant. Passmore's excellent account aims to alter the conventional portrait of conservatives, based upon modernization theory or classification. Historical reality is far more complex; the Right proved quite willing to work with a wide range of political options, from Radicalism to fascism, yet splintered into a multitude of mutually exclusive factions and parties. Further complicating the matter were ever-shifting alliances between groups, depending not upon rigid ideological positions but rather constantly evolving political and social circumstances. Hence Passmore offers a novel reading of the French Right, emphasizing a common political culture based upon several key precepts: anti-socialism/communism; an analysis driven by collective psychology which sought to direct the unruly masses to elect a government of the elite; a drive towards political, economic, and social organization; and a willingness to be simultaneously traditional and modern rather than merely obsessed with the past. Naturally this did not coalesce overnight, and Passmore's book offers a painstakingly detailed account of the evolution of conservative politics, the most comprehensive and rigorous to date. He traces the populist electoralism and party affiliation of the pre-1906 era through the retreat to an informal network of committees and interest groups from 1906-24, to the rebirth of popular conservatism in a more centrist vein after the fall of the Bloc nationale in 1924, and finally a shift toward the dictatorship and corporatism of the leagues in the 1930s. Although the level of detail presented is encyclopedic, the analytical rigor is equally impressive. The frequent discussions of women's roles--in the Boulanger Affair, the Ralliement, and the leagues--is laudable, and twinned with equally effective sections on regionalism, trade unions, and peasants. There are also prescient reminders of often forgotten facts: That Jews participated in centrist/moderate conservative politics even during the Dreyfus era, and the acceptance of laicite by many groups and factions. Equally noteworthy are mentions of Right-wing willingness to adopt Briandist foreign policy, mass mobilization through advertising and film, and Taylorism and state intervention in the economy (albeit wedded to the proto-monarchist organizational model of Henri Fayol for social-Darwinist ends). Despite boasting an exhaustive narrative and analytical rigor, Passmore's approach is not flawless. The work offers a curiously brief treatment of the Dreyfus Affair, for example, despite its centrality to the history of the French Right. Equally peculiar is the lack of discussion of the French empire, a glaring omission given recent historiographical trends towards redressing the privileging of the metropole. …

A Forgotten Murder, a Neglected French Fascism

A Forgotten Murder, a Neglected French Fascism

Gender, Fascism and the Right-Wing in France between the Wars: The Catholic Matrix

This article seeks to take the discussion of French fascism in a different direction by offering an analysis from a gendered perspective. Based on original archive material and literature, it provides an interpretation in terms of continuity between prewar conservative movements, Catholic women's leagues and far right organizations in terms of gender representations and the sexual division of political labour. The first part of the article focuses on the contrast between a vivid and flourishing scholarship on gender and fascism led by English-speaking scholars, and the relative paucity of research conducted from within the French academy on the same. The debate over the existence and the peculiarity of French fascism has represented an obstacle for the emergence of innovative research on subjects such as women, masculinity and more generally gender in France. Nevertheless, an empirical survey based on archival material of the Catholic Church and Catholic women's leagues, as well as the more usual material from the National Archives, provides new evidences of continuity from an organisational and ideological perspective to the Catholic Action league, the Croix de Feu/Parti social français and the Jeunesses patriotes.

‘Ni droite, ni gauche’? - Debatten over het Franse fascisme

Was France during the Interwar period ‘immune’ to fascism, or should it be considered one of the centres of fascist thinking in Europe? Was fascism in France fundamentally anti-bourgeois and ‘left wing’, or was it strongly related to traditional conservatism? These kinds of questions are still pivotal within the scolarly debate on French fascism, but at the same time research is also taking new directions. Through an overview of the historiographical debate on French fascism, this article analyses the development and the themes of an old discussion that is still raging strongly. Though the barriers between English and French language historians are far from gone, more mutual understanding must be possible. After all, only research taking into account political and intellectual history, programs of radical movements as well as ideas of non-conformist intellectuals, can provide meaningful answers to the big questions on French fascism.

