Brassillach, Celine, and Drieu La Rochelle.
See this. That is a scholarly analysis of the writing style and perspectives of three prominent French fascist fiction authors of the inter-war period, and how those styles and perspectives differ from that of the political fiction written by leftist authors. You are encouraged to read the entire manuscript.
This article is available in:
Studies in 20th Century Literature: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol10/iss1/7
TOWARD AN ANALYSIS OF FASCIST FICTION:
THE CONTEMPTUOUS NARRATOR IN THE
WORKS OF BRASILLACH, CELINE AND
DRIEU LA ROCHELLE
MARY JEAN GREEN
Dartmouth College
Excerpts (emphasis added) and my comments:
Three important French novelists of the same period, however, identified themselves with fascism. Of these, the writer who has consistently claimed the greatest attention is Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose creation of a unique literary language has inspired a constant stream of critical studies. The reputation of Robert Brasillach suffered to some extent from his execution as a collaborator in 1945, but his memory has been kept alive by a loyal coterie of friends and admirers, including his brother-in-law, the literary scholar Maurice Bardeche. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, known for a long time primarily as the author of Le Feu follet (1931), the novel of decadence made into a film by Louis Malle, has, within the last decade, inspired a number of new critical and biographical studies. There have, however, been few attempts to undertake a general analysis of the nature of French fascist fiction. This is in part because the notion of fascism itself is hard to pin down, existing as it did in many different manifestations.
Yes, but all of those manifestations center on Roger Griffin’s “palingenetic ultra-nationalism.” Thus, palingenesis, rebirth, in the context of the Far Right, from a “nationalist” perspective, underlies the fascist worldview.
In my reading, these texts exhibit the repeated use of a distanced, even contemptuous, narrative voice, a technique which can be clearly related to a recognized feature of fascist ideology and which serves to distinguish these texts written under the sign of fascism from the fiction inspired by an ideology of the Left.
Given the tropism of fascism for elitism, hierarchy, the superior individual, with a disdain for “last man” perspectives, and a disgust with herd conformism toward liberal concepts, it is perfectly understandable that there is a “distanced, even contemptuous, narrative voice” – the fascist does not find common ground with the sheep-like masses; even a populist, collectivist fascism is hierarchical, with a view toward overcoming. A palingenetic individual will of course view a degenerate society with contempt, with a sense of distance.
Celine, of course, is the extreme case: he is as hard to pin down in his pamphlets as he is in his fiction, and the only elements that seem to emerge clearly from the ideological chaos of his texts is a hysterical fear of war and a violent hatred of the Jew, who becomes an outsized figure summing up all the forces of oppression in the modern world.
That seems a reasonable summation by Celine, particularly when looking at actual history and actual group behavior.
Drieu and Brasillach, at least, manage to discuss politics in standard expository prose required by their work as essayists and journalists. Even so, their political programs seem commonly to defy analysis. Speaking of Drieu, Brasillach and others of their colleagues, Raoul Girardet observes: . . . fascism corresponds much more exactly to what could more appropriately be called a romanticism. . . . The attraction of fascism is above all that of a few great affective themes of a certain form of lyricism, the exaltation of certain sentimental and moral values. It is to the forces of the passions, it is to the imagination and the sensibility that French fascism aims primarily to address itself.' Girardet's conclusion is a common one, shared by almost all those who attempt to submit these works to serious political analysis.
The above paragraph has a stench of polemical anti-fascism about it, but it is true that fascism is much more about aesthetic values than are the creeds of the Left. Thus:
In his political biography of Brasillach, William R. Tucker makes a similar point: it is significant, in this context that he never attempted to formulate a definition of fascism. . . . At the same time, however, his intuitive approach to politics prompted an awareness that fascism was as much a response to the movement of time, a style, and a feeling of exhilaration, as it was a political creed."'
