Resentment and the Right: French Intellectual Identity Reimagined, 1898-2000 1611496357, 9781611496352

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Resentment and Right

Resentment and Right French Intellectual Identity Reimagined, 1898–2000 Sarah Shurts

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS Newark

Published by University of Delaware Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Shurts All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shurts, Sarah, 1976- author. Title: Resentment and the right : French intellectual identity reimagined, 1898–2000 / by Sarah Shurts. Description: Newark : University of Delaware Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017019386 (print) | LCCN 2017019452 (ebook) | ISBN 9781611496352 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781611496345 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Conservatism—France—History—20th century. | Right and left—France— History—20th century. | France—Intellectual life—20th century. | France—Politics and government—20th century. Classification: LCC DC369 (ebook) | LCC DC369 .S54 2017 (print) | DDC 320.520944/0904—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017019386 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Nathan and Will

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Right-Wing Intellectual Identity in Historiographical Context: The Right Right-Wing Intellectual Identity in Historiographical Context: The Intellectual Structure of the Chapters Notes 1

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Intellectual Identity Construction Begins: The Dreyfus Affair, 1898–1902 Resentment and Reaction on the Anti-Dreyfusard Right: Maurice Barrès Resentment and Reaction on the Anti-Dreyfusard Right: Ferdinand Brunetière Differentiation and Reappropriation of Cultural Values Collective Identity Construction: Segregation of Social Spaces and Professional Trajectories Notes Grooming the Right-Wing Intellectual: The Nouvelle Sorbonne Debate, 1910–1914 Resentment and Reaction on the Traditionalist Right: Henri Massis Resentment and Reaction on the Monarchist Right: Charles Maurras Differentiation and Reappropriation of Cultural Values Collective Identity Construction: Segregation of Social Spaces and Professional Trajectories Notes Constructing the French Fascist Intellectual: The Interwar Polarization, 1930–1939 Resentment and Reaction against the Popular Front: Abel Bonnard Resentment and Reaction from the Parti Populaire Français: Ramon Fernandez vii

ix xi 1 9 21 24 28

35 46 53 60 69 83 93 105 111 116 121 129 137 147 153

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Contents

Differentiation and Reappropriation of Cultural Values Collective Identity Construction: Segregation of Social Spaces and Professional Trajectories Notes The Ostracized Intellectual in Power: Occupation and Collaboration, 1940–1945 Resentment and Reaction from the Dissatisfied Collaborator: Pierre Drieu la Rochelle Resentment and Reaction from the Convinced Collaborator: Alphonse de Châteaubriant Differentiation and Reappropriation of Cultural Values Collective Identity Construction: Segregation of Social Spaces and Professional Trajectories Notes An All-Consuming Resentment: The Intellectual Right in the Postwar Era, 1945–1967 Resentment and Reaction from the Negationist: Maurice Bardèche Resentment and Reaction from the Hussard: Jacques Laurent Differentiation and Reappropriation of Cultural Values Collective Identity Construction: Segregation of Social Spaces and Professional Trajectories Notes Resentment and the New Right: Intellectual Identity Reimagined, 1968–2000 Notes

Conclusion Notes Bibliography Archival Sources Periodicals Primary and Secondary Sources Index About the Author

158 166 178 185 195 202 207 214 224 231 242 248 256 262 273 281 300 305 309 311 311 311 312 327 337

Acknowledgments

The book that follows is the result of tremendous support and encouragement by many mentors and my family and friends. I wish to thank my research advisor, Don Reid, who has been a stalwart supporter for the past decade and the other mentors from the University of North Carolina (UNC) and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who have continued to encourage and critique my work over the years, including Lloyd Kramer, Paul Mazgaj, Christopher Browning, and Jay Smith. What there is of value in this book is a result of their guidance and instruction. My research would not have been completed without the financial support of the George Lurcy Fellowship, a UNC Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Foreign Language and Area Studies travel grant, the Mowry Dissertation Fellowship, and a University Center for International Study doctoral research travel award. The writing and revision was supported by a mini-sabbatical from Bergen Community College. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the helpful librarians and archivists at the National Archives in Paris, the Archives of the Paris Prefecture of Police, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the university libraries at Princeton and Columbia, and the New York Public Library for their efforts in assisting me to locate the materials I required. I am very grateful to the editors and readers for my articles in Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, European History Quarterly, and French Politics, Culture & Society, who helped me to reconceptualize the elements of the project, and to the anonymous readers of the University of Delaware Press; University of Delaware Press senior editor for history, Julia Oestreich; and copyeditor Sam Brawand, whose suggestions and critiques have helped the original research evolve into the current book. Most of all, I must thank my two children, Nathan and Will, who have been patient with me as I devoted time to research and writing, and my family and friends, who have encouraged my passion for this project and celebrated its completion.

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Abbreviations

AEAR

Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionaires

AF

Action française

AN

Archives nationale de France

CNE

Comité national des écrivains

CPF

Cercles populaires français

CVIA

Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes

ENS

École normale supérieure

FN

Front national

GRECE

Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européene

JEN

Jeunes de l’Europe nouvelle

LTM

Les Temps Modernes

LTR

La Table Ronde

LVF

Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme

ND

Nouvelle Droite

NRF

Nouvelle Revue Française

OAS

Organisation de l’armée secrète

PCF

Parti communiste français

PPF

Parti populaire français

PSF

Parti social français

RDM

Revue des Deux Mondes

RDR

Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire

RPF

Gaullist Rassemblement du peuple français xi

xii

SFIO

Abbreviations

Section française de l’internationale ouvrière

Introduction

“I, the intellectual.” As he contemplated his condemnation by the Resistance intellectuals and his choice of suicide in late 1944, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle began the peroration of his self-penned defense with a statement of his most profound sense of self: “I, the intellectual. I acted perfectly consciously, in the middle of my life, according to the idea I had formed of the duties of an intellectual.” The duties he had constructed for the responsible intellectual were to take up a “necessary mission, that of being outside the crowd,” of taking risks, of incurring doubt, or even censure for the choices one made, but above all of “being in a minority.” It was his duty, he mused, to provide the counterpoint to the dominant message and worldview. “A nation is not a single voice, it is a concert,” he explained. “There must always be a minority; and we were that minority. We lost, we have been stigmatized as traitors. . . . You would have been the traitors if your cause had been defeated. And France would have been no less France; Europe, Europe.” But despite finding himself on the losing side, accepting the stigma of treason and the death penalty that could have resulted, Drieu continued, “I am one of those intellectuals whose duty is to be in the minority. . . . I am proud of having been one of those intellectuals.” 1 Although it is a seemingly simple statement, Drieu was in fact making a complex claim about his identity and challenging what he considered to be the preconceptions of his society. First apparent is his self-identification with the empowering title, role, and duties of the politically engaged thinker or “intellectual.” Then there is his suggestion that this identity was not a static concept but one that could be conceptualized in different ways based on the “idea” that one had of those duties and values. There is, in his prioritization of the self-identification “intellectual” and his repeated use of the title, also an underlying tone of resentment, frustration, and defensive pride indicating that he expected his identification to be refused by a society preconditioned to recognize only one dominant model of intellectual identity. And finally, there is the hint of an important element of this identity that by 1945 had already become a long-running trope of the extreme right: that the true and responsible intellectual is always “in the minority” struggling to offer necessary counterpoint to the dominant, even hegemonic, majority. Although Drieu is often, and correctly, identified as an iconoclast who does not fully represent the attitudes of the collaborationist right, his struggle to define himself as an intellectual according to his own, distinctly right-wing ide1

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Introduction

as of intellectual identity was not an anomaly. It was emblematic of a century-long struggle for recognition and cultural authority by a large segment of the French intellectual milieu that believed its political opponents had effectively excluded it from the empowering role and responsibility of the “intellectuel.” His simple statements, therefore, offer a first glimpse into an unexplored historical conflict between two competing concepts of intellectual identity. This struggle to define and delineate French intellectual identity consumed the intellectuals of both the left and the extreme right throughout the twentieth century, yet it has received little attention by scholars in the field. Exploring the motivation, process, and result of this struggle to distinguish a right-wing model of intellectual identity is, therefore, the central purpose of this book. The role of the intellectual was one that conferred status, authority, legitimacy, and political influence in twentieth-century France. Over time, as the public came to identify intellectuals as political, cultural, and moral guides, the ability to monopolize and control this identity was highly contested. This was particularly true during periods of national debate and crisis when intellectuals felt called to guide public affairs. Because the Dreyfusard intellectuals took an early and substantial lead in this contest during the Dreyfus Affair, defining the intellectual according to their own, alternative, right-wing conceptualization became a particular obsession among the engaged thinkers of the extreme right. Even when the republicans, the left, and the extreme right shared practices and perspectives, they often disregarded this common ground in order to highlight the perceived differences that contributed to a unique intellectual identity for the right and excluded the other. And, because the left enjoyed the advantage of anteriority in the role, the intellectual of the extreme right began to conceptualize this struggle as one of an oppressed and ostracized minority against what they perceived as a hegemonic front of the republican center and extreme left. Woven into the fabric of almost all of the discussions of political engagement since the Affair, despite the changing historical context and points of debate, is the underlying struggle to dominate and define what it meant to be an intellectual and who could ostensibly claim that status and moral authority before the public. Running like a current under the political debates were the defining questions: What relationship does the intellectual have to government, society, and particular institutions such as the university? What set of political, social, and intellectual values does an intellectual engage to defend? And what trajectories, communities, and experiences made one an intellectual? When viewed collectively over the century, the proclamations and reactions of, and even the language used by, the engagés, or politically active thinkers, of the extreme right reveal a unique pattern of general behaviors and collection of tropes. During each perceived national crisis over the century, when intellectuals felt called to engage in public affairs, the right-wing struggle to

Introduction

3

define true intellectual identity followed a similar cycle despite the changing events and conflicts: self-identification as intellectuals; perception of exclusion by the intellectual left; resentment of this ostracism and development of linguistic tropes of left-wing hegemony and right-wing repression; differentiation and reappropriation of cultural values; selfimposed segregation of social networks and professional trajectories; and eventual isolation and alienation from, and radicalization against, the mainstream intellectual and political world. Over time, the intellectual of the extreme right would internalize and appropriate the behaviors and language of their supposed pariah status, making these, in turn, essential to their concept of the experience and identity of the true, right-wing intellectual. They would evolve from considering themselves the friends and colleagues of those on the left and prioritizing their shared cultural experience, albeit with different political views, to seeing themselves as fundamentally different types of people for whom true intellectual camaraderie with those on the left was impossible. And, despite continued internecine quarreling on the extreme right throughout the century, this perception of exclusion and the language of resentment that emerged from it provided a common ground and source of shared identity for the diverse factions within the extreme right. The struggle to define the identity and values of “the intellectual” began on January 23, 1898, when Georges Clemenceau published “À la dérive” in L’Aurore, marveling at the number of petitioners supporting Émile Zola’s “Lettre à M. Félix Faure” and calling for full disclosure and revision of the Dreyfus case. 2 The article called these writers and savants whose names graced the petitions “intellectuels” and the signers slowly began to identify proudly with this new label. More importantly, they associated the role and responsibilities of this title with the values that the defense of Dreyfus came to represent: egalitarianism, individual rights, the universal ideals of Truth and Justice, and the rejection of antiSemitism. Naturally then, to be anti-Dreyfusard was to be opposed to these values and to become identified as “anti-intellectual.” This division was exacerbated because, rather than be called “intellectuals” and engage in public debate, the prominent spokesmen of the anti-Dreyfusard right claimed they preferred to be “men of intelligence” by avoiding political involvement. Very quickly, however, the “men of intelligence” perceived that the Dreyfusard spokesmen for the universal were effectively influencing public opinion and political policy. Right-wing scorn for “intellectuals” turned to envy of their authority and resentment of their unrivaled dominance over the role of social and moral guide. The anti-Dreyfusard right worked to reverse this trend toward Dreyfusard dominance over the term with the creation of the Ligue de la patrie française on January 1, 1899. 3 Maurice Barrès expressed the Ligue members’ new claim to the title “intellectual” saying, “The important thing is that no one is able to

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Introduction

say any longer that intelligence and the intellectuals—to use that questionable French word—are only on one side.” 4 This first effort to selfidentify as intellectuals was repeated throughout the century as new generations of extreme-right-wing thinkers felt called to engage and to publicly claim the title and its implied responsibility for public guidance. Their statements are remarkably similar in their tone and language and provided common ground for the extreme right across the century. All of them protested the audacity of the left’s claim to represent all intellectuals and adamantly promoted the existence of this phenomenon of the intellectual on the extreme right. Such a persistent compulsion to publicly claim this title and identity over the century is only fully understood when viewed within the larger context of the extreme right’s equally persistent perception that they were excluded and ostracized from the larger intellectual community by their political opponents. Sometimes their right to self-identify as intellectuals was, in fact, denied to them by the intellectuals of the left. As soon as the anti-Dreyfusards began the campaign to claim the title of intellectual in 1899, the Dreyfusard papers began their own campaign to prevent them from doing so. Many anti-Dreyfusards found themselves excluded not only from claim to the title, but also from more tangible roles and opportunities in the professional world. The influence of the intellectual was a valuable tool for the Dreyfusards that they did not intend to relinquish to Barrès and the right. Intellectuals of the left from Dreyfusard Françis de Pressensé to Jean-Paul Sartre engaged in this campaign, using remarkably similar language and arguments throughout the century, to exclude their opponents from recognition as intellectuals. At other times, the ostracism of the right-wing from the role was merely a perceived exclusion with little foundation in political or cultural reality. During the Occupation, when those on the fascist-sympathizing extreme right were given unparalleled dominance over the cultural field, Drieu still proclaimed himself and his peers to be victims of ostracism and exclusion from the ranks of the intellectual elites. Drieu expressed quite well the feeling shared by many collaborationists that, despite their new positions of power in the intellectual field, they still faced an uphill battle to change the mind-set of the French people. He believed that the public had not only been predisposed over the century to favor left-wing values and political views, but that they had also been taught to look to the left for their intellectual guides and to view the extreme right, particularly the fascist Right, as anti-intellectual. Drieu identified his duty as being a counterpoint to this dominant mind-set even if that made him the oppressed, vilified, and martyr-like minority. Despite the political power that the Occupation provided for his views, Drieu encouraged fears of an unseen leftist cultural hegemony in order to continue to identify with the right-wing discourse of exclusion and isolation and to see himself still as the misunderstood prophet and intellectual pariah. 5

Introduction

5

This seeming discrepancy between wielding power and using a language of oppression raises a common question for historians about accepting the claims of our sources at face value, particularly when those sources are quite adept at posturing and seeking publicity. Even if scholars can agree that “the nature of extreme right parties is often inferred from what they have to say . . . rather than from their concrete actions,” there can be disagreement about how we should approach these writings and statements by the extreme right. Not every historian “agrees on how much weight to give” the language of the extreme right. They debate whether the language is posturing, designed only to appeal to the right’s audience, or whether it can be said to provide real insight into their identity and political values. 6 While remaining cognizant of the inconsistencies in their protests and identifying and critiquing many of their fabricated claims, this book considers even the posturing, distortions, and exaggerations of extreme-right authors in order to fully display their perceptions and portrayals of persecution. In a study like this devoted to identity construction and the linguistic tropes of resentment and oppression, perception can be even more valuable than reality. Richard Griffiths has explored how perceptions and polemical language during these periods of engagement have the power to actually create real differences where before there were none. While the two sides shared common modes of discourse and vocabulary, he says, these “clan languages differentiated the two sides” and accusations or exclusions “which had started as imaginary exaggerations, took on a life of their own. . . . So it was that the rhetoric . . . in fact created even wider polarities between the participants.” 7 So, while extreme right intellectuals may not all have been expelled from the university system after the Dreyfus Affair, perception that their presence was marginalized there transformed into reality as new generations imbibed this rhetoric of exclusion and turned to alternative professional paths in ever-greater numbers. They also occasionally accused centrist intellectuals, like those supporting the Radical Party, or right-wing republican intellectuals, like those supporting the Gaullist Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF) (Rally of the French People), of aiding a left-wing alliance that oppressed the extreme right. Whether real or imagined, the intellectual extreme right believed this bloc was working against it with the left and therefore crafted language and polemics that resulted in more tensions than had previously existed between the factions of the right, preventing them from finding common ground in shared values such as their anticommunism. Both the perception and reality of ostracism from the spaces and roles of intellectual life cultivated an intense resentment of the perceived oppressors on the left that became ubiquitous in the work of the intellectual extreme right as early as the Dreyfus Affair and remained a central theme in their experience of intellectual life throughout the century. Even before

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Introduction

laying claim to the title of intellectual himself, Ferdinand Brunetière fumed that his anti-Dreyfusard views had made him a pariah among his peers, comparing his exclusion from access to the title of intellectual, even if he did not wish to hold it, to a religious ostracism in which a powerful institution denies something sacred to those not deemed to have orthodox views. Later, this ability of the intellectual left to define French thought would be characterized not as a religious ostracism but as a form of intellectual terrorism. The purge of collaborators after the Liberation and the omnipotence of the Resistance intellectuals in the Comité national des écrivains (CNE) (National Committee of Writers) had disappeared in the late 1940s, self-proclaimed right-wing intellectual Jacques Laurent wrote, but the great problem for the intellectual right in the 1960s was that in the minds of those who had suffered under the CNE’s constraints, it continued to exert a form of “intellectual terrorism,” preventing thought outside of its proscribed views. 8 Concepts of hegemony, isolating ostracism, and unwarranted or even unperceived repression of the intellectual right coalesced for Alain de Benoist and the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européene (GRECE) (Group for the Research and Study of European Civilization) in the idea of a leftwing Gramscian cultural hegemony where the mentality of the left was so engrained that it was impossible to think outside of its precepts. The result of the extreme right’s resentment became a crusade to legitimize an alternative, right-wing intellectual identity outside of, opposed to, and clearly differentiated from the dominant identity of the left. This onus on the right to first legitimize and lend authority to their position as intellectuals before ever entering into the political fray gave them a very different mentality of engagement from the intellectuals of the left who had no such insecurities. Engagement for the extreme right involved not just commentary on public issues, but also a concerted campaign to first delegitimize the left as a viable representative of French culture and intelligence, and then market their own alternative values, worldviews, and programs as those most conducive to French intellectual life. Differentiating the worldviews of the extreme right from those of the left, in order to delegitimize the left’s and legitimize their own, was an evident priority in most of the engaged work of the intellectual right throughout the century. They accused the left of unfairly and unrealistically claiming to speak for the universal, to grasp absolute truths, and to incarnate the international citizen of the world. Instead, the intellectuals of the extreme right proposed inhabiting what they believed was the more realistic, if, they noted wryly, slightly less awe-inspiring role of speaking for the French nation, revealing relative truths, and representing the intelligence of the real as opposed to the abstract and theoretical. Often, as in the case of the mission and practice of engagement itself, ideals and behaviors were shared by those on the left and extreme right. But those intent on developing a distinctive right-wing intellectual iden-

Introduction

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tity and challenging the perceived cultural hegemony of the left either did not see, or did not permit themselves to acknowledge, these underlying similarities in style and practice. Rather, they worked to emphasize the differences they saw between themselves and their politically opposed peers in order to highlight their own supposedly unique contributions and superior worldviews. This sense of separation from the enemy “other,” of what one Dreyfusard called an “unbreachable abyss” in worldviews, 9 of a total lack of shared sentiments and values, and the creation of “in groups” united because they oppose their common “out groups” has been noted by several scholars as an essential strategy in the formation of separate intellectual identities. 10 “Every collective identity,” Stéphaine Dechezelles explains “is based on a double strategy of homogenization and differentiation: the creation of an inclusive and positive Us that can be opposed to the irremediably different and negative Them.” 11 Highlighting these differences and emphasizing the Manichean divide, even, or perhaps especially, where it did not exist, therefore became a major theme in the work of those who attempted to define right-wing intellectual identity. Camaraderie and community, often based on little more than shared professional identity and resentment of their perceived oppressors, was actively promoted within the extreme right among its various factions, leagues, and journals, and, at least during polarizing national debates, it was made to seem unfathomable outside these lines with any peers on the left. This differentiation and separation required a corresponding effort on the extreme right to reappropriate labels and categorizations used by their opponents on the left to disqualify them from intellectual status. When criticized for his “reactionary” views on religion and the military, which many Dreyfusards considered to disqualify him from intellectual status, Brunetière claimed that in some cases, reaction ought to be considered synonymous with progress and liberty. 12 When the young intellectuals believed themselves excluded from positions within the university system, they revalued the role of the littérateur (man of letters) as the truest practice of intellectual responsibility and disparaged the increasingly republican and left-wing trajectory of the universitaire (professor). The right’s struggle to differentiate the values they associated with intellectual identity from those attached to it by the left, and to reappropriate the language and roles used to exclude them, paralleled a more tangible segregation of the physical intellectual community. Before the Dreyfus Affair, men of letters and journalists of different political persuasions often found themselves writing for the same journals, teaching in the same institutions, and sharing the same socio-professional network of mentors, friends, and colleagues. During the periods of intense intellectual engagement when political involvement increasingly polarized the intellectual community, these crossover environments became more and more rare. In 1955, Simone de Beauvoir and the editors of Les Temps

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Introduction

Modernes encapsulated this belief in the incompatibility of the intellectual left and extreme right in an issue dedicated to “La gauche” and an article within it by Beauvoir entitled “La pensée de droite, aujourd’hui” (The thought of the right today). 13 Here they outlined the essential ideological positions and worldviews that defined the left and distinguished its views of human nature, social conditions, and historical progress from those of the extreme right. Their very different understanding of humankind, society, and the necessity of change was the key, the enquête (survey) concluded, to the left and extreme right’s distinctly different postwar engagements and the impossibility of an association between them of any depth or duration. Although the intellectuals of the extreme right and left might still have participated in the same basic intellectual practices, from writing in journals to teaching students to signing petitions, the collective experience of these practices and, therefore, of daily intellectual life, became increasingly segregated and differentiated during periods of political engagement. Many journals became organs of engaged thought for either the extreme right or the extreme left where intellectuals’ values and political positions were reinforced and radicalized. Even literary journals such as the Nouvelle Revue Française that attempted to remain above the polarizing fray eventually took a political stance and began to exclude those writers who did not toe the political line. The university increasingly was seen as a bastion of republican, socialist, and later communist intellectuals, spurring the educators on the extreme right to create alternative, right-wingdominated institutions, such as the Institut d’action française and socioprofessional networks and spaces like those around Henri Massis, to mentor the next generation. Social and professional networks, spaces of sociability, and intellectual communities from petitions to cafés, and even private friendships, showed increasing signs of a left-right divide. Friendships and collaborations that crossed political divides, like that of Romain Rolland and Alphonse de Châteaubriant, did exist during these periods of intense intellectual engagement, but are remarkable for their peculiarity. And even these friendships showed the strain of conflicting political passions and intellectual values in private letters. As the collective spaces and experience of intellectual life became ever more polarized and segregated, the individual intellectual’s concept of his or her identity as a member of the genus “intellectual” reflected these narrowed influences. In much the same way that the language of ostracism and exclusion became integral to conceptualizing oneself as an intellectual on the extreme right, belonging to collective communities distinct from those on the left also became significant sources of identity formation. This effect of communities, touted as internally homogenous and externally differentiated, on collective identity formation has been traced by scholars of other European extreme-right groups like the Italian Alleanza Nazionale (AN). The Italian party members, according to Dechezelles,

Introduction

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gathered in “veritable sanctuaries” that provided a safe place for expressing views to which the outside world was perceived to be hostile. 14 The polarization of communities both reflects and subsequently reinforces the sense of a division between the two camps. Over time, the physical selfsegregation of communities, networks, and mentorships contributed necessarily to an insularity of thought and ideological isolation. This selfimposed isolation and entrenchment of succeeding generations in the teachings of hegemony, resentment, and differentiation in turn promoted radicalization of ideas on the extreme right and alienation from the mainstream in an ever-growing cycle of self-imposed retraction and retreat. From the Dreyfus Affair to the postmodern era, the intellectuals of the extreme right perceived themselves to be excluded and ostracized from the political world and, more importantly, from the intellectual life and leadership of France. Their reaction was one of resentment toward the dominant left. They struggled to redefine true, legitimate intellectual identity according to their own, alternative intellectual values and communities and to clearly differentiate and even physically separate these from the left. The result of this pattern was a vicious cycle in which they sensed themselves excluded, reacted by differentiating and isolating themselves, and found themselves increasingly marginalized and alienated from the mainstream. Before moving forward with any discussion of resentment and intellectual identity formation on the extreme right, it is important to first consider how this book will approach two integral concepts: the extreme right and the intellectual. And to understand the emphases in this book, it is necessary first to consider how these two concepts have been approached by scholars in the past and how this study contributes to several ongoing debates in the current literature. RIGHT-WING INTELLECTUAL IDENTITY IN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT: THE RIGHT Study of the extreme right in France has gained a great deal of momentum in the past two decades as the proliferation and popularity of extreme right movements throughout contemporary Western Europe invites comparisons to the movements and ideologies of the past. The intensity of these debates by historians of Europe has made, as one trio of scholars has phrased it, “right-wing extremism one of the most controversial phenomena of the contemporary period.” 15 Faced with an array of extremist groups in France and across Europe, historians are left to ponder if we are “witnessing the emergence of a new political phenomenon, whose nature, because it is rooted in a post-industrial society, is markedly different in terms of ideological orientation, political objectives and organization, from its historical (Nazi-fascist and neo-fascist) ancestors”

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Introduction

or whether the old “mobilizing passions” like xenophobia have simply evolved over the years to the point that “enduring obsessions” of the old extreme right now just “repackage old hatreds into new crusades.” 16 This underlying curiosity about the fundamental nature and origins of contemporary extreme right movements has resulted in a series of new and revisited debates in the historiography of the French far right that provide important context for understanding the concept of distinctive, right-wing intellectual identity construction. One of these trends in recent scholarship continues a long-running debate on the existence and nature of French fascism. This continued interest in fascist movements is linked to a second pursuit that highlights the diversity, complexity, and internecine conflict within the French “right” and demonstrates the error inherent in speaking of “the” right or even “the” extreme right. Interwoven into both of these trends in the scholarship is a third debate that is central to this book: one that questions the extent to which the left and the right were ideologically, culturally, or sociologically divided. While each of these approaches to the extreme right will be revisited throughout the book as they relate specifically to the evolving issues of intellectual identity during the twentieth century, an initial overview of these three trends in the scholarship is helpful to frame the context of this study. The study of the French extreme right remains, in many ways, both indebted to, and mired in the continuing interest in French fascism and its relationship to wartime collaboration. While it will be examined in more detail in subsequent chapters, the historiography surrounding French fascism is almost required groundwork for any study of the extreme right and its intellectual milieu. This debate over French fascism became a bitterly and often personally divisive one for historians beginning in 1954 with the introduction of René Rémond’s La droite en France de 1815 à nos jours, a study of the French right that argued for French immunity to fascist influences. Rémond’s work and subsequent revisions identified three threads of right-wing thought, including counterrevolutionary ultra-royalism, conservative Orléanism, and nationalist Bonapartism, that extend back to the early nineteenth century. While the nationalist thread might have supported authoritarian government and anti-parliamentarian leagues, according to Rémond, it was distinct from fascism and rested on different foundations of power. Fascism, therefore, could not “take root” in France in the 1930s and those few intellectuals, like Robert Brasillach, who supported it beyond the general “temporary fascination” were “perverted intellectuals.” 17 His work was followed quickly by Robert Aron’s Histoire de Vichy, which extended the immunity thesis for France beyond its defeat in 1940 and developed an elaborate defense of Philippe Pétain as part of the “sword and shield” interpretation of French state collaboration. 18

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American scholar Robert O. Paxton was the first to successfully challenge this image of a France immune to fascism with his 1972 watershed text Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 that posited, rather than a nation of resistors, a nation of collaborators. 19 From this point forward, Brian Jenkins has noted, the role of the French extreme right in the interwar and wartime eras became “a deeply sensitive field of study, and one which has become increasingly controversial over the last thirty years. . . . We are dealing with an area where passions run high and where more is at stake than purely academic pride.” 20 Paxton’s work was followed in the late 1970s and 1980s by that of Zeev Sternhell, Robert Soucy, and William D. Irvine, who have all contributed to the new pursuit of “finding fascism” in France by tracing connections and by highlighting the permeability between the traditional, conservative French right and the formation of what they considered fascist sympathizing leagues in the 1930s that prepared the nation for collaboration in 1940. 21 Their work finding and categorizing French fascism colored not only scholarship on the interwar and wartime years, but also that on the decades before and after as historians started searching for “protofascism” or “prefascism” in the extreme right before the war, and neo-fascism in the extreme right after the war. The fascination with finding fascism became so dominant that Christophe Prochasson rightly felt the need to warn these historians to be careful about claiming pre-fascist ideologies in a time where fascism did not yet even exist. 22 In this way, discussions of fascism, Vichy, and collaborationism became obligatory for any study of the extreme right from the fin-de-siècle to the Front national (FN). Unfortunately, while this new focus on the presence of fascism, pre-fascism, and neo-fascism in France brought attention to the study of the extreme right, it also temporarily sidelined exploration of the non-fascist extreme right in other periods. 23 The assault on the immunity thesis resulted, by the mid-1980s, in a revised but still staunch defense of French distaste for fascism from Serge Berstein, Philippe Burrin, Michel Winock, and Pierre Milza, who, while admitting that fascism might have “permeated” France more substantially than had been previously acknowledged, declared that France was still not a cradle of a native brand of fascism nor could it be identified as a nation overrun with fascist sympathizers. 24 This debate continued into the new millennium, with many scholars, particularly French historians like Jacques Nobécourt, Winock, Berstein, and Jean-Paul Gautier, continuing to assert as late as 2014 that France was not “fertile ground” for fascism or that France was even “allergic” to it, albeit carefully avoiding the term “immunity.” 25 Gautier perhaps best illustrated this trend when he wrote that while small groups of French may have been “touched by the fascist virus over time,” France as a whole remained “outside the magnetic field of fascism,” and fascist groups, though dangerous, “remained marginal.” 26

12

Introduction

While the disagreements over fascism in France continue, scholarship since 2000 has increasingly turned to other avenues of historical inquiry, in part as a reaction against the intractability of the debate. Samuel Kalman, Sean Kennedy, Michel Dobry, and Kevin Passmore are among those who have attempted to “refocus scholarly energy in the pursuit of a more nuanced portrait of the French right” that reevaluates movements and intellectuals of the interwar extreme right within a new interpretative framework. Rather than seeking to categorize interwar movements or intellectuals as fascist, this new approach explores the “centrality of gender, imperialism, political culture, and intellectual or cultural trends to the discourse and action” of extreme right groups. 27 Others, such as Paul Mazgaj, Gisèle Sapiro, Bruno Goyet, and Sandrine Sanos, examine the cultural politics, language of race and masculinity, socio-professional experience, and identity construction of the interwar and wartime extremeright intellectuals, rather than seeking solely to classify them as fascist or conservative. 28 “Simply put,” Sean Kennedy explains, “the newer scholarship shows more interest in understanding the intellectuals who embraced the far Right as intellectuals” and the connection between their political views and cultural agendas. 29 The trend has spread to study of the decades before and, to a lesser extent, the decades after the war, as historians follow new cultural approaches to fin-de-siècle and postwar intellectuals rather than pursuing charges of protofascism or neo-fascism. In keeping with this new trend in scholarship, this book moves beyond proclaiming its intellectuals as fascist, proto-fascist, or neo-fascist in favor of examining the cultural politics, discursive tropes, and socio-professional communities that informed their distinctive intellectual identity construction. The effort to nuance the study of the extreme right beyond the categories of fascist or non-fascist has also influenced a trend that emphasizes the complexity, internal factions, and fundamental diversity within the right. In some ways, this is again linked to the work of Rémond, whose 1954 image of the right in France was divided into three currents of thought but recognized no further internal distinctions or external influences on these three currents between the Napoleonic wars and the postwar period. His subsequent reflections and revisions in 1982 and 2005 bowed to demands of recent scholarship to recognize a more xenophobic and anti-Semitic current of right-wing extremism, but his work still maintained a rather neatly categorizable view of the right-wing world. Sternhell’s most recent work, Les anti-Lumières, presents an even more monotonal view of the right as the inheritor of an anti-Enlightenment tradition from the eighteenth century. While he acknowledges that disregarding the “richness, pluralism, diversity, and internal contradictions” of the anti-Enlightenment tradition would be a “grave error,” Sternhell continues to emphasize the “logic and coherence” of the intellectual origin of the right and “the common intellectual basis of the thinkers of the anti-

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13

Enlightenment” that he sees to go “over and above all contradictions” 30 With this mission to unify all of the “revolutionary right” since 1790 under the mantle of anti-Enlightenment thought “regardless of their time and milieu,” he admits freely to showing what is “essential and typical” of these right-wing thinkers, rather than “an exact representation of the thought of each writer in all its complexity.” 31 Winock also found “counterrevolutionary” and anti-Enlightenment thought to be the key to recognizing the extreme right in all its various manifestations across the century, although he added to this a rejection of both democratic institutions and the glorification of authority. 32 This essentialist approach has been challenged by other historians; James Shields, for example, who, even while searching for “ideological and political continuity” within the century of right-wing movements that can bring cohesiveness to the concept of “the right,” warns readers against seeing it as “an essentially undifferentiated continuum” or “a seamless linear narrative” that is oversimplified and reductive. 33 Kalman and Kennedy agree, warning that “to speak of the French right in the singular is profoundly misleading. France’s modern Right has always been multifaceted in outlook, divided between moderates and radicals, pious Catholics and secularists, establishment elites and angry populists.” 34 And, in their work on the political parties and organizations of the Third Republic, Passmore and Robert Lynn Fuller both emphasize that the innate complexities of these conservative and nationalist movements prevent any categorizations of or projections about the makeup of the political right beyond temporary alliances dependent on historical circumstance. 35 A subset in the debate over the internal divisions of the right is concerned with the parameters of and divisions within the “extreme right” and how this label is designated by historians. As Shields notes, even in the few decades since World War II, the “French extreme right has been host to hundreds of movements, many of them small, short-lived, and born from the mutations of others,” not to mention the proliferation of “clubs, associations, together with a prodigious output of periodicals” and their editorial teams. 36 So, once again, as Paul Hainsworth argues, any attempt at “essentialist categorizations of the extreme right are frought with problems” and there are no “irrefutable models of extreme rightism which might successfully accommodate or disqualify each concrete example or candidate deemed to belong to this political family.” 37 Cas Mudde has explored this problem of categorization by historians and identified twenty-six models to define the parameters of the extreme right containing over fifty-eight different essential traits. But, he marvels, while some of the qualifications for inclusion resemble “shopping lists,” scholars often “fail to mention or mention only vaguely what combination of features is necessary to constitute right-wing extremism.” 38 Wi-

14

Introduction

nock’s concept is particularly unhelpful here: “If the extreme right is not the devil, it is a tool to demonize.” 39 Even among the groups that are identified as extreme right, there is not always clear common ground of language or mission. Gautier explains that Some speak of revolution and others counterrevolution, some call themselves nationalists, others regionalists or Europeanists. Fundamental divisions appear on the nature of the regime to install (monarchist or republican) the form of the state (totalitarian or decentralized), the economic regime (liberalism, corporatism, étatism), on defense, on Europe, on foreign policy, on the place of religion in society. 40

Some historians, such as Jean-François Sirinelli, Soucy, and Irvine, have found common ground by seeing the spectrum of the right as a sliding scale where individuals can form socio-professional networks that link traditional conservative groups to center radicals to Catholic communities to extreme-right leagues and have memberships in a variety of organizations across the spectrum. Others, including Hainsworth, argue against this perspective, saying that “the extreme right does belong to a different political family and is distinguishable enough from the traditional right wing” because even when its voters or values overlap, on the concern over immigration, for example, the extreme right practices these values in entirely different ways. 41 Gautier echoes this, warning readers not to reduce the extreme right to just “the classic right-wing values taken to the extreme” because the extreme right, in fact, opposes many of the values held by the traditional, conservative right. 42 In addition to not having any consensus on the parameters of what we mean when we speak of “the right of the right,” 43 there is also little to no consensus on identifying terminology. Many historians, particularly when attempting to show distinctions from the left, just refer to their groupings as “left” and “right,” or “right-wing,” and include within these broad categorizations the extreme poles of the spectrum, placing the focus on the division between left and right rather than highlighting internal complexity within the right. 44 Yet when describing relationships to the center or to the more moderate right, a cornucopia of terms awaits. Individuals who are viewed as extreme right “pre-fascists” by one historian of the fin-de-siècle can be identified as “traditionalists” for another. And those twenty-first-century organizations dubbed neo-fascist in one text could just as easily be given the less inflammatory designation “national populists or neo-populists” in another. 45 Just referencing the FN alone, historians have used the labels “extreme right, far-right, radicalright, new radical-right, nationalist, populist, fascist, and neo-fascist.” 46 And each of these labels has a connotation that can slightly distinguish what a scholar intends to imply about the group. Mudde notes that European scholars often use terms like radical right and right-wing radicalism

Introduction

15

interchangeably with the term right-wing extremism, yet the terms carry a more distinctive meaning and subcontext for American audiences. 47 Jérôme Jamin denounces the equation of “populist” and extreme right that has become increasingly popular for historians of twenty-first-century movements because, he claims, populism does not involve the same threat to liberal democracy that is essential to the label of extreme right. 48 Clearly, in this wild west of terminology, categorizations or labels meant to encapsulate the attitudes, behaviors, identity, or political engagement of all those categorized as “the right” or even “the extreme right” over long periods of time will be flawed. This book acknowledges the inadequacy of these terms to encapsulate the amalgam of intellectuals in its pages and highlights how their attitudes and ideas changed with the events of the time, shifted in order to counter the engagement and ideas of one’s opponents, and also could be influenced by circumstances and experiences. The ultranationalism and Germanophobia identified with the anti-Dreyfusard right, for example, was replaced by Germanophilia and Europeanism for many considered “on the right” during World War II. Even socio-professional behaviors like teaching in the university could shift within a few short decades to roles more associated with the literary world. In the same way, it is impossible to speak of a single, unified right or even extreme right within even a single brief period. Certain ideas, affiliations, and practices could be held essential by one faction of the extreme right and simultaneously rejected by another, leading to recriminations, poaching of memberships, and antagonism between far-right movements. Anti-Semitism is rightly seen as a dominant attitude of the anti-Dreyfusards, but the rejection of anti-Semitism was also found in its ranks. While the Action française (AF) dominated much of the right-wing engagement of the 1920s, its monarchist beliefs alienated it from other extreme right-wing supporters. Collaborationists who expected pro-Nazi attitudes often found themselves at odds with the state collaboration of Vichy, and today the Nouvelle Droite (ND) and FN find themselves internally divided over maintaining the anti-Semitic attitude of old or replacing it with an anti-Islamic one that finds Israel as a new ally in the war against North African and Syrian immigration. 49 Clearly, there is no such thing as the right or even the extreme right. And yet a difficulty remains. While historians should emphasize the factionalism, pluralism, and internal conflict of the extreme right, they still need to organize these splinter groups and ideologies in some way that allows for historical evaluation and comparison. This book maintains that we need to “hold that pendulum,” to borrow an apt phrase from John F. Sweets’s work on wartime collaboration that urges moderation between two approaches. 50 There were elements of common ground between these factions that gave contemporaries a sense of network and community despite their differences and allows historians today to speak of them as “the right” or “the extreme right.” 51 So, while the extreme

16

Introduction

right “cannot be seen as a uniform type bearing essentially homogenous traits,” it can perhaps be viewed as “a political family whose constituent parts exhibit certain things in common.” 52 If we are to “hold that pendulum,” then the recent scholarly emphasis on the diversity, factions, and internecine conflict that have splintered the extreme right must be balanced by the equal recognition of forces of unity: “that certain themes (and indeed, styles) characterize and help to identify extreme right-wing parties. They help us to make sense of the extreme right and to understand it, without trying to fit all candidates for inclusion, into reductionist strait-jackets” or viewing them only in atomized isolation. 53 These forces of unity exist not only across the separate groups in the same period but also across the separation of time. While scholars are right to emphasize the great heterogeneity and evolution of the right and extreme right over the century, we should also acknowledge that each “subsequent expression” of the right maintains “part of its heritage” that helps link it to previous expressions of right-wing thought. 54 One of the central tenets of this book, therefore, is that despite the myriad political, religious, and social attitudes of the various extremeright groupuscules that divided them from one another in their time and the evolutions of the positions, values, and engagements that differentiated them over the century, it is still possible to see some sort of continuity that also unites them. One manifestation of transgenerational continuity and interfactional unity on the extreme right was the shared reaction by the intellectual elite to their perceived exclusion from intellectual engagement by their opponents on the (equally diverse and ill-defined) left. Intellectuals on the extreme right crafted an attitude of resentment, a selfconcept of the ostracized pariah, and a language of hegemony and repression that appealed to their extreme right peers across lines that might otherwise have divided them, and ultimately united them through a common self-image, a common vocabulary, and a common enemy. The perception of their exclusion from the spaces of intellectual and cultural power also led to the creation of distinctly right-wing “counter-societies” 55 that included educational outlets and professional mentorships designed to transfer these unifying forces to the next generation. What each successive generation imbibed from their predecessors was subsequently adapted to the events and circumstances of their own time, but still bore the essential hallmarks of notions of disenfranchisement and resentment throughout the century. The effort to see common ground between the various groups of the extreme right is reflected in the choice of terminology in this book as well. Passmore wrote very transparently of his process for labeling and selecting the groups in his study, saying that while any attempt to categorize or label “obscures (the] heterogeneity” of its subject, “historians must define the boundaries of their object of study, but they must remember that they choose these limits from many possibilities” and keep in mind what their

Introduction

17

chosen method of selection includes and excludes. He also gives some power in the choice of labels to the historical actors themselves, saying that he labels as “right” only those who “assumed the label themselves.” 56 This book uses “extreme right” as its “chosen” category of analysis and uses this term to distinguish its intellectuals’ general political orientation over the century, particularly their proclaimed extra-parliamentary stance opposing the parliamentary right. This label is also used, more specifically, as a way to designate those on the right who, due to their feeling of ostracism from the mainstream intellectual, political, and socio-professional world, engaged in the struggle for intellectual identity reclamation in a way that distanced them from their peers on the more moderate right. While the intellectuals themselves did not use the term “extreme right,” it is in keeping with the view of the great majority of historians who maintain that “while the inadequacy of the term ‘extreme right’ to convey any nuance or reservation is acknowledged, it offers the most comprehensive cover term for the range of parties, movements, and figures” that are explored in this book. 57 However, when comparing their movements and ideas to those of their opponents on the left, the more generic terms “right” and “left” or “left-wing” and “right-wing,” used by the intellectuals themselves to create clearer division between camps, will be followed. For the same reason, specific terms such as “anti-Dreyfusard,” “nationalist,” or “fascist” will be used to acknowledge the evolving labels applied by the intellectuals themselves. Certainly, these labels could be used by contemporaries both to self-identify and to include, exclude, tarnish, or insult others with little or no regard for what historians consider their proper meaning, 58 as when the postwar extreme right identified the Gaullists as “of the left.” In these circumstances, care will be taken to show the contradictions between the labels and perspectives of the intellectuals and the historiographical consensus on their political classification. This reflection on the internal complexity of the right and extreme right in France as well as continued work on French fascism are connected to a third trend in the scholarship that explores the extent to which the left and right were truly divided. Once again, much of the interest swirls around the interwar and wartime decades and the nature of fascism and its origins. And once again, debate on the division between the right and left traces back to the work of Sternhell and Soucy. While both scholars agreed on the presence of native fascist movements in interwar France, they clashed over the ideological origins of these movements. While Soucy and Irvine saw French fascism as a product of the extreme right that often overlapped with the conservative parties, Sternhell argued that the socialist elements of fascism indicated a heavy presence of left-wing thought. His 1983 work, Ni droite, ni gauche, portrayed French fascist movements as “third-way” alternatives impregnated with left-

18

Introduction

wing dissidents and socialist ideologues. This conflict set in motion a series of studies over the next three decades that brought to the fore leftwing dissidents and intellectuals who “drifted” into right-wing movements, collaborationism, or Vichy. From Burrin’s 1986 work on Marcel Déat, Jacques Doriot, and Gaston Bergery, to Diane N. Labrosse’s work more than twenty years later, prominent figures of the interwar fascist movements and the Vichy government whose political origins were on the left or extreme left were scrutinized to show the “taxonomical problems of French politics between the two World Wars.” 59 Nicholas Kessler’s exploration of the interwar intellectual movement, Jeune Droite, echoes this sense of fluidity between the left and right, arguing that, for the youth, the sense of generational solidarity with others coming of age in 1930 “often overrode partisan allegiances and ideological antagonisms” allowing the “same themes, the same indignations to pass easily from the left to the right, the right to the left.” 60 This same approach has been taken up for periods beyond the interwar by historians of both the Dreyfus Affair and the postwar era who have begun to explore crossover figures, such as Dreyfusard-turned-nationalist Charles Péguy; intellectual influences similar to that of revolutionary syndicalists Georges Sorel and Georges Valois on the prewar Action française; and language, for instance, “multiculturalism,” which was used by both the left and the ND, that suggests the absence of any substantive dividing line between the categories of left and right. 61 Others argue that certain cultural attitudes of the time, like those on gender and masculinity, race and the colonial empire, and latent anti-Semitism were shared across political divides, even if intellectuals did not make these attitudes central to their engagement. 62 A strong trend in the current scholarship is, therefore, to present the barrier between the left and right as highly permeable by offering evidence that left-wing intellectuals have been moving to positions and movements previously categorized as extreme right and by demonstrating how both the far left and right have been subject to some of the same sociocultural attitudes. However, here too we should “hold that pendulum.” In this case, the recent desire to show unifying forces should be tempered with a recognition that differences, both perceived and real, not only existed, but also gave meaning to the categorizations of left and right. Many historians remain resistant to the idea of a dissolved boundary. For some of these scholars, there is a fundamental separation of values too divisive for factors of a shared generation or common cultural attitudes to bridge, at least not during periods of intense political crisis. Sirinelli has said that the right and left define themselves and their opposition to one another based on a different relationship to history and to the future. Their “relationship to history and also to eventual action against its unwinding” is not only different, but it is also above all what nourishes their sensibilities and values, making their visions of history “probably one of the major

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19

differences between the left and right.” 63 Alain-Gérard Slama maintains that there is “an invisible but insurmountable line” of demarcation between the intellectual left and right that prevents their conflation. This line divides what he calls “specific political temperaments” denoting psychological, intellectual, and moral dispositions that clearly distinguish the right and left. 64 Kalman and Kennedy note that the economic crisis of 1932 “exacerbated” the “already deep divisions between left and right” and that they remained deeply divided afterward. 65 Jamin is one of many who has tackled the debate about whether twenty-first-century left-wing extremism and right-wing extremism are not simply two sides of the same coin, sharing more views and practices than not. He concludes by agreeing with other scholars of the contemporary extreme right, including Tamir Bar-On, that the extreme left and extreme right are fundamentally divided over the value of equality. These scholars insist that “by basing its whole ideology on the premise of racial and cultural inequality . . . extreme right ideology does not strictly have anything to do with extreme left ideology, even if in practice regimes inspired by these different ideologies can lead to similar consequences.” 66 Nor does it appear that there has been a mass migration or drift across these barriers, especially from the extremes of each camp, regardless of how permeable a few individuals have found them. Passmore argues that historians have “grossly overestimated” the transfer of left-wing Parti communiste français (PCF) members to the right-wing Parti populaire français (PPF) in the 1930s and also maintains that, even in his base of Saint-Denis, Jacques Doriot “lost the backing of left-wing voters as he moved to the Right.” 67 Sapiro agrees that while a few notable intellectuals and leaders of movements may have had origins in the far left, the vast majority of later intellectual collaborationists identified as right-wing or extreme right-wing in their political orientation before the war. 68 And while Pierre-André Taguieff might have found Benoist and the ND to be enigmas that straddle the right-left divide, Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol and others see the leftist language of the ND to be a seductive “thirdway” mask hiding a right-wing program, rather than a movement that has crossed over the line or defies right-left categorization. 69 Other historians point not to a division between vastly different cultural values or worldviews but to different ways of using or practicing those, often shared, values. Passmore, though his focus is exploring the internal diversity of conservatism, notes that all of the diverse groups on both the left and right overlapped because they shared a common political culture, yet they chose to use it for “different, often contradictory” purposes. 70 For example, Miranda Pollard, opposing what Passmore called an “undifferentiated anti-feminism on right and left,” 71 notes that while the “right did not have exclusive hold on the values” of maternalism, heterosexuality, and femininity, “the right most conspicuously and successfully mobilized them as political values” giving “French anti-femi-

20

Introduction

nism” support from the right that was “unique” from that on the left. 72 Even theories like crowd psychology that pervaded the political culture of both the left and right were used differently and emphasized different sources of connection to the masses. 73 Finally, Jean-Marie Donegani and Marc Sadoun employ the concept of a mirror to consider the differences between the right and left. “In the symbolic organization of the political universe,” they write, “the right and left define themselves by their mutual relationship. To speak of the right as a mirror of the left is to approach the identity of tendencies as the result of a common effort of differentiation. . . . The identity and the existence of each force is thus conceived in a polarized universe.” 74 Speaking of the right without its opposition and its foil on the left is incomprehensible, since the right is usually responding to the “vision of the world” created on the left and attempting to differentiate its own views from this. This is a repeated and an “unequal game,” they say, for the right often must use the “words invented by the liberal and republican adversary” to remove itself from the “disqualified place to which the left has assigned it.” 75 It is only in periods of national unity, such as l’Union sacrée of World War I, that “the frontier between the left and right is effaced and the adversary disappears and the traitor and enemy no longer exist.” 76 This book will again attempt to “hold the pendulum” by tempering the findings of historians who recognize common, overarching sociocultural attitudes and bridges between the right and left with the reflections and writings of contemporaries who perceived very real differences between their worldview and identity as intellectuals and those of their opponents. A central premise of the book is that in the midst of crises where intellectuals felt they were called to engage, they prioritized and emphasized these differences, rather than recognizing any common ground, when they thought about their identity as intellectuals. Sometimes these differences were real and have since been identified as sources of conflict by historians, while at other times they were imagined, perceived, hyperbolized, or intentionally fabricated. During periods of calm, these perceived differences could be breached by what these groups shared, but during periods of intense engagement, they fed into (and off of) the construction of barricades. Real or imagined, the perception of irreconcilable division and segregated camps had meaning at the time as well as the power to influence. Tony Judt has offered a similar assessment that intellectuals tended to engage during periods of national crisis when they identified intensely with one side of a debate or political question. During such crises, they saw their opponents as extremists and, therefore, avoided any compromise with them or any appearance of common ground, preferring to think in conventional terms of black and white and reflecting back the pre-existing divisions of the crisis. 77

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21

Griffiths argues that words, the medium of intellectuals, have the power to create reality from the imaginary. He claims that often the polemical language, like that proclaiming an unbreachable abyss between the left and right camps, used by engaged intellectuals, not only reflected the “entrenched attitudes” of the opponents, but also created real division between them that may not have existed before. 78 This book also, particularly in its approach to PCF-turned-PPF advocate Ramon Fernandez, supports those like Matthew Affron whose work shows that when individuals did shift their political camps from left to right, they often abandoned many of the values, attitudes, and even professional behaviors that were associated with the left-wing community and adopted those more common to the right. 79 While historians are right to acknowledge what was shared across the divide, this does not negate, or even supersede, the perception by contemporaries of a dramatic separation. Both are essential for understanding these intellectuals and their eras. Clearly, in three of the significant trends in the scholarship on the right and extreme right, there remains lively discussion and very little consensus, even among those who share certain approaches. However, as one historian notes of the continued disagreements, “What does stand out is the extent to which the . . . French Right remains a subject of enduring historical interest and vibrant historical scholarship.” 80 This study continues the ongoing effort to better understand the French extreme right by considering how right-wing resentment and intellectual identity construction can provide new insight into the debates about the perception of division between the left and right and the possibility of common ground within these internally complex camps. RIGHT-WING INTELLECTUAL IDENTITY IN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT: THE INTELLECTUAL A subject of equally enduring historical interest and contemplative scholarship is that of the intellectual. While there are historiographical debates concerning the birth of the intellectual, the treason of the intellectual, and even the death of the intellectual, these are subsets of a larger, overarching debate. That debate, essential to the study of extreme-right intellectual identity construction in this book, concerns what it means to be an intellectual and how historians should define the concept. Jeremy Ahearne has written that “historical representations of intellectuals in France have been dominated by a particular model of this figure that has come to function in some respects like a myth . . . and thereby cast into relative obscurity other modes of inhabiting this role.” 81 While his work focuses on public policy intellectuals as the overlooked figures, his observation applies equally well to the central focus of this book: a left-wing model that obscures extreme-right-wing modes of inhabiting the role.

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Introduction

This study reveals that exclusion of the extreme right from the coveted role of intellectual by a dominant left wing model resulted in the formation of new, right-wing ways of inhabiting this role and understanding its identity. While the book’s purpose is to approach intellectual identity as an actor’s construct that is distinct from historians’ later efforts to categorize the concept, part of the book’s significance lies in the fact that this identity construction has not been the subject of extensive study. In part, that lack of study is due to the fact that, as Winock has noted, “the terms intellectuel and intellectuel de gauche are often taken for synonyms,” and historians, even today, tend to think “intellectual of the left” when they see the term intellectual. 82 Interestingly, even Ahearne’s study of overlooked policy intellectuals did not include any intellectuals from the extreme right. Pascal Ory’s and Jean-François Sirinelli’s 1986 study Les Intellectuels en France made clear that ignoring the intellectuals of the right distorted the field of study and did a disservice to our understanding of intellectual passions on both the left and right. Their definition of the intellectual was one that, therefore, could encompass both sides. The intellectual was “a man of culture, creator or mediator, put in the position of a man of politics, producer or consummator of ideology.” 83 And yet, Mazgaj still needed to inform readers twenty years later that engaged writers “could be found outside the confines of the intellectual left” and marveled that despite Ory and Sirinelli’s groundbreaking effort, the focus for studies of engagement “has been almost exclusively on the antifascist left—so much so that the origins of intellectual engagement have come to be virtually equated with the individuals, organizations and publications surrounding the Popular Front.” 84 It is of interest to this study, therefore, to consider how intellectuals have been approached by historians; how the version of intellectual identity created by the left and seen as dominant and exclusive by the right could continue to have influence on historians’ categories; and how certain approaches could encompass the distinctive incarnation of the intellectual created by the right. In historical scholarship, intellectuals have been categorized and defined as universalists and particularists; organic and traditional; legislators and interpreters; critics and experts; producers and mediators; and teachers, writers, and celebrities, to name only a few. 85 As a general rule, the categorizations and definitions tend to be either ideological or sociological in nature. The first considers the intellectual as a product of his political and cultural values and ideas, and leads to definitions including spokesmen for “the France of the Enlightenment and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” “child of the Enlightenment,” “universalists,” and “special custodians of abstract ideas like reason and justice and truth.” 86 This set of definitions not only clearly eliminates the consideration of intellectuals who have extreme right-wing values, 87 but also borrows most directly from those concepts of intellectual identity

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developed during the Dreyfus Affair by the Dreyfusards and adapted and perpetuated over the century on the republican center and the left. The second approach defines the intellectual by his role in society, his behaviors, and his relation to power. This latter approach often borrows from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of knowledge to consider the intellectual as a product of his habitus and as a being struggling to monopolize power over cultural legitimacy. 88 These sociological studies have considered the intellectual as a product of: his relationship to institutions and proximity to professional power; 89 his connections to the republican government or the social elite; 90 and his placement within certain academic disciplines. 91 The studies have led to differentiations between the organic and traditional intellectuals and between the terms “intelligentsia” and “intellectual,” as well as to categorizations based on the intellectual’s role and behavior. The work of Sirinelli and Ory fall into this latter approach and will serve as the initial starting point for intellectual identity in this book. Essential to their definition, and of great importance for this study, is the understanding that the intellectual is not defined by his political values but by his actions: “He is not defined by what he is but by what he does, i.e., a certain type of intervention in a certain place; la cite.” “The intellectual,” they explain, “will be political in that which he intervenes—civic debates, city planning, etc. when he proposes a choice of society to his contemporaries in the name of cultural choice.” 92 From this it can be concluded that the intellectual is necessarily engaged and that “engaged intellectual” is redundant. A writer or savant who does not lend his name, prestige, and work to the debate on political or social affairs is a “philosopher” rather than an “intellectual.” 93 Therefore, according to this basic definition, writers and savants who intervened in public debates, whether their political affiliation was with the left, center, or right, must be considered intellectuals. Almost a hundred years before Sirinelli and Ory’s work, the anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals already recognized this same equality with the center and the left in their qualifications to speak, their choice to intervene in public affairs, 94 and their utilization of their cultural capital to influence political debate. 95 It was their recognition of this basic definition of the intellectual that was the source of the extreme right’s resentment when they perceived themselves excluded from that role. In his own attempt to “hold that pendulum” between the sociological and values-based approaches to intellectual identity, Michel Trebitsch criticized the sociological camp for being so eager to not “reduce the history of intellectuals to a piece of the larger political history” by dividing them automatically by political affiliation, that they “put left and right intellectuals on the same level simply because they share identical structures of sociability like cercles, revues, and cafés.” 96 For Trebitsch, histories of intellectuals that only consider the question of values as sec-

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ondary, preferring instead a pure description of behavior and engagement of the individual within a collective, are ill-founded. Relational practices such as socializing within a certain group are always founded on adherence to common values that “determine a specific sociability where the established relationships are always primarily in rapport with those values.” 97 Philippe Dujardin continues in this vein, warning that the tool of sociability can lead historians to ignore personal identities and a more complex sense of connection in favor of broad categorizations of intellectual identity based on a shared space or type of behavior. 98 Identifying intellectual communities without the context of their political currents of thought results in “confounding” the very different intellectual identities of the left and right that “their modes of sociability (alone) are not able to differentiate.” 99 This book will promote a middle ground position between the two dominant approaches to the intellectual in recent scholarship: one favoring sociological factors and the other a values-based definition. In the same way that the book acknowledges overarching cultural similarities between the right and the left, so will it recognize the common sociological behaviors and spaces of the intellectual milieu that could result in the unification of these elites across political lines. However, once again, it is in times of political calm and cooperation that intellectuals emphasized their shared professional class, their similar practices and behaviors such as attending salons or signing petitions, and even their mutual belief in the value of intellectual engagement. When a debate raged and intellectuals began to take sides, they did not recognize, or did not allow themselves to acknowledge, that these similarities could have united them. Instead they emphasized what still divided them, or was imagined to divide them, from one another within these shared spaces and practices. Because it is these periods of political and social unrest that intellectuals felt called to engage, it will be around these periods in French history that the book is structured. STRUCTURE OF THE CHAPTERS Intellectuals felt this calling to engage their work throughout the twentieth century, but it is during periods when they perceived France to be in crisis and seeking direction that they were most eager to restrict and define who could lay claim to the authority of the intellectual guide. These periods were politically divisive for all, but they dramatically polarized the intellectual community who saw France’s moral, cultural, and intellectual future to be at stake in each crisis. It is during these periods that the nature of intellectual identity—its values, responsibilities, behaviors, and proper affiliations—became the subject of intense reflection and debate on both the left and right. This study is divided into six chapters

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that correspond to six periods of perceived crisis in French society when intellectuals felt called upon to engage. The first crisis is the Dreyfus Affair, from 1898 to 1902, when the title and role of intellectual first became a cause of conflict between the left and right. The second crisis, from 1910 to 1914, is the Nouvelle Sorbonne debate over the Republic’s “Germanic” reform to the educational system. The third is the interwar reaction to the rise of fascism and communism from 1930 to 1939. The fourth is the crisis of German Occupation, from 1940 to 1945, and the divisive choices of collaboration or resistance. The fifth period is the postwar struggle, from 1945 to 1967, to redefine France’s place in the world and answer new questions about communism, colonialism, racism, and the Republic. And the study will conclude with the rise of the ND and GRECE, from 1968 to 2000, during which time the ND challenged republican and left-wing ideas about multiculturalism and nationalism. Each of these chapters is divided into five parts. The first provides some contextualization for the period and the important political, social, and intellectual issues of the time while also introducing historiographical debates significant for the period and briefly introducing the intellectual identity presented at the time by leading spokesmen of the left. While the reality of the values of the left are of less importance to this study than the way in which the extreme right perceived, imagined, and reacted to the divide with the left, it is important to show that these perceptions of division were often grounded in real differences. However, this section will not be able to encompass all of the historical events, intellectuals, and currents of thought during the time. Instead, it will follow an approach limiting historical context similar to that in Julian Wright’s work on regionalism. Wright explains how he limits the discussion of the intellectual environment for his subject Charles-Brun saying, The study of the intellectual environment will be limited to individuals and texts directly connected with Charles-Brun. . . . It is the individual at the centre . . . who defines the context, rather than the other way around. This limits the context. Many significant writers, movements, and ideas must be left out, or examined only cursorily or only from one point of view. . . . The context . . .will be defined here by the movement itself, its texts, and the links made between its leading characters. 100

The second and third parts begin the analysis of the intellectual identity constructed on the right by exploring the expressions of resentment, accusations of intellectual hegemony, and self-identification as intellectuals of two significant right-wing intellectuals in each period. There are numerous figures on the extreme right who could have been selected to represent this reaction and each may have introduced different complexities of character, idiosyncrasies, or contradictions. However, as Sternhell has noted, “a book necessarily entails choices.” Like Sternhell’s choice of writers in his book, “the choice of writers examined in this book is gov-

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erned not only by their direct and immediate influence on the intellectual life of their time, and the representative, typical quality of their work, but also by their influence on posterity and their long-term contributions.” 101 The intellectuals I selected have been chosen because they were prominent spokespersons in the debate over intellectual identity, were active in the intellectual communities of their time, and continued to have influence on those generations who succeeded them. One other factor contributed to the choice of figures: for each period, one of the intellectuals received some scholarly attention and the other received minimal attention from historians. The intellectuals chosen are: Maurice Barrès and Ferdinand Brunetière during the Dreyfus Affair; Charles Maurras and Henri Massis during the Nouvelle Sorbonne debate; Abel Bonnard and Ramon Fernandez during the interwar years; Drieu la Rochelle and Alphonse de Châteaubriant during the occupation; Maurice Bardèche and Jacques Laurent during the postwar; and the conclusion examines Alain de Benoist in the modern day. In each of these periods, the intellectuals reveal the same pattern of engagement and struggle: their self-identification as intellectuals; their accusation of left-wing dominance; their documented resentment of this hegemony; and evidence of their determination to reappropriate the concept of intellectual identity for the right. The fourth part of each chapter explores how both of the intellectual leaders examined, in conjunction with their colleagues on the right, struggled to differentiate their value system and worldview as it related to their unique concept of right-wing engagement and intellectual values. Over time, both a continuity in right-wing values and an evolution of these values is apparent. The three sections on resentment and intellectual values approach the issue of identity construction through a close reading of the personal speeches and statements, literary work, journalism, and private reflections of the engagé. The fifth and final section of each chapter explores the segregation of the intellectual communities and networks, and a resulting alienation of the extreme right’s experience as intellectuals from that of the mainstream left and center. Certainly, the distinctive right-wing counter-societies had more influence on the collective identity formation of the extreme right than the placement of this section at the end of the chapter would imply. These counter-societies should be seen not as divorced from the discussions of differentiated values and resentment of hegemony on the extreme right, but rather interdependent on them. The differentiation of values and feelings of resentment contributed to the desire to create these alternative communities. And their efforts to segregate intellectuals into divided camps, radicalize attitudes and perceptions adopted by those within these closed camps, and inculcate resentment and divisiveness within the rising generation were integral contributors to the continuation of this sense of alienation and differentiation. In this way, the sections on resentment, values, and collective communities should all

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be seen as symbiotic and cyclical in nature. This fifth section also includes a review of the significant left-wing organizations as they challenged or excluded the right-wing intellectual organizations, revues, movements, parties, professional networks, and social spaces. In particular, this section highlights the segregationist, polarizing nature of these communities, and the impact they had on collective intellectual identity formation. This also necessitates consideration of the trajectories, behaviors, practices, relationships to society, and experiences that were particular and distinctive to the intellectual extreme right, and as a result, helped to separate their understanding of what it meant to be an intellectual from that of the left. All together, the chapters reveal both the changing conceptions of what it meant to be an intellectual of the extreme right and also the continuities in their perception of exclusion, resentment, distinctive values, and ideological segregation that linked different generations of the intellectual extreme right to one another. Exploration of the lives of these prominent right-wing intellectuals and their writings on intellectual identity during periods of intense engagement seems to indicate that there are certain common characteristics and experiences that they perceived to be essential to being an intellectual of the extreme right, no matter the time. The common tropes, behaviors, expectations, and motivations that are identified here, helped to unite these extreme right intellectuals through a common language, sense of community, and self-image, despite their diverse factions, private conflicts, and lack of internal continuity. These commonalities also served to distinguish them from their counterparts on the republican center and extreme left in such a way that shared cultural attitudes, which might have united them with the extreme left during periods of political cooperation, were not enough to maintain alliances or even personal friendships during periods of engagement. From these exemplars of their collective group, it can be argued that right-wing intellectuals have not been just like left-wing intellectuals but with different political opinions. Rather, they can be approached as their own manifestation of engagé. Their concept of role and identity was uniquely formed by their perception of exclusion and their resentment of marginalization. Therefore, they have: a different conception of their place in society and intellectual affairs; a different relationship to the university and the State; a different mentality of engagement; a distinct system of intellectual, cultural, and social values; a unique worldview and conception of “True France”; a different set of intellectual spaces, socio-professional networks, and professional trajectories; and a different community of peers and organizations for mentorship, publication, education, and socialization. Most importantly, they appropriated and internalized their own perceived exclusion by their culturally hegemonic opponents on the left. In doing so, they made the tropes of exclusion, ostracism, and resentment, integral to their intellectual identity, and thereby made the practice of self-segregation and radical-

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izing ideological isolation central to their understanding of collective identity as intellectuals. Combined, this has created a very distinctive experience of intellectual life and a unique understanding of what it means to be an intellectual. NOTES 1. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Secret Journal, trans. Alastair Hamilton (New York: H. Fertig, 1973), 70–72; emphasis in the original. 2. Georges Clemenceau, “À la dérive,” L’Aurore, January 23, 1898. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 3. According to the published list, the Ligue had an initial membership list that included twenty-two academicians in addition to men of letters; savants; and university, law, and medical professionals. 4. Maurice Barrès, “Notes on the foundation, the primitive organization, the aim, and the tendencies of the League de a Patrie Française,” Archives Nationale de France (hereafter cited AN), F7 13229–30. 5. While Drieu and many others implied that they were ostracized pariahs, the term pariah is actually used by Jacques Laurent to describe his status (Christophe Mercier, Conversation avec Jacques Laurent [Paris: Julliard, 1995], 101; and Christian Millau, Au galop des Hussards: Dans le tourbillon littéraire des années 50 [Paris: Fallois, 1999], 34). 6. Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe: From Local to Transnational, ed. Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin, and Brian Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 2012), 6. 7. Richard Griffiths, The Use of Abuse: The Polemics of the Dreyfus Affair and Its Aftermath (New York: Berg, 1992), 5. 8. The phrase “intellectual terrorism” was used by Laurent in Mercier, Conversation avec Jacques Laurent, 114, and was also used by Maurice Bardèche in L’épuration (Paris: Éditions Confrerie Castille, 1997), originally published in Défense de l’Occident, January–February 1957, 119. 9. Françis de Pressensé, “La nouvelle Ligue des patriotes,” L’Aurore, January 2, 1899. 10. This phenomenon of creating “in groups” and “out groups” along politicized lines during periods of threat or crisis has been explored more for its contribution to nationalisms by Joshua Searle-White in The Psychology of Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001), but his theory applies equally well to the division of intellectual communities along political lines during periods of engagement. 11. Stéphanie Dechezelles, “Neo-Fascists and Padans: The Cultural and Sociological Basis of Youth Involvement in Italian Extreme-Right Organizations,” in Varieties of Right-Wing Extremism in Europe: From Local to Transnational, ed. Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin, and Brian Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 2013), 184–85; (emphasis in original). 12. Ferdinand Brunetière, La liberté de l’enseignement (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1900), 4–5. 13. Simone de Beauvoir, “La pensée de droite, aujourd’hui,” Les Temps Modernes 112–13 (May 1955): 1539–75; 114–15 (June–July 1995): 2219–61. 14. Dechezelles, “Neo-Fascists and Padans,” 190. 15. Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin, and Brian Jenkins, eds. Varieties of RightWing Extremism in Europe: From Local to Transnational (New York: Routledge, 2013), 2. 16. Ibid. 17. René Rémond, The Right Wing in France from 1815 to de Gaulle, trans. James M. Laux (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), 293, 305. 18. Robert Aron, Histoire de Vichy, 1940–1944 (Paris: A. Fayard, 1954).

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19. Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972). 20. Brian Jenkins, ed., France in the Era of Fascism: Essays on the French Authoritarian Right (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 2. 21. Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite, ni gauche: L’idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983); and more recently Les anti-Lumières: Du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide (Paris: Fayard, 2006); Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); and French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); and his two works tracing intellectual fascism and its influence on the French intellectual milieu: Fascist Intellectual: Drieu la Rochelle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); and Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barrès (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); and William D. Irvine’s French Conservatism in Crisis: The Republican Federation of France in the 1930s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). 22. Christophe Prochasson, “Elusive Fascism: Reflections on the French Extreme Right at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le Pen, ed. Edward J. Arnold (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 70. 23. Editors Samuel Kalman and Michel Kennedy say in their preface to The French Right Between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements From Conservatism to Fascism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), that “the study of the non-fascist right practically disappeared” if it didn’t fit into the dualist view created by the French fascism debate (vii). 24. Serge Berstein, La France des années 30 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1988); Philippe Burrin, La dérive fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery, 1933–1945 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986); Philippe Burrin in “La France dans la champ magnétique des fascismes” Le Débat (November 1984): 52–72 offers the concept of a magnetic field of fascism where some were attracted more while other stayed on the periphery. Pierre Milza, Fascisme français: Passé et présent (Paris: Flammarion, 1987); and Pierre Milza, “Le négationisme en France,” Relations internationals 65 (Spring 1991): 9–22. 25. Jacques Nobécourt, in Le colonel de La Rocque (1885–1946); ou, Les pièges du nationalisme chrétien (Paris: Fayard, 1996), calls La Rocque a Christian Nationalist rather than a fascist, Michel Winock, in “Retour sur le fascism français: La Rocque et les Croix-deFeu,” Vingtième siècle 90 (2006): 3–27 argues France was not fertile ground for fascism. Both of these are discussed further in Kalman and Kennedy, French Right between the Wars, 8–9. The most recent discussion of the controversy is found in Serge Berstein and Michel Winock, eds., Fascism Français? La controverse (Paris: CNRS, 2014). 26. Jean-Paul Gautier, Les extrêmes droites en France: De la traversée du désert à l’ascension du Front national, 1945–2008 (Paris: Syllepse, 2009), 8. 27. Kalman and Kennedy, French Right between the Wars, vii–viii. 28. Paul Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism: The Cultural Politics of the French Young Right, 1930–1945 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007); Gisèle Sapiro, La guerre des écrivains; 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999); Bruno Goyet, Charles Maurras (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2000); Sandrine Sanos, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 29. Sean Kennedy, “The End of Immunity? Recent Work on the Far Right in Interwar France,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 34, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 29 (emphasis in original). 30. Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Maisel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2010), 4. 31. Ibid., 30. 32. Michel Winock, Histoire de l’extrême droite en France (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994). 33. James Shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (New York: Routledge, 2007), 12.

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34. Kalman and Kennedy, French Right between the Wars, ed. Kalman and Kennedy, 1. 35. Kevin Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Robert Lynn Fuller, The Origins of the French Nationalist Movement, 1886–1914 (London: McFarland, 2012). 36. Shields, Extreme Right in France, 10. 37. Paul Hainsworth, ed., The Politics of the Extreme Right: From the Margins to the Mainstream (London: Pinter, 2000), 4. 38. Cas Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 11. 39. My translation for Winock, “Si l’extrême droite n’est pas le diable, elle est bien une machine à diaboliser,” in Histoire de l’extrême droite en France, 15. 40. Gautier, Les extrêmes droites en France, 7. 41. Hainsworth, Politics of the Extreme Right, 5. 42. Gautier, Les extrêmes droites en France, 7. 43. Mammone, Godin, and Jenkins, Varieties of Right-Wing Extremism in Europe, 2. 44. For example, within the past decade, Kevin Passmore’s The Right in France, speaks of the “political culture of the Right” (29) in the interwar years and says, “The Right saw itself as an elite” (31) when comparing it to the left but uses the label “conservatives” to describe the parliamentary right, compared to the others of the right in the same book. But he narrows his terminology using “radical right” when speaking specifically of the PPF in “Class, Gender, and Populism: The Parti Populaire Français in Lyon, 1936–1940” in The Right in France: From Revolution to Le Pen, ed. Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 185–214. In The French Right between the Wars, editors Kalman and Kennedy also talk about the “divisions between left and right” when describing the left-right divide but use the term extreme right to describe the complex phenomenon in itself (4). Kay Chadwick speaks of collaborationist Alphonse de Châteaubriant as “right-wing” in “A Broad Church: French Catholics and National Socialist Germany,” in The Right in France: From Revolution to Le Pen, ed. Nicholas and Frank Tallett (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 216; and Miranda Pollard uses the term “the right” throughout “Sexing the Subject: Women and the French Right, 1938–58,” in The Right in France: From Revolution to Le Pen, ed. Nicholas and Frank Tallett (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 231–44. 45. For example, Barrès and Charles Maurras are identified by Soucy as the founding fathers of French fascism, which places them among the category of pre-fascists and most certainly among the extremists of the right, noted by Jérôme Jamin, “Two Different Realities: Notes on Populism and the Extreme Right,” in Varieties of RightWing Extremism in Europe: From Local to Transnational, ed. Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin, and Brian Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 2013), 39. Sternhell however labels both men “traditionalists” in his most recent work (Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, 368). 46. Shields, Extreme Right in France, 10. 47. Ibid., 14. 48. Jamin, “Two Different Realities,” 39. 49. Jean-Yves Camus, “The European Extreme Right and Religious Extremism,” in Varieties of Right-Wing Extremism in Europe: From Local to Transnational, ed. Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin, and Brian Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 2013), 107–20, provides such an analysis of Islam and the Nouvelle Droite. 50. John F. Sweets, “Hold That Pendulum! Redefining Fascism, Collaborationism and Resistance in France,” French Historical Studies 15, no. 4 (Autumn 1988): 731–58. 51. This common ground is even more apparent in the cultural and intellectual world, where writers sought to build networks to spread an ideology, than in the political world, where local elections often pitted right-wing parties against one another for votes and organizations and leagues jealously guarded their membership. 52. Hainsworth, Politics of the Extreme Right, 4. 53. Ibid., 6.

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54. Winock, Histoire de l’extrême droite en France, 7–8. 55. Mammone, Godin, and Jenkins, Varieties of Right-Wing Extremism in Europe, 8. 56. Passmore, Right in France, 12–13 (emphasis in the original). 57. Ibid., 10. 58. Ibid., 4. 59. Burrin, La Dérive fasciste; Diane N. Labrosse, “‘La Dérive Bergery/The Bergery drift’: Gaston Bergery and the Politics of Late Third Republic France and the Early Vichy State,” Historical Reflections 34, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 66–87. Here again the recent trend of identifying internal divisions is apparent. While Burrin’s work groups the three left-wing dissidents together, Labrosse warns that such a triptych of such diverse figures, despite their seeming similarities, is “not overly useful” (14). 60. Nicholas Kessler, Histoire politique de la Jeune Droite (1929–1942): Une révolution conservatrice à la française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 30–31. 61. For Péguy, consider Géraldi Leroy, Charles Péguy: L’inclassable (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), for the Action Française (AF) see Goyet, Charles Maurras; and for ND multiculturalism, see Joan Antón-Mellón, “The Idéés-Force of the European New Right: A New Paradigm?” in Varieties of Right-Wing Extremism in Europe: From Local to Transnational, ed. Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin, and Brian Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 2013), 53–68. 62. For example, Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Metropolitan Books: 2010); William D. Irvine “Beyond Left and Right: Rethinking Political Boundaries in 1930s France,” in The French Right between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements From Conservatism to Fascism, ed. Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 237–39. 63. Jean-Francois Sirinelli, Histoire des droites en France: Sensibilités (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 3:869. 64. Alain-Gérard Slama, “Portrait d’un homme de droite: Litterature et politique,” in Histoire des Droites en France: Sensibilités, ed. Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 3:794–96. Slama says the right and left have different “orientations of the spirit” that reflect their specific historical memories and their particular exercise of reason. They have different responses to the basic philosophical questions of man and society despite their common source in the philosophes, and even when they seek the same ends, such as rights for Algerians, they do so with different visions of its accomplishment. 65. Kalman and Kennedy, French Right between the Wars, 4. 66. Jamin, “Two Different Realities,” 48. 67. Kevin Passmore, “Class, Gender, and Populism: The Parti Populaire Français in Lyon, 1936–40,” in The Right in France: From Revolution to Le Pen, ed. Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 188. 68. Gisèle Sapiro, “La collaboration littéraire,” in Les Intellectuels et l’occupation, 1940–1944: Collaborer, partir, resister, ed. Albrecht Betz and Stefan Martens (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2004), 42–43. 69. Pierre-André Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite: Jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1994); Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la Nouvelle Droite: Le GRECE et son histoire (Paris: Presses de la foundation nationale des sciences politiques, 1988). 70. Passmore, Right in France, 17. 71. Ibid., 11. Passmore uses this phrase to describe the perspective of Mary-Louise Roberts’s Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994). 72. Pollard, “Sexing the Subject,” 235; emphasis original. 73. Kevin Passmore, “Crowd Psychology, Anti-Southern Prejudice, and Constitutional Reform in 1930s France: The Stavisky Affair and the Riots of 6 February 1934,” in The French Right Between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism, ed. Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 29.

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74. Jean-Marie Donegani and Marc Sadoun, “Les droites au miroir des gauches,” in Histoire des Droites en France: Sensibilités, ed. Jean-Francois Sirinelli (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 3:760. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 3:770. 77. Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10. 78. Griffiths, Use of Abuse, xi. 79. For example, Matthew Affron’s piece “Waldemar George: A Parisian Art Critic on Modernism and Fascism,” in Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy, ed. Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 171–204. 80. Kalman and Kennedy, French Right between the Wars, 11. 81. Jeremy Ahearne, Intellectuals, Culture and Public Policy in France: Approaches from the Left (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 1. 82. Michel Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), 612. 83. Jean-Francois Sirinelli and Pascal Ory, Les intellectuels en France: De l’affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986), 15. 84. Paul Mazgaj, “Engagement and the French Nationalist Right: The Case of the Jeune Droite,” European History Quarterly 32, no. 2 (April 2002): 207; and then again later in Imagining Fascism, 20–21. 85. Jacques Julliard and Michel Winock, eds., Dictionnaire des intellectuels français: Les personnes, les lieux, les moments (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996), 15; Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, trans. Buttigieg and Antonio Gallari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity, and Intellectuals (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Lloyd Kramer, “Habermas, Foucault, and the Legacy of Enlightenment Intellectuals,” in Intellectuals and Public Life: Between Radicalism and Reform, ed. Leon Fink, Stephen T. Leonard, and Donald M. Reid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 29–50; Sirinelli and Ory, Les Intellectuels en France; Régis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, trans. David Macey (London: NLB, 1981). 86. The first is from Jeremy Jennings, “1898–1998: From Zola’s ‘J’accuse’ to the Death of the Intellectual,” European Legacy 5, no. 6 (2000): 831; and the last is from Stephen T. Leonard’s “Introduction,” in Intellectuals and Public Life: Between Radicalism and Reform, ed. Leon Fink, Stephen T. Leonard, and Donald M. Reid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 15. Leonard is quoting Lewis Coser’s concept of the intellectual from Men of Ideas: A Sociologist’s View (New York, 1965). 87. Richard Golsan, “Drieu la Rochelle aux Etats-Unis: Entre l’esthetique et le fascisme,” in Drieu la Rochelle: Écrivain et intellectuel: Actes du colloque international, ed. Marc Dambre (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1995), 65, for example, complains that the lack of critical reflection on the work of Drieu la Rochelle is “because Drieu was an artist, intellectual, AND fascist, which poses problems for the [American] critic for whom, traditionally, there exists a discrepancy/gulf, or to say it better, an insurmountable abyss between art and culture on one hand and fascism on the other.” 88. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). 89. Gisèle Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains; 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999). 90. Fritz Ringer, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 91. Christophe Charle, Naissance des ‘intellectuels,’ 1880–1900 (Paris: Minuit, 1990), 147–48. 92. Sirinelli and Ory, Les intellectuels en France, 25. 93. Ibid., 27. 94. Manon Brunet and Pierre Lanthier, “L’intellectuel et son milieu,” in L’inscription sociale de l’intellectuel, ed. Manon Brunet and Pierre Lanthier (Paris: Presses de

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l’Universite Laval, 2000), 16. They say “the intellectual is one who, without proclamation of his title, affirms publicly his ideas while seeking to rally the greatest number of citizens to his cause, in the name of the safeguarding of national identity.” This requirement that the intellectual feel a responsibility for gaining legitimacy and social authority for an intellectual position is essential to understanding the right wing’s struggle to reverse left-wing dominance. 95. Julliard and Winock, Dictionnaire, 15. An intellectual, Winock summarizes, is not just a signer of a petition but also one who proposes to society an analysis, a direction, a morality that his previous work and education seem to qualify him to elaborate. 96. Michel Trebitsch, “Avant-propos,” in Sociabilites intellectuelles: Lieux, milieux, réseaux, ed. Michel Trebitsch and Nicole Racine (Paris: Institut d’histoire du temps présent, 1992), 18. 97. Ibid., 22. 98. Philippe Dujardin, “De l’histoire à la sociologie: Tours, détours, retours” in Sociabilites intellectuelles: Lieux, milieux, réseaux, ed. Michel Trebitsch and Nicole Racine (Paris: Institut d’histoire du temps présent, 1992), 23. 99. Ibid. 100. Julian Wright, The Regionalist Movement in France, 1890–1914: Jean Charles-Brun and French Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 9. 101. Sternhell, Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, 26.

ONE Intellectual Identity Construction Begins The Dreyfus Affair, 1898–1902

Although the term intellectuel was introduced in France before the Dreyfus Affair, it was not until 1898 that control over who could be considered an intellectual became a point of contention among the educated elite. The Dreyfus Affair initiated what was perceived to be an unprecedented polarization within the academic and literary milieu that reverberated through the twentieth century. 1 For many intellectuals, the Dreyfus Affair was not solely about defending Dreyfus. It was also about creating a certain image of France and, more particularly, of themselves as its intellectual representatives and guides. When seen from this perspective, it was no wonder that the Affair was seen, by the intellectual community at the time, as “a clash between two worldviews, two conceptions of society, two scales of moral values.” 2 What was previously seen as a single stratum of French society united by its education and professions was reconceived as two fundamentally opposed camps. The division was not approached by contemporaries as a simple political disagreement among colleagues, but what Dreyfusard intellectual Francis de Pressensé described as “an unbreachable abyss” between the most essential aspects of identity on the right and left. 3 Because the left was first to accept the title of “intellectual” and the role of public engagement, they molded these concepts according to their own values and denied them to their rightwing opposition. The effectiveness with which they seemed to have excluded the thinkers, writers, and academics of the right from this role instigated: a century-long cycle of self-identification as intellectuals; resentment by the right wing of left-wing hegemony; differentiation and 35

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revaluation of cultural ideals; and segregation of spaces that were essential to the alternative intellectual identity construction of the extreme right. The Dreyfus Affair is almost mandatory in any discussion of intellectual identity or of division between the left and the right because it is during the Dreyfus Affair that the concept of the intellectual was first fully developed and, as a result, engagement in public affairs split the intellectual world into two camps. 4 Admittedly, the term itself was used in the latter 1800s in works by Guy de Maupassant and Maurice Barrès, and some historians have also challenged the reigning consensus that the Affair marked the “birth of the intellectual” as a concept of engagement in public affairs. Christophe Charle explained that the debate about the birth of the intellectual is about the decision of individuals to unite in a political and social community of peers in order to amplify sociopolitical protests in which they claim authority due to their symbolic cultural capital. According to Charle, all of these elements were used separately in the past by men of letters and savants, such as Bernard Lazare, who engaged their work in political affairs and mobilized their colleagues through petitions several years before the Dreyfus Affair. What made the Affair notable was that it brought the elements together simultaneously and that this particular protest involved not small groups, but the entire intellectual establishment and thus became a “source of political divisions and of a clash of worldviews” for decades. 5 Venita Datta agrees that intellectuals were politicized in the decades before the Affair and even united for certain causes, and she has also called for more studies of the pre-Affair avant-garde origins of the intellectual. Yet, she acknowledges that the Affair was the first time in history that a wide range of intellectuals joined en masse in a nationwide discussion as members of a self-identified sociological group. 6 Therefore, while “the intellectual” defined as a label by a decision to engage in public affairs or even an alliance with like-minded colleagues for a cause cannot be said to have been “born” with the Affair in 1898, engagement on a national scale with intellectuals divided against intellectuals in a way that had repercussions for decades can be. In this way, the conflict over intellectual identity that divided the intellectual class and initiated a pattern of resentment and reaction on the extreme right can also be said to have been born in 1898 with the petitions for revision printed in L’Aurore. The Dreyfus Affair proper began with the discovery of the bordereau (memorandum) in 1894 that indicated an act of military espionage and led to the subsequent indictment and imprisonment of Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason. The suggestion made two years later by Marie Georges Picquart that Dreyfus was unjustly accused instead of the real traitor, Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, sparked new interest in the case, particularly among the educated elite. When Walsin-Esterhazy was promptly acquitted and Picquart was arrested based on evidence falsified

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by Major Hubert-Joseph Henry, several men of letters and journalists began to suspect that the military was attempting to cover up an injustice in order to preserve its public image. It was with these suspicions that Émile Zola wrote the “Lettre à M. Félix Faure,” which Georges Clemenceau published on January 13, 1898 in L’Aurore under the title “J’accuse!” This open letter was followed by two petitions demanding full disclosure and revision of the Dreyfus case. 7 By February 8, the number of savants, academics, and men of letters who had lent their name and title to the petitions in favor of Dreyfus reached 1,482. On January 23, Clemenceau published a congratulatory article in L’Aurore saying, “Is it not a sign, all these intellectuels come from all corners of the world grouping themselves around an idea.” 8 His intentional italicization sought to claim and brand the term for the Dreyfusard petitioners and many were quick to adopt the term, including Lucien Herr and the Dreyfusard milieu of the Revue Blanche. The title and role originally implied critique of military corruption and governmental injustice in the name of the rights of the individual against the collective, but it eventually represented the rejection of antiSemitism. The term, the concept of public engagement, and the values expressed were all met with disdain and derision by the anti-Dreyfusard elite who preferred to be recognized as “men of intelligence” who stayed above the political fray. Instead, they supported both the military establishment and, although for some among them less enthusiastically, the anti-revisionist republican government under Jules Méline and then Henri Brisson, by ignoring the Affair. As reports surfaced throughout 1898, of corruption, forgeries, a revolving door of ministries, and particularly the trial of Zola for libel, newly minted Dreyfusard intellectuals created diverse organizations and leagues that supported revision, including the new Ligue française pour la défense des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (French League for the defense of the rights of man and the citizen), commonly called the Ligue des droits de l’homme, which grew to over forty-four thousand members. 9 In August, the anti-Dreyfusard side was eventually spurred to greater engagement with news of the suicide of their hero Major Henry, after his confession of forgery that seemed to doom the anti-Dreyfusard cause. Although not yet claiming what they considered the derogatory title of intellectual, the “men of intelligence” nevertheless found themselves engaged in affairs. Led by Charles Maurras and Édouard Drumont’s La Libre Parole, they crafted the “Henry Monument,” a petition and a solicitation for funds for his widow to pay legal costs needed to sue the Dreyfusard Le Siècle for defamation of Henry, which received fourteen thousand signatures and 131,000 francs within a month, indicating the popularity of the anti-Dreyfusard cause. And yet, by 1899, after the new ministry of Charles Dupy, the administration of Dreyfusard Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, and Brisson’s request for a retrial of Dreyfus, the anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals recognized that the winds had shifted in

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favor of the Dreyfusards. If they did not engage directly, they risked losing their influence over public opinion. Barrès and Ferdinand Brunetière announced on January 1, 1899, that the anti-Dreyfusard men of intelligence would also officially engage in public affairs and call themselves “intellectuals,” but of a different sort, with the creation of an anti-Dreyfusard Ligue de la patrie (League of the Homeland). Far from simply competing with the Ligue des droits de l’homme, membership in the Ligue de la patrie swelled past forty thousand in one month. In reality, theirs hardly qualified as a minority position. However, by the end of 1899, the activism of the anti-Dreyfusard right, coupled with its association with violent anti-Semitic street groups, resulted in the repression of many anti-Dreyfusard organizations by Waldeck-Rousseau’s so-called “government of republican defense.” 10 This governmental repression, the 1899 retrial and pardon of Dreyfus, and the increasingly perceptible association of intellectuals with Dreyfusism, led the anti-Dreyfusard right to see itself as suppressed, marginalized, and dominated by a Dreyfusard bloc on the left. 11 Loyalties to the Republic shifted in response to what they claimed was the new “Dreyfus government” of Waldeck-Rousseau, with anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals for the next decade or more opposing and resenting the injustices of the republican government and the Dreyfusards equating their roles as a fight “for the Republic, and against nationalism and clericalism.” 12 By 1899, the line that divided the two opposing sides in the political and the intellectual battle was drawn. It should be noted, however, that the traditional view of the Dreyfus Affair, as delineating clear value systems for the left and right that would set the parameters for future debates, has been somewhat amended in recent scholarship. The insinuation that the anti-Dreyfusard right or Dreyfusard left were internally homogenous groups united by values including anti-Semitism or anti-clericalism has been challenged by those who note the internal contradictions and complexities of the two sides. Eric Cahm was one of the first to identify internal diversity on the antiDreyfusard side, arguing that “there is nothing whatever in common, ideologically or politically, between the extremist anti-Dreyfusards of the nationalists and anti-Semites and the more moderate governmental antiDreyfusism of the bourgeoisie which only wanted peace and quiet.” 13 Cahm also criticized his fellow historians for “tending to identify all Catholics with anti-Dreyfusardism and therefore with extremism” since his work identified minimal support for extremist positions in the Catholic milieu. 14 Others have approached the internal complexity of both the left and right during the Affair by arguing that anti-Semitism, considered a defining trait of the extreme right, could not simply be equated with antiDreyfusism. Urbain Gohier, later publisher of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was famously Dreyfusard because he was even more antimilitarist than he was anti-Semitic. 15 Leslie Derfler has noted that the socialist

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spokesmen, especially Alexandre Millerand and Jean Jaurès, were initially hesitant to support the Dreyfusard cause because of their own antiSemitic and antimilitarist attitudes toward a man they classified as “a wealthy Jewish army officer.” It was not until Jaurès could reconceptualize Dreyfus as “no longer a bourgeois or a military officer but a representative of humanity displaying the highest degree of misery and despair imaginable” and therefore what he termed “an element of revolution” that he switched to the revisionist camp. 16 Jeremy Jennings has argued that while this shift was rampant during the Affair, to the point that antiSemitism by the end of the Affair had become a standard of the right and those defending the Republic rejected anti-Semitism as a threat to it, “it would continue to exist in some corners of the left,” including among the anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist groups around disillusioned Dreyfusards turned Action française allies Georges Sorel, Georges Valois, and Édouard Berth. 17 And, Ruth Harris has found the same complexity on the anti-Dreyfusard side, noting that many anti-Dreyfusards, including Brunetière, rejected scientific racism and denounced Drumont’s La France juive when it appeared in 1886. 18 Neither camp, then, was homogenous or without internal tensions and contradictions. While historians have introduced new complexity and division within the two sides of the Affair, they have also sought to challenge the absolute division between the sides. The traditionally accepted view of the Affair argues that, between 1898 and 1899, there was a “gradual step-bystep clarification of the political scene . . . the Left after breaking with nationalism and anti-Semitism would gradually come to identify itself with Dreyfusism. And it would be more and more directly opposed to a Right which was wholly anti-Dreyfusard.” 19 David Drake has summarized the intellectual division between the right and left as “a confrontation between two views of what sort of society France should be. Should it be, as most supporters of Dreyfus demanded, one based on notions of fraternity, equality, justice, and the rights of the individual or, alternatively should it be, as the anti-Dreyfusards argued, based on tradition, authority, and the national interest.” 20 In this way, the Affair and its subsequent division of the intellectual and political world was presented as a clear dividing line with fundamentally distinct worldviews on each side. However, other historians have argued that over emphasizing the political division of the intellectual world ignores the common cultural ground between the two. Those like Drake who see a fundamental divide have tended to ignore questions of gender saying of the Dreyfus Affair and other engagement before World War II, “It should be noted that the world of intellectual commitment was essentially an overwhelmingly male one and so women are largely absent from this narrative.” 21 For those who do see common ground between the left and right, including Christopher E. Forth, shared attitudes toward gender are an essential

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fabric of the debates. “In a contest whose participants agreed on very little,” Forth writes, “anxieties about the state of French manhood represented a significant, if rarely acknowledged, common ground.” 22 Concerns about masculinity and effeminization of the nation’s men were shared by both Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, Forth claims, and the language of virility can be seen outside the confines of the anti-Dreyfusards, despite works that see it as a defining trait of the extreme right. Others have found common ground between the right and the left during the Affair in the cultural works of the period. Gilbert D. Chaitin has examined novels from both Dreyfusards, for example, Zola, and antiDreyfusard Barrès, and found a common theme to works on both sides of the divide: the need for unity. This unity, he says, is presented by both sides as “supposedly lost through the machinations of the other side and recoverable only if the correct group were permitted to direct national” affairs. 23 Datta has explored the world of the heroes and legends idolized in fin-de-siècle France and found that some of these figures like Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Roland, and Cyrano de Bergerac were able to “bridge the gap between left and right to some extent.” 24 Both Dreyfusards and antiDreyfusards appealed to the heroic traits of courage, self-sacrifice, and abnegation for the greater good, and “concurred about the role of heroes in the quest for national revival.” 25 It is not entirely accurate, therefore, to suggest, as Chaitin does, that “the Dreyfus Affair divided the country into two political groups that had virtually nothing in common, a division that lasted all the way to the Vichy government in 1940.” 26 The complexities and internal contradictions of both anti-Dreyfusard and Dreyfusard positions are clear, as are the common connections across the left-right barrier. However, it is also worthwhile to note that those who did have these discordant views in their camps were often pressured to change their views or even felt the need to migrate to the other camp. Jaurès and Millerand responded to heavy pressure to abandon their anti-Semitic views in favor of solidarity with the colleagues on the Dreyfusard left, and Charles Péguy felt himself out of place and abandoned by his Dreyfusard peers when his Catholic conversion and nationalist views began, in their view, to align him more with extreme-right themes in the early years of the 1900s. Péguy and Sorel abandoned the Dreyfusards and formed closer ties with the extreme right after this, not, according to David Ohana, because the extreme right was demonstrating common ground with extreme left ideologies, but because Péguy and Sorel both recognized the incompatibility of their deeper convictions with their left-wing positions. 27 There is also a question of how significant shared cultural assumptions were in shaping attitudes about the other side. Whether it was shared attitudes about masculinity, heroic icons, or the use of polemic, these common ideals and practices were not emphasized during periods of debate and conflict when sides opposed one another and the validation of one’s identity

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required differentiation from the “other.” Instead, it was what divided them on issues that was prioritized and emphasized. Chaitin acknowledges that, while opposing disunity was a common cause, the sources of disunity were seen to be different by the right and left. 28 Miranda Pollard also contradicts Forth by suggesting that common attitudes toward femininity and masculinity still yielded different political usage of these attitudes on the right and left. 29 And, Datta recognizes that despite the common appeal to heroes, the left understood heroism as independent thought while the right found it manifested in physical exploits and the obedience to duty. 30 Our interpretation of the left and right during the Affair cannot, therefore, support either of these extremes in the historiography. In reality there were no completely homogenous camps nor was there an “unbreachable abyss” between the sides. However, during periods of intense conflict, the two camps wanted this to be true and increasingly emphasized those elements of their intellectual experience and values that made it seem so. Harris writes, “The two blocs were never as monolithic as is usually supposed, and fracture lines within the coalitions always threatened their delicate unity,” allowing certain internal contradictions in their ideologies or disagreements among factions to reveal common ground with their opponents. 31 Despite these internal fissures, protagonists on both sides wanted to represent two different value systems and two opposing views of French identity. . . . By joining together to defend moral and judicial values, centrist Republicans, socialists and anarchists discovered common political ground and social concerns. On the other side, Catholics, monarchists and anti-parliamentarian radicals grouped together to repudiate notions of Republican citizenship in favour of “traditional” France, nationalist discipline and often, anti-Semitism. 32

The intellectual milieu was similar to a family that had common cultural, educational, and class backgrounds and shared many ties. The Dreyfus Affair broke these bonds and created an “unexpected cleavage in the French intellectual class” 33 by privileging an image, a language, and a collective identity of unity within and differentiation without, despite the reality of shared values and a history of personal connections. This effort to coalesce within the camps and to differentiate one’s own camp from the opponents is clear, not only in statements of intellectual values and concepts of intellectual identity put forward by the intellectuals of each side, but also in the segregated sociopolitical communities that emerged in response to anti-Dreyfusard perceptions that they were excluded. Consequently, despite internal contradictions within the anti-Dreyfusard camp and potential common ground with the opposing Dreyfusards, there was an effort by the anti-Dreyfusard right to deemphasize this inconvenient reality in favor of a dramatic separation. This separa-

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tion included a very different concept of the intellectual from the one outlined by the Dreyfusard left. The Dreyfusards who led the effort to define intellectual identity wanted French society to consider itself the product of its Enlightenment and Revolutionary heritage rather than its military conquests or national borders. Ignoring their own camp’s internal contradictions, diverse political affiliations, and occasional anti-Semitic or anti-republican ideas, Dreyfusard spokesmen promoted the role of the intellectual as a concept that unified them behind their shared belief in universal abstractions of Truth, Justice, the Rights of Man, and the use of reason and rationalism in order to comprehend and then apply these abstractions to society. They advocated individualism and individual rights, and a stated belief in the equality and fraternity of a universal humankind regardless of nationality or religion. These values provided an underlying thematic unity to the Dreyfusard intellectuals’ more specific arguments in favor of revision, against the military leadership, and in opposition to right-wing anti-Semitism. In so doing, they also provided the foundation for the Dreyfusard intellectual model. One of the defining values of the Dreyfusard left was the existence of universal abstractions including “Truth and Justice” that served to guide all societies. Pressensé wrote in summation of the Dreyfusard intellectuals, “for us, the tradition or rather the soul of France is the cult of Justice and Truth, it is the strong sense of solidarity that means an innocent does not suffer without all citizens sensing themselves deprived in their rights.” 34 The belief in such universals and in their importance in defining not only the soul of France, but also the role and responsibility of its intellectual guides was a theme emphasized by all the Dreyfusard engagés (politically active thinkers) despite their internal division. Gaston Paris described the Dreyfusard intellectuals as “those who demand Truth and Justice” and who “consider these two things one of our most precious heritages.” 35 Throughout “J’accuse,” Zola implored France to become again the nation of honor, truth and justice.” 36 And the appeal to create the Ligue pour la défense des droits de l’homme declared that its purpose was to “spread anew, in the entire nation, the ideals of Justice, of Truth, and of Liberty from which it appears for a moment that public opinion has been detached.” 37 Richard Griffiths has noted that “in the Dreyfus Affair, a number of words took on new meanings or lost their meaning . . . [and] became politically slanted.” 38 Such, he found, is the case with the terms Truth and Justice that were so heavily associated with the Dreyfusards that they lost all real meaning, retaining only that attached to them by the polemicists. Griffiths shows as evidence this association of truth and justice with the Dreyfusards by Paul Léautaud who was quoted as writing “pour l’ordre, la justice, et la vérité” (for order, justice, and truth) when he contributed to the Henry Monument and wrote a scathing letter demanding it be corrected to “contre la justice et la vérité” (against justice and truth). 39

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The parameters and exclusivity of the new Dreyfusard intellectual emerged, therefore, around this first point of emphasis—that true intelligence and morality lay not in the particular laws, traditions, or determinations of a particular nation, society, or time, but rather in the abstract ideals that exist outside time and place. This central tenet was proclaimed by both sides as an essential dividing line between the Dreyfusard left’s concept of the intellectual and his responsibility from the concept held on the anti-Dreyfusard extreme right. Émile Duclaux lamented, in an article for the Revue bleue, the folly of the anti-Dreyfusards who “have approached the Affair as a question of the honor of the French military” and the stability of the French nation rather than a question of truth, justice, and the rights of man. 40 Duclaux also wrote in the article that he was appalled by the anti-Dreyfusard writers, including Barrès, who suggested that there were “relative” or “national” truths that only applied to certain nations and that questions of justice and equality should be considered in the light of those nations’ circumstances. The true intellectual, according to the Dreyfusards, was responsible for translating the universal, absolute truths into accessible national policies rather than making particular national experience into the general ideal. Equally essential to the Dreyfusard concept of intellectual identity was the use of logic and reason to grasp the universal truths and translate their abstract laws into social policy. “In the domain of truth,” Alphonse Darlu wrote, “It is not possible to have an authority other than Reason.” 41 Dreyfusard rationalism was linked to the Enlightenment promise that reason and logic, when applied to the questions of society, would yield “the Truth,” and also a moral direction and social guidance that is backed by scientific and mathematical certainty. As the representatives of intelligence and the spokesmen for morality and truth, the intellectuals were obligated to suppress any national, religious, or individual passions in favor of impartial reason. Duclaux wrote that in contrast to the antiDreyfusards who betrayed logical thought in order to accept the statements of the military high command, the Dreyfusard intellectuals “are incapable of inclining their logic before the order of a general and ask instead about the state of mind of those who would dare demand it of them.” 42 This identification of intelligence with not only rationalism but also with the belief that reason could provide social guidance brought the intellectual left into conflict with an extreme right that equated intelligence with realism and social guidance with particular, national experiences. Rationalism also implied an impartiality and tolerance that the Dreyfusards linked to the Enlightenment and the revolutionary goal of intellectual secularization. The Ligue pour la défense des droits de l’homme’s manifesto stated that reliance on reason, rather than religious morality, gave the Dreyfusards “clear minds” unclouded by “clerical reaction” with which to judge the Dreyfus case. 43 It was their traits of rationalism

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and of secularism that gave them the ability, and the authority, to speak for impartial intelligence. Rejection of religious intolerance, “clerical reaction,” and anti-Semitism became visible hallmarks of the Dreyfusard concept of intellectual identity. According to Darlu, the Dreyfusard “pro ratione” concept of intelligence and truth, that proposed to return the moral direction of intellectuals’ minds toward philosophy rather than religious authorities, was in direct opposition to the anti-Dreyfusard concept of intelligence and truth, which he believed was tied to the irrational worldview of the Catholic church. 44 Brunetière and the anti-Dreyfusards, Darlu wrote, returned to the anti-Semitic orthodoxy of the Middle Ages and, in doing so, betrayed their responsibility to uphold free, individual, and unorthodox thought. The work of Harris, Cahm, Jennings, and Derfler has debunked the claims by the Dreyfusards that anti-Semitism was not found in their ranks and that the anti-Dreyfusard right was more heavily influenced by Catholicism. However, the image and perception of these designations had a power of their own independent of the evidence. As a result, clericalism, Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and the associated themes of anti-cosmopolitanism, enracinement (rootedness), and integral nationalism were presented as the domain of the extreme right alone and a mark of “anti-intellectualism.” 45 Secularism and the rejection of anti-Semitism were linked to a final Dreyfusard concept of intellectual responsibility: the defense of individual rights and the equality of man under the law. The Ligue des droits de l’homme made protection of “the rights of an accused, whatever his religious or political opinions may be,” 46 a central tenet of their program. In particular, the appeal specified that individual rights were not to be sacrificed to the “raison d’État” (will of the state). For Dreyfusard intellectuals, it was the freedom of the individual that was the foundation for a secure society, rather than, as the anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals argued, that the security of society was the foundation for free individuals. 47 Clemenceau wrote, “The guarantees offered by justice cannot be withdrawn from a single person without threatening the whole fabric of society.” 48 Instead of viewing the nation as an organic collective, as the antiDreyfusards did, the Dreyfusards saw it as a civic agreement by a collection of individuals who were each bound to the collective only to the extent that their individual rights were assured. This concept of society and its relationship to the individual led Dreyfusard intellectuals to locate their responsibility and role in the defense of disenfranchised individuals, namely Alfred Dreyfus. In contrast, the intellectual of the antiDreyfusard right found his responsibility to be the defense of the beleaguered nation as well as its military. During the Affair and for several decades that followed, the intellectual was defined by the Dreyfusard left and their new republican allies as one who, as Herr wrote, “puts the law and an ideal of Justice before themselves, their natural instincts, and the egoisms of their group” 49 and

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who, as Péguy wrote, displayed a “passion for Truth, and a passion for Justice.” 50 It was against the standards of universalism, abstract values, individualism, Rationalism, and secularism that right-wing anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals were later measured and found wanting. By claiming that it was their values that defined the essential nature of France, the Dreyfusards legitimized themselves as the only intellectual guides for the nation. All those who opposed them were, by default, both anti-French and anti-intellectual. Because they enjoyed this unrivaled monopoly over the title and role of the intellectual for a full year from 1898 to 1899, the Dreyfusard left developed a mentality of engagement that distinguished them from the anti-Dreyfusard right. While the anti-Dreyfusards had to justify a reversal of their earlier position on engagement and also struggled to recover lost ground in the battle for intellectual authority and legitimacy, the Dreyfusard left had no such past to overcome. While the anti-Dreyfusards quickly earned disapprobation and repression from the regime, the Dreyfusard left received the Third Republic’s support after 1899. The benefits of anteriority and a connection to the existing regime after 1899 meant that the Dreyfusards engaged in public debates and were confident that the public saw them as legitimate authorities. As the first to control the title and role of intellectual, they simply defended their hegemony over the concept while the anti-Dreyfusard right had to launch a campaign to seize and redefine it. Dreyfusard Jaurès devoted an entire article on la classe intellectuelle (the intellectual class) to the reasons he believed that “the intellectuals of the Right have no right to the title of intellectuals” without first justifying his own right to it. 51 The intellectuals of the left, therefore, did not display the resentment, insecurity, or compulsion to legitimize themselves as intellectuals that those on the extreme right displayed. Because the anti-Dreyfusards rejected what the Dreyfusards saw as essential components of intellectual identity, maintaining instead their nationalist relativism, anti-Semitism, realism, collectivism, and rejection of universal abstractions, the Dreyfusard intellectual community refused them recognition as intellectuals and denied them the right to speak as authorities on public affairs. Reacting to this ostracism from the identity of the intellectual, the anti-Dreyfusards attempted to redefine the conceptualization of the “true” French intellectual. Recognized men of letters, Barrès and Brunetière played a central part in the struggle to create a new concept of the intellectual for French society.

