Rebatet (review)

This well-researched and informative introductory study of the fascist writer Lucien Rebatet (1903–72) provides a biographical overview, chapters on his journalism, art, film and music criticism and novels, a comprehensive bibliography and even (less predictably) an astrological study compiled by Marin de Charette. Ifri argues that Rebatet's eclecticism made him 'un cas à part' in French intellectual history and that he is unjustly remembered only as a self-confessed 'Collaborateur, et de l'espèce la plus frénétique'. Rebatet made a successful career in the right-wing press in the 1930s, distinguishing himself as a cinema critic (under the pseudonym François Vinneuil) and as an anti-Semitic 'specialist'. The riots of February 1934 awakened his political consciousness, arousing his disgust at the corruption of the political class and the passivity of the nationalist right. After publishing articles favourable to Hitler's Germany, he enthusiastically espoused the Nazification of occupied France, vilifying both the Vichy government and its adversaries (Ifri estimates that some forty people were arrested as a result of his denunciatory articles in Je suis partout). His book on Les Tribus du cinéma et du théâtre (published in Denoël's collection 'Les Juifs en France', 1941) alleged that the Jews who had invaded the artistic world were not creators but venal businessmen. In Les Décombres (1942), he extended his audience, targets and polemical verve to include the governments and sundry intellectuals of all persuasions (Maurras, Mauriac, Malraux) who had led France to disaster. The death sentence which he received in 1946 as a punishment for his rantings was eventually commuted to life imprisonment. The voluminous novel Les Deux Étendards, published in 1952, a few months before he was released from prison, failed to achieve either critical or popular acclaim; his most successful book was a history of music published in 1969. While the limits of this study are no doubt mainly attributable to the concise format of the series, one is left unconvinced that there is anything very exceptional about Rebatet (plenty of other writers have dabbled in extremist politics and paid a heavy price for pamphleteering). More attempt could have been made to probe the sources of his anti-Semitism and to connect him to the broader tradition of committed writing. A writer whose views and behaviour were as odious as Rebatet's needs more than this politely dispassionate account to rehabilitate him.