Again, this is unfair in the sense of the extreme view in which these ideas are taken to their conclusion, seemingly stripping fascism of any core ideology or serious political content. However, again, there is some truth to the idea that of the various ideological permutations of 20th century world politics, fascism, compared to its rivals, was the one most concerned with style, feeling, and becoming, than with stale ideological dogma. Fascism does have a core, as elucidated by Griffin, and fascist ideology derives from that. But fascism was never about the navel-gazing, turgid, ideological minutiae of, say, Marxism.
The quest for precise statements on political or social issues has already been undertaken by a number of critics, and it has done little to bring out elements of commonality to fascist fiction. The most extensive study of these three writers has been undertaken by Tarmo Kunnas (Drieu la Rochelle, Celine, Brasillach et la tentation fasciste), who examines their views on fifteen issues identified with fascism. Not surprisingly, he finds differences among the three French fascists on almost every item.
Fascism cannot be broken down into any “fifteen issues" – that is a leftist-style view. Fascism is palingenetic ultra-nationalism, and within that context, fascism can be fairly protean, with various manifestations.
My approach, therefore, will be a different one. I will examine their fiction for evidence of the use of similar fictional techniques, techniques which might serve to differentiate works produced under the sign of fascism from treatments of often similar subjects produced by major writers of the Left in the 1930s. Taking as a possible point of departure what is perhaps the most striking feature of the phenomenon of European fascism in the inter-war years, we might expect to find in the fiction techniques that make possible the expression of a collective exhilaration, a mass movement of immense vitality.
So, we understand the perspective of this analysis – more on style and perspective than on specific ideological talking points. Very well.
In Les Sept Couleurs (1939), one of his protagonists is impressed by the collective spirit which animates the Nazi youth camps and the Nuremberg rallies and by the spontaneous popular enthusiasm for the Italian fascist regime. It is this eminently fascist spirit of collective enthusiasm that the narrator (and Brasillach) would most like to see in France, uniting the various classes and allowing them to transcend their mundane lives. In his posthumously-published work, Les Captifs, written in 1940, Brasillach's pro-fascist protagonist is even able to participate in an analogous experience in the French right-wing riots of February 1934.
“…eminently fascist spirit of collective enthusiasm…” – that describes the collectivist nature of fascism; it is not the ideal of the lowest common denominator (contra Evola’s objections of fascism’s mass nature) but a collective enthusiasm for national overcoming, represented in its purest form by an elite at the top of the societal hierarchy. Of course, all in society can contribute to, and partake in, this overcoming, but the hierarchy exists and the popular enthusiasm typically revolve around charismatic leaders – superior individuals.
Collective experience, in fact, seems to be more a property of the fiction of the Left. The influence of Jules Romains's unanimisme is felt strongly in Nizan's Le Cheval de Troie (1935), for example, where a Communist crowd involved in a riot is described as a single entity, animated by a common will. Mass rallies receive a similarly positive portrayal at the conclusion of Aragon's Les Cloches de Bale (1934) and Les Beaux Quartiers (1936) and even among non Communist leftists like Malraux in L 'Espoir (1937) and Le Temps du mepris (1935). In several instances in the fiction of the Left, the protagonist is itself a group, whose destiny is the real subject of the work.
More on this below, but an executive summary – the Left is anti-hierarchical, caters to the lowest common denominator, and is founded on “last man” values. The Left disdains the individual and individual initiative and views humanity through the lens of impersonal historical processes – akin to the mass-based “psychohistory” in the science fiction books of the Jew Asimov (the Mule is the only redeeming character in those books – the mutant whose individual abilities upsets the historical process applecart).
Rather than emphasizing a collective experience, the fascist fiction here under consideration repeatedly presents the perspective of a narrator or protagonist who is clearly distanced from those around him. Moreover, this narrator/protagonist tends to view other characters with an attitude of condescension, even of contempt. Brasillach, the champion of fascist camaraderie, might seem to present an exception to this contention, especially in his later novels. But when they are not dealing with a small group of kindred souls, Brasillach's narrators exhibit the same remote and contemptuous attitudes found in the more solitary protagonists of Celine and Drieu.