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RESENTMENT AND REACTION ON THE ANTI-DREYFUSARD RIGHT: MAURICE BARRÈS Barrès is considered by most historians to have been one of the intellectual leaders of his time who influenced both the reading public and his fellow writers and thinkers. 52 Barrès was not only, as his peers in the Latin Quarter immortalized him, the “prince of youth” and the leader of intellectual trends among those of his generation, but he was also a mentor for the next generation of thinkers, such as Henri Massis, 53 a political influence in the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the French Parliament), and an accomplished author and French Academy member. Barrès was born in 1862 to a mother with a long family heritage in Lorraine. His childhood memory of France’s defeat and the subsequent annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany became a driving force for much of his later nationalism and politically engaged writing. Barrès’s desire to return Alsace-Lorraine to France was explicitly apparent in many of his speeches for the Ligue de la patrie as well as in his writings on the military; the weakness of the parliamentary Republic; and the need to be rooted in one’s region. Barrès’s earlier works in the late 1880s, particularly the Culte du moi trilogy, championed individualism to such an extent that both his contemporaries and later historians have often had difficulty reconciling the two incarnations of the author. Léon Blum actually approached Barrès at the outbreak of the Affair with the intention of bringing him into the Dreyfusard camp. Harris says that Blum was not ignorant of his idol’s work; he simply had not recognized that Barrès had undergone, in the decade between the Culte du moi and the Affair, “a philosophical and political reorientation” that had brought him “closer to the nationalists, anti-Semites, and anti-parliamentary Right.” 54 Barrès’s friendships with men like Blum before the Affair, despite scholars who claimed that Barrès was too bourgeois to ever be a man of the left, 55 is yet another reminder of the permeability of the political borders, the common cultural ground, and old friendships that existed until they were severed by perceptions of exclusion and prioritization of political conflict. Other scholars find Barrès’ transition more troubling and seek a continuing thread of rational, scientific thought in his later novels in order to balance what they consider “brutal anti-intellectualism” in this work and specifically in his campaign against the intellectual. 56 This continuing interpretation of Barrès’s critique of the Dreyfusard intellectual as a more generic “antiintellectualism” indicates the problem in the literature, failure to recognize two distinct versions of intellectual identity and value systems. Barrès and his peers were not “anti-intellectual” but “anti-Dreyfusardintellectual,” which explained why, when they took on the label of intellectuals themselves, they had to work so desperately to redefine public perception of the term.

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It was during the years leading up to the Dreyfus Affair that Barrès’s work first began to show the interconnected themes of collectivism, antiSemitism, and enracinement that contributed to his concept of nationalism based on rooted regional identities. It is this theme of rootedness that dominated the Roman de l’énergie nationale series of novels, Déracinés, Appel au soldat, and Leurs figures, written at the height of the Dreyfus Affair between 1897 and 1902. In order to lend his notoriety to the cause against the Dreyfusards, Barrès involved himself in the anti-Dreyfusard journalistic campaigns in the mainstream Figaro and Le Journal, but also in the monarchist Gaulois and anti-Semitic Le Drapeau of Paul Déroulède’s Ligue des patriotes. 57 It was this collection of work that brought Barrès to the attention of those scholars in the 1970s and 1980s who sought a line of continuity, a proto- or pre-fascist link, between the extreme right of the interwar fascists and that of the Affair. Eugen Weber eyed Barrès with this link in mind as early as 1962 when he identified the merger of socialism and nationalism in the French intellectual tradition specifically in Barrès’s short-lived publication La Cocarde, to which fellow extreme-right intellectual Maurras was an active contributor. 58 Robert Soucy continued this trend in his 1972 examination of Barrès as a case study for French fascism due to his early combination of nationalism, manipulation of mass politics, and recognition of social concerns as well as a biological anti-Semitism. 59 While more recent studies have tended to abandon the search for pre-fascism as anachronistic, Zeev Sternhell’s Les anti-Lumières still significantly links Barrès’s work to that of Ernst Junger and Carl Schmitt, German conservative revolutionaries that Sternhell labels German fascists, if not strictly Nazis. 60 Barrès also provides modern audiences with some insight into the tensions and internal complexities of the anti-Dreyfusard camp. His rejection of Maurrassian traditionalism was a source of conflict between the two leaders expressed in his reflection that he was “always stopped from giving my adherence to the movement of Maurras and [Paul] Bourget against the Revolution because I consider that one is not able to dispense with taking things in the state one finds them when one is a traditionalist.” 61 According to Philip Ouston, Barrès also felt conflicted by the universalism and cosmopolitanism of Catholicism that he saw as counter to the purpose of religion; to link the living and the dead was necessarily a local or national experience. 62 This was a source of tension between Barrès’s work and that of Brunetière and other ardent Catholic anti-Dreyfusards who saw any critique of Catholicism to be a critique of the French nation. 63 And yet despite these internal conflicts with his fellow antiDreyfusards, which might have separated them during more cooperative times, and his common history with many Dreyfusards, which might have linked them, these contradictions were suppressed during the Affair in favor of a unifying theme for the anti-Dreyfusards: resentment of

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their exclusion from the title of intellectual and the role of engagement by a Dreyfusard left that had taken control of the concept. Barrès’s February 1 article in Le Journal, entitled “La protestation des intellectuels,” was the first article by a recognized writer to condemn the Dreyfusard intellectuals’ engagement and deride the term “intellectuel,” thus initiating the debate over intellectual responsibility and values. 64 Yet, by 1899, Barrès had engaged his name and his pen in a struggle to formulate a right-wing vision of the intellectual. In these engaged works, he demanded recognition as intellectuals for the anti-Dreyfusard right and led the crusade against the left-wing hegemony over the intellectual identity he so resented. From the first acceptance of the title “intellectual” by Clemenceau in January 1898 until the public announcement of the anti-Dreyfusard Ligue de la patrie in January 1899, the hegemony of the intellectual left over the concept and role of the engagé was not only perceptible, it was unchallenged. It was not until October of 1898 that the first indications of resentment and a desire to end the left-wing monopoly on the role appeared. And it was not until January 1899 that this desire to legitimize a right-wing intellectual model became a public battle to control intellectual identity. During 1898, Barrès and other writers and savants who opposed revision studiously avoided both the term and the role of the intellectual and focused their efforts on delegitimizing the concept of engagement rather than redefining it for their own purpose. Barrès’s February 1, 1898, article initiated the anti-Dreyfusards’ scathing condemnation of the “intellectuels” who, he said, attempted to apply their general intelligence to the diverse problems surrounding the Dreyfus Affair without the necessary information about the case to even form an opinion. 65 Barrès wrote that Clemenceau had solicited the signatures of men of intelligence and published their names in L’Aurore saying, “This is the protest of the intellectuals.” By calling them intellectuals, Barrès claimed that Clemenceau was advertising the petition as a “catalog of the elite—who would not want to be in it!” and saying to undecided writers, “give me your name and I will give you the title of intellectuel.” 66 By trivializing the motivations of these signers, Barrès hoped to delegitimize their claims to moral and intellectual superiority. The intellectual, Barrès continued, “defines himself as a cultivated individual, though one without mandate, who claims to apply his intelligence to efficiently solve the diverse circumstances of the Dreyfus Affair.” But, he wrote, there is nothing in the Affair that has been clarified, no elements of real knowledge to which to attach one’s intelligence or on which to base an opinion of guilt or innocence. All positions, whether for or against Dreyfus, were based not on truth, justice, reason or science, but on hypothesis. “How do you intend,” Barrès taunted the “intellectuels,” “you cultivated men, you men of method, to undertake to solve the problem when you do not have all the data?” He closed the article with his own newly developed definition of the intellec-

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tual: “an individual who persuades himself that society ought to be founded on logic and who does not recognize that it rests in fact on anterior necessities and is able to be foreign to individual reason.” 67 The article was specifically intended to weaken the Dreyfusard intellectuals’ cause by scorning their claim to be recovering truth and justice based on their superior reasoning skills. The truth of the case, Barrès argued, could not be determined by science or reason and therefore the writers and savants of the petitions held no special authority or legitimacy. Rather than claiming to be “intellectuels” who made false claims to a superior knowledge, Barrès wrote of himself and the anti-Dreyfusards who had not signed the petitions, “It pleases us to be intelligent rather than intellectuals,” and to keep to their profession rather than attempting to meddle in judicial affairs where they had no special knowledge. He did not intend, Barrès continued, “that we muzzle, as we have been accused of wanting to do, the men of the laboratory and the library. But we do not approve of them saying everything, in every manner, in all circumstances, and to all sorts of people. They do not act in the abstract.” In contrast to this irresponsible behavior of speaking in abstractions without considering the dangers for concrete society, Barrès presented the anti-Dreyfusard thinker, whose realism, recognition of the needs of society, and refusal to interfere in judicial affairs beyond his skill “forbid him from being an ‘intellectuel.’” 68 By March 1898, Brunetière, René Doumic, and other anti-Dreyfusard men of letters joined Barrès by writing essays that queried what it meant to be an intellectual and determined that they were men who claimed to be superior, based on their intelligence, training, and erudition; who believed logic and rationality could comprehend the universal values of “Truth and Justice”; and that these abstractions could be applied to society. Rather than participate in this abuse of their talents, these self-identified “men of intelligence” refrained from engagement. This meant leaving the fate of Dreyfus to the military courts to preserve the stability of the military; protecting the interest of the collective nation; and acknowledging the realistic limitations on grasping universal truths. In truth, although they purported to be au-dessus de la mêlée (above the fray) because they were more responsible in recognizing the limits of intelligence, the anti-Dreyfusards’ refusal to engage effectively maintained their desired status quo. However, by October 1898, the influence of the Dreyfusard intellectual became a source of resentment on the right and the political cause of revision was weakened by the revelation of Henry’s forgeries; a request by Brisson for revision of the trial; and the introduction of what became a series of Dreyfusard-left-friendly governments. Despite the anti-Dreyfusards’ best efforts to discredit the “intellectuals,” the Dreyfusard left spokesmen for the universal were effectively influencing public opinion and political policy by proclaiming their responsibility to be the social and moral guidance of the nation. To gain equal social authority, the

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thinkers of the anti-Dreyfusard right realized that they needed to claim for themselves both the title of intellectual and the responsibility to engage while redefining these according to their idea of the role of “men of intelligence.” This crusade began with the creation of the Ligue de la patrie française (League of the French Nation) on January 1, 1899. 69 Three antiDreyfusard agrégés, Louis Dausset, Gabriel Syveton, and Henri Vaugeois developed a petition that was hostile to the Dreyfusards which called for the creation of a “society of intellectuals” to maintain the traditions of France against the agitations created by the Affair. From this initial petition was born the committee and petition of the Ligue de la patrie française, which included Barrès at its head. In creating this counterplatform to the Dreyfusards’ Ligue pour la défense des droits de l’homme, the intellectuals who signed its membership rosters were blatantly claiming the right to the previously abhorrent title of “intellectual” and to the role of a publicly engaged thinker. In a statement published in Le Journal on January 2, 1899, Barrès provided what is perhaps the clearest expression of these efforts to claim the authority and title of the intellectual for the anti-Dreyfusard right. The aim of the Ligue, he said, was to “protest against the pretension expressed by the defenders of Dreyfus that all the intellectuals are in their ranks.” 70 “The important thing,” Barrès wrote of the Ligue, “is that one is no longer able to say that intelligence, and the intellectuals—to use the questionable French term—are only on one side. . . . There is no longer anyone who is able to believe that all the intellectuals are partisans of Dreyfus or Picquart.” 71 It was, Barrès wrote, their distress at seeing the Dreyfusard “mandarins” applaud the destruction of the patrie (country/nation/patrimony) that had roused them to engage as a collective. 72 With the creation of an association, the intellectual extreme right would “no longer be a troop of sheep who bow to a squad of shepherds” on the left. 73 They became an equally legitimate, and equally authoritative, intellectual alternative. Barrès’s position was reiterated in the first conference of the Ligue de la patrie française, where Jules Lemaître said, “WE, that is all of France minus a few hundred thousand individuals—we were punished . . . we remained silent . . . but one day we wanted to reassure the brave men and comfort the army by showing that all the intellectuals were not on one side.” 74 Yet, as soon as Barrès began the campaign to claim the title of intellectual, the Dreyfusard papers had begun their own campaign to prevent it. The title, role, and influence of the intellectual were valuable tools for the Dreyfusards that they did not intend to relinquish to Barrès and the antiDreyfusard right. The thinker of the right who sought to claim this status had to be excluded, marginalized, and delegitimized. The day after the publication of the Ligue de la patrie manifesto in Le Journal, Pressensé wrote his response, “La nouvelle ligue,” in L’Aurore. “The Academicians [of the right] are indignant to hear it said that the intellectuals are on the

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side of Justice and Truth,” he wrote. “They have wanted to re-establish the equilibrium.” 75 But, he sneered, “It would be a naive illusion to persuade oneself that because one has been part of the Academy, one has the right to the title of intellectual.” He continued by declaring to the antiDreyfusard thinkers, “It is well evident that between you and us there is an unbreachable abyss” that necessarily prevented the two groups from sharing the same title. On one side the “so-called intellectuals” of the Ligue, and on the other, the real intellectuals, “those among us who have opened our eyes to the light and will no longer close them.” Here he claims, is the division between the “Two Frances: one that tries an offensive return under the name of nationalism, in the interest of clericalism, and in the hope of a Caesar, and one that orients itself definitively toward the future and that proclaims itself proudly of the Revolution.” The new Ligue, Pressensé wrote, taking care to emphasize his point with the use of italics, “is on the side of the first. The intellectuals who have taken in hand the cause of the revision are and remain on the side of the second.” 76 Other leaders of the intellectual Dreyfusards quickly rallied to exclude the right from the public’s image of the intellectual and to solidify the Dreyfusard hegemony over the concept. Clemenceau wrote in L’Aurore that though he was at first overjoyed by the idea of an association for the patrie, reading the list of the members of the Ligue quickly revealed that it was not what he envisioned. Clemenceau wrote of the Ligue founders, “When one poses oneself as ‘intellectuals against intellectuals,’ it is necessary at least to give oneself the appearance of Reason.” This was why, he claimed, he had no fear that this new Ligue of “pretended intellectuals” would impact the Dreyfusard vision of a patrie of justice and truth. In fact, he wrote that he was overjoyed to hear that they would be attempting to counter the Dreyfusard intellectuals in debates and lectures. “As soon as you cease to howl, as soon as you return to the articulated language that distinguishes men from beast, as soon as you foolishly accept the meeting of thoughts,” Clemenceau triumphantly claimed, “you are able to say nothing that does not turn to our advantage.” 77 Although the anti-Dreyfusards might be able to supply a list of illustrious Academicians, Pressensé and Clemenceau were suggesting, they had no real intellectual merit because their values were those of irrational authority rather than enlightened rationalism. In response, resentment of this new, intentional exclusion from the intellectual field became one of the main themes in the work of the antiDreyfusard intellectuals. “I was enthusiastic,” one Ligue de la patrie member wrote, “by the response that had opposed the new league to the exorbitant pretensions of the pseudo-intellectuals who imposed on their fellow citizens their convictions of the innocence of Dreyfus and their hatred of the military institution.” 78 Maurras praised the progress of the Ligue in a letter to Barrès that concluded, “Do not forget that the AntiDreyfusard people have been governed for three years by more or less

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avowed Dreyfusards.” 79 And, in one of the initial speeches of the Ligue, Lemaître summarized this theme by saying, “We are oppressed by a minority and by an evil-doing minority.” 80 These republican thinkers, he continued, “who make us feel the yoke,” claim to be “free-thinkers.” “What error! Hatred of men because they themselves . . . explain differently than we do the mystery of the universe, this is miserable. But this is the case with these feeble philosophers. They have the mania of evoking the State . . . against those who do not think as they do.” He concluded of the Dreyfusard hegemons, “they are marvelously organized for domination.” 81 These were the first forays into the trope of left-wing domination and monopolization of cultural power that became ever more essential to the language and self-conceptualization of the right-wing intellectual in the decades to come. Much of this language, and its inherent ploy for sympathy, depended on the public’s willingness to ignore political and cultural realities in favor of the anti-Dreyfusard portrayal of themselves as oppressed minorities. In reality, the anti-Dreyfusards were able to boast larger numbers of supporters and add even more illustrious names and titles to their petitions, and therefore could not actually call themselves the minority. Instead, they eagerly highlighted a perceived Dreyfusard connection to the new republican leadership in order to present themselves as the sympathetic, disadvantaged, and disempowered party. In fact, they also held more numerous and more widely circulated journals. But they bewailed their treatment by the Dreyfusard presses, which met anti-Dreyfusard claims to the role of the intellectual either with rebuttal or with silence. When Barrès gave a lecture on Alsace-Lorraine for the Ligue, a letter in L’Écho said, “Unhappily, it is only the minority who had knowledge of it [lecture]. . . . They have systematically annihilated it by their silence.” 82 Therefore, while the claims of dispossession and ostracism from the places of power in the intellectual world cannot be taken at face value, there were enough elements of intentional exclusion by the Dreyfusard left to perpetuate a perception of intellectual oppression. In particular, resentment was voiced against the large number of Dreyfusards who were believed to be dominating the Sorbonne and university system. Here it was claimed that Lucien Herr, Émile Durkheim, Charles Seignobos, and other prominent Dreyfusard professors were molding young minds to believe that the only true intellectuals were those who supported the Dreyfusard values. Barrès expressed his frustration with this Dreyfusard influence in an attack on the values taught by the republican institutions. “The philosophy that the State teaches is primarily responsible if the people believe the intellectual despises the national unconscious and makes intelligence function in the pure abstract outside the field of realities. . . . This is what we have reproached the University for; this is what creates, as its product, the ‘intellectuel,’ the enemy of society.” If they had any doubt that this philosophy was a

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powerful force of aberration in the university, Barrès continued, they need only consider the attitude shown by the majority of universitaires during the Dreyfus Affair, “an attitude favorable to Dreyfusism.” 83 These accusations of influence over the university students had much more solid foundations in reality than other claims. Louis Bodin found that Herr’s recruitment in the École normale supérieure (ENS) was a substantial contribution to the Dreyfusards and said that “it has been recognized for a long time that the Dreyfus Affair was the universitaires against the Academy.” 84 Charle’s study found that in the ranks of the Dreyfusards, “academics, and especially Parisian professors, played a crucial if not exclusive role.” Yet he tempered this, and critiqued the reality of the antiDreyfusard perception of a Dreyfusard university system, by acknowledging that the majority of academics (55 percent) were actually abstentionists in the debate, who refused to officially engage on either side. 85 Yet, once again the kernel of truth provided fertile ground for perceptions, language of repression, and hegemony to take hold. The growing fear among the anti-Dreyfusards, which will be revisited in the next chapter on the Nouvelle Sorbonne debate, was that the hegemony of Dreyfusism in the university would not only taint the concept of intellectual values in the present but would also be engrained in successive generations as well. “If Dreyfus and his friends write the history and scholarly texts,” Barrès warned, “you patriots who read me, we will be scoundrels before the centuries.” 86 It was vital, Barrès believed, that the anti-Dreyfusards present a new intellectual model and a new vision of France before such an alternative became inconceivable to future generations. RESENTMENT AND REACTION ON THE ANTI-DREYFUSARD RIGHT: FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE Brunetière brought to the reconceptualization of the intellectual his own resentment of the dominant intellectual left. Although Brunetière is less recognized among scholars today, his influence on the intellectual milieu during the Affair was considerable. Sorel wrote of him, “After the death of Renan and Taine, he was the uncontested guide of contemporary thought.” 87 During the early years of his literary and journalistic career, Brunetière was seen as a republican, a positivist, an anti-clericist, and a modernist, but by the 1890s, he, like many of his peers, had evolved to become a “reactionary, traditionalist, religious conservative” and was identified by both himself and his contemporaries as a man of the right. 88 It was in the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes (RDM) that Brunetière revealed this transformation in intellectual values and began to make a name for himself in the world of letters. From the intellectual stronghold of the RDM, Brunetière began launching his attacks on the Naturalist

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school, especially against its leading author, Zola. Brunetière built a strong reputation there as a literary critic of exceptional talent and taste, and soon began to climb the ranks in the journal until, in 1893, he took over its direction. In recognition of his extraordinary literary accomplishments, in 1886 he was granted a professorship in French language and literature at the ENS, despite his lack of a university degree. He retained his position at the ENS and added a position as lecturer at the Sorbonne until his ostracism from the university system in 1905, which he perceived as retaliation for his anti-Dreyfusard engagement. Brunetière was an original Ligue de la patrie committee member and one of its touted Academicians. Yet, his attitudes and political stance provide another window for modern scholars into the internal complexity and internecine quarrels of the anti-Dreyfusard camp, even within the nucleus of the movement aspiring to redefine intellectual identity. Brunetière challenged the republican government, particularly after 1899, but his attack was more reformist than many of his peers, especially the monarchists of the fledgling Action française, including Maurras and Léon Daudet, who strongly criticized his support for parliamentary democracy and the Republic. Brunetière’s reformist stance included an appreciation for the French Revolution, according to historian Marie Laurence Netter, that was certainly at odds with his more anti-republican, anti-Dreyfusard peers. Brunetière denounced the individualism that resulted from 1789, but not the revolutionary event or its democratic ideals. In fact, Netter argues, Brunetière defended the military leadership during the Affair by presenting it as the embodiment and defender of democracy, saying, “The army is itself an ideal society where all the classes mix, where the uniform creates equality, where merit permits advancement. . . . To impinge its honor is to attack democracy.” 89 Unlike many of his peers, Brunetière has also been recognized by historians, including Winock and Netter, for his relative lack of antiSemitism. He gave a scathing review to Drumont’s anti-Semitic La France juive and criticized the excessive anti-Semitism of the Affair. However, other historians such as Antoine Compagnon and Jennings have suggested that Brunetière was indeed anti-Semitic, and though his version was more cultural than biological, it was more insidious in its apparent decency and latency. 90 In his rejection of the more blatant racism and anti-Semitism shown by his companions, Compagnon suggests that Brunetière belonged to a clear minority within the anti-Dreyfusard camp, but that he represented this small minority faction that “put the military question before the Jewish question.” 91 There was also a difference between his patriotism and Barrèssian nationalism, Compagnon says, evidenced when Brunetière expressed relief that the case was reopened in a judicial forum, while Barrès and the majority of the anti-Dreyfusards were dismayed. 92 Brunetière, therefore, offers a different insight into the right-wing intellectual model that illuminates some of the diverse strands

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of thought within the anti-Dreyfusard camp. His values and positions showed some deviations from that of Barrès and others; still, he remained firmly right-wing, adamantly opposed to the idea of the intellectual on the Dreyfusard left, and vehemently resentful of what he perceived to be their hegemony over the concept. In spite of his quarrels with his fellow anti-Dreyfusards, therefore, he united with them in the demand for recognition of right-wing intellectual identity. Brunetière was one of the first intellectuals after Barrès to publicly oppose “J’accuse” and to deliberately call into question the responsibility of the intellectual through his landmark work, Après le procès (After the trial), first published as a series of articles in RDM on March 15, 1898, and later published in book form. The piece sparked a whole series of Dreyfusard responses from figures like Duclaux, Darlu, Yves Guyot, and Henri Bérenger. Like Barrès, before January 1899, Brunetière refused the “intellectuals” any special ability to intervene in public debates. “The ‘intellectuals,’” he wrote in Après le procès, “seem to me to have interfered with no discretion in a question that does not involve them at all.” 93 This strategy of delegitimization was continued throughout the piece as Brunetière both sneered at the intellectuals’ claim to have special insight into judicial truth and rejected their monopoly over this moral superiority. “What is an intellectual?” he asked. “And from which conception of life does he draw the superiority that he claims over all those whom he does not honor with this name?” 94 He continued that the self-proclaimed intellectuals, because of their authority in their specific fields, seemed to assume that “this superiority communicated itself to all that which they thought and their authentic reputation to all that which they said.” 95 But, Brunetière continued, “this is in fact a great mistake by them and a great danger for us since they are taken at their word and one is inclined to believe them on things of which they are incompetent. They behave,” he concluded, “like Nietzsche’s ‘enemy of the laws’” who place their ideas above the laws of social institutions and beyond the understanding of those they did not include under the title ‘intellectuel.’ “We have,” he said with resentment, “we other mediocre ones, only to admire and thank them for it.” 96 Netter has identified the internal contradiction in this stance, which serves as a reminder not to take Brunetière’s complaints at face value. “One is able to observe that Brunetière carries himself here, in publishing this pamphlet (Après) as one of the intellectuals whom he fustigates, that is to say that he meddles in public life, which is neither his métier nor his vocation, according to his own reasoning.” 97 And Compagnon placed the contradiction even earlier, suggesting that in his 1894 debates with Zola over the failure of science to produce a new society, he had become “a public man, an ‘intellectual,’ before the word, or at least before the declaration was published in the press.” 98

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The effort by Brunetière to discredit those who claimed a right as intellectuals to guide public affairs, although perhaps indicating a lack of self-awareness, sparked weeks of polemic between Brunetière and the Dreyfusard organ Le Siècle in August 1898. The paper’s director, Yves Guyot, attacked Brunetière in a front-page article on August 27. 99 His piece was followed by a series of articles, later complied by Guyot as the collection Les raisons de Basile, claiming that Brunetière had a “moral defect,” that he was “working for the great power of darkness,” and that the section in Après le procès on intellectuals was “truly dishonoring for a man of thought.” 100 One author, Michel Colline, compared the Dreyfusard crusade to the work of Voltaire in the Calas case. Brunetière responded that Voltaire’s engagement was an opportunistic attempt to crush the Church, not an effort to correct an injustice. This critique of Voltaire’s motives was a clear insinuation that Zola was attempting to discredit and overturn the military authority rather than to protect the rights of Dreyfus. 101 In the Chronicle section of RDM, Brunetière expanded on this theme, saying Zola was “looking for something to do,” 102 and the affair was only a pretext for the Dreyfusards, who had a predetermined hatred of the military and Catholicism. “Without Dreyfus,” he wrote, “you would have found some other ‘victim’ to defend since it was only done for ‘political reasons.’” “These reasons,” he continued, were “to reverse the ministry, to satisfy old rancors, to recapture a morsel of power” to receive praise and compensation for work. He wrote that they had engaged in the Affair because they were disgruntled that “they were not yet the masters or idols of public opinion . . . because one disputed their sentiments and did not tremble when they spoke.” 103 It was for personal and professional gain, according to Brunetière, that a writer or thinker engaged as a Dreyfusard, not for Truth or Justice, of which they knew no more in the case than he did. The accusations made by Le Siècle and its ability to monopolize the discussion eventually caused Brunetière to shift his resentment from the concept of engagement itself to the left’s control over it. Hostility, rather than mockery, began to permeate the tone of his articles, and the dominance, control, and censorship by the Dreyfusard left became his central theme. In his last letter to Le Siècle, he wrote, We differ in opinion on an essential point and instead of responding to my reasons with your reasons . . . you try to persuade the readers of Siècle that if I do not share your opinion it is because I have secret motives. One is not able to be of good faith if one does not think as you do! One is not able then to desire truth or justice but only politics! By what right do you say this? What is this method of erecting yourself, you and yours, as the sole representatives of Truth, Justice, Probity, you who have always lived by politics? 104

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In particular, Brunetière fumed against the Dreyfusard attempt to claim that all those who rejected the French Revolution and the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man were anti-republican and antiintellectual and therefore could not represent France or intelligence. It was in Le Siècle, well before 1899 when the anti-Dreyfusards officially claimed the title and role of the intellectual, that Brunetière unleashed his most virulent statement of resentment against the Dreyfusard hegemony over public perception of truth and guidance of public affairs. “By what right do you confound the ‘religion of the Revolution’ with France?” he wrote, “Ah yes, I know it well! You alone are France and you alone represent it! Whoever is not with Le Siècle or the Republic of which you compose the ministry is not French, would not know how to be French . . . for you treat him like an ‘émigré à l’interieur’ [a foreigner within their own land]. . . . Suffer, monsieur, that we feel and think in a different way! We are French like you and we have been so for a long time.” 105 Brunetière continued with a claim to equal intellectual legitimacy, saying, “We do not imagine it [1789] to hold the monopoly on Truth and Justice but we do not prevent you from believing it. And on the Revolution, as on those who make it the means of their declarations, we have the right, we maintain it, to think that which we want, we have the right to say it, and we will use it. And you, you have the right to contradict us, but not to denature us, to travesty or demean our intentions.” 106 Brunetière was intent on distinguishing his own thought and values from those of the intellectual Dreyfusards. “I maintain our right to think otherwise than you,” he wrote to Le Siècle, “on the Revolution, on science, on justice, on free thought, and on the Church.” 107 Brunetière was furious that his claim to be able to speak as a Frenchman and as a man of letters before the public was being questioned and denied to him because he did not express the same intellectual and social values as the Dreyfusards. He was even more outraged that by claiming the title and role of intellectuals, the Dreyfusards now dominated the role of public guide for society. “That which the free thinkers do not pardon the Church for having done in the past,” he wrote in the Chronicle of RDM, “is precisely what they have done. They have made all government action serve the propaganda of a philosophical doctrine. Whoever does not think as they do is excommunicated; they chase him from the Republic, they denounce him as loathsome to all ‘republicans.’” 108 The Dreyfusards, by proclaiming themselves the only intellectuals, had convinced the public that they alone spoke for French intelligence and that all ideas and opinions contrary to theirs were backward, opportunistic, or unjust. Brunetière resented this. It had become clear to him that if he wanted to enjoy the right to think differently, to hold different intellectual and social values despite the Dreyfusard hegemony, he had to also claim the right to engage, to speak for France, and to be an intellectual.

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Brunetière may have recognized this need for the status, responsibility, and authority inherent in the title of intellectual earlier than any other anti-Dreyfusard. In a March 15, 1898, letter to Vogue, he had protested the hegemony of the Dreyfusard intellectuals by introducing himself and the anti-Dreyfusard elite as “we other intellectuals.” It was an explicit attempt to show that the title, and therefore the prestige and responsibilities associated with it, “had not yet taken on exclusive meaning” by being irrevocably fused to Dreyfusard values. 109 Nevertheless, Brunetière did not push his claim to the title more forcefully at the time and the Dreyfusard intellectual press quickly moved to discredit Brunetière and prevent him from effectively claiming the role of intellectual as long as he opposed their views. L’Aurore printed an article that claimed sections of the RDM were plagiarized and questioned Brunetière’s qualification for its leadership by referring to him maliciously as “this eminent anti-intellectual.” 110 It was not until the formation of the Ligue de la patrie in 1899 that Brunetière again laid claim to the title and role of the intellectual. In an interview about the formation of the Ligue, Brunetière explained, “Several of my friends and I have been wearied and irritated by hearing it said that all the men of study and thought, the intellectuals, were on the same side. This was not true and we prove it. It was necessary to show that intelligence, which has its part, a very large part in the direction of the affairs of this nation, has not taken part in the abominable campaign conducted against the army.” 111 Claiming the identity of an intellectual and the responsibility to engage did not, however, bring an end to the perceived persecution by the Dreyfusard left. Brunetière continued to rage against his ostracism by the Dreyfusard elite, presenting himself and his colleagues as the ostracized, oppressed minority, if not in general numbers or in the French Academy, then at least in the university system. In this, his concerns, as noted for Barrès, were more real than simply imagined because the Dreyfusards had great influence in the university and ENS. In particular, he warned that the hegemonic Dreyfusards would attempt to maintain their monopoly over public understanding by preventing the anti-Dreyfusards from perpetuating their value system, effectively destroying the future generation of the right. “Today we hear,” he explained in 1900, “that we are not prevented the liberty of thinking as we please, but that this right to have ideas contrary to theirs can only be exercised behind closed doors.” Teaching, as the most effective way to propagate intellectual values, was expressly forbidden to the anti-Dreyfusards. In truth, he amended wryly, they were not prevented from teaching, “we are only forbidden to have students.” 112 Had Brunetière not already been convinced that the Dreyfusards exercised hegemony over the role of the intellectual, his own exclusion from the teaching field convinced him of this truth. After he received an invitation to present himself for the chair of French language and literature at

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the College de France and then became the nominee of the French Academy, a campaign was launched against him in the Dreyfusard press. L’Aurore claimed that those who wanted to block Brunetière from this post would form an alliance. The campaign proved effective and Brunetière was forced to withdraw his candidacy. 113 During the reorganization of the Sorbonne, Brunetière was also the only professor not incorporated into the Sorbonne from the ENS. There were remarkable instances of intellectuals crossing over the “abyss” to protest this blatant political repression including the Dreyfusard Alphonse Aulard who demanded to know why Brunetière’s name was not put forward for the Sorbonne position in French literature and turned in a blank vote in protest. His article in L’Aurore was indicative both of the continuing resentment between the two camps, even as late as 1904, and that there was still a willingness of some to cross these lines in the name of shared professional respect. “It is certain that M. Brunetière is one of the most ardent adversaries of the lay Republic,” Aulard wrote, “One is able to say that in politics, M. Brunetière supported nearly all that which displeases us and fought nearly all that which we love.” But, he continued, “M. Brunetière has the most talent . . . disagreeable talent if you want, talent in the service of deplorable ideas . . . which displeases us, but talent all the same.” 114 Despite the Dreyfusards’ support across party lines for his professional merit, Brunetière was not admitted for candidacy due to continued hostility by many toward the anti-Dreyfusard intellectual. This gave substantial weight to claims of Dreyfusard hegemony and cultural domination of the university system. Even the protégés of Brunetière were prevented from holding professorships. When Doumic applied at the ENS, he was told, “Since it is a chair at the ENS, yes, your political opinions will put you aside. Wrong or right you have been classified and you are not classified as a republican. . . . Never would the current ministers welcome a candidate to the École presented by Brunetière.” 115 Doumic admitted that as a prominent anti-Dreyfusard he had foreseen this hegemony over the university, but continued, “I do not see without regret all the doors to higher education close before me.” 116 This emerging trope of the oppressed, the pariah, and the minority ostracized from positions of cultural power because of their ideas became vital to the language and self-conceptualization of the anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals of the fin de siècle and to future generations of right-wing intellectuals. Like Barrès, Brunetière worked not only to reveal the inequity of the intellectual field and the hegemony over the concept of intellectual guide, he also engaged his pen to revalue and reappropriate those ideals and positions discredited by the left, that were central to the new intellectual alternative on the right. “In conforming to the Jacobin logic,” he wrote, “our adversaries will accuse us of backward political thinking and reactionary intentions. In effect we are reactionaries against the radicals. We

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try to react against the ideas that we believe are dangerous.” 117 But, he continued, since the left did not cease to use this label, the extreme right needed to reappropriate and revalue the concept of “reaction” for the public and wear the label with pride rather than struggle to escape its stigma. In the crisis that France found itself in, in the modern era, he suggested, reaction ought to be considered synonymous with progress and liberty and therefore the more ideal of the two alternatives for the public. 118 While certain worldviews such as reactionary politics could be repurposed for the public in this way, Brunetière also struggled alongside his anti-Dreyfusard colleagues to differentiate the values of the extreme right from those of the left in order to better distinguish the antiDreyfusard concept of true intellectual identity. DIFFERENTIATION AND REAPPROPRIATION OF CULTURAL VALUES To best reconstruct intellectual identity along anti-Dreyfusard parameters, the men of the extreme right needed to first differentiate and devalue the existing Dreyfusard attitudes and visions from those they would present. They also intended to reappropriate the term “intellectual” for the anti-Dreyfusard right by identifying those of the Dreyfusard left as a perverted incarnation of the role. Barrès wrote of the Ligue de la patrie that it would provide “national resistance, on the interior, against the anarchic forces” and particularly against the “intellectuels pervertis.” 119 From January 1899 on, Barrès and the intellectual extreme right worked to delegitimize not the concept of the intellectual or engagement per se, but only the version that was constructed by the left. Those in support of Dreyfus were labeled pseudo-intellectuals, perverted intellectuals, anarchic intellectuals, demi-intellectuals, mandarins, or simply referred to as intellectuals in quotes or italics to suggest doubt of legitimacy. There was a corresponding attempt to legitimize the alternative right-wing intellectual concept. Even before the official announcement of the Ligue de la patrie, Barrès wrote in Mes cahiers of his own concept of himself and of his anti-Dreyfusard peers as intellectuals “I say to the good intellectuals: you decorate French thought; you are able to serve it.” Were there any doubt of the identity of the “good intellectuals,” Barrès emphasized, “the good intellectuals have received the young universitaires who came to propose to them a nationalist league.” 120 The good intellectuals, as opposed to the perverted, demi, false intellectuals were those of the Ligue de la patrie. 121 Although these strategies were useful in attacking the Dreyfusards, the most effective means of legitimizing their distinctive alternative was the public differentiation of right-wing intellectual values. Many of the anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals had previously advocated values that were,

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by 1898, associated with the left’s support of Dreyfus. Even Barrès had celebrated individualism in his Culte du moi novels a short decade before. However, in the heated political debates of the Affair, sides were chosen and positions radicalized. Intellectuals on both sides of the political divide emphasized differences in worldview and sociocultural values, rather than any previous similarities, in order to more clearly define their competing concepts of true intellectual values and positions for the public. “There are now among us,” Barrès wrote of the Dreyfusards, “individuals born French who detest or think they detest all that which we believe. With them it seems that we no longer have in common words or sentiments. Here are the enemies, or rather the dangerous misleaders.” 122 This sense of separation from the enemy “other,” of an unbreachable abyss in worldviews and of a total lack of shared sentiments and values, was essential to the formation of separate intellectual identities. Highlighting these differences and the implications for right-wing intellectual identity became a major theme in the work of Barrès, Brunetière, and their colleagues. To the value of universalism they opposed national relativism, to abstractions and rationalism they opposed realism, and to individualism, they opposed collectivism. While not every intellectual of the anti-Dreyfusard camp supported all of these values or did so to the same degree, and while other values could be sources of internal conflict for the camp, these three values were the most often shared and the most commonly referenced in the struggle to differentiate the left and right’s intellectual identity during the Affair. For the Dreyfusard left, there was a set of universal truths, including the absolute values of Truth, Justice, and the Rights of Man, that were recognized in all places and times. In particular, these were the three that were invoked to demand the release of Dreyfus. Barrès and Brunetière rejected the very foundation of universalism in favor of national relativism. There were no absolute truths, only truths relative to circumstances and to nations. Man was therefore not a universal being but a national one whose consciousness and identity were, at their core, “rooted” in the nation. This different worldview had important ramifications for the distinctive right-wing concept of the intellectual’s role and responsibility. Rather than professing universals, true intellectuals spoke of the French truth, of the identity of the rooted Frenchman, and considered all questions of truth and justice in relation to the French nation. “It is necessary,” Barrès wrote in summation of intellectual responsibility, “to judge things in the relative.” 123 As early as October 1898, Barrès confided in Mes cahiers his idea of national relativism and their incompatibility with the Dreyfusard intellectual ideal. “One more time I examine an aspect of my thought: What is Justice? There are just relationships in a given time between given objects. This is the same story as that of the Rights of Man. Which man? Where does he live? When did he live? This error is so strongly accredit-

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ed in France because we have no national consciousness. This is the incalculable wrong that Paris does to France.” 124 Barrès blamed Paris because he blamed the Dreyfusard, universalist universitaires, centered in Paris, for indoctrinating these values in the youth. He emphasized this concern, later writing, “there are miserable ones who want to teach the children the absolute Truth. Naturally these professors are not able to discern it and they serve instead sentimental drivel. It is necessary to teach the French truth, that is to say what is the most useful to the nation.” 125 Only in teaching the truth as it related to the circumstances of both time and place did intellectuals fulfill their responsibility to educate the nation. “In the order of facts, that which we call Justice and Right do not exist,” Barrès wrote. “It is this,” he continued, “that they will never understand, these theoreticians of the university drunk with an unhealthy Kantism. They repeat like Bouteiller ‘I ought always to act in a way that my action serve the universal rule.’ No sirs—leave these great words ‘always’ and ‘universal’ and since you are French, preoccupy yourselves with acting according to the French interest at the time.” 126 The responsibility of the intellectual, as conceived by the anti-Dreyfusard right, was to determine the practical needs of France, not to determine an abstract vision for a universal humanity. National relativism specifically dictated the right-wing concept of the proper role of the intellectual in the Dreyfus Affair. Barrès determined, “It is possible that Dreyfus is not guilty, but it is absolutely certain that France is innocent.” 127 According to the anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals, it was better to sacrifice Dreyfus’s individual human rights than to sacrifice the well-being of the collective nation that secured these rights for all. The incompatibility between these Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard approaches was clearly summarized by Barrès. “Never,” he wrote, “has one sensed the necessity of the relative better than in the course of this Dreyfus Affair, which is a profound orgy of metaphysicians. They judge all by the abstract. We judge each thing by relation to France.” 128 Dreyfusards defended the individual Dreyfus despite the instability it caused the military and the nation. Anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals looked beyond the abstract rights of man to France’s particular need for collective stability at the time. The role of the anti-Dreyfusard intellectual was clear to Barrès; it was directly opposed to the universal truths of the left. “We have sensed that there are French Truths,” he wrote, “Let us prove them. . . . We will be the men in whom France persists.” 129 Barrès’ conception of national relativism was therefore closely linked to his idea of the French essence as a product of rootedness. An individual and a nation, he believed, gained their full identity and consciousness from their own earth and dead. Those outside of the nation, the déracinés who were uprooted from it, were not able to fully understand it. Although rootedness was central to several of his works including Déracinés, it is best summarized in Barrès’s speech for the Ligue entitled “La

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terre et les morts” (The land and the dead). He declared, “The German truth and the English truth are not the same as the French truth and are able to poison us. It is in vain that the foreigner tries to naturalize himself, in vain that he links his interests to ours, in vain tries to think and live in French, the blood refuses to follow the order.” 130 For Barrès, being rooted in one’s land and one’s history provided structure for the sentiments and the intelligence. It was a sort of determinism that encouraged some thoughts, actions, and sentiments, while discouraging others. The essence of French intelligence and culture depended on a continuing connection to the patrie. This was why Barrès felt education, one of the responsibilities of the intellectual, was best served by the national relativism of the anti-Dreyfusards, not by the universalism, internationalism, or cosmopolitanism favored on the Dreyfusard left. 131 Brunetière also opposed universals, although his conversion to Catholicism can rightly be viewed as a contradiction to this and, as previously seen, was critiqued by Barrès for supporting the very universalism and cosmopolitanism that he opposed in the philosophical and political realm. Brunetière’s opposition to this left-wing universalism and internationalism is perhaps best summarized in his lecture on “Les ennemis de l’âme française” (The enemies of the French soul) in March 1899. He listed internationalism, second only to individualism, as one of the most threatening internal enemies of the French society. The internationalists, he complained, in their search to extend their hand to all humanity and to erase divisions, were weakening France in a time when other nations were encouraging separation. “While everywhere around us we see nationalities concentrate on themselves, assemble and unite themselves as of old,” he wrote, “I entreat you to see that our worst enemies are the most internal. They are those you [Ligue members] have believed it necessary to combat: the Internationalists who repeat the imprudent verse ‘Nation is simply a pompous word to mean barbarism.’” 132 Although Brunetière scoffed at the idea that the Dreyfusards’ intellectualized internationalism could ever replace the instinctual love of the patrie in the people, he still warned against complacency. “These latter,” he wrote of the international humanists, “are the inheritors of the social philosophy of Mme Sand and M. Lamartine. ‘I am the fellow citizen of any man who thinks; liberty is my country’ they say.” Of these intellectuals whose abstract internationalism would have the English, French, German, and Chinese live and love one another as brothers, Brunetière says, “I believe they fool themselves.” 133 He was therefore quick to differentiate his concept of the relationship that the true, right-wing intellectual was to have with the patrie. While, he wrote, “certain philosophes find the idea of the nation limiting . . . and are ‘fellow-citizens of any man who thinks’ with a strange tendency to find that one thinks better everywhere else than in their own country,” he himself chose to “reason in a different manner.” 134 Far from being con-

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vinced by the rationalizations of the Dreyfusard internationalists, Brunetière wrote, “I say heartily that if the idea of the nation finds itself one day to be contradictory to the reasonings of ‘Reason’ or to the suggestions of nature, considering what we owe it in the present as in the past, the need that we have of it, and the superior life that it lets us live, so much the worse for nature and it is Reason which I will consider wrong.” 135 In practice, this meant that the role of the intellectual was not to seek the suppression of national differences in favor of a universal, international intelligence, but rather to defend national difference and national relativism. Defending the patrie entailed defending its traditions which were, according to Brunetière, “the military tradition, the literary tradition, the intellectual tradition, and . . . a religious tradition.” 136 This meant defending the courts’ decision on Dreyfus; the Church’s views on Jews and education; and the heritage of pre-Enlightenment intellectual values including militarism, authority, hierarchy, and French patriotism. Barrès summarized the separation in worldviews by saying, “The Opportunists have favored, for twenty years, the Jew, the foreigner, the cosmopolitan. Those who commit this criminal error say these exotic elements bring energetic elements to France. Here is the truth: the energetic elements that France has need of, it finds them in itself.” 137 Dreyfusard André Gide specifically opposed this idea of rootedness in his novel Les nouvelles nourritures. In it Gide proposed: instead of national selfsufficiency and the rejection of “foreign” intellectual elements, the transplantation and infusion of foreign ideas. He claimed that over history the influx of different ideas had strengthened France, aided her progress, and enriched her culture. 138 Barrès argued, in contrast, that universalist intellectuals could not even properly communicate their cosmopolitan ideas to the average Frenchman because they were so disconnected from French thought and sentiment. The role of the intellectual was not to seek universal ideals from “foreign” sources and force them on France, but rather to discern first the needs of France and draw inspiration from traditional sources that resonated with the people. Almost inseparable from the Dreyfusard value of universals was that of abstractions. For Dreyfusards there was a pure form, attainable through rational thought, on which all social values: justice, equality, and fraternity, were to be based. For the anti-Dreyfusards, intellectuals instead were responsible for making the abstraction practical by molding the value to best meet the needs of real society. Rather than act as high priests of the rational abstract, anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals would be the communicators of the real. Brunetière borrowed sentiments from his friend Paul Bourget’s novel Le disciple to express his dissatisfaction with Dreyfusard abstraction saying: “A philosopher, is he able to disperse among men the explanation he has conceived of the universe without considering whether this metaphysical explanation will translate in practice as a dangerous morality? Is he responsible for the harmful realities

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that his doctrine is able to give birth to?” 139 For Brunetière, the effect of an abstract idea on the real world was the intellectual’s greatest concern and responsibility. Rather than judging the truth and quality of an idea by its purity, its logic, and its beautiful composition, Brunetière argued that “all doctrine ought to be judged according to the social principles that it fortifies or menaces.” 140 The abstractions of Truth and Justice had no value if they were applied to society in a way that disrupted and divided it—as the Affair had. Brunetière’s insistence that the value of thought was measured by its impact on reality created conflict for him with Dreyfusard intellectuals. Anatole France, Guyot, and Darlu accused Brunetière of “considering the practical consequences rather than the truth of opinions” which was, for them, a scandalous stance for a self-proclaimed intellectual. Brunetière accepted the accusation, with pleasure, writing, Darlu would have done well to tell us what the truth is, by what signs he recognizes it, and how he has been able to have so much confidence in being the only possessor of it. As for what he has said of me, I continue to think that in the matter of social morality, the practical consequences of ideas are of some importance. . . . The defect of the intellectuals in general is precisely that of not regarding the practical consequences of the truths or of the so-called truths which they announce. 141

It seems, therefore, that there were two completely opposed concepts of intellectual responsibility and intellectual defect. For the Dreyfusards, intellectuals were to work in the realm of the abstract and to concern themselves with the purity of the idea rather than its practical effect. For Brunetière and the Anti-Dreyfusards, intellectuals were only responsible thinkers if they first considered how their ideas would impact the real people and institutions of their particular society. Brunetière, like Barrès, was also willing to draw intellectual inspiration from sources outside rational thought, those that the Dreyfusards considered anti-intellectual. For the Dreyfusards, thought and intelligence were a function of only logic and rationalism. According to Barrès, wisdom was never the result of abstract logic or rationalization by individuals. Instead, wisdom was a result of exposure to the collective wisdom of the patrie gained through the appreciation of its history and traditions. The intellectual’s responsibility to educate was therefore ill-served by the Dreyfusard university’s instruction in logic, rationalism, and theoretical abstractions. Instead, Barrès and the anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals promoted education in what the Dreyfusards considered “irrational” and “anti-intellectual” sources of inspiration: sensibility, experience, emotion, the subconscious, and intuition gained by excursions with families to see the battlegrounds, churches, and forests of the provinces. The responsibility of the right-wing intellectual was to provide students with “a

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sense of the real and of the relative, to convince the professors . . . to judge things as historians rather than metaphysicians . . . and to create for us . . . a national consciousness.” 142 The latter could only be achieved by drawing on sources of collective wisdom that existed beyond the capability of the mind alone and that were foreign to the Dreyfusard concept of individual, isolated, abstract reason. This division in worldviews and values found expression in the debate between Brunetière and the Dreyfusards over the “bankruptcy of science.” 143 Science and the scientific method, Brunetière argued, were incapable of being the source of truth and justice or of furnishing men with a “rule of life.” 144 The rationalism of science could not provide insight into morality nor into questions of truth. Therefore, he argued, the intellectuals who claimed this insight into the Affair because they were scientifically trained minds had misled the people. While science was a noble application of intelligence, neither science nor intelligence were “the entire man, nor that which there is of the best in him, it is therefore not the only force that ought to govern the world.” 145 To pure intelligence functioning in the abstract, Brunetière and Barrès contrasted experience, character, and will, which they claimed were qualities of the mind and soul that were more connected to the real. Naturally, they believed that the anti-Dreyfusards’ recognition of these qualities made them the more qualified intellectual guides. Barrès expressed his hatred of abstractions and his preference for an intelligence tied to reality most clearly in an article for Le Journal in October 1898. In the article he accused the Dreyfusards of dwelling so completely in the world of the abstract ideal that they could not see that blind application of such ideals would ruin rather than preserve France. In abstraction, one is able to support this thesis or that thesis, one is able according to the mind that one has to depreciate or appreciate the army, the military jurisdiction, and the struggles of the race . . . but these questions ought to be treated in relation to the interest of France. It is necessary to not suppress the army because a militia would not suffice. . . . It is necessary not to complain about anti-Semitism at the moment where one sees the enormous power of the Jewish nationality that menaces the French State. 146

When later he considered the ruling that was handed down from the cour de cassation (high court), he wrote, “It will furnish us with a truth finally. It will not be the absolute truth, for this no institution is able to furnish and no one is able to possess since it is not of this world. To promise such to us, one must have the extreme religious optimism of certain ignorant ones. . . . We await not the absolute truth but the judicial truth.” 147 The Dreyfusards, Barrès was suggesting in this piece, wanted the revelation of the absolute truth of Dreyfus’s innocence, the anti-Dreyfusards wanted simply a practical judicial decision that could be implemented to repair the social divisions and disruptions created by the Affair.

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Once again, Barrès emphasized for the public his conviction that the application of abstract theories of social justice to real society, idealized as intellectual responsibility by the Dreyfusards, was actually destroying rather than guiding France. Those who remained mentally trapped in their ivory tower of abstractions and ideals, he warned, will only destroy themselves and society by engaging in public affairs. “I do not mean that all theoreticians of the absolute necessarily are concussed, but it is the constant observation verified once again in the Dreyfus Affair that any theoretician of the absolute destroys himself in public affairs. . . . I have several times seen societies without Justice, but I have never seen Justice without a society.” 148 Societies could function without the pure abstractions of the Dreyfusard intellectuals, he said, but pure abstractions had no function outside of real society. Those who attempted to live in the ideal, outside of the confines of reality, were not only deluded and dangerous, they were also incapable of serving as intellectuals. According to Barrès, the very role and definition of the “intellectual” as a social guide was incompatible with the Dreyfusard ideal. An intellectual, he explained, is not the same as the philosopher who devises grand theories that need not apply to real life. The intellectual was responsible for using theories to guide a real society. Those who were divorced from the real, Barrès argued, ought not attempt to guide it. It was the dominant Dreyfusards, Barrès complained, who were “responsible for leading the people to believe that the intellectual despised the national unconscious and made intelligence function in the pure abstract, outside the field of realities.” 149 In truth, the true intellectual was a student of the real, not of abstract reason. One final value that the anti-Dreyfusards sought to revalue as truer to French culture and tradition despite Dreyfusard disdain was that of collectivism. Opposition to individualism was central to all of Brunetière’s work and was the stance most often cited by the Dreyfusards as proof that he was unqualified for the position of the intellectual. This became a major source of resentment for Brunetière who wrote of his struggle, “When I attack this ‘individualism’ of which you are the apostles, what right do you have, I do not say to combat in your turn my reasons, but to put them aside in order to substitute others for them? You think that this country lacks individualism and I believe, on the contrary, that if it suffers a great evil, it is precisely the excess of this individualism.” 150 In frustration he exploded, “I do not want them [Dreyfusard intellectuals] to have ideas contrary to mine, but I demand the right to have ideas contrary to theirs.” 151 This opposition to individualism was part of an anti-Dreyfusard worldview that understood the foundation of society and the relationship of citizens to the nation in a fundamentally different way than the Dreyfusards. Darlu’s response to Après le procès was specifically entitled, “M. Brunetière et l’individualisme” and declared that his main concern was to address the question of individualism raised by

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Brunetière. Since Brunetière had begun to “neglect his books to concern himself with public life,” it was necessary, Darlu wrote, to consider his ideas, particularly on individualism, to determine if they were the best possible for society. 152 In other words, one could infer, it was necessary to determine if Brunetière merited the title and authority of the intellectual. It is quickly clear that Darlu did not find him worthy of the role. He attributed Brunetière’s “blindness” in his “chosen side” of the anti-Dreyfusard camp to be a result of his rejection of the essential intellectual value of individualism. 153 Other Dreyfusard writers soon joined Darlu in attacking Brunetière’s qualification for engagement specifically because of his rejection of individualism. Guyot clarified the Dreyfusard concept of the intellectual and its link to individualism saying that it is not authority and social institutions that should be the concern of the men of intelligence, but rather “freedom of examination, which is simply the highest expression of individualism.” 154 Brunetière’s attack on individualism and individual rights in favor of the collective was therefore, according to Guyot, incompatible with the responsibility of the intellectual. Guyot even juxtaposed the two terms to make them seem a single affront: “the judgment that he [Brunetière] has come to carry against individualism and intellectuals.” 155 The Dreyfusard intellectual position was made clear for the public. Those who opposed individualism were the servants of blind, governmental authority, and therefore, were the enemies of free examination, personal liberty, and, most importantly, the intellectual. Barrès’s evolution after the Culte du moi has suggested to most historians a movement away from individualism and toward collectivism, although some scholars such as Sternhell and Griffiths have reinterpreted both his stance on individualism and collectivism as two expressions of a single discontent with modern isolation. 156 Despite any fondness for his earlier individualist works, Barrès supported Brunetière’s efforts to defend collectivism from accusations of anti-intellectualism during the Affair. “Do they ignore,” he wrote, “these intellectuals, that each individual . . . exists within a collective discipline?” 157 Barrès also saw the collapse of the collective in favor of the individual to be a threat to intelligence and culture. For Barrès, knowledge and wisdom were not the result of isolated, logic-based study by individual thinkers, but rather the result of exposure to: real life, to the ideas of the past, and to the traditions and faiths of the patrie. The individual was simply a vessel for the accumulation of thought and sentiment. Therefore, according to Soucy, it was the protection of the collective that was essential to French intelligence, not the protection of the individual. 158 With this in mind, Barrès confided to his journal that it was his responsibility as an intellectual guide to “protect with a durable effectiveness the most intimate and most noble element of the social organization, the living sentiment of the general interest, against the growing flood of individualism.” 159

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Brunetière argued that in promoting collectivism and rejecting revision of the Dreyfus case, he was not attacking the foundation of French intelligence or representing “anti-intellectual” militarism, but rather acting as a responsible intellectual guide for collective society. “If I find these ideas [of individual rights] false, if I find it dangerous, it is an opinion and it is mine,” he concluded; the Dreyfusard intellectuals could reject and oppose it, but they could not deny him the right to think in this way nor to deem it anti-intellectual. 160 “These intellectuals,” he sneered, when they claim to protect French intelligence and culture by demanding prioritization of the individual over the honor of the military, “do not think for one second that without the military, without the gift that it provides even to its internal enemies, there would be no leisure to martyr oneself in the laboratories nor the ease of holding a Congress of Peace nor the freedom to insult good sense and justice.” 161 The defense of intelligence, and of French culture, lay in the stability of the collective French nation, and, it was the intellectuals of the right who promoted this cause. COLLECTIVE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION: SEGREGATION OF SOCIAL SPACES AND PROFESSIONAL TRAJECTORIES The “unbreachable abyss” between the Dreyfusard intellectuals and the anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals, and the two distinctive concepts of intellectual identity, were not only a product of two very different sets of sociopolitical values, it was also a product of two different, and increasingly segregated, socio-professional communities and networks. It was in these intellectual communities that the abyss between the right-wing and leftwing value systems evolved from a theoretical disagreement into an actual physical separation of the intellectual milieu. Some historians 162 have encouraged the recognition of the shared professional spaces and elite educational backgrounds as sources of common ground that united the two sides; however, the personal stories reveal an emphasis on division rather than unity. Dreyfusard Jules Renard refused to be friendly with anti-Dreyfusard Lemaître as late as 1909, Gide was ostracized by his family, and Barrès recalled dining with former friends Anatole France and Bourget only after being assured that no one would speak of the Affair. 163 Anatole France rarely attended Academy meetings because of the majority of anti-Dreyfusard opponents there and Louise Buloz, whose anti-Dreyfusard salon shared a space with Brunetière’s RDM, had a tense relationship with her brother-in-law Charles Richet, who was a founder of the Ligue des droits de l’homme. 164 It was no wonder that Brunetière fretted as early as 1898, “Our good journals have never exchanged grosser insults and the division of minds has come to such a point that the two parties seem equally persistent in destroying one an-

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other, and without doubt will succeed; how will we ever remake One France?” 165 The Dreyfus Affair divided families, friends, and even university departments, but in dividing the old, it also created new, alternative, socioprofessional and personal cadres whose shared intellectual values brought with them a new sense of collective identity. Here, in the politically segregated counter-societies of the extreme right, resentments, worldviews, values, and understanding of role were nurtured, reinforced, and eventually radicalized by constant exposure to like-minded peers. And, although they shared general intellectual behaviors with the Dreyfusards, from teaching to journalism to petition signing, the segregation of the two groups during the Affair revealed underlying differences in the experience of these basic professional practices that contributed to a sense of fundamental incompatibility. As time passed, the segregation and sense of exclusion from the mainstream milieu differentiated the behaviors, professional trajectories, and practices themselves. The new collective identity that was created in the separate, alternative intellectual communities of the right both perpetuated and substantiated the perception by the anti-Dreyfusards that they had a different intellectual identity from the Dreyfusards. As previously noted, the university, particularly certain schools and faculties within it, became a central point of contention during the Affair because the anti-Dreyfusards denounced it as a Dreyfusard stronghold even though, in truth, the majority of universitaires remained outside of the debate. Dreyfusards were prominent in the scientific faculties at the Sorbonne, at the École nationale des chartes (National School of Maps), and at the École pratique des hautes études (a prestigious research university), while, in contrast, no member of the Faculty of Law signed a Dreyfusard petition. 166 The ENS was also considered a center of Dreyfusard, and particularly socialist, engagement since those like Brunetière and Doumic were denied positions and since Herr was a dominant force as the librarian. 167 Herr’s anticlerical, socialist, and Dreyfusard political discussions in the afternoons in the ENS library began as early as 1894 and influenced an untold number of students, including Jaurès who joined the Dreyfusards at his urging. It was a left-wing space so devoted to the mentoring of future left-wing intellectuals that right-wing Robert Brasillach recalled he felt out of place. Several students noted the general perception among their classmates that the ENS and its professors were “Dreyfusard with very few exceptions.” 168 The equation of the universitaire and normalien (ENS student) with the collective identity of the Dreyfusard intellectual nurtured the strong resentment of Dreyfusard hegemony over the structures of culture as well as reinforced the emerging trope of ostracism, exclusion, and persecution of a minority. It also had important consequences for the construction of distinct concepts of left-

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wing and right-wing intellectual practice and selection of professional trajectories in the decades to follow. There were anti-Dreyfusard voices within the university and this indicates a certain common professional ground between the two camps. However, this similarity in the professional role was downplayed in favor of the many differences within the role that the two sides chose to emphasize instead. Anti-Dreyfusard universitaires were distinguished from their Dreyfusard peers by the disparate level of recognition and authority given to their role as universitaires. Charle’s study of the university professors at the time notes that within the ranks of the Dreyfusards, the university professors “had a directing and leading role” and their prominence and influence helped to identify the intellectual with the university professor despite, as Bodin has noted, the fact that littérateurs (writers) like Zola and Anatole France seemed to provide their leadership. 169 It was in the Sorbonne and the ENS, in particular, that the “innovatory concept of the Dreyfusard ‘intellectual’ and the revisionst cause” found its “best supporters.” 170 In contrast, the universitaires of the anti-Dreyfusard camp were merely “one element of support within a much larger coalition” that was directed by and recognized for its journalists and writers rather than its professors. 171 Because of this, the Dreyfusard concept of the behavior and experience of the intellectual was modeled on that of the university professor rather than the journalist and writer who served as the model for the anti-Dreyfusard right. As Griffiths has argued in his study of Dreyfus Affair polemic, perceptions had the power to create realities. 172 Since they perceived a Dreyfusard hegemony within the university, in this case supported by the reality of positions refused to anti-Dreyfusards like Brunetière and Doumic, the anti-Dreyfusards turned increasingly to the literary world, particularly the literary journals and weeklies, to voice their views to the public. The anti-Dreyfusards’ overwhelming dominance in letters and the press meant that journal teams and offices became important communities and networks for the intellectual extreme right. 173 The journal provided not only a laboratory and an outlet for ideas that were oppositional to the regime and university, it also served as a space of interaction and fellowship for the writers. In this environment, students who eschewed the professional path of the university professor found literary mentors and opportunities to develop their skills as contributors before becoming regular columnists. Collaborators on journal teams usually worked in the same offices and shared opinions and stories, met to discuss the upcoming issue, or simply used the offices as points of rendezvous for other social gatherings with fellow collaborators. Their shared values and likeminded approach to political and social situations, in addition to their shared professional pursuits in journalism and literature, more often than not engendered friendships and a strong sense of social community and collective identity. This sense of community and collective identity was

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also experienced on a broader scale among the network of journals that shared collaborators and sociopolitical perspectives throughout France. The journals provided, therefore, not only real interpersonal community but also a source for an imagined intellectual community shared with all the other writers who contributed to like-minded papers. Right-wing intellectuals dominated the teams of several of the larger journals and daily presses, including L’Écho de Paris, L’Éclair, Figaro, Gaulois, Gil Blas, L’Intransigeant, Le Journal, Libre Parole, La Patrie, Petit Journal, and La Presse. The anti-Dreyfusard collective identity of these papers was seldom in question since the journals continued the same right-wing themes as the individual intellectuals. One article in Gil Blas, for example, denounced Dreyfusard hegemony and advocated the legitimacy of the Ligue saying, “The men attached to the cause of Dreyfus have affirmed that the elite of France is with them . . . they have concluded that they dispose all the intellectual forces of the nation. . . . The foundation of the Ligue de la patrie française shows that the Dreyfusards have only created an illusion for us. The intellectual elite of France is not with them, it is divided.” 174 A small bimonthly journal called Les Annales de la Patrie Française was also created expressly as the organ of the Ligue in May of 1900. Each issue included political essays or articles in addition to literary pieces, poetry, theater, and a section called “Le Mouvement Nationaliste” advertising the meetings, lectures, and committees being held around France. 175 In a clear attempt to forge a sense of collective intellectual identity in the initial issue, despite the recognition that the anti-Dreyfusard readership was inherently diverse and might share only the most tenuous of connections, Lemaître listed five values he was persuaded could unite all the readers and collaborators of the journal in a single mind-set. The brief list prioritized their opposition to the “persecuting” Republic that “denied freedom of assembly to the anti-Dreyfusard leagues.” 176 Although each of these journals provided a segregated community that reinforced and amplified anti-Dreyfusard engagement, it was Brunetière’s RDM which was the most prestigious and least ephemeral of them. The RDM was one of the more actively engaged literary journals in the anti-Dreyfusard arsenal and employed such leading anti-Dreyfusards as Lemaître, Doumic, Brunetière, Francis Charmes, and Charles Benoist on its permanent staff of chroniclers, as well as inviting regular articles and literary contributions from other anti-Dreyfusard notables like Bourget, André Bellesort, and Barrès. The journal was a socio-professional space for all of its contributors, but particularly for Brunetière who worked in his office alongside his contributors every day, read each of their pieces, and collaborated with them on revisions and alterations. Twice a week he gathered all the permanent writers to his offices for a discussion of the issue, 177 and in the evenings, there were salon meetings hosted by Buloz in the offices of the journal. 178

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Brunetière knew that the journal was a flagship for anti-Dreyfusism and preferred his post as director to any political position he could have earned since he saw it to be “a podium more resounding than any other in France or even in Europe.” 179 This platform provided an opportunity for other contributors to amplify their own views as well and to protest the monopoly of the left and the repression of the right with more effect. For example, in the June 1899 political chronicle, author Francis Charmes repeated the anti-Dreyfusards’ new mantra that though the Ligue des droits de l’homme said “all the intellectuals were on its side,” that this “was false. Other intellectuals who were inferior to them neither in quality nor even in number have been wearied and irritated by hearing this incorrect affirmation repeated.” 180 The RDM team was, therefore, both a place of sociability and professional collegiality for Brunetière and his contributors and a means to amplify their individual engagement. It linked its writers in a network of like-minded peers who shared a purpose and a system of values. Most importantly, identification with RDM implied a sense of alienation from Dreyfusard communities. Writers for the RDM during the Affair were often found in other anti-Dreyfusard journals but rarely, if ever, had essays or even literary works published in the network of Dreyfusard journals. Brunetière even removed his work from Calman-Lévy’s publishing catalog when Lévy published the Revue de Paris, led by Dreyfusards Ernest Lavisse and Herr, and gave it instead to publishers Perrin, Delagrave, and Hachette until his death in 1906. Writing for RDM implied a decision to support the anti-Dreyfusard camp and a rejection of the Dreyfusard community. Although the Dreyfusard left did not enjoy the dominance of the press that the anti-Dreyfusards did, they did form their own, distinctly Dreyfusard network of revues. The journals that were Dreyfusard centers of intellectual community included the militant and university journals like Revue Philosophique; Revue Historique, where Gabriel Monod was editor; Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, where Darlu wrote against Brunetière; and Revue Bleue where Durkheim wrote “L’individualisme et les intellectuels” To these were added the socialist journals that became Dreyfusard following Jaurès and Millerand: Le Mouvement Socialiste, Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine of Péguy, and Pages Libres. There were also several literary journals like Revue Blanche and journals of daily information like L’Aurore and Le Siècle. Revue Blanche became “one of the great rallying centers of the writers, artists, and intellectuals who were convinced of the innocence of Dreyfus.” 181 The Affair made the journal team, which had once welcomed diverse political adherents and had considered Barrès one of its masters, into a politically segregated Dreyfusard community where even Barrès was excluded and attacked. 182 Julien Benda wrote of the camaraderie and collective identity he found within the Dreyfusard camp in the pages of the Dreyfusard organ, Revue Blanche: “Here is a phalange of men who not

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only conceive of general ideas but in whom these ideas determine corresponding emotions that in their turn determine actions.” 183 They shared, he concluded, “not intellectualism but intellectual sensibility.” And they saw themselves opposed to the anti-Dreyfusards by this sensibility. There were those, he concluded, who “are exclusively sensible to their own interests on one side and on the other side, the men capable of conceiving the general interests of humanity.” 184 The journal offices became “true councils of war” where collaborators met and held discussions late into the night. Blum wrote of these evenings, “We met at the journal, toward the end of each day, nearly every evening at the same hour. We could hear the passionate ideas of Octave Mirbeau, comment on the last news from Le Temps, share that which each had learned during the day.” 185 At the end of the evening, the discussions could sometimes spill over into nearby Café Calisaya, which itself became a Dreyfusard center. Segregated intellectual communities and social identities were, therefore, also reinforced in separated salons, bookstores, and cafés, where opposing thinkers and opinions were excluded during times of intense engagement and political discord. Salons had initially been spaces where diversity and contrast in ideas was believed to be intellectually beneficial. During the Dreyfus Affair, however, several of these spaces became devoted centers of one or another side of the polemic. Dreyfusards found willing listeners in the salon of Mme de Caillavet where the visitors and the political discussion naturally drove away many previous attendees like Maurras and Lemaître while attracting new visitors like Clemenceau and Jaurès. The salon of Mme Strauss had also been frequented by Lemaître and Arthur Meyer, director of the monarchist Le Gaulois, until the Dreyfus Affair. Meyer later wrote in his memoirs that his frequenting of the salon of Mme Strauss stopped “the day when the Dreyfus Affair, which has separated all from being able to agree, broke relations which were very precious to me.” 186 Other politicized salons of the Dreyfusards included that of Mme Ménard-Dorian who favored socialist and anticlerical ideas and hosted Blum, Clemenceau, and Zola; 187 of Mme de SaintVictor who was nicknamed “Notre Dame de la Révision” (Our Lady of the Revision); and of the Marquise Arconati-Visconti who was later be labeled by the right-wing Action française as “the protector and benefactor of all that which decomposes and dissolves society and French intelligence.” 188 Brunetière’s salons of choice were those of Mme Buloz, which often met at the offices of the RDM and that of Mme Aubernon, where “the Dreyfusard artists no longer showed themselves” after the Affair sparked the division into camps. 189 The anti-Dreyfusards found themselves most at home in the salons of Mme Leland, Mme de Loynes, and Comtesse de Martel, who were such strong supporters of the work of the Ligue de la patrie that they became its bâilleuses de fonds (financial backers). 190 Mme de Loynes’s salon had once welcomed as diverse a clientele as Renan,

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Flaubert, Anatole France, and Barrès in the same room, yet, with the advent of the Dreyfus Affair, her salon became a “fortress of nationalism” where Dreyfusard thinkers were no longer welcomed while Lemaître, Barrès, and Brunetière were frequent visitors. 191 Salons were also important centers of mentorship and professional networking for right-wing intellectuals. De Loynes’s salon helped rightwing editors find financial assistance and introduced Ernest Judet of Le Petit Journal to financier Antoine Vlasto, enabling Judet to start the more nationalist and anti-Semitic paper L’Éclair. Her most notable project, according to Harris, was Lemaître, who “had been a Dreyfusard until he came under Mme de Loynes’s influence, but then he moved steadily to the right.” 192 It was because of her success in poaching Lemaître, Harris claims, that Dreyfusard salonnière Mme de Caillavet turned to wooing Anatole France to the revisionist cause. 193 Other editors including Gaston Calmette of Figaro, 194 Henry Simond of L’Écho de Paris, and Léon Bailby of La Presse and L’Intransigeant were frequent guests of de Loynes and used the salons as opportunities to meet potential contributors. It was at one of de Loynes’s dinners, among friends who shared the same intellectual frustrations during the Affair, that the original plan to create the Ligue de la patrie was supposedly devised. 195 Cafés and small dinners offered more casual opportunities for antiDreyfusard intellectuals to form personal links with like-minded peers, to discuss and debate their ideas, and to hold small organizational meetings with fellow engaged writers. Several café spaces, particularly during the divisiveness of the Affair, separated what had before been a clientele of mixed ideologies into very polarized communities whose political persuasion dominated the atmosphere and patronage of the café. Café des Vosges, for example, literally changed its name to Café François Coppée to recognize the dominance at that café of Coppée and his followers around the time of the Affair. 196 Café Procope and Café Voltaire were also widely recognized as anti-Dreyfusard spaces during the Affair where one could find Barrès, Bourget, Jean Moréas, and Maurras holding small gatherings or simply relaxing and discussing affairs with a few friends. 197 Café Voltaire, in particular, became the home of the Association nationalistes de la jeunesse (National Association of the Youth) whose aim, it was said, was to create a space for student sociability “where one does not admit Dreyfusards.” 198 La Closerie des Lilas, on the other hand, was strongly Dreyfusard and was “diametrically opposed both geographically and politically to the Café de Flore, the cradle and fief of the Action française.” Here young Dreyfusards like Gide gathered and felt themselves surrounded by others who shared their “international spirit.” 199 A Dreyfusard bookstore, Librairie Bellais, opened by Péguy in the Latin Quarter was also a gathering place for Dreyfusard thinkers, particularly students interested in socialism. Blum, who frequented the site, described it as the “general center

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of Dreyfusism in the Latin Quarter.” Bellais was not only a space used to discuss shared ideas, it was also a center for Dreyfusard youth militantism. Here, Daniel Halévy wrote, clashes [with the anti-Dreyfusard students] were frequent in the corridors of the Sorbonne, the entrance of which was only 100 meters away from Bellais. Péguy kept himself in constant readiness to send his friends into the fight. . . . If he was in the school when the call came he would immediately go from study to study opening the doors. “Assemble!” he cried at each door. They would all seize their sticks and rush to the Sorbonne. 200

Intellectual communities were therefore not only effective in organizing and amplifying individual engagements, they also converted thought into collective action. These now divided social spaces reflected the corresponding division in personal and professional friendships that had often been formed around socializing in a café or salon. The Comtesse de Martel de Janville, better known as Gyp, who was a prolific author in her own right, had originally been connected to scholars across the political landscape. However, “when the Affair exploded, she found she could no longer tolerate anyone with Dreyfusard sympathies. She even broke with Anatole France, a friend for fifteen years, and dismissed servants she suspected of Dreyfusard loyalties.” 201 While Gyp was somewhat dramatic and eccentric for her time, her passionate reaction to the Dreyfus Affair and the loss of friendships because of it was not uncommon. Anti-Dreyfusard activist Daudet recounted how on the eve of the Affair, his father Alphonse, Zola, Anatole France, Coppée, Lemaître, Bourget, and Barrès had enjoyed meeting together at Restaurant Durand. When Daudet declared that it was necessary for all who thought and wrote to take the side of France and the army, Zola responded to the contrary and the atmosphere of the group, according to Daudet, “became glacial.” When the party adjourned for the evening, Lemaître suggested to the group that, “the Balzac dinners had a place at one time, but it is likely they will not take place again.” It is thus, Daudet concluded, “that the Dreyfus Affair divided the world.” 202 Yet once again, where the Affair split groups that had previously united men of letters across political lines, it now created new communities with more sociopolitically segregated members. Perhaps the largest gatherings of anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals for politically charged dinner discussions were those in honor of Barrès’s Appel au soldat held most often in the Café de l’Univers. In recollecting these dinners, Barrès expressed clearly the sense of intellectual community and collective identity that formed. “Two years ago,” he wrote, “the majority of those who are today united around this table did not know one another. They were made sensible to one another by the intensity, the cruelty of the drama of

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which France was almost the victim. This first of all brought us together.” 203 However, Barrès did not consider the grouping to have been only voluntary. There were preexisting sentiments in the men present in that hall, he continued, and certain words like patrie and France awakened in them ideas that “were not able to be understood by those in whom these associations of ideas had not previously existed. It is not a matter of intelligence: whatever their [Dreyfusard intellectuals] rapidity of mind, whatever their alertness, they are not able to sense things as we do. A shared instinct, a shared physiology has grouped us.” 204 And, he was clearly suggesting that this psychology and sense of things that had brought the anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals together in this community also separated them as intellectuals from the Dreyfusards. These centers of physical, tangible communion were expanded to include engagés who might never have actually shared the same space through the imagined communities of manifestos and petitions that created a sense of collective identity on a massive scale. When the Ligue de la patrie petition was first published, it had twenty-two academician signatures; by the first official assembly of the Ligue there were ten thousand adherents; by the end of 1899 there were twenty thousand; and by the end of 1900 over five hundred thousand, compared to the eight thousand of the Ligue des droits de l’homme. 205 These collections of names, perhaps better than any other form of intellectual community, drew a line of division between the left and right. Signers of Dreyfusard manifestos felt that they shared a common purpose and engagement with the intellectuals whose names were listed alongside theirs. In contrast, they considered those names on the anti-Dreyfusard petition for the Ligue de la patrie to be suspect and outside their community. Guyot of Le Siècle wrote of the petition, “It is useful. It classes men. We will preciously guard their names. They disqualify themselves. We know now who are the professors in the university who represent the Jesuit spirit.” 206 Petitions literally provided a list of all those who shared the same worldview, values, and engagements while also clearly listing those who were outsiders and adversaries. The Ligue petition was followed by other antiDreyfusard petitions, like the “Henry Monument.” Begun in La Libre Parole, 207 it garnered fewer signatures but became a means, used by both camps, to identify intellectuals as anti-Dreyfusards. Signing one’s name and title to these petitions implied a certain willingness to be identified with the values and programs of the collective extreme right and a disassociation with the Dreyfusard left. The very practice of petition construction also reveals two distinct concepts of intellectual community. While the anti-Dreyfusards’ listing of names revealed the organization, hierarchy, and elitism prized by the extreme right, placing the names of the Academicians first, followed by the most eminent universitaires, then authors and savants, the Dreyfusard petitions revealed a certain desire for egalitarianism. The petition in favor

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of Picquart was ordered alphabetically, the “Manifeste des intellectuels” (Manifesto of the Intellectuals) had no clear organization by social or intellectual cadre, and later Dreyfusard petitions mixed the professions completely. 208 Scholars can be somewhat skeptical of the order of these lists, however. According to Charle, the prominent listing of universitaires by the antiDreyfusards was not necessarily representative of the real respect accorded to the role or the significance of these individuals for the movement. Rather it was a strategic manipulation of public opinion. The high placement of those names was an effort to “reverse the equivalence that prevailed in public opinion between the defense of Dreyfus and the University where dreyfusard agitation had been particularly visible.” 209 They recognized and resented the common perception that the Dreyfusards controlled the university and hoped to suggest through the names on the petition an equal claim to this domain. 210 The petitions were most influential in the creation of the separate organizations, which became the most visible structures of separate, opposed intellectual communities during the Affair. On the Dreyfusard left, the Ligue des droits de l’homme clearly distinguished its values and intentions from those on the anti-Dreyfusard right. In particular, its first statute declared that the association was designed “to defend the principles of liberty, equality, justice announced in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789” and declared that all forms of “arbitrariness and intolerance are a menace of civil division, a menace to Civilization and Progress.” 211 The Ligue not only held lectures and meetings but also published an official Bulletin, created an intellectual journal called Droits de l’homme, and held annual congresses for members. It also hosted banquets where its intellectual leaders and political members could fraternize and share ideas. One banquet, described in L’Aurore in 1902 was host to more than six hundred people. On the right, the Ligue de la patrie became the central network of the anti-Dreyfusard intellectual and formed a clear division between those who were Dreyfusard and those who were not. Although the Dreyfusard Ligue des droits de l’homme had not literally excluded any particular men of letters from signing, the anti-Dreyfusard group pointedly included the proscription that no individual who had signed the Dreyfusard petitions in favor of revision would be accepted as a member of the new league. Lists of new adherents were published in blatantly anti-Dreyfusard journals like L’Éclair, L’Écho de Paris, and Gil Blas. And, the first meetings of the Ligue in the Salle de l’Horticulture were for invited guests only. 212 With this stipulation, the Ligue became an arm of specifically anti-Dreyfusard collective engagement. The most effective expression of this collective engagement, and a significant contribution to collective intellectual identity, was the Ligue de la patrie’s lecture tours. These tours began in Paris, where speakers

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gave lectures before large crowds of university students and the general public, before traveling to the larger provincial cities. They were referred to as “conférences patriotiques” and were not only reproduced partially in the larger papers the following morning but also were printed and sold as pamphlets by the Ligue’s own press. 213 Certain speeches, like one given by Lemaître in 1900, were not even sold, but rather distributed in envelopes to every home in all the quarters of Paris. 214 The dissemination of these lectures sought to create an imagined community of like-minded readers that extended well beyond the small number of actual attendees. The published speeches were also an effective means of promoting the larger anti-Dreyfusard intellectual network. After 1900, the inside cover of several of these printed lectures included advertisements for the Ligue de la patrie bulletin Annales and a summary of the contents of the next issue. Back covers often listed other essays and lectures given by Ligue members that were available to purchase. 215 The lectures were also the aspect of Ligue engagement that continued to connect member intellectuals in the Ligue’s socio-professional network. Although Brunetière left the directing committee as early as February of 1899 and Barrès left it in October of 1901, they both remained committed members of the Ligue’s lecture efforts throughout the Affair. Brunetière’s departure should be given some attention for the insight it provides into the undercurrent of tension that existed within the anti-Dreyfusard camp between the various elements that comprised its uneasy conglomerate. When ÉmileFrançois Loubet assumed the presidency after the death of Félix Faure, Lemaître and Coppée called for his resignation because they considered him the “candidate of the Panamists and the Dreyfusists.” Their activism resulted in a massive street demonstration with the Ligue des patriotes. What was untenable, however, was that the two anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals claimed to speak and act in the name of the entire membership of the Ligue de la patrie. Several members of the Ligue wrote of their displeasure to Brunetière, who represented them by resigning and writing in a public letter to Le Temps that he saw no reason for the prime minister not to move into the president’s position when it was vacant and thought it “monstrous for the league that names itself for the French nation to throw suspicion on the leader of the state.” 216 While the Ligue might provide an “apparent unity” of all the anti-Dreyfusards, therefore, it only temporarily, and often futilely, “veiled the many divisions that still existed.” 217 And yet the perception remained that the Ligue was a collective and cohesive space where anti-Dreyfusards could feel safe and respected and where their sense of repression could be nurtured and amplified. These lecture tours reinforced and magnified the common themes and tropes on the right. Lectures by Coppée and Lemaître, for example, noted the “oppression by an evil doing minority” who claimed to have a “monopoly” on engagement. 218 They called for the Ligue to continue to organize, discipline, and publicize itself in order to legitimize its alterna-

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tive position. 219 In the Ligue’s fifth conference, titled “Où sont les intellectuels?” (Where Are the Intellectuals?), Doumic complained that the Dreyfusards had “entitled themselves ‘Les intellectuels’” and excluded from this role all who disagreed with them. 220 These men had been friends and peers of ours, he continued, but “suddenly they appeared to us transformed. . . . We held them for men of open and tolerant minds, but they now consider that all those who were not of their opinion were men without heart, that they alone had the monopoly on humanity, piety, and generally all of the beautiful sentiments, while we were, we others, the partisans of injustice and barbarism.” He concluded by declaring of this unwarranted Dreyfusard hegemony, “In entitling themselves with pomp ‘Les Intellectuels’ instead of calling themselves, as they ought to have, ‘plusieurs intellectuels’ (several intellectuals), they have wanted to make it be believed that the immense majority of France who thinks, reflects, and lives by intelligence was on their side. And it is the contrary that is true.” 221 The first lecture, titled “La patrie française,” was given by Lemaître to “explain the spirit and design of the Ligue.” He presented briefly, but with striking clarity, the fundamental differences the Ligue leadership believed existed between the Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard conceptualizations of intellectual responsibility and identity. While the Dreyfusards had accused them of not loving “truth and justice as much, of not being as attached as them to the rights of man and the citizen,” Lemaître, explained, they were here to clarify that though they loved truth and justice, as intellectuals, they also “had a duty to respect the fundamental pacts of human society” and the stability of the nation. 222 Barrès further emphasized this alternative concept of collective responsibility and role by reminding listeners that the Ligue was led by “an elite of historians, savants, artists and grands lettrés” who had taken the responsibility of “advising on the necessities of the nation.” He continued, “We share a common will . . . and we have among us the men of France most capable of expressing in a clear and moving fashion, with disinterested hearts, the national sentiment.” 223 The Ligue de la patrie also created a network of intellectuals and devotees that served to link various members to one another in a larger right-wing community. Beginning in 1900, there were monthly Liguesponsored banquets that brought together the leading names of the Ligue and celebrated the members newly elected to office. It organized its own section for women called the “Dames de la patrie française,” which continued to hold permanent meetings well past the Dreyfus Affair and printed its own bulletin by 1910. Belonging to the Ligue de la patrie also linked members to other anti-Dreyfusard associations. Despite the clear dominance of intellectuals in the Ligue de la patrie and the working-class majority of the other leading anti-Dreyfusard groups, the memberships, and especially the audience, of the different associations could not help

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but overlap during the Affair. 224 The Ligue de la patrie cooperated with Déroulède’s Ligue des patriots in several electoral campaigns and they and the Ligue antisémitique supported one another’s writers and public demonstrations. Barrès not only belonged to the Ligue des patriotes, he joined in Déroulède’s February 1899 attempted coup during the funeral of Faure and eventually became the editor of Le Drapeau and the leader of the Ligue des patriotes. 225 Brunetière was giving lectures and writing articles on the enemies of France and the values of anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals to the Union de la paix sociale (Union of the Social Peace) and the Catholic University during the time that he was speaking for the Ligue de la patrie. And Lemaître, Dausset, Syveton, and Vaugeois all joined Maurras and Maurice Pujo in the Action française. The latter was born almost simultaneously with the Ligue de la patrie and saw itself as a son of this original collective community. While the segregation and polarization of spaces and organizations of intellectuals contributed to a sense of division, difference, and alienation from the intellectual “other,” historians who use sociological definitions of the intellectual have been quick to note that the segregation was still predicated upon a commonality of practice and behavior among the two camps. However, neither camp acknowledged that their shared behaviors such as petition signing or publication might have meaning in their understanding of identity and role. Adding to this perception, were the true differences in intellectual experience due to the right and left’s distinctly different relationships to places of cultural or political authority. These distinguishing relationships contributed heavily to both a sense of separation and also an all-consuming belief in left-wing cultural hegemony and right-wing repression. For the Dreyfusards, being an intellectual required a certain relationship to the university, which has already been examined, but also to the Third Republic and the church that the intellectual right did not share. Although the Dreyfusards accused both the military high command and the government of perpetuating a known injustice in 1898, they did so in the name of the better, truer nature of the French Republic. In striking contrast, the anti-Dreyfusards defended the military and the interests of the collective patrie, yet they did so by announcing the inadequacy of the Republic and the collapse of Enlightenment values. More importantly, the Dreyfusards and their intellectual agendas were promoted, protected, and nurtured by the republican ministries as early as 1899, when the tide turned in favor of revision of the trial and the Dreyfusard cause. The “government of republican defense” under WaldeckRousseau incorporated radicals and socialists as part of a mutually beneficial relationship between the Republic and the left-wing Dreyfusards. Winock notes, “Dreyfusism was founded in the defense of the republic, the latter benefiting from then on from the moral reference to the former.” 226

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At the same time, the anti-Dreyfusard organizations were persecuted and proscribed as a threat to the Republic after the failed coup by Déroulède in 1899. In August, Waldeck-Rousseau ordered a massive roundup of activists, many of whom were royalists. The anti-Dreyfusards were later forced to apply for governmental authorization of organizations and journals, reorganize disbanded leagues, and replace imprisoned leaders. 227 This oppositional relationship to the Third Republic and its political values meant that the right-wing experience of intellectual life was one of perceived repression and persecution. Doumic reacted to this perceived exclusion writing, “The spirit of the sect [political left] is the spirit of exclusion. To exclude, this is their favorite pastime. No one will be Republican outside of us and our friends!” 228 Behind the “word screens” of Justice, Liberty, and Civil Equality, he concluded, “is practiced a politics of oppression.” According to the anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals, therefore, the Dreyfusard experienced intellectual life from the vantage point of the protected republican intelligentsia while the anti-Dreyfusards’ experience became that of the repressed and persecuted intellectual opposition. The relationship of the Dreyfusard intellectual to the Catholic Church was also important in differentiating the experience of the Dreyfusard intellectual from that of the anti-Dreyfusard. The debates surrounding the Dreyfus Affair were linked, sometimes overtly, to the discussion of the place of the Church in French society and to the issue of secularization. Catholicism was not a defining characteristic of either the Dreyfusard left or the anti-Dreyfusard right since Catholics remained prominent on both sides. However, many anti-Dreyfusards intentionally linked themselves to the institution and tradition of the Church in their discussions of anti-Semitism and the integral French nation while most of the Dreyfusards pointedly linked their engagement to the secular and even anticlerical tradition of the Enlightenment and civic nationalism. 229 They juxtaposed their value of rationalism, scientific reason, and free thought with what they saw as the Church’s irrationalism, superstition, and limits to free thought. Also, although there were many Catholics who favored revision, they were joined by Protestants, like Gide, and Jews, like Halévy, who were rarely found in the anti-Dreyfusard camp. 230 Barrès and Brunetière were some of the first on the anti-Dreyfusard right to oppose the influence of the Dreyfusard intellectuals and were leaders in the struggle to legitimize an alternative. Their experience of engagement and effort to construct a right-wing intellectual identity initiated a cycle of behavior, a trope of repression, a set of values, and a new socio-professional community that would became essential to rightwing intellectual identity construction over the century. They rightly perceived themselves excluded from the title and role of the intellectual, both before and after 1899, by a left-wing hegemony over the concept. Much of the blame rests with the initial reluctance of the anti-Dreyfusard

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right to engage, but there was also a concerted effort by the Dreyfusard camp to discredit the anti-Dreyfusard claim to intellectual identity. Perception of this monopolization of the role and status of the intellectual guide resulted in violent resentment on the extreme right and an emerging language of dispossession, ostracism, and repression that became essential to the identity construction process in the future. The anti-Dreyfusards not only claimed the right to speak as an intellectual, they also intentionally highlighted the “abyss” between the anti-Dreyfusard concept of true intellectual values and those of the Dreyfusards. Instead of universalism and abstract truths, they redefined the intellectual as one who valued relativism, the real and, most important for their stance in the Dreyfus Affair, the collective nation rather than the rights of an individual. The perception that the intellectual of the right was excluded from the new authority of the intellectual guide, resentment of this hegemony, and the struggle to differentiate cultural values and concepts of intellectual responsibility from those of the Dreyfusard left were shared by others on the anti-Dreyfusard right. These like-minded individuals congregated in intellectual communities, separate from those dominated by the Dreyfusards, in order to transform their individual protest into a more effective counter engagement. These collective communities of ostracized intellectuals of the right, and the different relationships to institutional power, professional practices, and daily experiences that developed, contributed the final component of the anti-Dreyfusards’ first conceptualization of distinctive right-wing intellectual identity. As successive generations of intellectuals developed their collective identity in this polarizing environment, their views of their world and their sense of self as intellectuals were radicalized and alienated from that of the left. This development and radicalization of the next generation of right-wing intellectuals and their peers on the left were most apparent during the debate over the Nouvelle Sorbonne. NOTES 1. In this chapter, reference to the Dreyfus Affair may be shortened to “the Affair.” 2. David Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 23. 3. Francis de Pressensé, “La nouvelle ligue des patriotes,” L’Aurore, January 2, 1899. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 4. For example, Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (New York: G. Braziller, 1986); Louis Bodin, “L’affaire Dreyfus et la notion d’ ‘intellectuel,’” in Les intellectuels face à l’affaire Dreyfus alors et aujourd’hui: Perception et impact de l’affaire en France et à l’étranger, ed. Roselyne Koren and Dan Michman (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 320. 5. Christophe Charle, Naissance des “intellectuels,” 1880–1900 (Paris: Minuit, 1990), 8. 6. Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 150.

