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THE AESTHETICS OF HATE

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...........................................................................................................ixIntroduction..............................................................................................................11 "The Crisis Is in Man": The Nation, the Self, and Cultural Politics in the 1930s........................................152 A Genealogy of the Far Right............................................................................................433 "Will We Get Out of French Abjection?" The Politics and Aesthetic Insurgency of the Young New Right.....................754 The Absent Author: Maurice Blanchot and the Subjection of Politics......................................................1185 "Negroid Jews Against White Men": Louis-Ferdinand Céline and the Politics of Literature............................1586 The Race of Fascism: Je Suis Partout, Race, and Culture.................................................................194Conclusion................................................................................................................245Notes.....................................................................................................................261Bibliography..............................................................................................................333Index.....................................................................................................................355

Chapter One

The Nation, the Self, and Cultural Politics in the 1930s

Those were years exemplary of paradox and surprise. —Jean-Pierre Maxence, Histoire de dix ans, 1939

We were eighteen; our minds were somewhat confused, we felt rather disgusted with the modern world—and had a certain innate bent to anarchy. —Robert Brasillach, Notre avant-guerre, 1941

Cultures of the Anxious Modern

In 1937, far-right essayist and intellectual Thierry Maulnier boldly declared: "We must win back our universe!" Maulnier was, in the mid-1930s, a well-respected literary and political critic. A graduate of the prestigious École normale supérieure, he had begun his journalistic career—as many on the far right did—in the pages of Charles Maurras's monarchist and ultra-nationalist L'Action Française. By the time he penned this heartfelt call, Maulnier was regarded by many as the natural heir to Maurras: he was a young man whose wide-ranging literary culture matched his reactionary political commitment. His articles appeared in a far-right magazine he had helped create the previous year and coedited with Catholic conservative Jean de Fabrègues, who shared his revulsion at the decadence the postwar era had unleashed. The magazine's name, Combat (Struggle), proclaimed its editors' intent. By 1937, when the Spanish Civil War dominated the news and the Popular Front had come to power, Maulnier had already published several collection of essays that took literature and politics as their central topic. Their titles hinted at the radical discontent he experienced: his essays claimed "The Crisis Is in Man," pondered "Socialist Myths," and announced "France, Tomorrow." Maulnier devoted much of his energy in the 1930s to offering a critique of the chaos and decadence he claimed to have observed around him. Such critique infused his insistent call for a revolution of a particular nature, an aesthetic as well as cultural and political revolution that would come from a new generation of far-right intellectuals.

Thierry Maulnier was not alone in this endeavor. His words formed the rallying cry for a group of young men who, in the years 1930 to 1935, expressed themselves in more or less short-lived journals and magazines of high intellectual caliber but little readership, with rather austere names that hardly hinted at their content. They were trained in the ideas of far-right and conservative nationalism and aspired to cultural and political prominence. Ranging from ultra-Catholic journalists Jean de Fabrègues and René Vincent to novelists Robert Brasillach and Georges Blond, music and film critic Lucien Rebatet, energetic polemicist Jean-Pierre Maxence, and the lesser-known but no less dedicated Pierre-Antoine Cousteau and Pierre Monnier, they were a motley collection united in their disgust with the postwar world in which they had come of age. They sharpened their words in little-read newspapers and magazines: Les Cahiers (the Notebooks), Réaction pour l'Ordre (Reaction for Order), La Revue Française (the French Journal), La Revue du Siècle (the Journal of the Century). These young men achieved intellectual and political recognition in the late 1930s with the polemical newspapers they created: from the intellectual magazine Combat (Struggle) to the controversial L'Insurgé (the Insurgent), and the refashioning of weekly newspaper Je Suis Partout (I Am Everywhere). They explained that, in this decade, the 1930s, it was necessary—urgent even—to find a solution to the "confused search" that had pervaded the postwar years and had consumed their youthful undertakings.

It was the memory of a youth influenced and troubled by the political disorders and cultural effervescence of the 1920s that fueled this young intellectual generation's search for a dissident politics that they conceived as an irrepressible desire for truth. As one of its leading figures, Catholic writer Jean de Fabrègues, observed, "When faced with the poverty of what the modern world has to offer us, we find ourselves gripped by a tragic sense of uneasiness." With similar language, fellow journalist René Vincent explained in 1935 that their desire for a radical (far-right) politics had emerged out of the disconcerting and confused postwar years:

The uneasiness of 1920 was born under the sign of the post-war disorder; it was, in a certain way, the product of this disorder; it nonetheless expressed a loud dissatisfaction with this very disorder, [and] a categorical refusal of this unfair state of affairs[; it was] a confused search whose troublesome nature some were dangerously inclined to, but in any case, a true search, an unconscious and sometimes blind undertaking, but an undertaking [geared] toward higher values [that were] truer than the ones celebrated by this century.

In the face of the "tragic sense of uneasiness" brought about by the modern world, these young intellectuals claimed action must be urgently undertaken. The modern (namely, the "crazy 20s"), as they experienced it, had produced a pervasive anxiety.

Why did they experience the modern—postwar culture and aesthetics—with such anxiety? (For the words "anxiety" and "disquiet" reappeared obsessively in their writings on the topic of the "après-guerre.") The war had been a momentous event that had decimated the generations of fathers and older brothers they paid homage to and yet were haunted by. They had not experienced the Great War, as most had been born at the beginning of the century. But its long-lasting cultural, social, and political effects convinced them that a...