French Literary Fascism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (review)

Book Reviews 191 These selections deal with such problems as well as with others that are more subtle-tcivialization, for example, or its relative, commercialization , or the simple-mindedness ofthose who believe that we will somehow become better people by learning about the Holocaust, or that studying it "will prevent such a thing from ever happening again," in the familiar phrase. Yet others see great danger to Jewish identity if being hated and murdered is the thing that most Jews know best about Jewish history and identity. No collection of articles, even if limited to the French scene, could possibly address the many questions that emerge from the Holocaust. This one, with its decided emphasis on literary and philosophical perspectives, does not recommend itself to a large audience. Although a number of the articles are clearly written and in other regards excellent (two of my favorites are those by Plottel and Greene), others are only too clearly the product of that unfortunate if familiar macciage of convenience: academic fashion and mediocre talent. Albert S. IJndemann Department of History University of California, Santa Barbara French LiteraryFascism, Nationalism,Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture, by David Carroll. Princeton, N]: Princeton University Press, 1995. 299 pp. $29.95. David Carroll explains that his focus on "literary fascism" was taken to understand better what constituted fascism for a diversified group of French writers and intellectuals and how fascism was for them both a nationalist (or Europeanist) political ideology and a nationalist aestheticaesthetics -as-ideology. Carroll further states that this "literary fascism" does not concern the "application" offascist ideology to literature, that is, the outside influences of fascism on his subjects, rather it concerns "the 'internal' relations of fascism and literature." To him, this internal literary fascism exploits the totalizing tendencies implicit in literature itself and constitutes a technique or mode offabrication, a form of fictionalizing or aestheticizing not just of literature but of politics as well, and the transformation of the 192 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 disparate elements of each into organic, totalized works of art. Carroll divides his intense study into two parts. The first part presents the "fathers" of French literary fascism. These include Maurice Barres, Charles Peguy, and Charles Maurras. Part two deals with the literary fascists proper, i.e., Robert Brasillach, Drieu la Rochelle, Edouard Drumont and louis-Ferdinand Celine, Lucien Rebatet, and Thierry Maulnier. It's quite a list, and at first view its elements seem incompatible. But Carroll puts forth a definition of fascism which seems to smooth over the rough edges. Fascism, he contends, is an extreme but logical development of a number of fundamental aesthetic concepts or cultural ideas: namely, the notion of the integrity of "Man" as a founding cultural principle and political goal; of the totalized, organic unity of the artwork as both an aesthetic and political ideal; and fmally, of culture considered as the model for the positive form of political totalization , the ultimate foundation for and the full realization and unification of both the individual and the collectivity. Other than the contention itself, this platonic point is hard to accept, creating as it does a convenient umbrella for what Carroll wants to prove and avoiding any strong relationship to the practice offascism. A secularist might consider fascism remarkable for its absence of putative spirituality, concerned more with pushing men around rather that extolling their cultural integrity. Mussolini might have claimed that the state was a spiritual and moral fact in itself, "a transmitter of the spirit of the people," but his real point (made in the article he signed for the 1932 Enciclopedia italiana) was that fascism was a movement "born of the need for action and was itself from the beginning practical rather than theoretical." Mussolini is not mentioned in Carroll's book-a pity because, in admitting that fascism was fonned bya series of"aphorisms, anticipations, and aspirations," Mussolini comes close to explaining the real intellectual fonnation of those French writers whom Carroll cites as examples of French literary fascists. Although philosophy students recognize that the chicken-and-the-egg argument-which came first, the deed or the idea?-will never be resolved, it is hard...