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7. The first petition read “the undersigned, protesting against the violation of the judicial forms in the trial of 1894 and against the mysteries which have surrounded the Esterhazy affair, persist in demanding revision.” The second read “the undersigned, struck by the irregularities committed in the Dreyfus trial of 1894 and by the mystery which surrounds the trial of commandant Esterhazy, persuaded in addition that the entire nation is interested in the maintaining of legal guarantees, the protection of citizens in a free nation, astonished by the findings of Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart and the findings no less illegal attributed to the latter, moved by the procedures of judicial information employed by the military authority, demand the Chamber maintain the legal guarantees of citizens against all things arbitrary” (Georges Clemenceau, “Une protestation,” L’Aurore, January 14–15, 1898, 1). 8. Georges Clemenceau, “À la dérive,” L’Aurore, January 23, 1898; emphasis in the original. 9. Eric Cahm, The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics, rev. ed., trans. Cahm (New York: Longman, 1996), 69; This work is the translation and revised edition by Cahm of his L'affaire Dreyfus: Histoire, politique et société (Paris: LGF, 1994); original edition by New York: Longman, 1966. 10. The crackdown on right-wing organizations was prompted by the attempt by Paul Déroulède and the Ligue des patriotes to spark a military coup during the funeral of President Faure. Maurice Barrès played a prominent role in both the attempted coup itself and in the right-wing journalistic narrative of the coup, the trial of Déroulède, and the subsequent repression of the right. 11. On September 11, 1899, Dreyfus was found guilty with “extenuating circumstances.” Eight days later he was pardoned. By 1900, all Dreyfusards indicted for crimes in the Affair received amnesty and, in 1906, the original verdict was overruled. The military, however, would not officially declare Dreyfus innocent until 1995. 12. Cahm, Dreyfus Affair, 158. 13. Ibid., 88. 14. Ibid., 90. 15. Richard Griffiths, The Use of Abuse: The Polemics of the Dreyfus Affair and Its Aftermath (New York: Berg, 1992), 10. 16. Leslie Derfler, The Dreyfus Affair (London: Greenwood Press, 2002), 133. 17. Jeremy Jennings, “Anti-Semitic Discourse in Dreyfus-Affair France,” in The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le Pen, ed. Edward J. Arnold (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 19. 18. Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 152; Édouard Drumont, La France juive: Essai d’histoire contemporaine (Paris: C. Marpon & E. Flammarion, 1886). 19. Cahm, Dreyfus Affair, 108. 20. Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics, 4. 21. Ibid. 22. Judith Surkis, Review of The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood, by Christopher E. Forth, in Journal of Modern History 78, no. 1 (March 2006): 225. 23. Gilbert D. Chaitin, The Enemy Within: Culture Wars and Political Identity in Novels of the French Third Republic (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 15. 24. Venita Datta, Heroes and Legends of Fin-de-Siècle France: Gender, Politics, and National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 12. 25. Ibid., 19–20. 26. Chaitin, Enemy Within, 11. 27. David Ohana, “The Dreyfus Revolution: The Counter-‘J’accuse’ of the Radical Right,” in Les Intellectuels face à l’affaire Dreyfus alors et aujourd’hui: Perception et impact de l’affaire en France et à l’etranger, ed. Roselyne Koren and Dan Michman (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 200. 28. Chaitin, Enemy Within, 15. 29. Miranda Pollard, “Sexing the Subject: Women and the French Right, 1938–58,” in The Right in France: From Revolution to Le Pen, ed. Nicholas and Frank Tallett (Lon-

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don: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 231–44; Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004). 30. Datta, Heroes and Legends, 19–20. 31. Harris, Dreyfus, 7. 32. Ibid. (emphasis in the original). 33. Ibid., 9, 144. 34. Pressensé, “La nouvelle ligue.” 35. Gaston Paris, “La Ligue de la patrie française,” Le Siècle, January 4, 1899. 36. Émile Zola, “Lettre à M. Félix Faure,” L’Aurore, January 13, 1898. The observation that these are key themes for the Dreyfusards is also made in Jeremy Jennings, “1898–1998: From Zola’s ‘J’accuse’ to the Death of the Intellectual.” European Legacy 5, no. 6 (2000): 831. 37. “Ligue Française pour la defense des droits de l’homme et du citoyen,” An announcement of the creation of the League. Archives Nationale de France (hereafter cited AN), F7 12487 38. Griffiths, Use of Abuse, 17. 39. Paul Léautaud, Henry Monument, quoted in ibid., 29. 40. Émile Duclaux, “L’élite intellectuelle et la democratie,” Revue politique et littéraire; revue bleue, May 21, 1904, 34. 41. Alphonse Darlu, M. Brunetière et l’individualisme: A propos de l’article “Après le procès” (Paris: Armand Colin, 1898), 41. 42. Duclaux, “L’élite intellectuelle,” 34. 43. “Ligue française pour la défense des droits de l’homme et du citoyen appel.” The call is listed as being created at the Siege social: rue Jacob, 1 VI arrond., AN F7 12487. 44. Darlu, M. Brunetière, iv, 46. 45. The army, despite its defeat in 1870, had become for many on the right, the great heroic force that would exact its revenge on Germany and return Alsace-Lorraine to the nation. Widespread insecurity about the military preparedness of France until this revenge led not only to glorification of military figures but to immediate opposition to anything that might damage its stability and stature. Nationalism, which had long been associated with Jacobin patriotism, was redefined and popularized by Barrès in 1892 with a new anti-republican tone and became synonymous with the defense of traditional values and institutions against internal and external enemies. Nationalism as a concept and a program would therefore switch, in these pre-Dreyfus Affair years, from the liberal, Jacobin and republican left to the monarchist and extreme right. For further reading on the shift from left to right of the Nationalists, Robert Lynn Fuller’s The Origins of the French Nationalist Movement, 1886–1914 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), provides a good introduction. According to Peter M. Rutkoff’s Revanche and Révision: The Ligue des Patriotes and the Origins of the Radical Right in France, 1882–1900 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), the connection between the new, right-wing nationalism, Anti-Dreyfusism, and anti-Semitism also caused a noticeable shift of antiSemitism. The Ligue antisemitique of Jules Guérin, the Ligue des patriotes, and the work La France juive and journal La Libre Parole of Édouard Drumont would be instrumental in associating anti-Semitism with anti-Dreyfusism and the extreme right. 46. Advertisement for the creation of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, AN, F7 12487. 47. Against Brunetière’s rejection of individualism as anarchism and the loss of all social authority, Dreyfusard Henri Bérenger in La France intellectuelle (Paris: Armand Colin et Cie, 1899), would write, “To progressively free the individual from all exterior authority, to put in his internal life the rule of all moral and intellectual obligation, to respect among others this same personal liberty of which one has made his own law, this is the individualism of the French revolution and of modern philosophy” that the anti-Dreyfusards ignore (43). 48. Clemenceau, quoted in Cahm, Dreyfus Affair, 70.

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49. Lucien Herr, quoted in Les Intellectuels en France: De l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours, ed. Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris: A Colin, 1986), 18. 50. Charles Péguy, quoted in Rutkoff, Revanche et Révision, 539. 51. Jean Jaurès, “La classe intellectuelle,” La Petite République, January 7, 1899; and in Charle, Naissance des “intellectuals,” 162. 52. Robert Soucy, Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barrès (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 2. Shlomo Sand, “The Croix de Feu and Fascism: a Foreign Thesis Obstinately Maintained,” in The Development of the Radical Right in France from Boulanger to Le Pen, ed. Edward J. Arnold (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 95; and Fuller, Origins of the French Nationalist Movement, 246, are among the minority who consider Barrès’ influence to have been peripheral. 53. Henri Massis wrote, “For me, I find the influence of Barrès at the origin of all my ideas.” Soucy, Fascism in France, 5. 54. Harris, Dreyfus, 144. 55. Michel Curtis, Three against the Third Republic: Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 267. 56. Richard Griffiths, “Maurice Barrès: Intelligence and ‘the Intellectuals,” in Les Intellectuels face à l’affaire Dreyfus alors et aujourd’hui: Perception et impact de l’affaire en France et à l’etranger, ed. Roselyne Koren and Dan Michman (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 211. Also, similar sentiments on Barrès’s anti-intellectualism can be found in Michel Curtis, Three against the Third Republic, 127. 57. Maurice Barrès, Journal de ma vie extérieure, ed. François Broche and Eric Roussel (Paris: Éditions Julliard, 1994). 58. Eugen Weber, “Nationalism, Socialism, and National-Socialism in France,” French Historical Studies 2, no. 3 (1962): 276. 59. Soucy, Fascism in France, 11, 135. 60. Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Maisel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2010), 316; a translation of Les anti-Lumières: Du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide (Paris: Fayard, 2006). 61. Maurice Barrès, quoted in Philip Ouston, The Imagination of Maurice Barrès (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 69. 62. Ibid., 75. 63. Jennings, “Anti-Semitic Discourse,” 27. 64. Maurice Barrès, “La protestation des intellectuels,” Le Journal, February 1, 1898, and reproduced in Maurice Barrès, Scènes et Doctrines du nationalisme (Paris: Éditions du Trident, 1987), 45. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Maurice Barrès, Scènes et Doctrines du nationalisme (Paris: Éditions du Trident, 1987), 51. 69. The Ligue had an initial membership list that included twenty-two academicians in addition to men of letters; savants; and university, law, and medical professionals (Christophe Charle, “Academics or Intellectuals? The Professors of the University of Paris and Political Debate in France from the Dreyfus Affair to the Algerian War,” in Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France: Mandarins and Samurais, ed. Jeremy Jennings [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993], 95, 105). 70. First stated in “Notes sur la fondation, l’organisation primitive, le but et les tendances de la Ligue de la Patrie française,” AN, F7 13229-30; and also published in Le Journal on January 2, 1899. 71. Barrès, Scènes et doctrines, 53. 72. “It is thus that we others, divided on many points but who have in common the knowledge of the conditions without which there is no society, have assembled in order to resolve the public health” (ibid., 56). 73. Ibid., 56.

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74. Jules Lemaître, Conference de la Patrie française (Paris: Bureaux de la Patrie française), 11. 75. Pressensé, “La nouvelle ligue.” 76. Ibid.; emphasis in the original. 77. Georges Clemenceau, “Une ligue nouvelle,” L’Aurore, January 5, 1899. 78. This quote is from “Leon Fatoux’s ‘les coulisses du Nationalisme’ 1903” and is substantiated by a police file on the group reporting on the connection between Coppée’s thought and its connection to the Ligue (AN, F7 13229; F7 15930). 79. Maurice Barrès, “Letter from Charles Maurras,” in Mes cahiers (Paris: Plon, 1929), 1:291. 80. Jules Lemaître, L’Oeuvre de la patrie française (Paris: Bureaux de la Patrie française, 1899), 9. 81. Ibid., 13. 82. Barrès, Mes cahiers, 1:284. 83. Barrès, Scènes et doctrines, 57. 84. Bodin, “L’Affaire Dreyfus,” 325. 85. Charle, “Academics or Intellectuals?” 95, 105. 86. Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, La République ou le roi: Correspondance inédited, 1888–1923 (Paris: Plon, 1970), xxviii. 87. Jacques Julliard and Michel Winock, “Ferdinand Brunetière,” Dictionnaire des intellectuels français: Les personnes, les lieux, les moments, ed. Jacques Julliard and Michel Winock (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996), 228–29. 88. Elton Hocking, Ferdinand Brunetière: The Evolution of a Critic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1936), 37. 89. Ferdinand Brunetière, quoted in Marie Laurence Netter, “Ferdinand Brunetière contre les intellectuels,” Mil Neuf Cent 11, no. 1 (1993): 69. 90. Antoine Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière? Enquête sur un antidreyfusard et ses amis (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), 10; Jennings, “Anti-Semitic Discourse,” 23. 91. Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière? 11. 92. Ibid., 179. 93. Ferdinand Brunetière, Après le procès: Reponse à quelques ‘intellectuels’ (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1898), 3; originally published in Revue des Deux Mondes, March 15, 1898. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. Netter, “Ferdinand Brunetière,” 68. 98. Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière? 23. 99. Yves Guyot, “Les compagnons de Brunetière,” Le Siècle, August 27, 1898. 100. Yves Guyot, Les raisons de Basile (Paris: PV Stock Éditeur, 1899), 6. 101. Ferdinand Brunetière, Lettres de combat (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1912), 15. 102. Ferdinand Brunetière, “Chronique,” Revue des Deux Mondes, January 31, 1898. 103. Brunetière, Lettres de combat, 58. 104. Ibid., 86. 105. Ibid., 61. 106. Ibid., 62. 107. Ibid., 91. 108. Ferdinand Brunetière, “Chronique,” Revue des Deux Mondes, April 30, 1898. 109. Ferdinand Brunetière, Letter to the editors, Vogue, March 15, 1898, quoted in Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière?, 268. 110. Article (n.d.) by author identified as T. H. from L’Aurore in the Archive de la Préfecture de Police de Paris (hereafter cited APP), Ba 986. 111. Piece called “Opinion de M. Brunetière,” drawn from an interview of Brunetière, segments of which were also printed in Le Temps and in La Libre Parole January 1, 1899, APP, Ba 986. 112. Ferdinand Brunetière, La Liberté de l’enseignement (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1900), 6. 113. Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière?, 197.

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114. Alphonse Aulard, “M. Brunetière et le Collège de France,” L’Aurore, February 8, 1904. 115. René Doumic, quoted in Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière?, 198. 116. Ibid. 117. Ferdinand Brunetière, Le droit de l’enfant (Paris: au siège du Comité, 1903). 118. Brunetière, La Liberté de l’enseignement, 4–5. 119. Barrès, ““Notes sur la fondation.” 120. Barrès, Mes cahiers, 1:87–88. Ligue de la patrie founders Dausset, Syveton, and Vaugeois are the young universitaires (professors) here. 121. Barrès, Mes Cahiers, 1:87. 122. Royal and Maurice Toussaint, Decentralisation: Polemique entre royaliste et républicain par Colonel Royal et Maurice Toussaint avec un lettre par Maurice Barrès, third edition (Malzéville-Nancy: E. Thomas, 1907). 123. Barrès, Mes cahiers, 1:84. 124. Ibid., 83. 125. Ibid., 86. 126. Barrès, Scènes et doctrines, 30. 127. Ibid., 25. 128. Ibid., 62. 129. Ibid., 89. 130. Maurice Barrès, La Terre et les Morts (Paris: Bureaux de la Patrie française, 1899), 24. 131. “It is necessary to watch the University,” he warned, “it contributes to destroy the French principles, ‘decereber’ us, under the pretext of making us citizens of humanity, it uproots us from our soil and from our ideals” (Barrès, Mes cahiers, 54). 132. Ferdinand Brunetière, Discours de combat (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1900), 162. 133. Ibid., 165. 134. Ibid., 157. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., 176. 137. Barrès, Scènes et doctrines, 303. 138. André Gide, Les nouvelles nourritures (Paris: Gallimard, 1935). 139. Henry Bordeaux, Les écrivains et les moeurs: Notes, essays, et figurines, 1900–1902 (Paris: Plon, 1902), 103. The ideas were originally expressed in Paul Bourget, Le disciple (Paris: Plon, 1888). 140. Ibid. 141. Brunetière, Lettres de combat, 28. 142. Barrès, Scènes et doctrines, 30. 143. Ferdinand Brunetière’s comments on the failure of science had in fact been made in 1895 in his piece “Après une visite au Vatican,” but they were revived by the Dreyfusards during the initial months of 1898 (Revue des Deux Mondes, January 1, 1895, 97–118). 144. Brunetière, Après le procès, iv. 145. Ibid. 146. Barrès, Scènes et doctrines, 34. Originally published as Maurice Barrès, “L’état de la question,” Le Journal, October 4, 1898. 147. Ibid., 35. Originally published as Maurice Barrès, “La raison nationale,” Le Journal, December 9, 1898. 148. Ibid., 58. 149. Ibid. 150. Brunetière, Lettres de combat, 64. 151. Brunetière, Discours de combat, 247. 152. Darlu, M. Brunetière et l’individualisme, 12. 153. Ibid., 17–18. 154. Guyot, Les raisons de Basile, 8. 155. Ibid., 24.

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156. Griffiths, “Maurice Barrès,” 211, and Sternhell, Les anti-Lumières, 8. 157. Maurice Barrès, Ce que j’ai vu à Rennes (Paris: Bibliotheque Internationale d’Edition, E. Sansot, 1904), 84. 158. Soucy, Fascism in France, 77. 159. Barrès, Mes cahiers, Volume 1, 87. 160. Brunetière, Lettres de combat, 64. 161. Brunetière, Discours de combat, 230. 162. Those of the sociological school of intellectual identity described in the introduction. 163. Curtis, Three against the Third Republic, 34. 164. Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), 67; Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière?, 97. 165. Letter from Brunetière to Mme Buloz in the fall of 1898, quoted in Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière?, 175. 166. Charle, “Academics or Intellectuals?,” 109. 167. Bodin, “L’Affaire Dreyfus,” 320–25. 168. Robert J. Smith, The École Normale Supérieure and the Third Republic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 92. 169. Charle, “Academics or Intellectuals?,” 105; Bodin, “L’Affaire Dreyfus,” 327. 170. Charle, “Academics or Intellectuals?,” 99. 171. Ibid., 105. 172. Griffiths, Use of Abuse, xi. 173. Charle, “Academics or Intellectuals?,” 104. 174. Article clipping from Gil Blas “La politique: La Ligue de la patrie française,” January 3, 1899, AN, F7 12721. 175. Annales de la Patrie Française no. 1 (Paris: Bureau de la Patrie française, 1900) (hereafter cited Annales). 176. The first was that individual liberties were violated by the loi de scolarite (law of schooling/education) and that the Republic of the day was “sectarian, persecuting, Masonic, and exploited by a party.” The following statements said that the Third regime had as its friends the anarchists who desired the collapse of the army, the strikers who refused the right to work to others, and the international collectivists represented in the ministry by Millerand. It concluded with the statement that even monarchies allowed the freedom of assembly denied under the Third Republic to the nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard leagues (Lemaître, quoted in ibid). 177. Revue des Deux Mondes, Le livre du centenaire: Cent ans de vie française à la Revue des Deux Mondes, preface by René Doumic, with contributions by Louis-Jules Arrigon (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1929), 423–26. 178. Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière?, 94. 179. Brunetière, quoted in ibid., 92. 180. The following year, 1900, when Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau’s ministry initiated the laws on associations that primarily punished anti-Dreyfusard organizations, the RDM published a series of articles deploring this abuse of political power and loss of guaranteed rights to assemble. 181. A. B. Jackson, La Revue Blanche, 1889–1903: Origine, influence, bibliographie (Paris: M. J. Minard, Lettres Modernes, 1960), 101. 182. Lucien Herr would attack Barrès and the anti-Dreyfusards in Revue Blanche saying, “You have against you,” he wrote, “the true men of reflection, the unrooted and disinterested who know how to put the law and the ideal of justice before themselves, before their instincts, and their group egoism.” Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 15. Félix Fénéon was the editor and attracted contributors like Octave Mirbeau, Pierre Quillard, Jean Psichari, Julien Benda, André Gide, Lucien Herr, Gustave Kahn, Léon Blum, and Bernard-Lazare. 183. Julien Benda, “Notes d’un Byzantin,” Revue Blanche 17, December 1898, 616. 184. Ibid. 185. Léon Blum, quote in Jackson, La Revue Blanche, 106.

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186. Arthur Meyer, quoted in Jean-Francois Sirinelli, Histoire des droites en France: Cultures (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 2:115. 187. Laure Rièse, Les salons littéraires parisiens: Du Second Empire à nos jours (Paris: Privat, 1962), 118. 188. Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 46. 189. Ibid., 45. 190. Rièse, Les salons littéraires parisiens, 119. 191. Hocking, Ferdinand Brunetière, 69. 192. Harris, Dreyfus, 277. 193. Ibid. 194. Sisley Huddleston, Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios (London, J. B. Lippincott, 1928), 155. 195. Sirinelli, Histoire des droites en France: Cultures, 2:126. 196. Noël Riley Fitch, Literary Cafés of Paris (Washington, DC: Starrhill Press, 1989). 197. Nicole Racine and Michel Trebitsch, eds. Sociabilités intellectuelles: Lieux, milieux, réseaux (Paris: Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, 1992), 255. 198. Flier for the Association nationalists de la jeunesse from April 6, 1900, subtitled “conférence contradictoire hebdomadaire,” AN, F7 13229–30. 199. Racine and Trebitsch, Sociabilités Intellectuelles, 159. 200. Léon Blum and Daniel Halévy, quoted in Cahm, Dreyfus Affair, 85. 201. Harris, Dreyfus, 293. 202. Léon Daudet, Études et milieux littéraires (Paris: B. Grasset, 1927), 171. 203. Barrès, Scènes et doctrines, 86. 204. Ibid., 116. 205. Intellectuels en France, ed. Ory and Sirinelli, 23. 206. Yves Guyot, “La Ligue du sabre et du goupillon,” Le Siècle, January 6, 1899. 207. The petition was to raise funds and express support for Colonel Henry’s widow. Fourteen thousand signatures and 131,000 francs were collected within a month. 208. Charle, Naissance des “intellectuels,” 148. 209. Ibid., 146. 210. Charle says, “The success of petitions for Picquart had proved that university prestige was an effective tool to conquer public opinion; it was necessary to utilize this dynamic to the profit of nationalism” (ibid., 147). 211. “Statutes of the Ligue des droits de l’homme,” AN, F7 12487 212. Jean-Pierre Rioux, Nationalisme et conservatisme: La Ligue de la patrie française, 1899–1904 (Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1977), 31. 213. Correspondence by authorities concerning the Patrie française (all notes are entitled “d’un correspondant”), May 1899, AN, F7 13230. 214. Ibid., September 2, 1899. 215. Collection of Ligue pamphlets with covers intact, AN, F7 13229. 216. Article clipping from La Libre Parole, February 22, 1899; and a longer one from Le Temps, n.d., describing Brunetière’s resignation and the motive for his resignation, Ba, 986. 217. Harris, Dreyfus, 279. 218. The second lecture was given by Coppée and Marcel Dubois on “L’avenir de la Ligue de la patrie”; and the sixth was again given on November 13, 1899, at the Salle des agriculteurs de France by Lemaître on “L’oeuvre de la Patrie française.” 219. Lemaître, “L’oeuvre de la patrie française.” 220. René Doumic, Où sont les intellectuels? (Paris: Bureaux de la Patrie française, 1899), 8. 221. Ibid., 9. 222. Jules Lemaître, Conférence de la Patrie française (Paris: Bureaux de la Patrie française, 1899). 223. Barrès, La terre et les morts, 5. 224. Peter M. Rutkoff, “The Ligue des Patriotes: The Nature of the Radical Right and the Dreyfus Affair,” French Historical Studies 8, no. 4 (Autumn 1974): 585–603.

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225. Rutkoff, Revanche et Révision, 159. 226. Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 63. 227. Barrès, for example, replaced the imprisoned Paul Déroulède as leader of the Ligue des patriotes. Under the ministry of Waldeck-Rousseau and later of Émile Combes, extreme right-wing leaders like Déroulède and Guérin would be exiled and imprisoned, right-wing leagues would be banned, and religious orders associated with anti-Dreyfusism and anti-Semitism were persecuted and forced to seek government authorization to function. 228. René Doumic, L’esprit du secte (Paris: Bureaux de la Patrie française, 1900). 229. It is not surprising that when Waldeck-Rousseau and Combes sought to limit the influence of the extreme right wing, they included religious orders in their list of banned organizations, nor that separation of church and state was finalized in 1905 when the Dreyfusards were enjoying political prominence. 230. There were a few Jews who converted to Catholicism and joined the anti-Dreyfusards, for example, Brunetière’s close friend Flore Singer.

TWO Grooming the Right-Wing Intellectual The Nouvelle Sorbonne Debate, 1910–1914

The large-scale political engagement by intellectuals in the Dreyfus Affair had revealed underlying differences, despite shared cultural and professional behaviors, within the intellectual milieu. These differences were perceived by the participants to be more than mere political disagreements; they were also understood as a veritable abyss between their conceptualizations of culture and intelligence as well as of the responsibilities and values of the intellectual. The perceived differences on both sides engendered a desire to exclude the intellectual position of opponents, and also cultivated a perception of repression and rejection on the anti-Dreyfusard right. The right’s resentment of this exclusion did not disappear at the end of the Affair. Instead, the struggle for legitimacy and the process of differentiation and segregation on the extreme right continued into the next decade. The conflict reemerged during these years as a series of debates over revisions to the educational system pejoratively termed by right-wing intellectuals Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, writing under the pseudonym Agathon, the “Nouvelle Sorbonne.” While questions of educational and curricular reform might not seem grounds for passionate debate between the left and right, Gilbert D. Chaitin has argued that “what might first seem narrow questions of pedagogy such as curriculum or teaching methods became . . . a complex effort on a hitherto unprecedented scale to alter the identity of the modern nation.” 1 Republican and left-wing supporters argued that the reforms were a way of “transforming the identity of its citizens by inculcating those [democratic and universal] principles into their minds.” In response, “opponents on the right challenged that program precisely because of its dependence on universal principles.” 2 As representatives of culture, educa93

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tion, and intelligence, the intellectual was seen as the voice of authority in the debates, even more so than during the Dreyfus Affair. The struggle to monopolize the title and role was therefore increasingly important to the engaged elite on both the left and the right during the years leading up to World War I. The debate over the educational reforms in France that became known as the Nouvelle Sorbonne did not begin until the early 1900s, but the ideas behind the reforms first emerged in the shadow of the FrancoPrussian War. After the 1871 defeat, tensions with Germany not only continued to run high, but were also further exacerbated by the Dreyfus Affair’s focus on concerns over espionage and the Kaiser’s 1906 provocation of anti-French attitudes in Morocco. French hostility toward Germany and suspicion of its intentions were balanced by something akin to envy, of both its military prowess and its industrial growth. Many republican universitaires (university professors), shaken by the French defeat and the perceived social chaos of the Paris Commune, sought to model French educational reforms on the German university system that was seen as the core of its national unity and therefore its military strength. This was justified by the Two Germanies theory that presented a cultural Germany and a militarist Germany. The theory became increasingly popular and was used to justify borrowing from German society the aspects that were deemed useful for France, such as elements of German scientific education, while continuing to disavow and saber rattle against the rest. 3 Many believed that a more organized, scientifically structured educational program would provide the same cohesion and structure for France as they assumed it had for Germany. In 1876, historian Gabriel Monod returned from his visits to the Universities of Berlin and Göttingen with a new vision of histoire positive (positivist history) that was described and endorsed in his journal Revue Historique. In the first issue of this journal, Monod explained his new interest in reforming the French educational system based on the German model by writing, “It is Germany that has contributed the most to the historical work of our century. . . . Germany owes this superiority without doubt to its own genius, to its patient work of erudition; it owes it also to the development that political life and industrial life have had on the other side of the Rhine. . . . It owes it above all to the strong organization of its universities.” 4 Behind this strong organization and educational reform, according to Monod, was the German reliance on modern, scientific methods in the pursuit of knowledge, rather than the artistic sensibility and literary taste celebrated by the more traditional French. In the opening article of the first issue, Monod explained that the journal contributors “position[ed] themselves from a strictly scientific point of view” based on the German model of historical study. 5 His admiration for the Germanic system and his disillusionment with the French system was palpable in this opening issue: “One is able to compare Germany to a vast

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historical laboratory where all efforts are coordinated and concentrated and no effort is lost” he wrote. “No country has contributed more than Germany to give to historical study the character of scientific rigor. The development of historical studies in France is far from having had the same regularity . . . [in part because of] the absence of any superior teaching structure, of any scientific discipline, of any directing authority . . . which are given by the university.” 6 Monod’s conversion to scientific methodology was also intended to promote “disinterested, scientific research” in opposition to what he disdained as the more pervasive use of history in France at the time: to uphold certain political or religious ideas, particularly those of Catholicism and traditionalism prized by the monarchist and nationalist right. This monarchist and nationalist right, however, was also becoming increasingly engaged in shaping public opinion. During the Affair, Henri Vaugeois and Maurice Pujo wrote a speech titled “Action française” that called for the “reconstitution of France” through a renewal of traditions that would make it as strong a state as it had been under the ancien régime. 7 From this call to arms came first the Ligue de l’action française, then the journal, then by 1908 the daily paper. As early as 1906, David Drake contends, the Action française was recognized as the predominant force on the nationalist and monarchist extreme right. 8 And, one of the central concerns for the organization, due to its large student following and its association of the existing university system with Dreyfusism and the Republic, was the opposition to the new educational reforms brought forward by republican and left-wing intellectuals at the time. This opposition was one of the reasons that Ligue members created the Institut d’action française (AF) in 1906, which served as a counter-university for right-wing students. 9 Monod’s ideas and those of his cohort at Revue Historique influenced a new generation of educational reformers and republican politicians who introduced reforms to the French university system beginning in 1902. The new bloc des gauches (left-wing coalition) government, under radical Émile Combes, implemented reforms that simply continued the Dreyfusard-friendly, left-wing regime begun by Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau. Any reforms from this government of radicals, liberals, and socialists were therefore met with suspicion and hostility by the former anti-Dreyfusards of the extreme right. The German-inspired reforms of 1902 included: a new focus on practical sciences; an emphasis on modern languages; scientifically based methodologies in the humanities; and a new attempt to guide students toward a specialization. The reforms also introduced four baccalaureate options, including one that required the study of only sciences and modern language. Although the traditional option of studying the humanities and classical languages remained an alternative, rightwing men of letters were outraged by the assault on French traditional culture. Insult was added to injury in 1903 when the Dreyfusard universi-

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taires arranged for the integration of the elite École normale supérieure (ENS) into the Sorbonne, a move that, as seen in the last chapter, displaced Ferdinand Brunetière due to his political opinions. The conflation was intended to democratize the higher education system by making coursework and degrees more accessible to the average student, and to erode the intellectual elitism of the ENS. The shift was widely reproached on the right as an effort to destroy the natural hierarchy of intelligences and to create an unnatural republican-inspired egalitarianism, which would only result in widespread mediocrity. The Third Republic also succeeded, by 1905, in the separation of church and state. 10 This resulted in the forced resignation of many Catholic professors and the elimination of the more than ten thousand Catholic schools, that many on the right saw as a mainstay of traditional, conservative education. The final blow came in 1907, when reformers suppressed the Latin and French composition requirements for the license in letters. Right-wing traditionalists responded by declaring in their speeches and journals a “crisis of French” and calling for widespread intellectual engagement against the crippling of French education by the Third Republic. 11 Pierre Lasserre and Charles Maurras led the campaign against the reforms for the newly emergent Action française. The AF was created as an anti-republican and anti-Dreyfusard, though not yet monarchist, organization. However, within the first few years, with Maurras as its theoretician, its core membership slowly shifted toward monarchism while retaining a strong base of nationalist and anti-republican supporters. It received great notoriety as a movement for right-wing students in 1908 during the Thalamas Affair. Amédée Thalamas, a professor who had allegedly insulted Joan of Arc as a spiritual hero in his course at Lycée Condorcet, but was still given a course in pedagogy in 1908, was the focus of riots and demonstrations by the AF student organization the Camelots du roi (promoters of the king), created just two years before. Although the AF gained rapid popularity for its critique of republican educational reform, it was the work of “Agathon” in articles for L’Opinion in 1910, later collected into the book L’esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne published in 1911, that really solidified educational reform as the new divisive issue for intellectuals. Before 1910, Claire-Françoise BompaireEvesque argues, the attack on the reforms was from isolated individuals or extremist groups like the AF. After 1910, the debate engaged most of the intellectual elite and the journalists of France. 12 The series of articles written by right-wing intellectuals Massis and de Tarde rallied support for the humanities from the moderate, conservative, and extreme rightwing presses as well as the majority of the men of letters. The articles were a condemnation of the university’s failure to achieve its goals of a French national education. The cause of this failure, they claimed, was the heavy influence of German philosophy, pantheism, and the utilitarian and scientific methods so revered by the republican and left-wing intel-

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lectuals. The success of these articles spawned a 1913 faux enquête (fabricated survey), published as Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui (The Youth of Today), in which Agathon outlined the new right-wing model of the intellectual. 13 The work of Agathon and the AF forced the socialist and republican press and the left-wing universitaires to defend the educational reforms of 1902–1907 and, through this, their intellectual values, their understanding of the role of education, and their vision for France. The republican and left-inspired reforms to the education system seemed, to the former anti-Dreyfusard right, to be yet another attempt by the left to dominate society’s concept of culture and of the nation by monopolizing the intellectual formation of the French youth. The resentment of left-wing hegemony that had festered since the Dreyfus Affair found a new outlet, therefore, in the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates. Once again, it is important to consider whether these resentments and complaints of oppression have any basis in reality or if they were simply posturing for public effect. There is merit, for example, BompaireEvesque notes, in the right-wing complaint “that in 1910, the left was in power and that its ideology played the role of official doctrine.” 14 After the minister of public instruction, Théodore Steeg, refused to acknowledge a petition to reverse the reforms, claiming that the signers had ulterior political motives against the republic, Bompaire-Evesque says, “the cause . . . had from that point on been taken in hand by the government and the parliamentary majority. . . . It became clear that to critique the Sorbonne was to oppose oneself to the government,” and, one could infer, it would result in like repression. 15 As in the Dreyfus Affair, the traditionalists and their allies on the extreme right enjoyed numerical advantage in the debates; however, the left-wing reformers dominated positions in the university and, therefore, in the battle for intellectual authority there. Republican and socialist reformers, from Ernest Lavisse to Alfred Croisset to Émile Durkheim, held prominent and powerful positions in the university system, and they effectively implied that the new reforms were backed by the university as a whole. Lavisse’s history books were provided for free to all of the schools making them the standard textbook for this generation, and Gustave Lanson’s Histoire de la littérature française became the official literature text since a question from it was included on the exam in letters. 16 This real monopoly over certain areas of education was reinforced by the young universitaires who numerically dominated the scientific and modern disciplines receiving the most public attention in the debate. “The Sorbonne,” according to BompaireEvesque, “therefore had real power.” 17 The reforms of the Nouvelle Sorbonne had also been in place for several years before the protest of Agathon ignited right-wing engagement. 18 As it had with the Dreyfus Affair, the anteriority of the left’s claim to speak for intellectuals on education and the delayed reaction of the intellectual extreme right damaged the effectiveness of its engagement. So, while not every claim of oppression

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by the right can be taken at face value, the opponents of the Nouvelle Sorbonne did face a powerful alliance and began the debates at a disadvantage. The claim of repression and intentional ostracism also had some basis in reality. Lasserre’s work condemning romanticism, one of the new German literary ideals, was not only dismissed by the Sorbonne professoriate, but it was also sanctioned by them. Touting this instance of repression as indicative of a wider university-government conspiracy against the right, Maurras and the AF invited Lasserre to speak at the Institut d’AF instead. 19 While much political hay was made out of certain perceived slights or inequities, there was an element of truth to the right’s perception that, at least in the university world, intellectual life was dominated by the left. Following fast on the heels of the Dreyfus Affair, many anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals perceived the educational reforms as an attempt by the now-dominant Dreyfusard left, and their government allies, to further reduce the cultural influence and social role of the more traditional and often religious intellectual extreme right. Following this lead, the majority of historians also find the debates over education to be a continuation of the Dreyfus Affair conflict. Bompaire-Evesque has suggested that the debates effectively “transferred the intellectual and moral cleavages that dated from the Dreyfus Affair and had hardly changed since then.” 20 However, it is overly simplified to suggest that the old battle lines between the Dreyfusard left and the antiDreyfusard right were simply redrawn in the decade before World War I around the new issue of French education. Certainly, the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates regrouped many into their previous Dreyfusard or antiDreyfusard camps because of the origin of the reforms in the Dreyfusardfriendly Waldeck-Rousseau and Combes governments. However, others displayed a realignment of attitudes and priorities, which meant that many who were considered “of the left” or “of the right” during the Dreyfus Affair switched sides in the Nouvelle Sorbonne debate. Some, including Charles Péguy and the anarchists, found themselves on a new side in the second debate, while others focused on themes such as regionalism that crossed political lines. These crossover intellectuals have led several historians to emphasize the possibility of common ground between the two sides of the intellectual debate. The declaration that the new educational reforms would be based on the universal ideals of the democratic Republic not only agitated the nationalist right but also the anarchist left, providing a common ground between the two extremes. Chaitin has found that “both the nationalist right and the anarchist left asserted that, by ignoring or overriding particulars of history, region, and race, republican universalism eliminated the creative spontaneity of history, the uniqueness of different cultures and individuals, and true human freedom.” 21 In response, they broke with the Republic and its educational reform program protesting

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that it took from students the very individuality that the government had supposedly defended during the Dreyfus Affair. 22 The defense of an education and a history drawn from the particulars of the nation, region, and culture of the people, rather than abstract universals, also drew in another movement that crossed the political divide: the regionalist movement. Regionalism, according to Julian Wright, has “typically been characterized as right-wing” during this period because of its connections to the AF and the perception that it was “backward looking” and therefore inherently traditionalist and reactionary. However, he says, despite the support of many regionalists for the AF and the extreme right during this time, regionalism was also at home in the vast middle landscape of the modérés (moderate center) and on the left. 23 Wright concludes, in clear opposition to Zeev Sternhell, that for regionalists, “moving away from Enlightened ideals” did not always mean a slide into the camp of the extreme right. 24 Finally, Robert Wohl has suggested that both the left and right intellectuals shared common cultural attitudes that were based on their shared generation of 1914. Both the left and the right tended to see their world as decadent and in decline, a theme that extended into the interwar years, and as a result began to court danger and action in their politics and their engagement. They both also anticipated the war, Wohl says, as a way of breaking the political impasse and party squabbles in order to return France to its former unity. 25 Others point out that the boundary between the left and the right was also more permeable than one might expect. Several intellectuals considered “of the left” at the time, like Alain (pen name of Émile Chartier), André Suarès, Jules Romains, and Paul Claudel, also criticized the reforms while not aligning themselves officially with the right. Alain, Bompaire-Evesque explains by way of an example, did so for his own reasons, not because he wanted to question democracy or support clericalism. 26 Georges Sorel, on the other hand, fully renounced his Dreyfusard past, insulted Émile Zola, and fully joined the right in 1909—to the great delight of the former anti-Dreyfusards. 27 But, perhaps more than any other figure, Péguy has garnered attention for his shift from the Dreyfusard left to the side of the extreme right. Michel Winock describes his welcome to the other side saying, “Always in search of hegemony, they would not be upset to count in their ranks this original recruit come from the opposite camp.” 28 But, he admits, this meant that those like Maurice Barrès in the new camp needed to conveniently forget all that Péguy had written before 1905. Péguy himself seemed somewhat ambivalent about his rightwing adoption. When Barrès and other right-wing critics praised his 1910 Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc, he followed it immediately with a defense of his Dreyfusism in Notre jeunesse. Yet, Péguy still became an active supporter of the causes of the right, despite his past Dreyfusard values. These included critiquing the hegemony over the cultural field of the “parti intellectuel” (party of the intellectuals) of the left including Jean

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Jaurès; Francis de Pressensé; Lucien Herr; and the spokesmen of the Nouvelle Sorbonne, Charles Seignobos and Lavisse. 29 Although the presence of these crossover intellectuals and common cultural attitudes seems to indicate a fluidity of the boundary between the extreme left and the extreme right, this was not the reality that the intellectuals at the time understood. Rather than prioritize their common generational attitudes, those intellectuals engaged in the Nouvelle Sorbonne debate, and particularly those interested in asserting a right-wing intellectual identity, focused once again on the divisions that they continued to see between the two camps. And when intellectuals crossed over from one camp to another, it was only after they recognized that their intellectual priorities were no longer represented in the original camp, ultimately resulting in a clear and irreconcilable break. There are several historians who support this assessment that, far from providing common ground, the intellectual field of the pre-World War I years was fundamentally divided. Martha Hanna has argued that even the Union sacrée (sacred union) movement, which brought together intellectuals of the left and right in a common effort to support the war and denounce the German enemy, was only a temporary cover for deep differences between the left and the right. Although Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli said that the political animosity and division between engaged camps was effectively set aside during the war and did not appear again until the early 1920s, Hanna says the differences were always there and were too deep and destructive for the union sacrée to have been more than an ephemeral facade. 30 Drake has suggested other significant divisions within the anti-Germanist view that both sides seemed to share as the war approached. The left not only supported the Two Germanies theory that allowed the bad Germany to be an enemy in war while the good Germany provided a model for scientific education, but it also distinguished its German enemy as being the ruling and military class and the Kaiser, allowing them to continue to maintain their internationalist appreciation for the German people. The right, on the other hand, saw the German people, or more precisely the German race, to be the cause of its conflict with France. 31 Consequently, even when both the right and left entered into the union sacrée to promote the war, they saw the conflict in different ways. Finally, Bompaire-Evesque has argued that scholars should recognize multiple elements for the conflicts of 1910, but while she includes a tension between the classicists and the moderns as well as a generational tension between the youth and the generation of their professors, she also emphasizes the conflict and cleavage between the left and the right. 32 The presence of Péguy on the side of the extreme right also indicates that the camps themselves were not internally homogenous, any more so than those during the Affair. While Péguy attacked the Nouvelle Sorbonne in 1911, he did so in his own way, without cooperating in any way

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with the AF or Massis. He primarily chastised his fellow Dreyfusards Jaurès and Herr for trying to dominate culture through the university and accused them of being not independent socialists, but rather part of the “parti intellectuel” in collusion with the government. 33 Within the Amis du latin (Friends of Latin) organization, while one could find the expected names of Barrès and his antireform colleagues, there was also Victor Snell, a writer for L’Humanité and the anarchist Octave Mirbeau. The right itself remained fractured and often at odds underneath its shared mission to avert the educational reforms. Kevin Passmore has meticulously tracked many of the groups that he classifies as conservative at the time of the debates, finding radical royalists, moderate republicans, antisocialist progressists, organizationalists, recently revived Bonapartists, and the AF Maurrassians. Maurras himself, recognizing the incredible diversity of views with which the AF would have to cooperate, created a strategy of requiring purity of ideology within the AF, but also allowed for diversity of beliefs in those with whom the AF allied for political advantage. 34 Added to this were those groups following their own trajectories that happened to oppose the Nouvelle Sorbonne, including the anti-Semitic leagues and the Catholic organizations. By World War I, the AF was an enormous organization with multiple subsets, groups, publications, and pursuits. Therefore it is no surprise that, despite the overarching guidance of Maurras and his monarchist, Catholic ideology, the AF had internal contradictions and complexities. The AF adamantly supported the Catholic Church because of its significance for French history, its social structure, its authoritarian hierarchy, and its connection to the ancien régime rather than to the Enlightenment or the Revolution. Yet, Maurras himself was not a practicing Catholic and he eventually separated his appreciation of the Church from Christianity, which he saw as individualist and anarchic, to such an extent that he and the AF received a papal condemnation in 1926. There were also the seemingly out of place “Maurrassians de gauche” (Maurrassians of the left) including anarcho-syndicalists like Georges Valois and Sorel who formed the AF-affiliated Cercle Proudhon to combine left-wing syndicalist ideas with right-wing integral nationalism. It was this seemingly contradictory merger of two opposing political theories that several historians in the 1980s, including Sternhell, saw as the crucible for native French fascism, in part because after Valois severed ties with the AF, he started the Faisceau. 35 Despite their shared crusade in 1910 to take down the Nouvelle Sorbonne, Massis and Maurras also criticized one another. According to historian Michel Toda, Maurras disliked Massis’s toleration of republicanism and Massis echoed Barrès’s critique of Maurras’s influence on the youth. 36 While Massis came to be a devoted fellow traveler of the AF in the interwar years, he still never wrote for its daily or journal. But, as Nicolas Kessler noted, this was not uncommon in the AF. There were, he said “a variety of ways one could have allegiance to Maurrassianism,

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from sympathy for its principles to active engagement and all stages in between.” 37 Crowded together under the Maurrassian umbrella, therefore, were strict devotees, dissidents, Catholics, nonbelievers, monarchists, nationalists, anti-Semites, Germanophobes, classicists, syndicalists, and a wide swath of the extreme right who saw the AF as the best opportunity to achieve their own agenda. Clearly, neither the reformist left nor the antireform right were homogenous entities and both struggled with a diversity of views and contradictions within their camp. In the debate over the Nouvelle Sorbonne, however, the shared perception that their rights were being repressed and the demand for recognition as intellectuals brought the intellectuals of the right together in a common crusade. In the same way, it cannot be said that the extreme right was entirely divided from the left, or at least from those who were considered of the left only a few years earlier during the Affair. Yet, despite their shared cultural attitudes and crossover intellectuals, most of the participants in the debate saw clear cleavages between themselves and their opponents, and those divisions were amplified and prioritized instead of their similarities. One of the important cleavages was in the perception of an abyss between the educational priorities and intellectual values of the two sides. The Nouvelle Sorbonne that was under attack in Agathon’s articles, and in the right-wing press campaign that followed, was not so much the institution itself or even a series of reforms, but rather a collection of intellectual values that Agathon referred to as a “spirit.” 38 The reaction certainly targeted the tangible reforms of 1902 and 1907, but these specific attacks developed from the right’s rejection of the general principles of education and culture that were shared by the republican and left-wing reformers. The reformist left, like its right-wing opposition, included a diverse range of political ideologies from liberal republicanism to socialism. However, those leftists who engaged in the battle over intellectual identity could agree on certain general values and concepts of the intellectual that gave them common ground in the debate on educational reforms and also separated them from the intellectual right on these issues. Their tendency toward the university not only led them to envision the role of the intellectual as that of the university professor and the erudite, but also to link intellectual responsibility and practice to objective science, specialization, and international cultural exchange. This meant that they specified the essential values of the true intellectual as those of rationalism, democratic egalitarianism, and modernism. It was against these left-wing, democratic views of education and intellectual responsibility that the right-wing rebelled. Perhaps most essential to the reformist concept of the intellectual was the devotion to rationalism and the scientific methodologies it engendered. This value, and the roles and responsibilities it implied for the intellectual as educator, became one of the main sources of division be-

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tween the left and right during the debates. In a speech before the Ligue de l’enseignement (League for Teaching), Alfred Croiset, doyen of the Sorbonne, specifically attacked Agathon and drew a clear line of division between the intellectual values of the two camps. The opponents of the Sorbonne, he summarized, were anti-intellectual because they were “the enemies of Rationalism.” 39 According to the republican and left-wing intellectual reformers, to be a true intellectual and educator required that one be a rationalist who values logical deduction, fact-driven research, and the consistency of the scientific method. Facts, procedures, and steps of analysis could all be taught uniformly across a particular discipline and did not vary according to the taste, preferences, or particularities of the instructor. This uniform consistency and verifiable results, according to the reformers, meant that scientific rationalism brought one closer to the Truth than irrational methods based on traditional interpretations did. Rationalism and science therefore became synonymous with intelligence and the intellectual, while taste and sentiment were rejected as anti-intellectual and of little value in educating the nation. Lavisse, director of the ENS, wrote articles in Le Temps suggesting that a strong education following the steps of the scientific method would encourage students to question their professors and, as a result, the professors could guide their students through the steps of analysis. This would ensure that professors taught according to the verifiable facts of their disciplines, even in literature and the arts, rather than their intuition, sentiments, or personal tastes. Croiset echoed this new vision of the responsibility and practice of the reformed universitaire, saying, “Our role is not to form men of taste, amiable dilettantes. . . . Taste is too individual an affair to be made a part of university instruction.” 40 This newly defined role required not only an evolution in teaching practices; it also demanded a transformation of the disciplines themselves. Charles Seignobos, a reformist professor of history whose work was often used in the Sorbonne as official textbooks, 41 argued for the transformation of history from a vague philosophy to a scientific and rational pursuit of factual truths. Only scientific methods applied in a thoroughly rationalist approach, he wrote, would “lead to the scientific truth,” which is the aim of all historical investigation. 42 The application of the scientific method to history would make it less subjective and provide a clear methodology for students to follow that would consistently lead them to the same truths. Rules and procedures for study would prevent history from being what it had been in the past—simply an instinctual imitation of the ideas of previous masters. Instinct and talent, Seignobos wrote, “were not rational procedures” and resulted in contradictory claims and ill-founded theories. 43 The positivist dimension that Monod added to the study of history was referred to scathingly by Agathon and the intellectual right as the German “fetish of ‘méthode historique’ (historical method).” 44 Perhaps most irksome to the intellectual right, however, was the method of

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bibliography, which became a central component of historical and literary studies and a more vital component of examinations than essays or compositions. The tendency to have advanced students in history compile bibliographies and historiographies on a given subject rather than produce a new interpretation was an overt effort to support a rational approach to history through the scientific collection of data. Yet it was also seen by the opponents of reform as a covert attempt to reform the university system into a more egalitarian, democratic, and therefore utilitarian institution. Equally important to the left-wing concept of the intellectual was devotion to democratic egalitarianism, first identified with intellectual identity by the Dreyfusards. The egalitarianism that united the reformers, and thereby placed them in opposition to the traditionalists and the extreme right, was perhaps best revealed by the reform that integrated the elite ENS into the democratic Sorbonne. This reform leveled the graduation requirements of the ENS with those of the Sorbonne, merged both the students and the professors of the two schools, and equated the degrees conferred by each institution. Yet the passion for democratic equality in education was also essential to less dramatic reforms including: the new preference for bibliography; the reorganization of the baccalaureate; the decline of study in Latin and classics; and the rejection of the traditional literary canon. In their defense of each of these reforms, the Nouvelle Sorbonne intellectuals linked their egalitarianism and democratic ideals to their concept of the role of the university and the professor in modern society. While the intellectual of the anti-reform right saw the university as providing an education in humanities for the nation’s elite, the intellectual of the reformist left saw it as a training ground for the entire citizenry in the necessary skills needed for daily life. In contrast with the intellectuals of the right who saw the role of the educator to be one who identified and refined the talented few, the intellectuals of the reformist left promoted a concept of the educator as the instructor of the masses in utilitarian skills. One of the leaders of the reform, Lanson, considered bibliographies to be an introduction to history and literature that was accessible to all students and required no theorization or analysis that might reveal differences in the abilities of the students. Rather than useless exercises in theory, composition, and analysis, the reformers proposed utilitarian methods of study that would better serve the needs of the mass of students who were destined for jobs in science, industry, or business, rather than lives as savants or philosophers. Therefore, new utilitarian methods like laboratory learning, bibliography, and sociological study were essential if the university was to fulfill its function of equally educating all of society. 45 “I am not able to conceive of a teaching that is not clearly utilitarian,” Lanson wrote; “education ought to prepare us to solve, in the measure that is given to each of us, the great social and moral questions

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that are posed today.” 46 These questions of the day, according to Lanson, were modern issues of republican citizenship. According to the reformists, the true intellectual guides of France should provide an education designed to meet the needs of the modern republican citizen, not instruction in dead languages or collapsed civilizations. Lanson and the reformers were adamant that fields of study in Latin language and ancient history were not only unnecessary for French studies, but they also were, in fact, an elitist pursuit that had no practical application. French was a republican language, Lanson wrote, while Latin was aristocratic and elitist and did not correspond to the needs of a modern democracy. An article by fellow reformist professor Jules Delvaille emphasized this point, saying, “What good is it to have the young men continually live in Rome . . . when one allows them to ignore the things of their own country.” 47 The reformist left’s understanding of its role as educators of the republican citizenry also led it to reject the traditional literary canon. Lanson identified the works of the seventeenth century that were the mainstay of a literary education as “monarchial and Christian” and therefore completely unacceptable in a democratic republic that admitted no state religion. Lanson saw no patriotic value in the works of the pre-Revolutionary era and used only the works of the nineteenth century. Those professors of pre-Revolutionary French literature, who tended, like the classicists, to be antireformist educators in an increasingly left-wing university system, were labeled backward, reactionary, monarchist, and anti-intellectual. 48 Faced with a series of government- and university-sponsored reforms that they felt were hostile to their own intellectual values and educational practices, the extreme right turned once more to its tropes of hegemony, ostracism, and repression. The intellectual extreme right believed it was more excluded and marginalized in the reformist intellectual world than it had been during the Affair, since now they not only were denied the right to engage in a debate, but they were also increasingly marginalized in the education of the youth. Massis and Maurras responded by accusing the reformers on the left of intellectual hegemony and by taking a new interest in guiding the student population and developing new socio-professional alternatives to the modernist, egalitarian university for the next generation of intellectuals. RESENTMENT AND REACTION ON THE TRADITIONALIST RIGHT: HENRI MASSIS Massis has been recognized by his biographer Toda as a “witness of the intellectual Right,” 49 yet, in truth, he was more a provocateur of intellectual issues and a linchpin to the complex networks of right-wing intellectual life than a mere witness. Massis provoked the explosion of the Nou-

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velle Sorbonne debates in 1910; outlined his vision of the intellectual of the right in 1912; led the crusade for the continued mobilization of intelligence in 1919; introduced the discourse of a “defense of western civilization” 50 to the arsenal of the right in 1927; provoked the engagement of right-wing intellectuals on the side of fascist Italy in 1935; wrote the speech that created the Pétainist myth of the sword and shield in 1944; and added his weight to the petitions in favor of French Algeria in 1961. His lifetime was spent raising new issues and clarifying the values of the intellectual right while creating spaces, networks, and personal connections to mentor the next generation of right-wing intellectuals. Historians have tended to approach Massis in a way that highlights one of his great strengths, his ability to mediate and forge connections. Paul Mazgaj highlights Massis’s visionary cultural politics that introduced to the extreme right its new language of pan-Europeanism, decline of civilization, cultural decadence, and renewal by the next generation. Massis, Mazgaj claims, was not only a creator of this new cultural politics, but also its greatest disseminator, through his self-created role as mentor for the rising generation of 1930, which included Thierry Maulnier, Robert Brasillach, and the Jeune Droite coterie. 51 Mazgaj concludes that though Massis was a “journeyman intellectual of unexceptional talents,” he could “combine persuasive cultural anxieties and fears of national decline with hopes for renewal through the agency of youth,” and this made him the epicenter of a vast network of older and younger scholars from diverse paths of the extreme right. 52 For Wohl, Massis was one of the great guiding sources for the generation of 1914, and for Kessler he was such a figure for the generation of 1930. In truth, he was both. “His welcome and his friendliness to those who came to his door made him an ‘older brother’ for all the youth who gravitated around the AF,” Kessler says, and “without breaking the bridge with Maurras . . . he contributed to the originality of the young Maurrassian generation.” 53 Kessler also highlights his ability to mediate between two other strands of the extreme right, the AF and the Church, after the papal condemnation in 1926 drove away many prominent Catholic intellectuals like Jacques Maritain. 54 Massis as a friend and mentor provided a common link for the diverse strands of the extreme right in the years before World War I. His cause was aided further by the language of resentment of repression that he made central to his engagement, which appealed across the extreme right groups. Massis, partially in response to the educational reforms, turned to a life of literature and journalism rather than teaching. His first literary study on Zola was the only work that he had to present when he was introduced to Barrès, but Barrès found promise in the young writer, despite his topic, and aided him in his entry into the world of letters. During the years between this introduction to the literary world and his explosion on the scene as “Agathon,” Massis received introductions and

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began writing for various journals in the right-wing network including L’Écho de Paris, Figaro, Gil Blas, and Paris-Journal. By 1909, he had taken political direction of Petit Journal, by 1912, he became the sécretaire de rédaction of L’Opinion, and, by 1914, he was the literary critic for L’Éclair. 55 It was, however, his work as “Agathon” in 1911 and 1913 that secured his reputation and leadership in the world of right-wing engaged journalism. De Tarde arranged for an introduction to Massis after reading his articles in Paris-Journal and the two agreed to collaborate as Agathon on an article against the Sorbonne reforms that appeared in L’Opinion on July 23, 1910. Had it not received the immediate condemnation of Lavisse and, therefore, great public interest, this article might have been the only one written. However, the raging debate sparked a series of articles that continued until the end of December and the mystery of Agathon remained until the spring when the authors revealed themselves to great outrage among the reformist milieu who had expected them to be prestigious men of letters, not young journalists. The two were made immediate stars of the intellectual right and were invited to join the board of the Ligue pour la culture française (League for French Culture), which was formed by several Academy members. Agathon reunited for one last large work before parting ways; Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui was published in L’Opinion in 1912 before being released as a book in 1913. This fabrication, presented as an enquête (survey), claimed to see a new spirit among the rising generation of intellectuals who were disgusted with the current state of affairs. Although Agathon’s enquête claimed to be reporting a measured change among the youth, it is today widely recognized that Massis was instead attempting to create this change and promote his own concept of right-wing intellectual identity among the next generation. Massis’s engagement in the debate was driven by his resentment of the hegemony that the intellectual left held over the education of university students. He resolved, in the summer of 1910, that it was “his duty to react against the Germanization of higher education at the Nouvelle Sorbonne, against this sterile erudition that demoralized the souls and enslaved the intelligences.” 56 He felt sure that his mentor Barrès would appreciate his new crusade and was crushed when Barrès dismissed his frustrations as only those of every student. Massis recalled his shock that the great opponent of Dreyfusards’ domination did not recognize the new hegemony they exerted now in the university as reformers: “How could he not comprehend that the Sorbonne of François-Alphonse Aulard, Seignobos, Lanson, and Durkheim constituted a party that was going to give its direction to politics, to the mind, to the temporal, to the spirit of France, and that the party tended toward nothing less than the subversion of all that which he, Barrès, defended?” 57 It could only be, Massis decided, that Barrès did not know the Nouvelle Sorbonne well

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enough to recognize the power that its monopoly assured the left. “This attempt against culture, against intelligence,” Massis mourned, Barrès “did not see it or, if he saw it, he saw it too late.” 58 To save true culture and intelligence, he determined, a coordinated campaign was necessary to reveal the nature of the Nouvelle Sorbonne and the threat it posed to true right-wing intellectual values. The articles by Agathon in L’Opinion in 1910 were written with the intention of sparking this campaign. They are perhaps his most significant statement of resentment against the hegemony of the intellectual left in the university. The articles were a public statement of “repugnance for the suffering of constraint that our masters of higher education, dazzled by Germanic science, have imposed on young minds.” 59 More than this, the articles were a warning about the wider “intellectual despotism” and “enslavement of intelligence” by the left through the means of the university. 60 Massis particularly rejected the influence of Durkheim on the next generation. Durkheim’s required course in pedagogy was the perfect opportunity to instill the value system of the reformers in all the students who would become professors. “Students today,” Massis later wrote, “are not able to imagine the domination of Durkheim at that time, the extent of his power and the authority that his sociology exercised over certain students.” 61 Clearly, Massis continued, Durkheim was an “omnipotent personage,” an “all powerful master” who exerted a “despotic” monopoly over the image of the educator and the formation of the intellectual elite. 62 Massis was particularly incensed that Durkheim was part of the committee that surveyed all of the nominations for higher education positions and that students had to reproduce his sociological interpretations of pedagogy in order to be admitted to exams. “Through Pedagogy,” Massis fumed, “even more by the prerogatives of administrative authority which have been attributed to him, M. Durkheim has strongly established his intellectual despotism. He has made of his teaching an instrument of rule.” 63 Massis warned that Durkheim used his monopoly over the university to insert the new discipline of sociology favored by the scientifically minded reformers. Sociology, Massis concluded, was the “scorn for ideas and individuals, the vehicle of despotism.” 64 Sociology and Durkheim were both rejected by the leaders of the Sorbonne, Massis claimed, until the Dreyfus Affair, when it was decided that anyone who was as ardent a Dreyfusard as Durkheim must have reason on their side and “follow a common ideal” with the other Sorbonnards. 65 After this, he claimed, sociology was welcomed as the official philosophy of the Sorbonne and made a tool of moral reeducation and control. “An appetite for domination, the ideal of moral enslavement, a narrow dogmatism” Massis wrote, “this is the philosophy of the Sorbonne” as represented by sociology. 66 It was this sort of “dogmatic authoritarianism,” “intellectual despotism,” and “moral enslavement” by the left that Massis demanded

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the intellectuals of the right engage against. If they failed to collectively oppose the left, he warned, future generations might not even recognize the invisible system of intellectual oppression. “In truth,” he concluded, “Erudition as exclusive master of the intelligences would reign over the people as slaves. . . . It would be intellectual servitude.” 67 The values of the left would be engrained from the earliest age and become the unquestioned model of intelligence and culture. Durkheim was not the only harmful influence dominating the university system in Massis’s opinion. “It is impossible to misconstrue the hold of Lucien Herr on souls nor the dominating leadership that the famous librarian of the ENS exercised over the minds and wills of his generation,” Massis wrote. Herr, Massis claimed, was “intimately linked to the ‘parti intellectuel’” even though he “worked in the shadow” of the library because there he held decisive influence on the formation of French socialism among universitaires. “He made of the École normale,” Massis warned, “the cradle of university socialism on which Jaurès supported himself and where he recruited his cadres.” 68 Massis concluded, “It was the action of this group of intellectuals, of whom Herr was the leader, that made the Sorbonne and the ENS the foyer of the ‘parti pro-allemand.’” 69 After showing the dominance of the leading left-wing intellectuals, Massis expanded his complaint against left-wing hegemony to the university as a whole. “We imagined an independent and free university,” he lamented, “we found it enslaved, degraded by politicians and the grossest demagoguery, by that which has a hatred of intelligence.” 70 As the ideological arm of the Republic, the Nouvelle Sorbonne proclaimed itself the center of true French intelligence and culture. All thought that opposed the ideals of republicanism were, by default, anti-intellectual and anti-French. Massis resented the left-wing bloc that he believed united the university and the government. He complained that the university under the control and influence of the reformers became “a vehicle for despotism” that protected and disseminated a set of ideals derived from Dreyfusism. 71 They dispensed with all ideas, particularly those from preRevolutionary history and literature, that did not meet their ideal of republican culture, and replaced them with modern science, proclaiming their ideal to be the true foundation of French thought. Massis wrote angrily, “They have decided to make a blank slate of all the inherited ideas—why? Because they have not been obtained scientifically. They say ‘we are the representatives of Science, we alone are able to speak as it is necessary of Justice, of Peace, of the Passions. We are the masters of Thought.’” 72 Most importantly, Massis warned, the intellectuals of the reformist left intended to actually become the “Masters of Thought” by rejecting all ideas and knowledge that had come before them. Only by destroying public faith in traditional values and methods could they assert them-

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selves as the new guides of French education. In imposing these values and seeking only their own aggrandizement, Massis wrote, these universitaires betrayed their role and responsibility as intellectuals. It was they, not the right, who were the “anti-intellectuals” or false intellectuals. He wrote of the new scientific methods, “In the eyes of these false intellectuals, it [science] was only a pretext to exercise an imperious privilege, to claim a temporal dominion, and to impose it with much more fanaticism. . . . That which the ‘parti intellectuel’ pursued was the enslavement of intelligences.” 73 It was the responsibility and role of the intellectual of the right to prevent this destruction and enslavement by providing voices of equal authority to those who spoke against the Nouvelle Sorbonne. However, he feared, it might be too late for this right-wing engagement. The left, according to Massis, controlled not only the programs and direction of the university and the title and image of the intellectual, but also the public’s perception of the role. The role of the intellectual, and the authority to guide public opinion, educate the nation, and influence affairs, was now closely associated with the university professor. “Society,” Massis fumed, “has been led to think that a university savant knows all and thus leave their sons with no defenses in the university. We cannot conceive that a man who puts the title of agrégé [graduate who can take a teaching position] on his calling cards could be tricked in his political party and does not have all the instruction that one is able to receive.” 74 The left had garnered the truest form of intellectual dominance according to Massis, it had seduced the public into believing that the true intellectual and representative of intelligence was the university man of science. Against this inculcation, it was practically impossible for the intellectuals of the extreme right to convince anyone that their values and positions outside the university were better suited for French intelligence. “The educator,” Massis complained, “is, for the worker, the depository of all science and if we come into a provincial salon to oppose a professor of philosophy, you will see quickly appear on all the faces the signs of severe disapprobation.” 75 This, he continued, was both a ridiculous and dangerous illusion that it was the responsibility of all right-wing intellectuals to combat. To do this, it was necessary to publicly legitimize the right-wing intellectual. Agathon wrote the articles in 1912 that became Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui with this purpose in mind. Although written as a testimony to events of the time, these articles were in fact an effort of propaganda by Agathon; a conscious effort to legitimize his own concept of intelligence and his own model of intellectual identity. Rather than revealing an actual generational shift, the work was a vision for the future, built around the ideals of the intellectual extreme right. Massis claimed that he was portraying the sentiments of the “new type of the young intellectual elite” whose ideal was synonymous with the will of a New France. 76 By proclaiming this vision to be the new sentiment among the youth, Aga-

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thon was countering the cultural capital of the university with the legitimizing power of the elite youth. In speaking with his young friend Ernest Psichari about his plans, Massis said, “I will speak of the Sorbonne, the university tyranny, the false erudition, and I will defend culture despite our professors. Yes, it will be . . . a long analysis of our sentiments, of our ideas, all this animated by an active love of intelligence, despite the intellectuals! And we will speak of the young men of today in search of an order, a discipline, a faith.” 77 The key was that the young men would be shown to be searching outside the confines of the university and its leftwing ideology to find alternatives on the extreme right. As the war drew nearer, Massis intensified his struggle to legitimize the intellectual worldview of the right. The intellectuals of the left, he warned, “betrayed their responsibility to culture” by defending internationalism and pacifism as invasion threatened. While the “legitimate role of the university would have been to put the masses on guard,” it instead “betrayed its role” by appealing to their egoism and urging them against the military service “law of three years.” 78 In contrast, as one right-wing author wrote, the intellectuals of the anti-reform right had “perceived our task, our proper role, our duty.” 79 The defense of the patrie required the mobilization of intelligence and the antireform right proved its legitimacy as the guardian of French culture by leading this effort. Massis’s palpable resentment of a perceived hegemony by the “masters of thought” on the left, desire to distinguish the traditionalist intellectual of the right from the “false intellectual” of the revisionist left, and effort to reappropriate the role of educator from the left was shared by his colleague Maurras. RESENTMENT AND REACTION ON THE MONARCHIST RIGHT: CHARLES MAURRAS The avowed influence of both Maurras and the AF on successive generations of young writers from the left and right speaks to the intellectual and political significance of both the man and his movement. Maurras gained his entry into intellectual life through journalism, not the university system, writing first for the Catholic L’Observateur Française and then Barrès’ La Cocarde. His star rose when he called for the Henry Monument and became a vocal anti-Dreyfusard. By 1900, he became the recognized leader of Vaugeois’s and Pujo’s Comité d’action française (Committee of French Action) and drafted the first version of his Enquête sur la monarchie (Survey on the Monarchy) that melded his ideas of integral nationalism, classicism, anti-Semitism, and monarchism into a new ideology that could only be called Maurrassian. 80 Both a political ideologue and also a man of letters and Academician, he embodied the concept of engagement as well as the identity of an intellectual of the extreme right.

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Maurras has held a fascination for many historians and they have presented him over the years in different ways. Sternhell still recognizes him primarily for his antidemocratic thought and integral nationalism that became the foundation for native French fascism, and he explains Maurras’s relationship with both Italian fascism and Vichy. 81 Bruno Goyet, inspired by Maurras’s categorization in a 1998 piece by Le Monde, explores many interpretations of the man. Maurras was identified in the Le Monde piece as one of the politicians rather than one of the intellectual engagés during the Affair, which Goyet terms “a completely deformed vision of the field of the Affair.” 82 While he created a league and a political ideology, Goyet argues, he was first and always a man of letters and an intellectual who presented himself as such despite his political involvements. The young Maurras of the prewar years has been presented over time by historians as: a revolutionary who allied with syndicalists to create a new version of monarchism that gained the respect of the young left; a conservative who played to his traditionalist, Catholic base despite his own lack of faith; a modern nationalist who saw the patrie as an organic collective in a way that foreshadowed the fascists; a Germanophobe and anti-Semite who knew how to pander to violent emotions but rarely turned words to action; a neoclassicist who looked to Rome for guidance in political and artistic life; an honored writer elected to the Academy before being stripped of his seat for his support for Vichy; and an anti-parliamentarian who was a significant political opponent for the Republic. 83 Winock has added to this an image of Maurras as a political strategist whose vision for the AF was a “Gramscism of the Right before such a thing existed.” He claims that, under Maurras, the AF identified its political goals as “working for 1950,” evoking the idea of long-term transformation of the culture rather than of immediate changes. 84 Although Agathon received the glory for popularizing the Nouvelle Sorbonne debate, the AF actually took the lead in attacking the Germaninspired scientific reforms of the university as early as 1907. These attacks were led by Lasserre and provided a continual polemic by AF members against the reformists from 1907 to 1914, as well as street and classroom protests by AF youth. All of the attacks on the Sorbonne found firm footing in the ideas and writings of Maurras during these years that praised classical and traditional education, rejected Germanism in all its forms, and strongly opposed the perceived left-leaning university. 85 Despite setbacks, including the papal condemnation, his movement continued unabated into the 1920s and 1930s. It was in the AF, which by the interwar years included Massis, that the young nonconformists of the 1930s found their first intellectual mentors and professional community. The AF itself was described by Eugen Weber as highly influential, internally paradoxical, and disinterested in actually taking over government power. The AF, like its leader, Weber said, was Germanophobic but paved the way for collaboration with Germany and was a champion of

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the Church and monarchism but was disavowed by both the Vatican and the pretender to the throne. 86 While opposition to the enlightenment and insistence on monarchy failed to attract some of the right such as Barrès and Péguy, the promise that the AF seemed to hold for anti-parliamentary right-wing political and cultural victory exerted a magnetism for others like Lemaître, Bourget, Léon Daudet, and Lucien Moreau that brought them into the organization’s orbit. From a small movement whose leadership met for “fortnightly dinners of their sympathizers,” the AF grew to a massive organization of journals, a daily paper, a league, the Institut, a press, a youth organization, and a variety of interconnected clubs and circles. It was unfortunate for our understanding of the organization, François Huguenin says, that it was dragged into association with fascism because it meant that both contemporaries and historians dismissed it to the extent that today there have been no real studies of the AF as “a school of thought.” 87 The tendency to reduce the AF to a political or activist movement instead of a school of thought with great influence in its time is, perhaps, why Goyet found Maurras under the category of politician rather than intellectual. And yet, both Maurras and the coterie of the AF were at the forefront in the struggle to present themselves as intellectuals during the Nouvelle Sorbonne debate. One of the clearest statements of resentment about hegemony over the concept of the intellectual was written by AF devotee Lasserre. “Before critiquing the attitude of the ‘intellectuals,’” he wrote of those supporting the reforms, using quotes to suggest the dubious nature of their claim to this title, “we must first state that the orators of the Action française are also intellectuals and that they have equal rights to participate in this debate.” 88 Only by claiming the status of the intellectual and the responsibility to engage would the AF be able to participate as equals, in the eyes of the public, in the debates over the Nouvelle Sorbonne and French education. Maurras’s own demand for intellectual authority was, like the enquête on youth by Agathon, both an attempt to reveal the existing hegemony of the left and an effort to claim legitimacy by suggesting that a shift to the right was already underway. He claimed that beginning in the years 1906 through 1909, the AF had accomplished a massive shift in Western history. “Intellectual prestige,” the statement read, “the honors of the mind, the ability to hypothesize on the future, had ceased to be reserved to the doctrines and tendencies of the left; the ideas of the right had taken their place.” 89 Maurras wanted to emphasize that, while the left had held the authority over the intellectual in the past, the extraparliamentary and anti-republican right, through the AF, was now becoming the new intellectual model. From now on, Maurras continued, no one would ask “if it was true that to be intelligent it was necessary to be Dreyfusard.” 90 Instead, the public had a superior alternative to the leftwing intellectual model that was so dominant, it now had the model of the royalist intellectual of the nationalist right. 91

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During the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates, it was the intellectuals of the university, and the concept of intelligence, culture, France, and engagement that they instilled in the youth, that Maurras found to be the most threatening to the future of right-wing intellectual identity. One of Maurras’s more forceful statements against the university dominance was made in his L’avenir de l’intelligence (The future of intelligence). This work was his summation of the history of French intelligence, his condemnation of the decadence into which it had fallen under the Republic, and his proposed model for the royalist, right-wing intellectual engagement that would save it for the future. Here, Maurras popularized his resentment of the monopoly that the left and the Republic held over the education of the youth in particular, and intellectual production and expression in general. The university, Maurras wrote, was a product “of the State” and “with the methods that the State could dispose of, created an immense obstruction in the scientific, philosophical, and literary domain.” The goal of the university to monopolize intellectual life, he continued, “to take literature, philosophy, and science captive” led it to “stifle” all opposition from the right. It exercised in this way, he concluded resentfully, “an indirect monopoly” over intellectual life and “determined speech or silence” of intellectuals. 92 The ties between the left-wing leaders of the university and the Third Republic made the hegemony of the left-wing reformers and universitaires even more ominous. The Republic’s bureaucracy reached into every village primary school and thus prevented the development in the next generation of any serious adversary to its “muzzling and sedating of intelligence” through the university. By controlling the education of the youth, access to publication, and the dispensation of intellectual honors, the Republic exercised an invisible hegemony over the intellectual field that made thinking outside the parameters of the intellectual left virtually “unthinkable.” Maurras would summarize this, saying that the republican university system “prevented the opposition from knowing a political truth, and if it saw this truth from telling others of it, and if it told others of it from being heard and understood by them.” 93 In short, he was arguing that, by monopolizing the university system that mentored all future intellectuals, the republican regime silenced any possible intellectual opposition or deviation from its value system. This theme of the “unthinkable” thought and autocensure within the more general trope of hegemony was repurposed throughout the century, but found its greatest popularity in the postwar work of Maurice Bardèche and Alain de Benoist that will be explored in chapters 5 and 6. In particular, Maurras and the AF intellectuals resented the dominance that certain reformist intellectuals held over the university and their ability to exclude as “anti-intellectual” the ideas and educators of the extreme right. An article by Lasserre identified Durkheim, Lavisse, Lanson, and Seignobos as “belonging to a little group of professors of the

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Sorbonne whose . . . omnipotence in all things of public instruction has been the most characteristic fact of university life for the past twelve years.” 94 Durkheim was recognized as both a political and administrative power within the university and his pedagogy course as “cover for a maneuver to tighten around him the new generations of universitaires, to make of sociology according to Durkheim their new religion.” 95 Yet, the control supposedly exerted over public instruction by these reformers was nothing, according to Maurras, compared to that exerted by Monod. Monod, Maurras wrote, had annulled the positive, nationalist influence of the historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges by denigrating his work in the university and glorifying instead the German histories and methods. Monod had the State, the administration, and the “subsidized bookstores and the enslaved press” supporting his interpretation of history. This was, he fumed, a veritable intellectual and governmental “bloc.” 96 Against this hegemonic power, the intellectuals of the extraparliamentary right had only the Institut and their independent press to draw back the minds of the youth. For the past thirty years, Maurras continued, Monod had influenced every branch of the moral sciences, presided over their development, and jealously surveyed their progress. He had integrated his own left-wing concepts of intelligence and history into university courses while excluding those ideas, professors, and historical interpretations that did not correspond to his views. In truth, he had been “the tyrant of professors of French history.” 97 Maurras and the AF were cognizant that many of their claims of repression and ostracism would not be taken seriously by a public that saw their membership and subscription numbers and believed claims of minority status simple posturing. To those who suspected that the dominance of the university by the republican regime and the left-wing intellectual reformers was exaggerated, they provided the example of Louis Dimier and Lasserre. These two AF advocates had doctorates in letters and yet had been ejected from the Sorbonne. They had turned to the Institut in order to continue teaching their intellectual and cultural values. There they taught courses that were not “authorized to a professor in the Sorbonne” since the university feared such courses would reverse the official republican and socialist curricula. 98 Certainly this rhetoric was designed to inflame and therefore tended toward melodrama, such as Barrès’s emotional claim in 1909 that his nephew’s suicide was a result of the “mauvais milieu” (bad environment) of the lycées (secondary schools) and the Sorbonne that made despair a product of university education. 99 However, as Bompaire-Evesque attested, the influence of the left and the alignment with the government in the Nouvelle Sorbonne was not entirely a right-wing fabrication.