Fascism and regionalism in interwar Alsace

This article explores the relationship between regionalism and fascism in interwar Alsace. Although fascism is usually characterized as hypernationalist, the relationship between regionalism and fascism in Alsace suggests something more complex. On the one hand, French and German fascist movements sought local legitimacy by co-opting issues of regional identity. Hypernationalism would have fallen on deaf ears. On the other hand, the Alsatian Bauernbund, a regionally based fascist movement, adapted fascist principles to strictly regional aims. The goal of fascism, in this case, was not necessarily national. A better way to understand the range of fascist interaction with regional identity is to see fascism as aggressively espousing the politics of spatial identity in a political environment that generally downplayed ethnic, regional or national sensitivities. Fascism offered a hierarchy of identity or belonging that embraced the socially powerful relationships of family, region and nation.

The Extreme Right in Interwar France: the Faisceau and the Croix de Feu. By Samuel Kalman

In this book, Samuel Kalman offers a new approach to the study of the extreme right in interwar France. Since René Rémond categorised the French right into Royalist and Bonapartist movements, historiography in the field has been largely preoccupied with the ongoing debate over the definition and existence of a French fascism in the interwar period. Though this study mentions this debate the book's purpose lies elsewhere: to demonstrate that the extreme right had clear plans for the overthrow of the Republic and the renovation of the state. Kalman centres on the programmes of the Faisceau and the Croix de Feu/Parti Social Français (CDF/PSF), ‘the largest extreme-rightist leagues in the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties respectively’ (p. 4). As well as scrutinising their respective doctrines within a broad historical context (1880s-1945), the author reveals in striking details how conservative and modernising factions co-existed within the two organisations, thus dispelling the myth that the two movements were ‘doctrinally monolithic.’ (p. 9)

Louis Darquier avant Darquier de Pellepoix Les enseignement biographiques d'un manuscrit inédit de 1931

Little was known about the life of Darquier de Pellepoix before he stormed into his anti-Semitic career in 1936. One unpublished manuscript that he had written in 1931 sheds light on the characteristics of a man who at the time was known only as the drifting son of a notable and an immature nationalist who did not care about anti-Semitism. Looking for the Lost France - this is the title of this novel with a philosophical message - reveals a rebellious young man who denies his bourgeois, republican and rationalist education ; who dreams of adventure and a glorious destiny. Miserably exiled in England, Darquier elaborates the basic points of his political beliefs, his respect for hierarchy and tradition, and his craving for power. A narcissistic confession, haunted by a decadence which reminds us of the typical profile of the “young French fascist,” as can be read about in the writings of Brasillach or Drieu La Rochelle.

Imagining fascism: the cultural politics of the French young Right, 1930-1945

The role and influence of intellectuals is one of the flashpoints in the recurring debate on the nature and dimensions of French fascism. At the forefront of this debate are a group of emerging writers, collectively known as the Right. Though thoroughly schooled in the reactionary nationalism of Charles Maurras' Action francaise, whose orbit they entered in the early 1930s, they were soon seduced by the mobilizing force of neighboring fascist movements and regimes. Led by two precocious literary talents, Robert Brasillach and Thierry Maulnier, the Young Right set themselves to rejuvenating French nationalism and winning a place for France in an emerging new Europe. Their project - an attempt to graft lessons from foreign sources onto a native language of French generational and cultural politics - was one of several efforts to create a distinctive French fascism.

Beyond Left and Right, and the Politics of the Third Republic: A Conversation

Scholars of Third Republic France have long assumed that the political spectrum was divided into a readily identifiable Right and Left, adhering to mutually exclusive positions. But this comfortable political taxonomy could, at times, to violence to political reality. The Right could at some periods in the history of the Third Republic be aggressively nationalistic; at other times it could be positively irenic. The Left was often pacifist, but not always and there were moments when it, or some fraction of it, could be quite bellicose. Neither anti-Semitism nor racism in general were the exclusive province of the Right. On critical issues, the Left could be more refractory to women's rights than was the Right. French fascism claimed to be neither right nor left and at least some French fascist movements could list as many former members of the Left among its leaders as former members of the Right.