I write about this more below, but an executive summary – fascist ideology and aesthetic, valuing higher, noble values, founded on palingenesis, aimed at overcoming, would, as a matter of course, view liberal democratic/leftist values with disdain, and have “an attitude of condescension, even of contempt” for The Last Man. Why should any of that come as a surprise? Consider that “distance” your typical White nationalist of today has for all around him.
The era of the Great Depression, not surprisingly, witnessed a resurgence of the social novel, which had been out of literary fashion since the eclipse of Zola and the naturalists at the end of the nineteenth century. This resurgence was accompanied by a number of manifestos and movements, such as the "populist" and "proletarian" schools of literature and, of course, the ever-evolving doctrines of the Communists. As might have been expected, many of the works that constituted this new "literature of the people" were sympathetic to the goals and ideals of the Left. However, Celine also, quite naturally, set his two novels of the 1930s, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) and Mort a credit (1936), in the milieu of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie and working classes in which he had spent his life. Brasillach seemed simply to enjoy observing the inhabitants of the poor districts of Paris where he had lived as a student,6 and he made them the subject of two of his novels of the same period, L'Enfant de la nuit (1934) and Le Marchand d'oiseaux (1936). Although they are set in similar lower-class districts of Paris, Celine's and Brasillach's novels depict radically different worlds. Brasillach's fictional universe seems drawn from the Rene Clair musicals he so admired and is certainly closer to fairy tale and ballet than to the sordid realism of the naturalists. Celine's novelistic vision, on the other hand, turns the same Parisian reality into a nightmare world of asphyxiation and putrefaction…
I have to admit I laughed when I read “a nightmare world of asphyxiation and putrefaction.” But there is political meaning to that – to a real fascist, the degenerate and corrupt societies produced by liberal democracy, societies inhabited and led by “last men,” are akin to “a nightmare world of asphyxiation and putrefaction.”
…where the inhabitants carry on hostilities that parallel and even surpass those of the Great War. Despite these differences, the ideological stance which emerges from these novels is strikingly similar. At first glance, they seem relatively unburdened by ideological freight, unlike much of the social fiction of the Left. They lack the didactic tone that characterizes, in particular, Communist writers like Nizan and Aragon, and they seem free even of the commitment to improving the lot of the poor which is apparent in all the fiction of the Left.
However, the portrayal of the lower classes in the fiction of Brasillach and Celine is almost unrelievedly negative. Many of the working-class characters in all four novels are shown to be slovenly, alcoholic, and brutal, if not openly homicidal.
Truthful depictions?
The negative view of the lower-class milieu found in the social novel of the Right is the consequence of a distance that separates reader and characters. This distance is established through the interposition of an observing intelligence who is not identified with the lower-class setting and who mediates the reader's perception of events.
At least in fascist fiction this is done openly and honestly, as opposed to heavy-handed leftist writing that pushes an enforced identification of all with the lowest strata of society.
Celine's narrator/protagonists are not totally insensitive to the importance of economic factors. It was for this reason that his first novel, Voyage, was warmly received by critics of the Left. While economic deprivation makes the characters' lives unpleasant, however, it does not really seem to account for the perversity of their actions, which seem rather to result from tendencies inherent in their natures. This impression is made explicit in the many misanthropic aphorisms that punctuate Celine's texts.
The Right prioritizes inherent human nature and, unlike the Left, does not use excuses to justify subhuman behavior. As part of the rightist worldview, nature trumps nurture.
While Brasillach uses narrative strategies different from Celine's in his two social novels, he is careful to maintain a similar distancing. In L'Enfant de la nuit the first-person narrator, named Robert B., is an unemployed interior decorator who has come to live in their poor district of Vaugirard while he is temporarily down on his luck (naturally, he leaves as soon as he gets another job). His background and education raise him above the people he describes, and he observes them with the bemused and tolerant fascination of an outsider-mirroring the position of Brasillach himself when he lived in the same district.