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DIFFERENTIATION AND REAPPROPRIATION OF CULTURAL VALUES Maurras and Massis both took great pains to show the hegemony and dominance of the left over the concept of the intellectual and particularly over the formation of the intellectual in the university. Their expressions of resentment and anger at this exclusion were seconded only by efforts to reappropriate the language, titles, and roles of intellectual guides and mentors for the extreme right. This struggle to convince the public of the legitimacy of the right-wing intellectual took several forms. One of the main strategies of legitimization, as it had been for the anti-Dreyfusard petitioners, was to display publicly the recognized men of letters who had joined the camp of the anti-reform right and to discredit and devalue the intellectual spokesmen of the Nouvelle Sorbonne left. Respected names in literature and journalism were advertised as lecturers for the Institut, which was intended to provide an alternate education in rightwing values for both the general public and the university student. To these masters associated with the AF, Lasserre compared the influential men of letters of the left. Anatole France, he smirked, was the only one of “great intellectual and literary value who had not taken in regard to the regime an attitude of hostility and distaste.” In a great stroke of bravado, Lasserre continued, “What therefore can we put on the intellectual bilan (balance sheet) of the Republic? I see nothing.” 100 In his enquête on the monarchy, Maurras concluded that monarchist, right-wing intellectuals deserved public recognition and authority since “so many collaborators of infinite price” had shown themselves to be on the side of the right. 101 A second strategy of legitimization was to claim, as Agathon had done with such marked success, that the youth of France, the symbol of fresh thought and progress, were against the Nouvelle Sorbonne reforms. “The new generation,” Maurras wrote in defense of his ideas on monarchism and his hostility toward the Republic, “is above all in revolt against the resignation to death.” 102 The youth, Vaugeois continued, were no longer seduced by theories claiming to be “free-thinking or revolutionary” and instead recognized them as utopic visions that could not offer the substance of traditional French instruction. 103 In particular, this strategy required the traditionalists and monarchists of the right to reappropriate and revalue their categorization, much as Brunetière had done with the term “reactionary” in order to show that “traditionalism” was not archaic, but rather a more realistic approach to the modern world. 104 While the left accused the right’s emphasis on the classics and pre-Revolutionary literature of promoting backward thinking, unscientific sentimentality for the past, and a desire to revert society to the medieval age, the antireform right saw its appreciation for tradition and the classics as preserving both French cultural identity and the fundamentals of civilization necessary for any stable progress. By popularizing the image of the “youthful

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reactionaries of the AF,” the “generation of national royalists who did not believe themselves any more anachronistic than their adversaries,” 105 Maurras was able to claim that intellectual prestige and victory had “changed camps” from the left to the right. The youth of the intellectual elite, Maurras wrote, were no longer “convinced that the future horizons were only able to open themselves to the ideas of the left” and had made a break from the dominant majority in favor of the new, yet traditionalist, intellectual alternative. 106 Claiming a youthful and elite avant-garde gave the intellectual extreme right a powerful tool in both the struggle against curricular reforms and in favor of a new perception of the intellectual. During the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates, Maurras and Massis intentionally distanced and differentiated their cultural and social values from the intellectual ideals of the left, once again presenting the two worldviews as an unbreachable abyss rather than recognizing the common ground of professional concerns about education. “One does not see any ground of entente between the Jacobins and us,” Maurras wrote of the left in the years before the Union sacrée; “their spirit is opposed to ours. The two spirits had been manifested in the Dreyfus Affair and they have survived it. Any reconciliation is only a sham.” 107 Whether the difference was truly so great became inconsequential in the war of words that created a new reality of hostility and segregation. The intellectuals of the antireform right believed that they held a very different understanding of the essence of French intelligence and the role of intellectuals as educators than their opponents on the left did. While the reformers favored German-inspired modernity, positivism, and scientific research, the opponents of the Nouvelle Sorbonne defended the traditional, classical humanities as the foundation for French intelligence and culture. In response to the reformist’s belief in specialization and utilitarian education as the key to progress, the right advanced a trust in the benefits of a general, liberal education in French and classical thought and literature that would enable the student to meet new problems with time-tested ideas. And, while the reformers saw the aim of education to be the preparation of the masses for democratic citizenship, the right believed that education, particularly higher education, was intended to form an intellectual elite who would guide the democratic mass. Perhaps the most powerful statement by Massis against the Nouvelle Sorbonne concept of culture and intelligence was found in L’esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne, where he wrote, “If there is a culture opposed to ours and that we are not able to imitate without forcing and falsifying our natural qualities it is without doubt the Germanic culture. . . . This spirit that the Nouvelle Sorbonne has imported from the Germanic universities . . . is incompatible with French culture and perhaps with all true culture.” 108 True culture, he explained was not the Germanic categorization of concepts, but rather the French approach, modeled on that of the ancients, of attempting to understand the ideas behind a concept and

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appreciate their beauty. The latter required a higher form of intelligence, a more intimate knowledge of the material, and a devotion to thoughtful analysis. While the German scientific methods might benefit the physical sciences, the true French intellectual understood that there was more to intelligence and to culture than these sciences. True French culture was intimately connected to classicism and the humanities, not to science and erudition. “There exists a profound accord between our French genius and that which we call ‘classical culture,’” Massis wrote, therefore “in fighting for taste and style we [the intellectuals of the right] are fighting for the prestige of French thought.” 109 For Maurras and the AF, France was “the legitimate heir of the Greek and Roman world” not of the Frankish “barbarians” who had settled in the land. 110 Germanic ideas, particularly the scientific approaches, were therefore foreign and even corrosive to the French mind. Classicism and the traditional French literary canon, which drew inspiration from the literature and law of the Greeks and Romans, were instead a means by which to preserve French national identity, intelligence, and culture. The reformist intellectuals’ determination to “reform” the university by replacing the French and classical elements with German ones implied a distaste for French intelligence incompatible with being France’s intellectual leaders. It was when, Maurras wrote, “the French were taught to despise themselves, when they no longer love themselves, when they can no longer suffer that which is made by their own hand or their ancestors’” that they delivered themselves to their enemies. 111 The campaign by Lasserre in the journal Action Française during the years 1908–1912 112 best represents the Maurrassian defense of classicism and his critique of the intellectual left, who, he believed, wanted to eradicate it. Lasserre claimed that the Republic, the “government of Dreyfus . . . had need for its own conservation of violating the tradition of the intellectual culture in our nation, of making a generation of minds without ideas, without method, without taste, minds without country, without civilization, and without defense.” 113 It was for this anti-French reason that the humanities and classics were chased from the university and secondary schools, Lasserre asserted, and substituted with the foreign and sterile products of erudition. 114 Massis wrote that the new intellectuals, these intellectual youth of the right, recognized that the battle between classicism and modernism was over a moral conception, over the spiritual notions out of which the youth made their lives. They found in the scientific approaches to intelligence and culture proposed by the Sorbonne only “a pedantic materialism . . . a dehumanization of the soul . . .where there is only the most mediocre, the most despaired moral ideal.” 115 Instead, they turned to the classics, where they found “as much a moral benefit as an intellectual benefit.” By immersing themselves in classical thought, Massis proclaimed, the right-wing intellectual youth were separated from their utili-

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tarian peers by more than just forms of intelligence, they were affected in their daily moral lives. Youth formed by classical, French culture had “a taste for the definitive, for stability, for order . . . a horror of unruliness, of anarchy as the worst obstruction to the development of themselves and true liberty.” 116 Classical history, ancient literature, and languages provided a model of man, of culture, and of moral life, he argued, which was essential to the continuation of French culture and society. 117 While, according to Massis, the left saw education as the mass production of specialized parts, the spokesmen for the right argued for an intelligence that would “form judgment, discover the capacities of intelligence, and develop the innate gifts” of taste, style, and talent. Massis claimed this separation in the aims of education between right and left was proven true by Durkheim’s work La division du travail social, where instead of proposing the creation of a complete, total man, he suggested the need for a specialized man. Durkheim and the reformers, Massis wrote, wanted to shrink the horizons of the minds of the youth, to force the “spiritual activity of individuals to adapt itself to a more and more narrow task.” This, he continued, supported the “defeat of all culture and of all moral ideals.” 118 “Many will die without ever having had to use algebra,” Massis supporter René Doumic wrote, “but all their life they will have had to use the observation, wisdom, and dreams which are enclosed in literature . . . before becoming a doctor or a savant it is necessary first to become a man.” 119 Those on the intellectual right who opposed the reformers believed that a broad classical education created complete men capable of moral and intellectual growth while a specialized education was only intended to create cogs in the Republic’s economic wheel. The defense of classicism and traditionalism by the opponents of reform was the cornerstone of their attempt to reappropriate the definition and object of public education and the role of the intellectual as educator from the Republic and left. The reformers and the traditionalists conceived of the goal of French education and the responsibility of the university completely differently and, therefore, as the AF presented it, they “contradicted one another at their very foundation” on the sort of intellectual formation suitable for new French generations. 120 According to the reformers, rigorous education in classical languages and history was extremely impractical for the French masses and served only to identify those students who would become men of letters or savants. It provided excellent material for advanced instruction in style, taste, and individual interpretation but not in the basic skills of computation, compilation, and repetition. The reformers wanted to democratize secondary and higher education, to make it accessible to all, and to use this new common education as a tool for social egalitarianism in all aspects of life. In contrast, the intellectual of the right engaged to protect higher education as the domain of the elite. According to Massis, those who opposed classicism were promoting the republican vision of egalitarianism at the expense of

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the well-being of French culture and intelligence, a clear betrayal of their duty as intellectuals. The “apostles of our so called intellectual democratization,” Massis wrote, desired the “abasement of education” in order to “give it a broader hold” on the populace. 121 The quality of the instruction provided no longer mattered as long as it was conveyed in equal quantities to all the students. This, Massis fumed, made secondary and higher education the glorification of mediocrity. According to Massis, Lanson praised the reformers for their “democratic tendencies” and ability to “utilize the mediocre who were neglected by the former literary education,” revealing the “clearly democratic tendencies” of the reform. 122 Massis and the intellectuals of the antireform right decried the sacrifice of the elite, the unnatural praise for those without aptitude, and the obsession with quantity to the detriment of quality. Like Barrès and Brunetière before them, Massis and Maurras insisted that intelligence was not a universal or international concept, but rather a nationally relative one tied to a particular time, space, and group of people. It was the internationalism of the intellectual of the left, Massis wrote during the war, that most distinguished him from the intellectual of the right. The intellectual of the left said, “I only recognize intelligence, it does not suffer borders and I would sacrifice one hundred French imbeciles for a single intelligent citizen of any nation.” 123 While the left lost its connection to the nation by exalting universalism and abstraction, the new intellectual elite of the right were conscious “that they live in France, in a certain period of its history, and that all ought to be envisioned from this current and French point of view.” 124 This cultural nationalism clearly divided the reformist left and antireform right intellectuals and strongly influenced their views on German-inspired reforms in the decades where the memory of 1870 remained strong and the tensions of 1914 began to emerge. “Here,” Massis wrote, “is that which separated the intellectuals of the left from the ensemble of their colleagues: they have no confidence in their patrie!” 125 This cultural nationalism was the priority of the right-wing “Parti de l’intelligence.” Maurras and the royalists were particularly disturbed by their perception that the university reformers promoted a distorted version of cultural nationalism that ignored the most essential national foundations. They complained that the official doctrine of the monopolized university deliberately divorced students from the long history of France as a monarchy in favor of an emphasis on only the post-Revolutionary era. The AF was incensed by the reformers’ supposed attempt to minimize all history and literature that was not written in the nineteenth century. AF writer Leon de Montesquiou even claimed Nouvelle Sorbonne reformer Aulard had said that “it does not concern teaching the child the historical truth but teaching him to abhor all that which is not of the Revolution in our past.” 126 For the AF intellectual, France was the sum of its historical experience, specifically the experience of the monarchy. It was, therefore,

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the responsibility of the intellectual as an educator to instruct the nation in its glorious royal past. This was the mission of the intellectuals who lectured for the Institut. 127 What distinguished the thinkers of the AF from those of the Republic, de Montesquiou concluded, was that the AF wanted “the health of the patrie” while the republican only wanted “the health of the republican form” and the socialist only the health of international socialism. “With these others,” he wrote of the socialist left and republican intellectuals, “we are not able to be understood since we do not want the same things.” 128 Clearly, the intellectuals of the AF right saw an abyss between their own values and visions as intellectuals and those of the republican and left intellectuals. Both Massis and Maurras engaged actively in publicizing this perceived abyss between reformist and traditionalist intellectual values and visions for the education of the youth. They loudly proclaimed their status as intellectual leaders and educators and decried their repression by the “intellectual despotism” of the university “masters of thought.” In particular, the language of an invisible repression began to emerge in the trope of hegemony and domination. Students taught only from the perspective of the republican reformers, the right-wing intellectuals worried, would eventually be unable to think outside the prescribed lines. The repetition of the themes of dominance, exclusion, repression, and struggle in their work were intended to present the traditionalist intellectuals as the victims of an ill-conceived reform. The perception that the intellectual of the antireform right was excluded from the role of educator, resentment of this hegemony, and the struggle to differentiate cultural values and educational ideals led like-minded intellectuals to create their own communities, distinct from those dominated by the university reformers, in order to transform their individual protest into a more effective counter-engagement. The counter-societies of the self-proclaimed pariahs of the university, and the different mentoring relationships, educational practices, and professional experiences that developed in them, contributed the final element to right-wing intellectual identity construction during the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates. COLLECTIVE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION: SEGREGATION OF SOCIAL SPACES AND PROFESSIONAL TRAJECTORIES As it did during the Dreyfus Affair, the perceived exclusion of the extreme right from the spaces of intellectual authority, particularly in the education system, resulted in the resentful right wing constructing its own increasingly segregated socio-professional spaces. These isolated spaces not only provided like-minded companionship, but they also created networks of right-wing mentorship in the professional trajectories outside of the traditional university route, which was increasingly

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perceived to be dominated by the left and their republican allies. The physical separation of intellectual communities, networks, and mentorships led to a new sense of collective identity that emphasized and even radicalized the right-wing identity of its members. It simultaneously nurtured their resentment and sense of ostracism. Within these crucibles of discontent, the perception of hegemony and exclusion was exacerbated and the resulting resentment and tropes of oppression were inculcated in the new generation of the extreme right. Perhaps the clearest line of demarcation between the two socio-professional communities was in relation to the university. While the antireform right increasingly felt its values and goals for intelligence were excluded from the university and turned toward careers in journalism and literature, the left continued to command the university trajectory. This divisive tendency was perhaps best exemplified by the composition of the left-wing Amis du française et de la culture moderne (Friends of French and Modern Culture) and the previously mentioned right-wing Ligue pour la culture française. The Amis included more than fifteen Sorbonne professors and mainly “received the support of the universitaires generally situated on the left, from Charles Andler to Paul Langevin.” 129 The membership shows “few writers supported the Amis du française, and the majority of those who did belonged exclusively to the intellectual families of the left.” 130 On the right, the Ligue, though boasting thirty-six Academicians, had only two Sorbonnards, the Latin professor Frédéric Plessis, and conservative Émile Faguet, and was dominated instead by journalists and men of letters. 131 This division in professional trajectories led left-wing intellectuals to have not only a different intellectual community and network within the university space than the minority right did, but also different intellectual experiences and expectations. The intellectual of the left who followed the common trajectory of university teaching began not only on a different professional path from his right-wing peers, but he also began in a different region. Very few agrégés earned teaching positions in Paris and most found themselves teaching at one of the provincial universities for several years before returning to a position in Paris. While the intellectuals of the right were able to begin building a name, a professional network, and a publishing career in Paris at an early age, their universitybound peers who tended to be more of the left were exiled to the provinces and had to build public influence when they returned. Men of letters like Maurras and Massis had a different daily experience of intellectual engagement because their professional focus was on the contribution to and often the direction of a journal instead of on classroom lecturing and research. Like Brunetière, Maurras began his journalistic and literary career without attending the university and built a reputation and network of journal columns for himself at an early age. Massis began contributing to influential journals like Figaro and L’Écho de

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Paris while still in school and by age twenty-six had already taken over direction or editorship of three respected literary journals. 132 Their professional focus was on journalism and literary activity and so their primary experience of political engagement and influence was, at least initially, through this medium. Although the republicans and the left made use of journalism for their defense of reform, even these outlets were often linked to their primary life and focus as universitaires. The journals that they dominated were most often pedagogical journals, 133 and their larger works were often written for use as university texts. The majority of the reformists’ engagement was related in some way to the university, while that of the antireform right was influenced more by the world of journalism and literature. These different professional trajectories also led to different practices of mentorship between the left and right. By physically and ideologically dominating the ENS and the Sorbonne and influencing primary and secondary educators through pedagogical lectures and journals, the reformers of the left exercised a veritable hegemony over the mentorship of emerging intellectuals. Lucien Herr was remembered by many students for his strong influence at the ENS through afternoon discussions in the library and guidance of the students’ reading selections. Alain had a long-standing forum at lycée Condorcet and Durkheim personally mentored each aspiring universitaire in his required pedagogy course at the Sorbonne. Even if the professor was not a reformist, the students still received reformist indoctrination through the official textbooks. Seignobos’s book Introduction aux études historiques was routinely assigned as a history text, as was that of Lavisse, whose history textbooks were disseminated for free in the schools courtesy of the publisher Ville de Paris. In literature, Lanson’s Histoire de la littérature française became the foundational text for literature. Knowledge of his concept of literary history was even a required component of exit exams. 134 While the reformers and the left-wing universitaires enjoyed the benefit of the automatic prestige attached to the university as well as easy access to the youth, the right believed that it had to be more strategic in gaining student followers. Massis was recognized by many of the nonconformist and fascist-sympathizing intellectuals of the interwar years as one of their most valuable mentors. His mentorship was not offered through the classroom, but rather through personal relationships developed with individual students one at a time. Brasillach recalled walking with Massis in the avenues around the ENS and speaking of political matters in their suites or at the Deux Magots café instead of attending the popular socialist circle of Herr. Both Brasillach and Maulnier recalled recognizing Massis as a voice of the disaffected youth of their own generation, but one who also offered guidance. “Massis found himself among us, or us around him,” Maulnier wrote. “We considered him naturally as a guide since he knew that which we had to do.” 135 Brasillach and

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Maulnier joined other right-wing youth in the small journals that Massis had created, such as 1933, as training journals for emerging right-wing talent. Massis introduced those who were successful in these preparatory journals to the larger organs like the Action Française and Revue Universelle or helped critique their literary works and introduced them to publishers. The influence of Massis was remarkable considering he did not have a classroom of students at his disposal. Yet, it cannot compare with the machinery of youth mentorship and propaganda that was the AF. The AF had connected with the youth of the Latin Quarter at the start of the century and worked constantly to retain and expand its influence over their thought and activity. Various strategies were implemented ranging from the smaller, intellectually focused student journals like L’Étudiant Français to the massive youth movements like the Camelots du roi and the Étudiants d’AF (Students of the AF). These youth organizations were not small affairs of individual mentoring, but rather massive bodies of students with their own leadership, meetings, and forms of engagement. Events were organized for hundreds of AF students, like class banquets for all the AF youth before the start of the school year where speakers reminded the youth of the left-wing corruption of their schools, 136 annual processions to the statue of Joan of Arc, 137 Camelots celebrations with speeches, music, and political rallies, and excursions to property in Neuilly for sporting events. 138 In return, the youth were called upon to engage themselves in the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates by provoking street demonstrations and disrupting reformists’ lectures. 139 Perhaps the most significant testimony to the efforts of the AF to mentor the next generation of intellectuals in right-wing identity was the creation in 1906 of the Institut d’action française. This Institut had been devised by AF leaders at one of their fortnightly dinners at the Boeuf à la Mode where discussion had focused on efforts to mentor the student population in the ideas of the AF outside the confines of the republican and socialist university. 140 Maurras voiced his resentment of the growing power of republican and left-wing reformist intellectuals like Monod and Durkheim and the decreasing influence or outright exclusion of the antirepublican, right-wing universitaires like Lasserre. As successive generations of intellectuals were mentored by this left-wing system, Maurras warned, engaging outside of or in opposition to the engrained left-wing ideals was literally inconceivable. The general purpose of the Institut was described at its tenth anniversary as “the intellectual reform of our nation misled fifty years ago by the false principles of the Revolution.” The mission of its professors was “to carry to the French nation all the general light, all the clarification of principles of which these men dispose who have for the past fifteen years oriented all their reflections, consecrated all their studies, each in his own sphere, to the restoration of the intelligence of the nation.” 141 The Institut was originally organized around four chairs named for figures admired by the AF, including Comte and Barrès,

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with professors such as Maurras, Montesquiou, Dimier, and Moreau providing a series of seven to ten lectures. 142 It welcomed the general public as well as students and so countered the influence of the already faltering left-wing universités populaires (popular universities) that offered educational outreach for the general public as well as the Sorbonne. It also admitted left-wing students whom Vaugeois claimed were not inherently incapable of coming to integral nationalism, just less prepared than their right-wing peers who had already been “initiated to the royalist political truth which we explain.” 143 The Institut was therefore a strategically designed, broad-scale counter-influence to the mentoring provided by the university. As the youth emerged from their increasingly segregated mentorships, they sought to continue these socio-professional support systems. For republican and left-wing reformers, one of the more successful networks was the Musée pedagogique (Teaching Museum). The organization had been founded by Jules Ferry in 1879 with the aim of furthering popular education and serving as an example of the pedagogic renovations being made in education. By 1902, the Musée was directed by reformist historian Charles-Victor Langlois and served as an outlet for reformist ideas and a network for republican and left-wing intellectuals. The Musée provided lectures and seminar discussions such as those by reformers Ferdinand Brunot in 1906, Seignobos in 1907, and Lanson in 1909. These lectures were particularly followed by lycée and university professors who hoped to keep up-to-date with the latest pedagogical reforms created by the Sorbonne intellectuals and then implement them in their own teaching. Lectures like Lanson’s on “L’éducation de la démocratie” (The education of the democracy) and Seignobos’s on “L’enseignement de l’histoire comme instrument d’éducation politique” (The teaching of history as an instrument of political education) were intended to convince these professors that the mission of secondary education was the formation of youth for their roles in democracy and the modern world. 144 A similar and closely linked community on the left was created in the École des hautes études sociales (School for Higher Social Studies), directed by Croiset in 1910. The program of the École for the year 1910–1911 included public lectures by leading reformers like Seignobos, Croiset, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Andler, Lanson, Langlois, and Romain Rolland. The École not only brought together the leading minds of reform and spread their ideas to the broader populace; it also, according to the intellectual opposition of the right, formed a network that exerted great collective influence over the nomination and selection of Sorbonne professors and chairs. Both the influential network of the École and the forum for mentorship of the Musée were closed to intellectuals identified as “of the right.” 145 On the antireform right, this network was opposed by a variety of other organizations, but none was more powerful or extensive than the

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AF. The AF network included two powerful journals, associated presses, a publishing house, and an influential network of circles, youth groups, writers, political candidates, and activists. The initial league was described by Maurras as the creation of a handful of men who wanted to create, in the larger body of followers and supporters, “a national sense, a national spirit . . . in this veritable intellectual desert.” 146 The Ligue d’AF was therefore recognized as a powerful means of creating an intellectual environment, a community of like-minded peers. The Ligue mission statements and written pledges publicized the values of royalism, nationalism, anti-republicanism, traditionalism, Catholicism, and anti-Semitism that became identifying traits of the collective AF intellectual milieu. 147 The AF became the center of an extensive network on the intellectual right spreading its influence beyond the limited royalist circle to the larger nationalist and traditionalist community. It remained, however, closed and unwelcoming to the reformist and internationalist intellectuals of the left making it a segregated and polarized socio-professional network. Under its auspices, a collection of smaller leagues were created that were designed to help organize and support the different types of adherents, both intellectual and nonintellectual, in the growing AF. These included the female organizations Dames de l’Action française and the Jeunes filles royalistes (Young Royalist Women), and the student organizations the militant Camelots du roi and the Étudiants d’AF. There were also regional sections of the AF that formed their own local leadership, created their own regional journals, and nominated local leaders for AF political campaigns. Other organizations were designed specifically as communities for right-wing intellectuals. The Cercle Fustel de Coulanges grouped those who advocated the teaching of nationalist history and united them through a journal and demonstrations on the anniversary of Fustel’s birth. 148 The Cercle Proudhon, created in 1911, attempted a shortlived collaboration with Sorel’s syndicalists and united intellectuals interested in economic reform. 149 Each of these smaller groups retained an affiliation with the AF while working to create smaller, AF-friendly communities around its particular membership demographic. The network of support created by all of the interconnected sub-leagues provided a veritable intellectual and social world on the right. Perhaps the most important of all socio-professional networks for the antireform right, however, originated in the journal teams. Journal offices provided a space for fraternization among contributors and often daily exposure to like-minded writers. Teams often developed into, or out of, strong personal friendships whose ties extended beyond the workplace. It was not uncommon for teams to gather at nearby cafes or restaurants to continue the discussion of an issue or even an intellectual debate that had begun in the office. AF journalists like Léon Daudet recalled meetings held after hours in the home of Maurras where writers sat around a table “writing a tract or poster while the secretary Louis Gonnet took notes and

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led the debate on useful documents.” 150 It was here, he wrote, that he had the chance to meet and share ideas with Montesquiou, Jacques Bainville, Moreau, Dimier, Pujo, Lasserre, and others who were on the directing committee of the Action Française. “All these men,” Daudet marveled, “came from different places including the university, the military, and the literary worlds, but all agreed and came together around the thought of Maurras.” 151 A shared sense of intellectual purpose and values combined with the sociability provided by such journal team interactions yielded, as Daudet testified, a new sense of intellectual unity, community, and collective identity as Maurrassian intellectuals. Maurras himself spoke of the personal connection that had initiated the journal and that continued to extend to the friends who were brought in to write for it as it expanded. He wrote in his Au Signe de Flore of the early meeting of friends Vaugeois, Pujo, Bainville, and Moreau and the determination that each shared to construct an intellectual movement to counter republican and left dominance. He had met Moreau at the Revue Encyclopédique, where the two of them felt isolated by the Dreyfusards and frustrated that their opinions were ignored. 152 This network of friends continued, from that point on, to bring together writers and thinkers from an ever-expanding web of personal and professional connections. It was in this way, Maurras wrote, that the AF had “composed in our nation a veritable circle of ardent intellectual friendships.” 153 The network created by the socio-professional relationships remained a rightwing, if not always monarchist, community that left-wing intellectuals had no interest in joining. This led the left to create their own, less prolific, journal network. While the larger journals like Le Figaro, Le Temps, and Journal des Débats remained supporters of classical culture and traditional education, the reformers found journalistic havens in the left-wing militant presses like those of La Dépêche de Toulouse, L’Humanité, and the previously Dreyfusard Le Siècle. 154 During the Novelle Sorbonne debates, even more so than during the Affair, intellectuals were divided into segregated socio-professional spaces and trajectories. Their different organizations, mentorships, and relationships to the university or to the world of journalism and literature were all compounded by a perceived difference in relation to the power of the state. The latter perhaps more than any other factor, inspired the resentment and tropes of hegemony that became integral during this time to right-wing intellectual identity. As the ruling of minister of public education Steeg made clear, opposing the Nouvelle Sorbonne was “antiRepublican.” 155 The intellectual of the reformist left, whether liberal or socialist, was perceived as engaging to make the education of French youth more republican by making it more egalitarian, rational, scientific, modern, and cosmopolitan. The reforms they defended were those legislated by the Third Republic and supported by its ministries. To their opponents on the anti-reform right, the intellectual of the left seemed to

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experience daily intellectual life as the protected intelligentsia. Under the state-sponsored reforms, right-wing professors were replaced with more progressive, left-wing universitaires, and positions of power and influence within the university system went to left-wing reformers like Croiset, Lavisse, and Durkheim, and disciplines like Latin, where right-wing traditionalists dominated instruction, were slowly eliminated or de-emphasized in favor of left-wing dominated scientific disciplines. Because their reforms were made in the name of republican values, the reformers easily earned the authorization of the regime for any institutional changes they deemed necessary, from a required course in pedagogy taught by Durkheim to an emphasis on bibliography. Being an intellectual of the reformist left, according to those who observed from the right, meant enjoying privilege, promotion, and power within the university and having the ear of the government. That these resentments had some basis in fact has already been established, but the perception of an oppressive republican alliance during the years of the debates was reinforced by changes to the curriculum after the election of the Bloc national, the right-leaning coalition of parties that took power in 1919. It was during the four years of the Bloc national government that the counter-legislation was passed returning classical languages to the curriculum and balancing the emphasis on science with a returned focus on humanities. 156 Maurras explained his very different conception of the only true relationship between the intellectual and the state in the first line of one of his chronicles of the right-wing intellectual experience. “This book,” the line read, “is a simple chronicle of our moral and mental resistance [to the State] before the war of 1914.” 157 The intellectual of the extreme right had already felt excluded, repressed, and even persecuted by the dominant intellectual powers of the Republic and their socialist allies during the Dreyfus Affair. The changing nature of the university made them feel that their values were excluded and marginalized in one of the most important institutions of the Republic. A speech for the youth of the Latin Quarter in 1913 lamented this obstacle to AF universitaires, saying, “our [AF] professors do not occupy the official posts but on the contrary have been hunted down and excluded from it by the republican government.” 158 The engagement of the intellectual of the extreme, extraparliamentary right therefore came to be identified as a force of opposition and resistance to what Maurras called the “official world” of the republican center and left. For years, Maurras wrote, he and the AF had carried out this “reaction, always private, always exterior and hostile to the official world, treated by this official world as an enemy.” Being an intellectual of the extreme right, according to the Maurrassian model, meant being a “reactionary” whose experience of engagement was one of opposition, repression, and external critique. 159 When considering how much credence to give these claims of rightwing hostility to an oppressive republican regime, it is important to note

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that the intellectual of the right who was so passionately engaged in reaction against republican dominance in the education system was more willing to support that same republic in other matters. The debates over the “law of three years” in 1913 that extended military service from two to three years yielded protest petitions from the left of over two hundred signatures, including a large number of the same universitaires involved in the Nouvelle Sorbonne defense. The antireform right, in contrast, was relatively disinclined to petition in this debate. Sirinelli has suggested that this was because, in this particular debate, they supported the Republic and petitions tend to be the tool of the opposition. 160 It is not surprising therefore, that the intellectuals of the right nurtured their image of right-wing intellectual identity and its essential trope of oppression more during the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates than during the “law of three years” debates. Despite these real contradictions in right-wing relationships to republican power, the perception of repression that was highlighted remained the more powerful message. The different communities, mentoring networks, and relationships to authority on the reformist left and antireform right that were created in response to the perceived oppression contributed to two very different ways of understanding intellectual life. The segregation of spaces, even though it was often self-imposed by the right, contributed to an ongoing perception among these intellectuals that they had been dispossessed of their traditional intellectual roles, relationships, and responsibilities, particularly in the realm of education. The isolated communities, and particularly the mentorships they provided, also amplified and intensified the language of intellectual repression and ostracism and perpetuated the tropes of hegemony and intellectual domination for the next generation of right-wing intellectuals. The generation of students that emerged from the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates had been inculcated in these tropes and in the perception of fundamentally different intellectual and cultural values on the left and right. When this generation felt called to engage in the discussion about fascism and communism that consumed the interwar years, they were already prepared to see an abyss between the left and the right and intentional oppression of the right by a political and cultural bloc on the left. NOTES 1. Gilbert D. Chaitin, The Enemy Within: Culture Wars and Political Identity in Novels of the French Third Republic (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 7. 2. Ibid., 248. 3. Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers During the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 10. 4. Gabriel Monod, “Du progrès des sciences historiques,” Revue Historique 1 (January–June 1876): 27. Unless otherwise noted all translations are mine. 5. Gabriel Monod, “Avant propos,” Revue Historique 1 (January–June 1876): 1–2.

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6. Monod, “Du progrès des sciences historiques,” 28–29. 7. Henri Vaugeois and Maurice Pujo’s speech, “Action française,” quoted in Michel Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), 76. 8. David Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 44. 9. The Action française refers to a movement began at the Institut d’action française in 1906, as result of a speech entitled “Action française,” written by Henri Vaugeois and Maurice Pujo during the Dreyfus Affair. The movement will be cited hereafter as AF. 10. The break with the church and the new focus on science and modern language was promoted as instruction in rational, logical abstraction and the development of scientific, progressive, internationally minded individuals freed from clerical traditionalism. And institutional changes to the Sorbonne and École normale supérieure (hereafter cited as ENS) were presented as steps toward true democratization, egalitarianism, and the foundation for an education in republican citizenship. 11. For example, Henri Massis, Évocations: Souvenirs 1905–1911 (Paris: Plon, 1931), 125. 12. Claire-Françoise Bompaire-Evesque, Un débat sur l’université au temps de la Troisième République: La lutte contre la Nouvelle Sorbonne (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1988), 92. 13. Henri Massis, Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui: Le goût de l’action, la foi patriotique, une renaissance catholique, le réalisme politique (Paris: Plon, 1913). 14. Ibid., 239. 15. Ibid., 97. 16. Ibid., 80. 17. Ibid. 18. Even the 1907 suppression of the Latin and French composition requirement had been institutionalized before Agathon’s complaints gained the attention of the intellectual right. 19. Bompaire-Evesque, Un débat sur l’université, 40. 20. Ibid., 18. 21. Chaitin, Enemy Within, 2. 22. Ibid., 256. 23. Julian Wright, The Regionalist Movement in France, 1890–1914: Jean Charles-Brun and French Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), xi, 16. 24. Ibid., 244. 25. Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 26. Bompaire-Evesque, Un Débat sur l’université, 211. 27. Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics, 49. 28. Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 106. 29. Ibid., 108. 30. Hanna, Mobilization of Intellect, 20–21. 31. Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics, 57. 32. Bompaire-Evesque, Un Débat sur l’université, 239. 33. Ibid., 46. 34. Kevin Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 138–73. 35. Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite, ni gauche: L’idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983). The Faisceau is one of the only organizations recognized as fascist even by those historians who supported the immunity thesis. 36. Michel Toda, Henri Massis: Un témoin de la droite intellectuelle (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 152. 37. Nicolas Kessler, Histoire politique de la Jeune Droite (1929–1942): Une révolution conservatrice à la française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 23.

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38. Agathon, L’esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne: La crise de la culture classique, la crise du français (Paris: Mercure de France, 1911). 39. Alfred Croiset, quoted in Bompaire-Evesque, Un Débat sur l’université, 154. 40. Croiset, quoted in ibid., 153. 41. Charles Seignobos’s Introduction aux études historiques (Paris: Hachette et Cie, 1899), written in cooperation with fellow reformer Charles Victor Langlois and published by the reform-friendly Hachette firm, was particularly recommended by the Nouvelle Sorbonne proponents. 42. Ibid., 1–2. 43. Ibid. 44. Agathon, L’esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne. 45. It should be noted here that the combination of democratism and scientific methodology on the left led them to embrace the “practical” aspects of intellectual life that they had dismissed as anti-intellectual in the work of Ferdinand Brunetière. During these years, the right was also distinguishing its concept of the real by linking it more to the irrational realities of national enracinement, emotion, sentiment, and experience than to practical application. 46. Gustave Lanson, “L’étude des auteurs français,” Revue Universitaire (1894), 262. 47. Jules Delvaille, “A propos de la ‘crise du français,” Revue Universitaire (1911), 117–19. 48. Lanson, “L’étude des auteurs français,” 262. While there were several universitaires and writers who favored the conservation of Latin and the humanities while still supporting the liberal ideals of the Third Republic, the majority of the opposition to the Nouvelle Sorbonne and particularly its intellectual leaders was anti-Republican and rejected efforts to remove Latin for Republican and democratic reasons. In contrast, most historians have recognized, as the contemporaries of the debates did, that the Nouvelle Sorbonne and its “modern culture recruited its defenders from the electorate of the left” and the staunch supporters of the Third Republic (BompaireEvesque, Un débat sur l’université, 15). 49. Toda, Henri Massis. 50. Henri Massis, Défense de l’Occident (Paris: Plon, 1927). 51. Paul Mazgaj, “Defending the West: The Cultural and Generational Politics of Henri Massis,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 17, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 103–23. 52. Paul Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism: The Cultural Politics of the Young Right, 1930–1945 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 18. 53. Wohl, The Generation of 1914, Kessler, Histoire politique, 27. 54. Kessler, Histoire politique, 29. 55. Ibid., 41. 56. Massis, Évocations, 49. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Agathon, L’esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne, 9. 60. Massis, Évocations, 49; and Agathon, L’esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne, 100. 61. Massis, Évocations, 78–81. 62. Agathon, L’esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne, 100. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 115. 65. Ibid., 107. 66. Ibid., 115. 67. Ibid., 161. 68. Henri Massis, L’honneur de servir: Textes réunis pour contribuer à l’histoire d’une génération , 1912–1937 (Paris: Plon, 1937), 157. 69. Ibid., 160. 70. Massis, Évocations, 138. 71. Agathon, L’esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne, 115.

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72. Henri Massis quoted in Toda, Henri Massis, 55. 73. Massis, Évocations, 152. Emphasis in original. 74. Agathon, “Mandarinat universitaire,” L’Opinion, November 29, 1919. 75. Ibid. 76. Henri Massis, Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui, iii. 77. Massis, Évocations, 266. 78. Massis, quoted in Toda, Henri Massis, 140. 79. Toda, Henri Massis, 142. 80. Enquête sur la monarchie, suivie de une campagne royaliste au “Figaro” et si le coup de force est possible , ed. Charles Maurras (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1909). 81. Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Maisel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2010), 324–31. 82. Bruno Goyet, Charles Maurras (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2000), 11. 83. Ibid., 15–27. 84. Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 80. 85. During these prewar years, although Maurras took pains to place himself in clear opposition to the intellectual values and movements of the Republic and left, such as international socialism, class conflict, and egalitarianism, he did not exclude from the royalist movement those left-wing thinkers who had come to sympathize with his ideas. This attempt to unite the French under monarchism regardless of past affiliations is perhaps most apparent in the Cercle Proudhon created in 1911 and chaired by Maurras with the aid of syndicalists Georges Sorel and Edouard Berth. Although the movement spawned a few attempts at collaboration between syndicalists and monarchists, the compromise between the two parties was short-lived and their efforts eventually abandoned due to irreconcilable differences in values. Despite this brief collaboration and statements of inclusion, being royalist and Maurrassian came to be understood by contemporaries as being irrefutably on the intellectual Right. 86. Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962). 87. François Huguenin, A l’école de l’Action française: Un siècle de vie intellectuelle (Paris: JC Lattès, 1998), 12. 88. Pierre Lasserre, “Pour la défense nationale: La reunion du Quartier Latin (une soirée de patriotism et d’intelligence) [a gathering of patriotism and intelligence],” Action Française, April 17, 1913. The article includes excerpts from the speech by Lasserre (Archives Nationale de France [hereafter cited AN], F7 12863). 89. Charles Maurras, Au signe de Flore : Souvenirs de vie politique, l’affaire Dreyfus et la foundation de l’Action française, 1898–1900 (Paris: Grasset, 1933), xv. 90. Ibid., 72. 91. The AF intellectuals’ claim to be the new spokesmen for intellectual identity meant that they also claimed the key terms associated with intellectual responsibility like Truth and Justice. However, they made it quite clear that these terms would take on very different meaning when used by the extreme right: “Ten years ago, the Dreyfusards claimed the monopoly on Truth and Justice. They made them so sullied that one was no longer able to serve themselves of them. We have retaken the usage of them through hard struggle. . . . They have returned to our side. It is the same with all the great and beautiful words: Right, Liberty, Humanity, Civilization. Words hollow on Republican lips, words full of meaning in the mouths of monarchists” (Pierre Lassere, “Conférence de M. Pierre Lasserre,” Action Française Mensuelle, August 15, 1909), 156. 92. Charles Maurras, L’avenir de l’intelligence (Paris: Flammarion, 1927), 82. Similar statements were echoed in the articles of Action Française Mensuelle, such as the December 15, 1908, article by Leon de Montesquiou, “L’utilite de notre institut,” which claimed, “any school the Republican state does not directly or indirectly control will always be suspect to it. In teaching and education the republican state has need of a monopoly . . . of making the individuals passionate for its principles” (698).

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93. Maurras, L’avenir de l’intelligence, 83. 94. Pierre Lasserre, “Contre les humanites (les raisons de M. Lavisse),” Action Française Mensuelle, August 15, 1911, 118–46. 95. Pierre Lasserre, “La sociology de Sorbonne ou l’école du ‘totem,’” Action Française Mensuelle, June 15, 1910. 96. Charles Maurras, Quand les Français ne s’aimaient pas: Chronique d’une renaissance, 1895–1905 (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1916), 100. 97. Ibid. 98. Marie de Roux, “Pour Maurice Pujo,” Action Française Mensuelle, April 15, 1909. 99. Barrès quoted in Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 104. 100. Lasserre, “Conférence,” emphasis in original. 101. Maurras, Enquête sur la monarchie , 343. 102. Charles Maurras, Les idées royalist (Paris: Bureau de l’Action Française, 1910), 11. 103. Henri Vaugeois, “Au Quartier Latin,” Action Française Mensuelle, January 15, 1909, 9. 104. Ferdinand Brunetière, Le droit de l’enfant (Paris: au siège du Comité, 1903). 105. Charles Maurras, La contre-révolution spontanée: La recherché, la discussion, l’émeute, 1899–1939 (Paris: H. Lardanchet, 1943), 16. 106. Ibid., 17. 107. Maurras, Au signe de Flore, 252. 108. Agathon, L’esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne, 174–76. 109. Ibid., 174. 110. Charles Maurras, Mes idées politiques (Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1937) , 79. 111. Maurras, Quand les Français, viii. 112. Lasserre was a former professor of the Sorbonne, a current professor at the Institut d’AF, and the editor during these years of the monthly Action Française. 113. Pierre Lasserre, “L’enseignement des lettres a la Sorbonne,” Action Française Mensuelle, April 15, 1911, 251–83. 114. Lasserre, “Contre les humanites.” 115. Massis, Les jeunes gens, 57. 116. Ibid., 63. 117. Agathon, L’esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne, 69. 118. Ibid., 73; Émile Durkheim, La division du travail social (Paris: F. Alcan, 1893). 119. Rene Doumic, La défense de l’esprit français (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1918), 32. 120. Pierre Lasserre, “La question universitaire,” Action Française Mensuelle, November 15, 1911, 338. 121. Agathon, L’esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne, 124. 122. Ibid., 166. 123. Massis, Les jeunes gens, 38. 124. Ibid., 20. 125. Toda, Henri Massis, 187. 126. Leon de Montesquiou, “L’antipatriotism et la Republique,”Action Française Mensuelle, March 1910, 181. 127. Maurras, Enquête sur la monarchie , x. 128. Leon de Montesquiou, “L’antipatriotism et la republique,” Action Française Mensuelle, March 15, 1910, 164. 129. Bompaire-Evesque, Un débat sur l’université, 192. 130. Ibid., 215. 131. Ibid., 183. 132. Toda, Henri Massis, 41. 133. Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature was led by a Sorbonne reformer and Croiset directed the Revue internationale de l’enseignement. Revue universitaire had a committee of patronage and edition of almost exclusively Sorbonne professors, including Victor Bérard, Brunot, Croiset, former Dreyfusard leader Alphonse Darlu, Lanson, Lavisse, Seignobos, and Gustave Reynier. As one of the flagship journals for pedagogy, whose cover promised articles on the latest in “pedagogy, educational and teach-

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ing issues, administration, literary issues, bibliography, exams and courses,” its reformist tone was intended to influence its primary subscribers: lycée, college, and provincial professors awed by the Sorbonne. Writing for these revues, therefore, also became an important form of mentorship for the intellectual left who, if they were a minority in the larger world of journalism, dominated the important segment of the field marketed to educators. One striking exception to this rule was the rising power of the Nouvelle Revue Française (hereafter cited NRF), which became an important outlet for left-wing engagement during the interwar years. 134. Bompaire-Evesque, Un débat sur l’université, 79. 135. Thierry Maulnier, quoted in Henri Massis, Au long d’une vie (Paris: Plon, 1967), 12. 136. Henri Vaugeois, Notre pays: Figures de France, voyages d’Action française, le temps de la guerre (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1916). 137. “La Republique contre Jeanne d’Arc: Une victoire des patriotes,” Action Française, May 29, 1911. 138. January 18, 1911, news clipping about the Camelots fête at the Salle des agriculteurs rue d’Athènes (Hall of Farmers) and a August 21, 1912, police report on the property purchase by the AF of a field for the Camelots to play sports (AN, F7 12864). 139. Throughout the AF’s existence, they served as bodyguards for Maurras, street militants against the communist youth, and the most vocal supporters of AF rallies and speeches (AN, F7 15983/2). 140. Weber, Action Française, 39. 141. “Mission statement for Institut d’action française,” (AN, F7 12863). 142. Charles Maurras, Libéralisme et liberté: Démocratie et peuple special issue Action Française Revue Bi-mensuelle (1906). The lecture series covered topics like intelligence and the Revolution, the family and the patrie, the accord between Catholicism and positivism, and intellectualism and rationalism. 143. Vaugeois, Notre pays. 144. Bompaire-Evesque, Un débat sur l’université, 32. 145. Ibid., 67. 146. Charles Maurras, Devant l’Allemagne éternelle : Gaulois, Germains, Latins; chronique d’une résistance (Paris: A l’Étoile, 1937), 99. 147. For example, the “Membership Application” for the Ligue d’AF, which says at the top, “Founded in 1899, in full political, military, and religious crisis, the AF is always inspired by the nationalist sentiment.” There is also the “Pledge” of the AF, which says, “I engage myself to combat any republican regime. The republic in France is the reign of the Foreigner. The republican spirit disorganizes the national defense and favors religious influences hostile to traditional Catholicism. It is necessary to return France to a regime which is French. Our unique future is therefore the monarchy.” (AN, F7 12863). 148. Maurras, Devant l’Allemagne éternelle, 99. 149. “Notes on the formation of Cercle Proudhon” (AN, F7 12863). 150. Léon Daudet, Souveniers littéraires (Paris: Grasset, 1968), 286. 151. Ibid. 152. Maurras, Au Signe de Flore, 84. 153. Charles Maurras, La politique de Charles Maurras, 1926–1927 (Versailles: Bibliothèque des Oeuvres Politiques, 1928), 172. 154. Although the majority of the reformers were universitaires whose dominance was in the university and education system rather than in the world of letters and journalism, there were several republican and left-wing papers. Leading reformer Alphonse Aulard published his defense of the Nouvelle Sorbonne in Siècle, Dépêche, and L’Action, while Célestin Bouglé printed his dissection of the psychology of the opposition in Dépêche. Numerous reformers including Anatole France, Andler, and Lanson wrote articles for Humanité and made personal and professional connections there with socialists Herr, Blum, Halevy, and Pressensé. Other left-wing journals that had blossomed under the Dreyfusards, like Le Radical, helped the Reformers to paint

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the opposition as politically motivated and declared all opposition to all modern, scientific, utilitarian, and rationalist education “anti-Republican” as well as “anti-intellectual.” 155. In 1911, Théodore Steeg, minister of public education, rejected a petition demanding the revision of the reforms of 1902. The Third Republic made it quite clear that to oppose the Sorbonne was to oppose the government (Bompaire-Evesque, Un débat sur l’université, 97). 156. Ibid. 157. Maurras, Devant l’Allemagne éternelle, 1. 158. Pierre Lasserre, “Pour la défense nationale. 159. Maurras, Devant l’Allemagne éternelle, 294. 160. Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions française: Manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 29–32.

THREE Constructing the French Fascist Intellectual The Interwar Polarization, 1930–1939

During the interwar decades, engagement became the new way of life for the majority of French academics, savants, and men of letters. The new international alternatives of fascism and communism led more thinkers to engage in the 1930s than ever before and produced what Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli have called unrivaled “cleavages within French intellectual society.” 1 Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs in 1927 in which he condemned intellectuals who betrayed their role as representatives of the universal values of Truth and Justice in order to advocate for sordid nationalist positions. While his condemnation was directed at the intellectuals of the right, more so than of the left, whose stance he approved, his overarching message was one that promoted the concept of an ivory tower elite. 2 However, two years later, Emmanuel Berl published Mort de la pensée bourgeoise, which led many of these supposedly disinterested intellectuals, such as André Gide, to engage in politics by arguing that true intellectual treason was abstaining from action in a world that threatened culture and thought. 3 Abstention from engagement, in the name of disinterested art or ivory tower academicism, was no longer a respected choice for the educated elite. Responsible use of one’s talent and intelligence now demanded active engagement against either communism or fascism. In time, even engagement in favor of the Third Republic and status quo politics, instead of the extreme alternatives, was seen as abstention, and “intellectuals of the center” were increasingly rare. 4 The antifascist and anticommunist extremes, therefore, became the mutually exclusive, identifying traits of the left and right 137

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camps that united them despite their internal differences and also divided them by an unbreachable abyss, despite any common ground, from their opposition. With this dualistic view of their world, the extreme right once again saw themselves ranged against an alliance between the Republic and the left that excluded them from the places of power in the intellectual world. With the rise of the Popular Front and the new antifascist blocs seeming to provide proof of this conspiracy, the intellectual extreme right believed that the hegemonic alliance of the Republic and the left was even more prevalent than in previous decades, excluding the right not only from the university system, but also from French public affairs in general. In response, extreme-right intellectuals like Abel Bonnard and Ramon Fernandez resurrected the familiar language of hegemony, ostracism, and repression; reasserted their demand for public recognition as intellectuals; and continued the efforts, begun during the Dreyfus Affair, to differentiate their intellectual values and self-segregate their communities and networks from the perceived monopoly of the left. Although the Wall Street crash caused increasing frustration with the liberal Republic as early as 1931, the crisis that intellectuals of both the extreme left and the extreme right identified as the incentive for their respective engagement was the Stavisky Affair of 1934 and the resulting February 6 riots. Alexandre Stavisky was a con artist who sold fraudulent bonds before being found shot in an apparent suicide. His death led extreme right groups like the Action française (AF) to claim that Stavisky was assassinated by the government as part of an effort to cover up massive republican financial corruption. The Camille Chautemps ministry was quickly replaced by Édouard Daladier’s government, which appointed many left-wing-leaning members and made the mistake of firing the right-wing prefect of the Paris police. The firing of the prefect instigated the riots of February 6, which resulted in fifteen deaths and the resignation of Daladier. Because the majority of those killed in the riots were right-wing activists from the AF and Croix-de-Feu (Cross of Fire), the riots were quickly associated with the movements of the extreme right and suspected as an attempt to install a fascist regime in France. Therefore, these actions were quickly countered by the first combined protest of the socialist and communist extreme left on February 12. The association of the riots of February 6 with the influence of fascism, and the growing fears after 1934 of France’s two fascist neighbors, collapsed the tripartite division between fascism, communism, and republicanism, and thereby created the dual camps of fascism and antifascism. 5 David Drake has labeled the Stavisky Affair and February 6 riot as the “turning point in political polarization” for many intellectuals, since the right found justification for its anti-republicanism, and the Republic and the left believed it had uncovered a new fascist force in right-wing France that necessitated their alliance in an antifascist Popular Front. 6

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The engagement prompted by the Stavisky Affair reflected the intellectuals’ larger international concerns. On the extreme right, intellectuals were uneasy about the increasing attraction of the Parti communiste français (PCF) (French Communist Party) for left-leaning intellectuals and the infusion of communism into French affairs under the cover of antifascism. In 1932, the Communist International (Comintern) altered its policy on proletarian culture in order to woo the intellectual milieu to its side and away from the fascist temptation. By 1933, movements created by intellectuals and approved by the Communist Party like the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement, the Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionaires (AEAR) (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists), and the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (CVIA) (Committee of Vigilance of the Antifascist Intellectuals) capitalized on the broad appeal of antifascism for intellectuals of both the Republic and the various parties of the left. By joining in the antifascist cause, even previously uncommitted littérateurs (authors) such as Gide were drawn into increasingly polarized active engagement. In the 1930s, Gide, whose influence over the direction and tone of the Nouvelle revue française (NRF) was extensive, tilted this supposedly disinterested flagship literary journal toward more political engagement by including excerpts from his diary that contemplated the promise of Stalin’s regime and documents on Russian youth by Ilya Ehrenburg. By 1934, even though the editor Jean Paulhan tried to balance the NRF by including pieces from the right, including several by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, the highly influential literary journal had effectively positioned itself on the left with many of its writers engaging in and signing the CVIA’s manifesto. 7 These committed left-wing intellectuals were disturbed by the successes of Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Franco in Spain. They feared that the new generation of nonconformist intellectuals, including the Jeune Droite (Young Right), who began to distance themselves from the inactivity of the AF, saw foreign fascism as a political alternative for France. Emerging militant groups like the Croix-de-Feu and anti-Semitic and fascist-sympathizing newspapers and periodicals like Je Suis Partout and Gringoire seemed to have radicalized the intellectual extreme right and provided a threatening forum for opposition to the Republic as well as the extreme left. Competing claims over the role of the intellectual were quick to appear after the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia as intellectuals of the extreme right signed a manifesto titled “Un manifeste des intellectuels français pour la défense de l’Occident” (A manifesto of the French intellectuals for the defense of the West) and intellectuals of the left responded with a counter-manifesto claiming to be the “true representatives of the French intelligentsia.” 8 Intellectual divisions between the fascist-sympathizing extreme right and the anti-fascist left continued in the years that followed with debates over French involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the appeasement of Germany at Munich.

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The confrontation of the intellectuals over the affairs of Europe was mirrored on the national level by their battles over the French Popular Front. Another shift in Comintern policy in 1935 encouraged the antifascist coalition of the PCF to cooperate with socialists and even their alliance with the Radical Party. It was perhaps most clearly visible in the intellectual world in the 1934 short piece Aux travailleurs written as a call for vigilance against fascism, by republican Alain, communist Paul Langevin, and socialist Paul Rivet. The manifesto called for unity of their respective factions against “fascist dictatorship” in France and claimed to have the signatures of five thousand “intellectuals” already. 9 The manifesto became the foundational document for the creation of the CVIA. This policy of cooperation, added to the anxiety after the riots of February 6, tilted the balance of power in the French government to the favor of the new extreme-left and Radical coalition and put the government of France’s first socialist Prime Minister, Léon Blum, in power in 1936, along with the first communist presence in the parliamentary majority. 10 The Popular Front returned the favor of the antifascist intellectuals by giving them significant roles as government advisors and emphasizing cultural preservation through antifascism. 11 While the Popular Front rallied the intellectuals of the Republic and the extreme left, its existence also gave new unity, strength, and purpose to the excluded intellectuals of the extreme right. They saw the Front as proof of a long-standing alliance between the republican center and the socialist or communist extreme left that intentionally excluded the extreme right from public affairs. Due to the leadership of Blum, the Popular Front also sparked a renewal of rightwing anti-Semitism, the intensity of which had not been seen since the Dreyfus Affair. When Blum was attacked in 1936, reportedly by the Camelots, one of the AF’s youth organizations, a June 18 decree dissolved the extreme right leagues including the Ligue de l’Action française and Croix-de-Feu that led many to transition into political parties as an alternative. This repression was interpreted as validation of the extreme right wing’s perception of left-wing dominance, not only in the university, but also in public affairs as a whole. The victory of the Popular Front, ironically, was the incentive for many thinkers of the extreme right to become active, engaged intellectuals. This engagement led to the creation of a new network of right-wing communities, such as the Parti populaire français (PPF), that could provide a sociopolitical alternative for what they perceived to be the increasingly ostracized intellectual of the extreme right. The antifascist left effectively presented their new crusade against fascism and, for some, in favor of the USSR, as a continuation of the universalist, internationalist, and Enlightenment ideals associated with the predominant image of the intellectual since the Dreyfus Affair. Even more effective, however, was the conscious effort to unite the diverse elements of the Popular Front under the principle of antifascism, which became

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synonymous with intellectual responsibility and moral authority. By labeling the programs and values of their opponents on the monarchist, nationalist, nonconformist, or fascist-sympathizing right as fascist, and identifying themselves, their Radical republican allies, and their diverse factions as antifascist, the left created a division between the legitimate intellectuals of the left and the anti-intellectual fascists of the extreme right. Once again it is important to consider whether the perception by these intellectuals of such a Manichean division between the left and the right truly reflects the sociopolitical reality of the time, particularly on the extreme right. Jacques Doriot, leader of the PPF, reportedly claimed “I have too much experience in French political life to attach much importance to the difference between right and left.” 12 This seeming ambivalence, when paired with Doriot’s original affiliation on the extreme left, raised questions for historians about “whether fascism, or the radical right in a more general sense, is essentially revolutionary or reactionary.” 13 Zeev Sternhell’s Ni droite, ni gauche found leaders like Doriot to be representative of the vast left-wing ideological underpinnings of native French fascism, indicating a migration across a permeable left-right border, or possibly an alliance of the two extremes against a republican center. However, his interpretation has been challenged by William D. Irvine, Philippe Burrin, Robert Soucy, and Kevin Passmore among others. 14 Soucy has argued that Doriot and individuals of the left who migrated to the extreme right abandoned their ideology and their left-wing supporters when they shifted to fascism. Passmore contends that there was neither a mass migration nor a unity of extremes against the center. Even the common language of antibourgeois or anticapitalist themes that was used by the right to attract working-class votes was dismissed as simple posturing, and as nothing they truly shared with the left. 15 In general, most historians support the intellectuals’ perception that the interwar years revealed a “chasm between left and Right” that continued to shape French political life moving forward. 16 However, some scholars have continued to look for common ground in the interwar years between the right and the left in shared generational or cultural attitudes. Nicholas Kessler claims that the Jeune Droite intellectuals looked to the left for inspiration due to their mutual scorn for bourgeois conservatism and the status quo of their decadent generation. He provides as an example of this generational common ground the recollections of Claude Roy, who wrote that both camps had “a sort of sympathy either exhibited or subtle for the brother one judged as delinquent, for the adversary who had split off from the same premises.” 17 Even during the interwar conflicts, Kessler argues, “whether they are of the left or the right, Marxists or Catholics, progressists or reactionaries, monarchists or republicans hardly mattered in the end; the sentiment of collusion born of shared concerns was the strongest.” 18 Yet, far from

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supporting such supposed fraternity, Sean Kennedy’s work suggests that the same groups were “obsessed with demonizing and undermining the left” and that the “fierce hatred of the political left was fundamental to the ultranationalist discourse” shared by the extreme right in the interwar decades. 19 And, while they might share the generational language of decadence, decline, and disillusionment with their modern world, the nonconformist intellectuals of the extreme right found different sources and solutions to this modern decadence that were more aligned with those of the German neoconservatives than with those of their French peers on the extreme left. 20 Paul Mazgaj has noted that this was in part because their concept of European decadence and renewal was developed by their mentor Henri Massis to still exist comfortably within the “Maurrassian worldview” and therefore was marked by integral nationalism. 21 Irvine has suggested that historians should dissolve the categories of left and right during the interwar period entirely because of the many inconsistencies and contradictions within these categorizations. However, Irvine’s argument that nationalism, militarism, and pacifism could be found on the left and the right does not account for the shift in international relations during the 1930s that made, by the end of the decade, pacifism a political statement in favor of fascism and militant nationalism a left-wing defense against it. Nor do the arguments about common attitudes toward gender and colonial empire between the extreme right and the left provide any profound accord that could have bridged the more divisive political issues of the day. 22 Much more convincing in the discussions of gender and of race is the work of Sandrine Sanos, whose analysis of the use of the discourses of masculinity and of anti-Semitism demonstrates their distinctive, integral connection to the cultural politics of the extreme-right intellectual. 23 Her work is supported by that of Geoff Read and Daniella Sarnoff, who posit that attitudes toward politicized women and paternalism are distinctive to the extreme right. 24 The scholarship, at this point, tends to still support a boundary between the right and the left in the interwar period. However, it has shown the borders to be much more porous between the diverse factions and ideologies categorized within the extreme right. It is once again misleading to speak in the singular of the French right or even the extraparliamentary extreme right during the interwar period, when a variety of right-wing organizations developed in response to leftwing coalition governments. Passmore has revealed an array of conservative parties within the parliamentary right and documented their frequent alliances with the republican center throughout the 1920s and 1930s. 25 The success of the Cartel des gauches (Cartel of the Left) in 1924 also led to the creation of diverse extraparliamentary leagues and movements including Antoine Rédier’s Légion, Pierre Taittinger’s Jeunesses patriotes (Young Patriots) and Georges Valois’s Faisceau. They were

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joined in their opposition to the Cartel by the AF, which remained vital even after the 1926 condemnation, and by Catholic organizations like the Fédération nationale catholique (National Catholic Federation), which, although not considered of the extreme right, shared many characteristics and members with these other groups. Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy have suggested that the relative absence of activity during the late 1920s corresponded to the parliamentary right’s control of the government between 1926 and 1932. However, after the 1932 election of a centerleft government, more extreme right-wing groups like the Francistes, Croix-de-Feu, the Solidarité française and the PPF emerged and remained active through the Popular Front years. 26 During the early 1930s, the proliferation of right-wing political organizations was joined by an explosion of right-wing intellectual movements and cultural outlets that interacted, held dual memberships, and shared ideologies with these leagues and parties. The nonconformists who gravitated away from the AF to form their own unique current of thought within the extreme right-wing world formed coteries like the Jeune Droite and journal outlets including Réaction, Combat, L’Insurgé, and Idées among others. Here Massis was a welcome mentor and friend to a younger generation that included Robert Brasillach, Thierry Maulnier, Jean de Fabrègues, Jacques Laurent, and Maurice Bardèche. Once again, joining the right-wing groups in the 1930s were organizations including Alexandre Marc’s personalist and Catholic Ordre nouveau (New Order), the journal Esprit, and intellectuals such as Emmanuel Mounier who defied the label of the extreme right, but whose “denunciations of the liberal democratic state and corrupt bourgeois society converged with those of the far Right on key points.” 27 Between all of these groups were continuous tensions, competition for membership, bickering, and shifting alliances. Even within the amorphous Jeune Droite, Kessler has found that there was division between those who circled around Maulnier and those who followed Fabrègues. 28 Clearly it was a misnomer for the intellectuals of the left to categorize their opposition to this diverse body under any single label, much less that of antifascism. Yet, there were interconnections, shared memberships, networks of writers, friendships, and common interests across these extreme right-wing groups that united them despite their differences during the 1930s. Brian Jenkins has found that the factions and parties of the right, despite their internal contradictions and factional quarrels, “shared a common pool of similar ideas, sentiments and programs, regular interchanges and movement of personnel across the divide between parliamentary and extraparliamentary, mainstream and ‘extreme’; of multiple alliances and constantly shifting loyalties.” 29 Much of the internecine fighting within the interwar extreme right was over membership and influence rather than over any severe differences in political opinion. He notes that the Front de la liberté (Liberty Front), which was organized in

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1937 by the PPF, tried to unite with the Fédération républicaine (Republican Federation) simply because they wanted to undermine the popularity of François de la Rocque’s PSF and win its members. 30 The extreme right tradition in France was therefore complicated by their relationship with the traditional right that involved crossover memberships, shared financial backing, and general public interest in ancillary organizations and societies like those created by the Croix-de-Feu. 31 And yet this territorial infighting on the right was also evidence of common ground and shared values that allowed the members of these movements to pass with some ease between groups. When the extreme-right leagues were banned in 1936, the PPF gained members from the dissolved AF, Jeunesses patriotes, Solidarité française, Francistes, and even the former Croix-de-Feu, the PSF. 32 There was, therefore, some sense that these other groups shared similar goals and values and that members could transition between them. The dissidents who left the AF because they were disillusioned with its failure to act after the Stavisky Affair riots seem to indicate the formation of a classic splinter group due to internal factions within the organization. One of the dissident movements was Eugène Deloncle’s group of ninety-seven dissidents that reorganized as the more violent and revolutionary clandestine Organisation secrète d’action révolutionnaire nationale (Secret Organization of National Revolutionary Action) commonly called the Cagoule. 33 And yet, D. L. L. Parry has argued that the Cagoule’s general political beliefs aligned with other groups allowing them to recruit from the AF, the Croix-de-Feu, the PPF, and the Solidarité française among others. This, Parry says, means that when the AF warned its members not to join the Cagoule, it was not indicating a difference in political opinions between them, but, on the contrary, protecting its territory and its membership from a group that seemed so similar that it could provide competition. 34 So while these groups splintered and disagreed on certain topics or approaches, they were still viewed as similar enough to provide competition for membership. While most of the scholarship on these factions and the movement between groups has been conducted in the realm of extreme-right political parties and leagues, the same process was at work in the intellectual milieu. Mazgaj has emphasized the shared ideological foundation of the larger conservative right of the 1930s with the Jeune Droite intellectuals. “Despite internal feuds,” he says, the Jeune Droite “joined as comrades in arms with other factions of the nationalist Right in the common struggle against the Popular Front.” Because of this, he says one must ask “were the differences between the Young Right and the traditional right, however real, perhaps less consequential than what they shared as allies against a recently united left?” 35 One of the most visible themes that intellectuals used to create common ground and bridges to the other groups was their perception of their own disenfranchisement and their

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resentment of left-wing hegemony. When their identity as intellectuals was impinged upon, this common ground among the various splinter groups of the extreme right was prioritized above the internal discord, leading to a shared language of resentment; networks of support; and collective communities to amplify their demands for recognition. And, since the perceived repression came from their intellectual opponents on the left, their resentment provided an even greater sense of a bifurcated world that shared cultural attitudes could not bridge. In particular, the extreme right-wing resented what they perceived to be the continuing dominance of the left-wing version of intellectual values. Although the intellectual left continued to see belief in universal abstractions as essential to intellectual identity, the new focus in the 1930s was not the Dreyfusards’ Truth and Justice, but rather the abstract ideas of Revolution and the People. Revolution in its most generic and universal sense was used as a theme to unite the intellectuals who identified with the traditionally left-wing ideals of the Revolution of 1789 with the intellectuals who identified with the new aims of the communist revolution. The communist-inspired AEAR attracted large numbers of noncommunist intellectuals of the left, based on this shared association of intellectual responsibility with the universal values associated with revolution and the people. On the more extreme end of the left-wing, PCF intellectuals like Paul Nizan, André Malraux, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, and Louis Aragon advocated for the application of the Soviet model of Revolution and the concept of the People to the French political field. 36 The duty of the intellectual, Nizan declared, was to “serve the revolution with their pens by waking the minds of the masses.” 37 These PCF intellectuals were a minority on the engaged left, but they spearheaded the antifascist engagement and as a result dominated the image of the intellectual more than their numbers might suggest. Unlike some on the left including Gide, who admired the Soviet system but did not recommend its imitation in France, the party intellectuals saw communist revolution and proletarian dictatorship as abstract truths that were universally applicable. The extreme right saw the PCF’s fascination with a foreign, generic concept of revolution; image of the People as divorced from any national or ethnic ties; and belief that these abstractions could be applied to the French circumstance, as proof of a continued left-wing disconnection from French reality. The antifascist coalition of the left also believed the legitimate intellectual was a proponent of social egalitarianism. This shared value, and its association with antifascism, enveloped positions ranging from liberal visions of republican fraternity among the classes to communist visions of class conflict and social reorganization. Alain warned that the essence of France was found in the guarantee of the “precious equality of persons” that was threatened by attacks on individual liberties in both Ger-

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many and Italy. He chastised those who “even among our friends” were discarding liberty and equality as “old idols” in favor of new, and, he insinuated, un-French, alternatives. 38 PCF intellectuals and fellow travelers Nizan, Malraux, Vaillant-Couturier, Aragon, and Gide shared a sense of guilt over their supposed class treason that came with escaping the working class by means of their higher education. The intellectual, according to the PCF, could never be part of the honored proletariat since he was relegated by birth or education to the shameful institution of the bourgeoisie. He could, however, redeem himself by actively promoting social homogenization: working in conjunction with the masses, writing for and about the working class, and supporting the idea of class conflict and struggle. 39 Vaillant-Couturier made it clear in his program for the AEAR that the role of the intellectuals was to become “the little group among the ruling class that detaches itself from this class in order to join itself to the revolutionary class to whom the future belongs.” 40 They were to become social revolutionaries who aided in the inevitable collapse of the bourgeois class and the ascendancy of the proles. Although some fascist sympathizers of the extreme right, especially in the PPF, promoted an image of the intellectual as the guide and partner of the people, they quickly explained that they had reappropriated and revalued the concept until it no longer resembled the one that was outlined by the left. The left-wing value of social egalitarianism was also linked to the continued intellectual value of internationalism. Alain, Gide, and PCF intellectuals like Aragon, extended their engagement against social inequality beyond the hexagon to a “condemnation of all colonialism without reservation,” particularly the colonialism of the fascist powers. 41 This anti-imperialism, particularly during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, was cited by both the intellectual left and the extreme right as a clear indication of the abyss between the two camps. Republicans, socialists, and communists agreed on a vision of man as a universal abstraction, unfettered by national or racial particularities. Republicans continued to defend the idea of the international rights of man while communist intellectuals promoted the related idea of the fraternity of the international working class. In sharp contrast with the extreme right, the left increasingly devalued the idea of national culture, rootedness, and biological racism in favor of internationalist, cosmopolitan worldviews and concepts of culture and intelligence. Gide summarized the aims of the antifascist International Writers Congress for the Defense of Culture by saying, “we must begin with the idea that this culture which we seek to defend is the sum of the particular cultures of each nation . . . that it is international.” 42 This internationalist view of “culture” was emphasized, by both camps, as a distinguishing characteristic that separated their programs of engagement. Even when borrowing elements from Nazism, Belgian Rexism, or Italian Fascism, or promoting ideas of pan-Europeanism or a declining Western civilization, the intellectual extreme right empha-

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sized the French foundations of the ideas or the alterations necessary to adapt it to French circumstances. The political unity of intellectuals in the Popular Front, where the mantra was “no enemies to the left,” was emblematic of the sense among left-wing intellectuals that they shared a common set of intellectual values and worldviews. This set of values was categorized under the legitimizing title of antifascism and served as a foundation for the new leftwing model of intellectual identity. The continued respect for universalism, egalitarianism, and internationalism on the left and the resulting vision of intellectual role and responsibility once again dominated the public and historical image of the intellectual. Naturally the intellectual extreme right perceived the entire spectrum of these responses as a threat to their own values and grouped them all equally, indiscriminately under the category of intellectual bolshevism. The extreme right perceived this unity and dominance as threats to their own public influence and to their recognition as intellectuals and, once again, revived the trope of hegemony, ostracism, and exclusion. RESENTMENT AND REACTION AGAINST THE POPULAR FRONT: ABEL BONNARD Bonnard was one of the more prestigious intellectuals of the extreme right in the 1930s and was engaged in a wide variety of intellectual groups, petitions, and journals. Although Bonnard began his politicization in the 1920s as a Maurrassian, he demanded a more active solution during the 1930s and was drawn to the promise of German fascism. During the immediate interwar years, he traveled extensively across Europe, the Far East, and Brazil. His writing on China received the Grand prix de littérature in 1924 (Grand Prize in Literature) from the Académie française, but also earned much opposition on the intellectual left for its blatant approval of French colonialism. 43 During the 1920s, Bonnard also began what would become for him a prolific career in journalism. 44 As early as 1912, he began writing for Figaro and by 1925 he began developing his anti-republican ideas in Valois’s daily paper Nouveau Siècle. In this early writing, he pled for a European movement that would free people from the double myths of parliamentary democracy and Marxism. His association with this organ of the Fascieau marked him early on as an “homme de droite” (man of the right) who was searching for a more active alternative to the AF. 45 As an Academy member, his engagement was particularly welcomed by the right-wing groups seeking intellectual legitimization. In the early 1930s, Bonnard showed interest in mentoring the intellectual youth. He became an early leader of the Cercle Fustel de Coulanges where he specialized in questions of pedagogy and regularly published appeals to the youth in the new nonconformist magazine,

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1933. 46 As early as the 1920s he adopted the theme of the “decline of Western civilization” essential to the language of the nonconformists and German conservative revolutionaries with his concept of drame which concerned acting forcefully “to save a civilization menaced by inferiors.” 47 After 1935, his name was prominent on both the “Manifeste des intellectuels français pour la défense de l’Occident,” as one of its sixteen Academy signatures, and the “Manifeste aux intellectuels espagnols” (Manifesto to the Spanish intellectuals), both of which declared that their right-wing signatories were the true intellectuals of France. 48 As early as 1936, Bonnard turned from the AF, which he deemed shortsighted in its Germanophobia and ineffective in its political action, 49 to the PPF of Doriot and began directing the party’s monthly journal, Rassemblement National. Within a year he was presiding over many of the functions of the Cercles populaires français (CPF) (French Popular Circles), the intellectual arm of the movement. This new inclination toward fascism was intensified a year later when Bonnard traveled to Germany. Along with fellow travelers Brasillach and Alphonse de Châteaubriant, he returned from his visit and his personal interview with Hitler enthusiastic about the fascist experiment and the Fuhrer. 50 In 1936, Bonnard also published one of his most politically significant works, Le drame du présent: Les modérés. This book was an impassioned attack on the moderate republicans who had formed an antifascist alliance with the socialists and communists of the left. The result, Bonnard claimed, was that there was no longer any representation from the center, simply one large party of the left. The book was a violent rejection of the social philosophy, moral crisis, and abstract intellectualism he believed to see on this united left. 51 In reality, internal disagreements over things like “the Pause” and support for the Spanish Civil War divided the Popular Front, and eventually pulled it apart, suggesting that Bonnard’s view of a monolithic center-left alliance should not have been given full credence. However, the attempted alliance and the presentation of a united front, despite internal tensions, created the public image of a left-leaning republican center. The intellectual far right welcomed the book as the official refutation of the then recently formed Popular Front and raised Bonnard as a spokesman for the extreme right against the hegemony of the left. 52 During the 1930s, and particularly during the years of the Popular Front, the intellectual extreme right felt that it was again excluded and ostracized as it had been in the Nouvelle Sorbonne before. This time, it would not simply be from the university system but from public affairs in general. The ties between the Popular Front and the intellectuals of the left contributed to right-wing suspicions of a conspiracy against them and reinforced their sense of segregation and exclusion. Bonnard was one of the most vocal opponents of this hegemony. He demanded not only that the unwarranted dominance of the bloc be overturned, but also that the intellectual extreme right be recognized instead as the legitimate

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guides of public affairs. He believed the left had monopolized the university system and thus prevented both the intellectuals and the ideas of the extreme right from gaining the ear of the youth. His rejection of the hegemony found an outlet in the Cercle Fustel de Coulanges, a group of right-wing intellectuals devoted to overturning the left-wing’s influence on education and replacing it with their own. An article by A. Rivaud in the Cercle’s Cahiers Fustel de Coulanges: Revue Bitrimestrielle summarized the right-wing’s frustration with left-leaning educators saying, “an incessant propaganda under the aegis of the Third International, has rallied all the educators to Marxism.” Because of this, he continued, “there exists currently a Marxist pedagogy, a Marxist doctrine of education. Its organs are spread in the larger public, it disposes of defenders in the ministry and University . . . and proposes Marxism to our students not as a doctrine of the past but as one of the future and of progress.” 53 Bonnard was particularly incensed that the teaching of history was “deformed and perverted since the beginning of the century by the socialist and communist ideologies of the teaching left.” 54 Distorting history allowed the left to present its own ideas of internationalism and egalitarianism as those that had built the nation. Without a true knowledge of their collective national past, Bonnard believed the left would find it increasingly easy to “manipulate students to their will.” 55 But control of the university and mentorship, Bonnard feared, was only one step in a larger plan for left-wing domination of all of French intellectual life. Marxist dominated pedagogy in the university was, Bonnard concluded ominously, an attempt by certain intellectuals to dominate a profession that “implied disinterest so that they could control the entire world” without suspicion. 56 Bonnard’s resentment of the dominance of the left was, therefore, not limited to its appearance in the university system. His frustration and fury was directed toward the intellectual left as a whole, which he believed exerted an unwarranted and unhealthy dominance over the entire intellectual milieu of the 1930s. This dominance was in great part a result of their ties to the regime. In general, he wrote, it sufficed that an intellectual be well-disposed toward the regime of the Popular Front for him to be treated as an intellectual master. 57 These “lapdogs of the regime” had only to declare themselves communists to add “an additional rosette d’esprit” (intellectual prestige) to their reputation among the public. “While the true sages and authorities on the human race” on the extreme right dared not say anything against the increasingly dominant left, Bonnard wrote in outrage, the destructive ones on the left “intimidated everyone with their reel of sophisms,” and for this they were “adorned with intellectual prestige.” 58 During these years, Bonnard fumed, it seemed it was necessary to be a supporter of the Popular Front to be considered an intellectual. Those who agreed with the ideology of the left, no matter the

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strength of their minds, were granted the authority of an intellectual master. “They promenade in society,” he wrote of the intellectual left, distributing around them the diplomas of intelligence. Only these certificates were never awarded according to the value of the minds but according to the color of the opinions. If one showed finesse and judgment but remained attached to the social order, he obtained from them no praise, but if another, unreasonable and haphazard, declared himself against this order, the desired diploma was soon awarded to him and he carried it proudly. 59

In other words, those who aligned themselves with the ideas of the dominant left rose to intellectual prominence while those who opposed these ideas were rejected and excluded from the new construction of intellectual identity and social authority. The intellectuals of the left claimed for themselves not only the titles and authority of the intellectual elite but also the determination of what made intelligence. Bonnard claimed that much of the attempt to dominate the term was a calculated effort to exclude the extreme right from such a legitimizing concept. Yet beyond the opportunism and strategy, he wrote, there was the truly ingrained sentiment among the intellectuals of the Republic and extreme left that “there is always intelligence in being a socialist and that there is never intelligence in being a royalist.” 60 It was this sentiment, which had become woven into the mental fabric of society since the Dreyfus Affair, Bonnard believed, that ensured the real hegemony of the intellectual left. Intelligence, when used by the left in the 1930s, came to be synonymous with the communist intellectual values and with the vague idealism and abstraction of the left. “When one realizes,” Bonnard continued, “that this disposition has been spread in France from the salons to the cabarets, from the men of the world to the students, and that one has believed everywhere that it suffices to declare oneself against the principles that maintain human society in order to prove themselves intelligent, one is surprised that the rudiments of order have survived.” 61 Bonnard expressed his refusal of this invisible hegemony when he said that the left had given the term intelligence new vogue among its adherents but that it “mocked that which it designates essentially.” 62 In an effort to delegitimize the automatic association of intelligence with the left, Bonnard argued that the left did not understand the true meaning of intelligence because it associated it with its values of abstraction and universalism rather than with its necessary component, realism. Bonnard also resented the implications made by the left that their concept of the intellectual was the only one that favored the freedom of thought and the goal of progress. The intellectuals of the left, he wrote, “claim to prove to us by their opinions that they have a free mind . . . and to suggest that all other minds have only a choice between prejudices.” 63 In truth, he wrote, “that which one calls having a free mind is only that of

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having the prejudices of a little group of intellectuals that has put itself in the position of distributing diplomas” and who “believe to have acquired by the handling of abstractions, the right to rule all things.” 64 Bonnard quickly demonstrated that this claim—to be the only representatives of free thought—hid an even more sinister form of domination and repression. Free thought was not only attributed to the intellectual left alone, it was also to be allowed to the intellectual left alone. One article, by colleague Thierry Maulnier, reported that a socialist deputy cried, “Liberty yes, but not for those who do not think as we do!” Here, Maulnier continued, was “thesis of the Popular Front: entire license given to the faithful of this government to act in their guise, all the repressive force of the state turned against the opposition.” In subscribing to this thesis, it asked, how is the Popular Front’s domination of intellectual life any better than fascism? In fact, it is worse because while fascism also restricts its own partisans, the “fascism of the Popular Front closes the opposition in prison only to free the field to its own unleashed troops.” 65 Bonnard was particularly frustrated by the left’s attempt to delegitimize the extreme right by associating its own views with progress and those of the right with regression. This association of the right-wing intellectuals with backward political and social thought was commonplace since the Dreyfusards’ crusade against Ferdinand Brunetière. However, Bonnard argued, it had become the cornerstone of the communist intellectual’s argument that Marxism offered a progressive, scientific path to the future while fascism reverted to the old traditionalism and blind nationalism of the Middle Ages. In an attempt to describe the dramatic division that this strategy yielded, Bonnard wrote, “the antithesis that the philosophes and romantics instituted between a past of darkness and a future of light is rediscovered in the antithesis that current political discourse has established between the right and the left.” He continued by recalling a story of a socialist orator who had made this association quite clear by saying “Waldeck-Rousseau wanted to go toward the future. What did he do therefore? He went toward the left.” 66 Claiming the legitimizing ideal of intellectual and social progress was just one more way that Bonnard believed the intellectual left was attempting to dominate the intellectual milieu of his time. Had the left only threatened to dominate the intellectual field, Bonnard might have felt more confidence in the ability of the intellectual right to overturn its influence. Yet this was not the only area in which he found a hegemonic left. In its most generalized form, Bonnard believed the entirety of the political and governing system was dominated by the communist-republican alliance. Although this political hegemony was not specifically targeted against the intellectual milieu, Bonnard argued that there was a strong correlation. If all of public affairs, from international relations to socioeconomic policies, were controlled by the left, to the exclusion of right-wing ideas and values, these ideals would become engrained in the

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public mind and the intellectuals of the right then would face an uphill battle to change public opinion. In a left-wing world, there would be no room for right-wing intellectuals and they would be excluded a priori. With this in mind, Bonnard began his crusade against the Popular Front with Les Modérés. Bonnard’s first task in Les Modérés was to prove that there was a collusion of the moderate republicans of the political center with the extreme left socialists and communists. In truth, he summarized, “there is only one party in France: that which encompasses the left and the extreme left.” 67 The political left controlled the government and excluded the persons and ideas of the political extreme right in the same way that the intellectual left excluded the intellectual extreme right: by purporting to “have all the virtues” and by “excommunicating all that which was excluded from it.” 68 They assigned themselves a “moral superiority without bothering to justify it” and in announcing this superiority of their sect, claimed they owed nothing to those they dominated and did not regard them as equals. 69 By aligning themselves with the extreme left, the moderates were compensated with high offices, but they also allowed the infiltration of the communists into positions of power. “They have found opened to them,” he wrote of the communists, “all the gates of the fortress that a government worthy of its function would have defended against them, and thus they have enjoyed the protection of the State in the destruction of the nation, of society, and of the State itself.” 70 “Politics,” Bonnard complained, “is no longer a battle because one side no longer fights. Those who claim to constitute an opposition have a spirit so intimidated by their adversaries that they do not dare to offend by a single truth the system of lies where they are enclosed. They salute the same idols as the men of the left.” 71 Even the conservative republicans, Bonnard wrote, were captivated by the republican ideals of egalitarianism, democratic liberties, and international fraternity. In these parties of the so-called conservatives, there was a “prejudice in favor of revolutionary opinions.” 72 In short, within the current republican system, there was no longer any opposition, “there is only the excess of the left that exists without counterpoint.” 73 Only the external opposition of the politically excluded extreme right remained. This extraparliamentary extreme right, among whom Bonnard included himself, was identified by a term he reappropriated from the left and revalued for the new era: “reactionaries.” The reactionaries, he wrote, were given this name which implied “absolute opposition to the established regime which is evil in its essence, according to us.” 74 Unfortunately, Bonnard wrote, because the world was allied against them and their values; because the regime deprived them of any chance to serve their nation; and because it excluded them from the places of power, they had separated themselves from the life of the world. 75 The segregation of the intellectual extreme right in response to its “excommunication” by

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the left and the Republic led it to isolate and alienate their intellectual community from the general public. However, he explained that some of the reactionaries, such as the AF, segregated and alienated themselves to such a point that they embraced a political form disconnected from the needs of modern society, and therefore became ineffective and inactive. During these years when Bonnard sensed the entire political world of France was dominated by the left and the only external opposition was rendered ineffective, did he find a new opportunity for the excluded extreme right: fascism. Bonnard’s resentment of the intellectual hegemony of the left was paired with a corresponding desire to delegitimize this dominant power and legitimize the extreme right by reappropriating the term “fascist.” The left was accused of allowing an international party to manipulate and corrupt its freedom of thought and, consequently, debase its intellectual ability. While Bonnard dismissed left-wing values as dangerous and “false ideas” that were unnatural for the French, he revalued those of the extreme right as “the ideal of French political thought and culture.” 76 He urged the French extreme right not to have any fear of acting or “shame of their opinions, even when their adversaries treat them as fascists.” For if, he continued, the ideas of the extreme right were those of fascism, as the left said in an attempt to discredit them, then despite the fact that the left “had made a bogeyman of it,” fascism was a valuable resource. 77 Bonnard was joined in his crusade against the excommunication of the extreme right and the reappropriation of intellectual identity by his fellow PPF leader, Fernandez. RESENTMENT AND REACTION FROM THE PARTI POPULAIRE FRANÇAIS: RAMON FERNANDEZ Although Bonnard’s intellectual evolution was indicative of the great majority of the fascist-sympathizing intellectuals of the 1930s who came from a background of political conservatism, there were several intellectuals from the revolutionary and communist left who were drawn to the new extreme right. Fernandez is representative of the intellectuals of this trajectory. Despite his early adherence to the Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (SFIO) (French Section of the Worker’s International) and his support for the AEAR and CVIA, Fernandez became classified as an intellectual “of the Right” by his contemporaries and by historians because of his late 1930s disavowal of communism and fascination with fascism. 78 Fernandez, like many on the left, was trained at the Sorbonne to become a professor and taught for four years at the College de Montcel. He eventually turned to a career as a writer, a literary critic, and a journalist. By 1922, Fernandez began writing articles and literary criticism, and received an introduction to Jacques Rivière at the NRF. This

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became a twenty-year association with the NRF that spanned not only the years of Gide’s influence, but also the fascist period under Drieu’s direction in the early 1940s. As late as 1934, Fernandez’s articles in the NRF supported Gide’s fellow travelling and promoted the connection between the intellectual and the needs of the working class. 79 However, by 1935, Fernandez became more engaged in political affairs and grew disillusioned with the communist influence on the left’s concepts of nationalism, revolution, realism, and the working class. This disillusionment was expressed in his politically charged 1935 novel Les violents where his evolution toward what he termed “socialisme fasciste” (fascist socialism) was first indicated. The PPF professed ideas and visions of class cooperation, national socialism, French independence from international forces, and alternative economic policies that, as Passmore has suggested with Doriot’s loss of original supporters in Saint-Denis, brought it closer to the intellectual values of the extreme right, and thus distanced it dramatically from the intellectual left. Fernandez was attracted to the PPF as early as its creation in 1936 and joined the party in May 1937. By December, his name appeared in the right-wing “Manifeste aux intellectuals espagnols,” placing him on the side of the “fascist” rebels. By 1937 Fernandez had become a leading member of the PPF and was writing regular columns in the PPF organ L’Émancipation Nationale on intellectual responsibility, the differences between left- and right-wing intellectuals, and the dangers of intellectual communism. The title of one article, “Qu’est-ce qu’un intellectuel?” (What is an intellectual?) was indicative of the main theme of his engaged work: intellectual identity on the extreme right. 80 In May of 1938, he took a leading role in the creation of the CPF in order to combat the intellectual monopoly he believed the left wielded through the AEAR and its Maisons de culture (centers of culture). Throughout the late 1930s, Fernandez made intellectual identity, intellectual values and responsibility, and the distinction between intellectuals of the fascist right and the communist left the foci of every piece he wrote, regardless of topic. However, it was his resentment of the left-wing hegemony over the intellectual world that drove his engagement more than any other factor. Initially, Fernandez’s resentment of the left was expressed purely as an angry denunciation of their hegemony over intellectual life. In one of his clearest attempts to explain this hegemony, Fernandez wrote, The complaisance of the men of the left does not cease to astonish me. They do not claim only to have an opinion, which is their right, but they claim to have THE opinion, that which is not their right. They not only claim to have intelligence, which is possible after all, they claim to have THE intelligence, the only, the unique intelligence. They do not only claim to have good sentiments, they claim to have THE good sentiments. 81

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In short, he concluded, “these adversaries of monopolies have the monopoly on genius. These enemies of trusts make a trust of all the human qualities. Such, at least, is their pretension. But they are far from accurate.” 82 Fernandez was frustrated that by moving from the left to the extreme right and by being categorized as a fascist intellectual, he was excluded from the moral superiority and cultural authority of the role of intellectual that he previously enjoyed. Despite the presence in the oppositional camp of recognized, engaged men of thought, like Charles Maurras, Bonnard, Drieu, and Fernandez himself, the intellectuals of the left continued to claim for themselves the “monopoly” over French thought, intelligence, culture, and the best interests of society. To make matters worse, Fernandez fumed, they had convinced the public both at home and abroad of the legitimacy of this dominance. When reflecting on the “scandal” that was the submission of French intellectuals to the Popular Front, Fernandez was even more distressed by the public’s perception that the intellectual could only support the Popular Front. In a line reminiscent of Maurice Barrès’s and Brunetière’s 1899 declarations, Fernandez wrote, “That which is more serious still is that many foreigners currently imagine that French intelligence is entirely on the side of the Popular Front.” 83 This international perception of the intellectual was a coup for the left that Fernandez angrily attributed to “the unpardonable act of brainwashing” by the Popular Front thinkers. 84 This manipulation of opinion by the intellectual left, according to Fernandez, was noticeably apparent in their engagement in favor of the Spanish writers of the left. Fernandez wrote that the intellectual left “says to the readers that it concerns here the ‘authentic’ representatives of Spain. The others, the intellectuals of Spain ranged against the Marxist tyranny of Madrid and Barcelona are only, without doubt, bloody mercenaries disguised for the cause in the false feathers of authentic intellectual representatives.” 85 But, Fernandez continued, discrediting the intellectual extreme right of Spain was nothing compared to the left’s efforts to keep the intellectual extreme right of France out of public favor. The key to this discredit was antifascism. Antifascism was the primary tool of the intellectual left in its crusade to disempower the intellectual right. As such, it received the focused fury of Fernandez in his tirades against left-wing hegemony. In an article tellingly titled “Incapables d’avoir raison contre Doriot . . . les ‘intellectuels’ s’en consolent en le représentant comme un croque-mitaine fasciste” (Incapable of being right against Doriot . . . the “intellectuals” console themselves by representing him as a fascist bogeyman), Fernandez claimed that what the “intellectual” (in quotes to suggest the dubious nature of this title) calls fascism today are “all the political programs opposed to that which he has elaborated in the silence of his room, between his dreams and his books.” 86 In other words, the intellectuals of the left labeled as fascist any intellectual program that was rooted in

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social reality, opposed to their communist utopias, and therefore categorically of the extreme right. Unable to justify their accusations of fascism, Fernandez continued angrily, “These sirs have invented a prefascism,” which they accuse all their opposition on the extreme right of displaying. In truth, Fernandez wrote, the label of fascist and prefascist was simply a refusal to enter into a debate of ideas with the intellectual extreme right. “Behind the proposal of ‘antifascism,’ one senses a great fear of thinking, of creating,” in short, a refusal to fulfill the responsibilities of an intellectual. 87 Instead of accepting the intellectuals of the extreme right and debating their ideas, Fernandez explained, the intellectuals of the communist left chose to automatically discredit them. “M. Langevin is a great savant, M. Maurras a great mind, M. Montherlant a stylist of great value, here are the facts,” Fernandez wrote, for example, “Here now is what the communist tactic draws from the facts: Langevin is with us therefore he is a genius. Maurras is against us therefore he is an idiot and naturally a fascist.” 88 This reductionism showed the irresponsibility of the so-called intellectuals of the left who hid behind antifascism to avoid discussion, as Fernandez asserted, “These intellectuals do not attempt at all to be right, they simply give ‘right’ to themselves.” 89 This was the epitome of an abusive intellectual hegemony. To counter this hegemony, Fernandez did not hesitate to claim the title and role of the true intellectual for himself and his peers on the intellectual extreme right. In an article on the Second Congress of the PPF, Fernandez spoke clearly of his own role in the party. “I pronounce myself here as an intellectual,” he began, explaining that Doriot had given him the momentous task of “representing the intellectuals” for the PPF and of organizing its intellectual community the CPF. 90 Fernandez believed that, unlike the Communist and Socialist parties that used intellectuals simply to glorify the workers, the PPF was the “party of the workers and the intellectuals.” 91 As such, he wrote, intellectuals felt welcomed and did not have to “sacrifice their culture” or their intellectual integrity, as social realists did, by adhering to party line. It was in his capacity as the organizer of the PPF intellectuals, he continued, that he was able to note the large number of recognized writers and savants who chose to engage through the PPF. “I have observed,” he emphasized here, “the quality, the cultural value of the intellectuals who have come to us.” 92 And, Fernandez wrote in later articles, “in the enthusiastic response of the intellectual elites . . . very few weeks pass where I do not find in the register some eminent name.” 93 In his effort to legitimize the right-wing intellectual of the PPF, it was not uncommon for Fernandez to list these “eminent names” of the PPF-associated intellectuals who were popular or who had achieved academic honors, including Bonnard, Drieu, and Bertrand de Jouvenel. Claiming the title and role of the intellectual and calling attention to the distinguished names of the right did not automatically assure the

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right-wing intellectual legitimacy and authority. With this in mind, Fernandez worked diligently to redefine and revalue what he considered to be the true “task of an intellectual” and to distinguish “those intellectuals worthy of the name” on the extreme right from those on the left-wing, such as Jean Guéhenno and Benda, “who have not wanted to see clearly and have failed in their task.” 94 Part of this legitimizing strategy for Fernandez was to emphasize his own decision to convert. “I served the ideas called ‘of the left’ for years” he wrote, “but toward the end of June 1936, from the point that one could see clearly the methods of this majority, such service was no longer possible.” 95 Fernandez argued here that in order to continue to uphold intellectual responsibility and the values of any truly French intellectual, it had been necessary for him to leave the left for the PPF and the ideas called “of the Right.” As a newly minted intellectual of the right, his responsibility lay in reappropriation: “taking back [from the dominant left] one by one all the ideas, one by one all the words which compose our mental universe.” 96 Taking these ideas, like family, fidelity, authority, and liberty back and returning to them their right-wing content, Fernandez and his collaborators believed, was one of the responsibilities of the true French intellectual, and it was only available to those who were in touch with the values of the intellectual, nationalist right. Also, far from the internationalism proclaimed by the left to be the hallmark of the French intellectual, Fernandez wrote that “the intellectual, the true one” produced a work of genius that was “only able to be national.” 97 By showing that the international, communist left was incapable of intellectual responsibility and the nationalist right was preternaturally disposed toward it, Fernandez hoped to legitimize the concept of right-wing intellectuals and ultimately to replace the left’s dominance over intellectual authority. The hegemony that allowed the “intellectual bolshevization of France” was, according to Fernandez, undeniable. “One of the preoccupations of the left since 1936,” he wrote, “has been to establish that only the communists and their allies are capable of saving France, of understanding French interests.” 98 The hegemony over the role of French social and moral guide was completely unwarranted, according to Fernandez, since it was inherently foreign to the French mind. Communism, he explained, was “the action of a party in the pay of a foreigner who has dragged the French flag in the mud and France into the manure.” 99 They were able to “trace a circle of black magic so that nothing is able to be truly French without being designated as reactionary and renegade.” 100 Communism, therefore, could not represent French thought or French culture because it had no comprehension of national things and worked only to destroy them and their proponents. Yet, Fernandez wrote, communism still held sway over the public mind. “The bolshevik publishing houses,” he argued, “quietly institute a veritable dictatorship over

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thought.” And the intellectuals of the Republic, if they did not welcome it, were unable to see its infiltration. 101 Fernandez was also intent on discrediting the ideology of the left by arguing that, far from promoting intellectual freedom, communism was a dictatorship of thought and a prison for the intellectual. Rather than indicating a defense of culture as the antifascists boasted, Fernandez wrote that antifascism, when led by the communists, contented itself with attracting “naive intellectuals to it in order to maneuver them like puppets.” 102 Under the Marxist spell, intellectuals “were obligated to undermine the forces of free intelligence, of free will, of energy, and notably of all that which makes the force and traditional grace of French civilization.” 103 What greater proof, Fernandez asked, could the public need to see that the communist thinker betrayed culture and “True France,” and therefore was unfit for the role of intellectual. 104 “French thought,” he continued in order to drive this point home, “expresses the exact opposite of Marxist thought . . . and as French thought is living, strong, and rich from a glorious past, it declares war on those who want to crush it.” The true representatives of French thought, Fernandez wrote, were those on the intellectual extreme right who defended its vital national sources. And “to distinguish its enemies, the criteria is simple,” he wrote with flourish, “all the intellectuals, whatever be their claims, who accept being led by the Marxist tactic and therefore who accept Marxism, who betray French thought and with it universal thought.” 105 The communist “intellectuals” were therefore disqualified from the role of the French intellectual and the right-wing intellectuals were its true representatives. Both Fernandez and Bonnard resented what they perceived to be an unmerited dominance of the left over the intellectual field and engaged their substantial body of work in destroying this monopoly on thought. They not only sought to raise awareness of and hostility toward the leftwing hegemony, but also to delegitimize its positions, and to reappropriate and revalue the language and roles that the left had supposedly usurped. In particular, Fernandez and Bonnard sought to attack the concept of antifascism as intellectual responsibility and the equation of fascism with anti-intellectualism. In doing so, they had to reassert rightwing values and attempt to revalue these ideals for France. DIFFERENTIATION AND REAPPROPRIATION OF CULTURAL VALUES As it was for their predecessors, the most effective means of delegitimizing the interwar left, while legitimizing the intellectual extreme right, was to display the differences in intellectual values between the two camps. By clearly noting these perceived differences from the dominant intellectual model being promoted by the left, men with substantial intel-

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lectual and journalistic prestige, like Bonnard and Fernandez, hoped to convince the public that their ideas, though deemed fascist and antiintellectual by the left, were in fact superior alternatives. As Bonnard wrote, “It is here that the men of thought are able to be useful . . . far from repeating to them that differences in political opinion are of little importance” the intellectuals of the right should instead “fulfill their duty” by giving an example of committed opinion and marking clearly the differences that exist between the camps. 106 Their emphasis on intellectual realism, the necessity of an elite, class cooperation, and nationalism linked them to a broad network of intellectuals on the new extreme right and also emphasized their separation from those of the Popular Front and communism. Mazgaj has been one of the few historians to identify the creation, during this time, of a right-wing, nationalist version of the écrivain engagé (engaged writer) by the Jeune Droite that rivaled that of “their adversaries on the left” but “employed a different vocabulary and looked to very different political goals.” 107 His work follows the Jeune Droite and particularly the influence of Maulnier in crafting an extreme right-wing version of the committed intellectual to rival that of the left. As proof of this crusade, Mazgaj notes Maulnier’s plea to his colleagues in Massis’s Revue Universelle, “One cannot fail to recognize the addition of energy and efficacy that the enrolment of intellectuals can give to nations or parties that are enemies of our culture. Is it not necessary to respond with a comparable enrolment?” 108 The intellectuals of the Jeune Droite, therefore, joined with colleagues across the intellectual extreme right including Fernandez and Bonnard in the PPF, in defining intellectual values and French culture as the values of the extreme right. Once again, the intellectual extreme right proclaimed itself the embodiment of intellectual realism in response to the universalist, rationalist thought of the left. Realism was a trope that had become essential to the identity of the intellectual extreme right by the 1930s and remained noticeably absent in the language of the left. In the early 1930s, while he was still affiliated with the intellectual left, Fernandez made little to no mention of the concept of realism. It was not until he broke with the communist left in 1936 and found a new intellectual community on the extreme right that he began to incorporate the idea of intellectual realism into his thought and work. For both Bonnard and Fernandez, intellectuals of the extreme right were the representatives of “good sense” that was inspired by all the elements of real life rather than “intelligence” that drew only from sterile rationalism. 109 They were actively involved in meeting the needs of society as it was rather than passively envisioning society as it should have been. As in the past, the intellectual right’s prioritization of realism meant intelligence was only true if it was produced from contact with the social, geographical, and temporal realities. Because of this, both Bonnard and Fernandez believed that the true intellectual continued to

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reject abstraction, universals, and absolute truths that remained essential to the left’s concept of intelligence. But the changing circumstances of the 1930s gave their understanding of realism a new layer of complexity. With the new influence of fascism, there was an increasing tendency to see intelligence as a product of an organic collective. The new fascist glorification of action also contributed to the new understanding of intellectual realism. According to the fascists, ideas that were in contact with the real were ideas that could be put into action or practically applied and were therefore of higher value. Finally, intellectual realism began to be connected to the fascist concept of the complete man. The true intellectual was what the Nazis called a complete or total man of both intellectual and physical vitality who drew inspiration not only from rational thought but also from his experience, sentiment, will, and inherited wisdom. Both Bonnard and Fernandez pointed to a lack of realism as the reason for the failures of the left. The intellectual journal of the Front, Vendredi, had “failed,” Fernandez wrote, “because the philosophy of the Popular Front, that which its editors claimed to expose and defend, is a false philosophy, because it does not correspond to anything real.” 110 Bonnard accused the Popular Front of “abhorring all reality” and epitomizing the “irrealism that the entire nation had attained.” 111 The intellectuals of the left were so immersed in their abstract theories, Bonnard and Fernandez claimed, that they were incapable of appreciating the reality that surrounded them. “The intellectuals that I know,” Bonnard wrote, “whose profession is to understand all, no longer understand anything because they close their windows to think at the very moment where they ought to open them wide . . . they have not enough mind for the reality which is offered to them.” He accused the erudite thinkers of the left of weaving beautiful phrases like “acrobats” high above the plane of real life. These ideas and visions, particularly those envisioned by the Marxists, of egalitarianism, of higher standards of living, and of an end to war, might be beautiful and enticing, he warned, but they could never be effectively applied because they had no basis in real historical experience. Their universal values and abstract theories, Bonnard concluded, “are only a common expedient . . . to ignore the world. One formulated that which the world ought to be in order to dispense with going to see for oneself that which it had become.” 112 But, he continued, despite their beauty, these universal values and theories did not start with an honest assessment of man and society as it currently existed, but rather with an abstract understanding of humanity. Because of this source of their understanding, their values and theories were sterile, inapplicable to the real world, and insignificant to society. The intellectual of the extreme right, on the other hand, saw his duty differently. While the extreme left attempted to ignore any reality that did not suit their vision of the rise of international communism, Fernan-

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dez claimed, that the PPF had chosen to accept the existing reality and to design its programs to function within the new reality. The PPF, Fernandez continued, unlike the communists, did not develop “ideas to adhere to for one time and always.” Rather, it adapted its ideas to the experiences of the world at the time. Doriot, he wrote, “is more savant and artist than philosopher, more intelligent than theoretical. All his ideas have issued from a direct collaboration of his thought with things. . . . One is not able to consider them in isolation as beautiful pure ideas that a solitary philosopher perfects at his desk.” 113 It was his grounding in the real nature of society, Fernandez believed, that gave Doriot “true political intelligence” and the PPF its ability to respond actively to the needs of France during the crisis of the 1930s. Rather than dreaming of the world as it should be, Bonnard wrote, the true intellectual’s “role is to know the world ‘such as it is’ in order to prevent it from remaining such as it is.” 114 To fulfill this role, the intellectual needed to be able to “rediscover the attraction, the taste, the love of the real” and to know the world rather than simply critique it. Action in the realm of the real was therefore key to right-wing concepts of intellectual responsibility and engagement. Bonnard’s attachment to intellectual realism led him to reject the term “intelligence” in favor of “good sense” and “character.” His distinction between the two concepts was drawn from a tradition of right-wing realism that stretched back to Massis’s appreciation of sentiment and experience, and Barrès’s concept of collective wisdom. Yet, it was also influenced by the new fascist theme of the complete man as the foundation for social change. Bonnard’s dismissal of the term “intelligence” and his related article titled “Je n’aime pas les intellectuels” (I do not like the intellectuals) 115 were immediately touted by the left as an indication of his anti-intellectualism. However, Bonnard was dismissing neither the traditional concept of intelligence nor the title and role of the intellectual, but only the connotations that these terms had assumed under the dominant left. To clarify, he wrote in the first paragraph of the offending article: “I myself am an intellectual,” and used the title to describe his peers on the extreme right. The article specified that the reason he “did not like intellectuals” was because the intellectuals of the left “believe only in the type of merit that they flatter themselves of having.” In particular, Bonnard clarified that these “faux intellectuels” (false intellectuals) believed in the merit of abstract, rational, logical thought that was divorced from the other sensibilities that made man complete and real. 116 Common good sense and character, in contrast, were “augmented, enriched, refined in the harmonious development of an individual born to think” until they became true intelligence. 117 Good sense in the hands of these thinking men did not produce vacant words, but rather “useful words, words that have value by the application that one is able to make of them in real life.” 118 “The so called intelligence,” he wrote of the left-wing concept, “is only the wandering in a void; good sense is a practical intelligence on a

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sure terrain.” 119 “Good sense,” he continued, “is the wisdom of all speaking from the mouth of one; the speech it inspires is not the invention of an individual. . . . It recalls to us the virtues proven by the centuries.” 120 The theme of collective wisdom was also influenced by the new fascist discourse of the organic nation. To be a nationalist rather than an internationalist, and to be rooted in the reality of one’s time and space rather than in vague assumptions about humanity, provided the intellectual with “a manner of entering into things.” This organic connection with the essence of the nation made him, Bonnard wrote, a “concrete man . . . animated by more force than he could have been by himself, proud of the grandeur in which he participated.” It was the intellectuals of the nationalist and fascist right, who “being both men of thought and men of heart” had this essential organic connection with the nation. 121 “Here is why,” Fernandez wrote, “the PPF is an admirable educator of the intellectual. It obliges him . . . to remain in constant contact with reality. From the intellectual cocoon he leaves a man, and this man, in becoming a man, becomes more intelligent because he has become more true.” 122 Although such statements were attacked by the left as indicative of anti-intellectualism, it was clearly the abstraction and isolation of the “intellectual cocoon” that Fernandez opposed, not the concept of the engaged thinker itself. In fact, Fernandez proclaimed the PPF-educated intellectual as the true intellectual, one who was rooted in social realities and had intelligence formed by experience, not just logic and reason. Because of this, Fernandez suggested that the intellectual of the extreme right was not only distinct from the intellectual model of the left, he was a superior guide for society. In keeping with their predecessors on the extreme right, both Bonnard and Fernandez also attempted to revalue the term elite, which had, they claimed, been made to seem anti-French by republican and communist thinkers. This effort was intended both to discredit the ideals of the left and open the public to the possibility of a French elite crafted along fascist principles. The evils of egalitarianism and the republican crusade against social hierarchy and elitism began, Bonnard believed, with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Bonnard and others on the extreme right saw a long history of struggle between the “two Frances . . . revolutionary France of the Rights of man enflamed with pure republican mystique and conservative and traditional France.” 123 The first France was incontestably linked to the “left since it is in the ideas of the left that the purest democratic doctrine is incarnated,” while the second was the patrimony of the intellectual extreme right. 124 Egalitarianism and a hatred of any form of elitism was, they believed, the most noxious outcome of this Revolution. Equality was linked in the revolutionary slogan with fraternity and liberty, but, Fernandez wrote, neither of these other two valuable concepts were compatible with democratic equality. “Without discipline, without the joyful recognition of each of his place in the hier-

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archy there is no life possible for men united in a group. This discipline is the only condition for liberty.” 125 The steady decline of France was due in great part to the fact that the “nation remained impregnated with the abstract idea of man that the eighteenth century had formed and that democracy had translated by saying that each man was the equal of another.” 126 The great danger, Bonnard wrote, was that this “master idea” “was so well admitted” that it did not even have to be expressed any more. It became engrained and almost incontrovertible in the public’s mind. 127 Such a hegemonic ideal gave the left a real political power over the extreme right and prevented them from effectively replacing the defective egalitarian political formats with right-wing, fascist alternatives. It was the role of the intellectual of the extreme right to root out this engrained view of man and replace it with a more natural, organic concept of society. Marxism, Bonnard decided, took the concept of homogenized mediocrity to extremes. “Communism,” Bonnard wrote, “renders man stupid . . . the internationalist is a consumed, dehumanized, leveled man.” 128 The responsible intellectual celebrated the unity of the patrie (nation/country/ homeland) in all its various social levels and envisioned the nation in solidarity, while “the socialists and their friends on the left, the Bolsheviks, destroy the patrie by means of the following idea: there is no vertical solidarity . . . there is only a horizontal international solidarity.” 129 This idea of international solidarity based on class consciousness was, Bonnard fumed, enticing to the intellectuals of the left whose excessive egalitarianism caused them to champion the downtrodden. The communist goal, according to Bonnard, was a society lowered to the level of the proletariat. Here all those with talent and potential, like the savant and the writer, were made to resent their original social sin of being born bourgeois and to strive toward mediocrity in order to serve the communist revolution. In response to this, the intellectual of the extreme right promoted elitism as a means to preserve the glory of French culture. As one article by Henri Boegner described it, the intellectual’s duty to defend culture “was one of the strongest motives for leading against democracy the defense of the Intelligence that it degrades and the people that it enslaves in stupidity.” 130 Instead of the democratic and Marxist desire to “reduce the elite to the dominant socioeconomic class of the time,” Bonnard proposed this elite be chosen, not through “market criteria,” but through meritocracy. This meritorious elite that Bonnard believed would be the force to reconstitute France would not be a permanent body of aristocrats as the royalists had conceived, but rather a fascist elite that drew from all levels of the social hierarchy. This “solid harmony, this marvelous constellation of elites” would be representative of the best talents of each layer of the national social structure and would work together to re-create French values and mentalities. 131 This official recognition and investment of an elite, Fer-

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nandez sincerely believed, was what the fascist intellectuals of Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Japan had initiated under their new governments. 132 The role of the PPF intellectuals was to pave the way for this type of revolution in France and organize the resulting system of elites. 133 This vision of a harmony of social elites and an authoritative, organically linked leader at their head saturated the work of an entire community of intellectuals of the fascist-sympathizing right. More importantly, it clashed dramatically with the worldview and social vision of both the republicans and the communists of the intellectual left. The linguistic tropes of the extreme right shifted during this time as well when the ideals of realism, elitism, and opposition to democratic and communist politics began to be tied to discursive themes of decadence and renewal in the cultural politics of the intellectual extreme right. The appropriation of these themes by writers ranged from the more moderate Massis to the extremist Brasillach, especially during the years leading up to the occupation, and revealed the increasing influence of fascism on the entire spectrum of the intellectual right. This common language of decadence and renewal was initially common to both the left and the right in the 1920s, and later PCF intellectuals like Nizan used the idea of decadence and decline in their work. 134 However, by the mid1930s, this language became a distinctive feature of the nonconformist and fascist-leaning intellectual extreme right, that both reflected and reinforced a sense of separation from the left. Bonnard explained his view of left-wing decadence and right-wing renewal by painting it as an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of good and evil. “When I speak of combat,” he wrote of the duty of the engaged intellectual, “ I mean this action that we must without reserve and without relaxing lead against the base and deceitful ideology [of the left] in order to replace it with the just notions and noble ideas by which a people is able to be reborn.” Only then, he continued, will France, like so many other European nations, “reassure themselves by their abundance of life that they have survived the risk that they ran of dying.” 135 The call “to remake France” and the “necessity of being reborn” from the existing “social decadence” became part of a new language distinct to the intellectual right and appeared in articles, speeches, and even a few manifestos like the “Magnifique réveil des intellectuels français” (Magnificent awakening of the French intellectuals). 136 This social rebirth of man was necessarily, according to the extreme right, a nationalist one. And, although several intellectuals of the extreme right began to speak of Europeanism during the 1930s, they were clear to separate their own view of man and the French nation within a European-wide regeneration from the internationalist, universal man created by the left. In a schism that indicated yet another internal tension in the world of the extreme right, many intellectuals like Bonnard discarded the remnants of their AF anti-Germanism and made Franco-German rap-

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prochement, and even a budding Europeanism, an integral part of their concept of intellectual responsibility. He was convinced, Bonnard explained, that the best interest of Europe lay in rapprochement. “If reciprocal knowledge is necessary between all the nations,” he wrote, “it is particularly indispensable to France and Germany. In that where all the values are concerned, where the fate of general civilization is decided along with the fate of the patrie, France and Germany are involuntarily linked in solidarity.” 137 Germany and France, he believed, were the two European geniuses whose mutual cooperation was essential to the regeneration of the continent and the struggle against communism. They were equal contributors to the cultural legacy of Europe through science, music, art, and literature. Their continued exchange would not cease to be fruitful in the future. Bonnard was convinced that the artificial cultural antagonism that was placed between them during World War I was exacerbated by the “false intellectuals” who desired that France’s natural bond with Germany be replaced with a forced relationship to the USSR. France needed a healthy Franco-German exchange in order to retake its place in the New Europe that was being created by the fascist nations. “To the France degraded and leveled of the Marxist world,” one PPF article proclaimed, “we oppose a France brilliant with initiatives and intellectual, social, and political values . . . a patrie that will once again give lessons and models to the universe.” 138 For Fernandez and his peers on the intellectual extreme right of the 1930s, this strong, rooted France was the only “True France” and its leadership in a mosaic of autonomous European nations was the only internationalism that could be allowed. Fernandez’s and Bonnard’s efforts to distinguish and differentiate their understanding of internationalism, Europeanism, and cultural exchange from that of the left; to appropriate the language of renewal and decadence; and to continue their identification of the real with right-wing “good sense” and elitism, were consciously made and played an important role in legitimizing and publicizing a distinctly right-wing concept of intellectual identity. This intentional differentiation of values was consistently linked in their writing to the trope of left-wing dominance and right-wing repression. The left’s monopoly on thought, they proclaimed, was exercised not only over the public’s concept of an intellectual and the education system, but also over the government of France in the form of the Popular Front. Such all-encompassing control over French thought, education, and sociopolitical affairs, they believed, could only be fought through collective organizations designed to gather together the oppositional intellectuals and amplify their engagement for the public.