Classical Violence: Thierry Maulnier, French Fascist Aesthetics and the 1937 Paris World's Fair

Classical Violence: Thierry Maulnier, French Fascist Aesthetics and the 1937 Paris World's Fair

The Political and Cultural Roots of Negationism in France

This article examines the history of the Holocaust Denial, or "negationism" in France. The author, who headed a French government commission to research and report on the phenomenon at the University of Lyon-III, where there have been numerous examples of the phenomenon involving students, faculty, and administration, describes the phenomenon at Lyon and the circumstances and individuals involved. He also traces the history of "negationism" from the early postwar period, where it was linked, at least initially to French fascism and collaboration with the Nazis, through its links to the extreme Left and currently, Islamic extemism. The author discusses the major figures associated with negationism including Maurice Bard�che, Paul Rassinier, Robert Faurisson, and Roger Garaudy.

Gustave Hervé's Transition from Socialism to National Socialism: Continuity and Ambivalence

In 1901 Gustave Hervé attained notoriety by writing an article which included the image of the tricolour planted in a pile of manure. Soon he founded a French anti-militarist movement called Hervéism which attempted to unite the revolutionary left. When French socialists united in 1905, Hervé led the most extreme faction and soon created a weekly newspaper, La Guerre sociale. Before the first world war Hervé was a strident voice within European socialism, advocating revolutionary means to prevent war. Six years of provocative campaigns failed to implement his ideas. Despite his dedication, the quixotic Hervé grew frustrated due to continuing leftist divisions. His disillusionment was connected to a rather naive reading of the increasingly anachronistic revolutionary tradition. Hervé was sincere, yet his romantic and eclectic socialism exhibited atavistic features. Well before 1914 he rallied to 'la patrie en danger' and eventually renamed his paper La Victoire. In 1919, Hervé and several prominent socialists created a national socialist party. Startling as his reversal may appear, Hervé's activist Insurrectionalism actually included an anti-materialistic critique of society. That critique was crucial to his national socialism which looked to the nation and its religious traditions to remedy social division. His interwar writing and organizations offered various authoritarian panaceas to end French decadence. Despite Hervé's marginalization during the interwar era and his reluctance to engage in violence, his neo- Bonapartist views and admiration for Mussolini must inescapably be included within 'the fascist drift'. Striking shifts, such as Hervé's , from one extreme to the other, have often been tied to fascism. But the two chief interpretations of French fascism sometimes use Hervé's career to buttress their contrasting arguments. Such a paradox demands an explanation. This article analyses the anomalous features of Hervé's socialism in order to make his shift to the extreme right understandable. As strange as it may seem, the anti-militaristic, anti-patriotic and international socialist Hervé exhibited patriotic, ethnocentric, ascetic and anti-democratic attitudes from the very beginning, and he was episodically ambiguous on the issue of antisemitism. Hervé's ideas often belie the apparent logic of political language. Such continuity and ambivalence underscore the limits of political language in dealing with hybrid movements such as fascism.

Contesting sacrifice: religion, nationalism, and social thought in France

From the counter-reformation through the twentieth century, the notion of sacrifice has played a key role in French culture and nationalist politics. Ivan Strenski traces the history of sacrificial thought in France, starting from its origins in Roman Catholic theology. Throughout, he highlights not just the dominant discourse on sacrifice but also the many competing conceptions that contested it. Strenski suggests that the annihilating spirituality rooted in the Catholic model of Eucharistic sacrifice persuaded the judges in the Dreyfus Case to overlook or play down his possible innocence because a scapegoat was needed to expiate the sins of France and save its army from disgrace. Strenski also suggests that the French army's strategy in World War I, French fascism, and debates over public education and civic morals during the Third Republic all owe much to Catholic theology of sacrifice and Protestant reinterpretations of it. Pointing out that every major theorist of sacrifice is French, including Bataille, Durkheim, Girard, Hubert, and Mauss, Strenski argues that we cannot fully understand their work without first taking into account the deep roots of sacrificial thought in French history.

I am a Fascist Writer: Maurice Bardèche--Ideologist and Defender of French Fascism

(2002). I am a Fascist Writer: Maurice Bardeche--Ideologist and Defender of French Fascism. The European Legacy: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 195-209.