As in the case of Celine, however, many of Brasillach's characters who live in equally deprived circumstances are able to lead lives of devotion to moral and aesthetic ideals. These people may be said to constitute an aristocracy of the poor in his work, and they are the characters upon whom his narrators lavish their attention.
The Far Right values personal responsibility, noble values, and self-overcoming; hence, characters from poorer origins who exemplify these traits will be valued.
The narrative distance found in Celine and Brasillach is not at all characteristic of the Left-oriented social novels of the 1930s. In general, the narrative strategies adopted by writers of the non Communist Left correspond to the well-known definition of the "populist" novel put forth by Gabriel Marcel: "a novelist is populist insofar as, taking as heroes men of the people, he succeeds in preserving with respect to them a non-spectacular attitude. . . . They become not only 'you' but `we.’
The Left reduces all to the lowest common denominator, “last man” values – we must all identify with the mass; here, collectivism is suffocating and claustrophobic, no healthy “distance” and perspective is allowed.
The omniscient narrator of the Communists, however, could always be counted upon to adopt what has been called the proletarian point of view." While the Communist writers of the 1930s do not limit themselves to portraying only the working classes, a Communist novel which does do so, Nizan's Le Cheval de Troie, adopts as its privileged point of view the perspective of the Communist worker group.
Communist fiction can be viewed as a very rigidly ideological form of political polemic, lacking in imagination and in contextual subtlety.
…in Celine's description of the urban settings, certain features are stressed and restressed until they take on the exaggerated nightmare qualities of the Celinian fictional universe. In the opening description of the Paris suburb of La Garenne-Rancy-already well-described by its name, which evokes a rancid atmosphere and hunted rabbits-the page overflows with vocabulary relating to slimy excrement. The same is true of the description of the Passage des Beresinas in Mort a credit, where the clients urinate on the shopkeepers and where the father spends his time shoveling shit. Everything with which Celine's narrators come into contact is deformed by a vision that seeks out and exaggerates the most repugnant features.
From the fascist perspective, degenerate liberal democratic society, particularly one afflicted with Jewish-derived values, can be represented in such stark terms, and the features can be exaggerated to make the contrast to a more ideal society more distinct.
Brasillach, too, moves away from simple realism in rather the opposite direction. His vision tends to play down or entirely overlook ugliness, to mute colors, to bring out hidden beauty. His preferred time of day in these Parisian novels is twilight, and his attention is attracted especially by the unusual and picturesque-like the bird-peddler or the shoemaker-poet-rather than by the typical or mundane.
This can be viewed as a form of fascist aesthetic.
Unlike Celine's fiction and some of Brasillach's, Drieu's novels are set in the world of wealth and political power which he himself frequented. The French masses are not at the center of his vision. On the few occasions when his protagonist is forced to confront them, however, he characteristically reacts with contempt and disgust…The first-person narrator of La Comedie de Charleroi is a veteran, returning to the Charleroi battlefield after the war with the mother of a dead comrade. Despite her total inability to comprehend the experience of war (a charge which had become a commonplace of war fiction), this woman, aided by her wealth, has made a career out of being the mother of a dead soldier, an enterprise for which the narrator does not attempt to conceal his disgust. By focusing on her, the novella shows power in French society being exercised by a character who is both a Jew and a woman, both perversions of the natural order according to Drieu.
This part - "a Jew and a woman, both perversions of the natural order according to Drieu” – can we really blame Drieu for that perspective? Now, with respect to “Jew” this is understandable from a (European-derived) fascist perspective – Jewish identity and the “Jewish soul” are viewed as profoundly alien, and thus a perversion of the natural order in any European, Western society. As regards women in general, one needs to remember fascism has a much masculinized political aesthetic and thus from the standpoint of inherent superior human values, contextualized as male, women would represent a perversion. But a White woman is not, or should not be, a perversion of the natural order the same as a Jew – the Jew is a perversion in totality form the Western fascist perspective (early Jewish supporters of Italian fascism notwithstanding), while women represent a perversion only from the narrow perspective of the male-oriented hierarchical perspective – there is a hierarchy of sex (male dominant) just as there is one of ethny and civilization and one of superior and inferior individuals.