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COLLECTIVE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION: SEGREGATION OF SOCIAL SPACES AND PROFESSIONAL TRAJECTORIES As they did during the Dreyfus Affair and the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates, the intellectuals of the left and extreme right claimed certain spaces and networks where their values were appreciated and where their individual engagement could take on a collective force. These intellectual communities gathered like-minded peers in a common effort and excluded the other either by directly rejecting them or by indirectly creating an environment that was hostile to their positions. By segregating and separating their intellectuals in this way and demonizing the intellectual opposition, these communities reinforced among their members a certain segregated conception of intellectual identity. Because the extreme right perceived the spaces of power and prestige to be monopolized by the left, their language of hegemony, exclusion, and rejection was reinforced by the creation of oppositional spaces. The world of the extreme right during the 1930s became an increasingly complex system of interconnected communities that were linked through personal and professional networks and a shared sense of purpose. Although these communities remained officially unaffiliated and often jealously guarded their memberships, they were loosely united by their opposition to communism, the Popular Front, and democratic republicanism, and by their fascination, to varying degrees, with the fascist movements of Europe. They were also linked in this counter-society by the intellectuals who: tended to write for a variety of journals; participate in numerous cultural outlets; and create socioprofessional ties with fellow intellectuals in other communities. Bonnard and Fernandez were both at the center of this web of connected networks. Their participation in these alternative communities and the resulting relationships that they formed with the Republic, the university, and the international intellectual community gave them a distinctly right-wing collective identity that alienated them even further from the collective intellectual identity of the left. The distinctive intellectual identity of the left was in part a product of the experiences of daily life that were not shared by those on the right. As in previous periods of engagement, the intellectual left’s relationship with the Third Republic and the university system continued to affect its experience of daily life. Under the Popular Front, the intellectual community of the left enjoyed, more than ever before, the governmental support and protection of an intelligentsia. Left-wing intellectuals saw themselves as especially valued by the new government, in part because many of the leading left-wing intellectuals like Blum held leading roles. State mandated repression of the right-wing leagues in 1936 seemed to offer proof of this leftist conspiracy to the right-wing engagés who already believed in a government conspiracy to eliminate them. Instead of working alongside the state and serving as its intelligentsia, therefore, the intellectual of the

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extreme right reenvisioned the role of the intellectual as the outside opposition to the regime. Although the Front did not last long, the symbiotic relationship of the left and the government during the 1930s was touted for decades to come by the extreme right as evidence of a distinctly left-wing experience of intellectual life that engagés of the extreme right did not share. Liberal republican and socialist universitaires continued to dominate the university system in the 1930s. The perceived left-wing atmosphere in the university influenced not only the experience of the universitaires themselves, but also the experience of the student population. Diane Rubenstein has argued that the preponderance of left-wing normaliens (students of the École normale supérieure [ENS]) and the general political environment at the ENS was so blatant that historians tend to treat the right-wing students there as aberrations and pay little attention to their alternative paths. There were statistically more left-wing students at the ENS throughout the 1930s, 139 and the perception of their dominance led left-wing students to engage differently from their right-wing classmates. Brasillach recalled that when listening to the left-wing student groups around Lucien Herr, he felt out of place and uninspired. While students of the left turned their suites into socialist cells and participated in the efforts of the larger socialist and communist party organizations, students of the extreme right searched for alternative routes to political and professional prominence. Massis became the particular friend and patron of the young ENS group that included Brasillach and Maulnier and provided them with journalistic opportunities at the Revue Universelle and 1933 and also introduced them to the editors at the book publisher Plon. The AF student paper L’Étudiant Français, also provided an easy transition for young right-wing students of talent seeking entry into the world of letters and political journalism. Other mentors included Pierre Gaxotte, who introduced young normaliens of the extreme right to the sympathetic publisher Fayard, and Jean Prévost, who provided internships for students at his right-wing paper L’Intransigeant. 140 It is perhaps because of these early student experiences at the ENS that so many right-wing normaliens of the 1930s engaged primarily through their literary work, while their left-wing peers in the university track were more likely to join parties and consider writing a supplemental activity. 141 Fernandez made the distinction quite clear in his discussion of “qu’est-ce qu’un intellectuel” on the left and extreme right. On the left, he gave the example of Popular Front universitaire, and self-proclaimed intellectual Victor Basch, whom he wrote “would be totally unknown except to a few students” had he not joined in the Front efforts. “On the left,” Fernandez explained, “one becomes an intellectual not by the good works that one puts on the literary market but by the oral protestations that confer an unmerited dignity.” 142 In contrast, he continued, the intellectual of the extreme right earned his authority and legiti-

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macy by producing intelligent pieces of journalism and literary works of high caliber. It was the support of the Popular Front and left-wing political parties, according to Fernandez, that gave the universitaires of the left their unmerited public exposure. Mentorship in university settings and encouragement toward political party activism led left-wing students to yet another distinctly left-wing trajectory as professionals. Despite the electoral efforts of the Patrie française, the AF, de la Rocque’s PSF, or the PPF, there was no political party on the extreme right that provided the extensive organization, doctrine, and international network for its intellectuals that the Socialist and Communist parties provided. It was estimated that, by the 1930s, the PCF was the most powerful and organized Communist party outside of Russia. Its “initiative in mobilizing intellectuals on an international as well as national level” cannot be disregarded when considering the experience of the left-wing intellectuals. 143 When the Comintern realized in 1932 that intellectuals were a vital component of revolutionary preparation, fellowtraveling became a way of intellectual life for many. Left-wing intellectuals developed ties to foreign thinkers at writers’ congresses and saw themselves as collaborating on a daily basis with intellectuals from across Europe in literary journals like Commune. While many, such as Gide, eventually regretted and rejected the influence that the Comintern and external political affiliations had on French thought and literature, the effect of these associations on the left-wing intellectual experience is undeniable. The extreme right was much slower to capitalize on such international collaboration with German and Italian intellectuals during the 1930s, in part because there was no official Fascist party in France that could facilitate such exchanges. The lack of organization, however, was quickly revalued by the intellectuals of the extreme right who crowed to their public that they did not experience the same constraint on their literary expression, their choice of speakers at congresses, or their political affiliations as the left. Instead, the intellectual extreme right saw itself as creating, not a satellite of a larger political entity, but rather its own unique, French form of the vague phenomenon that was fascism, a claim that even today is actively debated by historians. 144 The extreme right intellectuals often claimed that they represented French thought and culture while the communist fellow-travelers were slaves to a foreign nation and an un-French political ideology. In one Émancipation Nationale article, Fernandez accused the “intellectual agents of Moscow” of “penetrating the French salons” and demanded that the thinkers who sympathized with the PPF build a veritable “Maginot Line before its infiltration.” 145 Other Émancipation Nationale articles claimed that the Maison de culture’s writers “drew from the foreigner their political orders,” 146 while “our comrades have sacrificed nothing of their own culture in adhering to the PPF.” 147 Specifically, they accused the intellectuals of the Popular Front and the communists of

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“submitting to the extra-intellectual intelligence of the party,” “adopting the ‘line,” or “becoming a gear in the machine.” 148 Unlike these party activists, “like M. Louis Aragon,” who was “deintellectualisé” (de-intellectualized) by submission to the international Communist Party, Fernandez claimed, those of the PPF, the AF, and other right-wing parties remained fully French and fully capable of their intellectual responsibility. 149 This argument of submission to the party line was reinforced by the extreme right’s public disdain, albeit private envy, of the leftist intellectual organizations of the AEAR and CVIA. Unlike the CVIA whose three diverse founders emphasized the frontist aspect of its mission, the AEAR, created in March 1932 under the direction of communist intellectual Vaillant-Couturier, was an association intimately tied to intellectual communism since it was conceived as a French section of the Moscow-based Union internationale des écrivains révolutionaires (International Union of Revolutionary Writers). Yet it and its subsequent organs of propaganda welcomed, even before the Comintern shift toward frontism, those intellectuals of any affiliation on the left who were opposed to fascism. By 1933, the movement announced that it had attracted over five hundred fifty writers and artists who wished to “struggle alongside the proletariat.” 150 The AEAR fostered community and collective identity in two ways: One was more tangible and based on the interaction of French intellectuals within the association, and the other was more imaginary, based on a sense of shared mission with intellectuals across Europe. Both senses of community were emphasized in the smaller intellectual communities created under the AEAR—the journal Commune, the International Writers Congress, and the Maisons de culture. Commune’s directing committee was a diverse collection of left-wing intellectuals who were sympathetic to communism, including Aragon, Henri Barbusse, Gide, Nizan, Romain Rolland, and Vaillant-Couturier. These directors were also constant contributors to the journal alongside international names like Maxim Gorky and Ilya Ehrenbourg. 151 Commune served as an important network that linked the various AEAR groups and supported its affiliated writers and ideals. In Commune, readers and adherents could find articles on the AEAR, notes on the upcoming programs of the Maisons de culture, as well as poetry, essays, political chronicles, and critiques of other journals by AEAR writers. 152 The contributors found their common ground in the mission statement included in every issue. “Commune,” it read, “is a revue of combat; it makes public the struggle that the AEAR leads.” Antifascism was a particularly important component of unity: “In the face of the confusion through which modern culture marches toward fascism, Commune proclaims that the only revolution is the proletarian revolution. It engages in combat against the first evidence of French fascism on the left and right, against the ideological

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preparations for imperial war and the armed struggle against the USSR.” 153 AEAR also sponsored grand writers’ congresses where audiences could hear speeches by French and international intellectuals. The first of these was held in March 1933 with the proclaimed purpose of combating the rise of Hitler. It featured Gide as its principle speaker in an effort to show that AEAR welcomed all “nonconformist representatives of literature and art” on the anti-fascist left. But this open invitation did not include representatives from the extreme right, nor were the topics of antifascism designed to make right-wing thinkers feel welcomed. The topics of Gide’s speech, antifascism and anti-imperialism, reinforced the intellectual values shared by both communist and noncommunist intellectuals alike. The AEARs crusade, to give “writers ‘of the left’ an orientation by mixing them in the struggles of the proletariat,” was specifically directed to “writers of the left” and was not open to the intellectual extreme right. 154 This was clearly apparent in the “1935 International Writers Congress for the Defense of Culture,” which included an extensive list of French and foreign writers and political activists, including Benda, Jean Cassou, Georgi Dimitrov, and Maxim Gorki. 155 Of course, in a leftwing atmosphere such as this, “conservative writers were unwelcome,” and although all the great names of the literary left were invited, those on the right, including Henri Béraud, François Mauriac, Maurras, Henry Montherlant, and Paul Morand were intentionally excluded. 156 While AEAR congresses were influential, a more daily form of sociopolitical interaction was necessary. The Maisons de culture were opened in Paris in 1934 and offered music; poetry; and lectures on literature, film, and political affairs by AEAR-affiliated intellectuals. Within two years they were serving over ninety-six thousand members and had sections throughout France and Algeria. 157 These centers of left-wing intellectual community and collective engagement became one of the most vilified targets of the intellectual right who saw them as organs of propaganda. Akin to the AEAR in many ways yet without the connection to international communism and the USSR was the CVIA. The CVIA was founded in 1934 with the manifesto “Aux travailleurs,” written by the socialist Rivet, radical republican Alain, and communist sympathizer Langevin. 158 The alliance of the three authors in the stated purpose of confronting and defying internal and external fascism was emblematic of the larger unity and frontism provided by the movement for the left-wing intellectual community. The express purpose of the movement was to form collective groups of intellectuals and workers who pledged to maintain a “vigilance” against the rise of fascism and against the concept of “national revolution” in France. 159 This collective therefore did not include the intellectuals of the right who sympathized with both of these ideas. By the end of the year the CVIA gained over six thousand signatures from writers, journalists, and professors who sympathized with

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their goals of fighting fascism in all its forms. 160 Although it provided fewer physical gatherings for intellectuals of the left than the AEAR, the CVIA was more likely to draw in republican, pacifist, and noncommunist intellectuals of the left and to involve them in the engagement against fascism that would divide them from the intellectual far right. The extreme right, in response to the active engagement of the AEAR and CVIA, created its own organizations for political opposition. Despite a history of proscription by the Republic, the right-wing, antiparliamentary leagues continued to flourish in the early 1930s. However, intellectuals did not tend to play as prominent a role there as they had during the years after the Dreyfus Affair. Taittinger’s Jeunesses patriotes, François Coty’s Solidarité française, and even de la Rocque’s Croix-de-Feu, which after converting to the PSF, outnumbered alone the combined memberships of the PCF and SFIO, garnered little active participation by the intellectual milieu. Even the once mighty force of the AF, by the 1930s, lost its attraction for many right-wing intellectuals. Although these street leagues continued to share some membership with the intellectual milieu and had influence over the daily life and perception of repression of the extreme right, the intellectuals tended to congregate instead in organizations like the coterie of nonconformist intellectuals of the Jeune Droite, the cultural organizations of the PPF, and the numerous cercles sympathetic to the ideas of the extreme right. Although there was no anticommunist umbrella organization like the AEAR or CVIA on the intellectual right, many right-wing intellectuals who did not find a home in the traditional arms of the AF or its Jeune Droite offshoot found a like-minded community in the PPF of Doriot. Here disillusioned intellectuals from the left, the center, and the traditional right were brought together in a new community that was self-identified as a party of the extreme right because of its opposition to the communists and the left. The fascist pedigree of the PPF has been debated relentlessly by scholars whose determination of its placement often mirrors their concept of the extent to which France suffered from fascist incursion on its soil. René Rémond identified it as one of the only French fascist movements of the interwar period, while Burrin claims we cannot view the PPF as a fully functioning Fascist Party in the first place, claiming it was merely national populist. 161 Passmore, like Burrin, takes a middle ground, arguing that the PPF “imagined the people in reactionary and anti-pluralist terms, but did not fully realize its conceptions in the practical form of paramilitarism. It therefore hesitated between the fascist and non-fascist radical right.” 162 In this ambiguously extreme right, fascist-sympathizing space, a writer with origins on the left like Fernandez could commune and collaborate with a former Maurrassian like Bonnard and a self-proclaimed fascist like Drieu la Rochelle. Fernandez wrote excitedly of the powerful bonds that the collective community had on him and the other intellectuals saying,

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“For fifteen years I disputed with Drieu. But now we no longer dispute. It is the miracle of the PPF. Before we were never in accord by either nature or friendship . . . but now we love each other well and find ourselves in the same party.” 163 Among the diverse intellectuals who formed this “miracle” community could be found such recognized names of the intellectual right network as Alfred Fabre-Luce, Bertrand de Jouvenel, and Camille Fégy, in addition to Paul Marion, Jacques Boulenger, Paul Chack, and Claude Jeantet. While such claims of instant brotherhood and miraculous camaraderie should not be taken at face value considering the level of internal disagreements that were seen to plague the extreme-right world, there was a new sense that a united community of intellectuals could better defend itself against repression from the left. This sense tended to make individuals like Fernandez emphasize the “miracle” of union and ignore the reality of difference. The PPF painted itself as the “party of renewal and reconstruction of the patrie” intentionally drawing on the language of decadence and renewal that the extreme right appropriated. 164 In the PPF program, Bonnard found affirmation for his ideas of realism, elitism, and Franco-German rapprochement; and Fernandez found reinforcement for his ideas on class cooperation, the need for a charismatic leader, and nationalism. The PPF also provided a social world for its member intellectuals and public supporters. It had annual congresses, worker organizations, “sections féminines” (women’s sections), brigades of shock troops, youth programs, and even an aviation club. 165 Most importantly, it gave great attention to the community of intellectuals it attracted, providing them with the CPF, journalistic outlets in L’Émancipation Nationale and La Liberté, opportunities to give lectures, and a place of honor in its organization. The CPF was created at the instigation of Fernandez and was placed under his authority, although its meetings had several presidents over the years, including Bonnard. In one of the first meetings of the CPF, Fernandez explained their purpose. “These cercles of which I am the founder,” he said, “have been created with the aim of fraternity and comprehension, our desire being to see the intellectuals and the manual laborers collaborate together.” 166 Although the PPF cannot be seen as a right-wing AEAR, Fernandez was insistent that the intellectuals of the extreme right have an outlet for the dissemination and elaboration of their ideas and values like the intellectual left had in the Maisons de culture. “In short,” he continued in explaining the CPF’s purpose, “we want, as in the communist Maisons de culture, to inculcate in them [members] our faith and our dynamism.” 167 The new group’s purpose was summarized in a speech that declared, “It is to put a stop to the conquest of the intellectuals by the communist party that we have created the Cercles populaires. We want to inculcate in the intellectuals the true sense of French politics.” 168 The CPF also provided proof of the intellectual legitimacy and responsibility of the extreme right. In “the AEAR

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organ Commune,” one PPF intellectual fumed, “one explains admirably that the nationalist right disinterests itself in questions of education, laboratories, artists and writers.” The CPF served as a tool to end the “intellectual propaganda” and reveal the true intellectual priorities of the extreme right. 169 In the CPF, according to its description in the L’Émancipation Nationale, the PPF intellectuals had “recourse to all the means of expression which are able to adapt critical reflection to the conditions of social action: meetings, lectures, courses, brochures, etc.” 170 In these meetings and lectures, the PPF intellectuals spoke to fellow writers, students, members of the liberal professions, and the few working class members who were encouraged to attend. 171 Topics varied from discussions of love, poetry, and cinema, to the more politically engaged issues of the new Germany, intelligence and character, African colonialism, António de Oliveira Salazar’s Portugal, and the National Revolution. 172 PPF intellectuals also tried to expand the reach of their efforts by taking their lectures abroad. Fernandez gave a series of seven lectures during a week in Morocco and, by the end of his travels, created a Moroccan branch of the CPF. Although the CPF and its parent organization the PPF provided some of the most active intellectual communities of the right, they were not the only intellectual spaces sympathetic to the ideas and values of the extreme right. Bonnard was actively involved in one of the many groups, the Cercle Fustel de Coulanges, which attracted several of the intellectuals of the AF milieu. The Cercle, named for the nationalist historian, stated its aim as the “consideration of the problems of education and the defense of intelligence and French patriotism.” 173 Its range was not as great as the CPF but it claimed to have recruited over two thousand members of the intellectual and teaching milieu and also boasted that its influence was better measured by the “furious attacks that L’Humanité, Populaire, La Ligue des droites de l’homme [the League of the Rights of Man], and the University” had launched against it. 174 The Cercle united those right-wing intellectuals and educators who valued nationalism, the classical humanities, militarism, colonialism, and a rejection of the intrusion by Bolshevism or republicanism into culture. The cercle intellectuals also communed in a more socio-professional environment through the collaboration on Cahiers Fustel de Coulanges: Revue Bitrimestrielle, which ran for over a decade, and a series of independent publications. 175 Personal ties and professional networks were also forged through a series of banquets for the purposes of socialization and exchange of ideas among its members. Physical groupings of intellectuals like the Jeune Droite, CPF, and Cercle Fustel were not the only means of building a sense of collective identity among the intellectual extreme right. As they did during the Dreyfus Affair and the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates, manifestos signed by like-minded intellectuals created a sense of imaginary community.

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Again, while signing petitions and creating manifestos was a shared behavior between the left and extreme right, both camps intentionally ignored this common intellectual practice in favor of an emphasis on the sense of opposition and division that these lists could create. The lists allowed right-wing intellectuals to publicize the irritation they felt toward the left-wing, the demand that they be recognized as intellectuals, and the belief that they represented the true values of French intelligence and culture. As early as 1931, the pacifist left issued the “Manifeste contre les excès du nationalisme” (Manifesto against the excess of nationalism) that claimed to speak on behalf of all intellectuals. Signed by 186 intellectuals drawn in large numbers from the contributors to the NRF, the manifesto implored France to break with the strategy of war in favor of one of reconciliation. The intellectual youth of the extreme right were made so indignant by this attempt to monopolize the title of intellectual that they launched their own “Manifeste des jeunes intellectuels ‘mobilisables’” (Manifesto of the young mobilized intellectuals), which prominently utilized the name “intellectuel” and demanded an equal authority to speak for the intellectual community. One smaller right-wing manifesto in the L’Émancipation Nationale titled “Un magnifique réveil des intellectuels français” (A magnificent awakening of the French intellectual) gathered mainly writers associated with the PPF like Bonnard, Boulenger, Brasillach, Chack, Drieu, Fernandez, and Maulnier along with a few non-PPF intellectuals like Massis. Despite its small size, the manifesto was able to bring together these writers and claim for them not only the title of intellectual but also the right to speak out as intellectuals on issues of social importance. As previously mentioned, in October 1935, Massis penned the much larger Défense de l’Occident manifesto which had sixty-four signatures, including twelve Academy members, in its first publication. Like the smaller petitions, Massis’s manifesto sought to provide a platform for intellectuals to collectively engage in a particular public concern, in this case, the colonizing efforts of Mussolini’s Italy. The manifesto proudly proclaimed the right-wing signers to be “the French intellectuals” and argued that it was because of their vocation as intellectuals that they felt the responsibility to speak out against the sanctions placed on Italy. “While the acts of men, to whom the destiny of nations is confided, risk putting in danger the future of civilization,” the manifesto began, “those who consecrate their work to the things of intelligence ought to make known with vigor the demands of the mind.” 176 It continued to explain that Rome was the home of Western civilization and that efforts to stifle the growth of Italy indicated that “intelligence” had “abdicated its authority” in favor of political ideology. In closing, it again claimed the title and responsibility of intellectuals saying, “As intellectuals, we ought to protect culture with even more vigilance since we profit from its benefits; we are not able to allow civilization to decide against itself. To prevent such a suicide, we appeal to all the forces of the spirit.” 177 The

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right-wing signers were clearly claiming the right to speak as intellectuals and the duty to conserve culture and guide affairs. They were also denying this continued right to the thinkers of the left who “abdicated” their responsibilities to intelligence by dabbling in left-wing politics. The final great war of petitions in the interwar was waged in 1936 over French involvement in the Spanish Civil War. The left’s petition titled “Déclaration des intellectuels républicains” (Declaration of the republican intellectuals) was placed in Commune in December 1936. The signers claimed a “duty” to speak for France and to help guide public opinion in the path of the universal conscience. Any policy of nonintervention, they wrote, was simply intervention in favor of the rebels against the Popular Front. The signers were united by their antifascism and their desire to help the Popular Front, communist-friendly Spanish government. In response, the intellectuals of the extreme right banded together in the “Manifeste aux intellectuels espagnols” where they expressed their support for the rebels of Franco. Again, the signers of the right-wing manifesto claimed themselves to be “intellectuels français” in the very first sentence. 178 These forty-two self-proclaimed intellectuals, including Fernandez and Bonnard, again announced themselves to be the ones faithfully representing the demands of culture and intelligence. They also stated, in an obvious effort to contrast their ideas of this representation with those on the communist left, “We place ourselves above all politics” and cited their belief in the “fraternity of the classes, not their reciprocal hatred” and the right to defend the nation against exterior interference under pretext of ideology. 179 In closing, they emphasized that they, as right-wing intellectuals, were speaking for “la vraie France” (true France). In the imagined spaces of collective identity, even the structuring of the petitions revealed a difference between the communities of the extreme right and the left. Signers of the left-wing petitions like the “Declaration des intellectuels républicains” were grouped separately under the headings of “Professors” and “Writers.” Because the number of universitaires, over two hundred, outnumbered those of the men of letters, the latter was augmented by artists, architects, and others of the liberal professions. Even so, it still totaled only half of the universitaire number. 180 On the far right, such divisions were less common. Writers and journalists, who dominated the list of signers, held prominent places in its display. The manifestos were most effective in amplifying individual engagements when they were well-publicized in a journal that had built a community of sympathetic readers. The most prominent journals and the most widely circulated papers during the 1930s remained the property of the intellectual extreme right. Massis was quite cognizant of the influence that a journal team could have on the creation of collective identity, despite the disparate origins or trajectories of its individual right-wing con-

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tributors. The Revue Universelle, he wrote, was “a haven for conservativenationalist, traditionalist, and reactionary writers,” where ideas could be expressed freely without repression, where friendships were formed, and where mentoring was offered. 181 In particular, the Revue Universelle opened itself to the emerging names of the Jeune Droite and the nonconformist circles of the interwar years as a sort of training ground. Here writers like Maulnier, Benjamin, and Massis’s particular protégée, Brasillach, were introduced to nationalist, anti-international, anticommunist, and occasionally anti-Semitic journalism. 182 In their first issue where the new team of the Revue Universelle outlined their program, they extolled these benefits, writing, “This organ will federate all the intellectual elements that on all the points of the globe are devoted to safeguarding civilization.” 183 The “destiny” of the Revue Universelle, they continued, was to spread relationships between groups devoted to the cause of the mind that too often ignored one another. Here, “French patriots,” could enter into contact with one another, unite, and realize their alliance. In coming together they would “know themselves and each other better” and “take consciousness of their force” in order to increase the “effectiveness of their action.” 184 Only, they concluded, when “all those who think the same way come together and collaborate” would the “just ideas” they shared triumph. It was the aims of intellectual community and fraternity, of shared purpose, of effective engagement, and of a united front against the “forces of intellectual dissolution” on the left that helped build these right-wing intellectual communities and contributed to a distinctive collective identity on the extreme right. Some of the most powerful intellectual journals on the extreme right, beyond the ever dominant Action Française and the Revue Universelle, were Candide and its radical offshoot Je Suis Partout, Gringoire, and the PPF journal L’Émancipation Nationale. When combined with the networks of smaller journals, the web of right-wing journals became a powerful tool for building collective community and socio-professional ties. Candide, published by Fayard and directed by Gaxotte, had direct ties to the AF and brought in a number of its collaborators including Jacques Bainville, Alphonse Daudet, Lucien Rebatet, and Brasillach. The enormous circulation of Candide, around four hundred thousand during the years of the Popular Front, made it a formidable opponent for the left, whose journals could not begin to compete with such numbers. Gringoire, with a circulation near six hundred thousand, enjoyed the status of being the most highly diffused weekly of any paper in the 1930s. It also enjoyed the redoubtable talents and prestige of writers Henri Béraud, André Tardieu, and Drieu la Rochelle. Gringoire also participated, though not to the same extent, in the increasing anti-Semitism that was found in Je Suis Partout. Most importantly, Gringoire was one of the leading opponents of Blum and the Popular Front. The mass circulation of the paper did not fail to

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influence fellow right-wing intellectuals and its ideas and articles were often cited in smaller right-wing papers. Even during the years of the Popular Front, the mass journals of the right like Gringoire, Candide, and Action Française drastically outsold leftwing papers and even republican journals like Figaro. 185 But there were several important left-wing journals that provided a sense of intellectual community, a fraternity of writers, and a shared journalistic mission for their collaborators. The French press sympathetic to the left-wing effort included papers like Humanité, Commune, Monde, Clarté, Nouvel Âge, Europe, and later Ce Soir. Even journals like the NRF that tried to maintain their moderate republican or even apolitical appearance still visibly favored antifascist works and authors. These journals were linked in a politically segregated professional network that included publishing houses that managed both the journals and authors sympathetic to the cause. In this way, journal collaborators gained important publishing connections. Éditions Clarté, the Librarie de l’Humanité, and Éditions Sociales Internationales were firms particularly sympathetic to communism, while the Gallimard Press retained an open catalog but tended to welcome NRF contributors because of its close ties to the journal. 186 Although right-wing writers like Drieu la Rochelle might be included in Gallimard’s catalog in part due to their involvement at the NRF, they did not find the sort of camaraderie and sympathy there that left-wing writers did. Most, including Drieu, eventually took their work to the more sympathetic publishers Plon and Fayard. Journal teams not only provided segregated professional networks, they influenced writers’ social interactions as well. Although, under Paulhan, the NRF attempted to retain the apolitical priorities of the journal, Gide’s interest in communism severely altered its tone. 187 The newly politicized team was an intellectual and social community unto itself. The staff met socially after hours at Gide’s home, in the nearby Pont Royal bar, or in the home of communist writer Malraux. On a larger scale, contributors were invited to extravagant summer retreats in Burgundy where they could participate in symposia, outings, and even parlor games. Retreats like these allowed aspiring young authors like Jean-Paul Sartre to make professional contacts with Gallimard publishers and also with the entire network of prestigious NRF writers. On a weekly basis, the wives and families of NRF staff came by to watch the printing process before journeying out together as a giant family to a nearby restaurant. 188 This polarization of social interactions due to journal team socialization did not eliminate friendships between left-wing and right-wing writers. But it contributed to a general sense of collective identity with those who shared the same spaces of daily intellectual life. Such intimate networks of sociability and professional support created a strong sense of identification with the left-wing journal teams, publishing networks, petition communities, and political organizations. In contrast, the exclusion of

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right-wing intellectuals tended to reinforce the sense of intellectual and personal separation between the two political camps. Right-wing intellectuals engaged not only to combat the politics of antifascism and communism, but also to redefine intellectual identity according to right-wing ideals. Their struggle for intellectual legitimacy and the reversal of the left-wing hegemony became an essential trope in their cultural politics, and their resentment was an essential element of their engagement that the left did not share. The intellectuals of the extreme right were also distanced from those of the left by their emphasis on themes like decadence and the real, a hierarchy of elites, and FrancoGerman rapprochement. These distinctive right-wing values and perception of their exclusion from the mainstream intellectual world led to the formation of segregated intellectual communities and networks to foster these values and perpetuate the sense of resentment and ostracism. Right-wing intellectuals were identified by their participation in certain parties, cercles, and movements, as well as their signatures’ appearance on certain manifestos, and their relationships to certain journalistic and publishing networks. The right-wing collective identity fostered in these segregated spaces contributed to and was influenced by the extreme right’s perception of its relationship to the places of power and influence, such as the government, the university, and international political parties, all of which affected daily intellectual experience. Even when behaviors between the right and the left were shared, intellectuals on both sides chose to emphasize not the common practice, but rather the polarizing elements of the political engagement in order to provoke a sense of alienation, of segregation, and of resentment. The concept of the right-wing intellectual evolved yet again after 1940 in order to address the changing place of the extreme right under the German occupation. NOTES 1. Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France: De l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: A Colin, 1986), 92. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 2. Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris: B. Grasset, 1956); trans. The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: Norton 1969). 3. Emmanuel Berl, Mort de la pensée bourgeoise (Paris: Grasset, 1929). 4. Martyn Cornick, Intellectuals in History: The Nouvelle Revue Française under Jean Paulhan, 1925–1940 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 4. Hereafter, the Third Republic will be referred to as “the Republic.” 5. David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 1914–1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 113. 6. David Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 107. 7. Cornick, Intellectuals in History, 85. 8. Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics, 132. 9. Alain [pseud. of Émile-Auguste Chartier], Paul Langevin, and Rivet, Aux travailleurs (Paris: Imp. Centrale de la Bourse Paris, March 5, 1934).

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10. Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2. 11. Ory and Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France, 99; see also ibid., 39. 12. Jacques Doriot, as quoted by Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, “The Intellectual Extreme Right in the Thirties,” in The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le Pen, ed. Edward J Arnold (New York: St Martins Press, 2000), 129. 13. Kevin Passmore, “Class, Gender, and Populism: The Parti Populaire Français in Lyon, 1936–40,” in The Right in France: From Revolution to Le Pen, ed. Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 185. 14. Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite, ni gauche: L’idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983); and his “Morphology of Fascism in France,” in France in the Era of Fascism: Essays on the French Authoritarian Right, ed. Brian Jenkins (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 27. 15. Robert Soucy, “Fascism in France: Problematising the Immunity Thesis,” in France in the Era of Fascism: Essays on the French Authoritarian Right, ed. Brian Jenkins (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 82–83. 16. The French Right between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism, ed. Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 6. 17. Nicholas Kessler, Histoire politique de la Jeune Droite (1929–1942): Une révolution conservatrice à la française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 30. 18. Ibid., 32. 19. Sean Kennedy, Reconciling France against Democracy: The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français, 1927–1945 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007), 14–20. 20. Sarah Shurts, “Safeguarding a ‘Civilization in Crisis’: The Pan-European Community of La Revue Universelle and the Cultivation of a French Conservative Revolution, 1920–1935,” Journal of Modern European History (February 2017). 21. Paul Mazgaj, “Defending the West: The Cultural and Generational Politics of Henri Massis,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 17, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 104–5; see also Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism: The Cultural Politics of the Young Right, 1930–1945 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007). 22. William D. Irvine, “Beyond Left and Right, and the Politics of the Third Republic: A Conversation,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 34, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 134–46. 23. Sandrine Sanos, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 24. Geoff Read, “Des hommes et des citoyens: Paternalism and Masculinity on the Republican Right in Interwar France, 1919–1939” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 34, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 88–111; Daniella Sarnoff, “An Overview of Women and Gender in French Fascism,” in The French Right between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism, ed. Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 148–49. 25. Kevin Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 26. Kalman and Kennedy, French Right, 2–5. The Croix-de-Feu was founded as a veterans association in 1927 but became a popular league under the leadership of François de la Rocque in 1930. It later transformed into a political party, after the league was banned in 1936, called the Parti social français. 27. Ibid., 4. 28. Kessler, Histoire politique de la Jeune Droite, 16. 29. Brian Jenkins, “Introduction: Contextualizing the Immunity Thesis,” in Brian Jenkins France in the Era of Fascism, ed. Jenkins (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 18. 30. Ibid., 18. 31. Kennedy, Reconciling France, 21. 32. Passmore, “Class, Gender, and Populism,” 187.

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33. D. L. L Parry, “Counter Revolution by Conspiracy, 1935–1937,” in The Right in France: From Revolution to Le Pen, ed. Nicholas and Frank Tallett, (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 162. 34. Ibid., 172. 35. Mazgaj, Imaging Fascism, 33. 36. Although Paul Nizan broke with the PCF in 1939 over the Nazi-Soviet pact, he was an active collaborator of the PCFs intellectual model throughout the decade under consideration in this section. 37. Paul Nizan, The Watchdogs: Philosophers of the Established Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 126–38. 38. Alain, Message au peuple: 15 Juin 1934 (Paris: Librairie Picart, 1934), 2. 39. In his 1930 poem Le Front Rouge (The Red Front), Louis Aragon wrote, “Bring down the police comrades, bring down the police, onward toward the West where sleep rich children. . . . I sing the violent domination of the bourgeois by the proletariat, for the annihilation of the bourgeoisie” (Aragon, The Red Front, trans. E. E. Cummings [Chapel Hill, NC: Contempo, 1933], quoted in Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 94). 40. Paul Vaillant-Couturier, “Un an d’activité de l’association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires,” L’Humanité, March 21, 1933. 41. Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 206. 42. André Gide, quoted in Herbert R. Lottman, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (San Francisco: Halo Books, 1991), 87. 43. J. Mievre, “L’évolution politique d’Abel Bonnard (jusqu’au printemps 1942),” Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale 27, no. 108 (October 1977), 4. 44. Over his lifetime, Abel Bonnard would publish in over one hundred journals. 45. Mievre, “L’évolution politique d’Abel Bonnard,” 5. 46. Abel Bonnard, Inédits politiques d’Abel Bonnard de l’Académie française, preface by Olivier Mathieu (Paris: Éditions Avalon, 1987), 14. 47. Olivier Mathieu, Abel Bonnard: Un aventure inachevée (Paris: Avalon, 1988), 240. 48. Henri Massis, “Un manifeste des intellectuels français pour la défense de l’Occident,” Les Temps, October 4, 1935; and author unknown, “Manifeste aux intellectuels espagnols,” Occident: Bimensuel Franco-Espagnol, December 10, 1937. 49. Ibid., 255. 50. Ibid., 263. 51. Bonnard, Inédits politiques, 25. 52. Mievre, “L’évolution politique,” 11. 53. A. Rivaud, “Marxisme et education,” Cahiers Fustel de Coulanges: /Revue Bitrimestrielle, December 1935, 5. 54. Abel Bonnard, “L’intelligence française,” La Gerbe, April 16, 1942. 55. Abel Bonnard, “speech by Abel Bonnard at the annual banquet,” Cahiers Fustel de Coulanges: Revue Bitrimestrielle, July 1931, 5. 56. Abel Bonnard, “speech by Abel Bonnard for the Cercle,” Cahiers Fustel de Coulanges: Revue Bitrimestrielle, July 1933, 3. 57. Bonnard, “L’intelligence française.” 58. Abel Bonnard, Le drame du présent: Les modérés (Paris: Grasset, 1936), 137. 59. Ibid., 129. 60. Ibid., 132. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 130. 63. Ibid., 125. 64. Abel Bonnard, Ce monde et moi: Aphorisms et fragments recueillis par Luc Gendrillon (Paris: Dismas, 1991), 38. 65. Thierry Maulnier, “L’ilote ivre,” Courrier Royal, April 25, 1936. 66. Bonnard, Le drame du présent, 244. 67. Ibid., 64. 68. Ibid., 41.

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69. Ibid., 34. 70. Ibid., 43. 71. Ibid., 139. 72. Ibid., 179. 73. Ibid., 171. 74. Abel Bonnard, “Les réactionnaires,” Je Suis Partout, May 19, 1941. In sum, they were the men who “remained faithful to the truths of life in a regime that constituted itself on principles opposed to them . . . who recalled obstinately the laws of all health in a society that is lost and exalts the ideas that continue to lose it” (ibid). 75. Ibid. 76. Bonnard, according to Mievre, “L’évolution politique,” 11. 77. Bonnard, Inédits politiques, 48. 78. For a more in depth discussion of the place of the PPF in the right-left continuum, see Robert Soucy’s response to Zeev Sternhell’s Ni droite, ni gauche: L’idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983), in his French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); and French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Also Ory and Sirinelli’s Les intellectuels en France finds both Ramon Fernandez and the PPF to be of the extreme Right by 1936. 79. Ramon Fernandez, “Lettre ouverte à André Gide,” Nouvelle Revue Française 247 (1934): 703–8. 80. Ramon Fernandez, “Qu’est-ce qu’un intellectuel?,” L’Émancipation Nationale, August 20, 1937. 81. Ramon Fernandez, “La culpabilité morale de Léon Blum,” L’Émancipation Nationale, July 10, 1937. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Ramon Fernandez, “Les intellectuals et la guerre d’Espagne,” L’Émancipation Nationale, March 17, 1939. 86. Ramon Fernandez, “Incapables d’avoir raison contre Doriot,” L’Émancipation Nationale, July 24, 1937. 87. Ibid. 88. Ramon Fernandez, “En Russia les Communists ont domestiqué les intellectuels,” L’Émancipation Nationale, July 17, 1937. 89. Ramon Fernandez, “L’esprit du temps,” L’Émancipation Nationale, January 20, 1939; emphasis in the original. 90. Ramon Fernandez, “Notre deuxieme Congres,” L’Émancipation Nationale, March 26, 1938. 91. Ramon Fernandez, “Le PPF et le pays intellectuel,” L’Émancipation Nationale, March 11, 1938; emphasis in the original. 92. Fernandez, “Notre deuxieme Congres.” 93. Fernandez, “Le PPF et le pays intellectuel.” 94. Ramon Fernandez, “Le Front populaire est enterré par ses intellectuels,” L’Émancipation Nationale, May 20, 1938. 95. Ibid. 96. Ramon Fernandez, “De l’élite,” L’Émancipation Nationale , May 26, 1939. 97. Ramon Fernandez, “Ramon Fernandez à Marseille,” La Liberté, September 23, 1938. 98. Ramon Fernandez, “La droite et la gauche,” L’Émancipation Nationale, June 30, 1939. 99. Ramon Fernandez, “Le communisme et M. Julien Benda,” Émancipation Nationale, August 12, 1938. 100. Ramon Fernandez, “M. Hubert Bourgin explique lumineusement la corruption de l’élite intellectuelle,” L’Émancipation Nationale, April 22, 1938.

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101. Ramon Fernandez, “Délivrons la pensée du mensonge libéral,” L’Émancipation Nationale, December 31, 1937. 102. Fernandez, “En Russia.” 103. Ibid. 104. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 105. Ibid. 106. Bonnard, Le drame du présent, 308. 107. Paul Mazgaj, “Engagement and the French Nationalist Right: The Case of the Jeune Droite,” European History Quarterly 32, no. 2 (April 2002): 207. 108. Ibid., 223. 109. Abel Bonnard, “Le bon sense français,” La Revue Hebdomadaire, March 19, 1938. 110. Fernandez, “Le Front populaire.” 111. Abel Bonnard, “Le français qu’il nous faut,” Je Suis Partout, March 21, 1941. 112. Bonnard, “L’intelligence française.” 113. Fernandez, “Incapables d’avoir raison.” 114. Bonnard, “Le français qu’il nous faut.” 115. Abel Bonnard, “Je n’aime pas les intellectuels,” L’Émancipation Nationale, March 19, 1938. 116. Abel Bonnard fumed in one article, “These French intellectuals of the left, the men the most aged and outdated that there are in the world, without relation to any type of reality, speak without cease of ‘progress’ because they dare not regard the future. Whatever they are able to say, life is otherwise” (“En écoutant la voix anglaise,” August 22, 1940, in Inédits politiques d’Abel Bonnard de l’Académie française [Paris: Éditions Avalon, 1987], 204. 117. Bonnard, Ce monde et moi, 130. 118. Bonnard, “Le bon sense français,” 119. Bonnard, Ce monde et moi, 129. 120. Ibid. 121. Abel Bonnard, “Preface,” in L’éducation et l’idée de patrie, ed. H. Carteron, O. Pozzo di Borgo, Albert Rivaud, H. Boegner, and Serge Jeanneret (Paris: Librairie de l’Arc, 1936). 122. Fernandez, “L’esprit du temps.” 123. P. Heinrich, “Comment est enseignée l’histoire de la Troisieme République,” Cahiers Fustel de Coulanges: Revue Bitrimestrielle, July 1930, 29. 124. Ibid., 17. 125. Ramon Fernandez, “Perspectives sur les relativites humaines de Jacques Moreau,” Emancipation Nationale, December 17, 1937. 126. Bonnard, Le drame du présent, 242. 127. Ibid, 241. 128. Bonnard, Ce monde et moi, 24–26; emphasis in the original. 129. Émile Bocquillon, “Patriotisme,” Cahiers Fustel de Coulanges: Revue Bitrimestrielle, April 1929. 130. Henri Boegner, “Intelligence et democratie,” Cahiers Fustel de Coulanges: Revue Bitrimestrielle, December 1928, 6. 131. Abel Bonnard, “Necessité d’une élite,” 132. Ramon Fernandez, “De l’élite suite,” L’Émancipation Nationale, May 19, 1939. 133. Conference notes for PPF meeting, November 24, 1938, at the Salle d’Horticulture, rue de Grenelle, Archive de la Pré fecture de Police, Paris (hereafter cited APP), box Ba 1946. 134. Paul Nizan, an eventual PCF intellectual, wrote during this time in the more left-leaning NRF, “All is swept away in the permanent scandal of civilization where we are, in the general ruin where men are in the midst of destroying themselves” (Nizan, quoted in Kessler, Histoire politique de la Jeune Droite, 32). 135. Bonnard, “Le bon sense français.” 136. Abel Bonnard, “Les durs et les mous,” L’Émancipation Nationale, April 1 1938.

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137. Mathieu, Abel Bonnard, 263. 138. Paul Marion, Programme du Parti populaire français (Paris: Les Oeuvres Françaises, 1938), 102. 139. Diane Rubenstein, What’s Left? The École Normale Supérieure and the Right (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990),12.. 140. Ibid., 107. 141. Ibid., 9–27. 142. Fernandez, “Qu’est-ce qu’un intellectuel?” 143. Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 115. 144. As explored more extensively in the introduction of this study, the argument, created by historians and intellectuals of the left immediately after the Liberation, that fascism had little influence in France before the occupation and that it was a foreign import from Germany, has since been amended by most historians of fascism. The early belief that France was immune to fascism was held by historians like René Rémond, Stanley Payne, Pierre Milza, and even the recent work of Serge Berstein and Michel Winock. This post–World War I history was overturned by the work of Robert Paxton, Sternhell, Soucy, and Philippe Burrin and the recent work of Roger Griffin and John F. Sweets. Rather than seeing it as an “aberration,” more and more credence has been given to the fascist-sympathizing intellectuals’ own claims that they were building a French form of fascism that drew, not on German or Italian examples, but on the traditional nationalism, anti-parliamentarianism, anticommunism, and even anti-Semitism of True France. Those intellectuals like Bonnard and Fernandez, who showed an increasing attraction to fascism during the latter 1930s, made reference to the nationalist ideas of Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, Fustel, la Tour du Pin, and others in the traditional French lexicon to express their ideas of the French version of the national revolution. 145. Ramon Fernandez, “L’incendie des idées,” L’Émancipation Nationale, December 8, 1939. 146. Henri Nancroix, “Pour la vraie pensée française,” L’Émancipation Nationale, November 28, 1936. 147. Fernandez, “Notre deuxieme Congres.” 148. Ramon Fernandez, “Le procès de l’intellectuel,” Nouvelle Revue Française, August 1938. 149. Ibid. 150. Lottman, Left Bank, 59. 151. Inside cover of Commune, July 1933. 152. One critique of Esprit chastised Jacques Maritain for believing that the church could remedy the profound causes of the current social malaise. “Notes on esprit,” Commune, July 1933. Another issue included political poems calling for proletarian revolution. An enquête (survey) in 1933 and 1934 asked, “Pour qui ecrivez-vous” (For whom do you write?) and suggested the proper answer was for the proletariat. And Paul Vaillant-Couturier argued that artists and writers had to stand beside the working class, in his article “Avec qui etes-vous artistes et écrivains?” [Who are you with artists and writers?] Commune, July 1933. 153. “Mission Statement,” Commune, July–October 1933. 154. Vaillant-Couturier, “Un an d’activité.” 155. At the International Writers Congress for the Defense of Culture conference, held in Paris June 21, 1935, topics of speeches ranged from “The Role of the Writer in Society” to “The Individual” to speeches against nationalism and in favor of socialist realism. 156. This exclusion of the right-wing writers was met with feigned outrage by the extreme-right journals, who claimed, “A congress of writers that deprives itself of the great majority of writers is only a clan of partisans” (Lottman, Left Bank, 83). In truth, they would not have had any interest in speaking in this left-wing environment. 157. Ibid., 60. 158. Alain, Langevin, and Rivet, “Aux Travailleurs.”

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159. “Le manifeste du Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascists,” ed. Nicole Racine,http://biosoc.univ-paris1.fr/histoire/textimage/texte22.htm(accessed 2007). 160. “We are ready to sacrifice all,” the CVIA spokesmen wrote, “to prevent France from being submitted to a regime of repression and bellicose misery under the cover of a national revolution.” Ibid. 161. René Rémond, The Right Wing in France from 1815 to DeGaulle, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1969), 217. 162. Passmore, Right in France, 184. 163. Fernandez, “Avec Doriot.” 164. Marion, Programme, 14. 165. Abel Bonnard, citation, in press clippings from 1936 and 1937 meetings with reports on the PPF and the sale organized by the sections féminines du PPF (women’s sections of the PPF), n.d., APP, box Ba 1946. 166. Ramon Fernandez, “Meeting Notes of the CPF on the opening speech of Ramon Fernandez” March 23, 1939 in Salle Chansonia, boulevard Beaumarchais, in APP, box Ba 1946. 167. Ibid. 168. Ibid. 169. J. Saint-Germain, “Il faut fermer cet établissement sovietique,” L’Émancipation Nationale, July 28, 1939. 170. Ramon Fernandez, “Pour une culture française . . . voici les Cercles populaires français,” L’Émancipation Nationale, May 13, 1938. 171. Ramon Fernandez, “Premiere soirée littéraire des Écrivains PPF,” L’Émancipation Nationale, June 10, 1938. 172. “Meeting Notes of the CPF” from March 1939 to July 1939 APP, box Ba 1946. 173. “Cover Statement,” Cahiers Fustel de Coulanges, October 1928, cover. 174. Ibid. 175. Collection du Cercle Fustel de Coulanges (Paris: Librarie de l’Arc, 1930). 176. Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions française: Manifestes et pétitions au XX e siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 93. 177. Ibid., 94. 178. Ibid., 107. 179. Ibid., 108. 180. Ibid., 105. 181. Edward R. Tannenbaum, The Action Française: Die-hard Reactionaries in TwentiethCentury France (New York: Wiley, 1962), 59. 182. Jean François Sirinelli, Histoire des droites en France: Cultures (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 2:180. 183. “Notre Programme,” Revue Universelle, April 1, 1920. 184. Ibid. 185. Lottman, Left Bank, 71. 186. Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 47. 187. Cornick, Intellectuals in History, 34. 188. Lottman, Left Bank.

FOUR The Ostracized Intellectual in Power Occupation and Collaboration, 1940–1945

Although the declaration of war in 1939 and the subsequent 1940 invasion of France momentarily brought together intellectuals from both sides of the political divide, 1 the resulting occupation again violently divided the French intellectual world to an extent previously unimaginable. The division of the French intellectuals during the years of the Occupation resembled that of the 1930s division between the antifascists and those who were opposed to the Popular Front. However, the new source of division—the choice to collaborate, to resist, or to accommodate in a gray zone in between—evoked much stronger passions in an intellectual environment that was already strained by the events of the war, occupation, and censorship. During the Occupation, the Resistance presented its opponents as traitors to the intellectual ideals of the patrie (nation/country/homeland), free thought, and human rights, while the committed collaborationists often presented the resistors as saboteurs of French civilization’s last chance to renew itself and take its place in the new world order. There was a sense on both sides that an apocalypse for France was imminent. In this radicalized view of the danger posed by the opposing camp, differences in opinion were reinforced with violence, denunciation, imprisonment, or death, making all previous intellectual differences and resentments, even those of the more volatile 1930s, seem like mere academic exercises. Never before did it seem so important for intellectuals to clarify the differences between their two camps and legitimize their own group as the nation’s rightful intellectual guides. The established intellectual world seems best described as indecisive and chaotic in the initial months after the German invasion and occupation in June 1940. The communists had found themselves initially in the 185

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unfamiliar role of nationalists and militarists, but with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939, the committed communists suddenly lowered their objections. This led the republicans to mobilize more urgently not only against the fascist extreme right, but also against their former allies from the Popular Front. Communist outlets like L’Humanité and the Parti communiste français (PCF) (French Communist Party) were both banned by the government and remained clandestine operations that favored Germany and opposed both Charles de Gaulle and the Allies until the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. After the armistice, voting full powers to Philippe Pétain and the creation of Vichy were viewed as the acts of the legitimate French government and, despite later condemnation of the vote as unconstitutional and manipulated by Pierre Laval, it had the support of the majority of the French public and foreign governments. 2 However, it was soon apparent that the Vichy state was submissive to Third Reich politics even if it was not occupied by the military, and extreme right intellectuals found ready places within its new cultural and political structures, while left-wing intellectuals found themselves facing censorship and restrictions. Vichy officially retained national sovereignty in the occupied zone as well, making the nation still a single unit in the imagination of Vichy’s leaders and its supporters. 3 In reality, the officials in the occupied north, though French, had little contact with Vichy and instead negotiated their policies and cultural production through Otto Abetz and the German military administration. 4 This distinction between the administration and the oversight of the two regions, especially before 1942, meant that intellectual production, daily life, and ideological affinities could be different on each side of the border. Certain intellectual outlets were accepted in Vichy France, like Charles Maurras’s traditionally Germanophobic Action française (AF), but were banned in the north and attacked as inactive and moderate by the Parisian collaborationist press. The Vichy intellectuals in turn accused the Parisian intellectuals of succumbing to intellectual colonization by Germany and of a loss of their French patriotism. 5 Those on the extreme left found repression in both Vichy and Paris and many like Raymond Aron, Jean-Richard Bloch, and André Breton sought exile in America, England, the USSR, or Brazil while others like André Gide fled to the colonies. Those on both the right and the left who remained to “wait and see” what the Occupation would bring, faced new decisions about collaboration and how that aligned with their identity as intellectuals. Discussion of collaboration and resistance has been fraught with controversy ever since Robert Paxton initially disrupted the carefully constructed French memory of the nation of forty million resistors. René Rémond’s and Aron’s arguments presented a France immune to fascist influences, save the experience of a few of what Sartre, in his “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” called “perverted intellectuals” on the extreme right. 6 The majority were suffering under a foreign import during the

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Occupation while being shielded from the worst by the double game of Pétain. This view, put in place after the Liberation, was assaulted in the 1980s by scholars outside of France—from Paxton and Zeev Sternhell to Robert Soucy and William D. Irvine. These new studies found evidence not only of fascist sympathies within a broader section of the French public but also a native variant of French fascism developed in the early decades of the twentieth century by the nationalist intellectuals of the extreme right, including Maurice Barrès, Maurras, and Georges Sorel. The defense of French immunity has since been heavily amended by scholars, including Serge Berstein, Philippe Burrin, Pierre Milza, JeanPaul Gautier, and Michel Winock, who all acknowledge that France was touched by fascism more significantly than previously admitted, but still resist the idea of anything more than what Gautier has called a “marginal” influence or a peripheral space within what Burrin calls the “magnetic field of fascism.” 7 The debate over the division between and the percentage of the fascists and their republican and extreme-left opponents is intimately tied to a secondary examination of the internal differences within the extreme right—between Vichy intellectuals’ state collaboration and the support for Nazism provided by the committed collaborationists. It is imperative, Pascal Ory and others have warned since the 1970s, not to confound the ideology and behavior of the Vichyists with the collaborationists. Collaborators with Vichy were often seeking their own gain or were interested in possibly freeing French prisoners of war or were simply compromising in order to continue daily life, Ory explains. Collaborationism, on the other hand, was a deliberate political choice of what he considers to be an “active minority” of the population. 8 Julian Jackson clarifies the argument further, saying that the difference in the two was the collaborationists’ commitment to fascist ideology. While he says historians have been wrong to see Vichy as free from fascism until the last years of the Occupation and to claim that all real fascist ideologues returned to Paris, he contends that fascism only played a subsidiary role in Vichy’s agenda in those early years. 9 An attempt to find middle ground has been proposed recently by James Shields who says of Vichy that, while it is “inaccurate to call it fascist, it was a regime wide open to extreme right influences where avowed fascists acceded to power over time.” 10 Yet this relative consensus by French and non-French scholars on the absence of a strong commitment to fascism in Vichy suggests that there was a true internal tension within the extreme-right during the Occupation. Those who initiated more active support for the Nazi regime, like the Parti populaire français’s (PPF) support in June 1941 for the Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme (LVF) (Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism) or Georges Claude’s support for German scientific advances, therefore often marked their split with Vichy, at least until after 1943. 11 And collaborationists like Abel Bonnard who began

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working for the Vichy regime as officials were often frustrated with the supposed failure of the National Revolution. 12 This internal division of the extreme right and the concept of collaboration was the origin of much of the anti-Vichy language found in the collaborationist press that expressed disappointment in the failure of Vichy’s National Revolution and the ineffectiveness of its policy. The pressure from the more vocal collaborationists has also been cited as one of the reasons for the eventual radicalization of the Vichy state. 13 There was also added tension within the extreme right from those who supported neither Vichy collaboration nor Nazi collaborationism. There was internal division not only between collaborationists and Vichy collaborators, but also within Vichy itself. Vichy was an amalgam of diverse influences—from the socialist left, Radical center, conservative right, and fascist extreme right—and it also bore the heavy mark of the AF. 14 In general its policies were improvised as circumstances required and were kept in check by the moderates who remained in their positions in the government bureaucracy, by its own lack of efficiency, and by a desire to be practical rather than principled. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle quickly became disillusioned with the regime, calling it “a regime of reactionary conservatives,” while Maurice Bardèche dismissed it as the “opposite of fascism,” and Marcel Déat denounced it as overly Maurrassian and therefore not the promised national socialist revolution. 15 Both the collaborationist intellectuals of the right and historians therefore tended to agree with Roger Griffin’s assessment that “Vichy was far from fascist in its inspiration; it was a Babel of illiberal nationalisms.” 16 The world of the extreme right, even of those who supported fascism and collaboration, was a diverse, heterogeneous one internally divided by conflicting views. Although there is agreement that there were major distinctions between the intellectual supporters of Vichy and the intellectual collaborationists who tended to remain in the occupied zone around Paris, there is less consensus on the possible common ground between them. Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy et les Juifs emphasized the differences between the anti-Semitism of the French state and that of Nazi policy, and also found that “the project of Vichy was to exclude the French Jews from the State and society and favor the remigration of foreign Jews; the German project was extermination.” 17 However, Laurent Joly’s research indicates that there were common anti-Semitic policies in both Vichy and the occupied zone and he rejects the historiographic trend of labeling Vichy’s anti-Semitism as exclusionary rather than as genocidal. Joly argues that initial anti-Semitic policies in October 1940 were instituted without German involvement and that Vichy policy by 1941 was to return undesirable Jews to Germany knowing of the violence they would suffer. Joly therefore calls for historians to reconsider the division that they have created between the Vichy and collaborationists in this area of

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anti-Semitic policy. 18 Brian Jenkins has also raised questions about the division between Vichy and collaborationism, suggesting that the designation was first created in the midst of Cold War politics that needed to see communism and Nazism as equally heinous enemies and yet preserve the reputations of Western allies by designating the latter “authoritarian conservative” rather than fascist. 19 Despite this potential common ground between Vichy collaborators and the Parisian collaborationists, the decision to collaborate during the Occupation was one of incredible complexity, stemming from different political and ideological origins that manifested in different choices of where and how to collaborate. The sociopolitical and moral complexity was compounded when the diverse options for resistance and accommodation were included. Although scholarship in the 1980s tended to suggest that “by Spring 1941 the French population had begun to polarize into two groups, collaborators and resistors,” 20 the choice for the French people was not a simple decision of supporting or rejecting the German occupation. 21 Rab Bennett has shown that resistance was often regarded as irresponsible in its extreme form since its practices involved terrorism that had repercussions for the citizens and was not clearly recognized as heroic in the midst of the Occupation. 22 There was also, as John F. Sweets has demonstrated, no clear designation of what could constitute a smaller act of resistance, so many later credited themselves resistors for what could equally have been seen as accommodation at the time. 23 Others slid imperceptibly across a vague boundary from accommodation to collaboration and back, depending on circumstances. 24 Their choices and motivations were examined by Robert Gildea whose accumulation of interviews and archives suggest that there was no overarching or recognized code of “good” and “bad” choices but only decisions made in defense of the local community or out of prudence or practicality in the circumstances of the moment. This perspective meant that, building on Burrin’s concept of a middle ground of accommodation, collaboration could have been seen as heroic for the local community’s needs at some times, while resistance could be the heroic choice at others. 25 Such murky concepts of morality during the Occupation were conveniently and collectively forgotten at the Liberation. For intellectuals in particular, decisions to stay and write, to stay and resist, to move to Vichy, or go into exile were equally complex and morally murky but were made with what Gisèle Sapiro has deemed the “unique practices” and motivations of the literary milieu since, she claims, the intellectual rarely disassociated their decisions from their professional role. 26 Intellectuals, it could be said, turned to state collaboration, collaborationism, resistance, or a place within the gray zone of accommodation in order to defend their idea of intellectual responsibility as a vital part of their own sense of self. Gide and Breton went into exile and Bloch went to the USSR, believing that there was no intellectual

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integrity in publishing under the occupiers, but others of the extreme left felt their place was in the intellectual capital. Alexandre Zévaès refused to leave Paris or his role at the publication L’Oeuvre and so changed its political orientation and turned to collaborationism. 27 Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux, at least initially, remained in Paris and published in a restricted climate because, as intellectuals, they believed the continued expression of French culture was a form of resistance. 28 On the extreme right, some chose to move their intellectual production to Vichy believing that a French state would better preserve French culture, including some of the more notable authors and journals such as Maurras and Henri Béraud and the Action Française, Gringore, Candide, and Figaro. Other intellectuals were seduced to collaborationism by those aspects of German culture that were emphasized by the Nazis, like Wagnerian opera, a history of scientific research in its university, or possible cultural exchange with German littérateurs (authors). 29 These intellectuals rationalized their embrace of “cultural exchange” with the Nazis by intentionally ignoring those aspects of which they disapproved. And still others like author Robert Brasillach and the newspaper Je Suis Partout enthusiastically supported Nazism as the embodiment of their intellectual value system and actively promoted German policy and propaganda in their work. For most, even in the intellectual world, life in occupied Paris and Vichy required an element of collaboration balanced by an element of resistance. On either extreme of this gray zone in the intellectual world, however, was a polarized minority of vocal intellectuals who spearheaded the divisive struggle to monopolize true intellectual identity during this period of crisis. Despite the enormous complexity of the decisions and the diversity of options for engagement within the intellectual world of the Occupation, the efforts to define the responsibility and values of the engaged intellectual tended toward the creation of more rigid boundaries for attitudes and expectations for behavior on each side. While the reality might have remained complex, the perception and language of an abyss returned to these intellectuals’ understanding of their identity as well as their place in the intellectual community. Rather than the diverse spectrum of possible choices and engagements, the struggle to define and claim true intellectual identity portrayed the choices as more straightforward: collaborationism or resistance. With the perception of clear division and fundamental dissimilarity between the two sides came the familiar trope of exclusion followed by the attitude of resentment. Surprisingly, however, it was the extreme right, protected and favored by the occupiers and by Vichy, that continued to portray itself in this light. Writers of the Resistance increasingly turned to participation in clandestine presses as the “Otto list,” which named the writers who were hostile to Nazi policy and therefore excluded from publication, grew in length. By the fall of 1941, one of the earliest civilian resistance organiza-

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tions, the Front national de lutte pour l’indépendence de la France, created a section for writers called the Comité national des écrivains (CNE). By the following year, it had formed its own literary journal, Les Lettres Françaises, which became the home of some of the most prestigious intellectuals of the communist and republican left. The CNE claimed in its 1943 manifesto that it united “the intellectual elite of the entire nation” and “gave to the writers of France and to all its intellectuals the general mobilization of the mind against the Barbarians.” 30 The CNE manifesto, despite the clandestine and repressed nature of its intellectual representatives, claimed that it spoke for the entire body of French intellectuals and that these Resistance intellectuals were the only ones who could provide cultural integrity and intellectual legitimacy during foreign occupation. “Against the bestial terrorism installed in our nation by the barbarian occupant,” the statement read, “we the intellectuals of France, writers, artists, professors . . . raise before French opinion and before the collection of the civilized world a solemn protest.” 31 The manifesto repeatedly emphasized that “the intellectuals of France” were defined during the Occupation by their refusal to collaborate, to publish, or even to accept the defeat. “We the intellectuals of France,” the manifesto continued, “reject with scorn the shameful appeals of a cowardly submission.” The collaborationists, it argued, partook in intellectual life as it had been reinstated and authorized by the Germans, which was an intellectual life that was really “a regime of terror installed under the cover of cultural ‘collaboration.’” Instead, the intellectual as redefined by the CNE would “take part in the liberating struggle,” putting their “knowledge, their art, and their authority in the service of the immortal cause of the homeland.” 32 The resistant left, therefore, claimed the moral superiority of defending the patrie and unadulterated French culture and thus gave itself a legitimacy and an authority that it denied the collaborationist and Vichy intellectuals. This would be the foundation of the extreme right’s perception of a continued hegemony of the left despite the reality of their new position as the favored intelligentsia. The CNE had determined that the new role of the intellectual was to oppose the occupied press and declared that “all legal literature was treasonous literature” despite the fact that many who considered themselves opposed to the Occupation had been writing in the press of Vichy or the occupied zone during the initial years of the Occupation. The CNE in particular equated fascism and collaborationism with barbarism and the destruction of culture. It therefore made the role of the organization, and the responsibility of the intellectuals affiliated with it, the “anti-collaborationist struggle against the institutions, literature, and culture of collaboration as well as the individuals who collaborated.” 33 While the collaborationist press argued that continuing to publish according to the German dictates was the only way to promote French culture in the new Europe, the intellectual of the Resistance increasingly saw his duty to be

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refusal to publish, unless it was in a clandestine press. The declaration of the role of the writer in Les Lettres Françaises read, “In this world of lies in which we are forced to live, our role as writers is to ‘shout the truth.’” 34 The professors of the university who rejected the intrusion of Vichy into the educational system also published a statement declaring the true role of the professor was “to take the necessary initiative and contribute by our authority and by our example to the liberation of France . . . to organize a resistance of French intelligence, and to safeguard, complete, and orient the programs that the Nazis sabotage.” 35 By 1943, the CNE had solidified its position on the role of the intellectual and published its official manifesto. “Do not listen to those who ask, what are we able to do, we are only intellectuals?” the manifesto declared. Instead, “aid in all your means with your science and your intelligence in the sabotage of this monstrous collaboration.” 36 The “intellectual at his post,” the manifesto explained, was the one who participated in the battle to expel the German invader, not the one who withdrew from the struggle or, even worse, like the collaborationist intellectuals, accepted the German yoke. Intellectual opposition to collaborationism necessarily involved an opposition to the influences of Nazi cultural values in France. The left, which had favored cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and the influence of German culture since the Dreyfus Affair, now found itself calling for pure French culture and intellectual patriotism, while the collaborationist extreme right called for Europeanism and cultural exchange with Germany. Borrowing from the vocabulary of the interwar extreme right, the Germans became, for the Resistance intellectuals, the “barbarians” and the “Boches,” who had “stomped under foot all our intellectual patrimony.” 37 All language of internationalism and Franco-German cooperation was replaced by a new left-wing nationalism and all previous admiration for German writers, musicians, and scientists evaporated in the Resistance press. As one Resistance paper would explain, “our program, our tendency is summarized in our name, Valmy, the first victory of the Revolution against the Prussians.” 38 The CNE, even after the return of the communist influence in 1942, proclaimed its role as “a movement created by intellectuals for intellectuals” to be “the grouping of all the French intellectuals around a single mission: the defense of the homeland and of its spiritual patrimony.” 39 However, the collaborationist extreme right also presented its FrancoGerman collaboration and Europeanism as a broader form of French nationalism. It was therefore necessary for the left to recapture its nineteenth-century monopoly on nationalism by reviving an older meaning of the word more in keeping with its values. While the intellectual extreme right claimed to continue to represent French nationalism by collaborating with the Germans in order to create a new and stronger France, the intellectual left reverted to a Jacobin-inspired nationalism laced with the Revolutionary vision of “True France.” In this way, the

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Resistance made a concerted effort to monopolize the concept of French nationalism, so valuable during wartime, for its own camp. “Do not be tricked,” read one manifesto from 1941 that claimed to be the “spokesman for numerous intellectuals.” “Do not be tricked by appearances; True France is not the minority that has supported if not provoked a capitulation without honor. It is not the journalists who today praise the vanquisher.” 40 Instead, “True France” was the “man of thought, the writers, the professors, and savants, the representatives of the sacred tradition” of 1789 who had launched papers protesting collaboration and occupation. It was not the collaborationist “masters of the day,” but the resistors who truly knew the “soul of the nation” and the best interests of France. 41 The resistant left’s return to Jacobin nationalism was perhaps best revealed in its continuing identification with the universal absolutes of Revolution, the People, Democracy, and the Rights of Man at the foundation of the republican ideal. The “Manifeste des intellectuels” (Manifesto of the intellectuals) in 1941 highlighted the defense of these absolutes as the major point of division between the collaborationist right and the resistant left. It declared that the struggle of collaborationists and anticollaborationists was not a political struggle in the traditional sense, but rather a struggle between individuals who were “divided by esprit.” On one side were the traitors who had succumbed to the force of an antiFrench ideology that negated the values on which the nation had been built. On the other side were those “for whom truth, justice, tolerance, national independence, love of peace, fraternity and humanity are the only world that is inhabitable.” 42 Both communist and republican intellectuals alike turned to the symbols and discourse of the French Revolution in an effort to link democratic values and the promise of communist revolution to a historic and victorious France. “Tell them” Henri Laugier wrote concerning French publications in America, “that France has maintained her faith in the efficacy of the principles of 1789, of the Revolution, of the Rights of Man, of popular sovereignty and of free institutions.” 43 The universalist vocabulary of individual rights, democracy, egalitarianism, tolerance, and revolution practically became a required element of any Resistance article. “France,” one article in Franc-Tireur said, “has remained ardently and fiercely republican and searches no other doctrine than the Rights of Man so odiously derided by the so-called French government.” 44 Because of this, the anonymous author claimed, it was on the “republican idea, the new and true republican tradition, that France, delivered from the Nazis and from Vichy, would shape her future anew.” 45 The intellectual left also revived its long-standing association of intellectual identity with rational thought. During the years of the Occupation, left-wing rationalism was highlighted by both camps as the counterpoint to the Nazi concept of intelligence as a product of irrational will,

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action, and sentiment. In particular, the left emphasized its devotion to rational thought in order to distance itself from the fascist’s focus on the physical body as a source of inspiration. Action, the body, masculinity, and the “complete man,” who relied on sources outside the intellect, were important themes in the work of the collaborationist right. The left rejected these sources as anti-intellectual, “mystical,” and a “Barbarism” that was a “degradation of French thought,” specifically because these sources existed beyond the boundaries of rational analysis. 46 Emphasis on rational thought over irrational reaction also had important implications for left-wing intellectuals who were continuing to oppose anti-Semitism. Racism, even that purported to be scientific or biological, was identified by the intellectual left as a strain of irrational thought that conflicted with the fundamental goals of the Enlightenment, and therefore with the French intellectual tradition. Although the Resistance did not always make the defense of the French Jews a central component of its work, its fundamental opposition to the idea of a racial elite served to distance its idea of responsible intellectual engagement under the Occupation from that of the collaborationists. Overthrowing the imposed values of the Nazis and reviving traditional left-wing values became essential to the role and responsibility of the resistant intellectual. “Above all,” James D. Wilkinson explains, “the écrivains résistants [Resistance writers] believed that their task was to formulate moral ideals opposed to Fascism.” 47 The responsibility of the resistant writer was to shed light on injustice, to stir the public to action, to demand human freedom, and to reject oppression. It was not possible, the Resistance intellectuals believed, to create good art that favored antiSemitism, imperialism, or oppression. 48 Collaborationist writers like Drieu and Alphonse de Châteaubriant who defended these fascist-inspired programs, according to the resistors, had betrayed their responsibility as intellectuals. The resistors believed, therefore, that regardless of their clandestine status, they remained the intellectual authority for the public and would not adopt the discourse of exclusion, resentment, and struggle for public legitimacy that had characterized the engagement of the right. Resistance articles presented their authors as the legitimate, albeit displaced, authority and the spokesmen of the silent majority. As the first number of Combat confidently explained, the “majority of our patrie remains faithful to its traditions of honor and of liberty” and recognized its intellectuals as those who defended the antifascist ideals. 49 The intellectual left felt certain that although they had been removed from power, they had not been displaced as a moral and intellectual authority in the French imagination. In fact, the intellectuals of the left were certain that their opposition to the foreign occupation gave them a moral authority and demonstrated a patriotism that the extreme right could no longer claim once they attached themselves to the occupier. Those who opposed collaborationism came to believe that there was “a moral elitism of the

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Resistance” and that the war and the Occupation “was gradually creating a new class of moral leaders” on the anti-collaborationist left that would take over direction of France at the end of the war. 50 Paradoxically, despite the fact that the structures of intellectual hegemony changed hands, it was the collaborationist intellectual of the extreme right who still identified with the images and discourses of exclusion, repression, and ostracism that had defined his identity during the previous decades. After so many years of being considered anti-intellectual and excluded from cultural authority, the intellectual extreme right eagerly seized control of all aspects of the intellectual world, yet they never felt confident in this new position of power and continued to feel the need to justify the choice of intellectual collaboration as that of the legitimate intellectual and to rail against an engrained rejection of rightwing intellectual values in the public. Although the Resistance lacked the tools to dominate the intellectual world during the Occupation, its clandestine, oppositional status during that time gave it newfound claims to moral superiority and patriotism that many, like Drieu and Châteaubriant, believed held real power for the public. Therefore, as illogical as it may seem, the brief period of right-wing dominance during the Occupation continued the pattern of right-wing resentment, perceived exclusion, struggle for legitimacy and self-isolation. RESENTMENT AND REACTION FROM THE DISSATISFIED COLLABORATOR: PIERRE DRIEU LA ROCHELLE During the interwar period and particularly the years of the Popular Front, intellectuals of the extreme and fascist-sympathizing right not only felt excluded from the centers of intellectual power and legitimacy, like the university, but also from the larger arena of political affairs. Drieu and his fellow collaborationists entered into the intellectual world under this left-wing hegemony and carried in them the resentment and sense of oppression that it fostered long after 1940 when the literal domination of the left ceased. Identifying with the oppressed minority had become second nature to the point that, although they reveled in their newfound cultural and political dominance, they found it hard to discard the discourse and behavior of their decades-long struggle. Drieu, despite being a truly unique figure in the intellectual world of the time, shared with his right-wing peers his perception of continued hegemony and language of exclusion. He believed the public had not only been predisposed over the century to favor left-wing values and political views, they had been taught to look to the left for their intellectual guides and to view the extreme right, particularly the fascist right as anti-intellectual. In response, Drieu adamantly proclaimed himself both an intellectual and a collaborationist, especially after the Resistance denied this duality.

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In many ways, Drieu must be considered an eccentric individual who does not represent the trajectory of the collaborationist right. However, the desire for legitimacy that he expressed, the intellectual position that he defended, the invocation of the familiar tropes of hegemony and exclusion, and the socio-professional network in which he engaged during the Occupation were characteristic of a broader intellectual trend among the collaborationists. He is, therefore, perfectly representative of collaborationist intellectual identity construction during the time. Drieu, like Brunetière and Bonnard before him, has been accused of anti-intellectualism on the basis of his negative statements about “intellectuals.” Pascal Balmand made the association of anti-intellectualism with Drieu and the fascist and collaborationist extreme right quite clear by claiming that during the interwar and occupation decades, it was right-wing thinkers like Drieu who were “close to fascism in the 1930s” who “integrate[d] into their ideology a strongly marked anti-intellectualist component.” 51 He claimed to reveal Drieu’s clear anti-intellectualism by quoting a line from Chronique politique where Drieu wrote, “European statistics pronounce a crushing condemnation against the physical administration of the French nation by the old world gagged with intellectuals of the left.” 52 Balmand wanted readers to focus on the word “intellectuals” in this sentence in order to make Drieu an anti-intellectualist. But Drieu, like many on the extreme right, in fact desired the title and role of the intellectual. It was the values, programs, and organizations attached to it by the left that he rejected. He is revealed to be not an anti-intellectualist but rather an opponent of the intellectual model created by the left when the phrase is completed to read “intellectuals of the left.” He considered it his responsibility not only to speak out against the hegemony that he saw but to redefine intellectual identity according to his own perspective. Drieu has been approached in a variety of ways by scholars who try to understand how an author of such promise could turn to fascism and collaborationism. William R. Tucker found his fascism to be of the “romantic” or “aesthetic” kind and dismissed it as the writer’s fascination with action and virility in a world of decadent decline rather than a real understanding of fascist political programs. 53 Soucy has corrected this analysis saying, “Drieu found fascism a logical, coherent, inspiring philosophy of life, firmly rooted in some of the most prestigious intellectual traditions of the West.” 54 Drieu, and other men of intelligence and education, were drawn to this movement for more than its aesthetic qualities. However, Soucy and others like Alice Yeager Kaplan are at a loss to explain why a respected intellectual and author could turn to brutal authoritarian politics in this way and resort to what Richard J. Golsan claims are reductive assessments of “a wounded and even sadistic personality” or a reaction to a harsh family life to explain it. 55 Golsan has used Drieu’s case, and analysis of it by scholars including Kaplan and Soucy, to generalize about modern American scholars’ inability to recon-

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cile culture and fascism. They cannot be seen as two incompatible concepts, Golsan says. Drieu can only be understood if we recognize him as both “an intellectual AND a fascist.” 56 Jean-Baptiste Bruneau has noted that, despite Drieu’s prolific work and introspective journals, our understanding today of the progression of his life and work is distorted and colored by his final politics and by the way in which new generations have adapted his work and interpreted his life. 57 Some who support the idea of native French fascism trace his ideas of decadence, regeneration, virility, and the complete man back to his work in the 1920s to claim his fascism was lifelong. 58 Yet, others argue that originally Drieu had been a man of the left, working with the Dadaists and surrealists like Aragon before rejecting their interest in Marxism and converting instead to the extreme right once he was exposed to the concept from his travels in Germany. The reality, Bruneau argues, is that there is no “cas Drieu,” because he was so multifaceted and changed his political philosophy so much over time. The public watched all of these changes and their reaction to Drieu’s collaborationism was a product of their understanding of his multifaceted past. He was the iconoclast dandy, the World War I hero, the Dada artist, the womanizer, the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) littérateur, and the respected Gallimard star before he was the political engagé and collaborationist. 59 He was quick to grow disenchanted with movements and ideas, and as a result dismissed the surrealists, the AF, the PPF, Vichy, and eventually the Nazis for failing to achieve the promised sociocultural revolution he sought. In the end, he even spoke longingly of Stalinism in his search for the next new revolutionary possibility, although most scholars, including Soucy and Jean-Pierre Morel, have warned that Drieu was not changing his rightwing ideology but was just seeking to remain the avant-garde prophet of political change. 60 Perhaps it is because his past was so eclectic and his literary career so promising that his contemporaries seem to have been more indulgent of his choices and historians have been more confounded by them. Drieu’s public infatuation with fascism began in 1934 when he traveled to Germany and met Otto Abetz at a meeting of the Sohlbergkreis, a movement that sought Franco-German cooperation. During this time, Drieu wrote the articles that would become his book Socialisme fasciste, and publicly announced his sympathy for the fascist ideology. In his search for a French version of the fascist alternative, Drieu was drawn to the PPF of Doriot. From 1936 to 1938 he was the ideological voice of the PPF and formed strong bonds with fellow PPF intellectuals Ramon Fernandez, Abel Bonnard, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Alfred Fabre-Luce, and Georges Suarez. By 1938, Drieu became disgruntled by the PPF’s failure to take action and to build a strong fascist France that could be the partner of Nazi Germany. By 1939 he had resigned. With the declaration of war in 1939, Drieu tried to gain a post as a liaison officer with the British

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or as a cultural diplomat to Spain, but his previous admiration for fascism prevented both. After briefly considering flight to England and also suicide, Drieu turned down a position as Censor of Literary Production in Vichy, choosing to remain and write in occupied Paris. During the Occupation, Drieu wrote for Châteaubriant’s La Gerbe, the PPF’s L’Émancipation Nationale and La Révolution Nationale, and Brasillach’s Je Suis Partout and then became director of the newly staffed and now authorized NRF. Drieu had a long history at the NRF and had been a respected, albeit right-wing, voice in the journal that provided counterpoint and moderation to Gide’s increasing engagement in the 1930s. His devotion to the journal and to its mission of French literary excellence encouraged him to try to keep several of the original NRF staff, including Gide and Jean Paulhan, despite their antifascist political views. However, as tensions mounted, these antifascist intellectuals pulled away from publishing and the revue devolved into an outlet of collaborationism where the values of the extreme right were dominant and the trope of continued, invisible left-wing hegemony was constantly evoked. Drieu’s belief in the necessity of a continued struggle for legitimacy was based in great part on his concept of the world prior to the 1940 defeat. For Drieu, the dominance of the republican ideals, the communist influence, and the left-wing intellectual milieu was so complete before 1940 that nothing short of a complete revolution in thought, not just personnel, could unseat it. He recalled his personal experience of this leftwing hegemony saying, “Ever since I returned from the other war, I had suffered censure. At times I didn’t even write the articles, I knew so well that they wouldn’t be published. Between 1920 and 1930 I was a sleepwalking journalist—I could not write during the day so I wrote in my sleep.” 61 He used “intrigue,” he said, simply to break into the “enthroned” journals like NRF. Once he had “broken in,” however, he felt excluded and unwanted. By 1940, resentful of the continued lack of welcome, he wrote, “I have decided to no longer set foot in the NRF where the Jews, the Communist sympathizers, the former surrealists and all sorts of men who believe in the principle that ‘the Truth is on the left’ dominate.” 62 Of course, in reality his work was accepted and included in the journal before 1940 and Paulhan even trusted that Drieu would maintain the journal’s integrity after 1940. However, it was Drieu’s perception of intellectual exclusion and a repressive left-wing dominance that held sway. This dominance was not one of individual censors, Drieu believed, but of a broad public mind-set that became so ingrained that it resulted in a type of public autocensure. “The France which had read Sorel, Barrès, Maurras, Péguy, Bernanos, Céline, Giono . . . was not strong enough to impose itself on the France which had read Anatole France, Duhamel, Giradoux, Mauriac, and Maurois,” Drieu complained. “What is one able to do with a people made morons by two centuries of rationalist and

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individualist teaching?” 63 Several times he noted that France “is entirely what its educators have made it” and lamented the fact that these educators were the “pacifist and the antimilitarist, the atheist, and the petty socialist” who had instilled their “sclerotic, rationalist values” in the people from youth. 64 According to Drieu, even the triumph of fascism would not turn them to the ideas of the extreme right if its intellectuals did not continually struggle to legitimize these ideas and destroy the invisible dominance of the left. Initially, Drieu hoped that Vichy would win the struggle. “Vichy works hard,” he wrote, “Vichy beats itself against a world of perfidious difficulties, against a hell of evil wills.” 65 But, he soon realized that the long-held “prejudices” of the public were not changed by Vichy, since even the men of Vichy were formed, in part, by left-wing republican values and by unseen communist influences. “Vichy is very poor and very sad,” Drieu eventually concluded, “This old France of the Right, all used and eaten away by the long submission to the prejudices of the left, has tried to replace this France of the left” 66 but it was too weighed down by the old prejudices against it to succeed. Perhaps Drieu’s most blatant expression of resentment of the left’s entrenched monopoly over thought was reserved for his private journal. The left, he wrote, which was composed of “radicalism, socialism, and communism at the same time,” was “a little milieu full of arrogance and of self-importance that thinks it holds the monopoly on intelligence, on art, on everything.” 67 Against this monopoly, Drieu wrote, “I am on the alert, on the defense against the dominant prejudice which is the prejudice of the left, a prejudice accumulated in my nation for more than two centuries.” 68 And although “the majority of the French have made it a habit to always think and to feel in this direction,” Drieu accepted that it was his duty, as an intellectual opposed to this dominant mind-set, to reorient their thought toward fascism and collaboration. In this endeavor, he believed, he was in the intellectual minority despite the opportunities for a tangible dominance over the field that the Occupation provided. By seeing and portraying himself as a representative of the oppressed, vilified, and even martyr-like minority, despite the power that the Occupation provided for his views, Drieu was able to continue to identify with the right-wing discourse of exclusion and isolation and to see himself still as the misunderstood prophet. “I am always found in the opposition,” he wrote, “This is the proper place for the intellectual . . . there is always a majority among the intellectuals, I am content to always be against this majority.” 69 Drieu wrote that, far from seeing the Occupation as an opportunity to be part of the dominant majority, he always knew that he was in the minority by accepting collaborationism. “When I returned to Paris in the end of August 1940,” he explained, “I said to myself that I would never write in the Parisian press—one would detest me too much in my quarter. A month later I took an article to Châteaubriant—his solitude had attracted me. Never will men pardon us for this trait of non-

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conformism.” 70 His intellectual responsibility to be the prophetic voice of the minority, according to Drieu, trumped his desire to be adored by the people. Conformity during the Occupation, Drieu wrote, far from being an acceptance of fascism and collaborationism, was actually resistance, which “conserved the old forms of the spirit of the literary left.” 71 The true avant-garde of thought, and therefore the intellectual pariahs, were, according to Drieu, still on the extreme right. The image of the prophet in his hometown was one that Drieu returned to consistently in order to identify himself as the intellectual leader against a hostile mind-set. “It is necessary to give up being politically linked in the present to accept the position of prophet,” Drieu wrote of his own feeling of isolation from the majority thought of his time. “I have truly been a prophet,” he wrote, “in reading the prophets, I discover that they were ‘collaborationists,’ they knew that all of a certain form was lost” and sought to lead the people toward the new horizon. 72 The image of himself as “prophet” not only encouraged Drieu’s perception that he was oppressed in a world predisposed against his values, it also lent a moral quality to his evolved concept of the role and duty of the intellectual. He wrote in his post-Liberation self-defense statement that the main reason he was hated was because he accepted the reality of French weakness in the world. “It was natural that I should be hated,” he wrote piously, “and an intellectual worthy of the name has no alternative but to put up with hatred as stoically as possible; his duty is to continue in his thankless task.” 73 The responsibility of the intellectual, as conceived by Drieu and the collaborationist right, was to point out the failures of the status quo and then to design radical alternatives that would not earn immediate public acceptance. He continued, “I came to Paris in 1940 fully determined to break with the vast majority of French opinion for a long time to come . . . despite my fears and my hesitations I forced myself to do what I thought was my duty.” 74 By placing intellectual responsibility on the side of the collaborationists and claiming that it was they, rather than the Resistance, who were hated during the Occupation years, Drieu was able to envision himself as the morally superior prophetic martyr. It was the invisible but dominant hand of the intellectual left, in this scenario of the Occupation, that remained the hegemonic power. It is quite possible that this language and imagery was simply posturing by the collaborationists frustrated by their lack of success with the public. The self-portrayal of collaborationists as a minority against the engrained and still dominant ideology of the left may have been a device that allowed them to return to the comfort of their decades-long discourse of exclusion and resentment. Or, it may have truly been the way that the collaborationist right perceived the task of converting the public to fascism. Either way, the perception that their new control of the intellectual field was not accepted as legitimate by the public led intellectuals like Drieu to proclaim more than ever their right to the title and role of

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the intellectual. His written self-defense began with a single statement of his most intimate identification: “I am an intellectual.” He continued by explaining that he remained both an intellectual and a collaborationist throughout the Occupation and that these were not mutually exclusive terms as the Resistance intellectuals had claimed. “I do not plead guilty” he wrote of the charges of intelligence with the enemy and treason, “I believe that I acted as an intellectual and a man, a Frenchman and a European should have acted.” 75 In his peroration he continued this line of defense by beginning, “I, the intellectual, acted perfectly consciously according to the idea that I had formed of the duties of an intellectual.” 76 In claiming the title in this way, Drieu needed to also explain his distinctly right-wing concept of the role and duties of the intellectual and how this alternate vision of intellectual identity was able to coincide with fascism and collaborationism. “It is the duty of the intellectual,” he wrote, “to go beyond the event, to take risks, to try out the roads of History . . . to be outside the crowd.” 77 This duty required the intellectual to step outside the ivory tower and to experience life as a complete man, rather than as a theoretician like the Marxists. “In order to ‘look’ the best,” he wrote, “I should have situated myself at the lowest level, been a pure intellectual, purely contemplative, entirely disincarnated.” 78 This “action” and submersion in life of the extreme and especially fascist right was, Drieu believed, entirely foreign to the intellectual left whom he accused of abstract intellectualism. “I say,” Drieu warned these intellectuals of the left, “you will sleep and you will die as democrats and liberals or you will awaken, rise, and triumph as fascists.” 79 Intellectual theory might produce beautiful ideas, he wrote, but this was not the place of the true intellectual in a time of crisis. “In times of crisis,” he explained, “it is the least of the duties of the intellectual who wishes to remain in some measure a man to expose himself . . . to anger and hatred.” 80 This meant actively exploring the “roads of History” offered by unpopular ideas like fascism and participating in their incarnation. “I wanted,” Drieu explained of his concept of role, “to make myself the intellectual counselor of that which was: a world on the path to metamorphosis.” 81 In short, the responsibility of the intellectual was to be actively engaged in the political path which seemed best for the future of society and to help bring about the renewing change. For Drieu, the political path was fascism and the corresponding responsibility of the intellectual: collaboration. Drieu and his peers on the collaborationist right actually dominated the intellectual spaces and structures of occupied France and thereby forced the resistant left underground through persecution, censorship, and intimidation. This was a position they had not enjoyed since the Dreyfus Affair and in many ways they seemed unable to believe their fortune. And yet, although they could not claim actual exclusion or minority status in the intellectual field, they made every effort to identify

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themselves in this way. Their struggle for legitimacy, as Drieu explained, was no longer against a hegemony of left-wing personnel but against the continuing dominance of left-wing values, political ideals, and representations of true intellectual identity ingrained in the public mind. In this struggle against the imagined left-wing hegemonic power, he was joined by fellow Paris collaborationist Châteaubriant. RESENTMENT AND REACTION FROM THE CONVINCED COLLABORATOR: ALPHONSE DE CHÂTEAUBRIANT Châteaubriant has been overshadowed in the scholarship on collaborationist writers by the more notorious figures of Brasillach and Drieu. This is in part because his biographers have tended to see his collaborationism as unique due to his religious fervor and therefore dismiss his politics as naïveté. Kay Chadwick has determined that his collaborationism was a result of his Catholicism, not any interest in fascism or even in extremeright political and social ideologies. 82 From this perspective, his antiSemitism and anti-Bolshevism were products of his view that Jews and Marxists were agents of de-Christianization, and his anti-parliamentarism was a result of his belief that democracy was a force of modernity that damaged the soul. Others like Louis Alphonse Maugendre have highlighted: his eclectic and even left-wing past that included support for Dreyfusism; a close friendship with left-wing Romain Rolland; publication in the “socialist, liberal and pacifist” journal Europe after World War I; and, conversely, a complete fascination with Hitler’s Germany when he visited in 1936. 83 Châteaubriant was also unique because while he stayed and published in Paris and was a collaborationist, he refused to critique the Vichy state or Pétain, and, in fact, encouraged his Paris readers to support Vichy projects and cultural programs even while his collaborationist peers were demeaning the failures of Vichy. Still other scholars like Golsan have declared him to be overlooked in the scholarship of the time because he was more despised by his contemporaries and left in ignominy by his disinterested successors; a reaction quite the reverse of the reverence Drieu received. 84 Yet, Châteaubriant was equally if not more involved in the activity of intellectual collaboration and was at the center of two of the most important intellectual communities for collaborationists: Groupe collaboration and the weekly journal La Gerbe. And, despite his eclectic political past and debatably unique motivation for collaborationism, he remains one of the most vocal defenders of collaborationist intellectual identity and one of the most prolific authors opposing left-wing hegemony. Châteaubriant’s political path toward the extreme right and fascist collaboration began when he traveled to Germany in 1935 and found inspiration for a piece he wrote on the New Germany titled La gerbe des

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forces. 85 The work was met with hostility by the left and was hailed during the Occupation as the epitome of collaborationist literature. His initial visit to Germany was followed in 1936 by a more extensive trip during which Châteaubriant interviewed Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Joachim von Ribbentrop; spoke to a mass meeting of Hitler youth; and assisted in the opening of the Olympic Games in Berlin. 86 For the next few years before the war, Châteaubriant pled for rapprochement and cultural collaboration between France and Germany and personally returned to Germany to give lectures and to have his works translated and published in German. In 1940, Châteaubriant met with the printer Jean Floch and began preparations for a new European journal to be published in Paris, La Gerbe. La Gerbe quickly earned approval to begin publishing from the German Propagandastaffel and put out its first issue July 11, 1940. Over the years the journal gathered to it some of the most prominent names of the intellectual collaboration, including Brasillach, Drieu, Jean Giono, and Louis Ferdinand Céline. But its most tireless contributor remained Châteaubriant who contributed over eighty-six articles during its publication. In particular, Châteaubriant encouraged the publication of radical anti-Semites Georges Montandon, Céline, and reprints of work by Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau in La Gerbe and made no protests against the 1942 ordinances requiring the yellow star be worn by all Jews or against mass deportations. He condoned the declarations of the Comité pour l’épuration de la race française (Committee for the Purification of the French Race) and supported the creation and activities of the Milice française (French Militia). By 1944 he even signed a “Déclaration commune sur la situation politique” (Joint declaration on the political situation) that demanded Vichy join Germany in the war effort and create even more repressive ordinances against the “promoters of civil war” in the Resistance. Like Drieu and the other collaborationists, Châteaubriant did not imagine that the new positions of power that he enjoyed in the intellectual field had actually changed public perception of intellectual identity. He believed that for over three decades, the intellectual left had exercised something of a monopoly over the conceptualization of intellectual values and responsibility, and had, therefore, ingrained a certain perception of France and of her international relations in the public imagination. Intellectuals were associated with democratic ideals, avant-garde communism, and most importantly, antifascism, while all those who had called for an end to the Republic, a fight against communism, and an appreciation of the fascist program were categorized as anti-intellectual. The perception was not changed, he believed, simply because the German occupiers had placed the collaborationist intellectuals in positions of dominance. In fact, he thought, as Drieu had, that their very connection to the German enemy made their program of a national revitalization through fascism and European cultural cooperation suspect to the

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French. Because of this, Châteaubriant approached his engagement as a struggle against a defeated yet ingrained mentality and felt the need first to legitimize his positions as those of a viable intellectual. According to Châteaubriant, the intellectual leaders of the resistant left, the “murderous, sleepwalking Mandarins,” who had taken their ideas of France “from the abstract geometric figures that dance under the sky of their minds,” continued to monopolize discourse in France well after the Popular Front. Instead of approaching the New Germany as a source of strength and adapting the fascist ideals to better the French nation, they had retreated into their “immortal principles” and accused all who were outside of these principles of treasonous and anti-French thought. “Official thought,” he concluded, “had descended on France without the least political sense, the least notion of the spirit or the law of other peoples, without any intelligent, direct view of the true interests of the French people” but only with their “blind prejudices” and the “miserable nourishment of lies and stupidity.” 87 He and the staff of La Gerbe, Châteaubriant explained, had tried to oppose this official thought of the Republic and the communist left with new, healthy fascist ideas, but were rejected, marginalized, and excluded from the intellectual discussion until the Occupation gave them a platform from which to speak. “Those who grew fat off the regime had not permitted it to be questioned,” he explained, “they imposed a conspiracy of silence against the nonconformists.” This “conspiracy of silence” against the extreme right was enforced not only by the “politicians of the left” who imposed their “crude and limiting antifascism” but also, he wrote, “by the ‘intellectuals’ who aided them and who claimed to express through them their ‘humanism.’” 88 Châteaubriant was convinced that the “prejudices and stupidities” of the prewar intellectual left and their “official thought” continued to dominate the minds of the French public even after their fall from official power. “There are too many men in this country,” Châteaubriant wrote resentfully, “in the train of old sensibilities and slow in the virile disciplines; too many men in false liberty, in false individualism, in false instruction, in false intelligence.” And “these men, in their narrow blindness, continued to suffocate France.” 89 If France was to regain her stature and her independence in the world, he believed, society needed to shake itself loose from the official thought and values, and from the “false intelligence” of the intellectual left and “purify” its “sullied minds.” This, he wrote, was the “struggle” that the intellectuals of Groupe collaboration and La Gerbe engaged in. The first issue of the journal Collaboration: Groupement des Énergies Françaises pour l’Unité Continentale emphasized the nature of this struggle and said that their group was “desirous of scattering with the light of experience the unjust preventions sewn into the minds of the French and the sterile scorns amassed in their hearts.” 90 It was in this way made clear that the reason that the intellectual collabo-

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ration struggled to legitimize its values before the public was because the harmful conceptions of the intellectual left had been so long engrained that they were literally paralyzing the nation. “We have searched to bring back our compatriots to the very sources of life and of thought,” an article by Jean Weiland emphasized two years later, “to untangle them from the conceptions that have been paralyzed by a century and a half of aberration.” 91 The language scattered throughout other articles only emphasized this vision of struggle against a dominant mind-set and the surgical effort, the “work of demolition,” needed to uproot it. 92 The journal La Gerbe was described as “an organ of our effort and of our struggle” and later as an organ of “action and of purge.” 93 In language reminiscent of Drieu’s, those who sought to proclaim the new way of fascist health were described as the “prophets who cry in the desert” of predetermined intellectual misconceptions. 94 The intellectual Resistance was described as the “deficient elite that had not known how to or had not wanted to clarify the country.” 95 They were the “rival who represents a past world that does not want to die” in a life and death struggle, “a last duel,” or a “war of the worlds” with the collaborationists and “the new world that wants to live.” 96 Because of them, France was a “prisoner of its conceptions” and was prevented from renewal by its “old illusions.” 97 They were the “carriers of an intellectual bacteria” that continued to sicken society long after the first contamination decades before. 98 The collaborationist intellectuals, in contrast, were consistently described as engaged in an “arduous task” to transform the public perception of Germany, intellectual life, and national responsibility. To change the ingrained mind-sets one article summarized, “it was necessary to struggle against a profound intoxication of the minds” by the Resistance. 99 In these articles in La Gerbe and Collaboration was found the familiar, decades-long self-portrayal of the intellectual of the extreme right as the minority opposition, struggling against a dominant intellectual left position. Despite the new monopoly they enjoyed under the Occupation, the collaborationists returned to their stock discourse of oppression, of exclusion, and of the rejected prophet. A declaration by Rene Pichard du Page in Collaboration complained, “In France, the clairvoyant servants of the nation have only received incomprehension and ingratitude.” 100 In case there was any doubt, the clairvoyants in the declaration were identified as the intellectual milieu of Collaboration. Later articles explained that Groupe Collaboration had been formed because, as a misunderstood minority, the collaborationist intellectuals’ “actions were often betrayed and annihilated by an uncomprehending public opinion” and they needed a friendly space to reinforce and support them in their work, which was their “patriotic duty.” 101 For the great masses of society, Châteaubriant reiterated, “things are not clear and it is necessary for us to clarify them.” But, he continued, “this is not always easy for we are plunged in the

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shadows, the shadows of false liberty and of false sentiment of self, of false intelligence and false guidance. So many things are against us!” 102 The many forces assailing the collaborationist intellectual included the “blind or abused crowd, the adversaries too interested that nothing be changed . . . and the reactionaries who deliberately sacrifice the nation.” 103 In short, the collaborationists urged, they could not be seen as the new masters of thought under the Occupation since they were still the misunderstood and marginalized prophets of truth. After the Liberation, Châteaubriant continued this theme in his work, and explained that the collaborationist had been like “the man who sees things too early.” Though they had tried to “rise above the battle and see as far ahead as possible,” the “intellectual Resistance, armed to the teeth with the passions of the preceding century,” crushed all hope of progress and revitalization and “shot those for whom the problem posed itself in its true and vast proportions . . . suppressed them as traitors.” 104 Yet, far from being traitors, Châteaubriant and his peers believed that they were the only intellectual representatives during the Occupation. The members of Groupe collaboration in particular proclaimed themselves “intellectuals” and stated that true intellectual responsibility lay not in resistance or even in neutral “waiting” but in guiding society toward collaboration. “Is it not the duty of those who know and who had [before the war] vainly tried to give to the French people the necessary warning and put it on guard” the Groupe asked, “to take up again the task interrupted by the catastrophe of war?” 105 Châteaubriant declared that he himself fulfilled this collaborationist understanding of intellectual responsibility saying that he was, “in the middle of my compatriots, the sower of the very principles of health that experience had elucidated in my consciousness.” It was his role to “remake France” by “giving it a better comprehension of its true political situation,” which meant, during the Occupation, understanding its new role in a fascist Europe. 106 In his final statement of self-defense, Châteaubriant wrote that he, as a true intellectual, had “acted with the most total sincerity in the view of that which I believed to be the interests of my nation” and that insinuations of intellectual irresponsibility by the left were “the result of ignorance and the credulity of politicized men.” 107 This collaborationist understanding of intellectual identity during the Occupation led Châteaubriant, like Drieu, to protest vehemently against his designation as an intellectual traitor, asserted during the Liberation and postwar purge. He saw the CNE blacklist and the purge to be the proof that the intellectual Resistance and the left had not ceased to exercise a monopoly over the understanding of intellectual values in France. The intensified exclusion and elimination of the intellectual extreme right during the postwar years was, to Châteaubriant, confirmation of their abusive and unwarranted hegemony over the concept of intellectual identity. When describing the renewed hegemony of the postwar Resis-

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tance, Châteaubriant wrote, “As for me, laureate of the Goncourt and the Academy, I see myself today erased from French literature. . . . I have suffered erasure because I had loved my nation to the point of sacrificing to it the works” of my life. 108 In previous decades, the intellectual right had believed its exclusion from claiming the position of the intellectual in a debate, the university, or the political system, was a result of the left’s relationship to power and consequently their ability to control the intellectual field. During the Occupation, when this control was reversed, the right determined that its exclusion was not due to any external imposition of barriers but rather a result of French society’s ingrained conceptualization of intellectual identity. The sense of a more fundamental exclusion from intellectual life, one in which the public did not even fathom the concept of an intellectual of the extreme or fascist right, drove the engagement and trope of ostracism and hegemony in the Occupation and postwar years. The sense that right-wing intellectuals were literally “unthinkable” drove them to even more extreme efforts to publicize and distinguish their values, labeling them as both French and intellectual. As Châteaubriant wrote of the continuing abyss between understandings of intellectual identity, “the incomprehension that our adversaries manifest on this essential question [of what values and choices led to the true health of France], shows us one more time that our minds are divided into two different types.” 109 For Châteaubriant, the German fascists were closer in mentality and values to him than were the French intellectual left. “There are no longer sentiments, traditions, or nationalities that oppose one another,” he explained, “there are only two conceptions of life, one excluding the other.” 110 In Châteaubriant’s opinion, the intellectual left had one conception of life, and the intellectual collaborationist right another, opposing one. If one was to legitimize the intellectual extreme right, it was important to first make clear the divisions in the two conceptions. DIFFERENTIATION AND REAPPROPRIATION OF CULTURAL VALUES The Occupation turned the tables on intellectual hegemony, placing the previously excluded extreme right in positions of cultural power and repressing the intellectual left. However, this did not alter the struggle on either side to differentiate their intellectual values or to legitimize their intellectual model as the best for the French patrie and civilization. While the intellectuals of Vichy and the collaborationists enjoyed a hitherto unknown dominance that came with supporting the party in power, the intellectuals of the left laid claim to patriotism, free thought, and a moral superiority that threatened the newly acquired right-wing authority.

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Both Drieu and Châteaubriant returned to the theme of intellectual realism as the most important of the right-wing intellectual values for France. Châteaubriant’s understanding of intellectual realism involved two different but linked imperatives. One was to recognize the reality of Europe’s decline relative to the continental superpowers, particularly the USSR, and the dangers that communism would have for French civilization. The other imperative was to accept and to react to the lived reality of the nation, society, and man “as it actually is” rather than to devise intellectual solutions based on an idealized abstraction. For Châteaubriant and for Drieu, this involved accepting the reality of the decline, defeat, and occupation of France by Germany and the necessity of collaboration that put their practice of intellectual life in direct confrontation with the behavior demanded of the intellectual left. As Weiland put it, “you have a choice, to take refuge in a wild but useless Resistance, to wait for the turn of events to take position, or to loyally fulfill the conditions of an armistice that France solicited. You have seen that the first of these attitudes . . . put our nation in catastrophe.” 111 “What matters today,” Drieu wrote in the first months of the Occupation, “is not what the French say, it is what they do. They collaborate. Repair roads and bridges—rebuild France. English radio is pretty but it is for those who have nothing to do. It has little to do with the reality, with the immediate French reality, with the question of life or death for the men, women, and children of this nation.” 112 According to Drieu, the Resistance proved its idealism and detachment from the concrete realities of life by refusing to accept the parameters imposed by occupation. Instead, the responsible intellectual of the Occupation, according to Drieu’s concept, had a duty to involve himself in the “ugliness” of reality in order to make the best of it. “One must assume one’s responsibilities,” he wrote in his post-Liberation defense, “join impure groups, acknowledge that political law obliges us to accept contemptible or odious allies. We must dirty our feet, at least, but not our hands. And this is what I did.” 113 “Collaboration, does not concern simply universal fraternity,” Châteaubriant added, “but a more clarified . . . more Realist comprehension of the true international situation.” 114 According to the collaborationist concept of identity, although collaboration had “dirtied their feet,” these men acted as intellectuals by accepting and engaging in the real circumstances of the time. 115 The collaborationist right’s understanding of realism was in total opposition to the rationalism, abstraction, and what Châteaubriant referred to as the “intellectualism” of the resistant left. “Intellectualism often lacks the substantial truth,” he began, since abstract thought alone was a superficial exercise if it had no relation to man and the reality of his culture. “Intellectuality is a magnificent mirror, precious among precious things,” he conceded, “but the false intellectual and the bad intellectual wrongly and inconsiderately fill this with finite forms, instead of removing it from these finite forms to let integral life be reflected there.” 116 To be truth,

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according to Châteaubriant, thought had to work in real life, beyond the confines of theory and reason. The “false intellectuals,” he continued, “do not see the force of things” in the real world and so do not know how to prevent the evils that have arisen from the attempted application of their false ideas. In particular, Châteaubriant was thinking of the application of Marxist theory on a French society ill-suited for it. 117 Those who prefer rationalism to realism, he wrote, reminded him of “the men who have only learned how to ride a horse in the riding manuals” and yet still dared to advise those who had real riding experience. 118 “Pure intellectualism,” he summarized, “is only an image without substance.” 119 To advise society properly as an intellectual, one needed more than knowledge of the manual, more than an image of life, one needed all the resources that real experience could provide. Drieu’s autobiographical character Gilles explained that he “had a horror of the attitude of the intellectuals who oppose to social life, such as it is, one knows not what abstraction of it.” 120 Instead, he spoke of the “true French reason,” which was not abstract rationalism but rather a complete intelligence that “embraced all the elements of the being” that were offered by both the abstraction of the soul and the physical realities of the body. 121 Drieu was always quick to emphasize that this rejection of “intellectualism” by the right-wing intellectual did not disdain the things of the mind but rather sought to merge thought and action, mind and body into a harmonious existence reminiscent of the Greek ideal. Drieu believed the left’s reliance on intellect and rationalism had divorced it from the physical reality and created an imbalance that led toward cultural decadence. It was the role of the intellectual, as conceived by the collaborationist right, to restore balance by reintroducing the physical element and renewing and rejuvenating man and his sources of inspiration. Drieu’s vision of the fascist-inspired “complete man” was the foundation for his concept of intellectual identity. In clear contrast to the intellectuals of the left, whom Drieu accused of mental asceticism, the fascist intellectual model combined intellectualism with action. 122 This was the message of his L’homme à cheval. “Men of action are important only when they are sufficiently men of thought,” he wrote, “and men of thought are only valuable because of the embryonic man of action they carry within themselves.” 123 In short, Drieu’s concept of the true intellectual was to “combine the role of the pure intellectual with that of the man of action.” 124 According to the collaborationists, fascist action was not anti-intellectualism or “opposition to thought, but rather a new thought substituting itself for an old thought.” And the new fascist thinkers were not antiintellectualists or opposed to culture, but were “extraordinary thinkers who by tying up thought in their action reinforce this thought rather than isolating and weakening it.” 125 Châteaubriant too saw this belief in the “fascist, complete man” as one of the most essential elements that separated him from the intellectual

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left. He believed the right’s embrace of the concept of the “new” or “complete” man and the left’s rejection of it was not just a minor discrepancy in political views but rather revealed two deeply divided understandings of the essence of man and society. “Societies,” Châteaubriant explained, “always construct themselves on a certain foundation and this foundation is the idea that they have made of man—a religious, metaphysical, ontological idea. They construct themselves on this man and for this man.” 126 The modern, democratic society of the French Republic was created around a vision of “the man of material progress, the man of techniques, of positive and experimental science” and above all, the man of the Rousseauian social contract. 127 According to Châteaubriant, the man of Rousseau’s social contract was an isolated individual who was connected to society only in order to preserve his goods and was politically an “emasculated practitioner of political representation.” In contrast, Châteaubriant continued, with “the new man, an entirely different concept of self intervenes. . . . The new man is not an individual separated from all others. . . . His spirit refuses this egoistic conception; he is attached by all his most profound energies to the life of the community.” 128 For Drieu and many of his collaborationist peers, the desire to celebrate both the intellect and the bodily sources of intelligence and culture that combined to form the “complete man” led to a new, fascist-inspired discourse of “the Body” that was not shared on the left. Among the collaborationists, as Miranda Pollard and Sandrine Sanos have suggested, the body became a device to critique the values of the non-fascist left, to justify anti-Semitism and misogyny, and to create an image of the new masculine virility they envisioned for France. 129 According to Drieu, the “French national body,” which was a product of each individual body in the nation, had been a strong and healthy organism during the Middle Ages thanks to the celebration of both the spiritual and the physical in that time. After the Enlightenment, however, the intellectual left had devalued physical action and force in favor of rationalism. As a result, the individual body was deemphasized in education and culture and the national body was weakened. In contrast to the “New Man” or “Hitlerian Man” developed by the rest of Europe, Drieu wrote, “France has created its opposite: a nation of sitters, Pernod drinkers, babblers in committees.” He continued, “Our professors, our intellectuals have forgotten this rule of life,” and as a result of the deprivation of the body, had engendered the “weakness or rather the absence of the soul of France.” 130 The focus that Drieu and many of his collaborationist peers gave to the fascist cult of the body influenced their conceptions of both gender and masculinity and also of race in a way that, as Sanos’s work shows, distanced them even further from the intellectual left despite Christopher E. Forth’s perception of common ground in the glorification of masculinity. 131 For Drieu, women and the femininity they represented were a

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constant presence in his life as wives, mistresses, and affairs yet never as friends, equals, or professional peers. 132 “For years after the other war,” Drieu wrote during the Occupation, “one might have thought I was especially interested in women. In fact I was much more interested in men. For me the drama of friendship between men is the whole heart of politics.” 133 He was particularly scornful of women because he viewed them in the same way he did purely rationalist intellectuals, as weak, as the antithesis of the healthy, strong body that he found essential to the creation of the complete man. Drieu’s concept of the gulf existing between regenerative, active masculinity and decadent, inert femininity was one that was reinforced and exacerbated by his engagement in fascism and collaborationism. Drieu’s understanding of France as an organic national body, that was a product of all the individual Frenchmen, also informed his anti-Semitism. Collaborationist anti-Semitism marked a clear separation in the values and worldview of the intellectuals of the collaborationist right and the resistant, anti-fascist left during the Occupation. 134 Although initially Drieu was resistant to Nazi ideas of biological racism, he and his collaborationist peers continued a right-wing intellectual tradition, stretching back to Barrès’ concept of rootedness, of seeing Jews as foreign elements within the French national body that corrupted its purity. 135 By 1940, Drieu had settled into a firm language of anti-Semitism that, while not biological, was clearly connected to his ideas of decadence, renewal, and the need for a healthy French body. Although the majority of Drieu’s journalism remained, when compared to his collaborationist colleagues, relatively free of radical anti-Semitism, his private journal during these years revealed a more sinister form of anti-Semitism that tended to distinguish the collaborationist intellectuals. Drieu suggested in his journal that one could avow a sort of “intelligent anti-Semitism” that recognized that Jews were deprived of taste and intelligence and therefore incapable of being artists or writers. Those who infiltrated the literary world ruined it with their self-interest and their “insufficiency in handling the treasures of the French tradition.” Julien Benda, for example, was a pedant and André Suarès a false genius. 136 Much of Drieu’s and Châteaubriant’s conviction that they had behaved as legitimate intellectuals was based on the belief that this recognition of weaknesses and the need for the “complete” fascist man was integral to French intellectual health. Unfortunately, Drieu complained, the resistant left took great pains to portray the intellectual who was in touch with this reality as unintelligent and anti-intellectual. “It is a great political trick in France to leave the impression that the adversary is not intelligent,” Drieu explained, “The popular front treated the fascists of France and the fascists of other countries as imbeciles. But what is it to be intelligent? It is not showing how agile one can be at picking dry notions off a tree; it is the gift of wresting from the universe the most constant means of living largely.” 137

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Châteaubriant echoed Drieu’s resentment of the left-wing rejection of intellectual realism. “The intellectuals say of that which they do not understand” on the collaborationist right, Chateaubriant scoffed, “that it is ‘confused.’ They ignore that there exists a certain level of intelligence to which they are not initiated, not able to know with their intellect.” 138 “The error committed by the disciples of the rational method considered as the only means of knowing,” he continued, “consists in believing that the searchers who transport themselves beyond this method have broken relations with reason. They call this extra-rational domain the domain of the irrational.” 139 It was not “irrational,” he fumed, to attempt to know man and society by means other than a distant and removed rationalism. Chateaubriant and Drieu both argued that according to the left, those who favored the physical world, concrete experiences, and the sentiments born from active engagement were no longer intellectuals. In actuality, Drieu wrote, this supposed anti-intellectualism gave them the only intelligence worthy of guiding the people: a knowledge of their needs and of the real paths possible to achieve them. “It is necessary that the vain subtleties of abstract rationalism which, in many of them [the left], falsifies the sense of life necessary to lead,” one article by Pichard du Page explained, “be replaced by a profound and direct vision. To abandon intellectuality is to rediscover true intelligence.” 140 Such an intellectual formation, he claimed proudly, “is only able to come from us.” Integrally tied to this concept of right-wing intellectual realism and the acceptance of life “as it is” was a fascination with the idea of Europeanism as the modern political reality. Drieu and Chateaubriant were united in their goal to reappropriate Europeanism and internationalism and revalue it as the truest and most realistic approach to French nationalism. This revalued Europeanism, however, would not be anything like the internationalism envisioned for decades by the intellectual left. Drieu emphasized he had never been “an internationalist in a pacifist, humanitarian manner, not a universalist” like those on the left who claimed internationalism. 141 His Europeanism was not an “internationalism of individuals which is cosmopolitanism” nor the sort of union of centrally controlled soviet satellites imagined by the communists. 142 Rather, it was a type of European Empire or League of Nations that allowed autonomy and the maintenance of distinctive national politics, cultures, and local economies, while accepting the unifying ideology of fascism. As these authors worked to reappropriate European union for the extreme right, they emphasized the idea of the “nation Europe” and a French core to the European cultural genius, rather than the traditional leftist understanding of universal mankind. Their new Europe was a right-wing reappropriation of pan-Europeanism as an expanded French nationalism, more likely, in their view, to survive in the real age of continental powers. In a time when the left promoted French nationalism to counter the Occupa-

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tion, the attitude of pan-Europeanism was a distinguishing characteristic of the collaborationist right. Châteaubriant and Groupe collaboration intellectuals called both for a cross-fertilization of European cultures and for a willingness to look beyond national borders to a larger, continental conception of French identity, all in the name of Western civilization. “France must discard the geocentricism that has been the source of our ignorance,” one of his selected speakers, Pichard du Page explained. “Though French thought is predominant in the world—which even the Germans have respected—it is not the only thought.” 143 The French must, therefore, encourage cultural exchange with other nations in order to both teach and learn from those around them. The “spiritual accord” between Germany and France, Pichard du Page explained, “is the condition not only for the stability of Europe but for the very development of Civilization.” 144 When the German war effort suffered in 1943, Châteaubriant reminded his readers of the integral role that Germany needed to play within a strong Europe. One Groupe writer, Philippe Henriot warned, the success or failure of Germany “concerns opting for the life or death of France. For the life of France is inseparable from that of Europe.” 145 For Châteaubriant and the members of Groupe collaboration, therefore, the concept of the nation of France had evolved into a new, more fluid concept of the nation of Europe, which would be more likely to survive in the real postwar world. Renowned scientist Georges Claude lent his support to this defense of French national and economic benefit through Europeanism, saying: A new Europe will be a new world where one is able to conceive of each nation consecrating itself specially to what it is apt to produce better than do others. A new world where all will enjoy the natural riches, waterfalls, energy from the sea. . . . This is not a simple integration, which is no longer a question, but a collaboration that still leaves us purely French with our traditions and our beliefs. 146

While the Resistance intellectuals promoted cultural nationalism and opposition to all things German, Châteaubriant and the intellectual collaborationists found that their role and responsibility as intellectuals was precisely in the promotion of intellectual recognition, exchange, and cooperation with Germany. “Our ‘intellectuals’” of the prewar years, one article by Pichard du Page complained about the left, “had a large responsibility for the ignorance in which we have been plunged about the real Germany.” 147 In contrast, Drieu and Chateaubriant believed that by promoting the intellectual affinities of Germany and France and seeking cultural collaboration, they were serving the best interests of intellectual life. The two neighboring nations had long been the primary cultural geniuses of Europe with “equal importance in the intellectual life of Humanity.” 148 One speech argued that “these two peoples, having received from the creator such gifts, ought not create politics that risk leading to

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catastrophe, but ought always to remember the obligations that they have to themselves, to each other, and to all of Europe.” 149 For the collaborationists, Germany was France’s natural intellectual peer, so mutual spiritual enrichment was guaranteed by their collaboration. The collaborationists were passionate about this component of their intellectual duty. They devoted their work to convincing the public of the cultural affinities between Germany and France, the desirability for European-wide intellectual and economic exchange, and the importance of collaboration for France. As in previous times of crisis and engagement, both sides created intellectual communities and networks, public for the collaborationists and clandestine in the Resistance, to help them engage the public in these competing values. Most importantly, both sides continued to develop, within these segregated spaces and communities, severely disparate concepts of what it meant to be an intellectual. COLLECTIVE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION: SEGREGATION OF SOCIAL SPACES AND PROFESSIONAL TRAJECTORIES The Occupation forced a complete “restructuring of the intellectual space” and yielded an intellectual environment in which the intellectual of the left was forced to create new communities and formulate new practices. In both the occupied and southern zone of France, the left-wing writers who formed the bulk of the intellectual Resistance quickly found themselves unwelcome in the places of intellectual power they had previously called home, from the university to the ministry to prestigious revues like the NRF. Even when their presence was not officially condemned, they felt, as the extreme right had for so many years, that their values were no longer represented. These institutions that had defined left-wing intellectual identity for the first half of the twentieth century were now controlled by the collaborationists. The intellectual of the left was forced to redefine intellectual identity as opposition to, rather than participation in, these networks, institutions, and spaces. The Resistance intellectual communities created tight bonds of friendship, loyalty, and shared values between their members. There was a certain “resistance mystique of solidarity and camaraderie based on common danger” that historian Wilkinson claimed many intellectuals had not found even in their interwar engagement. 150 The fraternity they found in clandestine communities and in the acts of literary resistance provided them with a previously elusive collective identity and a sense of greater purpose. In Simone Beauvoir’s work Le sang des autres, the young intellectual dies happily at the end, her “search for identity,” according to Wilkinson, “ending with the revelation of Resistance solidarity.” 151 For many besides Beauvoir, the experience of the clandestine intellectual resistance remained one of the happiest memories of intellectual life, and

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they worked diligently to prolong its effects after the Liberation. The model of the “resistance community” became a discursive theme in almost every essay published during the Occupation on the ideal restructuring of society, politics, and class relations after the Liberation. 152 The principal organization of the intellectual resistance was the CNE. The CNE was created in the occupied zone in the fall of 1941 at the suggestion of Jacques Decour, a prominent resistor and editor of the prewar Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionaires (AEAR) (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists) organ Commune. It was to be the intellectual section of the civil resistance movement the Front national de lutte pour l’indépendence de la France. The Front was dominated by the Communists, but included Gaullists, republicans, and unaffiliated professionals and workers. The first committee of the CNE had seven Resistance leaders including François Mauriac and Jean Guéhenno. A second section was created by 1943 in the southern zone at the suggestion of Aragon. Both sections drew from the experience and techniques of mobilization and organization learned during the antifascist crusades of the 1930s, and provided an umbrella organization for resistors. 153 The CNE, unlike the Front and other early resistance movements that focused on acts of political and paramilitary resistance, was exclusively devoted to intellectual activities and to opposing the intellectual collaborationists. As the center of intellectual organization for the Resistance, Sapiro notes that the CNE was able to “impose norms of conduct for writers” and to define true intellectual identity in part by adherence to its programs. 154 Its redefinition of intellectual norms and of intellectual responsibility, according to Resistance values, practices, and associations, was an essential component of its attempt to recapture public opinion and earn international recognition. 155 The CNE mobilized and organized the various left-wing intellectuals who were excluded from their previous positions of dominance in the university or literary world. By the Liberation, it claimed to have attracted over two hundred of these intellectuals to its ranks who might otherwise have remained isolated voices or never have engaged in the Resistance on their own. In this way, the CNE worked to create not only a collective forum for more effective engagement but also a collective identity, as the legitimate intellectuals, for its adherents. However, the efforts of the CNE, underground and persecuted, could not compete with the juggernaut of intellectual organizations developed on the collaborationist right. During the Occupation, the intellectual collaborationists could hardly feel excluded from the spaces of political and intellectual power, since their fascist and collaborationist values were the only ones authorized by the German government or supported by Vichy. However, those who chose active collaborationism in the occupied zone were a relative minority and remained unpopular with much of the general public. 156 The collaborationists’ perception of this consistent unpopularity and rejec-

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tion, even when they were in power, made them as eager as those in the Resistance to work together in intellectual communities that could magnify the effect of their individual engagement. Perhaps the most influential of the collaborationist organizations was Groupe Collaboration, which was formed in Paris in September 1940 and earned approval to also operate in Vichy by November 1941. 157 Under the presidency of Châteaubriant and the direction of Jean Weiland, it gathered to it some of the most prestigious names in science, arts, and letters in the collaborationist camp. Among its directing committee were found the names of noted savant Claude; Academicians Abel Hermant, Bonnard, Cardinal Baudrillart, and Pierre Benoit; and public intellectuals and journalists Drieu la Rochelle, Pichard du Page, and Ernest Fornairon. Groupe Collaboration also had the distinction among the collaborationist organizations of having the largest membership, with numbers estimated around one hundred thousand, and of having the only membership to increase during the final years of the Occupation when the war was turning against the Germans. 158 Many of its members, including Châteaubriant, Bonnard, Céline, Paul Chack, and Hermant, also participated in the Cercles européen, a group whose mission was to “facilitate contacts between the writers, intellectuals, economists, industrialists, and businessmen of diverse nationalities of Europe.” 159 The overlapping memberships made Groupe Collaboration and Cercles européen more like a single network than two separate organizations. Their members came together in any venture intended to educate the public about the New Germany and the benefits of collaboration. They engaged their work through lecture series, speeches by French and German intellectuals, and cultural exhibitions. Groupe Collaboration itself was divided into smaller subcommunities that were intended to group intellectuals by their primary cultural interests. These sections included the groupings Economic, Literary, Artistic, Musical, Cinema, and Scientific. Subcommittees of the group and its sections spread throughout the occupied zone, into the provinces of the southern zone, and even reached into North Africa for a short time. 160 As the reflection on the Groupe’s first year explained, “Many come to us . . . conscious of the necessity of grouping themselves” in order to accomplish their vision of France. 161 The Groupe, its sections, and its provincial committees all grouped together intellectuals and supporters who sought to amplify their voices in a collective engagement. These groups were not only more effective than individual engagement, they also provided collaborationists with smaller, more intimate groups of peers with which to identify within the larger collaborationist camp. This was particularly important in the case of the Groupe’s Youth section, the Jeunes de l’Europe nouvelle (JEN). The purpose of the JEN was not just to provide a youth outlet but also to reeducate the youth in collaborationist cultural values, serving in much the same way that the

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Institut d’AF had, as an alternative source of education for its members. This subgroup, created in May 1941 and led by Jacques Schweizer, held its own youth congresses, provided a cadet program for school youth, offered protection squads for Groupe collaboration meetings, and sponsored social events with the “section féminine” (women’s section). 162 The JEN held demonstrations during certain anniversaries of the war, set up a summer camp to foster the exchange of ideas among the collaborationist youth, and arranged weekly showings of fascist films. 163 These activities were designed not only to build a sense of fraternity, solidarity, and collaborationist purpose in the next generation but also to educate. The Groupe’s vision in creating the JEN was not to create yet another militant youth group but “to support among our youth of the New Europe, the formation of a training ground of leaders.” 164 This philosophy meant that the JEN cooperated, rather than competed, with the other collaborationist youth groups, like the Jeunesse franciste and the Jeunesses nationales populaires “permitting the JEN to make contact with their comrades” in a great “fête of youth.” 165 The Groupe’s effort to create for its youth a space of intellectual sociability where collaborationist ideas could be freely exchanged was a reflection of its vision for its own, adult members. While official organization on a large scale like that of the collaborationists was difficult to manage for the Resistance, clandestine journalism, whether as an imagined community of individual and isolated writers or of journal teams that had enough trust to meet together, could provide a sense of sociability and collective identity. CNEs official organ, Les Lettres Françaises, became the primary outlet for the prestigious writers of the Resistance and united them in the program as outlined by the CNE. 166 A call to arms for the writers of France was prominently displayed in the first issue, published in 1942, and declared to its readers, “The National Front groups all the French, with the exception of the traitors and the capitulators who do the bidding of the invaders.” It continued, “the Hitlerian plan of enslavement of France is also a plan to enslave French intelligence. Hitler and has accomplices dream of assigning to our Letters, our Sciences, and our Arts a secondary place in a Europe freed to German barbarism.” In closing it demanded intellectual engagement by the Resistance saying, “French writers, we ought to play our role in the historic struggle engaged by the National Front. French Letters are attacked. We will defend them . . . Les Lettres Françaises will be our weapon and through its publication we intend to take our place as writers in the struggle to the death waged by the French nation to free itself from its oppressors.” 167 The claim to speak for the majority of the French nation against the minority of collaborators and the foreign occupiers remained a central theme in all the articles of the paper for each of its nineteen clandestine issues. One of the primary themes of its articles was the condemnation of the collaborationist as anti-intellectual. Paulhan provided literary critiques

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that praised Resistance writers and denigrated the work of “compromised” artists as that of a lower tier of writers. Sartre, Mauriac, and Claude Morgan provided portraits of writers like “Drieu la Rochelle ou la haine de soi” (Drieu la Rochelle or the hatred of oneself) that theorized on the psychological aberrations and treasonous intentions of the collaborationist writers. Most essays and literary critiques provided some sort of invective against the collaborationist press, the quality of its writers, and the constrained literature produced under foreign censorship. One article lamented, for example, “alas, there is not much left of what was fine in the NRF” under the new direction of Drieu. 168 In contrast, Les Lettres Françaises consistently promoted literature written by its own network of authors, like Sartre’s Les mouches and foreign literature by allied authors like Ilya Ehrenburg, as that of the real, untarnished literary elite. The writers who gathered together in the Lettres Françaises team included intellectuals who were prominent and successful before the war as well as those who had come of age during the Occupation and became significant forces in the postwar literary world. Here, anonymously, Aragon, Guéhenno, Paulhan, Mauriac, Jean Cassou, André Frénaud, Vercors (pseudonym for Jean Marcel Bruller), and even Benda wrote alongside newcomers Sartre, Claude Roy, and Albert Camus. The CNE of the southern zone also began its own literary journal Les Étoiles with writers like Aragon, Pierre Emmanuel, and Jean Prévost. By 1944, it added such notable voices to its pages as Jean Schulmberger, Paul Valéry, Georges Duhamel, and the Tharaud brothers, Jean and Jérôme. Many of these same writers published work in other Resistance papers linking the Resistance journalists in a large network united by anti-collaborationism. Combat, for example, which published fifty-eight clandestine issues, employed the talents of Camus, Sartre, Gide, Raymond Aron, and eventually Malraux, who all wrote for other Resistance papers as well. In addition to the continued publication of L’Humanité and Le Populaire, the Resistance message was carried by numerous new Resistance papers. Défense de la France published forty-seven clandestine issues, Le Franc-Tireur put out thirty-seven, and Libération Sud and Libération Nord circulated over two hundred forty issues together. Intellectuals were particularly prominent in L’Université Libre which was first published in 1943 by Sorbonne professors as the organ of the university resistance. 169 The truly oppositional works of literature and journalism were published by the Éditions de Minuit. Minuit published Sartre’s Les mouches, Guéhenno’s Dans la prison, and Vercors’s Le silence de la mer among other clandestine works. Unlike many of the other clandestine Resistance operations, like the Bibliothèque Française, which was a communist-affiliated publishing house, Éditions de Minuit remained relatively autonomous and independent of the communist influence, open to all Resistance authors and ideologies as long as they opposed both the Occupation and collaboration. Such sympathetic publishers provided an imagined com-

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munity and intellectual refuge for the Resistance intellectual where his ideas and values were welcomed rather than persecuted. However, once again, the public influence of the Resistance publications, based on distribution numbers, could not compete with the monopoly on the written word held by the collaborationist right. The intellectuals of Groupe Collaboration participated almost to a man in the journals Collaboration and La Gerbe. Collaboration was the bimonthly official organ of the Groupe and its pages served as a support network for the Groupe’s writers. Its mission, as indicated by its motto “Rénovation Française, Réconciliation Franco-Allemande, Solidarité Européene” (French Renovation, Franco-German Reconciliation, European Solidarity), echoed that of the larger Groupe and of the collaborationist community as a whole. Here Groupe members published the texts of their speeches, provided new essays on collaboration and culture, and promoted the literary work and collaborationist activities of its members and its sections. The bulletin provided a sense of imaginary community for those intellectuals who shared in the work of the Groupe, but had little opportunity or time to socialize with its other contributors. La Gerbe was a much larger weekly publication that was able to attract and to link together a majority of the prominent writers of the right-wing intellectual world. 170 Its pages boasted the familiar names of Claude, Bonnard, Hermant, Brasillach, Drieu, Jean Cocteau, Giono, Marcel Aymé, Bernard Faÿ, and Céline in addition to the almost weekly articles of its director Châteaubriant. La Gerbe used its space to advertise the events of Groupe Collaboration, to promote the independent publications of its contributors, and to speak on cultural and intellectual issues as well as ideological and political ones. A quick overview of the articles in La Gerbe during its four-year publication reveals an effort to amplify its message of Europeanism, anti-Bolshevism, realism, and the revitalization of France through the new fascist man. Two of the most anti-Semitic papers of the Occupation, Au Pilori and Je Suis Partout, were also linked to these intellectual networks. Au Pilori made itself the advocate of many collaborationists, even those who did not write for it. For example, one article wrote of Drieu, despite his unwillingness to contribute to Au Pilori: “Drieu is an intellectual . . . but he is a true one.” 171 Although Au Pilori was too extremist for many like Drieu, Brasillach’s Je Suis Partout and La Gerbe were the premier organs of the collaborationist intellectuals in the occupied zone. Je Suis Partout employed a long list of intellectuals whose names, ranging from Céline to Lucien Rebatet and from Bonnard to Hermant, were also found on the rosters of many other collaborationist journals and organizations. One other journal of note that linked these authors was the NRF. Drieu attempted to retain many of the prewar intellectual elites of the paper and succeeded, at least for a few issues, in attracting Paulhan, Gide, and Alain. However, as the Occupation wore on, those who chose to publish

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in the NRF were increasingly aware that they were writing for the Germans, not for the NRF of old, and that their participation was seen as intellectual collaboration. As more writers recognized the Manichean divide between journals after 1940, the list of contributors showed a significant shift from its prewar roster. In the place of the usual names of the left, one found Jacques Chardonne, Marcel Jouhandeau, Giono, FabreLuce, Paul Morand, Fernandez, Bonnard, Henry de Montherlant, and regular pieces by Drieu. Drieu, despite his efforts to retain moderate and left-wing writers, made of the NRF, according to Ory, a “lieu de vigilance” (place of vigilance) whose writers were, from then on, marked as collaborationists and as part of the extreme right and where no man of the resistant left remained. 172 Once again, the abyss between collaborationism and resistance removed the left from the spaces and intellectual communities it had previously enjoyed and placed the extreme right in those positions of cultural power. Perhaps more important than any collective organization or segregated space was the complete shift in the experience of intellectual daily life and practice on the left and the extreme right. The intellectual extreme right, for the first time since the Dreyfus Affair, experienced life as the authorized voice, rather than the repressed opposition, of the governing regime. Bonnard became minister of education under Vichy with the power to restructure the Sorbonne according to his fascist ideals. Maurras identified himself as the counselor of the prince in his new position as an informal advisor to Pétain. Drieu was offered a position as censor of literary production in Vichy, which he turned down in order to accept Abetz’s offer to direct the new NRF. Collaborationist intellectuals found themselves fêted by the fascist-friendly regimes in the north and south and officially recognized as the only intellectual spokesmen for France. With this new relationship to the governing regime came a similar change in the relationship of the extreme right to the university. Once a stronghold of the Republic and the left, the university system under the Occupation became increasingly open to the intellectuals of the collaborationist right as well as their values. Under the direction of Bonnard, Vichy’s Ministry of Education ejected communist, socialist, and Jewish universitaires, and replaced them with collaborationists. Even the structure of the university underwent a right-wing reconfiguration as two new chairs with anti-Semitic themes were introduced to the Sorbonne. The university was no longer a welcoming space for the intellectual left and the cultural authority associated with the universitaire was now extended to the extremists of the right. Many left-wing universitaires did continue their work in education and even conducted clandestine resistance efforts from within. Contributors to Libre France, the “organ of French university forces,” made the recruitment of universitaires and students the primary focus of their engagement. However, for the most part, the intellectual Resistance no longer associated intellectual identity with

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the life and practice of the universitaire. Instead, during this time of repression, they redefined intellectual identity according to new practices in journalism. This new relationship between the extreme right and the official spaces of power in France had important implications for daily life and intellectual practice. While the left was forced to adapt its practice and engagement to life underground, the collaborationist and Vichy right enjoyed the privileges of the intelligentsia. Even before engaging in active intellectual resistance, writers of the anti-collaboration left faced a difficult professional and moral decision about their role and responsibility as intellectuals that the collaborationists did not. Writing, publishing, and teaching were essential to these intellectuals’ sense of role, responsibility, and identity, and the decision to leave these spaces of intellectual legitimacy for exile or for clandestine resistance was difficult to make. Once the decision was made, new hardships had to be faced on the left. Although the material shortages of war affected the entire intellectual community, it was ameliorated to a great extent for the collaborationists. Papers like La Gerbe received direct financial support from the German cultural embassy and were able to pay their contributors handsomely despite the wartime economy. Eleven journals, including La Gerbe, Je Suis Partout, Au Pilori, and Révolution Nationale were given priority status in the distribution of restricted materials, especially paper and ink. This significantly affected the ability of collaborationist intellectuals to write and to publish. While the clandestine journals of the Resistance were often unable to produce issues on even a consistent bimonthly schedule, collaborationist journals could be assured enough materials for consistent daily publication. And while the Resistance papers were limited by their equipment, supplies, and the nature of underground printing to limited pages and circulation numbers, the collaborationist presses produced much longer papers, with full-length columns for its contributors, and circulations that could reach around one hundred forty thousand. 173 The experience of intellectual life as one of instability and adaptation was a trait that Resistance intellectuals came to identify as part of being a true intellectual under the Occupation. For the collaborationist intellectual, on the other hand, the daily practice of journalism entailed no great personal risk, no need to requisition supplies, and no unusual limitations. Although material difficulties forced new practices on the resistant intellectual community that dramatically changed the experience of book publication and journalism, perhaps the most significant change in the intellectual experience was the new danger associated with these previously innocuous professional activities. The stories of Decour’s arrest and execution, and that of the seven members of the Musée de l’Homme’s Résistance team of writers, were repeated throughout the Occupation. The Défense de la France network of writers had over a third of its three thousand members either imprisoned, sent to camps, or executed. 174 The

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Bernhard and Otto lists of forbidden books and authors made quite clear what sort of literature would earn these kinds of punishment for both the writer and the publisher. Instructions for both distributors and readers of Combat made clear the danger and the necessary changes in intellectual practice. “Let us recommend to you the utmost caution,” it warned distributors, “distribute the newspaper as fast as possible, avoid keeping bundles of it at home, never write any name on a newspaper.” 175 The danger of intellectual opposition severely affected how resistors were able to go about their daily life as intellectuals. All writers, even those like Raymond Aron who wrote in exile, worked under pseudonyms or simply left their pieces unsigned. Meetings between publishers, editors, and writing staff that had once been occasions for weekly socializing, literary discussions, and mentoring of new writers became hurried, secret affairs. Intellectuals of the Resistance, therefore, found the experience of intellectual life under the Occupation much different from their peers on the collaborationist right. Collaborationist writers, on the other hand, found an additional perquisite of German support. Works by Châteaubriant and at least ten other French authors were selected for translation and publication in the German-speaking world. Others had their works adapted for the German cinema, and many were invited for speaking tours and Writers Congresses, like those held in Weimar and Nuremberg. Collaborationists were also welcomed and their work eagerly solicited by the authorized publishing firms. The most notorious of the collaborationist publishers was Grasset Publishing, which handled many of the writers at La Gerbe and Je Suis Partout. Those collaborationists who were not already part of the Grasset catalog, including Drieu, were actively seduced from their original firms. Grasset was not the only firm to welcome collaborationists, however. Other sympathetic firms included Baudinière, Denoël, Sorlot, and Éditions de France. 176 Once again, the very essential intellectual practice of publishing work was extremely different for those who were favored by the regime and those who were repressed by it. The experience of intellectual life as the representatives of the regime was not always a positive one, however. The financial assistance and the preferential publishing came with stipulations and demands that severely altered the intellectual expression of the collaborationist intellectuals. There were three main German services for controlling intellectual expression, even in the authorized presses: the Propaganda-Abteilung, which controlled the production of pro-German propaganda as well as basic censorship; the Institut allemande, headed by cultural liaison Karl Epting, which promoted collaborationist material; and the Ant Schrifttum that arranged for the censorship or the elimination of undesirable works. 177 In the southern zone, Inter-France, a supposedly autonomous “cooperative society of the press” that eventually included 180 authorized periodicals, was created to assure that both journals and writers

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promoted a positive view of both Germany and Vichy. 178 Beginning in 1940, any director attempting to authorize a journal in the occupied zone had to appear before the Propagandastaffel offices on the Champs-Elysées, pledge support for both Germany and its military efforts, and align the journal with all propaganda directives. 179 These directives included specific instructions on the content, tone, and language of all radio and press expression. In 1944, for example, journalists were instructed to minimize the effects of the aerial offensive and to suggest the invention of more powerful weapons by Germany, to continue condemning the imperialism of Stalin, and to advertise the American refusal to recognize the Comité d’Alger as the provisional government of France. 180 German interference in intellectual expression took even more intrusive forms. At La Gerbe, the weekly column “Le fait de la semaine” (The fact of the week) under the name “Aimé Casar” was actually written by Eitel Möllhausen from the Berlin Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Châteaubriant, despite his position as director, had no editing control over this column. More than ever before, both collaborationist and resistance intellectuals saw an impassable abyss between their two worlds. Those who participated in collaborationist organizations, wrote for Nazi-approved presses, or favored the politics of Vichy marked themselves irreversibly as collaborators and as a result never found themselves in the Resistance circles writing for proscribed journals just as their opponents in the Resistance presses did not cross the divide to join their collaborationist milieu. An intellectual’s choice of political engagement during the Occupation was seen more than ever as the defining quality, not a fluid or variable aspect of their scholarly identity. Those disagreements that had previously existed in a purely academic plane from then on carried the threat of imprisonment, of forced exile, or of violence, and therefore made the divide between intellectuals more real and more irrefutable than before. Inextricably linked to the separations of the intellectual sociopolitical world were the separations that continued to exist and to grow between the value systems of the two intellectual camps. Once again, the extreme right claimed the concept of realism as its own and linked to it the incontrovertibly right-wing and fascist values and language of the “Complete Man,” anti-Semitism, and a fascination with masculinity and the body. They argued also for a new concept of Europeanism, made clearly distinct from that of the left, that envisioned a collection of fascist continental powers. The isolating values and estrangement of social and professional spaces and activities heightened the collaborationist and Vichy right’s sense of an abyss and, against all reason, contributed to their continuing perception of ostracism, hegemony, and repression. Despite their own dominance over an intellectual world virtually purged of the existence of left-wing opposition, and despite their control over the supplies for intellectual expression and the spaces of intellectual power, the extreme right continued to believe that the left exerted an

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invisible “monopoly on intelligence” 181 and proclaimed itself once more the minority opposition to the dominant perspective. Both Drieu and Châteaubriant, without a trace of irony, returned to the usual right-wing trope of left-wing hegemony and dominance over an ostracized right. Even as they held the power in the intellectual world, they took refuge in the constructed image of themselves as the rejected prophets, embattled pariahs, the struggling minority, and the repressed. Such tropes of alienation and of obsession with their feelings of resentment were strong during the Occupation, but they became the indisputable, overwhelming factor in right-wing identity during the postwar. NOTES 1. Intellectuals of the fascist right like Robert Brasillach found themselves fighting the German invasion alongside extreme left intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre. 2. Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 3. Laurent Joly, Vichy dans la “solution finale”: Histoire du commissariat général aux Questions juives (1941–1945) (Paris: Grasset, 2006), 18. 4. Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France during the German Occupation (New York: Picador, 2002), 14. In the early years between the armistice and the invasion of the USSR, the German occupiers tended to negotiate policy with the French administration in the north. After June 1941, however the policies on Jews and communists, among others, were imposed rather than negotiated in response to the new Nazi programs of war with the USSR and genocide. 5. Albrecht Betz and Stefan Martens, eds., Les intellectuels et l’Occupation, 1940–1944: Collaborer, partir, résister (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2004), 10. 6. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” Situations III: Lendemains de guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 7. Jean-Paul Gautier in Les extrêmes droites en France: De la traversée du désert à l’ascension du Front national, 1945–2008 (Paris: Syllepse, 2009), 8, suggests France was only “touched” by fascism and that its influence was marginal. Philippe Burrin in “La France dans la champ magnétique des fascismes,” Le Débat (32 November 1984): 52–72, offers the concept of a “magnetic field of fascism” where some were attracted more while other stayed on the periphery. For further discussion of each of these authors, see the introduction in this work. For additional reading on the topic: Michel Winock, in “Retour sur le fascism français: La Rocque et les Croix-de-Feu,” Vingtième Siècle 90 (2006): 3–27, argues France was not fertile ground for fascism. Serge Berstein, La France des années 30 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1988); Philippe Burrin, La dérive fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery, 1933–1945 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986); Pierre Milza, Fascisme français: Passé et présent (Paris: Flammarion, 1987); and Pierre Milza, “Le négationisme en France,” Relations internationals 65 (Spring 1991): 9–22, have all addressed the question of native French fascism and the extent to which France was influenced by fascism. The most recent discussion of the controversy is found in Serge Berstein and Michel Winock, eds., Fascism Français? La controverse (Paris: CNRS, 2014); and in Sean Kennedy, “The End of Immunity? Recent Work on the Far Right in Interwar France,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 34, no. 2 (Summer 2008), 8. Pascal Ory, Les collaborateurs, 1940–1945 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1976), 48. Unless otherwise noted all translations are mine. 9. Julian Jackson, “Vichy and Fascism,” in The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le Pen, ed. Edward J. Arnold (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 168; and Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia has modified the original argument even

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further to suggest that Vichy was a heterogeneous regime that was not collaborationist and “not Fascist in the strict sense” because it depended on a French interpretation of fascism that was unique (ibid., 175). 10. James Shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (New York: Routledge, 2007), 3. 11. Ory says that Vichy refused to recruit for the Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme (hereafter cited LVF), in the southern zone despite LVF propaganda suggesting that it had been “authorized by Marshal Pétain” until Laval recognized it officially in 1943 (Les Collaborateurs, 242). 12. Miranda Pollard, “Sexing the Subject: Women and the French Right, 1938–58,” in The Right in France: From Revolution to Le Pen, ed. Nicholas Tallet and Frank Tallett (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 241, says Abel Bonnard was “more associated with the profascist Paris right than the traditionalist Vichy right.” 13. Shields, Extreme Right, 5. 14. Gildea, Marianne in Chains, 15. 15. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Maurice Bardèche, quoted in Shields, Extreme Right, 36. 16. Roger Griffin, quoted in Shields, Extreme Right, 43. 17. Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy et les juifs (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 2013), quoted in Joly, Vichy, 15. 18. Joly, Vichy, 16. 19. Brian Jenkins, “Introduction,” in France in the Era of Fascism: Essays on the French Authoritarian Right, ed. Brian Jenkins (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 6. 20. James D. Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 38. 21. Philippe Burrin, France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise (New York: New Press, 1996). Burrin believes the vast majority of the French chose to accommodate the Germans in order to get by. This could include small acts of resistance and small acts of collaboration in daily life. 22. Rab Bennett, Under the Shadow of the Swastika: The Moral Dilemmas of Resistance and Collaboration in Hitler’s Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 5–6. 23. John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France: The French under Nazi Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 24. For example, see Gildea, Marianne in Chains. 25. Ibid., 404. 26. Gisèle Sapiro, La guerre des écrivains: 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 9. 27. Ory, Les Collaborateurs, 56. 28. David Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 162. 29. Ory, Les Collaborateurs, 60. 30. French Press and Information Service, La culture française sous l’Occupation: La résistance des intellectuels (New York: Section de Documentation, French Press and Information Service, 1945). 31. Ibid., 38. 32. Ibid. 33. Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics, 177. 34. Author unknown, “Front national des écrivains,” Les Lettres Françaises, September 1942, 1–2. 35. French Press and Information Service, La culture française, 43. 36. Ibid., 5. 37. Ibid., 42. 38. Free France, April 15, 1942. 39. French Press and Information Service, La culture française, 30. 40. Ibid., 4. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Henri Laugier, quoted in Free France, April 15, 1942.

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44. Franc-Tireur, September 11, 1942 quoted in Free France, November 1, 1942. 45. Ibid 46. From an unauthored article, “Appel,” in Resistance newspaper Combat 1, December 1941, 1–2. 47. Wilkinson, Intellectual Resistance, 45. 48. Ibid., 39–45. 49. “Appel,” 1–2. 50. Wilkinson, Intellectual Resistance, 48. 51. Pascal Balmand, “L’anti-intellectualisme dans la culture politique française,” Vingtieme Siècle 36 (October–December 1992): 36–37. 52. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Chronique politique, 1934–1942, third edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 52, quoted in ibid., 38. 53. William R. Tucker, “Fascism and Individualism: The Political Thought of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle,” Journal of Politics 27, no. 1 (February 1965): 153–77. 54. Robert Soucy, Fascist Intellectual: Drieu la Rochelle (Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley, 1979), 16. 55. Richard J. Golsan, “Drieu la Rochelle aux États-Unis: Entre l’esthétique et le fascisme,” in Drieu la Rochelle, écrivain et intellectuel: Actes du colloque international, ed. Marc Dambre (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1995), 65. 56. Ibid. 57. Jean-Baptiste Bruneau, Le “cas Drieu”: Drieu la Rochelle entre écriture et engagement, débats, representations et interpretations de 1917 à nos jours (Paris: Eurédit, 2011), 19. 58. Marie Balvet, Itinéraire d’un intellectuel vers le fascisme: Drieu la Rochelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984). 59. Bruneau, Le “cas Drieu,” 12. 60. Soucy, Fascist Intellectual, 139; Jean-Pierre Morel, “Drieu la Rochelle et le communisme,” in Drieu la Rochelle, écrivain et intellectuel: Actes du colloque international, ed. March Dambre (Paris: Presses de la Nouvelle Sorbonne, 1995), 55. 61. Drieu la Rochelle, Chronique politique, 217. 62. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Journal, 1939–1945, ed. Julien Hervier (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 175. 63. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Notes pour comprendre le siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 173. 64. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Mesure de la France, suivi de Écrits, 1939–1940 (Paris: Grasset, 1964), 168. 65. Drieu la Rochelle, Chronique politique, 281. 66. Drieu la Rochelle, Journal, 275. 67. Ibid., 107. 68. Ibid., 109. 69. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, “En marge I,” Défense de l’Occident: Revue Mensuelle Politique et Littéraire 50, February 1958; previously published in Révolution Nationale, March 25, 1944. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Drieu la Rochelle, Journal, 217; 284. 73. Drieu la Rochelle, Secret Journal, trans. Alastair Hamilton (New York: H. Fertig, 1973), 69. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 66. 76. Ibid., 70; emphasis in the original. 77. Ibid., 71. 78. Drieu la Rochelle, Journal, 393. 79. Drieu la Rochelle, Chronique politique, 190. 80. Drieu quoted in Soucy, Fascist Intellectual, 201. 81. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Socialisme fasçiste, second edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1934), 222.

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82. Kay Chadwick, Alphonse de Châteaubriant: Catholic Collaborator (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 16–19. 83. Louis Alphonse Maugendre, Alphonse de Châteaubriant: 1877–1951 (Paris: André Bonne, 1977), 115. 84. Richard J. Golsan, French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 53. 85. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, La gerbe des forces (Paris: Grasset, 1937). 86. Maugendre, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, 194. 87. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, “Lettre à Monsieur le Marechal Pétain,” La Gerbe, July 11, 1940. 88. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, “Gerbe ou Faisceau,” La Gerbe, August 15, 1940. 89. Châteaubriant, untitled article, Collaboration: Groupement des Énergies Françaises pour l’Unité Continentale, October 1942, 1. 90. Ibid. 91. Jean Weiland, “Nos principes d’action,” Collaboration : Groupement des Énergies FrançAises pour l’Unité Continentale , May–June 1944. 92. Abel Bonnard, “Les grandes conférences de La Gerbe: Constitution d’une elite,” La Gerbe, January 23, 1941. 93. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, “Sur La Gerbe,” La Gerbe, July 18, 1940. 94. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, “Alerte!,” La Gerbe, August 29, 1940. 95. Georges Claude, “Au seuil d’un monde nouveau,” La Gerbe, November 7, 1940. 96. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, “Le dernier duel!,” La Gerbe, September 19, 1940. 97. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, “Une conférence de M. Alphonse de Châteaubriant,” La Gerbe, November 5, 1941. 98. Camille Mauclair, “Droits et devoirs du talent,” La Gerbe, January 14, 1943. 99. “Une année d’activité du groupe ‘collaboration,’” La Gerbe, October 2, 1941. 100. Rene Pichard du Page, “Vues sur la collaboration culturelle,” Collaboration: Groupement des Énergies Françaises pour l’Unité Continentale, May–June 1943. 101. Jean Weiland, “Trois ans d’action,” Collaboration: Groupement des Énergies Françaises pour l’Unité Continentale, September–October 1943. 102. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, “L’espace français dans le drame mondial,” Collaboration: Groupement des Énergies Françaises pour l’Unité Continentale, November–December 1942, 8. 103. Weiland, “Trois ans d’action.” 104. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Procès posthume d’un visionnaire (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1987), 39. 105. Groupe collaboration, Une anée d’activité du Groupe collaboration: September 1940–September 1941 (Paris: F. Béroud, 1941), 4. 106. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Cahiers, 1906–1951 (Paris: Grasset, 1955), 185. 107. Châteaubriant, quoted in Romain Rolland and Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Histoire d’une amitié: Nombreaux texts inédits de Romain Rolland et d’Alphonse de Châteaubriant, ed. Gabriella Castelot (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 1962), 17. 108. Châteaubriant, Procès posthume, 25. 109. Ibid., 40. 110. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, “L’éclair,” La Gerbe, July 17, 1941. 111. Weiland, “Nos principes d’action.” 112. Drieu la Rochelle, Chronique politique, 257. 113. Drieu la Rochelle, Secret Journal, 72. 114. Châteaubriant, Procès postume, 12. 115. Drieu la Rochelle, Secret Journal, 72. 116. Châteaubriant, Cahiers, 170. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., 257. 119. Alphonse de Châteaubriant quoted in “Conférences,” Cahiers Franco-Allemande, March 1939, 189. 120. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Gilles (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), 384.

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121. Ibid., 392. 122. Drieu la Rochelle, Chronique politique, 283. 123. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, The Man on Horseback, trans. Thomas M. Hines (Columbia, SC: French Literature Publications, 1978), 138. 124. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Notes pour comprendre le siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1941). 125. Ibid. 126. Châteaubriant, “L’espace français dans le drame mondial,” 9. 127. Ibid. 128. Châteaubriant, Procès posthume, 205. 129. Sandrine Sanos, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); and Pollard, “Sexing the Subject.” 130. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, “Pensées urgents,” La Gerbe, November 14, 1940. 131. Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004); and Sanos, The Aesthetics of Hate. Although there may have been slight divisions in language of gender before the advent of fascism, it is during the Nazi-inspired years of the prewar and Occupation period that gender seems to have most divided the left and the right. The homosocial nature of Nazism and, to a lesser extent, of the other European fascist movements, has attracted much scholarly attention in recent decades. Several works have uncovered the segregated communities and separate spheres for women created by fascism to emphasize gender differences and unequal social roles. Others consider the new emphasis that fascist ideology placed on the physical, emotional, and intellectual discrepancies between the masculine and the feminine natures. The consensus is that fascism entailed the glorification of force, militarism, physical strength, and virility as well as an attraction to homosocial environments where masculinity was reinforced. In many ways it was a male ideology that had little room for the female except as the mother of children and the representative of domesticity. Many historians and contemporaries of French collaborationist intellectuals have distorted this fascist separation of gender identities into a proclivity to sexual deviancy. Accusations by the resistors that the collaborationists were guilty of a homosexual love affair with the idea of the virile German soldier were written as public propaganda to destroy the collaborationist intellectuals. However, they do indicate a sense that the issue of gender was a point of division between the intellectuals of the left and right after the introduction of fascism on the right. 132. Soucy, Fascist Intellectual, 326. 133. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Sur les écrivains, 1940–1941 (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 44. 134. Although not all European fascisms were anti-Semitic and many fascist sympathizers continued to disapprove of anti-Semitism into the late 1930s, it is clear that collaborationism required, at the very minimum, a certain tacit acceptance of it. Many collaborationists like Louis Ferdinand Céline, Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet and others of the rabidly anti-Semitic Je Suis Partout engaged in the biological racism of the Germans and encouraged the deportation of Jews from France. Others like Drieu and Bonnard continued to avoid biological racism but adopted anti-Semitic language and accepted the deportations as necessary for French national renewal. 135. In the 1920s, Drieu had rejected anti-Semitism as a historically created bias and had instead praised the Jewish community for its patriotism during World War I. During this period he had many Jewish friends and colleagues and was married to a Jewish woman, although he later claimed to have despised this marriage and to have only committed to it for financial stability (Drieu la Rochelle, Gilles, 99). At the time of the Popular Front, Drieu adopted the anti-Semitic language being used by the intellectual right to critique Leon Blum and the regime. However, he also wrote a piece in July 1938, (Drieu la Rochelle, “In Regard to Racism,” Chronique politique, 156), which was a condemnation of strong anti-Semitism. 136. Drieu la Rochelle, Journal, 146. 137. Soucy, Fascist Intellectual, 245. 138. Châteaubriant, Cahiers, 236.

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139. Ibid. 140. Rene Pichard du Page, “La collaboration des élites,” La Gerbe, June 18, 1942. 141. Drieu la Rochelle, Secret Journal, 67. 142. Drieu la Rochelle, “En marge I.” 143. Pichard du Page, “Vues sur la collaboration culturelle,” 5. 144. René Pichard du Page, “Section littéraire,” Collaboration: Groupement des Énergies Françaises pour l’Unité Continentale, October 1942, 16. 145. Philippe Henriot, “La France veut vivre,” Collaboration: Groupement des Énergies Françaises pour l’Unité Continentale, March–April 1943, 2. 146. Georges Claude, Histoire d’une évolution: De l’hostilité à la collaboration (Paris: Les Éditions de France, 1941), 8. 147. Pichard du Page, “Vues sur la collaboration,” 3. 148. René Pichard du Page, “Affinities intellectuelles,” Collaboration: Groupement des Énergies Françaises pour l’Unité Continentale, January–February 1944, 1. 149. Jean Weiland, René Pichard du Page, and Ernest Fornairon, Pourquoi nous croyons en la collaboration: Causerie donnée le 27 décembre 1940 sous les auspices du groupe collaboration (Paris: Groupe Collaboration, 1940), 20. 150. Wilkinson, Intellectual Resistance, 49. 151. Ibid., 50. 152. One unnamed resistor wrote, “It was the only period of my life when I lived in a truly classless society” (Wilkinson, Intellectual Resistance, 49). 153. Sapiro, La guerre des écrivains, 467. 154. Ibid., 17. 155. Its success in solidifying its own concept of intellectual responsibility as the true one can be gauged by its ability to conduct the postwar purges with little immediate reaction. 156. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France , 83. 157. Châteaubriant, untitled article, Collaboration: Groupement des Énergies Françaises pour l’Unité Continentale, October 1942. 158. Bertram M. Gordon, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 41. 159. Betz and Martens, Les intellectuels et l’Occupation, 1940–1944, 46. 160. Weiland, Pichard du Page, and Fornairon, Pourquoi nous croyons. 161. Un Anée d’activité du Groupe Collaboration: Septembre 1940–Septembre 1941, (Paris: Groupe Collaboration, 1941), 4. 162. Pichard du Page, “Affinities intellectuelles.” 163. “Compte-Rendu de la Réunion tenue par la Section Universitaire des JEN” (August 7, 1943). Archives Nationale de France, Paris (hereafter cited AN), F41 347, folder 3, document 2. 164. Ernest Fornairon quoted in Jacques Schweizer, “Jeunes de l’Europe nouvelle,” Collaboration: Groupement des Énergies Françaises pour l’Unité Continentale, January–February 1944, 11. 165. Schweizer, “Jeunes de l’Europe nouvelle,” 15–16. 166. The manifesto of the CNE was published in the first authorized number of the journal in 1944. Jacques Decour had argued for the need for such an organ to be the voice of the CNE and by 1941 brought in the former editor of the NRF, Jean Paulhan, to plan its realization. Decour’s arrest and execution, and the resulting fears that the journal’s contributors had been exposed, delayed the initial number of the journal. However, by September 1942, the first issue was published and distributed under the direction of Claude Morgan (French Press and Information Service, La Culture Française). 167. Author unknown, “Front national des écrivains,” Les Lettres Françaises, September 1942, 1–2. 168. Excerpt taken from Le Figaro and reproduced in Free France, April 1, 1942.

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169. Pierre Albert, “The Journalism of the French Resistance: An Underground War of Words,” Media Studies Journal 14, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2000): 42–49, also available at http://archive.is/U9zFy. 170. Betz and Martens, Les intellectuels et l’Occupation, 1940–1944, 44. La Gerbe was one of the few journals actually created and financed by the German Embassy. Beginning publication in July 1940, it was one of the first weekly papers to be authorized in the occupied zone. 171. Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France: De l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: A Colin, 1986), 132. 172. Ory, Les Collaborateurs , 215. 173. Sapiro, La guerre des écrivains, 36. 174. Albert, “Journalism of the French Resistance.” 175. Readers earned similar warnings to “be discreet, do not try to know who makes your newspaper, do not try to find out where it comes from.” These distributors and readers were not considered part of the intellectual milieu but their need for caution indicates the pressure felt by writers to keep their work hidden (ibid.). 176. Ory, Les Collaborateurs, 220. 177. Sapiro, La guerre des écrivains, 33. 178. Ory, Les Collaborateurs, 67. 179. Maugendre, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, 250. 180. Typewritten directives of the German Propaganda Office in France for the Press and Radio sent out June 29, 1944. AN, F41 347, folder 3, section 7. 181. Drieu la Rochelle, Journal, 107.

FIVE An All-Consuming Resentment The Intellectual Right in the Postwar Era, 1945–1967

During the Occupation, collaborationist intellectuals still imagined themselves as the repressed minority battling an ingrained left-wing conception of intellectual life despite the fact that it was the extreme right that held the positions of power. This obsessive resentment of the left and the corresponding tropes of hegemony and ostracism had been maintained by the extreme right during the Occupation despite their spurious claim, but when these tropes were revived in the postwar, they illustrated legitimate concerns. The postwar period, from the Liberation to colonial conflicts, was a period of dramatic political transition, national reconstruction, and increased engagement of intellectuals. With the Liberation, the ideas of the collaborationist and the Vichy extreme right were quickly discredited and the ideas and figures of the Resistance became not only the dominant voice in the political and cultural world, but also the only authorized voice. As early as the first clandestine papers of the Occupation were issued, the resistance intellectuals of the Comité national des écrivains (CNE) (National Committee of Writers) promoted two programs for the postwar period that they proceeded to carry out: the construction of a new French Republic, founded on the principles and relationships discovered during the Resistance, and the punishment of the collaborationists. Visions of a new Republic with all the parties of the Resistance cooperating soon evaporated in the reality of internal divisions. 1 The main intellectual representatives of the resistance divided roughly into three categories in the postwar era: the Gaullists and liberal democrats of the Gaullist Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF) (Rally of the French People) and the Christian democratic Mouvement républicain populaire (Popular Repub231

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lican Movement), including Raymond Aron, André Malraux, and François Mauriac; the “third-way” proponents of noncommunist social revolution, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Emmanuel Mounier, and intellectuals of the short-lived Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (RDR) (Revolutionary Democratic Rally); and the Communist Party intellectuals like Louis Aragon, Claude Morgan, and Claude Roy. As early as 1946, fissure lines appeared in the supposedly united front as anticommunist resistors like Jean Paulhan and Jean Schlumberger denounced the purge, and then disassociated themselves from the CNE, which was dominated by the Parti communiste français (PCF) (French Communist Party). In his 1952 Lettre aux directeurs de la Résistance, Paulhan further condemned the dominance of the communist left, saying of the purge trials, “in fact the communists form the majority in the Court of Justice. But even if they did not form the majority, it is they who have authority over the others, impose their views; it is they who make demands.” 2 Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, despite their “third way” designation, identified as “firmly rooted on the Left” and attacked the conservatism and antiliberalism they perceived in Gaullism, despite their common history in the Resistance. 3 When Aron failed to defend Sartre after Sartre’s October 1947 radio address in which he compared Charles de Gaulle to Philippe Pétain, Sartre wrote, “I realized that Aron was against me politically. . . . I considered his solidarity with the Gaullists against me as constituting a break.” 4 When the PCF supported the anti-Tito campaign by the Soviets, they came under heavy criticism from the intellectuals of Esprit as well as Jean Cassou and Jean Bruller (writing under the pseudonym Vercors), who were in turn denounced as traitors by the PCF. The internal division on the left was exacerbated by Albert Camus, whose 1951 work L’homme révolte critiqued the Soviets and broke definitively with the PCF intellectuals. The scathing reviews of Camus’s book in the journal Les Temps Modernes (LTM), where Sartre held sway, indicated the depth of division that such political disagreement could effect, even between two old friends from the Resistance. The advent of the Korean War also created new division as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, colleagues at Les Temps Modernes, sparred over whether the war was a result of Soviet or American aggression. 5 And yet Sartre had also found himself at odds with the PCF intellectuals, at least until his reconciliation with them in 1952, since the communists rejected his existentialism as bourgeois idealism and his defense of the individual as a threat to social class consciousness. After the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, further divisions appeared. The Soviets were denounced, not only by the Gaullists, including the Preuves staff under Aron, but also by those communist supporters like Sartre and Beauvoir who decried the repression without condemning non-Soviet Communist Parties. 6 The divisions in the postwar decades destabilized the political efforts of the Fourth Republic and caused fric-

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tion among the various representatives of the tenuous alliance of Gaullist republican, third-way social revolutionary, and communist intellectual elites. However, despite these internal divisions, the extreme right continued to view these parties as a united left-wing bloc. This perception was aided by the fact that, despite their internal disagreements and denunciation of one another, the parties that emerged from the Resistance all agreed on one area of common ground: the unsuitability of those on the extreme right to be intellectual leaders. Although the punishment of all political, economic, and intellectual collaborators influenced the exclusion of the extreme right in the French public space, it was the punishment of intellectuals for “intelligence with the enemy” under Article 175 that most affected the postwar understanding of intellectual responsibility and identity. Collaborationist intellectuals were accused of betraying the “French soul,” and of “collusion with a foreign power.” In short, they betrayed a “certain idea of France” held by the Resistance. 7 The CNE, which was increasingly dominated after the Liberation by the PCF, became the most prominent institutional advocate of the purge of the intellectuals. It created, in September 1944, the first of three blacklists identifying twelve writers accused of espousing Nazi ideology, supporting the relève (plan that sent French workers to Germany) and the Milice (Vichy-organized militia), and opposing the allies and Free French. By October, the CNE had expanded its initial twelve-name blacklist to 165, and brought the list to the Ministry of Justice to help steer judicial indictments. Fifteen writers, including Georges Suarez, Henri Béraud, Robert Brasillach, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle were charged with treason and sentenced to death. Earlier in August 1944, a second law had been created that sought to punish collaborationists and Vichy intellectuals, such as Charles Maurras, for “indignité nationale” (national disgrace), rather than political treason, and carried prison sentences, fines, and the loss of citizenship rights including voting, teaching, and writing for the French press. It was not the judicial punishments that most damaged the intellectuals on the blacklist, but rather the proscription that the CNE placed on their work. Publishers, journals, and other writers refused to work with writers identified by the CNE as collaborationists, and “effectively banned them from the postwar literary scene,” 8 leading them to construct new, separate avenues for their intellectual expression. Due to the purge, the CNE proscription, and the general delegitimization of the intellectual extreme right in the early postwar years, most public discussions of intellectual responsibility, the “right to err,” 9 true intellectual values, and the necessity of engagement were carried out within the intellectual camps of the left and the Gaullist republican right. Despite the work of anti-communist Gaullists to steer political discussion, the PCF and the communist intellectual vision initially held the greatest influence within the CNE. Sartre and the majority of Les Temps

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Modernes “third way” intellectuals came under its sway by 1952 and, initially, even the Catholic intellectuals of Esprit entered into a hesitant alliance with intellectual communism. 10 During the mid-1950s, news of the Soviet purge trials, deportations, and even the campaign against Yugoslavia were denied, rationalized, or dismissed as anticommunist propaganda by intellectuals of both the extreme left and the third way, leaving anticommunism to the Gaullist intellectuals like Aron and the defectors like Camus. 11 News of the American action in the Korean War promoted strong anti-Americanism and increased leniency toward the mistakes of the USSR by some like Sartre. The PCF used news of the war to lead efforts to limit atomic proliferation through the Stockholm Appeal. Tony Judt has suggested that these fellow travelers were, particularly during this time, reluctant to see the errors of the USSR and spent much of their energies justifying its atrocities with claims of historical necessity. Rather than thinking critically about Marxism, Judt explains, these intellectuals returned to memories of the Soviet liberation of the East and compared it to the moral bankruptcy of the West. 12 It was not until 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev’s report against Stalin emerged and the Soviets crushed the Hungarian uprising, that many of the committed intellectuals showed the first significant disillusionment with the USSR, resulting in mass resignations from the PCF and even the circulation of a petition calling for its ban. 13 Even then, disillusioned dissidents among the intellectual left often maintained their faith in communism and revolution, though not in the USSR or the PCF, by turning their attention to the newly emergent communist nations in China, Southeast Asia, and Cuba. Communist revolution therefore remained, according to JeanFrançois Sirinelli, well into the 1960s, the “grid of political analysis and the system of ideological reference” for the intellectual milieu. 14 There might have been dissent and debate over its course of action, David Drake concludes, but there was never any question of supporting its opponents on the extreme right. 15 The general assessment of the immediate postwar years has therefore provided a picture not of an abyss between the extreme right and the left, but rather the absence of the extreme right. Sirinelli explained that while there had always been two “opposed lights” of French intellectual expression before 1945, World War II seemed to remove the far right from the discussion, creating a thirty year “zone of depression” for not only their ideas but also their intellectuals. 16 The left, he said, dominated the period of the postwar and “reign[ed] without division,” except for a few lone witnesses like the Hussards, until the extreme right’s reemergence after 1975. Drake has supported this assessment, arguing that “until the mid 1970s, the French intellectual field had been dominated by the left” and was not open to the right-wing perspective until after Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was published in 1974. 17 Jean-Paul Gautier’s view is more definitive, saying simply that, in the early postwar

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years, the extreme right no longer existed. But he places their revival somewhat earlier, saying that it was in the 1950s that they made a timid attempt to reenter the intellectual world. 18 Certainly the purge and the CNE’s blacklist severely limited the organization and expression of the extreme-right intellectual. However, this did not entirely silence or eliminate the extreme right, who instead found ways to publish editorials, letters, novels, and plays that challenged the CNE’s interpretation of their collaboration. As early as 1944, the Maréchalistes and collaborationists launched a series of small, occasionally clandestine, journals intended to denounce the liberation regime, the purge, and Nuremberg, and to exculpate fascism, Pétain, and collaborationism. The Maurrassians created Documents nationaux, which evolved into Aspects de la France, and René Malliavin’s Perspectives, which eventually became Écrits de Paris and was launched to group Vichyites, the purged, and the exiled under a single banner. 19 Even before 1950, therefore, the intellectual extreme right was not expunged to the extent that some scholars have suggested they were. However, this perception on the extreme right that the Resistance, both Gaullists and the left-dominated CNE, had attempted to eliminate them and had come close to succeeding drove their resentment, their language of repression, and their determination to return as equal intellectual alternatives. However, particularly in the early years of the postwar, the factionalism and diverse pathways for the extreme right, even with their limited options and decreased numbers, remained a source of internal conflict and disunity. After 1947, many former Vichy supporters were accepted into the ranks of the RPF. This pathway for former Pétainists to become Gaullists, Gautier claims, allowed many to transition from the tainted extreme right to the more politically acceptable “classic” and republican right. 20 And yet, those on the more extreme fringe of the right, who remained outside the Gaullist camp, often saw these converts as intellectual traitors who were allied with the left in repressing the extreme right. Michel Winock has shown that those who identified primarily as Catholic intellectuals were also often caught in the middle like Mounier and his Esprit team or Mauriac, who had been a member of the Front national de lutte pour l’indépendence de la France (hereafter FN) and the Resistance, engaged as a Gaullist, and yet opposed the purge and even secured the commuting of Béraud’s death sentence. 21 Jean-Yves Camus has grouped the Paroles Françaises team, composed of former resistors who favored anticommunism and national reconciliation, within this camp of the republican right, even though they were Pétainist rather than Gaullist. Clearly the world of the right, like that of the left, was a diverse and multifaceted one whose complexity continues to defy neat categorization by historians. Even those of the extreme-right minority who, rather than support the Gaullist right, were purged, exiled, blacklisted, and condemned by the liberation regime and the Fourth Republic, were also

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divided among themselves. The Maurrassians; the intellectuals of L’Association pour défendre la mémoire du maréchal Pétain (Association to Defend the Memory of Marshal Pétain); René Binet’s Nouvel ordre européen (New European Order), a group of neo-fascists who separated from Maurice Bardèche; the Europeanists at Malmö, Sweden; the fringe group neo-Nazis; and the Hussards, among others, all pursued their own agendas, had their own intellectual leadership, and built their own journals within the ostracized extreme right of the postwar world. And yet, there gradually grew, from the disunity on the extreme right, a unifying common ground between the disparate groups. Intellectuals of the discredited, anti-republican extreme right returned once more to their efforts to create collective identity by reviving the common language of shared hegemony, repression, and resentment. One of the more effective themes of the revived language of exclusion and ostracism was that of the purge as an intentional “extermination of the extreme right.” Gautier suggests that the criminalization of the liberation regime in this way, using the new vocabulary of genocide, allowed the extreme right to once again “position themselves as the victims and develop a theme of martyrdom.” 22 Philip Watts has noted that the extreme right referred to themselves as “political prisoners” in order to make the ideological nature of their crimes clear to the public and again compare themselves to victims of totalitarian repression. 23 In order to amplify their protest and to proclaim their presence to the public, the diverse groups of the extreme right began to construct and cooperate within larger counter-societies and socio-professional networks. By 1951, the extreme right achieved some semblance of interconnection again, symbolized by the new journals Rivarol and Défense de l’Occident, which were designed to be an outlet for all the intellectual tendencies of the extreme right despite their internal differences: “fascists, vichyists, collaborationists, Maurrassians, integral catholics, and future hussards.” 24 By the late 1950s, the political climate shifted once more and allowed the extreme right to enter more effectively into mainstream intellectual engagement. Efforts to contain communism and the global struggles for independence sparked new debates about intellectual responsibility on the left and right. Although the French interventions in Indochina during the late 1940s raised relatively little interest among the intellectual milieu, the war for Algerian independence from 1954 to 1962, and the later involvement of the United States in the Vietnam conflict, became the new crusades of the engaged intellectual. The mixed reaction of the public to Algerian independence provided an opening for renewed influence by the extreme right after 1954. The creation during that year of over forty extreme-right organizations gives some insight into the new viability and public appeal of the extreme right during the Algerian conflict. 25 In response, their opponents revived the debate over intellectual identity and sought to limit the title and role, as they had in the past, to their own

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camp. James D. Le Sueur has argued that the “Algerian war compelled intellectuals to return to the workshop of identity to refashion their selfdefinitions of intellectual legitimacy.” 26 In particular, he says, the redivision of the intellectual community over the issue of French Algeria into extreme-right and center-left alliances reignited the debate, begun during the Dreyfus Affair, over who could be considered an intellectual. The main question, Le Sueur concludes, “concerned whether an intellectual, French or Algerian, could advocate French colonialism in Algeria or express admiration for the so-called advantages Western colonialism/ progress had brought to Algeria.” 27 Initially, division of the intellectual camp over the issue of Algerian independence was not clearly an issue of left and right. Numerous antifascist, Resistance intellectuals, including Camus and Jacques Soustelle, were opposed to the idea of an independent Algeria. However, while several left-wing intellectuals supported the idea of French Algeria, none on the extreme right initially advocated for an independent Algeria. It quickly became apparent that to the question of whether an intellectual could advocate for French Algeria, the consensus on the left was a resounding no. In 1955, the Comité d’action des intellectuels contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord (Action Committee of the Intellectuals against the Continuation of the War in North Africa) manifesto was signed by hundreds of left-leaning intellectuals. Soustelle challenged their right to address the world as intellectuals in an open “Lettre d’un intellectuel a quelques autres a propos de l’Algerie” (letter by an intellectual to a few others concerning Algeria) in Combat, claiming that they were betraying the role by substituting passionate images for rigorous research. However, the left was quick to deny Soustelle the title in turn, claiming his ideas were not those of an intellectual but of a bureaucrat who had relinquished his intellectual identity by taking a government position. 28 Esprit had already shifted its support: reporting the use of torture as early as 1954; publishing 211 articles on Algeria between 1954 and 1962; and devoting a special issue in 1955 to stopping the war. 29 Aron wrote La tragédie algérienne promoting independence in 1957 and Camus had stopped engaging in the debate around 1956. By 1960, the remaining Gaullists of the republican right joined the majority of the intellectual left in supporting independent Algeria as the most logical course for France and pushing for the withdrawal of French forces there. By 1961, therefore, support for French Algeria and especially support for the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS) (Secret Army Organization) was relegated to the extreme-right intellectuals. Subsequent intellectual division over the American involvement in Vietnam was much more clearly marked between the extreme right and the mainstream left and republican right. Anticolonialism therefore became the hallmark of the intellectual left and its republican allies and, subsequently, was an essential component of their new concept of legitimate intellectual identity.

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The Algerian conflict, and particularly the crossover of intellectuals like Camus and Soustelle and the presence of the Gaullist republican right on the left-wing side sparked new interest in defining not only who could be considered French intellectuals, but also what it meant to be “of the left” instead of “of the right.” These preoccupations of the postwar intellectual elite show a revived interest in conceptualizing and redefining left- and right-wing versions of intellectual identity in the postwar, to reflect changing attitudes and positions. On the left, they reveal a desire to distance left-wing intellectual values from those of the extreme right and to exclude the extreme right from participation in the new intellectual identity. On the extreme right, such preoccupation resulted in a redefinition of right-wing intellectual identity not only against the left-wing model but also against that of the Gaullist, republican right, that was once again seen, as it had been by Abel Bonnard during the 1930s, as partner to the hegemonic and repressive left. Despite the clearly publicized differences and divisions between the Gaullist republicans, the third-way intellectuals, and the extreme left, 30 the intellectuals of the extreme right perceived them as coconspirators in the hegemonic leftist bloc. For this reason, former conservatives like Mauriac who had turned to Gaullism were singled out for attack by the resentful extreme-right intellectuals like Bardèche as often as PCF intellectuals were. Their perspective of a front composed of Gaullists and the extreme left has been validated to some extent by Sunil Khilnani, whose discussion of Gaullism suggests that while it still belongs to the political right, “it was distinguished from other elements on the French right by its acceptance of revolution” and its interpretation of “France’s identity in terms of its universal mission,” which Khilnani says drew it closer to the extreme left. 31 Here again, Judt’s reminder that intellectuals engaging during a crisis tended to see their opposition in black-and-white terms does much to explain the power behind this perception of the Gaullists as supporters of the cultural hegemony of the left-wing intellectual model. Although PCF intellectuals had a tremendous impact through the CNE in defining intellectual betrayal by the right, it was Sartre and the third-way intellectuals who were the most influential in defining the new model of the engagé of the left during the latter half of the 1950s and the early 1960s. 32 Sartre’s conceptualization of the “authentic intellectual” indicated the common ground shared by the third-way intellectuals, the PCF, and even at times, the Gaullists. Authentic intellectuals, according to Sartre, engaged “on behalf of the oppressed, whether described as the proletariat, the masses, the people, or the Third World.” 33 Of all the internal discussions of intellectual identity, the most concise effort to define the intellectual left and its values, and to distinguish it as a unified bloc from the extreme right, was found in the special issue of the journal Les Temps Modernes published in the spring of 1955. This issue, devoted to “La Gauche,” considered the drastic division between the thought of the

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extreme right and the left; the values that united the diverse factions of the left; and the essential definition of the left as conceived by its intellectuals. A summary enquête (survey) in the issue determined that despite their internal divisions, the intellectual left and right were internally cohesive mentalities that were distinctly different from one another and opposed at their very essence. 34 “The findings of this study,” it concluded, “show a fundamental difference between the man of the left and the man of the Right.” 35 The entire issue was devoted to examining this fundamental difference and the values that LTM believed defined the left, including: a certain interpretation of the war and liberation, a dedication to universalism, an opposition to colonialism, and a vision of social revolution. Despite their significant factions and internal disagreements, the intellectual left and the Gaullists shared a fundamental historical interpretation of the war and Liberation years that required a distinctive view of the purge and the “right to err.” The intellectuals of the republic and the left united behind a narrative of the war that described France as the nation of forty million resistors; the government as the Free French in exile; and de Gaulle as, with the help of the communists, the liberator of France. According to this historical perspective, which became the standard interpretation of the war in France until the work of Robert Paxton, the people silently rejected collaboration, Vichy was treasonous to France, and punishment of the aberrant collaborationist minority was necessary for justice. A few intellectuals associated with the Resistance, like Thierry Maulnier and Paulhan, rejected the idea of the purge and defended the intellectual’s “right to err” as essential to free expression. 36 However, as a majority, the left was united behind both the necessity of the purge and the refusal to see collaboration as a forgivable error. The PCF and existentialist intellectuals in particular argued that the collaborationists’ opinions had led to real and foreseeable consequences for France and that their speech had therefore taken on the characteristic of an act that could be judged. The intellectual did not have the “right to err” or to free speech if it resulted in the oppression of others. The purge was the enforcement of this new understanding of intellectual responsibility. The language of betrayal and legal culpability attached to the collaborationists during the purge indicated the left’s attempt to define and limit intellectual identity to the thinkers who shared the values of the Resistance. 37 In response, the intellectual extreme right declared themselves “political prisoners” of the ideological dominance of the left and compared the purge to the Terror of 1793 saying it had been created “to punish unpopular, that is, extreme right-wing political opinions.” 38 But, the majority on the left saw the purge, at least initially, as just retribution for the intellectual betrayal of France by the men whom, Camus wrote, “France is carrying within her, like foreign bodies, whose existence poses a problem for justice.” 39

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This concept of justice was linked to another left-wing ideal that came to the forefront during the postwar: universalism. If there was, as the left maintained over the century, an abstract humanity and a universal man, then there was also a set of universal human rights, an abstract standard of morality, and a universal conscience. Events like the Holocaust and the Occupation of France were able to be universally condemned according to these standards and their individual supporters punished. While the extreme right argued for extenuating circumstances and the impracticality of any supranational standards for behavior and rights, the left supported international bodies that were to represent the universal conscience of an abstract humanity. In practice, the idea of a universal conscience and abstract standards of civilized thought and behavior led to support by the republicans and the left for the Nuremberg Trials, the “crimes against humanity” clause, the partitioning of Germany, and for most, participation in the United Nations. The idea of a universal conscience and a duty to guide not just France, but humanity, was linked to the left’s new postwar passion of anticolonialism. 40 The debate over independence for Algeria was not originally a clear left-right division, but, Le Sueur says, “it soon became clear to many that intellectual legitimacy was going to become more allied with anticolonialism” than with the French empire and that this was a reflection of the left’s support for anticolonialism. 41 This conflation of intellectual legitimacy with opposition to empire required a new narrative of the political community as a set of political ideals of freedom and of social revolution drawn from 1789, ideals that could extend beyond hexagonal France, rather than community as confined to national borders. 42 As Sartre summarized, the intellectuals of the left believed that “colonialism is in the midst of destroying itself, but it still influences the atmosphere. It is our shame; it mocks our laws. . . . It infests us with racism. . . . Our role [as intellectuals] . . . is to help it to die.” 43 Peace and the ability to focus on social change, they believed, demanded an end to all wars, but particularly those carried out under the aegis of imperialism and economic oppression. 44 In practice, this demanded that the intellectual of the left conceive of his role not as an ivory tower theorist for hexagonal France, but as a globally vigilant activist. While the French colonial struggle in Vietnam had attracted little intellectual or public interest outside of LTM and Esprit, the conflict in Algeria quickly aligned the entire intellectual community to such an extent that contemporaries compared it to the Dreyfus Affair. Initially, the majority of the intellectual left devoted their engagement to a protest against the use of torture and the inequalities and exploitation of the colonial system in general. Even the PCF, during the early years, did not support the idea of a fully independent Algeria. However, the extreme right and, initially, the republican government, increasingly tried to justify colonialism as a beneficial and necessary ex-

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perience for the people of Algeria. In response, anti-colonialism, opposition to continued war in Algeria, and eventually even support for an independent Algeria became the “cement” that grouped “divergent political positions on the left” with those of the republican center and clarified the division Sirinelli recognized as yet another “right-left cleavage.” 45 As intellectuals, the republicans and the extreme left saw themselves as inheritors of the Enlightenment and Revolutionary legacy, and so sought to engage their work against all forms of racial intolerance, paternalism, inequality, economic exploitation, and political oppression. The idea of social revolution, both in the colonies and at home among the working class, was essential to the left’s concept of the intellectual and to its portrayal of legitimate engagement. In particular, the left, whether republican, socialist, communist, or third way, emphasized revolutionary symbols and discourses, the culture of social rights and progress of 1789, the image of popular revolution, and the identification of the “Nation” with the “People” in its engaged work. 46 Therefore, as the representatives of the true French nation, the intellectuals of the left “defined their own identity and their authority based on arguments drawn from the language of revolutionary politics.” 47 According to the intellectual left, support for social revolution was the rule by which one could “identify those who properly constituted the nation and exclude traitors.” 48 As a correlate, support for social revolution was the mark of those who properly constituted Sartre’s “authentic intellectual” and opposition to it, the mark of the anti-intellectual traitors. 49 Beauvoir summarized this difference between the intellectuals and the extreme right in “La pensée de droite, aujourd’hui” 50 (The thought of the right today). Since the fall of fascism, she wrote, the extreme right saw no future except decadence, decline, and the collapse of civilization. Since they had no positive vision of the future, Beauvoir continued, the right could only define itself negatively. “The contemporary right no longer knows what it defends,” she decided, “it defends itself against communism; that is all.” 51 By rejecting the revolutionary alternative provided by communism, the intellectual extreme right made itself the protector of social difference, privilege, racism, and inequality, which they called “Civilization.” But, she concluded, the right fails to recognize that the “civilization” they cling to is not the “civilization” envisioned by the intellectuals of the left. The responsible intellectual did not defend status quo inequalities but fought actively for a world civilization of equals that was possible only through social, and even communist, revolution. Identification of the “authentic intellectual” with the social and cultural values of the left and declaration that the thought of the left and the thought of the right were “fundamentally” different were clear efforts to exclude the right-wing intellectual from identifying as an intellectual. Combined with the purge, the CNE blacklist, the confiscation of rightwing property, and the general public suspicion of the extreme right, this

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work by the left effectively excluded the extreme right from participation in intellectual life in the early postwar years. As Malraux famously claimed when speaking of the Gaullists, “What is there today in France? Us and the Communists, and nothing else.” 52 While the left pursued engagement, confident in its welcome by the public, the extreme right continued to approach its engagement as a resentment-fueled struggle against oppression, exclusion, and ostracism. RESENTMENT AND REACTION FROM THE NEGATIONIST: MAURICE BARDÈCHE Bardèche, brother-in-law of the more infamous collaborator Brasillach, vocally opposed the postwar purge, spoke out against the international justice proclaimed at Nuremberg, introduced Holocaust negationism, and wrote radical articles in favor of French Algeria. In the postwar decades when those who remained on the extreme right often wanted to distance themselves from fascism, Bardèche proudly proclaimed “I am a fascist writer” and worked to legitimize the concept of a neo-fascist intellectual. In all of these guises, Bardèche was a significant force on the intellectual extreme right of the postwar decades. And yet, Ian R. Barnes has noted, few historians have devoted attention to his work or his contributions to the extreme right. Barnes argues that Bardèche originated the language of Holocaust negationism when he wrote that the concentration camps were not capable of killing the number of people reported. He also developed a new concept of fascism that was distanced from the Nazi failures and yet retained the essential ideology. Barnes also identifies a strand of pan-Europeanism in Bardèche’s fascism that became essential to the European New Right’s understanding of nationalism and fascism in the modern day. 53 Tamir Bar-On and Andrea Mammone have also highlighted Bardèche’s significant influence over the neo-fascist movements throughout Europe, both in his role at Malmö and in his written work. They have emphasized his importance as a mentor, similar to the role that Henri Massis played during the interwar—whose strength lay in his ability to link French neo-fascists to the extreme right throughout Europe and also to translate the ideas of the interwar and wartime fascists like Drieu and Brasillach to the rising generation of the Nouvelle Droite (ND) (New Right). 54 In addition to these significant contributions, Bardèche’s resentment of left-wing hegemony, his desire to legitimize and exculpate fascist intellectuals, and his frank discussion of the values of the postwar extreme right made him a valuable contributor to rightwing intellectual identity construction. 55 Although Bardèche was not actively engaged in collaborationist politics, he did accept a position as chair of nineteenth-century literature at the Sorbonne, which had been left open by its Jewish former occupant. 56

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His concern during the Occupation years, he recalled, was not with the larger political decisions of the day but rather with the daily affairs of wartime existence. He did, however, contribute occasional articles to Brasillach’s Je Suis Partout and also held small literary and political discussions with a circle of students at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS). When several of these students turned out to be directors of a Resistance paper, Bardèche said he felt betrayed and withdrew even further from political discussion, claiming he had no time for political engagement due to his teaching responsibilities. 57 After the Liberation, he was detained in Drancy with other collaborationists and then sent to Fresnes. After the execution of Brasillach and his own trial where his apolitical wartime pursuits were confirmed, Bardèche was freed from prison only to discover that his property had been seized. It was during this time, he wrote, that he found himself part of a new community of former collaborationists brought together by a shared resentment of their mistreatment. The execution of Brasillach and the purge of his peers galvanized Bardèche and led him on a new path of political journalism and engagement. His Lettre à François Mauriac initiated his engagement on the extreme right as both an opponent of the purge and an advocate for fascism. When, because of his political views, he was released from his publishing firm, Bardèche formed his own publishing house, Sept Couleurs, in 1949. Here he printed not only his next two controversial works on Nuremberg, which earned him a trial for treason, a prison sentence, and a reputation as a negationist, but also a catalog of Brasillach’s works which were blacklisted at other publishers. By 1952, he also founded the right-wing journal Défense de l’Occident, which became a source of intellectual community for the excluded extreme right for over a decade. In the years that followed, Bardèche became one of the most vocal and visible representatives of extreme-right-wing thought and the most prestigious among the intellectual proponents of neo-fascism. He represented France at the “conférence européenne des mouvements néo-fascistes” (European Conference of Neo-fascist Movements) in Malmö, Sweden, in 1951 and was an active supporter of the International Amis de Robert Brasillach. His essay “Qu’est-ce que le fascisme?” (What is fascism?) laid out the groundwork for the creation of a new neo-fascist ideology and attempted to distance the ideas of fascism from the failed incarnations of Nazi Germany, Italy, and Vichy. During the late 1950s, Bardèche described himself as merely a “passionate spectator” of the debates over French Algeria. 58 But, during that decade, he wrote numerous articles defending French Algeria and third-world colonialism and advocated what he considered to be a new concept of segregation based on ethnic difference. Under his guidance, Défense de l’Occident became one of the centers of this extreme-right intellectual approach to international affairs. That approach was continued in the next decades by the Nouvelle Droite (ND) and Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation euro-

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péene (GRECE) (Group for the Research and Study of European Civilization]. Bardèche’s boldness in speaking of himself as a neo-fascist made him something of an anomaly in the postwar. However, his resentment of the marginalization of the extreme right and his self-identification as an intellectual were all common themes among the various groups of the extreme right. As one scholar of Bardèche, Ian Barnes noted, “a review of the literature emanating from the extreme Right in France since 1945 makes it clear that Bardèche has . . . articulated the fears and values of a pariah caste as well as the psychological consequences of prolonged ideological isolation and the defensive reactions it engenders.” 59 Bardèche provided an intimate analysis of his own feelings of exclusion, isolation, and marginalization in the intellectual world throughout his postwar writings and in doing so, spoke for an entire community of extreme-right intellectuals. Those intellectuals, echoing his palpable resentment of the left, joined him in condemning “a world of intellectual terrorism that excluded all discussion.” 60 In his Souvenirs, Bardèche wrote of the years after the purge, “I do not know if I discovered immediately my isolation, my situation of foreigner within the nation of which I carried the name.” 61 His understanding of the Occupation and the decisions and motivations of the collaborationists, he wrote, gave him a separate “vision of the past and the present” that isolated him ideologically from the intellectual Resistance and, because of this, from all public affairs. This understanding of the Occupation, he continued “had installed me on a deserted island. In truth I was not alone there; I had companions. But I was alone with my companions against an apparent unanimity” among the rest of the intellectual field. 62 For Bardèche, the perception of isolation and exclusion brought with it not resignation but rather a sense of righteous indignation toward those who had intentionally ostracized him. His resentment of his exclusion and isolation in the new intellectual environment of the postwar remained with Bardèche for the rest of his intellectual career. The purge, he wrote later, was the beginning of an enterprise of dispossession which . . . is still pursued at the moment where I write these lines.” 63 The intellectuals of the right were dispossessed of their positions in academia and journalism, of their authority in society, but most importantly, of their very identity as intellectual spokesmen and guides for the nation by the hegemonic intellectuals of the left. He fumed that during the immediate postwar years, his failure to conform to the unanimity of the dominant majority had literally excluded him from the title and role of the writer and of intellectual calling him instead with disdain “écrivain sic” 64 (writer [sic]. “They condemn our truth,” Bardèche wrote, “they declare it radically false. They condemn our sentiment, our roots even, our most profound manner of seeing and