Gilles's contempt is frequently directed against women characters who, as was the case with Mme Pragen, are often chosen as representatives of larger social groups." This is a technique also used to some extent by Celine, particularly in his distorted portrayal of Lola, the rich American volunteer in Voyage. In Gilles the protagonist's first wife Myriam is the Jewish intellectual, complete with unbecoming glasses…
Can you blame one for having contempt for a Jewess?
Drieu's work, like Caine's, ends with his protagonist isolated from others by his own choice. But this profound isolation has been inherent in the narrative voice from its first appearance. Brasillach's protagonists, too, are cut off from all but a few worthy souls by an attitude of innate superiority. The use of a distanced narrative voice that presents a denigrating view of all which comes within its purview is consequent with an important strain of French fascist thought.
This contempt for the degeneracy of liberal democracy and its society and the disdain for “last man” values is part and parcel of the superior man’s overcoming; this isolation and contempt has some association with some of Nietzsche’s work, but while Nietzsche’s superior man works for his own overcoming only, that of the fascist man works in the direction of serving is people (even with whatever “distance” he may have from and for them).
Despite the importance of collectivism for German national-socialism, Italian fascism, and even the French right-wing philosophy articulated by Marechal Petain, the three French fascist writers remain profoundly individualistic, as Tarmo Kunnas shows with reference to their political statements. But, Kunnas continues, what is at issue here is less a matter of individualism than of an attitude toward social hierarchy. One aspect of fascism that appears strongly in the work of all three writers is its anti-egalitarianism: It is the antidemocratic spirit, the spirit of hierarchy, which, along with corporatism, dominated the whole of fascist ideology. This antiegalitarian thought attracted our writers much more than the antiindividualism, because they think less of individual liberty than of the liberty of superior individuals. They are convinced that men are not equal…
As part of the fascist ideology and the fascist attitude – the fascist political aesthetic – collectivism is actualized only in the context of hierarchy. It is an individualist form of collectivism – not an oxymoron in this sense – in which the aspirations of the collective are achieved at least in part by the exertions of superior men. But the collective foundation remains because the superior man works in the interests of his collective – despite (or perhaps because of?) is feelings of distance and contempt for society.
Much the same is true of Sartre's Lucien Fleurier, protagonist of his novella about the evolution of a fascist, "L'Enfance d'un chef." Here, too, the narrator is cut off from the world, and, as he finds his identity with a group of young fascists-much like those idealized by Brasillach-he develops the characteristic attitude of contempt, which finds its natural expression, as with Nizan, in the savage beating of a dark-skinned foreigner. The story ends with Lucien, revelling in his bright new self-image, watching the crowd in a Paris café: All those dagos were floating in a dark heavy liquid whose ripples nudged their soft flesh, picking up their arms, moving their fingers, playing with their lips. The poor guys! Lucien almost felt sorry for them.
Well, that three sentences are certainly consistent with a Type I fetishist Nutzi “movement” mentality. Of course, from a British “the wogs begin at Calais” viewpoint, Lucien is just as bad as a “dago.” Of course, note that this was written by Sartre, a hard leftist, projecting his own views of what a fascist is, rather than being an authentic expression of fascist sensibilities.
In their portraits of fascists, Nizan and Sartre implicitly recognize that a fascist mentality is not just a set of political beliefs but a question of attitude. In the work of Brasillach, Celine and Drieu, this attitude is embedded deeply in the fiction.
Some we come full circle here to the meaning of fascism as reflected by the work of these three authors. Fascism does have an ideology and a set of political beliefs, but it is more than this – it is also an “attitude.” One can say that about any political ideology I suppose, but it is particularly true of fascism; no other political ideology is as dependent on attitude, on aesthetics, on feeling, on an innate sense of right and wrong than is fascism. In this sense, fascism is the political ideology most akin to religion, it is that ideology most dependent on faith and the least dependent on (as is Marxism) on rigid ideological formulas.