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feeling. They explain to us that our mind is not made as it should be; that we have the mind of a barbarian.” 65 Bardèche wrote of the purge that it was not simply a judicial punishment that allowed the accused to retain their own views but rather a process for domination, for control over important concepts like that of the intellectual, and for reeducation along left-wing lines. The purge not only eliminated significant sources of opposition on the extreme right, it also sought to substitute “one consciousness for another,” and impose an “obligatory vision of the past” in order for the left to legitimize their new position. In short, he wrote, it was a calculated attempt at “brainwashing.” 66 This brainwashing of both the intellectual milieu and the general public followed the postulate that “whoever has not been a resistor has been a bad Frenchman.” And no one, Bardèche argued, was “free to think or deduce outside of this postulate” if they wanted to be considered a legitimate thinker. 67 From this postulate, Bardèche continued, in the eyes of the French public, all the intellectuals of the extreme right were made “exiles” outside true French sensibilities and were therefore, by definition, incapable of being French intellectuals. 68 What was worse, he wrote, the resistant left had even convinced some among the collaborationist right that they were intellectual traitors. This exclusion of the intellectual extreme right from the categories of Frenchman and intellectual, which were so important for their role as social guides, Bardèche wrote, was blatant and crude during the purge. However, it was more insidious in the decades after the purge because it was less apparent but more effective. “Nothing is expressly forbidden,” he explained, “but we are forewarned that a certain orientation is not good.” The required intellectual values were infused into the indoctrination of the youth, Bardèche wrote, as “one taught us to conjugate verbs ‘M. Mandel is a great patriot . . . M. Jean-Richard Bloch is a great writer. M. Benda is a thinker’ and inversely ‘I will never be a racist, I curse eternally the SS, Charles Maurras, and Je Suis Partout.’” 69 And what, he asked, of those who refuse these sympathies, whose minds “think through other categories?” 70 They are labeled intellectual heretics and unpatriotic Frenchmen, and are forthwith excluded from authority or legitimacy. And the result, Bardèche assured his readers, was that the left had “created a minority which, not seeing history through your lens and not being able to see it thus, is condemned to permanent loss of citizenship. . . . This vilified minority . . . has neither the means to express itself loyally by its journals nor the means to honestly designate representatives.” 71 In short, he raged, the intellectuals of the left had made of the intellectual extreme right a class of “untouchables and children of untouchables . . . and created on the interior of the nation a heresy and its heretics.” 72 It was this “intellectual ostracism,” Bardèche argued, that made the hegemony of the left such a frightening force in France and that excluded

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the extreme right from its rightful claim to intellectual identity. 73 The intellectual left, he insisted, was carrying out a modern day war of religion during the postwar decades. This war of religion was not simply about tearing down the visible structures of the intellectual collaborationist’s power during the Occupation, it was about “the installation of a certain optic which colors all things, not only politics but morals, habits, judgments which one makes, in a word, all of life . . . a certain manner of being.” 74 The left was intent on uprooting any of the moral qualities, the sensibilities, and the images of man, society, and the moral universe that the extreme right valued. To do this, the left realized that it was not effective to carry out purge trials, which made national martyrs of the victims. “Those who refuse to ‘be in line,’” Bardèche wrote, “were not sent to Siberia but they became citizens of the second zone. . . . One does not prevent them from speaking but one arranges it so that no one hears their voice. One does not prevent them from living, but one arranges that their lives be useless. . . . One does not persecute them but one ignores them.” 75 In this way, he assured readers, the intellectual left did not need violence or physical exile to accomplish its cultural cleansing. It simply proclaimed certain ideas, thinkers, and values heretical and outside the boundaries of intellectual legitimacy, and thereby it eliminated the extreme right through silent extinction. In the years following the Occupation and particularly those after Brasillach’s execution, Bardèche carried a real sense of shame that he had been only an apolitical observer during the Occupation, while his peers attempted to change the world. He saw it as his duty in the postwar to compensate for this ivory tower isolation by engaging without hesitation in the struggle against the dominance of the intellectual left. This required first that the public be brought to see the hegemony and then that it recognize its illegitimacy. In a simple statement explaining the hegemony, Bardèche wrote, “there is currently a monopoly on political opinion. One only allows those to exist who do not call the fundamental truths of the regime into question.” 76 Bardèche, like the interwar extreme right intellectuals, casually lumped together communists like Aragon with republicans like Aron under the general category of “the Regime” or “the System.” He and his journal team also referred to the Gaullist-left bloc as “the intellectual Party,” referencing Péguy’s condemnation of the pre-World War I intellectual hegemony of the bloc of the intellectual left. 77 The hegemony exerted by the “intellectual Party” prevented the intellectual right from fulfilling its role and responsibility by preventing them from reaching the public with their ideas. “Only those who serve your truth” he wrote to Mauriac, have the right to speak. This manipulation of opinion created what Bardèche called “a divided society where one side has the right to carry arms and the other side to receive the blows.” 78 The monopoly of the left over intelligence and opinion was a repression that the extreme

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right could not tolerate but also could not effectively combat without resources. For this reason, Bardèche believed, the hegemony was particularly heinous in the press. “The resistors declared that since all the French newspapers had committed treason during the Occupation,” he wrote, “they were now the masters of all the newspapers. So they took charge of all of them—and the presses too. Consequently absolutely all opinion, not only the mass media but the whole press was in their hands. . . . There was sort of an intellectual coup d’état.” 79 During these postwar decades, Bardèche explained, the intellectual extreme right was not even able to protest the hegemony. “I did not have a journal through which to respond when one affirmed in 200,000 copies that I had applauded the concentration camps,” he wrote angrily. “And I was not able to appeal to the judgment of the reader since they prevented him from reading my book himself.” 80 The press, because it excluded the extreme right, was just as much a reflection of the common front “System” as the intellectuals themselves, Bardèche believed. “For ten years,” he complained, “no new daily was able to be founded to break the organized blockade around public opinion made by the new press . . . in the essential things, it is the same journal at the foundation of all we read.” 81 Because of this “unanimity” in the intellectual world, Bardèche warned the public, “we live in the time of the brainwashed.” 82 Bardèche believed, as Drieu had before him, that the true intellectual’s role was not to join in the prearranged chorus but to bring new ideas, challenges, and opposition to “the System.” According to Bardèche, therefore, it was the intellectual extreme right’s responsibility during the postwar to actively reassert the legitimacy of its ideas, values, and writers in order to win back public opinion and effect its own vision of change. 83 The first step in legitimizing the reconceived values of the intellectual right was to publicly claim the status, role, and title of the intellectual. “We have our intellectuals,” Défense de l’Occident boldly proclaimed in a statement strikingly reminiscent of Barrès’ original claim to the term. “The term used does not signify that we have writers, journalists, men of letters on our side; this is already evidenced. We want to say that the well-known phenomenon exists equally in our ranks. We have our men who in writing doctrinal studies and political memoirs, can claim to give weight to them because they are intellectuals.” 84 Once the title and the role of the intellectual was claimed, the second step in regaining legitimacy and public authority for the intellectual extreme right was to bring together the two concepts that had been so difficult to reconcile: fascism and intellectualism. “I am a fascist writer,” Bardèche wrote in what has become one of the most recognized statements of the intellectual extreme right in the postwar. 85 In a time where even Bardèche admitted “no one consents to being a fascist,” he believed that it was his duty to not only claim to be an intellectual but

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also to link this to his fascism. And, Bardèche did not accept that he was the only fascist intellectual. “If I were the only one of my species,” he wrote, “this clarification would not merit being discussed . . . but if the fascist writer, the fascist intellectual is a rare prey . . . there is still a fascist spirit and thousands of men who are fascists without knowing it.” 86 The role of the intellectual then, as Bardèche understood it, was to legitimize the new concept of fascism so that these men who shared in the fascist spirit would no longer be hesitant to claim it alongside their title of intellectual. During the Occupation, right-wing intellectuals had styled themselves as martyrs, claiming to be misunderstood prophets in a society where left-wing intellectual values were thoroughly engrained. In the postwar, Bardèche and his peers on the extreme right found the pariah status was no longer a helpful tool but rather an inescapable reality. The hegemony of the intellectual left was absolute and unquestioned over both the institutions and the conceptualization of the intellectual. For Bardèche, this exclusion from the intellectual world and isolation from public debate brought with it “a sort of living death” for the intellectual. 87 It was vital that the intellectual extreme right reclaim its right to participate as intellectuals and clarify the distinctions that existed between them and the left. The struggle against the hegemonic “System” might appear hopeless, he conceded, but it was the only option if the extreme right was to avoid extinction. “Even if the dreams of the promised land seem distant to us,” Bardèche concluded, “it has been too long that all which is ours in France has been excluded from power for us not to have a desire to throw out the usurpers. Even if we will not do better . . . we have had enough of being in exile for half a century and of being impotent . . . after all, since we are nothing now, what do we have to lose?” 88 He found new allies and supporters, like Jacques Laurent, in his efforts to revive the intellectual extreme right during the evolving debate over decolonization. RESENTMENT AND REACTION FROM THE HUSSARD: JACQUES LAURENT In the postwar era, which saw the neo-fascism of Bardèche and the extremism of Rivarol and Occident, Laurent was not the most radical spokesman of the intellectual extreme right. He was, however, one of the intellectuals on the extreme right who most directly combated the Sartrian, Gaullist, and communist interpretation of intellectual engagement and their dominance over the intellectual field. Laurent was a master of popular literature, both under his own name and his pen name, Cecil Saint-Laurent, as well as a respected Academician and winner of the Goncourt Prize. He was also a prolific journalist, journal director, and one of the four writers dubbed the “Hussards.” He was a voice that the

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previous generation of right-wing writers like Bardèche wanted to nurture and that the next generation of right-wing intellectuals recognized as “the most active, during the pandemonium of the century, of all the writers of the young literary Right.” 89 His legitimacy and omnipresence in the intellectual field and his relative lack of any compromising collaborationism during the Occupation made him a difficult opponent for the left to discredit or ignore. Most importantly, in his crusades against the intellectuals of the Republic and the left, Laurent effectively verbalized both the resentment that the intellectuals of the extreme right harbored and also their desire to differentiate their own engagement. Laurent provides historians with a unique entry into the discussion of the division between the left and the right in the postwar, since he can be seen as both a littérateur (author) seeking neutral space for apolitical literature and art, and a political engagé who provoked the divide. Laurent and the Hussards are not often the central figures in the scholarship on the postwar extreme right, since they are still usually seen as more literary and less extremist than their peers like Binet and Bardèche. However, they have received individual attention from historians interested in the connection between their literary pursuits and their political engagement. Bruno Curatolo has highlighted Laurent’s identity as a writer rather than an engagé, emphasizing his hesitancy to proclaim his early 1950s literary journals like La Parisienne as “revues of the right,” even though the leftwing journals like LTM designated them as such. This, Curatolo argues, was a result of Laurent’s attempt to provide an apolitical forum for leftand right-wing authors to present their work as cultural, rather than politically engaged pieces. However, Curatolo asserts that the effort to create an apolitical literary space was short-lived, since the idea of “mixing and reunion became chimerical” during the Algerian affair and the effort was discontinued after 1958. 90 By 1955, an entire issue of La Parisienne was devoted to the work of Drieu and, Curatolo admits, the journal was consistently hostile to Sartre’s existentialism. Despite Laurent’s initial attempts to create common ground for the left and right, therefore, he and the editors recognized the impossibility of political neutrality during this period of national debate and took up position on the extreme right. Laurent’s biographer Bertrand de Saint Vincent has emphasized Laurent’s underlying political engagement despite his efforts to keep certain spaces in his artistic endeavors apolitical. He points particularly to the political messages supporting Pétain and condemning the Resistance within his Clotilde novels, published under the name Cecil Saint-Laurent. 91 Nicholas Hewitt has also presented Laurent as more of a political engagé than an apolitical artist and shows him provoking, rather than bridging, a division between the extreme right and the left. He claims that Laurent, more than any other extreme right writer in the postwar, challenged Sartre’s portrayal of existentialist, left-wing engagement as

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the only position for the authentic intellectual. He was also, Hewitt continues, a vital contributor to the portrayal of the Gaullist right as part of an intellectual bloc with the extreme, communist left. His Mauriac sous de Gaulle disparaged the Gaullists and the lack of independence for Gaullist intellectuals like Mauriac who, Laurent claimed, followed de Gaulle uncritically. 92 Hewitt argues that this perception of a left-republican bloc excluding the extreme right from the intellectual world should not be seen as posturing or fabricated. The Hussards offered a “refuge” for the right-wing intellectual, Hewitt says, “from the System issued from the Resistance which seemed to dominate the Fourth Republic and from the ideas of the left accepted without question by the intellectual world.” 93 While he might have initially been drawn to the idea of a common cultural space for left and right wing artists, Laurent was an adamant intellectual of the extreme right and the crisis in Algeria quickly confirmed his engagement and dissolved any ideas of common cultural ground. Once he engaged, he broadened this abyss by claiming that his earlier apolitical art was a political statement in and of itself. He claimed his intentional lack of engagement was a way of rejecting the committed intellectual as defined by the left, rather than a rejection of political engagement in general or an effort to find common ground with the left through literature. Laurent was connected to the extreme right by his uncle Eugène Deloncle, 94 but it was his involvement with the Action française (AF) as a student contributor to L’Étudiant Français and his political activism as a member of the Étudiants de l’AF (Students of the AF) that initiated his engagement on the antiparliamentary extreme right. His professors, he wrote later, informed him that they were “perplexed” by his association with “the extreme right” since they were convinced that “the word culture” was only associated “with the friends of the proletariat.” They were even able to convince him for a while of the “intellectual superiority of the left” despite his own intellectual talents and his identification with the extreme right. 95 Nicholas Kessler noted that this statement about being sensitive to the intellectual superiority of the left “testifies eloquently to the inferiority complex felt by the young intellectual of the right when faced with his colleague of the left and his fascination for the supposed authenticity of the revolutionary pose.” 96 This sense of inferiority disappeared with Laurent’s engagement in extreme right movements, but the resentment of it remained. Laurent wrote that his engagement in the AFs “school of thought” eventually convinced him that the extreme right held equal intellectual talent, just with different values. “In the AF,” he elaborated, “one tried to put the accent on all that which separated this movement from the ‘esprit’ of the left.” 97 This lesson in differentiation and its importance for right-wing intellectual legitimacy was one that Laurent carried with him in his own postwar engagement.

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During these years when the intellectual elite began to polarize over fascism and communism, Laurent wrote, “I knew myself to be of the Right because I preferred the civilization of my nation . . . of that which it had acquired by arms . . . and because I did not hold as sacred among us the health of the proletariat . . . and because the sacrifice of the individual to the collective which gave me horror was the basis of the thought of the left.” 98 During the war and the Occupation, Laurent remained in the southern zone and wrote briefly for the revues Idées and L’Écho des Étudiants before withdrawing, disillusioned, from collaboration with Vichy. But he emphasized later, the disillusionment never caused him to question the validity of the Vichy government or to find the Gaullists or the Resistance legitimate authorities. 99 Laurent was appalled by the purge and condemned the CNE-sponsored seizure of the press and the exclusion of the extreme right from all intellectual institutions. By 1947, he had joined with the other intellectuals of the extreme right who had avoided the blacklist in the revue La Table Ronde (LTR). This revue and its press were the only organs of the intellectual extreme right for several years after the Liberation. Although the articles were not extremist or even overtly political, Laurent’s participation, like that of the other writers there, was an expression of defiance against the left-wing hegemony over the French press and the literary milieu. It was his participation in this journal, Laurent wrote later, that definitively marked him as “of the Right” in the postwar intellectual world. 100 In particular, Laurent devoted his articles in LTR to his new crusade against Sartre and the left-wing concept of engagement. This crusade was crowned in 1951 by the publication of Paul et Jean-Paul, a polemical comparison of the work of Sartre and Bourget and a clear condemnation of the roman à thèse (thesis novel) or any literature dictated by political doctrine. 101 Beginning in 1957, Laurent ended his long political silence in order to speak out in favor of French Algeria and to oppose the Gaullist regime which he considered to be part of the dominant left-wing “bloc.” 102 He traveled to Algeria in 1958 as a political correspondent for L’Aurore and returned a convinced advocate of reform rather than independence. Although his engagement revealed an underlying belief in the benefits of European colonialism for Algeria, the real force of his arguments lay in his condemnation of the “intellectual dishonesty” he believed to find in the left’s arguments for independence and their manipulation of public opinion. By the early 1960s, this accusation was extended to de Gaulle whom Laurent accused of duplicity in his position on Algeria. His outrage against the regime and the mainstream intellectual support for the Front de libération nationale (FLN) was such that he joined with other young right-wing intellectuals in propagandizing the actions of Capitan Pierre Sergent and the OAS. 103 During the American involvement in Vietnam, Laurent traveled independently to South Vietnam twice claiming that no journal was willing to sponsor reports that did not

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comply with the Communist Party line. 104 He claimed to find that on the war in Vietnam, as in Algeria, the left-wing position was not only misguided but intentionally unreceptive to the truth of the conflict because of its blind obedience to doctrine. The works which resulted from Laurent’s travels, Mauriac sous de Gaulle (1964) and Les choses que j’ai vues au Vietnam m’ont fait doubter de l’intelligence occidentale (1968), solidified his oppositional engagement and resulted in his persecution by the government as a “subversive writer,” effectively compounding his perception of a hegemony over the field. 105 For Laurent and his right-wing peers, this hegemony did not end with the literal suppression of writers but extended to a more sinister dominance over the concept of intellectual identity. According to Laurent, the left no longer simply monopolized the university or political regime, it annihilated the extreme right and prevented them from even gaining an audience for their views. The general public, Laurent complained, was so “brainwashed” that they could no longer fathom an intellectual who was not of the left. Even the intellectuals of the extreme right themselves often refused to be identified as right-wing. Laurent believed, however, that it was the responsibility of the intellectuals of the extreme right to reveal this manipulation and the inequity in intellectual affairs and to reassert their own ideas as viable sources for postwar France. 106 Laurent’s personal resentment of what he perceived to be a monopoly over the intellectual world was best revealed by the terms he used to describe the two camps. Intellectuals of the far right were “pariahs,” he wrote, excluded from intellectual society. 107 It was in the offices of the right-wing journals that one “met the excluded, the pariahs, the badly whitewashed, and the suspect.” It was therefore on the extreme right that one was truly among the “camp of the reproved.” 108 Of his own experience of intellectual life, Laurent wrote, “Algeria made me first a rebel, then a pariah. Suddenly I was no longer a star but an outlaw.” 109 Intellectuals of the left were, correspondingly, “intellectual terrorists,” 110 who exercised a “tyranny” over letters, and “religious fanatics charged with a mission of extermination” against the intellectual extreme right. 111 According to Laurent, this tyrannical monopoly of intellectual life was a product of a united front by the camps of the PCF, Sartre, and de Gaulle. “This was an era,” he complained, “where the majority of writers, even former communists like Claude Roy, sang the praises of de Gaulle,” 112 and where “there was formed between the left and Gaullism a complicity.” 113 This complicit bloc, Laurent believed, had cooperated since the Liberation, despite its internal quarrels, to effectively exclude the far right from French intellectual life. All who were of their bloc were “dits à gauche” (called of the left) and intellectually authoritative, all who were opposed were automatically “dits à droite” (called of the right) and intellectual outcasts.

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This repression of the extreme right by a republican-left bloc was not a matter of perception, Laurent wrote, but of fact. Extreme right writers were suppressed with ease by the regime for any opinion which was deemed “subversive.” 114 He complained that several of his friends on the far right were arrested during the Algerian conflict for subversive views and that he himself was “hounded by the police,” put under surveillance, and brought in for interrogation. 115 “What had I done?” Laurent demanded furiously, “Nothing other than to signal in a few articles . . . my preference for a French Algeria.” 116 He was equally outraged that the “subversive” views in his Mauriac sous de Gaulle earned him a trial and resulted in the censorship of twenty-five pages. 117 Intellectual freedom, he wrote, was obviously a facade in France since only the views of the intellectual left and Gaullists were allowed to reach the public. In a more discrete article, he fabricated a conversation with a Spanish intellectual who was enamored of the intellectual liberties of the French. During their conversation, Laurent was interrupted several times by passing friends. One stopped to commiserate that Laurent was denied a visa to Algeria for his political views, another to report that a fellow writer was being pursued for subversive writing, and another to tell of the seizure by the government of two right-wing weeklies. 118 The supposed liberties of French intellectual life, Laurent was saying, were only granted to the thinkers who supported the values and programs of the “System” of the republican-left bloc. Yet, Laurent reminded readers, this tangible oppression of the extreme right was not the most heinous aspect of the intellectual terrorism. The great coup of the intellectual left had been first to strip the intellectual extreme right of any cultural authority or moral superiority before resorting to acts of legal suppression. In this way, Laurent wrote, they prevented them from earning martyrdom and no one, not even the intellectuals of the oppressed extreme right themselves, dared defend or identify with it. The purge and the omnipotence of the CNE disappeared in the late 1940s, Laurent wrote, but the great problem for the intellectual extreme right in the 1960s was that the CNEs “grotesque enterprise” of “intellectual terrorism” had not disappeared with it. 119 “The dictates of the CNE had ceased to control letters,” he explained, “but letters continued to suffer the effects of a regimentation . . . a generation of students, professors, and critics were formed by what Marxism and Resistantism decided were ethical and aesthetic.” 120 As late as 1968, Laurent lamented that “there is in the young intellectuals a desire to be fashionable and the fashion is to be of the left.” 121 The left’s conceptualization of culture, the nation, and intellectual values, Laurent claimed, were engrained in the public imagination after the Liberation. At the same time, the extreme right’s concepts were extinguished by their inability to gain exposure and their negative association with fascism and defeat. It was the left’s ability to limit the exposure of intellectual expression on the extreme right that

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seemed to most frustrate Laurent. “The work of the writers called ‘of the Right’ is successful enough,” Laurent argued, “but it is ignored. The left has won this battle; that of the faux-savoir. In the foreign universities, one learns Camus, Robbe-Grillet, and Duverger by heart but ignores the name of Nimier.” 122 While these lines might seem the posturing and exaggeration of a disgruntled writer whose complaints cannot be taken at face value, a survey of literature textbooks in the decades after 1950 by Michel P. Schmitt proves Laurent’s accusation true. Only 4 percent of the texts mentioned right-wing authors like Laurent, and of these, the reigning assessment included the negative description “turned toward the past.” 123 It was to promote exposure of the intellectuals of the extreme right that Laurent lent his pen to journals like LTR where the “pariahs” were able to write. It was also with increased exposure in mind that he created La Parisienne and Arts which both accepted contributions from previously blacklisted writers. Despite their efforts to reinsert the rightwing into French intellectual life, Laurent sorrowed, the hegemony of the left was such that the extreme right was practically eliminated from the intellectual narrative without anyone taking notice. Laurent admitted that this program to eliminate the far right from the intellectual narrative had not begun with the postwar left. The question “was intelligence and culture on the Right or on the left?” had always been in fashion, he wrote. “And there was an intellectual party which went far back, at least to Lucien Herr . . . and the defeatists of the war of 1914 who had . . . confiscated the word culture to the profit of the friends of the proletariat.” 124 This long running trend had even caused him, as a youth, to “hold as evident that nationalism was only good for boors, that a man of mind . . . was pacifist and cosmopolitan” and to “believe evident the intellectual superiority of the left.” 125 But, he continued, during the years of the postwar, this tendency to grant intellectual status to the left became a sort of religious faith that none dared question. In the journals of the left, Laurent explained, one was able to read statements such as “the PC is the party of France, it is above all the party which is always right!” and “All the intellectuals, with rare exception, are Stalinist at this time.” And at the tenth congress of the PCF, the Communist Party was “joyfully proclaimed the ‘Parti de l’intelligence française’ without making the Sorbonne or the journals collapse with laughter.” 126 But, more importantly, as Laurent noted, even the intellectuals of the extreme right accepted this dominance as self-evident and perpetuated the misconception of intellectual identity. “The French Right of these past years,” one article in La Parisienne seethed, “lets itself be accused of immobility and conservatism without saying a word. . . . The left, since it exists, is believed to have priority, political and ideological over the Right.” 127 Unopposed, the left was able to make of itself a religion, it became “Lord of Progress and the general will while the Right,” the

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author complained, “intimidated before its enormous religious claims was only able to cry Tyranny!” 128 There was no concerted effort by the extreme right, he insisted, to counter the claims by the left to represent all intelligence. And, even worse, the intellectuals of the right wing, out of frustration with their subordinate status or shame at being seen as antiintellectual, compounded this error by refusing to be labeled “of the Right.” “The Right is not stupid or unconscious,” he wrote, “it has shame of the motive which the left has assigned it. . . . Before the question ‘Why am I on the Right?’ the temptation is great to avoid it with an anecdote or to doubt if one truly is on the Right.” 129 But this was unacceptable if the intellectual right was to be revived and to provide some counterpoint to the monopoly over intelligence by the left. “A new Right searches for itself,” he wrote. “It is not impossible. But here are the conditions for its success: it must strip itself of the prejudices and deliver itself from the shame that the left has imposed on it.” 130 Only in breaking with the image of the anti-intellectual extreme right that was created by the left could they have a new model for their intellectual identity. As they had at every point during the twentieth century when they felt they were excluded from the legitimizing title of “intellectual,” the engaged writers of the postwar extreme right began their struggle to define intellectual identity on their own terms by claiming equal right to the title itself. In a 1954 article in L’Express entitled “À la recherche des intellectuels de droite” (In search of the intellectuals of the right), the leftwing journal mockingly wrote that, having found no “intellectuals” among the writers of the postwar extreme right, it would have to resort to the works of prewar writers like Drieu to complete its survey. 131 Laurent penned an immediate response to this challenge in La Parisienne. He chastised the left-wing journal for suggesting that the writers who did not construct their novels to influence the elections were unworthy of their role. But his clearest attempts to claim the title and role of the intellectual did not come until the Algerian conflict. In a 1960 enquête in Combat on reaction to the “Manifesto of the 121” by supporters of independence, Laurent gave a decided response. While defending the “particular duties” incumbent on “intellectuals” that separated them from average citizens, Laurent questioned whether the left-wing signers of the Manifesto deserved this distinction. Laurent accused the signers of the anticolonialist manifesto of claiming the right to the title and role of the intellectual without meriting it. “The aim of this manifesto,” Laurent concluded, was in great part to “make it believed that the ‘French elite’ had pronounced itself” in favor of an independent Algeria. 132 In fact, he wrote, the “true” French intellectuals were actually opposed to the Manifesto. The left’s attempt to “imprison the conscience of France and intoxicate public opinion” 133 by claiming to represent all of French intelligence was not only treason to France, it was, Laurent wrote, intellectually “irresponsible.” 134

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Laurent greatly resented the postwar trend on the left of declaring that “all that was revolutionary and Marxist was good, all that was reactionary and fascist was bad.” 135 This, he charged, was a distortion of the true nature of postwar culture that was meant to eliminate the extreme right from French intellectual life. Instead, he and his right-wing peers including Bardèche, claimed the right to engage as intellectuals and to construct their own version of intellectual role and responsibility based on distinctly right-wing intellectual values. DIFFERENTIATION AND REAPPROPRIATION OF CULTURAL VALUES Once again, the extreme right and the left engaged their pens to create a delineation, an abyss, in the intellectual values between the two camps, each claiming only those of their side were truly French and legitimate. During the postwar, the left once more claimed the concept of realism for its own ranks, much to the consternation of the extreme right who found itself in a battle to reappropriate what had traditionally been a right-wing ideal. Far from being a shared value that created common cultural foundations across political lines, the term was contested, redefined, and denied to the other on both sides. Beauvoir proclaimed that it was “the ideologies of the contemporary Right” that during the postwar were “idealist,” “cut off from the resistance of the real world,” and that “substituted abstract ideas for reality.” 136 Bardèche and the intellectuals of the right, therefore, went to great lengths to separate their understanding of realism and to delegitimize the term as described by the left. The most powerful statement of Bardèche’s differentiation between his concept of intellectual realism and the left’s was found in his Sparte et les sudistes. “The opposition between the right and the left,” he wrote, “puts in light the antinomy of the two temperaments. . . . The men of the left have a rational and abstract definition of man and they want to arrange the force of men in shelves that they have prepared.” 137 In contrast, he continued, “the men of the Right do not have a system; they do not construct society with a ruler and a compass. They take men as they find them, in the place where they have grown, in the unequal bunches that nature has formed.” 138 In short, he was insisting, the intellectual extreme right understood the true role of the intellectual was to begin with man as he was rather than as he should be. The left-wing proponents of liberalism, the third way, and the PCF all believed they were addressing reality by looking at material conditions and class relations, according to Bardèche. But they approached these real conditions of France through the lens of their ideology. The central ideologies of the left were themselves universalist abstractions which, no matter how they tried to claim a connection to a particular society, were always imposed on that society through an

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idealized, universal application. 139 “They work with different conceptualizations of man,” he wrote, “the man of the ideologues is an abstract being.” 140 In contrast, Bardèche wrote, the intellectual of the extreme right understood that a responsibility to realism required the intellectual to recognize the needs of the nation in its particular time. It was the role of the intellectual, therefore, to nurture a sense of the national consciousness in himself and in the public. “The national consciousness,” Bardèche wrote, “is the pulsing of the pays réel (real country). It is our history, our race, generations of peasants and artisans . . . who are the sons of the same earth.” In contrast, the universal consciousness of a universal humanity was “the dispossession, the expropriation of our souls, the uprooting and sterilization of our people.” 141 Those who proclaim that “a principle, an idea is superior to the imperatives of national life,” he continued, “strike this energy at its source” and destroy the autonomy of the nation. 142 In a statement strikingly similar to one by Barrès during the Dreyfus Affair, Bardèche wrote, “I know a French youth of French parents, I do not know this ‘Personne humaine’ and I do not know the anonymous society called ‘civilization.’” 143 Both Laurent and Bardèche saw the two distinct ideas of realism to have two extremely different results for intellectual practice and responsibility. For the left, Bardèche began, “one was able to be a traitor by serving the legitimate government if this government was not authorized by democracy” or some other universal ideology. 144 In practice, therefore, they condemned the undemocratic government of Vichy. In contrast, the intellectuals of the fascist and extreme right supported Vichy as the only functioning, sanctioned government that French society had at the time. They worked within the current reality, Bardèche wrote, while the resistant left created a fantasy government in the Resistance or paid allegiance to a government in exile. In an interview years later, Laurent recalled the necessity of posing this alternative version of Vichy and the Resistance to the dominant, left-wing narrative. In the interview, he claimed that his interpretation, which “called into question all the habits of thought and all the education of a generation,” was based on “incontestable testimony” rather than “fabricated on an immense lie” as the vision of the left was. 145 In short, in his construction of the right-wing memory of Vichy, Laurent portrayed himself as the more responsible historian and intellectual, who marshaled real evidence rather than ideology. He paraded quotes from Dwight Eisenhower that said it was Boisson, Vichy’s representative, not de Gaulle who had saved French Africa. He also highlighted the work of Gabriel Jeantet’s Amicale de France (Association of France) which he claimed had aided the Liberation while remaining devoted to Pétain. 146 His most concerted effort to portray the right-wing memory of Vichy as the real one, however, was in his Année 40 where he collected and commented on documents that he believed

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“put to light the double game of Pétain and the insignificant role of de Gaulle in the opposition to the Germans.” 147 This condemnation of idealism over realism, therefore, extended to Mauriac and the Gaullists. “Our future is in our intelligence,” Laurent lamented, but “the unsuitability of the regime that we submit to is that it has as its principle strategy the corruption of the information and the minds that have to analyze it.” 148 Gaullism, he claimed, exercised a certain power over writers and savants that led them to “mold the facts, denature them, erase and disfigure them” to the benefit of the regime. 149 The great betrayal of intellectual responsibility and integrity was nowhere more apparent than in the work of Mauriac. In his Mauriac sous de Gaulle, Laurent accused Mauriac of having more reverence for the personage of de Gaulle in his latest biography than he had held “when treating the Son of God” in a previous work. 150 Mauriac, Laurent wrote, “had renounced himself completely” and lost his ability to critique when faced with the embodiment of the political ideology he had adopted. 151 The effort to reclaim and redefine the concept of the real by distinguishing a right-wing concept from that proclaimed by the left wing was part of the larger effort to redefine and to reappropriate the concept of engagement and of political commitment for the extreme right. Laurent has been seen by several historians as an apolitical littérateur in the years before 1957, an interpretation warranted by Laurent’s condemnation at the time of committed intellectuals. However, Laurent was quick to clarify, his early refusal of “engagement” was actually an act of opposition, a statement of “disrespect” for the intellectual choices of the left. 152 Since only the left was allowed to voice its political opinion in the intellectual milieu during these years, opposition to engagement was, in reality, only opposition to the idea of engagement as it was practiced and defined by the left. “In the era where I had attacked ‘engagement,’ he wrote, “it was the vehicle of my adversaries. The strikes that I brought against the doctrine of engagement had been brought against those who employed it to terrorize literature.” 153 Intellectuals who adhered to the camps of Sartre, the PCF, and de Gaulle were all writing according to a doctrine that limited their search for truth. These intellectuals, Laurent believed, sacrificed their identity as writers and artists to their identity as political men. “There are not communist writers,” he quipped, but writing communists.” 154 His adversaries on the left monopolized the conceptualization and practice of engagement during the early 1950s. To oppose it, in Laurent’s mind, was to oppose the doctrines and the ideas of the left which were so closely associated with it. When he later chose to engage his own work on the side of French Algeria, he explained, he intentionally differentiated his own practice of engagement from that previously conceived by the intellectuals of the left. “Had I practiced engagement?” Laurent asked himself, “No, at least not in the sense that Sartre had given it.” 155

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In reality, Sirinelli, Pascal Ory, and the historians who favor sociological approaches to intellectual life are right to see both the left and the right united in the common professional behavior of engagement. But, the extreme right intellectuals were eager to differentiate and redefine their concept of engagement from that of the left instead of seeing it as a common practice. The behavior of engagement, Laurent believed, might have seemed common to the left and the extreme right during the debates over colonialism, but the practices were inherently different at their core. “I propose,” he wrote, “to define the writer of the Right as one who writes without referring to a code . . . without searching like Sartre and Camus to express the tendencies of groups or collectivities.” 156 This intellectual autonomy, for Laurent, was the hallmark of the right-wing conceptualization of engagement. It linked the intellectual extreme right’s rejection of engagement as it was conceived by the left in the early postwar years to their enthusiastic engagement, according to their own concept, during the colonial wars. “If you search for a continuity in my enterprise,” he summarized when asked about this seeming rupture, “find it in the refusal to enslave intelligence.” 157 The right-wing reentry into engagement during the debate over decolonization required that the right not only reappropriate from the left and revalue the concepts of the real and of engagement, but also of France and European civilization. In his memoirs, Laurent reflected on his support for French Algeria and the image of France that his support was founded upon. He had initially, he recalled, been ambiguous on the question of colonialism and the superiority of the European civilization. “France had a great empire like England and other nations of Europe possessed numerous colonies,” Laurent wrote, “this state of things seemed normal to me.” 158 He became more passionate about French Algeria when the conflict there threatened to remove it from his image of the French national identity. When “the bombings turned into war in Algeria, I reacted without ambiguity,” he explained, “I had a certain idea or rather a certain image of France and when I imagined it reduced to a hexagon, I had a crisis of claustrophobia.” 159 Laurent claimed the left intentionally misrepresented the effects of colonization in order to convince the public of its vision of social revolution. For the left, colonization was exploitation and a racist concept of inferior and superior races, but according to Laurent, it was a beneficial tutelage in European civilization that carried no concept of inferior races. “The colonial adventure seemed to me,” Laurent wrote, “a happy enterprise for the people who were being developed. I believed in the superiority of civilization but no scorn entered into the regard that I had for exotic races.” 160 The “happy enterprise” of colonialism, according to Laurent, provided Algeria with more political structure and economic possibilities than they could accomplish for themselves as an independent nation. In his Les Passagers pour Alger, Professor de Meilhan asks an

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Algerian about his desire for independence. The Algerian’s reply is “that the only true independence is from cold, hunger, violence, slavery and that he did not hope for this from an Algerian government.” 161 France, this novel explained, had “constructed a civilization that, imperfect as it is, was a thousand times superior to that which Algeria would have had had it remained to itself.” 162 If, Laurent summarized elsewhere, one considered the national fact paramount, then the French presence there was criminal, but “if one considers that civilization is preferable to barbarism, then it is no longer a right that is given to us to stay but rather a duty.” 163 The push for decolonization by the intellectual left, he concluded, was not a responsible recognition of Algeria’s preparation for independence but rather a betrayal and an abandonment, under the cover of high principles, of the duty to civilize. The internal diversity of the extreme right was perhaps nowhere more evident in the postwar than in the effort by some factions within the extreme right to redefine and revalue fascism for Europe. While not all extreme right intellectuals supported this venture, it was certainly a pursuit that divided those who did from the Gaullists and extreme left. It was, according to Bardèche and the neo-fascists, the duty of the engaged intellectuals to outline new parameters for a neo-fascism that lacked the failings of the old. With this understanding of his purpose as an intellectual, Bardèche wrote Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? (What is fascism?), his most comprehensive effort to transform fascism into a viable program for postwar Europe. “There is currently no fascism in France,” one Défense de l’Occident article, by Bernard Vorge, elaborated, “but only a fascist tradition. It concerns in reality a long intellectual and moral reform to produce a form that will be very different from that which the past has known.” 164 Bardèche warned readers first that the term and concept of fascism had been so distorted during the war and so maligned by the left and the Gaullists after the Liberation that few if any admitted to supporting fascism in the postwar world. “In truth,” he wrote, “fascism had been extirpated like a heresy, its leaders massacred, its symbols maligned . . . and this campaign was not the effort of a moment, it was continued, methodical, industrial. It endures still and will endure as long as the vanquishers of fascism are the exclusive possessors of all the organs of opinion: press, radio, cinema, publishing.” 165 But in the fascism that “the intellectuals, journals, and parties call fascism,” he explained, “the fascists refuse to recognize themselves.” 166 It was necessary therefore for the fascist intellectuals to be persistent in reappropriating the concept and in promoting their own version. Bardèche began the process of revitalization by distancing neo-fascism from the failed versions of Germany, Italy, and Vichy. 167 Instead, he proposed a “New Fascism” that had no dependence on biological racism, no imperative to expansion and to war, and no requirement of a “providential man.” The new fascism required only an elite who represented

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the best of the people, served as pioneers of the new ideas, and provided exemplars of the lived ideology. 168 It would not be a system of “constraint” as the left claimed, but one of “discipline” based on an understanding of the collective interest of the nation. 169 Fascism would provide a new image of man based on heroism, nonconformism, and an idea of liberty that promoted the collective good rather than individual rights. 170 Connected to Bardèche’s revaluation of fascism was his introduction of Holocaust negationism, a position that was shared by an even smaller segment of the diverse extreme right, but that definitively alienated these intellectuals from the republican-left alliance. Any devotee of intellectual realism, according to Bardèche, recognized the need for national relativism. The French should be concerned about justice and judgment for atrocities committed against their own nation, he argued. There was no universal standard of morality, of judgment, or even of justice that could be applied to all the situations of the war indiscriminately because each action, each perpetrator, or each case was particular in its nature. Therefore, Bardèche did not deny the presence of concentration camps but argued, “as for the concentration camps, honesty consists for us in demanding justice and reparation for the French innocents who had been deported and tortured, not for the others.” 171 Bardèche’s rejection of universal morality and international justice was augmented by his rightwing intellectual values of race and rootedness. Despite his disclaimer “I am not an anti-Semite,” this racist approach to international politics and morality was a constant in the work of the neo-fascist and negationist extreme right. “What becomes apparent,” Bardèche rationalized in Nuremberg; ou, la terre promise, “is that there was no will to exterminate the French but only to exterminate the Jews and while there are many proofs for Jewish extermination, there are no proofs for French extermination.” Linked to this was his belief that the left had unreservedly accepted the version of the Holocaust given at Nuremberg without digging further to substantiate the evidence. “Do we condemn ourselves to ignorance or hatred because these are easy positions?” he cried, “Is it a crime according to our laws now to try to understand? Is it an obligation to accord ourselves without reserve to the official condemnations and the maledictions of the journals?” 172 No! he answered. Rather it was the responsibility of the intellectual milieu, among whom he believed he was the only one to continue in his duty to question the official information, to analyze the evidence, to add complexity to the options presented, and to consider the moral implications. “This,” he concluded, “is why I have wanted to be that voice raised in this nation for that which I believe to be the truth and justice.” 173 Being a responsible intellectual during the postwar, according to Bardèche, meant questioning the official account of events and also opening up debate rather than stifling contradiction. The implications of this stance for the resulting rise of Holocaust negation led the mainstream intellectual world to reject Bardèche, his ideas, and the net-

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work of intellectual supporters that grew around him. As in the past, sensing themselves rejected from mainstream intellectual outlets, the intellectuals of the extreme right spectrum segregated themselves in social networks and cultural organizations that radicalized their sense of isolation, amplified their engagement, and reinforced the resentment of their repression. COLLECTIVE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION: SEGREGATION OF SOCIAL SPACES AND PROFESSIONAL TRAJECTORIES After four years of clandestine activity, suppression, and persecution, the intellectuals of the Resistance were eager to retake their positions of dominance in the intellectual field and revive the communities and networks that would give their individual engagement collective force. This process required not only the purging and banning of collaborationist and right-wing parties, revues, publishing firms, cultural organizations, and youth movements but also the re-creation of these communities for the republican and extreme left. And, on the extreme right, the perception of isolation and alienation became a tangible reality as they were purged from these places of cultural power. In order to regain even a small foothold in French cultural life, they formed communities, spaces, and socioprofessional networks that could serve as support structures for their return to active engagement. And, because the communities, organizations, and organs that had been their support structure during the interwar and occupation years were outlawed or seized for intellectuals who supported the “System,” these re-created communities were physical reminders of their status as outcasts and created breeding grounds for resentment. The CNE remained, especially during the early years of the postwar era, the most significant community for intellectuals across the spectrum of the republican-left. It portrayed itself as the premier organization of the Resistance and drew to it over two hundred intellectuals including the prestigious and the actively engaged Paul Valéry, Vercors, Malraux, Georges Duhamel, Schlumberger, Jean Guéhenno, Mauriac, Morgan, Paul Éluard, André Frénaud, Camus, Sartre, Cassou, Roy, Paulhan, Elsa Triolet, and Aragon who served as its general secretary. Initially, it was able to unite its membership behind the mission to purge France of the fascist and collaborationist influences of the previous four years. In its first, non-clandestine meeting after the Liberation in September 1944, it called for the “just punishment of the imposters and traitors” of the intellectual field and gathered over sixty signatures for its “Manifeste des écrivains français” (Manifesto of the French writers). In the manifesto, the members proclaimed the CNE as “the only representative and acting organization of French writers.” 174 Postwar editors and revue directors

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obediently followed its blacklist proscriptions, and intellectuals, even those who were concerned by the excesses of the treason trials, were united behind its efforts to delegitimize collaboration. The clearest statement of this community cohesion, sense of collective identity, and shared purpose was published September 1944. “The members of the CNE,” it read, “have engaged themselves to refuse all collaboration to the journals, revues, collections, etc., that publish a text signed by a writer of which the attitude or the writing during the occupation brought moral or material aid to the oppressor.” 175 In this way, the CNE defined proper intellectual practice for the collective community of the former Resistance intellectuals. The CNE was also the umbrella organization for several other sources of intellectual community. The CNE sponsored salons and literary discussions at the Maison de la pensée française (Center for French Thought) on Saturdays. This was a space where intellectual leaders like Aragon and Éluard spoke on current events and literary themes, where foreign and often communist writers were fêted, and where aspiring young authors were given opportunities to be mentored and made legitimate in the eyes of the public. Most importantly, perhaps, was the community that was formed around the CNE organ Les Lettres Françaises. The communist-dominated journal was extremely active during the Resistance years and retained most of its original PCF and Soviet contributors including Vercors, Aragon, Triolet, Roy, JR [Jean-Richard] Bloch, Ilya Ehrenbourg, and its director Claude Morgan. Most of the CNE manifestos and declarations were found in the pages of Lettres Françaises and the journal was responsible for publicizing the CNEs program and value system, particularly that of the extremely influential PCF contingent of the CNE. The PCF was therefore another important socio-professional community for the intellectual extreme left, even though it could only claim a fraction of the intellectual field as committed party members. As it had during the interwar years, the PCF was able to draw to it committed intellectuals like Aragon, Roy, and Pierre Daix but garnered its real influence from its ability to draw non-PCF intellectuals into its sphere of influence through its affiliated organizations, revues, cultural congresses, and petitions. Communist membership provided writers with: translation rights in Soviet controlled countries; promotion of their books and articles by one of the dominant political parties in France; invitations to travel and to speak in the USSR; and various awards and conference honors. As it had in the interwar years, the PCF also sponsored many congresses and movements directed toward the intellectual in order to draw nonparty intellectual supporters into its sphere of influence. As early as June 1946, the PCF organized one of the largest gatherings of intellectuals since the war: the Congrès de la Pensée (Congress of Thought). The texts from the Congress were published the following year

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as Le parti communiste, les intellectuels et la nation in order to spread the force of this effort of collective engagement to those who did not attended the congress. 176 Perhaps most influential, though, was the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, which was created in 1948 in Poland by communist intellectuals. The French subsidiary was the Mouvement des intellectuels français pour la défense de la paix (Movement of French Intellectuals for the Defense of Peace). The Peace Movement drew to it such prestigious names as Vercors, Cassou, and Sartre by proclaiming its mission to be not the spread of communism but the end of colonial wars, the defeat of lingering fascism, and the preservation of European national independence. The Movement initiated its own congress in 1949 and one year later was instrumental in gathering over fourteen million signatures for the Stockholm Appeal. These congresses provided communist sympathizing intellectuals with yet another platform for engagement. In 1952, for example, Sartre spoke at the Vienna congress on the necessity of German reunification, the United Nations recognition of the Peoples Republic of China, and an end to colonial war in Indochina. The intellectual extreme right did not have the party discipline that the PCF gave to the communist left or even the ideological coherence that Sartre and de Gaulle gave to their camps. 177 But this did not prevent them from forming small communities of like-minded thinkers whose shared opposition to the dominant politics of the day provided them with a common mission. In the early years of the purge, several rightwing groups like Ernest de Jonquière’s Ligue des intellectuels indépendants (League of Independent Intellectuals), to which Bardèche belonged, united right-wing intellectuals in a protest of the purge and a defense of Vichy and the collaborators. 178 There was also the Comité national français (French National Committee), of which Bardèche was a cofounder, which was an “umbrella organization” for numerous smaller efforts on the extreme and neo-fascist right. Although the French extreme right was not able to hold the mass meetings and congresses that it had during the interwar and occupation years, French intellectuals including Bardèche attended the 1951 Malmö Congress in Sweden. Mammone and Bar-On have suggested that this congress was essential to creating a panEuropean neo-fascist language and extreme-right movement that eventually evolved into the European New Right. 179 Here basic tenets of rightwing thought and political positions were agreed upon including the necessity of a strong Germany and anticommunism. 180 During the early decades of the postwar there were few organized alternatives for intellectuals on the extreme right, but, by the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Bardèche and other right-wing intellectuals had created a strong foundation for new groups that were beginning to redefine the political and intellectual extreme right like Ordre Nouveau, the FN, and GRECE. 181 Instead of massive political parties and congresses, the core of the collective communities of the extreme right was the grassroots network

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of socio-professional and personal relationships fostered by the polarized environment of the purge. Bardèche recalled that in the years of the purge, he and his family were stripped of their property and homes and were forced to rely on “the professional solidarity that was established so rapidly among the delinquents” in order to find new lodging. 182 He explained that there was a surprising readiness among the oppressed to share their resources and influence to help their fellow outcasts. While he was excluded from the company of the republican and left-wing university professors he had enjoyed before the war, he recalled that he was “touched by the young men unknown to us who came to offer their friendship to replace those that had been lost to us.” 183 Bardèche in particular also found “a whole new circle of international friends” through the Association internationale des amis de Robert Brasillach (International Association of the Friends of Robert Brasillach) created in 1968. Here he formed personal and professional networks through years of correspondence with intellectuals sympathetic to neo-fascism and collaborationism throughout Europe. 184 The one community of intellectuals to which Bardèche did not create a strong link was Laurent’s Hussards. The failure to create a network with these younger intellectuals, he wrote, was one of his “great regrets,” since he knew and liked their work and felt he “shared many ideas” with them. 185 The group known as the Hussards developed its own network of relationships in the larger intellectual extreme-right community. The term “Hussard” was actually introduced by the left-wing writer Bernard Frank in an effort, Laurent claimed, to tar a group of right-wing writers with the label “fascist.” In reality, Laurent wrote, there was no firm organization, simply a group of “men who were, during this time, united against the sort of intellectual consensus that came from the opposing side.” 186 The category was intended to include the young oppositional writers Roger Nimier, Antoine Blondin, Michel Déon, and Laurent. These writers shared a common worldview, contributed to the same journals, wrote in the same style, and formed both personal and professional ties. Most importantly, however, the Hussards shared the same disrespect for the established political values and concept of engagement. They formed “the contestatory pole opposite the group from LTM” and as such “invented their own way of life” on the extreme right. 187 The Hussards were seen by both the members themselves and the intellectual left as a separate “community” of intellectuals. 188 As one young admirer of the group wrote, it was a “resplendent family” of right-wing intellectuals. 189 Here, he continued, a young right-wing writer, excluded and marginalized in other intellectual communities, “walked into a group of young men seated around tables laughing” and felt that he had been immediately made “a member of the family.” 190 As they had in decades past, these “families” of writers and socioprofessional networks of ostracized intellectuals were quick to coalesce

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around independent revues and journals that could amplify their individual efforts to engage. One of the most significant revue teams to provide a haven for right-wing writers and offer a mentoring space for young writers of the right was that of Bardèche’s Défense de l’Occident. Contributors to Défense de l’Occident included Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Paul Sérant, and Jean-Marie Le Pen among others of the extreme right. 191 The journal promoted the ideas of neo-fascism, the new racism, and negationism, and also republished the works of collaborationists; opposed Sartre, communism, and the Gaullist republicans; and advocated French Algeria. 192 It was a “training ground” for the young intellectuals who formed the next generation of the extreme right. Despite Défense’s popularity with the more extremist, neo-fascist right, the most influential and respected intellectual journal of the immediate postwar years was LTR. The monthly LTR was created in 1948 by François Mauriac and Maulnier specifically to counter the power of Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes and to provide an outlet for the right-wing writers like Jean Giono, Henry de Montherlant, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Marcel Jouhandeau who were silenced by the liberation press. Initially, the journal included contributions from both sides of the political spectrum and had a committee of moderate anticommunists and Gaullists: Mauriac, Paulhan, Camus, Malunier, Aron, and Malraux. The journal presented itself as preserving the “responsibility of the profession” by promoting unity in the postwar and advocating freedom of expression for all, not just the Resistance left. 193 By 1954, these moderates were edged out by their more extremist, extreme-right contributors like Bardèche and the Hussards. Mauriac wrote of this unexpected mutiny, “Never did a hen hatch so many nonconformist extreme right-wing ducks.” 194 In the latter years of the postwar, under this more extremist influence, the journal supported French Algeria, opposed Sartre and communism, and became a space for the extreme right where Gaullists and the left were neither welcomed nor interested in writing. In these efforts, LTR was supported by an extreme-right network of journals that shared similar values and visions. The AF students continued the royalist presence by creating Documents nationaux and Aspects de la France, even though royalism attracted few of the postwar intellectuals. The “first periodical of the postwar Opposition Nationale” was Perspectives, a small bulletin created by René Malliavin, which changed its name to Questions Actuelles before the end of 1944, then to Écrits de Paris in 1947. The team of Écrits, including such notable figures of the far right as René Malliavin, Pierre Tattinger, Jacques Isorni, Bertrand de Jouvenel, and Morand, also started the extremist weekly Rivarol by 1951, which served as a rallying point for the most radical of the right-wing engagés. 195 After growing disinterested in the direction of LTR themselves, the “Hussards,” who “had a horror of the sanctuary of revealed truths,” which was the mainstream media, formed a vast, interconnected network of

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journals that were outside the intellectual world of the left and provided what Laurent called “a breath of fresh air.” 196 Hussard signatures were found in the right-wing journals Combat, Armée Nation, Opera, Esprit Public, and, most prominently, in the journals created by Laurent: La Parisienne, Arts, Au Contraire, and 168. The covers of each of these journals even cross-promoted one another by saying that readers could find more from the same authors in the other journals. While Arts and La Parisienne were both originally advertised as apolitical literary revues, La Parisienne often broke this mold in order to comment on the affairs of the day. In particular, one issue was devoted to reviving the work of Drieu, while another was dedicated to “La Droite” in a clear counterattack on the LTM issue reviling “the Right.” Esprit Public and the short lived 168 and Au Contraire were much more actively engaged and gathered the Hussards along with other right-wing intellectuals for a crusade in favor of French Algeria and opposition to de Gaulle. 197 Revues provided a supportive space where the writers of the rightwing opposition could express their political and cultural values without fear of repression. The right-wing revues and journals also created social spaces where writers could congregate and form both professional and personal ties outside the networks of the dominant republican-left “system.” The writers of LTR, for example, formed what Laurent later referred to as, “a Table ronde clan, an ensemble, a literary life” separate from the intellectual society of the left. 198 The revue was also a space for mentoring the next generation of right-wing intellectuals and introducing them to opposition journalism. Before Mauriac became a devotee of de Gaulle and alienated himself from the more extreme writers, a group of young LTR contributors gathered “nearly every Monday to dine at five or six around Mauriac in one of the little restaurants. All the personnel [of LTR] came,” Laurent recalled, “they allocated a little room to us which became our office.” 199 The revue team was therefore a key contributor to the formation of a distinctly right-wing collective intellectual identity. It surrounded authors with other like-minded right-wing thinkers, giving them a sense of validation, and connected them to others in the rightwing community. And, most importantly, right-wing revues were truly right-wing spaces, isolated from and opposed to the ideas and authors of the left. But, for the first time in the century of intellectual engagement, it was the left’s journals that dominated the public space and understanding of intellectual life. The PCF organ Action initially drew to its pages not only doctrinaire PCF writers, but also nonparty contributors including Benda, Merleau-Ponty, and Mauriac. After 1947, this camaraderie slowly disappeared as the party tightened its restrictions on non-party-line contributions and the Resistance front split into factions, but the initial effort had forged socio-professional networks between many of its former writers. Other PCF organs included La Pensée, where Paul Langevin and Frédéric

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Joliot-Curie attempted to connect Marxism and modern physics; Ce Soir, where Aragon remained a constant contributor; La Nouvelle Critique; and L’Humanité. Each of these journals suffered internal dissent and debate over issues ranging from Tito’s Yugoslavia to the appropriate response to Hungary to the place to accord Louis Althuser’s interpretations. Yet, despite the dissention and fracturing of their revue teams, these journals remained important centers of professional networking and of intellectual sociability. The centrist democrats and Gaullists like Malraux and Aron formed journalistic networks at the democratic papers Preuves, L’Aube, and Figaro. And Mounier’s Esprit, which had briefly connected to the RDR and allied with the PCF 200 until 1949, provided an intellectual community for the Catholic, third-way intellectuals. The intellectual collectivity of Esprit was instrumental in creating the so-called new left spaces that provided the left-wing youth with a socially progressive alternative to communism. However, the third-way intellectual community around the revue team of Esprit could not compare in influence to the most dominant revue team in the postwar intellectual world: that of Les Temps Modernes. LTM was an undeniable influence on the conceptualization of responsibility and identity for the left. The 1945 editorial board composed of Aron, Beauvoir, Michel Leiris, Merleau-Ponty, Albert Oliver, and Paulhan underwent several changes as Sartre turned toward communism and by 1955 was restructured around Claude Lanzmann, Marcel Péju, and Jean Cau. Yet, at each point in its evolution, this collective of intellectuals saw themselves as “firmly rooted on the left.” In its first issue, Sartre outlined their collective purpose in his “Présentation” and spoke of the team and the contributors as a collective “we.” As a collective entity, they agreed to use the pages of the revue to “change the social condition of man and the conception he has of himself.” 201 As the political color of the revue changed over time to follow Sartre’s communist conversion, the evolved journal team reflected the new political themes of communism, anti-Americanism, and an increasing opposition to colonialism. The dominance and prestige of the LTM in the postwar intellectual field, similar in many ways to that of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) in the interwar years, meant that being a part of the LTM community was an important connection for any left-wing intellectual and became a valuable part of their self-identification, one that differentiated them from those excluded from this community on the right. Writers on both the left and extreme right benefited from a professional network and shared political purpose, but they also developed the network into a space of sociability that influenced their collective concept of intellectual identity and reinforced the sense of division and ostracism. LTM writers often congregated in the café de Flore to work, debate, or simply socialize. “Flore was truly our club,” Sartre wrote of this social space and intellectual community, which was clearly a left-wing territo-

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ry. Sartre, Beauvoir, and their camp also made a habit of writing and meeting friends in the cafés of Deux Magots and Flore during the postwar decades and created something of an intellectual fortress in these cafes for the extreme left. Laurent recalled the extent to which the intellectuals of the extreme right were ostracized from even these seemingly neutral spaces. “Claude Roy had said that it was necessary for me not to return to Café de Flore, because this was a sacred place!” Laurent wrote. In fact, he continued, the entirety of Saint-Germain des Prés seemed overtaken by the intellectuals of the left and “when I walked in the SaintGermain des Prés, I went for a walk among enemies—which amused me for I loved to provoke them.” 202 In opposition to these left-wing intellectual strongholds, the extreme right intellectuals gathered at Brasserie Lipp where Laurent was often found writing and at the bar at Pont Royal where the LTR team met after hours and where the Hussards and supporters of Captain Sergent’s OAS propaganda congregated. 203 Herbert R. Lottman has rightly argued, therefore, that the cafés of Paris could literally be divided into two camps during these years based on the political leanings of their most devoted intellectual clientele. 204 Finally, as they had in all previous periods of intellectual debate, manifestos and petitions provided a forum for intellectual engagement and expression that united its signers in an imagined community of shared values. Although the signers might never have any true social contact, they were brought together through the petition into an intellectual community that extended beyond the material limits to encompass all likeminded intellectuals. Even this common practice of petition signing showed marked discrepancies between the left and the extreme right. The left, which had produced only limited and unsigned manifestos during the Occupation, returned triumphantly to petition signing in the postwar while the extreme right, defeated and persecuted in turn, remained remarkably silent. The intellectuals of the extreme right admittedly reemerged in full force during the conflict in Algeria, but even then, Sirinelli has argued, “in the war of petitions and the mobilization of clercs, the left and extreme-left imposed themselves and were even in a hegemonic situation” well into the 1970s. 205 The petitions of the intellectual left began immediately after the Liberation with the manifestos in Lettres Françaises calling for the purge. The Manfeste des écrivains français was signed by sixty intellectuals of the Resistance including Aragon, Benda, Camus, Éluard, Guehénno, Malraux, Mauriac, Sartre, and Paulhan. Later petitions ranged from one encouraging publishing firms to boycott the collaborationists listed on the CNE blacklist to one calling for clemency for Brasillach by those on the resistant left. Perhaps the most significant battle of petitions was that which occurred during the Algerian War between the intellectuals of the extreme left and those of the newly revived extreme right. 206 One of the larger petitions was the Manifesto of the 121, or the “Déclaration sur le

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droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” [Declaration on the right to insubordination in the war in Algeria], which initially could only be published outside of France because of its incendiary statements advocating insubordination among the French troops in Algeria. The 121 intellectuals who signed the manifesto included such familiar names as Beauvoir, Sartre, Éluard, Henri Lefebvre, Roy, Vercors, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. The signers were united in seeing the conflict in Algeria as an imperialist and racist war that was carried out against a people seeking independence. They called collectively for an end to the “criminal and absurd combat,” that was “operating overtly and violently outside all legality” and compared the use of torture there to the abuses of Hitlerian Germany. 207 In response, the Manifeste des intellectuels français [Manifesto of the French intellectuals] was published and signed by over three hundred figures, predominantly the intellectuals of the recently revived extreme right. These three hundred professed themselves as the true French “intellectuals” and included all four Hussards, as well as the old guard of the French extreme right like Pierre Gaxotte, Massis, and Maulnier among others. The right-wing manifesto stated that the signers had gathered to protest the left’s attempt to “make it believed that the great part of our intellectual elites condemn the action of France in Algeria.” 208 They denied the left the right to “pose as representatives of French intelligence” if they were going to advocate desertion in the military and support the revolutionary efforts of “fanatics.” 209 Once again the behavior of signing petitions, writing for journals, and seeking social spaces to hold political discussion, indicated a common ground of intellectual practice between the two camps. And yet, once again, it was the divisions in spaces and in communities within these common behaviors that was emphasized and touted by both sides. The emphasis on physical and social separation became more important than the reality of shared behavior in perceptions of an abyss between the two camps. The perception was accentuated by the spaces in which intellectual behavior was truly distinctive on the left and right. The Liberation brought with it another complete reversal of the intellectual field as the right-wing collaborationists were expelled from the places of political and cultural power and replaced, once more, by their opponents on the resistant left. The shift in relationships to the regime, the university, and the publishing world brought a change in daily intellectual experience for both sides. Under the provisional government and the Fourth Republic, the liberals like Aron, and Gaullists including recently reformed communist André Malraux, enjoyed a compatible, if not always conflict-free, relationship with the regime. Malraux even became minister of information and later minister of culture under the new government. And, although the third-way and PCF intellectuals clashed with de Gaulle over several issues and attacked his positions as those of the right, in reality the com-

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munists enjoyed more freedom and influence under the postwar governments than they did in any previous decade. In particular, they benefited from de Gaulle’s disgust with the collaborationist extreme right. The inequity between the “pariahs” of the extreme right and the “tyrants” of the State that Laurent described as late as 1960 was, therefore, not a matter of perception; it was a fact justified by the extreme right’s association with wartime collaboration. In particular, the intellectual left’s exclusive relationship with the republican regime allowed them to deny the extreme right access to legitimizing cultural institutions and practices through State sanctioned exclusion. Maurras, Abel Hermant, and Bonnard not only lost their seats in the French Academy after the liberation, but also new nominees like Morand were continually denied a seat due to de Gaulle’s insistence that only resistors be accorded this honor. 210 Right-wing intellectuals were also excluded from intellectual honors like a State burial. “It is easy to see who the state honors and who it neglects,” Laurent wrote resentfully, “Claudel yes, Montherlant no, Mauriac yes, Cocteau no. Good writers are rewarded with commendation, decoration, and national honors. Bad writers are forbidden from publishing, from giving lectures and from holding public posts.” But, Laurent, emphasized, “how does the state decide good and bad? Nothing is more dangerous than personal politics mixing with the judgment of lettres by lettres.” 211 It was instances like these, Laurent insisted, that revealed that the exclusion of the extreme right and the dominance of the left was not simply a perceived inequity or posturing for effect, but rather an organized, institutionalized hegemony sanctioned, authorized, and even carried out by the Republic. The same antagonism between the extreme right and postwar power continued in the university system. The members of the extreme right were quickly ejected from the professorship and especially the chair positions that they had filled in the universities and in the ENS during the Occupation. An enquête conducted by L’Express in 1957 indicated that communism and left-wing ideology had effectively “pervaded classrooms and become the intellectual apprenticeship for a series of generations.” When asked which writer had most affected the youth of the day, the leading response was Sartre, followed by André Gide and Mauriac. 212 University instruction once again became a left-wing dominated intellectual practice leaving the intellectuals of the right to search out alternative trajectories and mentoring opportunities. Bardèche in particular blamed the loss of his profession on the dominance of the Resistance left. When he left his position at the Sorbonne, he claimed that he had been driven out by liberal professors who learned he was related to Brasillach. When later he lost his position at the University of Lille, he wrote that he felt alienated from the entire university system and the former friends there, and turned instead to the community of “pariahs” in the right-wing publishing world. The honors and awards that the intellectual community

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had always seen as a mark of legitimacy and prestige were also, according to the intellectuals on the extreme right, denied them for political reasons. In addition to the politically determined seats in the Academy, Laurent claimed that his novel had been passed over for a literary prize in favor of a piece by Camus that had not yet even been published, a consideration that was only made for political reasons. With each slight, the extreme right became increasingly bitter about intellectual honors and began to deem them marks of subservience to the regime. In reality, the repression faded over the years and Laurent happily accepted both the Goncourt prize in 1971 and entry into the Academy in 1986, following Massis who had been elected to the Academy in 1960 and by Maulnier in 1964. However, the perception retained more power, and the majority of the extreme right decided during the postwar decades to disconnect intellectual honors and literary recognition from its concept of intellectual identity. The claims of marginalization and rejection by the intellectual world that had been intentionally fabricated during the Occupation became a tangible and an inescapable reality for the extreme right during the postwar. They saw this as a “dispossession” of right-wing intellectual identity and a form of “intellectual terrorism” and “brainwashing” of the public not to be borne. Their resentment at being made “untouchables,” “pariahs,” and “heretics” within the intellectual world led to an angry return to the tropes of left-wing hegemony and of right-wing ostracism. To these was added the language of political “optics” where thinking outside the “obligatory vision of the past” was literally unthinkable. The concept of autocensure was revived in the 1960s by Alain de Benoist. The perception of ostracism from the intellectual world led those on the extreme right to more forcibly proclaim themselves and their peers to be intellectuals and to claim once more a legitimate role in the direction of French intelligence. Reappropriating the concept of the intellectual for the extreme right once again required an effort to clarify, legitimize, and differentiate their values from those of the mainstream left, including those of Realism, engagement, civilization, neo-fascism, and negationism. The alternative concept of the intellectual that men like Laurent and Bardèche created around these values was strengthened and validated for them by the community of like-minded intellectuals with which they surrounded themselves. From these communities of dispossessed, ostracized intellectuals of the extreme right came not only a new collective identity for the intellectual, but also a new set of practices and experiences drawn from the extreme right’s alienation from the State, university, and publishing world. After 1968, however, the isolated and alienated extreme right evolved once more under the leadership of GRECE and the Nouvelle Droite in an effort to reinsert itself into public affairs and intellectual leadership.

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NOTES 1. The Parti communiste français (PCF) drew many to its ranks in the initial postwar years, with attacks on American imperialism as a destructive force of true democracy. However, many on the left were wary of the PCF due to Maurice Thorez’s strict adherence to Stalinism and the dictates of the Communist International (Comintern). Those hesitant to support the PCF often turned instead to the Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (SFIO) (French Section of the Workers’ International) which garnered 25 percent of the vote in 1945 and provided a space for those intellectuals of the left who were opposed to the PCF, but equally disenchanted with the other popular party of the immediate postwar, the Christian democratic Mouvement républicain populaire (Popular Republican Movement), which attempted to reconcile the Catholic Church and the new Republic and garnered a high number of votes from previously right-wing supporters who found themselves without political representation after the war. After 1947, the Gaullist Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF) was added to the mix and leeched supporters from the Christian democratic Mouvement républicain populaire, particularly former conservatives of the political right. And yet, none of these parties or movements were supported by the disgruntled intellectuals of the extreme right who instead saw them as partners in the left’s cultural and political postwar hegemony. 2. Jean Paulhan, Lettre aux directeurs de la Résistance (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1987), 41, originally published in 1952. Unless otherwise noted all translations are mine. 3. David Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 52. 4. Ibid., 54. 5. In his 1955 book Aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gillimard) Maurice MerleauPonty publicly criticized Sartre’s perspective and his choice to support the PCF in 1952. 6. Michael Scott Christofferson, “French Intellectuals and the Repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956: The Politics of a Protest Reconsidered,” in After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France, ed. Julian Bourg (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 256. 7. Philip Watts, Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 8. Ibid., 20. 9. The “right to err” became an important discussion surrounding intellectual legitimacy and collaboration. Some intellectuals of the left argued that collaborationists should not be held responsible for the results of their ideas and programs since free thought necessitated the right to theorize, experiment, and make mistakes without being held responsible for the consequences of their words. This was the view of many on the prewar left, like Anatole France, and was continued by postwar intellectuals like Jean Paulhan. The majority of the intellectuals of the left, however, believed that the thought of the collaborationists had too many consequences to be provided the leniency normally accorded to intellectual theory. They saw their work as speech-acts and denied them the “right to err” with impunity. Diane Rubenstein, What's Left? The Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Right (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 77. 10. Michel Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), 427. 11. The events of the Cold War admittedly caused many communist-sympathizing intellectuals like Maurice Merleau-Ponty to become disenchanted with the Communist Party and the USSR, but the majority of the fellow travelers were solidified in their beliefs during the early years. 12. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 77, 173. 13. Christofferson, “French Intellectuals and the Repression,” 256.

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14. Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions française: Manifestes et pétitions au XX e siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 187. 15. Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France, 86. 16. Jean-François Sirinelli, “Les intellectuels au miroir du siècle,” Magazine littéraire (December 1987), 21. 17. Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France, 7. 18. Jean-Paul Gautier, Les extrêmes droites en France: De la traversée du désert à l’ascension du Front national, 1945–2008 (Paris: Syllepse, 2009), 13. 19. Ibid., 17. 20. Ibid., 20. 21. ; Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 425. 22. Gautier, Les extrêmes droites en France, 14. 23. Watts, Allegories of the Purge, 44. 24. Gautier, Les extrêmes droites en France, 19. 25. James Shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (New York: Routledge, 2007), 90. 26. James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 2. 27. Ibid., 4. 28. Jacques Soustelle, “Lettre d’un intellectuel a quelques autres a propos de l’Algerie,” Combat (November 26–27, 1955). 29. David L. Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 76. 30. By the 1950s, the front that was created by the Resistance and initial liberation aims slowly disintegrated into a complex array of diverse republican and extreme-left camps, further subdivided by internal dissidents, that each had different perspectives on intellectual responsibility. On its most extreme left, this complex spectrum extended to the committed PCF intellectuals of Lettres Françaises, Action, and Nouvelles Critiques from Louis Aragon to Claude Morgan. At its most right leaning, it included the republicanism of Raymond Aron, Paulhan, Malraux, François Mauriac, and the intellectuals of Figaro and Preuves. The ideas of these Gaullists were often marginalized by the more extreme left because of their opposition to social revolution. Sartre even later claimed that de Gaulle was the ally of the Organisation de l’armée secrète (hereafter cited OAS) despite multiple assassination attempts. 31. Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 31. 32. Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France, 4. 33. Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, 50. 34. Rather than asking for political affiliation and using this to classify responses, the enquête classed the responses to questions about values as either right-wing or leftwing based on a preconceived notion of how these two camps would reply. In other words, the picture that the enquête provided of the mentality of the left and its difference from the right was based on what the writers at Les Temps Modernes (hereafter cited LTM) already conceived the different mentalities to be (“A la recherche de la ‘gauche’: Un enquête de l’institut français d’opinion publique” [In search of the left: A survey of public opinion by the French Institute], Les Temps Modernes [Spring 1955]). 35. It continued, “The ideology of the left is a coherent ensemble that the communist left represents with the most vigor,” and the “Right manifests an identical coherence” in its own, diametrically opposed ideology (ibid.). 36. Rubenstein, What’s Left, 77. 37. Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, 33. 38. Watts, Allegories of the Purge, 67. 39. Albert Camus, Combat, October 25, 1944, quoted in ibid., 6. Camus later relented on this justification of the purge and grew disillusioned with its practice by 1945.

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40. Although Algeria was not legally categorized as a colony, the intellectuals of the left and right used the term “colonialism” to describe the debate carried out over its future relationship to France. 41. Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 6. 42. Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, 10. 43. Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (New York: Routledge, 2001), 47. 44. LTM and Esprit were both relatively active in opposing colonialism as early as 1945 and supported the PCF in making anticolonialism a major tenet of the World Peace Movement. 45. Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions française, 201–9. 46. Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, 9. 47. Ibid., 13. 48. Ibid., 38. 49. The “authentic intellectual,” Sartre concluded of the role of the left-wing intellectual, “wants to be a universal man . . . in solidarity with the oppressed” (Claude Lanzmann, “L’homme de gauche,” Les Temps Modernes 112 [May 1955]). 50. Simone Beauvoir, “La pensée de droite, aujourd’hui,” Les Temps Modernes 112 (May 1955). 51. Ibid., 1545–46. 52. André Malraux, quoted in Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, 31. 53. Ian R. Barnes, “I am a Fascist Writer: Maurice Bardèche—Ideologist and Defender of French Fascism,” European Legacy 7, no. 2 (2002): 195–209. 54. Tamir Bar-On, “Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite: The Dream of Pan-European Empire,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 16, no. 3 (2008): 329–45; and his “Transnationalism and the French Nouvelle Droite,” Patterns of Prejudice 45, no. 3 (2011): 199–223; and Andrea Mammone, “Revitalizing and De-territorializing Fascism in the 1950s: The Extreme Right in France and Italy, and the Pan-national (‘European’) Imaginary,” Patterns of Prejudice 45, no. 4 (September 2011): 295–318. 55. Ian R. Barnes, one of the few historians to study Maurice Bardèche explains, “Bardèche has a position of great importance in French right-wing intellectual thought because he was the only post-war French fascist of any intellectual distinction and provided continuity with 1930s literary fascism. . . . He revives the old ideas of fascism but transcends them by introducing fascist aestheticism and heroism into a new ideology for the post-war world” (“Antisemitic Europe and the ‘Third Way’: The Ideas of Maurice Bardèche,” Patterns of Prejudice 34, no. 2 [April 2000]: 57). 56. Maurice Bardèche later left the Sorbonne for a position as chair at the University at Lille claiming that he had been ejected from the Sorbonne in 1942 by its remaining liberal professors because they discovered he was related to the notorious Robert Brasillach. 57. Maurice Bardèche, Souvenirs (Paris: Éditions Buchet/Chastel, 1993), 137. 58. Maurice Bardèche, Souvenirs (Paris: Editions Buchet/Chastel, 1993), 261. 59. Barnes, “Antisemitic Europe,” 57. 60. Bernard Vorge, “Les intellectuels et l’epuration,” Défense de l’Occident (January–February 1957). The article was later published in Maurice Bardèche, L’Épuration (Paris: Éditions Confrerie Castille, 1997), 119. 61. Bardèche, Souvenirs, 198. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 217. 64. Ibid., 253. 65. Maurice Bardèche, Nuremberg: Ou, La terre promise (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1948), 54. 66. Bardèche, Souvenirs, 200. 67. Maurice Bardèche, Lettre à Francois Mauriac (Paris: La Pensée Libre, 1947), 15. 68. Ibid. 69. Bardèche, Nuremberg: Ou, La terre promise, 53.

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70. Ibid., 54. 71. Bardèche, Lettre à Francois Mauriac, 19. 72. Ibid., 21. 73. Maurice Bardèche, Sparte et les sudistes (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1968), 43. 74. Ibid., 12. 75. Ibid., 34. 76. Maurice Bardèche, L’oeuf de Christophe Colomb: Lettre à un sénateur d’Amérique (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1951), 119. 77. Francis d’Orcival, “Nos intellectuels sont-ils des imbeciles?” Défense de l’Occident, (June 1963): 12–19. 78. Bardèche, Lettre à Francois Mauriac, 55; emphasis in the original. 79. Maurice Bardèche, quoted in Alice Yeager Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 178–79. 80. Maurice Bardèche, Nuremberg II; ou, les faux monnayeurs (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1950), 10. 81. Maurice Bardèche, Les temps modernes (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1956), 26. 82. Ibid. 83. In general, Bardèche and the intellectual right proclaimed themselves and their purged peers the legitimate representatives of France because they had supported, rather than resisted, what was internationally recognized as the legitimate French government during the Occupation. Bardèche fumed that it was the collaborators, those who had worked with the accepted Vichy regime who were being ostracized and the rebels who had sought to undermine this authorized government that dictated morality. “I was guilty only of not having been a dissident, a rebel, a combatant in the shadow,” he wrote, “and for this alone I was proscribed in my own nation” (Souvenirs, 208). The political “heresy” of collaboration was based, he wrote to François Mauraic, on the strong foundation of governmental legitimacy (Lettre à Francois Mauriac, 21). 84. d’Orcival, “Nos intellectuels,” 12; emphasis in the original. 85. Maurice Bardèche, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1961), 10. 86. Ibid., 12. 87. Bardèche referred to in Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, 178–79. 88. Maurice Bardèche, “Autocritique,” Défense de l’Occident (July 1959): 7. 89. Pol Vandromme, Bivouacs d’un hussard: Souvenirs (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2002), 164. 90. Bruno Curatolo, “La Parisienne, une revue littéraire à la Hussarde,” in Les Hussards: Un génération littéraire, ed. Marc Dambre (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2000), 33. 91. Bertrand de Saint Vincent, Jacques Laurent: Biographie (Paris: Julliard, 1995), 256–58. 92. Nicholas Hewitt, Literature and the Right in Post-War France: The Story of the Hussards (Oxford and Washington, DC: Berg, 1996), 185. 93. Nicholas Hewitt, “Hussards et jeunes hommes en colere” in Les Hussards: Une generation littéraire, ed. Marc Dambre(Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2000), 67. 94. Eugène Deloncle was the leader of the Cagoulards, a right-wing paramilitary group organized to overthrow the Third Republic in the mid-1930s. 95. Jacques Laurent, Histoire égoïste (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1976), 111. 96. Nicholas Kessler, Histoire politique de la Jeune Droite (1929–1942): Une révolution conservatrice à la française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 29. 97. Laurent, Histoire égoïste, 127. 98. Ibid., 135. 99. Ibid., 208. 100. Ibid., 260. 101. Although Laurent argued during these years against intellectual engagement and politicized literature, he clarified that it was the communist, the Gaullist, and the existentialist approaches to political engagement that he opposed, not that of the right.

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102. Because Laurent perceived Charles de Gaulle and the Republican intellectuals like François Mauriac to be part of the oppressive left-wing “bloc” and categorized them as “of the left,” this chapter will do so as well, despite the more common historical opinion that Gaullism was a product of the moderate right. 103. Saint Vincent, Jacques Laurent, 283. 104. Jean-François Bory, Jacques Laurent (Paris: Éditions Artefact, 1987), 168. 105. Laurent, Histoire égoïste, 286; and his Mauriac sous de Gaulle (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1964); Les choses que j’ai vues au Vietnam m’ont fait doubter de l’intelligence occidentale (Paris: La Table ronde, 1968). 106. Laurent wrote of his own efforts in this role, “French thought was dominated completely by Marxisto-sartrianism, which was not attackable. I had been the first to attack it with Paul et Jean-Paul. . . . All the sudden one was able to contest Sartrianism, all the sudden, one ceased to submit to it” (Jacques Laurent and Christophe Mercier, Conversation avec Jacques Laurent [Paris: Julliard, 1995], 99). 107. Ibid., 101. 108. Christian Millau, Au galop des Hussards: Dans le tourbillon littéraire des années 50 (Paris: Fallois, 1999), 34. 109. Laurent, quoted in Saint Vincent, Jacques Laurent, 285. 110. Laurent and Mercier, Conversation avec Jacques Laurent, 114. 111. Saint Vincent, Jacques Laurent, 283. 112. Ibid., 309. 113. Laurent, Mauriac sous de Gaulle, 177. 114. Ibid., 180. 115. Laurent and Mercier, Conversation avec Jacques Laurent, 140. 116. Laurent, quoted in Saint Vincent, Jacques Laurent, 285. 117. Ibid., 318. 118. Jacques Laurent [pseud. Calepin], Combat, March 22, 1961. 119. Laurent and Mercier, Conversation avec Jacques Laurent, 114. 120. Laurent, Histoire Égoïste, 271. 121. Laurent, Les choses que j’ai vues au Vietnam, 10. 122. Jacques Laurent, Au contraire (Paris: La Table ronde, 1967), 300. 123. Michel P. Schmitt, “École des Hussards? Les Hussards à l’école,” in Les Hussards: Un génération littéraire, ed. Marc Dambre (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2000). 124. Laurent, Histoire égoïste, 107. 125. Ibid. 126. Millau, Au galop des Hussards, 41. 127. Pierre Boutang, “Bilan et avenir,” La Parisienne (October 1956). 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid. 131. From an unnamed author “À la recherche des intellectuels de droite,” L’Expres, December 25, 1954. Quoted in Saint Vincent, Jacques Laurent, 237. 132. Jacques Laurent, “Le problème de l’insoumission et de l’objection de conscience et les reactions au manifeste des ‘121,” Combat, October 6, 1960. 133. Jacques Laurent, “La bataille des intellectuels; contre-manifeste aux ‘121,” Combat, October 7, 1960. 134. Laurent, “Le problème de l’insoumission.” 135. Jacques Laurent, Les années cinquante (Paris: La Manufacture, 1989), 9. 136. Beauvoir, “La pensée de droite.” 137. Bardèche, Sparte et les sudistes, 136. 138. Ibid. 139. Of course, fascism, for Bardèche, was not one of these ideologies because it was not universal or abstract in nature but rather a distinctive national expression, born out of the national need, in each of its manifestations. 140. Bardèche, Sparte et les sudistes, 76.

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141. Bardèche, L’oeuf de Christophe Colomb, 106. 142. Ibid., 87. 143. Ibid., 175. 144. Bardèche, Les temps modernes, 61–69. 145. Laurent and Mercier, Conversation avec Jacques Laurent, 135. 146. Jacques Laurent and Gabriel Jeantet, Année 40: Londres, de Gaulle, Vichy (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1965), 230, 374. 147. Saint Vincent, Jacques Laurent, 320. 148. Laurent, Au contraire, 276. 149. Ibid. 150. Laurent, Mauriac sous de Gaulle, 6. 151. Ibid. While François Mauriac showed Charles de Gaulle as a principled David against Goliath during the Occupation, Jacques Laurent assured readers that his decision to resist was self-interested. When Mauriac waxed poetic about de Gaulle’s ability to steer the events of the war, Laurent insisted that de Gaulle was merely “annoying” to the world leaders and more interested in defeating his rivals in France than in defeating the Axis powers. And, though Mauriac portrayed de Gaulle as the providential man who always appeared when France was in crisis, Laurent suggested that perhaps he allowed the disasters to occur “in order to exploit them”(ibid., 70). 152. Laurent, Au contraire, 7. 153. Ibid., 300. 154. Ibid., 49. 155. Ibid., 300. 156. Laurent, Histoire égoïste, 280. 157. Laurent, Au contraire, 300. 158. Laurent, Histoire égoïste, 288. 159. Ibid., 292. 160. Ibid., 288. 161. Cecil Saint-Laurent [pseud. Jacques Laurent], Les Passagers pour Alger (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1960), 2:622. 162. Ibid., 618. 163. Saint Vincent, Jacques Laurent, 269. In fact, he argued, although “great reforms were necessary and urgent” in order for the colonies to reach the desired levels of civilization, this did not necessitate an immediate independence. In fact the reforms had to be undertaken by the French. It was their responsibility to undo the errors they had set into motion in the colonies and so it was their “duty to stay in Algeria and accomplish these reforms.” 164. This new fascism would retain, the article assured the readers, at minimum, the essential elements “common to all fascist regimes: an attempt to unite traditional values and true social progress” (Bernard Vorge, “Où devrait aller la droite; réponse à Paul Sérant,” Défense de l’Occident 44 [May–June 1958]: 34). 165. Bardèche, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme?, 87. 166. Ibid., 11. 167. Although Bardèche would point to the Italian Salo Republic of 1944 as one viable model for neo-fascism (ibid., 21). 168. Ibid., 37. 169. Ibid., 43-54. 170. Ibid., 183. 171. Bardèche, Nuremberg; ou, la terre promise, 181. 172. Bardèche, Nuremberg II; ou, les faux monnayeurs, 229. 173. Ibid., 270. 174. Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions française, 144. 175. Ibid., 145. 176. Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France: De l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: A Colin, 1986), 159.

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177. Two of the opposition parties, the Union pour le renouveau (Union for Renewal) and the Centre national des indépendants et paysans (National Center of Independents and Peasants) were able to get deputies elected but held little sway over intellectual attitudes on the Right. 178. Barnes, “Antisemitic Europe,” 59. 179. Bar-On, “Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite”; and his “Transnationalism and the French Nouvelle Droite”; and Mammone, “Revitalizing and De-territorializing Fascism.” 180. Bardèche, Souvenirs, 240. The organization of Euro-Right in 1978 would also provide some unifying tenets for a new extreme right, which was to be separate from the traditional right-wing values of social conservatism. The French contribution to this international effort, the Parti des forces nouvelles (PFN), was led by a Défense de l’Occident contributor Pascal Gauchon and received the active support of Bardèche. 181. Barnes, “Antisemitic Europe,” 70–72. 182. Bardèche, Souvenirs, 203. 183. Ibid., 205. 184. Ibid., 251. 185. Ibid., 253. 186. Bory, Jacques Laurent, 157. 187. Marc Dambre, ed., Les Hussards: Un génération littéraire (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2000), 8. 188. Jean Maire Rouart speaking of the Hussards says, “It was not necessarily a school, but it was a community” (Schmitt, “École des Hussards?” 105). 189. Millau, Au galop des Hussards, 16. 190. Ibid., 23. 191. Bardèche, Souvenirs, 262. 192. Bardèche, “Autocritique.” 193. Laurent, “Chronique,” La Table Ronde (January 1948). 194. Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France, 87. 195. Hewitt, Literature and the Right, 46. 196. Bory, Jacques Laurent, 157. 197. Laurent, Au Contraire. 198. Bory, Jacques Laurent, 159. 199. Laurent, Histoire égoïste, 260. The Decameron would also become a veritable “annex of the La Table Ronde” where one could find Laurent and Roland Laudenbach, director of the La Table Ronde publishing house, smoking and drinking together at the end of the day. 200. Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France, 80. 201. Sartre, “Présentation,” Les Temps Modernes (October 1, 1945): 1. 202. Laurent and Mercier, Conversation avec Jacques Laurent, 108. 203. Saint Vincent, Jacques Laurent, 283. 204. Herbert R. Lottman, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (San Francisco: Halo Books, 1991). 205. Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions française, 246. 206. The use of petitions and manifestos to create a powerful bloc of intellectuals and to amplify their engagement in a collective voice continued after Algerian independence, particularly on the left, as intellectuals sought to protest collectively against the war in Vietnam. These petitions, all of which saw repeated the same names of the intellectual left, included an accusation of genocide in Vietnam in 1966, a call for a “day of intellectuals for Vietnam” in 1968, a mass protest against the bombing campaigns in 1972, and a letter to the university professors of America signed by over 650 French intellectuals later in the same year (ibid., 250). 207. Ibid., 213. 208. Ibid., 215. 209. Ibid.

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210. Saint Vincent, Jacques Laurent, 249. After several nominations, Morand eventually secured his place in the Academy in 1968. Laurent did not join him there until 1987. 211. Jacques Laurent, L’esprit des lettres: La Table Ronde, La Parisienne (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1999), 335; emphasis mine, originally published by Jacques Laurent, “Voici la Gloire,” La Parisienne (October 1954). 212. Ory and Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France, 147–52.

SIX Resentment and the New Right Intellectual Identity Reimagined, 1968–2000

It remains to consider in closing whether the patterns of behavior of selfsegregation and opposition, linguistic tropes of hegemony and the repressed minority, and efforts to legitimize, differentiate, and revalue right-wing intellectual engagement reflect the experience of intellectuals labeled extreme right in the modern day. Alain de Benoist has been the recognized master theoretician of the Nouvelle Droite (ND) (New Right) and its self-proclaimed laboratory of ideas, Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européene (GRECE) (Group for the Research and Study of European Civilization), since the latter’s creation in 1968. In particular, Benoist sought to use GRECE and various ND journals to create a “Gramscism of the Right” by which the intellectual extreme right could counter the metapolitical hegemony of the intellectual left. As the public face of the New Right metapolitics, Benoist was the key figure in the promotion and legitimization of the intellectual extreme right. But it was his ability to merge the ideas, thinkers, and journalism of the New Right into the mainstream media that most antagonized the left against him and made the ND the crucible for debates over intellectual identity and the nature of the far right in the modern day. Benoist was the son of a Gaullist who leaned, in his student years, toward both the anti-Semitic journals of Henry Coston and the politics of the Action française (AF), then toward the more radical Fédération des étudiants nationalistes [Federation of Nationalist Students], an offshoot of the neo-fascist Jeune Nation. 1 He supported French Algeria in the late 1950s, wrote for the neo-fascist Défense de l’Occident of Maurice Bardèche, and also contributed to and eventually edited Europe-Action. His work appeared in these outlets not only under his own name but also under 281

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the pseudonyms of Fabrice Laroche and Robert de Herte, as well. However, Benoist’s approach to political and cultural affairs quickly evolved beyond the standard positions of what he deemed the old right into a new right-wing ideology. While he continued to advocate for rootedness and traditionalism, and engaged against communism and republican democracy, Benoist outlined a new intellectual program for the ND that he proclaimed was separate from the monarchism, anti-Semitism, and fascism that were previously associated with the far right. The vehicle for the new program was the intellectual community GRECE, created in 1968 by Benoist and thirty-nine other right-wing thinkers. Pierre-André Taguieff has presented Benoist as the key figure behind the work of GRECE and the master theoretician for the larger movement of the ND. The ND, GRECE, and Benoist are therefore particularly useful for considering some of this study’s central questions. How truly were the left and right divided? To what extent was this division ameliorated for intellectuals by common cultural attitudes? Can we speak of the extreme right intellectuals in the collective despite their internal factions? And, most importantly, how do the themes of resentment and hegemony, and the construction of right-wing intellectual identity provide new insight into the debates about the nature of the ND? Neither the ND nor the thought of Benoist have been static over the decades since 1968. Both have consistently transformed in response to changing political and social contexts. Both Benoist and the ND have also, particularly in latter decades, placed an ever-greater emphasis on defying traditional left, right, and center designation. Benoist himself has often argued that his ideology and engagement as an intellectual crosses the lines of the left and right by emphasizing shared cultural values that supercede old political lines of demarcation. In one interview from 1987, he claimed that all the serious problems of the modern day create lines of rupture that cross the traditional designations of the left and right. 2 True cleavages were no longer along left-right lines, Benoist clarified in a later 2014 interview with Arthur Versluis, but along new fault lines that united voices on the left and right in favor of direct democracy, “integral federalism,” and dissent against American imperialism, global capitalism, and the Western concept of human rights. 3 Benoist even challenges arguments by historians of the extreme right, like Tamir Bar-On, who claims that Benoist is of the right because he rejects the republican tenets of the French Revolution. “I reject the influence of the Enlightenment, the xenophobic imperialism of 1793, the Terror, and the Vendéen genocide,” he agrees. “However, I certainly do not reject the influence of Rousseau, the ideal of the culture of Antiquity and the Festival of Federation (14 July 1790). To describe me as an adversary of the French Revolution is an outright lie.” 4 “Today,” Benoist concluded in a 2005 interview with Bryan Sylvian, “to know that someone is ‘on the left’” or “‘on the right’ doesn’t tell us much about how he or she really thinks on today’s con-

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crete problems. The left-right cleavage is consequently losing its operative value in defining an increasingly complex political scene.” 5 What are we to make of an intellectual movement that, while called the Nouvelle Droite, recognized as the modern intellectual extreme right by most scholars, and rejected by the French far left, consistently rejects categorization by left-right divides? Some, like Taguieff, have accepted this self-identification by Benoist at face value and have argued that while he is today recognized as the master thinker of a New Right movement, his ideas critique the traditional, conservative, and neo-fascist right and tend to cross the left-right divide. 6 This is why, some argue, he has found sympathetic colleagues on the anti-capitalist, anti-globalizing left, like Costanzo Preve, who can share his language of opposition to Americanism, liberalism, and globalization of markets despite their political affiliation. 7 Versluis tends to agree, seeing the ambiguity surrounding the ND to be one example of a general trend where “terms like ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ no longer seem to have any clear, widely accepted reference points or definitions.” 8 But Versluis also looks to emerging scholarship that studies the relationship between conservatism and the ND, finding promise in the idea of identifying the ND as a “radical conservative” movement. Massimiliano Capra Casadio has also noted that this ambiguity is being clarified today by those who study the formation of the ND. While acknowledging the evolutions and distinctiveness of the ND, Casadio writes, “One must also seek to offer a definition of the New Right that delineates their identity and traces their constants or concepts.” 9 Many scholars oppose Benoist’s and Taguieff’s picture of the ND, claiming instead that when its “constants and concepts” are traced to their roots, the ND is revealed to be a product of the extreme right. Roger Griffin has said that the ND is difficult to place within the political space because of Benoist’s past self-identification as neither left nor right, the language of the ND that utilizes left-wing vocabulary, and the fact that it does not partake of the traditions of the extreme right. Because of this, Griffin says, several historians have eagerly seen the ND as “the end of the traditional contraposition of left and right.” However, he concludes, “Its posturing as an ultra-modern movement beyond left and right” cannot “camouflage its origins in the extreme-right and its continuing fidelity to its origins.” 10 Bar-On agrees, calling the ND “revolutionary rightwing intellectuals with a metapolitical vocation” due to their rejection of equality and their promotion of wholesale anti-liberal political change, including the “end of Europe’s . . . liberal left policies.” 11 He concludes that Benoist’s support for inequality, even if it is voiced in the language of diversity and multiculturalism, is a distinguishing characteristic of the extreme right with which the left’s understanding of diversity and multiculturalism has no common ground. 12 Jim Wolfreys and Pierre Milza have agreed that the ND and Benoist are “firmly anchored on the right”

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and see the ND, against the claims of Benoist himself, to be the latest in a long line of revolutionary right movements that reject modernity in favor of traditionalism and ideals of order. 13 Griffin has also introduced a more damning line of argumentation: that the ND must be seen as an extreme right movement not only because of its origins, but also because it is inherently fascist. Griffin claims that the ND fits his definition of fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism, and fascism, according to him, is a product of extreme right ideology. Any effort to utilize the language of the left or to claim a third way between the right and left is therefore posturing, or an attempt to garner moderate voters by the New Right, not its real ideology. 14 For several historians, therefore, the questions about the nature of the extreme right and the identity of the ND are also determined by yet another question: Can we find fascism in France and does it continue to exist in France as a form of neo-fascism since 1945? In approaching this larger question, Bar-On asks, “Where have all the fascists gone? And answers that “former neo-fascist and ultra-nationalist intellectuals known as the nouvelle droite (ND) or European New Right (ENR) have contributed to the demise of conspicuous fascism” but says that on the question of “whether these thinkers have buried the fascist or protofascist longings of the past,” he has “serious reservations.” 15 Joan AntónMellón lends support to this side of the debate arguing that while the ND may claim to have created a new theoretical and political paradigm that is beyond the categories of the left and right, this claim is an intentional deception since the ND belongs, without hesitation, on the extreme right. Any language of “ni droite, ni gauche” (neither right, nor left) is simply a ploy to gain legitimacy in a mainstream public that has grown wary of the language and ideology of the extreme right. 16 The ND, according to Antón-Mellón, fits the theoretical model of the European extreme right because it defends ultra ethno-nationalist ideas, prioritizes collective identity, rejects equality, and glorifies combat. It also, he says, qualifies as “the most sophisticated modern version of fascist ideas.” 17 According to scholars, while Benoist, GRECE, and the ND might combine elements of the old right with the New Left and claim to bridge the gap between the two poles, in reality this is a deceptive claim since they are categorically of the extreme right and possibly even the neo-fascist right. As in previous chapters, this chapter takes something of a middle ground in the ongoing debates about the ND. Rather than seeing the ND as cryptofascist or its language as an effort to hide old right-wing beliefs under the cover of New Left terminology, it accepts as sincere Benoist’s belief that the ND is crossing boundaries and merging eclectic intellectual influences. Yet, it also acknowledges the convincing work done by scholars on the intellectual origins of the ND, the roots of its organization in the far right networks of the 1960s, and its use of the label right in the decades to follow. Of more interest here is whether, despite the ND’s

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transition away from that label, the language of perceived left hegemony and the desire to overturn it in favor of a new culture remains. If so, this continued resentment of ostracism from the left-dominated mainstream and the compulsion to introduce an alternative structure may provide another insight into what remains of the old right within the identity and mission of the new. As in the past, even if there are clear differences to be found between the left and the right, it does not imply a corresponding uniformity within each camp. Stéphane François and Bar-On have explained simply, “As there are many lefts, so there are also numerous rights. One of those rights is the ND.” 18 Piero Ignazi nuances this a bit to say that Benoist and the ND are not connected to the political parties of the modern-day extreme right and cannot be reduced to replicating the old extreme right ideologies. Instead, he says they represent an “independent component in the panorama of the contemporary right.” 19 James Shields has suggested that after the brief period of the Algerian conflict during which the extreme right was able to build a front in favor of French Algeria, they were “reduced again to factionalism which indicates the irremediable divisions” that existed on the right wing. 20 Even within the Front national de lutte pour l’indépendence de la France (hereafter FN), touted for uniting all the disparate factions of the political extreme right in a way not achieved since the AF, conflicts in 1999 between Le Pen and Bruno Mégret over attracting mainstream support were well publicized. 21 The factions and rifts within the intellectual milieu were less often in the news, but are no less significant for understanding the internal complexity of the extreme right. The internal division of the intellectual extreme right was perhaps clearest in 1979 when members of GRECE defected to create the rival political think tank of the Club de l’Horloge. GRECE favored a metapolitical approach to slowly changing hearts and minds, while the Club envisioned immediate infiltration of political parties and active influence on politicians. Nor was the divide simply over approach; the Club favored capitalism and neoliberalism, as well as socially conservative ideals that were aligned with the American New Right and Reagan’s political vision, while GRECE remained anticapitalist, antiliberal, and particularly anti-American. 22 From this point on, “their ideological divergences and common aim to ideologically rearm the right in France made them rivals for the monopoly of the doctrinal restructuring of the right.” 23 Jean-Yves Camus has noted that Benoist’s interest in paganism as an alternative to Christianity has also not appealed to many within the New Right who retain their traditional Catholic-inspired nationalism. Others, he says, are divided over whether to continue their traditional anti-Semitic views and find new allies within the Muslim community or to reverse their earlier anti-Semitism and find Jewish allies against the new migration of Muslim refugees. 24 Even more are hesitant about the ND’s Europeanism and the defense of the West that opposes them to the

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ultranationalist FN. 25 The ND has opposed the political juggernaut of the FN on several points including paganism, pan-Europeanism, attitudes toward Muslims in France, and capitalism and consumer culture. These differences have allowed Benoist to claim that he has nothing in common with the representatives of the FN despite the heavy influence that ND thought has had on far-right political discourse throughout Europe and within the FN in particular. 26 However, across all of the internal contradictions, individual defections, factional disagreements, and tensions within the ND runs the common thread of opposition to the hegemony of an intellectually dominant left that unites the ND and many of its diverse colleagues on the far right in a common mission. While Benoist has often confounded his opponents on the left with claims that he is pursuing a “third way,” which is neither left nor right, his engagement follows the pattern of resentment, the linguistic tropes of hegemony, the differentiation or reappropriation of values, and the creation of sociocultural alternatives that have been hallmarks of the intellectual extreme right. The resentment of left-wing hegemony and the desire to be recognized as intellectuals provided unity for the groupuscules of the extreme right despite its internal complexity. It also, particularly in the early decades of its existence, divided the New Right emphatically from the left, despite their language of “ni droite, ni gauche.” From the late 1960s through the 1980s, Benoist himself acknowledged this categorization on the extreme right and its division from the left saying, “The ND declares itself on the Right because it rejects the ‘ideas’ of the left, it is on the Right by the very fact that it designates the intellectual left as its principal adversary.” In perhaps his most concise statement of his identification with the intellectual right, Benoist concluded, when asked why he called himself “of the Right,” “essentially because the left has a conception of the world that I do not share, of which I refuse the essential postulates.” 27 Even when the ND spokespersons claimed common ground with the New Left, the very project of combining the concepts of the New Left with those of the New Right into a third way was described by GRECE and Benoist as a project for the intellectual far right. 28 Benoist and the members of GRECE not only identified as right-wing, they also identified themselves as “intellectuals.” In an unmistakable claim to the title and role, Benoist has stated simply in interviews, “I am an intellectual.” 29 When replying to an “attack” on him in Le Monde, Benoist wrote, “I know that I am the only intellectual today who is treated in this way.” 30 In the same way, GRECE is presented as a cultural and intellectual community and defined as a “laboratory of ideas” and a “society of thought.” 31 In claiming equal right to the role of the public intellectual, while continuing to identify with right-wing values and programs, Benoist and the members of GRECE are continuing a century-long

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struggle by the extreme right, for recognition and legitimacy within an intellectual world they believe to be dominated by the left. It is in his resentment of the perceived dominance of the left that Benoist most clearly embodies the model of behavior found on the extreme right over the twentieth century. When the New Right emerged in 1968, Benoist reminisced in a 2003 interview with Frank Adler, “no one claimed openly to be part of the Right” since there was “a left hegemony, quite evident within university circles and, generally speaking among intellectuals.” 32 Today in the twenty-first century, Benoist continued, this blatant hegemony of the left has been replaced by a “quiet hegemony of former leftist intellectuals now more or less tied to the dominant political system . . . who extended their influence beyond universities to journals, publishing houses, and the media in general.” 33 “For at least thirty years in France,” he wrote in 1978, “that which one calls by convention the left and the extreme left have never attained political power. By contrast, they have enjoyed a quasi-monopoly in the cultural domain. This is not contested by anybody.” 34 The hegemony of the left over the cultural domain, he believes, has allowed it to exclude any competing influences and to eliminate alternatives in intellectual values, political programs, and even moral judgment. “This intelligentsia has had the actual direction of the general ideas and implicit values, and above all of the social myths of which the spirit of the time was nourished,” Benoist complained, “it incarnated culture, knowledge, and the moral conscience.” 35 In short, Benoist wrote in his 1977 Vu de droite, the intellectual left has succeeded in making of its members the organic intellectuals envisioned by Antonio Gramsci. The metapolitical dominance of these intellectuals in the cultural field allowed them to steer leftward, unperceived by the public, the very fundamental values and belief structures of France. 36 This, Benoist explained, was the subversive purpose of the left’s cultural monopoly. The political progress of the left was owed to “the general climate it had foreseen to create metapolitically and by relation to which its political discourse sounds more and more true.” 37 If a student did not have very strong reasons to reject the dominant ideological undertow, Benoist continued, it would be nearly impossible for him not to be “mentally affiliated” with the liberal and Marxist egalitarianisms. This was because, he warned, the ideology of the left “no longer forms a doctrine among others, it forms the very framework on which all constituted thought is inscribed.” 38 So ingrained was this mentality, it required an act of conscious will on the part of the intellectual to even think outside the prescribed thought of the left. “One speaks of repression,” Benoist continues, “but it is not a gross political censure. Rather it is in the psychoanalytical sense, the perfect murder. The idea that one rejects spontaneously, which is unthought because it is effectively unthinkable by relation to the dominant ideology of the left, the idea that one rejects without even having the sense of rejecting it.” 39 This was the new totalitarianism of

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thought for Benoist: an autocensure so ingrained and automatic that it was not even recognized. And, he argued, for those who, like himself and the intellectuals of GRECE, had broken out of the mental molds created by the left and recognized the hegemony, the struggle was not yet over. The metapolitical hegemony of the left depended not only on saturation of the intellectual superstructure but also on its ability to prevent any oppositional thought from reaching the public. But this was not the crude repression of before that made martyrs of the suppressed extreme right. Today, Benoist wrote, the objective of the left is to eliminate the intellectual extreme right by denying its existence. In a strategy reminiscent of Jean Jaurès’ assertion that the intellectual of the right had no right to the title of intellectual, the goal of the left, Benoist explained, is “above all not to give ‘them’ any publicity, to do things in a way that one does not know that ‘they’ exist. To travesty cultural discourse as political ambitions, to maintain at any price the image of a group of thinkers who have no thought, who are not able to have it, who ought not have it . . . exclusions, anathema, the final aim is to prevent debate.” 40 This is nowhere more apparent than in the “Appeal for Vigilance” in Le Monde in July 1993 where self-identified intellectuals of the left warned readers not to be seduced by GRECE. Although they seemed to have respect for left-wing positions and to reject many tenets of the old right, it warned, GRECE and Benoist were simply employing a “strategy of legitimization” to cover their extreme right-wing nature. 41 Any attempt to engage in a dialogue with members of GRECE, it continued, would be viewed as a betrayal of French intellectual and cultural standards. As such, the signers of the “Appeal for Vigilance” agreed not to participate in any public dialogue, television programs, or journals connected with GRECE, Benoist, and the far right. Even liberal intellectuals like Taguieff who sought to understand and debate Benoist were tarred as traitors to intellectual life. 42 Benoist’s protests against participation in the wars in Iraq, a position shared by the intellectual left, were viewed as intellectually suspect and were attacked for promoting the correct position, that of the left, for the wrong reasons, those of the extreme right. By refusing to debate the intellectuals of the right as peers or equals, Benoist complained, or even consider their ideas as viable opponents to their own, the left-wing intellectual bloc was attempting to deny it publicity and legitimacy. “Today,” he concluded in 1994, “one decrees that there are ideas that have no value as ideas, opinions that are not opinions but crimes—in the eyes of the dominant ideology. As always, it admits all opinions . . . except those that are not opinions.” 43 This complaint might be seen as posturing for public sympathy since, as Bar-On has written, “the ENR has tended to cultivate . . . a stance of intellectual victimization (a ‘New Inquisition’ is the common ENR cry) vis-à-vis the ‘hegemonic’ European liberal-left cultural establishment” in order to counter percep-

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tions of a revival of “quasi-fascist ideals.” 44 However, there was an element of truth to the accusation. When Telos published articles by Benoist, many of its editors gave statements of protest indicating that they did not find Benoist’s work honest or worthy of inclusion in a journal of ideas. 45 Even Bar-On admits that “there has been a constant attempt to publicly marginalize the ENR intellectuals, throughout continental Europe and especially in France.” 46 To deny the status of thought or intellectual identity to the intellectuals of the extreme right, and to suggest their ideas were not worthy of being considered ideas, Benoist has argued, is the ultimate form of “intellectual terrorism.” 47 This intellectual terrorism that was the new censorship took many forms, depending on the power of the idea that was refuted. The first form, Benoist wrote, was the strategy of silence “where it pretends that intelligence is hémiplégique [hemiplegic].” 48 Any representative of the extreme right, Benoist wrote, already had a “hard life” and must “crawl” in order to have his work published since the publishing houses and journals are “normally all on the left.” 49 But if the representative managed to get published, the strategy was “not to write a single line on his work.” If the work became popular despite the campaign of silence, the “next level of attack is to attribute certain lines out of context” or to lie about the contents. 50 The “new police of intellectual moeurs, the culture cops” on staff at left-wing papers like Nouvel Observateur effectively stifle rightwing ideas by misrepresenting them. 51 All works by right-wing authors that question or oppose certain tenets of the left are, in this stage, accused of intellectual parochialism. “If one does not support such or such work of the avant garde,” Benoist explains, “it is because one does not understand it . . . there are those who understand and then there are the others. The first are intelligent and culturally developed and the second are only able to be half-wits.” 52 If all else fails, Benoist claimed, the intellectual left turned to “the major excommunication: the accusation of fascism.” 53 This trump allowed the intellectual left to “demonize the ideas of the New Right. These ideas are rejected from the start as emanating from a subject, individual (Benoist) or collective (GRECE) which already has been submitted to a reductio ad hitlerum by insinuation.” 54 In one of the more blatant attempts at this form of censure, Benoist complained, Le Canard Enchaîné even invented a letter that was intended to connect him to the infamous doctor at Auschwitz, Joseph Mengele. 55 One final strategy of delegitimization particularly effective with GRECE members who claim to follow a third way is the argument that the intellectual New Right’s efforts to cross political divides and to utilize concepts like “difference” in its cultural discourse are facades. The accusation, Benoist wrote in frustration, is that any seemingly legitimate discourse actually has “clandestine meaning” for right-wing readers who know how to decode it. 56 Likewise, any effort by GRECE to debate intellectuals of the left or to include left-wing contributors in its journals was

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simply a way to trick the public into seeing its journals, and therefore its right-wing contributors, as intellectually legitimate. Historian of the ND, Duranton-Crabol, seems to validate this compliant as well by asking how it was that the ideas of the ND ever gained an audience and surmising that perhaps they were so well cloaked in left-wing discourse that the critical left did not at first recognize them. 57 The clear insinuation, according to the resentful GRECE members, was that the New Right could only find intellectual legitimacy by masquerading in the ideas of the left and associating with the intellectual left community. This array of strategies has led to a palpable, violent resentment of the left’s perceived hegemony by those on the New Right. The perceived marginalization from debate was believed to form a veritable wall between the intellectuals of the ND and the public, ensuring the left’s ideological dominance by keeping the ND “intellectuals forever excluded from the legitimate space of debate.” 58 In an interview in 2008, Benoist reflected back without regret on the earlier accusations of a left-wing hegemony and calls for a rightwing Gramscism saying, “More than twenty years ago, when I happened to talk about ‘right-wing Gramscism’ . . . for me it was only one of many ways to show that a political action has little possibility of success when the ‘spirit of the time’ is hostile to it.” 59 It seems clear, therefore, that resentment of a left-dominated culture and the tropes of hegemony and ostracism, two defining characteristics of right-wing intellectual engagement from the Dreyfus Affair to the postwar, continue to be a powerful influence on the nature of the intellectuals of the ND and of Benoist in particular. As it has in the past, resentment of their exclusion and marginalization has led the ND to reimagine their own engagement as a struggle for public legitimacy and a redefinition of intellectual mores according to right-wing values. This particular approach to the practice of engagement has consistently distinguished the intellectual extreme right from the left during periods of public debate. Their struggle to “reconstitute” and reappropriate the ideas, discourse, and concepts surrounding intellectual life is one that, as Benoist explained in a 2003 interview, “has not yet been achieved” thirty years later. It remains, alongside revealing the left-wing hegemony, a central objective for Benoist and GRECE, and “gives life” to their social and political engagement. 60 The fight against the perceived hegemony of the intellectual left is the very reason for the existence of GRECE and the engagement of the intellectuals of the ND. The “raison d’être of GRECE resides,” one article says, “in being an “enterprise of metapolitical action . . . an action to respond to the cultural power (of the left) on its own terrain with a counter-cultural power.” 61 The perceived hegemony of the left had therefore sparked yet another defining characteristic of right-wing intellectual identity: a distinctive mentality of engagement that has legitimacy as its ulterior motive and the creation of communities of intellectuals to nurture this approach. For Benoist and

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GRECE, the struggle for intellectual legitimacy in the face of ostracism and autocensure demands the creation of a “counter-metapolitics,” a “Gramscism of the Right.” 62 As it did for the intellectual of the extreme right over the twentieth century, resentment of the hegemonic left and perception of exclusion have permeated the very role and responsibility that Benoist has outlined for the intellectual of the New Right. The “metapolitical strategy” that involved “denouncing the intellectual terrorism of the left and presenting a new Gramscism of the Right” was a new responsibility for the New Right, since it had, according to Benoist, previously “abandoned the intellectual-cultural field to the Marxist left.” 63 As one interview of Benoist summarized the strategy: “the historical significance of the New Right consists in having established a right-wing intellectual hegemony after a long tradition of left-wing liberal hegemony in France.” 64 According to Benoist, the ND succeeded in this endeavor because it alone understood the importance of “beating the adversary on his own ground.” 65 Rather than attempting to force a shift in hegemony and legitimacy by influencing politics directly, as right-wing intellectuals had for decades, GRECE infiltrated the cultural field, infusing its values into the literature, cinema, fashion, and mores of society. This “metapolitical reconquest” allowed the ideas and visions of the intellectual right to slowly penetrate the public mentality until the engrained republican and communist worldviews were driven out and replaced with the right-wing alternative. Only then, with a new set of intellectual and cultural values and views in the general public, would the political and social climate shift to the right. Although the proposed “Gramscism of the Right” was supposedly a new strategy of legitimization for the intellectuals of the ND, the desire to differentiate right-wing values and revalue them for the public has been shown in this book to be a central component of this struggle throughout the twentieth century. Since the Dreyfus Affair, intellectuals of both camps have adamantly argued that engagés of the left and extreme right were not all a common group of intellectuals who simply had different political opinions; they were distinctive, differentiated, types of intellectuals whose very identity was a product of their different values and worldviews. The set of intellectual values that the right-wing identified over the century as distinctive to their community and also foreign to the left continue to be themes of the new intellectual of the ND. These values include: a rejection of universalism and egalitarianism, a claim to be the sole representatives of intellectual realism, and a relativist approach to nationalism that can accommodate right-wing Europeanism. As early as Barrès and the intellectual anti-Dreyfusard right of 1898, a rejection of universal abstraction and democratic egalitarianism or leveling was the hallmark of the intellectuals of the extraparliamentary extreme right. Benoist and the intellectuals of the New Right continue in this tradition, while adding a new variation on the theme: the right to

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difference and the rejection of global homogenization. As Benoist explained, “I define the Right as that attitude which wants to take into consideration the diversity of the world. Consequently the relative inequalities which necessarily follow from this diversity are good. The homogenization extolled in the discourse of egalitarian ideology is evil.” 66 According to Benoist, the intellectual left, by contrast, opposes this diversity in favor of a universalism and egalitarianism based on man as an abstraction. Benoist’s rejection of the left’s egalitarianism is connected directly to his opposition to the very principle of universal abstractions. In a statement reminiscent of his predecessors on the extreme right, Benoist writes, “men exist but man in himself, abstract man, universal man, this man does not exist. He is only a construction of the mind utilized to oppose the peoples, a pure operatory concept destined to be the negative interpellation of the Real.” 67 Reality, Benoist believes, has shown that man is a particular creation whose nature is determined by his particular environment and biology. It is this belief that distinguishes the intellectual worldview of the extreme right from that of the left. He clarifies this distinction as that between the left-wing universalist and the right-wing nominalist. For the nominalist intellectual of the New Right, diversity is the fundamental fact of the real world. There is no common essence, no absolute truth, no universal abstraction, no general humanity, no natural rights, and no unmitigated equality, according to GRECE intellectuals. Individuals are valued for their differences rather than for their ability to incarnate “an abstract concept of the universal individual.” 68 However, GRECE did acknowledge that this elitism and anti-egalitarianism of the extreme right had taken on fascist and later racist connotations, and was in need of revaluation for the public if it was to be considered a legitimate worldview for the modern day. The language was shifted, therefore, from racial inequity to a respect for the “right to difference” and a “differentialist anti-racism.” 69 According to Benoist, respect for these differences and recognition of cultural and racial particularities is a defining characteristic of the ND intellectual that separates him from the intellectual left. While the intellectual left prefers to see what equalizes men, the intellectual of the New Right prefers to focus on what distinguishes them. At its most basic level these differences are found in race, ethnie, and nationality. While the intellectual of the left warns the public that this discourse of difference is a cloaked form of racism and xenophobia, Benoist defends the “right to difference” as the true “antiracism.” A celebration and exploration of what makes each people different, he claims, is not racism. For example, he continues, the Black Power movement in the United States recognized the loss of their distinctive culture in the American melting pot and sought to reroot themselves in their African heritage, rather than suppressing their differences through integration. The real racist, according to Benoist’s revalued and reappropriated language, is the intellectual left which seeks to eradicate these

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racial and national families in order to create a single, homogenized mass that has the qualities it deems desirable. Only the universalist, who has a “global paradigm outside mankind,” can believe that difference implies imperfection or inferiority. 70 From now on, he contends, the struggles and wars of the world will not be between men on different sides of a border but between opposed worldviews and ways of being, a differentialist way and a universalist way, an anti-egalitarian way and an egalitarian way, a way that aspires to an organic society where diversity is always recognized or a mechanical society where homogeneity reigns. 71 In his crusade to reappropriate the concepts of cultural inclusion for the New Right and revalue their language and ideals as “antiracist,” Benoist claims the greatest threat to the intellectual integrity of France and world cultures is the universalism that has been long proposed by the left. Americanization of pop culture, the “McWorld” phenomenon of multinational corporations, and the globalization achieved by technology are all to blame for the progressive disappearance of cultural diversity and the leveling and reduction of cultures to a common, mediocre denominator. But, it is the intellectual desire for this homogeneity behind the corporations and technology that most distresses the ND. The fundamental question, Benoist wrote, “is whether it is better to have a planet where different human types and varied cultures exist, or where a single culture and in the end a single type of people exists.” 72 It is a question, Benoist believes, that the intellectual left and the intellectual ND answer differently. As recently as its 2000 Manifesto, the ND and Benoist have declared that the right to difference and to traditional cultural identities is one of the major positions that differentiates it from the rest of the intellectual movements in France, particularly those of the left. 73 On the surface, the “right to difference” campaign in the name of respect for foreign cultures and a “differentialist anti-racism” provides a seemingly new theme to the anti-egalitarianism and anti-universalism that has been a continuing intellectual value on the extreme right. The ND presents itself as the defender of African and Asian ethnic groups and regional cultures against the “Western imperialism” it claims is advocated by the universalist left. However, this multiculturalist claim is made in conjunction with the ND’s opposition to immigration, which it finds to create an “imbalance” that is not desirable for the host or the immigrant population. Assimilation and the abolition of “the distinction between nationals and foreigners” undermines, Benoist writes in a passage reminiscent of Barrès, both French and foreign cultural and national identities. 74 He advocates instead for economic incentives and reforms in the African and Asian nations so that their populations will remain in their own “environment” rather than relocating. 75 In the final analysis, although the ND does not admit it directly, the respect for difference and the rejection of cultural homogenization in the global world is also a call for cultural, racial, and national self-segregation. Therefore, although the

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vocabulary of difference and cultural plurality may be a new addition to the traditional right-wing struggle against universalism, egalitarianism, and abstraction, the underlying desire for distinctive, rooted, cultural and national identities is reminiscent of the calls for enracinement [rootedness] and closed nationalism that have marked the discourse of the extreme right since 1898. Benoist and the ND intellectuals also revive the essential right-wing value and language of intellectual realism. Egalitarianism, Benoist explains, is premised on the natural equality of men but modern science and DNA studies have shown that man is different “down to the finest structures of his being.” 76 Diversity is therefore a fundamental fact of real life. Homogenization and equality are only possible in the realm of theory. Here is the basis that Benoist believes exists for the separation between the intellectual right and left. While the intellectual left, both liberal and Marxist, increasingly attempts to level the real differences between men, the intellectual of GRECE and the ND “on the contrary, searches to have a better knowledge of the facts of the Real,” of the diversities and differences between men, and to apply them to political practice. 77 The New Right, he continues in his effort to explain this difference, is “the representative of a party of the reality of things” and “does not believe in single explanations of reality based on class struggle, race, economics etc.” 78 In contrast, he writes quoting Thomas Molnar, “the philosophy of the left suffers from a radical divorce with the Real.” 79 This divorce is proven by the fact that the programs and political visions of the left always involve a mutation or an abolition of the existing social reality. Marxism in particular seeks to change the world as it is into something idealized in theory. What can be assumed from this, he asks, but that the “intellectual left is the party of those who are unhappy with being what they are” and therefore “radically denounce existing reality.” 80 The New Right, on the other hand, he continues, “is the opposite,” its programs and projects are “rooted in reality.” Benoist claims, like his predecessors on the extreme right over the century have, that it is this rejection of abstraction in favor of the real that has excluded the extreme right from categorization as intellectuals. “Our ‘anti-intellectualism,’” he writes scornfully, “comes from this conviction that life is always better than the idea that one makes of it, that there is a pre-eminence of the soul over the mind, of character over intelligence, of sensibility over intellect, of image over concept, of myth over doctrine.” 81 This concept of intellectual realism, and even the language Benoist uses to describe it, shares many attributes with that of the right-wing intellectuals from Barrès to Bardèche who believed an appreciation for reality meant an appreciation for distinctive races, nationalities, and roots rather than the abstraction of universal humanity. These intellectuals have all claimed to know no “men,” only “Frenchmen.” The ND concept of realism also shares many elements with that of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle,

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Ramon Fernandez, Abel Bonnard, and Alphonse de Châteaubriant, who glorified the complete man, promoted education from real-life experiences, and favored an appreciation for action, sentiment, and character over intellectualism and mental acrobatics. For these intellectuals, ideas cannot come from sterile abstraction, but only from lived experience. This understanding of reality, of the nature of intelligence, and of the relationship that a true intellectual must have to the real is something that the intellectuals of the extreme right have, since the Dreyfus Affair, believed to separate them from the intellectuals of the left. The intellectual left’s tendency to label the right as anti-intellectual because of this approach to realism and the rejection of abstraction has only strengthened the right’s perception of a separation and nurtured in them a resentment of exclusion. Closely connected to the New Right’s ideas of the real and of antiegalitarianism, is its rejection of traditional nationalism in favor of integral federalism that promotes regionalism and Europeanism simultaneously. The NDs integral federalist ideas have become increasingly popular, not only on the extreme right, but across political lines as increased immigration from North Africa and the Middle East create international tensions. 82 According to Benoist, the intellectuals of the left believe nationality is a product of civil ceremony and of legal rights, rather than history, ethnicity, or family. Civic concepts of nationality require no rooting in the history, language, religion, or land of the nation, but only an agreement to abide by the laws of the country that allows massive immigration. The problem, according to Benoist, is that immigration and legal naturalization do not really accomplish the assimilation they claim. Groups remain separate, pluralities within the nation, weakening its unanimity. Instead, he proposes a new concept of nation as ethnie, and therefore a French nationalism expanded to Europeanism. 83 This European alliance would not be founded on the Jacobin ideal of legal rights and civic ties but on the Barrèsian concept of cultural legacy. The European “empire” would be a cooperative federation of culturally rooted regions large enough to compete with the continental superpowers of the global age and united by its common Indo-European cultural heritage. 84 The new Europe would also, according to Benoist, more accurately reflect the reality of difference in the modern world. 85 The “frontiers of blood and of history are realities,” he writes, they cannot, therefore, be ignored by arbitrary lines of civic national borders. 86 Nor, he continues, should anyone desire that these frontiers be erased. The world, Benoist argues, is not made of interchangeable individuals but of rooted peoples and the defense of these distinctive roots is essential to the preservation of a people’s identity in an increasingly homogenized world. 87 Regions, and the European federation that they compose, must therefore be built around the realities of difference in race, ethnicity, religion, history, and cultural tradition rather than around the arbitrary administrative borders agreed

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upon by colonizing powers or the United Nations. “National” identity, for the ND, is not a function of “abstract politico-administrative borders” but of culture, history, and biology. 88 Whether it is the value given to culture and to history in redefining national identity, the belief that intellectual responsibility requires a devotion to lived experience and to realities above theoretical abstractions, or the opposition to egalitarianism and to universalism in favor of a recognition of difference, Benoist and the intellectuals of the ND have maintained a thread of traditional right-wing intellectual values that extends back to the anti-Dreyfusards of 1898. In order to create the Gramscism of the right that would win the hearts and minds of the ND, it was not enough to differentiate the ND from the cultural hegemony of the left, Benoist believed; it was necessary to “provide a real alternative, a complete ideological and theological corpus that would provide a real substitute.” 89 The stated goal of GRECE was therefore to “construct a new culture, a new view of the world and a new ideological project.” 90 Its promise to provide an “alternative vision of the world,” 91 was based on Benoist’s belief that “there are different ways of seeing the world and of being in the world, ways of the right and ways of the left, which encompass the pure knowledges, intuitive beliefs, emotions, implicit values, daily choices, artistic sentiments, etc.” 92 The intellectuals of GRECE were quite certain that their “specific world view” separated their cultural and intellectual pursuits from those of the intellectuals of the left. This ideological separation between New Right and left infused every aspect of the intellectual’s life and made not only his values and programs different, but also his very identity as a cultural being. It created, as Adler described Benoist, “a new type of French intellectual, fundamentally different from the dogmatic prototype identified with Sartre.” 93 As it had over the century, for intellectuals who felt alienated from the mainstream intellectual world, this new type of intellectual and new cultural experience was to be nurtured and radicalized within a segregated intellectual community created for the New Right. The intellectuals of the ND were quite clear about the importance that their alternative intellectual communities had on their engagement and experience as intellectuals. The Manifesto of GRECE perhaps stated the importance of community most clearly when it introduced its raison d’être by saying, “From the beginning, the French New Right has brought together people interested in participating in the development of a community. It constitutes a community of work and reflection whose members are not necessarily all intellectuals, but all of whom are interested, in one way or another, in the battle of ideas.” 94 The ND found it essential to create its own intellectual and cultural spaces where it could foster its own engagés and educate the general public according to its own values. Jean Varenne, past president of GRECE, explained the importance of GRECE as a place of sociability and professional community where like-minded intellectuals can amplify

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the effectiveness of their engagement. “Having come to the realization,” Varenne wrote, “that the cultural power . . . in France belonged to the Marxists and their following, it appeared that the first thing to do was to reconquer this lost territory.” Once again, the image of a dominant left exerting a hegemony over French culture was to inspire intellectual counter through collective community. “It was necessary therefore to create a society of thought, he continued, “that is to say an organism permitting the assembly of those who had the same vision of things in order to permit them to act more effectively. Thus was born GRECE . . . which gave itself the task of ideological formation of its members and the diffusion of a certain view of the world in the intellectual milieux.” 95 In GRECE, therefore, the ND intended to create not only a “laboratory of ideas,” but also a community that could provide a place of sociability, a professional network, a mentoring process, an educational organ, and a platform for engagement in the “battle of ideas.” It is perhaps the closest that the intellectual right came to repeating the success of the AF phenomenon since the 1920s. One of GRECE’s forty founders, Jean-Claude Valla wrote, “GRECE was not to be a simple addition of individuals which would have in common only the signature of a membership pass but aspired rather to transform itself . . . into a true community.” 96 It was to be a “community of work and thought” that would provide “support in daily life, professional facilities, and a certain duty of solidarity” for its members. 97 GRECE was not, therefore, an accidental conglomeration, but a calculated, organized, and structured attempt to create an alternative intellectual society with the support structures necessary to be a real force in engaged thought. In the tradition of the right-wing communities since the Ligue de la patrie, some of the most important “professional facilities” offered by GRECE to its community of intellectuals are sympathetic publishing firms like Copernic and its later replacement Labyrinthe. Since the ND intellectuals, like their predecessors over the century, believed themselves excluded and unwelcome at the firms seen as sympathetic to the dominant left, they needed a space where their works would be published without censorship. The two firms, both directed by Benoist for several years, have been the primary publishing firms for the ND intellectuals and the only source for the published transcripts of the GRECE colloquia. 98 Labyrinthe in particular would create the Livre-club du Labyrinthe [Book Club of Labyrinthe] which published by subscription those works “that do not situate themselves in the line of the dominant ideology.” 99 These publishing firms were not only vital organs for the dissemination of the thought of the right-wing community, they were also a source of imagined community among all those who shared a space in its catalog. Next to the publishing houses, the most influential places of community are GRECE’s numerous journals and professional networks of jour-

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nalists. In particular, the central journal for GRECE, Éléments, born as a simple bulletin in 1968, was vital in spreading the ideas of the ND and welcoming the ostracized right-wing writer. It has created both a real community of writers among its regular columnists and editing team like Benoist, Valla, and Pierre Vial, and an imaginary community including all its contributors and subscribers. 100 It is in Éléments, more than any of the other GRECE organs, that one finds advertisements for works by GRECE authors, summaries of the recent colloquia and debates offered by GRECE, and cross promotion of other GRECE journals. To this main journal have been added over the years the interior bulletin GRECETraditions, the theoretical organ Études et Recherches, and the short-lived Panorama des Idées Actuelles. Of great importance is the Nouvelle École, a publication intimately tied to the program and ideas of GRECE and founded and directed since 1969 by Benoist. It is here, more than in the other journals of GRECE, that Benoist lays out his own ideas and excerpts his larger works. Linked to these main journals through common contributors, the influence of Benoist, and a similarity of ideology are the rightwing-influenced journals Figaro-Magazine, Valeurs Actuelles, and Le Spectacle du Monde. Further along in the network of journals were those that shared a few contributors, such as Bardèche at Défense de l’Occident, Robert Poulet at Rivarol, and Alain Sanders at Aspects de la France. Although these journals and networks were vital to the successes of GRECE in reaching the public and also baiting the intellectual left, they were not the only sources of sociability and collective engagement for the ND. Just like its predecessor the AF, GRECE has created an entire intellectual society for itself complete with educational and mentoring opportunities for students, leisure activities, clubs, and public discussions where the intellectual left is the minority. GRECE provides its members with annual colloquia such as the one held in 1983 with the theme “Face au vide intellectuel, la troisième voie” (Confronting the intellectual void, the third way). In the colloquia, for over thirty-three years now, the GRECE intellectuals, including Benoist, Vial, and Guillaume Faye, mentor the public and particularly the right-wing student youth on timely political issues. Then there are the group meetings, a series of lectures and debates open to the public, appointed days of study, and special educational seminars led by GRECE intellectuals. Finally, there are the group voyages; organized vacations; a cinema club; and a summer program, Université européene du GRECE (European University of GRECE), where right-wing student youth participate in GRECE-sponsored conferences, courses, and activities. 101 For the adults there are the cafés-philo, which offer seminars and conferences for the general public around themes like that of the internal contradictions of liberalism. There was even an imagined community created specifically for those members of GRECE who are not able to participate and engage in these numerous social communities. The Club des Mille was a community for those who

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were unable to give of their time and so contributed to the GRECE community with monthly financial pledges. 102 The New Right’s practice and experience of daily intellectual life has been, as it was for the intellectual extreme right over the twentieth century, not only a product of the segregated, specialized, and radicalized socio-professional spaces but also a product of its relationships to the State and university. The university has been, Benoist pointed out in a 2003 interview, traditionally dominated by the intellectual left and so the professional trajectory, relied upon by the emerging intellectual of the left, has been relatively unappealing to the young intellectual of the extreme right. Since ND intellectuals are hardly welcomed as professors in the state university system, Benoist says they have, as their predecessors did for over a century, relied on journalism and literary publication as their primary means of engagement and of expression. This professional focus has allowed the relatively small number of ND intellectuals to produce a prolific number of journals, articles, books, and interviews, and also to make a greater impact on public affairs and journalistic debate than they might otherwise have had. 103 As it did for the previous generations of right-wing intellectuals, however, this avoidance of the university has made the necessary mentoring of the youth a more difficult task. GRECE has provided a different experience of intellectual mentorship for both the intellectual and the youth by arranging summer institutes and university courses, colloquia, and lecture series that move the experience of mentorship outside the traditional university setting. The daily and necessary practice of educating the general public has also proven a different experience for the intellectual extreme right. The new media of television talk shows and political interviews has been, Benoist suggests, mastered by “the young wolves of the intellectual left,” like Bernard Henri Lévy, who make it a regular practice to participate in televised appearances both in France and abroad to popularize their ideas. In contrast, when the “representative of the right” is fortunate enough to gain this platform, he remains passive, ineffective, and simply “smiles without realizing the game he is getting ready to enter.” 104 When they do enter these new public forums aggressively, as Benoist has done, and attempt to debate the intellectuals of the left, they face further difficulties—in particular, the absence of an opponent. The intellectual of the left is able to refuse to debate the intellectual of the New Right without appearing intellectually cowardly by proclaiming that they do not want to “play the game of the right.” 105 With this tactic, they are suggesting that any legitimate argument by the ND would be a distortion of its true position and that the intellectual of the left should not be forced to dignify it with a response. Benoist argues that, as with the other elements of French metapolitics, the intellectual of the New Right has not experienced life in the same way as the “media darlings” of the left.

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These differences, both perceived and real, in daily experience and access to the mainstream media, educational system, and the public have reinforced the ND’s reliance on segregated, alienated socio-professional networks and spaces. It has also encouraged and even radicalized their efforts to highlight the differences in the programs and values of the left and right, even when they use the same terminology, and to identify the New Right as distinct from and superior to the left. Underlying all of these efforts is the ND’s resentment of the left’s perceived cultural hegemony and saturation of the French superstructure to the point that rightwing thought is literally unthinkable. These beliefs and behaviors link the ND to a long line of right-wing thinkers and movements of the twentieth century who have created an intellectual identity for the extreme right dependent on tropes of hegemony and ostracism, differentiation of values and experiences, and self-segregation of socio-professional spaces. NOTES 1. Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la Nouvelle Droite: Le GRECE et son histoire (Paris: Presses de la Foundation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1988), 20. 2. Alain de Benoist, “Cinq questions precise aux intellectuels,” Le Magazine Littéraire, December 1987, 47. 3. Arthur Versluis and Alain de Benoist, “A Conversation with Alain de Benoist” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 8, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 79–106. 4. Ibid. 83. 5. Bryan Sylvian, “European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist” The Occidental Quarterly 5, no. 3 (2005): 10. 6. Pierre-André Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite: Jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1994), v. 7. Tamir Bar-On, “The French New Right: Neither Right, nor Left?” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 8, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 6. 8. Arthur Versluis, “What’s Right? A Review Essay,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 2, no. 2 (2009): 153. 9. Massimiliano Capra Casadio, “The New Right and Metapolitics in France and Italy,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 8, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 48. 10. Roger Griffin, “Foreword,” in Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, by Tamir BarOn (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), xiv–xv. 11. Tamir Bar-On, Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2013), 4–6. He later clarifies this further saying, “De Benoist’s continued anti-egalitarianism, rejection of the Rights of Man and representative democracy, and valorization of pagan elite rule makes him more primordially a man of the right than left . . . the fact that the ND leader still rejects administratively imposed equality based on the model of the 1789 French revolution separates him definitively from proegalitarian liberal, centre, centre-right, and left-wing political movements and parties. Moreover, in rejecting the allegedly ‘abstract’ Rights of Man, de Benoist unambiguously ties himself to radical right-wing traditions that have a long historical lineage dating back to the eighteenth century” (ibid., 162). 12. Tamir Bar-On, “Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite: The Quest for Pan-European Empire,” in Varieties of Right-Wing Extremism in Europe: From Local to Transnational, ed. Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin, and Brian Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 2013), 70.

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13. Jim Wolfreys, “Neither Right nor Left? Towards an Integrated Analysis of the Front National,” in The Right in France: From Revolution to Le Pen, ed. Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 265–68. 14. Roger Griffin, “Plus ça change! The Fascist Pedigree of the Nouvelle Droite,” in The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le Pen, ed. Edward J. Arnold (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 220–24. 15. Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 3. 16. Joan Antón-Mellón, “The Idéés-Force of the European New Right: A New Paradigm?” In Varieties of Right-Wing Extremism in Europe: From Local to Transnational, ed. Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin, and Brian Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 2013), 53. 17. Ibid. 62. 18. Stéphane François and Tamir Bar-On, “The Nouvelle Droite and ‘Tradition,’” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 8, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 90. 19. Piero Ignazi, quoted in Casadio, “The New Right and Metapolitics,” 79. 20. James Shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (New York: Routledge, 2007), 115. 21. Paul Hainsworth, “The Front National: From Ascendancy to Fragmentation on the French Extreme Right,” in The Politics of the Extreme Right: From the Margins to the Mainstream, ed. Paul Hainsworth (London: Pinter, 2000), 30. 22. Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, 38. 23. Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite, 10. Unless otherwise noted all translations are mine. 24. Jean-Yves Camus, “The European Extreme Right and Religious Extremism,” in Varieties of Right-Wing Extremism in Europe: From Local to Transnational, ed. Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin, and Brian Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 2013), 108. 25. Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite, 11. 26. See for example Tamir Bar-On, “Ties to Radical Right Populist Parties,” in Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2013), 212–26. 27. Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite, 214. 28. Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines (Paris: Copernic, 1979), 24. 29. Alain de Benoist, “Entretien avec Alain de Benoist sur la droite et la gauche,” Cosenza, Italy, November 2002–2003 and February–April 2003, at https://s3-eu-west-1. amazonaws.com/alaindebenoist/pdf/entretien_sur_la_theorie_du_genre-sm.pdf. Also quoted in Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la Nouvelle Droite, 57. 30. Alain de Benoist, “Quarrels of the Ancient Regime,” Telos 98–99 (Winter 1993–Fall 1994): 143. 31. Pierre Vial, Pour un renaissance culturelle: Le GRECE prend la parole (Paris: Copernic, 1979), 10. Also found in Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, “The French New Right in the Year 2000,”http://www.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain9. html. 32. Alain de Benoist and Frank Adler, “On the French Right–New and Old: An Interview with Alain de Benoist.” Telos 126 (Winter 2003): 113–31. Also found at, http://www.alaindebenoist.com. 33. Ibid. 34. Alain de Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit (Paris: Éditions Libres-Hallier, 1979), 14. 35. Ibid., 17. 36. Benoist, Vu de droite, 406. 37. Ibid., 19. 38. Alain de Benoist, Le grain de sable: Jalons pour un fin de siècle (Paris: La Labyrinthe, 1994), 40. 39. Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, 290. 40. Benoist, Le grain de sable, 61.

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41. “The Appeal to Vigilance by Forty Intellectuals,” Telos 98–99 (Winter 1993–Fall 1994): 135–36; originally published in Le Monde, July 13, 1993. 42. Pierre-André Taguieff, “Intellectuals and ‘The Confusion of Ideas’ A Serious Error in Analysis,” Telos 98–99 (Winter 1993–Spring 1994): 137–43, originally published in Le Monde, July 27, 1993. 43. Benoist, Le grain de sable, 63. 44. Bar-On, Where Have all the Fascists Gone?, 10. 45. Alain de Benoist, “Quarrels of the Ancient Regime,” 143; “The Ideal of Empire,” 81–98; and “Three Interviews with Alain de Benoist,” 173–206, in Special Double Issue, “The New French Right: New Right–New Left–New Paradigm?” in Telos 98–99 (Winter 1993–Spring 1994). 46. Bar-On, Where Have all the Fascists Gone?, 11. 47. Benoist, Le grain de sable, 58. 48. Benoist, Vu de droite, 409. 49. Ibid., 408. 50. Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, 24. 51. Ibid., 290. 52. Benoist, Vu de droite, 409. 53. Ibid. 54. Pierre-André Taguieff, “Discussion or Inquisition? The Case of Alain de Benoist,” Telos 98–99 (Winter 1993–Spring 1994): 42; emphasis in the original. 55. Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la Nouvelle Droite, 196. 56. Ibid., 66. 57. Ibid., 15. 58. Taguieff, “Discussion or Inquisition?,” 45. 59. Alain de Benoist, quoted in Casadio, “The New Right and Metapolitics,” 56. 60. Benoist and Adler, “On the French Right—New and Old,” 113–31. 61. Benoist, Le grain de sable, 41; emphasis in the original. As one pamphlet published in 2000 puts it, “the manifesto of GRECE. A fatal virus for the dominant ideology!” 62. Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite, 17. 63. Ibid. 64. Benoist, “Three interviews with Alain de Benoist,” 183. 65. Alain de Benoist, quoted in Vial, Pour un renaissance culturelle, 35. 66. Alain de Benoist, quoted in Pierre-André Taguieff, “From Race to Culture: The New Right’s View of European Identity,” Telos 98–99 (Winter 1993-Spring 1994): 108. 67. Alain de Benoist, Tiers monde, meme combat (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1986), 212. 68. Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, 87. 69. Benoist and Champetier, “The French New Right.” 70. Ibid. 71. Benoist, Vu de droite, 25. 72. Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, 154. 73. Benoist and Champetier, “The French New Right.” 74. Alain de Benoist, La ligne de mire: Discours aux citoyens européens (Paris: La Labyrinthe, 1995–1996), 1:140. 75. Although it is doubtful that Benoist intends the outsourcing of French jobs to these other nations as part of the economic reform. 76. Benoist, La ligne de mire, 1:115. 77. Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite, 11. 78. Benoist, Vu de droite, 16. 79. Thomas Molnar, quoted in ibid., 394. 80. Benoist, Vu de droite, 394. 81. Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, 34. 82. Benoist and Champetier, “The French New Right,” 13.

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83. Unlike many of his predecessors on the Right, Benoist does not see a united bloc of the “Occident,” but only of Western Europe because he finds America to be foreign to the European mentality. 84. Benoist’s concept of nationalism and Europeanism as a product of rooted national traditions has led him to search truer spiritual roots for Europe in paganism. Greco-Roman paganism, he has determined, is the true spiritual foundation of the Indo-European world and is therefore the best source for the new Europe. 85. Benoist, Tiers monde, meme combat. 86. Benoist, Le grain de sable, 33. 87. Benoist, La ligne de mire, 1:140. 88. Ibid., 1:132. 89. Benoist, quoted in Taguieff, “From Race to Culture,” 108. 90. Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite, 17. 91. GRECE documents, BNF, Tolbiac 2000, piece no. 1. Piece 1 is a flier advertising the book Manifeste pour un renaissance européene. 92. Benoist, Vu de droite, 20. 93. Frank Adler, “Left Vigilance in France,” Telos 98–99 (Winter 1993–Spring 1994): 29. 94. Benoist and Champetier, “The French New Right.” 95. “La coeur de la Nouvelle Droite,” interview with Jean Varenne, Éléments: Le Revue de la Nouvelle Droite (Winter 1985): 43. 96. Jean Claude Valla, “Une communauté de travail et de pensée,” in Pour une renaissance culturelle: Le GRECE prend la parole, ed. Pierre Vial (Paris: Copernic, 1979), 23–24. 97. Ibid. 98. Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite, 205. 99. Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la Nouvelle Droite, 225. 100. Vial, Pour un renaissance culturelle, 14. 101. GRECE documents, BNF, Tolbiac 2000, piece no. 2. Piece 2 is a flier titled “Why adhere to GRECE?” that includes ads for the Nouvelle École, the Université européen, conferences, the cafés philo, and the Actes du Colloque du GRECE. Since its creation in 1968, in each of these forums, the new names of the intellectuals of GRECE are mixed with familiar names of the traditional extreme Right like Maurice Bardèche, Lucien Rebatet, Paul Sérant, Marcel Jouhandeau, Jean Cau, and Jean Giono. 102. GRECE documents, BNF, Tolbiac 2000, piece no. 2 and no. 3. Piece 2 is a flier titled “Why adhere to GRECE?” that mentions the Club des Mille. Piece 3 is an ad for the Club des Mille that claims GRECE will provide the “metapolitical reconquest” that Europe needs. 103. Benoist, for example, has published over fifty books, four thousand articles, and has participated in over three hundred interviews. 104. Benoist, Vu de droite, 17. 105. Benoist, Le grain de sable, 98.

Conclusion

This study diverges from the general tendency in the historiography of the extreme right by examining not the political parties of the extreme right, but rather a very specific struggle by those who identified as intellectuals. These intellectuals devoted their energies to redefining intellectual identity and to reappropriating the intellectual’s role for the public in a distinctly right-wing way. Inherent in this struggle was an undercurrent of extreme resentment of a perceived left-wing hegemony that resulted, over the twentieth century, in a pattern of linguistic tropes, beliefs, and behaviors that seem to mark the intellectual of the extreme right even today. This resentment and the subsequent effort to reclaim intellectual identity and to reestablish right-wing values in new counter-societies bridged the division between the diverse factions of the extreme right, while simultaneously erasing potential common ground with their opponents on the left. Meanwhile, the extreme left and its perceived allies of the republican center, found an element of unity in ensuring that the public supported Jean Jaurès’s claim that “intellectuals of the Right have no right to the title of intellectuel.” 1 This exclusion was met with increasing resentment by an extreme right whose own efforts to redefine the title and role of the intellectual according to their own value system became something of an obsession. Resentment, the struggle against exclusion, and the effort to be seen as separate yet legitimate were central, formative experiences for the extreme right that recurred over the century. They permeated and influenced the extreme right’s mentality of engagement, values and discourses, choice of communities and of practices, and, as a result, their very conceptualization of their identity as true French intellectuals. As they internalized their resentment, they responded by segregating themselves, radicalizing their values and opinions, and ultimately alienating themselves ever further from the intellectual mainstream. Such segregation seemed the only option since the extreme right perceived itself to be in a hostile and even persecutory relationship with the official world of the French state and its republican institutions like the university. In the mind of the right-wing intellectual, the intellectuals of the extreme left and republican center formed a majority that was allied in a bloc, or a front, against them. This bloc, according to the extreme right, effectively dominated and infiltrated the government, the university system, mainstream intellectual organizations, and the official organs of the nation’s press. In contrast, the intellectual extreme right had been 305

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excluded, ostracized, and ejected, both literally and figuratively, from these places of power and influence. Ferdinand Brunetière, resented his expulsion from his position at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and Maurice Bardèche his ostracism from the approved publishing firms, but all intellectuals of the right perceived themselves rejected and oppressed. In particular, they believed that their exclusion was self-perpetuating since the left-wing intellectual model was engrained in the education system, and therefore in the minds of the next generations. The extreme right, therefore, saw its exclusion as a vicious cycle. Denied the title and identity of the intellectual, they were more easily excluded as “anti-intellectual” from places of power within the intellectual world. Denied participation in these spaces of intellectual power and legitimization, they were further alienated from the public’s perception of intellectual identity. This perception of ostracism, repression, and alienation from the spaces of intellectual legitimacy and from public recognition as cultural guides created a common ground for intellectuals of the extreme right that could often supersede their internal differences and factional quarrels, particularly during times of heightened conflict and engagement. Resentment of a perceived left-wing cultural hegemony and monopolization of intellectual spaces brought right-wing intellectuals into shared socio-professional spaces, forged new networks between diverse groups, and fostered collaborations and mentorships that might not have otherwise existed. Perceived hegemony, and the right-wing intellectuals’ reactions to it, therefore, serve as one of the forces of unity that bridged gaps between distinctive factions of the right and gave them a sense of common community and purpose while widening the perceived abyss with the intellectual left. Over the century, this hostile relationship to the official world dominated by the left became essential to the right-wing intellectuals’ perception of their place in French society and intellectual affairs. This, in turn, affected their understanding of the role of the intellectual and their mentality of engagement. The extreme right internalized and reappropriated the left’s language of exclusion to make it an essential, and positive, component of their role as intellectuals. For example, Bardèche identified himself as a foreigner within the nation and intellectual world, a member of the class of intellectual untouchables, and an intellectual heretic. And Jacques Laurent saw himself as the pariah, the outlaw, the excluded, and the suspect. Even when the extreme right monopolized the field during the Occupation, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle identified dramatically with the wandering hometown prophet speaking the truth to a resistant crowd, while Alphonse de Châteaubriant saw himself as one of the misunderstood minority. Even if, in reality, the regime was favorable to the right, the extreme right identified themselves, as Charles Maurras was famous for doing, as the often unpopular intellectual opposition to the dominant,

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mainstream system. Unlike the intellectuals of the left who often enjoyed a profitable relationship with the government and the university system, the intellectual of the extreme right believed himself to be oppressed, excluded, and ostracized from these relationships and therefore identified their intellectual responsibility and role with resistance, struggle, and opposition to the mainstream. Because the intellectuals of the extreme right were labeled “anti-intellectual” as early as 1898, they also always had a distinct mentality of engagement that required legitimization and self-identification as intellectuals before any political intervention. Ever since Barrès and Brunetière had declared that not all the intellectuals were on one side, the intellectual of the right associated engagement with the struggle for intellectual legitimacy and authority. Claiming and effectively redefining the title and role of the intellectual, which they saw to be increasingly denied to them by the left, became something of an obsession for the engagés of the extreme right. They saw themselves as having a double mission in their engagement. The extreme right engaged in order to manipulate public opinion on current political or social questions just like the extreme left. But it also engaged in order to counter the perception by the public that the dominant intellectuals on the left spoke for the entire body of the intellectual elite. It is not surprising that Barres’s 1898 claim to the title and role of the intellectual was echoed over the century by his successors even as late as the 1963 reproach: “We have our intellectuals.” 2 Resentment of their exclusion and an underlying rejection of the leftwing value system also led the extreme right to intentionally differentiate their own, alternative values and worldviews. In spite of the fact that historians today have identified common cultural ground and shared attitudes, and sociologists have identified common social practices and professional behaviors amongst left- and right-wing intellectuals, it was the perceived differences that were emphasized and made the most important reality in the minds of the intellectuals who engaged. They either did not see, did not wish to acknowledge, or intentionally ignored any commonality with their opponents in the heat of political polemic and engagement in order to prioritize what divided them instead. In short, they wanted it quite clear that they were intellectuals, but, as Châteaubriant wrote, their “minds [were] divided into two different types” and, therefore, they were separated from those on the opposing side. 3 Although the specific programs and positions of the extreme right changed over the century, reacting to and precipitating changes on the intellectual left, several core values and worldviews have remained constant identifying marks of the intellectual extreme right. The intellectual of the extreme right, no matter the decade, can be identified by a rejection of universalism, devotion to realism, opposition to internationalism in favor of a relativist nationalism or Europeanism, and rejection of egalitarianism. 4

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Because the right felt that their worldviews distinguished them from the left and excluded them from left-wing intellectual communities, the intellectuals of the extreme right sought new intellectual spaces and networks where their own values could be nurtured. They constructed a different set of intellectual spaces, socio-professional networks, and professional trajectories that provided them with a different community of peers and organizations for mentorship, publication, education, and socialization. When they were excluded from the Dreyfusard leagues and petitions, they created their own. When they found themselves to be a minority presence in the university system, they created their own personal mentoring relationships, organized summer institutes, and developed and taught courses to educate the youth in their own values. When they were not guided into the professional life of the universitaire, they swelled the ranks of the professional journalists in order to remain politically and professionally influential. When they felt ostracized from social and governmental affairs, they formed their own anti-republican political parties and cultural organizations like the Parti populaire français (PPF). And, when they were ultimately denied all access to the public through the traditional intellectual channels during the postwar, they congregated in sympathetic publishing houses and wrote for journals like La Table Ronde (LTR). The intellectual of the extreme right, like that of the left, constructed the concept of individual intellectual identity in part from these collective communities, networks, and trajectories. But the communities created by the intellectual extreme right were not those of their leftwing peers that had been equated historically with intellectual life. The segregated spaces and communities tended, therefore, to isolate and to separate the intellectuals from the mainstream public that they wished to engage; the result was a sense of alienation that only led to further resentment and radicalization. However, despite the left’s protests about the illegitimacy of the intellectual of the extreme right and their own self-imposed alienation, both left and extreme-right thinkers need to be included in the historical narrative of intellectual engagement. Both sides effectively engaged their cultural capital in French affairs and exerted influence over public opinion. Even while claiming that they were pariahs unable to be perceived as legitimate leaders by the public, the extreme right thinkers continued to hold sway over a large segment of the educated public. One could argue, therefore, as many right-wing intellectuals from Barrès to Alain de Benoist have, that intellectuals of the extreme right are not just left-wing intellectuals with different or unpopular political opinions, but, in fact, are their own category of engagé. They are “a new type of French intellectual, fundamentally different” from those of the left. 5 Their concept of purpose and of responsibility was uniquely formed by their perceived exclusion and their resentment has colored their approach to spaces of power and to the public. They have: a different conception of their place in society

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and intellectual affairs; a different relationship to the university and the State; a different mentality of engagement; a whole different system of intellectual, cultural, and social values; a different conception of “True France”; a different set of intellectual spaces, socio-professional networks, and professional trajectories; and a different community of peers and organizations for mentorship, publication, education, and socialization. All together, these differences have resulted in a very distinctive experience of intellectual life over the century and the creation of a fundamentally extreme-right understanding of what it means to be an intellectual. NOTES 1. Jean Jaurès’ accusation from “La classe intellectuelle,” La Petite République, January 7, 1899, 163, quoted in Christophe Charle, Naissance des “intellectuels,” 1880–1900 (Paris: Minuit, 1990), 8. 2. Francis d’Orcival, “Nos intellectuels sont-ils des imbeciles?” Défense de l’Occident (June 1963): 12. 3. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Procès posthume d’un visionnaire (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1987), 25. 4. Certainly these characteristic values of the extreme right, when viewed as components of a right-wing intellectual program, indicate certain inconsistencies and internal contradictions in right-wing thought. The intellectuals of the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates who claimed to be intellectual Realists promoted classicism instead of the technology and science most applicable to real modern society. The anti-universalists of the interwar years were willing to adapt fascist ideologies constructed outside France and promoted a Europeanism that was only with great difficulty distinguished from internationalism. The position of the extreme right on its German neighbor would vacillate over the decades, switching from hostility and cultural isolation during the Dreyfus Affair and Nouvelle Sorbonne years, to fascination, emulation, and exchange during the interwar and war years. The postwar advocates of French Algeria blithely mixed their anti-universalism with a sincere belief in the applicability of French civilization to the rest of the world. And Holocaust trivializers like Bardèche somehow juxtaposed Europeanism with a closed nationalism that expressed an interest only in French affairs and rejected European-wide institutions and tribunals. These inconsistencies and lapses in logic are apparent now to the historian, but were considered part of a distinctive, cohesive intellectual itinerary by the engagés of the extreme right at the time. 5. Frank Adler, “Left Vigilance in France,” Telos 98–99 (Winter 1993–Spring 1994): 29.

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Index

Abetz, Otto, 186, 197, 220 Académie française, 147, 180n46, 182n116 Academicians, 28n3, 50, 54, 77, 122, 216 Action française, 8, 15, 39, 74, 95, 111, 113, 126, 132n91, 138, 140, 185, 250, 281; Action Française, 118, 124, 132n92, 176–177; Camelots du roi, 96, 124, 126; Étudiants de l’Action française, 250; Institut d’Action française, 8, 95, 98, 112, 114, 115, 116, 121, 124–125, 130n9, 132n92, 133n112, 134n141, 217 Adler, Frank, 287, 296, 301n32, 302n60, 303n93, 309n5 Agathon, 93, 96–97, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113, 116, 130n18, 131n38 agrégé, 50, 110, 122 Ahearne, Jeremy, 21, 22 Alain, 99, 123, 140, 146, 170, 178n9, 180n38, 183n158, 219 Algeria, 31n64, 86n69, 106, 170, 236–238, 240–241, 242, 243, 249, 250, 251–253, 255, 258, 259–260, 266, 267, 269–270, 274n26, 274n29, 275n40, 278n163, 279n206, 281, 285, 309n4 anti-colonialism, 146, 237, 239, 240, 241, 275n44. See also colonialism anti-Dreyfusards, 3–4, 6, 15, 23, 37–38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 46–49, 50, 51, 52–53, 54–55, 57, 58, 59, 60–61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70–73, 74, 75, 76, 76–77, 78, 79–83, 85n47, 87n90, 89n176, 89n180, 89n182, 93, 95–96, 97–98, 99, 111, 116, 291, 296. See also Dreyfusards antifascism, 138–139, 140, 141, 143, 145–147, 148, 155–156, 158, 169–170, 175, 177, 178, 185, 198, 203–204

anti-intellectual, 3, 4, 44, 45, 46, 65, 68–69, 86n56, 103, 105, 109, 110, 114, 131n45, 141, 158, 161, 162, 194, 195–196, 203, 209, 211–212, 217, 226n51, 241, 255, 294–295 anti-republican, 42, 54, 57, 85n45, 96, 113, 126, 131n48, 135n155, 138, 147, 236, 308 anti-Semitism, 15, 18, 29n28, 38–39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 54, 66, 82, 85n45, 91n227, 111, 126, 140, 142, 176, 179n23, 188, 210, 211, 223, 228n129, 228n134, 228n135, 282, 285 Antón-Mellón, Joan, 31n61, 284 Après le Procès, 55, 56, 67, 85n41, 87n93, 88n144 Aragon, Louis, 145, 146, 169, 180n39, 197, 215, 218, 231, 246, 262–263, 268, 269, 274n30 Aron, Raymond, 186, 218, 222, 231, 234, 237, 246, 266, 268, 270, 274n30 Aron, Robert, 10 Arts, 254, 267 Aspects de la France, 235, 266, 298 Association des Écrivains et Artistes révolutionaires (AEAR), 139, 145, 146, 153–154, 169–171, 172, 215 Aulard, François-Alphonse, 59, 107, 120, 134n154 Au Pilori, 219 L’Aurore, 3, 28n2, 28n9, 36, 37, 48, 50–51, 58, 59, 73, 78, 83n3, 84n7, 84n8, 85n36, 87n77, 87n110 authentic intellectual, 155, 238, 241, 250, 275n49 Bainville, Jacques, 127 Balmand, Pascal, 196, 226n51 Bardèche Maurice, 26, 28n8, 114, 143, 188, 225n15, 236, 238, 242–249, 327

328

Index

256–257, 260–261, 264, 266, 271–272, 275n53–275n58, 276n83, 278n167, 279n180, 281, 294, 298, 303n101, 306, 309n4 Barnes, Ian R., 242, 244, 275n55, 279n178, 279n181 Bar-On, Tamir, 19, 242, 264, 275n54, 279n179, 282, 283, 284, 285, 288, 289, 300n7, 300n11–300n12, 301n15, 301n18, 301n22, 301n26, 302n44, 302n46 Barrès, Maurice, 3–4, 26, 28n4, 29n21, 30n45, 36, 38, 40, 43, 45–52, 54–55, 58, 59, 60–64, 65–67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 75, 76–77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84n10, 85n45, 86n52, 86n56, 86n61, 88n131, 88n146–88n149, 89n182, 91n227, 99, 101, 106, 107–108, 111, 113, 115, 120, 124, 133n99, 155, 161, 183n144, 187, 198, 211, 247, 257, 291, 293, 294, 295, 307, 308 Beauvoir, Simone de, 8, 28n13, 214, 231, 241, 256, 268, 269, 275n50, 277n136 Benda, Julien, 73, 89n182, 137, 157, 170, 211, 218, 245, 267, 269 Benoist, Alain de, 6, 19, 26, 72, 114, 266, 272, 281–299, 300n11, 301n31, 302n76, 303n83–303n84, 303n103 Béraud, Henri, 170, 176, 190, 233, 235 Berstein, Serge, 11, 29n25, 183n144, 187 Binet, René, 236, 249 blacklist, 206, 233, 235, 241, 243, 251, 254, 263, 269 Blondin, Antoine, 265 Blum, Leon, 46, 74, 75, 134n154, 140, 166, 176, 228n135 Bodin, Louis, 53, 71, 83n4 Bompaire-Evesque, Claire-Françoise, 96–98, 100, 115, 131n48, 135n155 Bonnard, Abel, 26, 138, 147–153, 155, 156, 158, 159–166, 171, 172, 173–175, 180n43–180n44, 181n74, 183n144, 184n165, 187, 196, 197, 216, 219–220, 225n12, 228n134, 238, 295 Brasillach, Robert, 10, 70, 106, 123, 143, 148, 164, 167, 176, 190, 198, 202, 203, 219, 224n1, 228n134, 233, 242, 243, 246, 265, 269, 271, 275n56

Brisson, Henri, 37, 49 Bruneau, Jean-Baptiste, 197, 226n57, 226n59 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 6, 7, 26, 38, 39, 44, 45, 47, 49, 53–59, 61, 63–65, 67–69, 69, 70, 71–74, 79, 81, 82, 88n143, 90n216, 91n230, 96, 116, 120, 122, 131n45, 151, 155, 196, 306, 307 Burrin, Philippe, 11, 18, 29n23, 31n59, 141, 171, 183n144, 187, 189, 224n7, 225n21 cafés, 8, 24, 74, 75, 76, 90n194, 90n196, 123, 126, 268–269 cafés-philo, 298, 303n101 Cagoule, 144 Cahm, Eric, 38, 44, 84n9, 84n12, 84n19, 85n48, 90n200 Camus, Albert, 32n77, 218, 231, 234, 237, 238, 239, 254, 259, 262, 266, 269, 272, 274n39 Camus, Jean-Yves, 30n49, 235, 285, 301n24 Candide, 176–177, 190 Cartel des gauche, 142 Cassou, Jean, 170, 218, 231, 262, 264 Catholicism, 13, 14, 30n44, 38, 41, 44, 47, 56, 81, 82, 91n230, 95, 96, 101–102, 106, 111, 112, 126, 134n142, 134n147, 141, 143, 202, 227n82, 234, 235–236, 268, 273n1, 285 Ce Soir, 177, 268 Céline, Louis Ferdinand, 198, 203, 216, 219, 228n134, 266 Cercle Fustel de Coulanges, 126, 148, 149, 173 Cercle Proudhon, 101, 126, 132n85 Cercles européen, 216 Cercles Populaires Français (CPF), 148, 154, 156, 172–173, 184n166, 184n172 Chack, Paul, 172, 173, 216 Chadwick, Kay, 30n44, 202, 227n82 Chaitin, Gilbert D., 40–41, 84n23, 84n26, 84n28, 98, 129n1, 130n21 Charle, Christophe, 32n91, 36, 71, 78, 86n69, 90n210, 309n1 Châteaubriant, Alphonse de, 8, 26, 30n44, 148, 194–195, 198, 199, 202–207, 208–209, 211–213, 216, 219,

Index 222, 224, 227n107, 233, 295, 306, 307 civilization, 78, 106, 116, 118, 132n91, 147, 148, 165, 173, 176, 179n20, 182n134, 207, 213, 241, 251, 257, 259–260, 272, 278n163, 309n4 Claude, Georges, 187, 213, 216, 219 Claudel, Paul, 99, 271 Clemenceau, Georges, 3, 37, 44, 48, 51, 74, 84n7 Club de l’Horloge, 285 La Cocarde, 47, 111 Collaboration : Groupement des énergies françaises pour l’unité continentale, 204 Collaboration, 1, 4, 10, 11, 15, 17, 25, 30n50, 31n68, 112, 126, 132n85, 160, 168, 186–195, 195–197, 199–213, 215–223, 224n9, 228n131, 228n134, 231–233, 235, 236, 239, 242, 244, 245, 246, 251, 262–263, 266, 269–271, 273n9, 276n83, 306 collectivism, 45, 47, 61, 68–69 Combat, 143, 194, 218, 222, 226n46, 237, 255, 267, 274n28, 274n39, 277n118, 277n132 Combes, Émile, 91n227, 91n229, 95, 98 Comintern, 139, 140, 168, 169, 273n1 Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (CVIA), 139, 140, 153, 169, 170–171, 184n160 Comité national des écrivains (CNE), 6–7, 206, 215, 217–218, 229n166, 231–233, 235, 238, 241, 251, 253, 262–263, 269 Comité national français, 264 Commune (journal), 168, 169, 172–173, 175, 177, 183n152 communism, 25, 137, 138–139, 153–154, 157–158, 159, 160, 163, 165, 166, 169, 170, 177–178, 178n5, 180n39, 180n41, 181n99, 183n144, 184n186, 189, 199, 203, 208, 234, 236, 241, 251, 264, 266, 268, 271, 282 Compagnon, Antoine, 54, 55 complete man, 160, 161, 197, 201, 209–210, 211, 223, 295 Coppée, François, 75, 76, 79, 90n217 Coulanges, Numa Denis Fustel de, 115 Cercle Fustel de Coulanges, 126, 148

329

Cahiers Fustel de Coulanges: Revue Bitrimestrielle, 149, 173, 180n53, 180n55, 182n123, 182n129–182n130, 184n173–184n175 Croisset, Alfred, 97 Croix de Feu, 86n52, 179n19 Curatolo, Bruno, 249, 276n90 Daladier, Édouard, 138 Darlu, Alphonse, 43, 44, 55, 65, 67–68, 73, 133n133 Datta, Venita, 36, 40–41 Daudet, Léon, 54, 76, 90n202, 113, 126–127, 134n150 Dausset, Louis, 50, 81, 88n120 Déat, Marcel, 18, 29n23, 188, 224n7 Dechezelles, Stéphaine, 6, 8 Decour, Jacques, 215, 221, 229n166 Défense de l’Occident, 131n50, 173, 243, 247, 260, 266, 275n60, 276n88, 278n164, 279n180, 281 Défense de la France, 218, 221 Deloncle, Eugène, 144, 250, 276n94 Derfler, Leslie, 38, 84n16 Déroulède, Paul, 47, 81, 82, 84n10, 91n227 Dobry, Michel, 12 Donegani, Jean-Marie, 20 Doriot, Jacques, 18, 19, 29n23, 141, 148, 154, 155–156, 160, 171, 197 Doumic, René, 49, 59, 70, 71, 72, 80, 82, 88n115, 89n177, 90n220, 91n228, 119, 133n119 Drake, David, 39, 95, 100, 138, 234 Dreyfus Affair, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 18, 23, 25, 26, 28n7, 31n73, 32n83, 35–41, 43, 44, 46–47, 48, 50, 53, 54, 56, 61, 62, 65, 66, 66–67, 69–70, 71, 73–76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 83n1–84n29, 85n45, 85n48–86n49, 86n56, 86n69, 87n84, 89n167, 89n169, 90n200, 90n224, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 102, 105, 108, 112, 117, 121, 127–128, 130n8–130n9, 132n89, 138, 140, 150, 166, 171, 173, 178n1, 178n6, 192, 201, 220, 225n28, 228n131, 230n171, 237, 240, 257, 278n176, 290, 291, 295, 309n4. See also Dreyfusards; anti-Dreyfusards

330

Index

Dreyfusards, 2, 3–188, 6–7, 15, 18, 23, 35, 37–40, 41–55, 56–82, 84n11, 85n36, 85n47, 87n90, 88n143, 89n176, 89n180, 89n182, 91n229, 93, 95–96, 98, 99, 101, 104, 107, 108, 111, 113, 127, 133n133, 134n154, 145, 151, 291, 308 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 1, 4, 26, 28n5, 29n21, 32n87, 139, 154, 155, 156, 171–172, 173, 175, 177, 188, 194–203, 205, 206, 208–209, 210–212, 213, 216, 218, 219–220, 222, 224, 228n134–228n135, 233, 242, 247, 249, 255, 267, 294, 306 Drumont, Édouard, 39, 54, 84n18, 85n45 Duclaux, Émile, 43, 55 Dujardin, Philippe, 24 Duranton-Crabol, Anne-Marie, 19, 290 Durkheim, Émile, 52, 73, 97, 107, 108–109, 114–115, 119, 123, 124, 128, 133n118 École Normale Supérieure, 53, 59, 70, 89n168, 96, 109, 125, 130n10, 167, 183n139, 243, 306 Écrits de Paris, 235, 266 Éditions de Minuit, 218 Éléments, 298 Éluard, Paul, 262–263, 269–270 L’Émancipation Nationale, 154, 172, 173, 176, 198 engagement, 1–4, 5, 6–8, 15–16, 18, 20–21, 22, 23–25, 26, 27, 28n10, 32n84, 35–38, 45, 48–50, 56, 57, 60, 68, 70, 72–73, 75, 77, 78–79, 82–83, 93, 96, 97, 99–100, 102, 106–107, 110, 111, 113–114, 119, 121, 122–123, 124, 128, 129, 134n134, 134n147, 137, 138–139, 140, 145, 146, 147, 154, 155, 159, 160, 164, 165, 166–167, 169, 170, 171, 173, 175, 178, 182n107, 190, 194, 198, 204, 207, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215–217, 221, 223, 226n57, 231, 233, 236, 238, 240–241, 242, 243, 248–251, 255, 256, 258–260, 262–263, 264, 267, 269, 272, 276n101, 281, 282, 286, 290, 297, 298, 305–309

Enlightenment, 12–13, 22, 29n31, 30n45, 32n85, 33n101, 42, 43, 64, 81, 82, 86n60, 102, 113, 132n81, 140, 162, 194, 210, 241, 282; rationalism, 42, 43, 45, 51, 61, 65–66, 82, 102–103, 134n142, 159, 193, 208–209, 210, 212; reason, 22, 31n64, 42, 43, 48–49, 51, 64, 66, 67, 82, 108, 162, 209, 212 enquête, 8, 87n90, 97, 107, 113, 116, 183n152, 239, 255, 271, 274n34 Enquête sur la monarchie, 111, 113, 116, 132n80, 133n101, 133n127 enracinement, 44, 47, 131n45, 294 Esprit, 183n152, 231, 234, 235, 237, 268, 275n44 L'Esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne, 96, 117, 131n38, 131n44, 131n59–131n67, 131n71, 133n108, 133n117, 133n121 L’Étudiant français, 124, 167, 250 Europeanism, 15, 106, 147, 164–165, 192, 212–213, 223, 242, 285–286, 291, 295, 303n84, 307, 309n4 extraparliamentary right, 115, 128, 142, 143, 152–153, 291 Fabrègues, Jean de, 143 Fabre-Luce, Alfred, 172, 197 Faisceau, 101, 130n35, 142, 143 fascism, 10–12, 14, 17–18, 25, 29n20–29n28, 30n45, 30n50, 31n59, 31n62, 31n73–32n79, 32n84, 32n87, 47, 86n52, 86n54, 86n59, 89n158, 101, 106, 112, 123, 129, 130n35, 131n52, 137–142, 145–148, 151, 153–156, 158, 159–160, 161–164, 166, 168, 169–170, 170–171, 179n14–179n16, 179n20, 179n24, 179n29, 181n78, 183n144, 186–188, 191, 194, 195–201, 202–205, 206, 207, 209–212, 215, 217, 219, 220, 223, 224n1, 224n7, 224n9, 225n19, 226n53–226n60, 226n80, 228n131–228n134, 228n137, 235, 236, 241, 242, 243, 247–248, 251, 253, 256, 257, 260, 262, 264, 275n53–275n55, 276n79, 276n85, 277n139, 278n164–278n167, 279n179, 289, 292, 300n10–300n12, 301n14–301n15, 301n22, 302n44, 302n47, 309n4; neofascism, 28n11, 28n14, 236, 242, 243,

Index 248, 260–261, 264, 265, 266, 272, 281–284. See also antifascism Fégy, Camille, 172 Fernandez, Ramon, 26, 153–162, 165, 166, 167–168, 171–172, 173, 175, 181n78–182n103, 182n110, 182n113, 182n122, 182n125, 182n132, 183n142, 183n144–183n148, 184n163, 184n168, 184n170–184n171, 220, 295 Le Figaro, 47, 72, 75, 107, 122, 127, 132n80, 147, 177, 190, 229n168, 268, 274n30 Forth, Christopher E., 39, 40, 41, 210, 228n131 France, Anatole, 65, 69, 71, 75, 76, 116, 134n154, 198, 273n9 Franco-German rapprochement, 165, 172, 178, 203 Franc-Tireur, 193, 218 French Revolution, 13, 14, 30n44, 31n67, 39, 42, 43, 47, 51, 54, 57, 84n27–84n29, 85n47, 101, 105, 109, 112, 116, 120, 124, 134n142, 145, 162, 179n13, 180n33, 192–193, 225n12, 241, 282, 300n11, 301n13 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), 251 Front National, 11, 14–15, 235, 264, 285–286 Fuller, Robert Lynn, 13, 85n45, 86n52 Gaulle, Charles de, 186, 231, 239, 251, 252–253, 257–258, 264, 267, 270–271, 274n30, 277n102, 278n151 Gaullists, 5, 17, 215, 231–235, 237–239, 242, 248, 249, 251, 253, 258, 260, 266, 268, 270, 273n1, 274n30, 281 Gautier, Jean-Paul, 11, 14, 187, 224n7, 235–236 La Gerbe, 180n54, 198, 202, 202–205, 219, 221–223, 230n170 Germany, 15, 25, 30n44, 46, 63, 85n45, 94, 95, 96, 100, 103, 107–108, 112, 114, 117–118, 120, 139–140, 141, 240, 264, 309n4; Nazi Germany, 147–148, 164, 165, 168, 173, 178, 183n144, 185–186, 187, 188–189, 191, 192, 197, 202–204, 207, 208, 213–214, 215–216,

331

217, 221, 222–223, 224n1–224n4, 225n21, 228n131, 228n134, 230n170, 230n180, 243, 258, 260 Gide, André, 64, 69, 75, 82, 88n138, 89n182, 137, 139, 145–146, 154, 168, 169–170, 177, 180n42, 181n79, 186, 189, 198, 218, 219, 271 Gildea, Robert, 189, 224n4 Golsan, Richard J., 32n87, 196–197, 202 Goyet, Bruno, 12, 112, 113 Gramscism, 112, 281, 290–291 Grasset Publishing, 222 Griffin, Roger, 183n144, 188, 225n16, 283, 284 Griffiths, Richard, 5, 21, 42, 68, 71 Gringoire, 139, 176–177 Groupe Collaboration, 202, 204, 205–206, 213, 216–217, 219 Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européene (GRECE), 6, 25, 31n69, 243–244, 264, 272, 281, 282, 284, 285, 286, 288–291, 292, 294, 296–299, 300n1, 301n31, 302n61, 303n91, 303n96, 303n101–303n102 Guéhenno, Jean, 156, 215, 218, 262, 269 Guyot, Yves, 55, 56, 65, 68–69, 77 Hainsworth, Paul, 13, 14 Hanna, Martha, 100 Harris, Ruth, 39, 41, 44, 46, 75 Henry, Major Hubert-Joseph, 37, 49 Henry Monument, 37, 42, 77, 85n39, 88n139, 90n207, 111 Hermant, Abel, 216, 219, 271 Herr, Lucien, 37, 44, 52–53, 70, 73, 86n49, 89n182, 100, 101, 109, 123, 134n154, 167, 254 Hewitt, Nicholas, 249–250 Hitler, Adolf, 139, 148, 170, 202, 203, 217 L’Humanité, 101, 127, 134n154, 173, 186, 218, 268 Hussards, 28n5, 234, 236, 248–249, 250, 265, 266, 267, 269, 270, 276n92–276n93, 277n108, 277n123–277n126, 279n187–279n189

332

Index

individualism, 42, 45, 46, 54, 61, 63, 67–68, 73, 85n41, 85n47, 88n152, 204, 226n53 intellectual identity, 1–7, 8–10, 12, 15, 17, 20, 21–27, 32n94, 35–36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 54, 55, 58, 60–61, 62, 69–72, 73, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82–83, 84n23–84n24, 89n162, 93, 100, 102, 107, 110, 111, 114, 116, 118, 121, 122, 124, 127, 129, 132n91, 145, 147, 150, 153, 154, 159, 165–166, 169, 173–176, 178, 186, 190, 193, 195, 196, 201, 202, 203, 206–207, 208, 209, 214–215, 217, 220, 221, 233, 236–239, 241, 242, 244, 246, 249, 252, 254–255, 258, 263, 267, 268, 272, 274n26, 281–283, 290, 296, 300, 305–306, 308 International Writers Congress for the Defense of Culture, 146 Irvine, William D., 11, 14, 17, 29n21, 31n62, 141, 142, 179n22, 187 Jackson, Julian, 187 Jamin, Jérôme, 15, 19 Jaurès, Jean, 39, 40, 45, 70, 73, 74, 86n51, 100, 101, 109, 288, 305, 309n1 Je Suis Partout, 139, 190, 198, 219, 228n134, 243 Jeantet, Claude, 172 Jenkins, Brian, 11, 28n6, 28n11, 28n15, 29n20, 30n43, 30n45, 30n49, 31n55, 31n61, 143, 179n14–179n15, 179n29, 189, 225n19, 300n12, 301n16, 301n24 Jeune Droite, 31n60, 106, 130n37, 139, 141, 143, 144, 159, 171, 176, 179n17, 276n96 Jeunes de l’Europe Nouvelle (JEN), 216–217, 229n163 Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui, 97, 107, 110 Jeunesses patriotes, 143 Jews, 64, 82, 91n230, 188, 194, 198, 202, 203, 211, 224n4, 228n134, 261 Joly, Laurent, 188 Le Journal, 50, 66, 86n70 Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 156, 172, 197, 266 Judt, Tony, 20, 234, 238

Kalman, Samuel, 13, 19, 29n23, 29n25, 29n28, 30n34, 30n44, 31n62, 31n65, 31n73, 32n80, 143, 179n16, 179n24–179n26 Kennedy, Sean, 12, 13, 19, 30n44, 142 Kessler, Nicholas, 101, 106, 130n37, 131n53–131n54, 141, 143, 179n17, 179n28, 182n134, 250, 276n96 Khilnani, Sunil, 238 Labrosse, Diane, 18, 31n59 Labyrinthe, 297 Langevin, Paul, 156, 170, 178n9, 183n158, 267 Langlois, Charles-Victor, 125, 131n41 Lanson, Gustave, 97, 104–105, 107, 114, 120, 123, 125, 133n133, 134n154 Lasserre, Pierre, 132n91 Laurent, Jacques, 6, 26, 28n5, 28n8, 143, 188, 224n3, 248–256, 257–260, 265, 267, 269, 271–272, 276n101, 277n102, 277n106, 278n151, 279n199, 306 Laval, Pierre, 186, 225n11 Lavisse, Ernest, 73, 97, 100, 103, 107, 114, 123, 128, 133n94, 133n133 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 266, 285 Le Sueur, James D., 237, 240, 274n26, 275n41 Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme (LVF), 187, 225n11 Lemaître, Jules, 50, 52, 69, 72, 74, 75, 76, 79–80, 81, 89n176, 113 Liberation, 183n144, 187, 189, 192, 200, 206, 208, 215, 231, 233, 235–236, 239, 243, 251, 252, 253, 257, 260, 262, 266, 270, 271, 274n30 La Libre Parole, 85n45, 87n111 Ligue antisémitique, 81 Ligue de la Patrie française, 3, 38, 46, 48, 50, 54, 58, 60, 72, 74–75, 77, 78, 80–81, 85n35, 86n70, 88n120, 89n174, 90n212, 90n218, 297 Ligue des Patriotes, 84n10, 85n45 Ligue française pour la défense des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, 37, 42, 43, 50, 85n43 littérateurs, 71, 139, 190 Lottman, Herbert R., 180n42, 183n150, 183n156, 184n185, 184n188, 269,

Index 279n204 Un magnifique réveil des intellectuels français, 164 maisons de culture, 154, 170 Malliavin, René, 235, 266 Malmö, 236, 242, 243, 264 Malraux, André, 145, 146, 177, 190, 218, 231, 242, 262, 266, 268, 270, 274n30, 275n52, 315 Mammone, Andrea, 28n6, 28n11, 28n15, 30n43, 30n45, 30n49, 31n55, 31n61, 242, 264, 275n54, 279n179, 300n12, 301n16, 301n24 Manifeste contre les excès du nationalisme, 173 Manfeste des écrivains français, 269 Manifeste des intellectuels, 78, 193 Manifeste aux intellectuels espagnols, 175 Manifeste des intellectuels français, 270 Manifeste des intellectuels français pour la défense de l’Occident, 139, 148, 180n48 Manifeste des jeunes intellectuels “mobilisables,” 173 Manifesto of the 121, 255, 269–270, 277n132–277n133 Marxism, 147, 149, 151, 158, 163, 180n53, 234, 253, 268, 294 Massis, Henri, 8, 26, 46, 86n53, 93, 96, 101, 105–111, 112, 116–121, 122, 123, 142, 143, 159, 161, 164, 167, 173, 175–176, 179n20, 180n48, 272, 274n21 Maulnier, Thierry, 123–124, 134n135, 143, 151, 159, 167, 175, 180n65, 239, 266, 270, 272 Mauriac sous de Gaulle, 250, 252, 253, 277n105 Mauriac, François, 170, 198, 215, 218, 231, 235, 238, 243, 246, 250, 258, 262, 266, 267, 269, 271, 276n83, 277n102, 278n151 Maurras, Charles, 26, 30n45, 37, 47, 51, 54, 74, 75, 96, 98, 101–102, 105, 106, 111–118, 120–121, 122, 124, 126–127, 128, 132n85, 132n92, 134n139, 142, 147, 156, 170, 171, 183n144, 186, 187,

333

188, 190, 198, 220, 233, 235, 245, 271, 306 Mazgaj, Paul, ix, 12, 22, 106, 131n51–131n52, 142, 144, 159 Mégret, Bruno, 285 Méline, Jules, 37 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 231, 267–268, 273n11 Milice française, 203, 233 Milza, Pierre, 11, 29n24, 183n144, 187, 224n7, 283 Les Modérés, 148, 152 Monod, Gabriel, 73, 94–95, 103, 115, 124 Montesquiou, Leon de, 120–121, 125, 127, 132n92 Morgan, Claude, 218, 229n166, 231, 262–263, 274n30 Mounier, Emmanuel, 143, 231, 235, 268 Mouvement des Intellectuels Français pour la Défense de la Paix, 264 Mouvement Républicain Populaire, 231, 273n1 Mudde, Cas, 13, 15, 30n38 Musée pedagogique, 125 Mussolini, Benito, 139, 173 national relativism, 45, 61–64, 83 national revolution, 164, 170, 173, 183n144, 184n160, 188, 284 nationalism, 15, 25, 28n10, 38, 39, 44, 46, 47, 51, 54, 63, 75, 82, 85n45, 86n58, 86n64–86n68, 87n78, 90n210, 90n212, 101, 111, 112, 120, 125, 142, 151, 159, 172, 173, 183n144, 183n155, 188, 192–193, 212, 213, 242, 254, 275n54, 279n179, 284, 291, 294, 295, 303n84, 307, 309n4 Nazis, 15, 47, 147, 160, 187–189, 190, 192, 193–194, 197, 211, 223, 224n4, 225n23, 228n131, 233, 242, 243, 324. See also Nazi Germany negationism, 242, 261, 272 Netter, Marie, 54, 55, 87n89, 87n97 Nimier, Roger, 254, 265 Nizan, Paul, 145, 146, 164, 169, 180n36, 182n134 Nobécourt, Jacques, 11, 29n25, 321 Nouvel ordre européen, 236

334

Index

Nouvelle Droite (ND), 15, 242, 243, 272, 281, 284, 301n18, 303n95 Nouvelle revue française (NRF), 134n134, 139, 154, 177, 182n134, 197–198, 214, 218, 219–220, 229n166, 268 Nouvelle Sorbonne, 25, 26, 98, 104, 108, 112–114, 115, 116–117, 121, 124, 127, 129, 130n12, 131n41, 131n48, 134n154, 148, 173, 309n4 occupation, 4, 25, 26, 31n68, 164, 178, 183n144, 185, 187, 189, 190, 191, 194–195, 196, 198, 199–201, 203–204, 205–208, 211, 214–215, 215–216, 218–221, 223, 224, 224n4–224n5, 225n23, 225n30, 228n131, 229n159, 230n170, 231, 238, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 262, 263, 264, 269, 271–272, 276n83, 278n151, 306 L’Opinion, 96, 107, 108 Ory, Pascal, 22, 23, 100, 137, 178n1, 179n11, 181n78, 187, 220, 225n11, 259, 278n176, 280n212 Ouston, Philip, 47 Page, René Pichard du, 205, 212–213, 213, 216, 227n100, 229n140, 229n143–229n149, 229n160, 229n162 La Parisienne, 249, 254, 254–255, 267 Parti communiste français (PCF), 19, 21, 139, 140, 145–146, 164, 168, 171, 180n36, 182n134, 186, 231–233, 238–239, 240, 252, 254, 256, 258, 263–264, 267–268, 270, 273n1, 273n5, 274n30, 275n44 Parti populaire français (PPF), 19, 21, 30n44, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 148, 153, 154, 156, 159, 160, 162, 164, 165, 168–169, 171–173, 176, 181n78, 181n91, 181n93, 182n133, 184n165, 184n171, 187, 197–198, 308 Parti social français, 179n26 Parti Solidarité Française (PSF), 143–144, 171 Passmore, Kevin, 12, 13, 16, 19, 101, 141, 142, 154, 171 patrie, 50, 51, 63–64, 65, 68, 77, 81, 111, 112, 120, 121, 134n142, 163, 165, 172, 182n121, 185, 191, 194, 207

Paulhan, Jean, 198, 217–218, 219, 229n166, 231, 239, 262, 266, 269, 273n9, 274n30 Paxton, Robert, 11, 183n144, 186–187, 188, 239 Péguy, Charles, 18, 31n61, 40, 45, 73, 75–76, 86n50, 98, 99, 100, 113, 198, 246 Pétain, Philippe, 10, 11, 106, 186–187, 202, 220, 225n11, 231, 235–236, 249, 257–258 petitions, 3, 8, 24, 33n95, 36–37, 48–49, 50, 52, 70, 77–78, 81, 84n7, 90n207, 97, 106, 116, 129, 135n155, 147, 173–175, 177, 234, 263, 269–270, 279n206, 308 Pollard, Miranda, 19, 30n44, 41, 210, 225n12 Popular Front, 22, 138, 140, 142, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149–150, 151, 152, 155, 159, 160, 165, 166, 167–168, 175, 176–177, 180n42, 185, 186, 195, 204, 211, 228n135 Pressensé, Françis de, 4, 35, 42, 50–51, 100, 134n154 Prochasson, Christophe, 11 Pujo, Maurice, 81, 95, 111, 127, 130n7, 130n9 purge, 6, 205, 206, 223, 229n155, 231–236, 239, 241, 242, 244–245, 246, 251, 253, 262, 264–265, 269, 273n7, 274n23, 274n38–275n40, 276n83 Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (RDR), 231–233, 268 Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF), 5, 231, 235, 273n1 realism, 6, 18, 43, 45, 49, 61, 64–66, 67, 68, 83, 150, 154, 156, 159–164, 165, 172, 178, 208–209, 212, 219, 223, 256–259, 261, 272, 291, 292, 294–296, 307, 309n4 Rebatet, Lucien, 176, 219, 228n134, 303n101 Rémond, René, 10, 12, 171, 183n144, 186 republican, 2, 5, 7, 8, 23, 27, 37–38, 41, 44, 52, 53–54, 57, 81–82, 85n45, 93, 95–97, 98–102, 103–105, 109, 113,

Index 114, 115, 119–121, 122, 123, 124–125, 127–129, 130n10, 131n48, 132n91–132n92, 134n147, 134n154, 138, 140–142, 145–146, 147, 148, 152, 162, 164, 166, 167, 170–171, 173, 177, 186, 187, 191, 193, 198, 199, 215, 233, 235, 237–238, 240, 240–241, 246, 250, 253, 261–262, 265, 266, 267, 271, 273n1, 274n30, 277n102, 282, 291, 305, 308 resistance, 6, 25, 30n50, 185, 186, 189–195, 195, 200, 201, 203, 205–206, 208, 213–215, 217–221, 223, 225n20–225n22, 226n46–210, 229n150–229n152, 230n169, 230n173, 231–233, 235, 237, 239, 243, 244, 249–251, 256, 257, 262–263, 266, 267, 269, 271, 274n30 La Révolution Nationale, 198 Revue Blanche, 73, 89n182, 89n183 Revue Bleue, 43, 73, 85n40 Revue des Deux Mondes, RDM, 53, 55, 56, 57–58, 69, 72–73, 74, 87n93, 87n102, 87n108, 88n143, 89n177 Rolland, Romain, 8, 125, 169, 202, 227n107 Romains, Jules, 99 Roy, Claude, 141, 218, 231, 252, 262–263, 269, 270 Sadoun, Marc, 20 Saint-Laurent, Cecil. See Jacques Laurent Saint Vincent, Bertrand de, 249, 278n163 salons, 24, 69, 72, 74–75, 76, 90n187, 90n190, 90n194, 110, 150, 168, 263 Sanos, Sandrine, 12, 142, 210, 228n131 Sapiro, Gisèle, 12, 19, 189, 215 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4, 177, 186, 190, 218, 224n1, 224n6, 231, 233–234, 238, 240, 241, 249, 251, 252, 258–259, 262, 264, 266, 268–270, 271, 273n5, 274n30, 275n49, 296 Schulmberger, Jean, 218 Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), 153, 171, 273n1 Seignobos, Charles, 52, 100, 103, 107, 114, 125, 131n41, 133n133

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Sergent, Pierre, 251, 269 Shields, James, 13, 29n33, 30n36, 30n46, 187, 225n10, 225n13–225n16, 274n25, 285, 301n20 Le Siècle, 32n82, 37, 56, 57, 77 Sirinelli, Jean-François, 14, 18, 22, 23, 31n63–31n64, 32n74, 32n83–32n85, 32n92, 86n49, 90n186, 90n195, 90n205, 100, 129, 135n160, 137, 178n1, 179n11, 181n78, 184n176, 184n182, 230n171, 234, 241, 259, 274n14, 274n16, 275n45, 278n174–278n176, 279n205, 280n212 Slama, Alain-Gérard, 19, 31n64 Sorel, Georges, 18, 39, 40, 53, 86n55, 99, 101, 126, 132n85, 187, 198 Soucy, Robert, 11, 14, 17, 29n21, 30n45, 47, 68, 86n52–86n53, 86n59, 89n158, 141, 179n15, 181n78, 183n144, 187, 196–197, 226n54, 226n60, 226n80, 228n132, 228n137 Soustelle, Jacques, 237–238, 274n28 Spanish Civil War, 140, 148, 175 Stavisky Affair, 31n73, 138–139, 144 Steeg, Théodore, 97, 127, 135n155 Sternhell, Zeev, 11, 12, 13, 17, 25–26, 29n21, 29n30, 30n45, 33n101, 47, 68, 99, 101, 112, 130n35, 141, 181n78, 183n144, 187 Suarès, André, 99, 211 Suarez, Georges, 197, 233 Sweets, John, 15, 183n144, 189 syndicalists, 18, 101, 112, 126, 132n85 Syveton, Gabriel, 50, 81, 88n120 La Table ronde (LTR), 251, 254, 266–267, 269, 308 Taguieff, Pierre-André, 19, 281–283, 288 Tarde, Alfred de, 93, 96, 107 Telos , 289, 301n30, 301n32, 302n41–302n42, 302n45, 302n54, 302n66, 303n93, 309n5 Le Temps, 79, 87n111, 103 Les Temps Modernes (LTM), 231, 239, 240, 249, 265, 267, 268, 274n34, 275n44 Thalamas Affair, 96

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Index

Third Republic, 30n35, 81, 82, 84n23, 86n55–86n56, 89n163, 89n168, 89n176, 96, 114, 127, 129n1, 130n34, 131n48, 135n155, 137, 166, 178n4, 179n25, 276n94 Toda, Michel, 101, 105, 130n36, 131n49, 132n72, 132n78–132n79, 133n125 La Trahison des clercs, 137 Trebitsch, Michel, 23–24, 33n96, 90n197, 90n199 Tucker, William R., 196, 226n53 Union sacrée, 20, 100 universalism, 22, 45, 61–63, 64, 83, 98, 120, 150, 159, 193, 212, 239–240, 291, 292, 293–294, 296, 307 universitaires, 53, 60, 62, 70–71, 77–78, 88n120, 94, 97, 109, 114, 115, 123, 124, 128, 129, 134n154, 167, 168, 220, 226n58 Vaillant-Couturier, Paul, 145, 146, 169, 180n40, 183n152, 183n154 Valois, Georges, 18, 39, 101, 143, 147 Varenne, Jean, 296–297 Vaugeois, Henri, 50, 81, 88n120, 95, 111, 116, 125, 127, 130n7, 130n9,

133n103, 134n136, 134n143 Versluis, Arthur, 282–283 Vichy, 10–11, 15, 18, 28n18–29n19, 40, 112, 130n34, 179n25, 186–191, 193, 197, 198, 199, 202, 207, 215–216, 220–221, 223, 224n3, 224n9, 225n11–225n18, 229n156, 231, 233, 235–236, 239, 243, 251, 257, 260, 264, 276n83 Waldeck-Rousseau, Pierre, 37–38, 81–82, 89n180, 91n227, 91n229, 95, 98 Watts, Philip, 236 Weber, Eugen, 47, 86n58, 112–113 Weiland, Jean, 205, 208, 216 Winock, Michel, 11, 13, 22, 29n25, 30n39, 33n95, 54, 81, 99, 112, 183n144, 187, 224n7, 235, 273n10, 274n21 Wohl, Robert, 99, 106 Wright, Julian, 25, 99 Zola, Émile, 3, 32n86, 37, 40, 42, 54, 55–56, 71, 74, 76, 85n36, 99, 106

About the Author

Sarah Shurts is associate professor of history at Bergen Community College in New Jersey. She received her PhD in Modern French History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the French extreme right and her recent publications include articles in Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, European History Quarterly, French Politics, Culture & Society, Journal of Modern European History, and History Teacher. She is a member of the governing council of the Western Society for French History, coeditor of the Journal of the Western Society for French History, and has served on several committees for the American Historical Association.

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