Zarathustra a Parigi: La ricezione di Nietzsche nella cultura francese del primo novecento by Alice Gonzi (review)

Alice Gonzi’s Zarathustra a Parigi analyzes the complex reception of Nietzsche’s work in French culture between 1877 and 1930. In the first chapter, she shows how French academic philosophy, generally of neo-Kantian orientation, and the Wagnerian circles in Paris in this period did not consider Nietzsche a canonical philosopher, but rather stigmatized his thought and minimized its importance. As early as 1891, Téodor de Wyzewa, in his F. Nietzsche, le dernier metaphysician, praised Nietzsche as a writer while criticizing him as a radical nihilist and pessimist. Although authors such as Daniel Halévy and Fernand Gregh treated Nietzsche as a philosopher of health and joy as well as a promoter of optimism and amor fati, against decadent culture, others, including Wyzewa, Ernest Seillière, Max Nordau, and Michel Bréal, referred to him in terms of immorality, “cruelty” (“cruellisme”), and illness, and André Gide rejected the idea of a Nietzschean “psychopathological philosophy.” Gonzi rightly emphasizes that the ambiguities of these first interpretations of Nietzsche’s thought in France were due to the lack of adequate and complete translations and to “mythologizing biographies” promoting the “Nietzsche-legend” (such as Ernst Bertram’s Nietzsche: Essai de mythologie, published in Germany in 1918, and translated into French in 1932).

While authors such as Alfred Fouillée and René Berthelot situated Nietzsche in the cultural climate of romanticism, other writers addressed his political stance. The French socialist Left rejected “undemocratic Nietzschean aristocracy” and endorsed the anti-fascist interpretations of Georges Bataille and Henri Lefebvre. Several anarchist authors treated Nietzsche as a critic of the middle class, hostile to the state and morality, and linked him to Michail Bakunin and Max Stirner. In his L’individualisme anarchiste (1904), Victor Basch in particular argued that there was nothing more opposed to Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch than the fascist celebration of brute force. In this context, Gonzi undertakes to explore the similarities and differences between Nietzsche and Stirner, observing that the reactionary circles of the French Right welcomed Nietzsche as an enemy of progress, a fierce critic of democracy and equality, and an admirer of aristocratic genius and hierarchical societies. With the outbreak of World War I and the rekindling of French patriotism and anti-German sentiment, however, interest in Nietzsche declined: the German soldier was labeled “a good disciple of Zarathustra” and Nietzsche’s thought was interpreted as a glorification of German imperialism, responsible for the war.

Particularly interesting in this first chapter is Gonzi’s analysis of Marcel Proust’s Recherche and his simplified and even caricatured image of Nietzsche. While Proust’s most important philosophical reference was probably Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche remains a constant undercurrent in Recherche, both in Proust’s sensitivity to artistic poiesis, as opposed to philosophical theoria, and in the idea that the truth of life consists in art. The dual, philosophical and literary nature of Nietzsche’s and Proust’s writings and their critical views of the idea of the substantial “self” allow Gonzi to establish deep parallels between them, and at the same time to reject the idea that Recherche treats Nietzsche’s thought only superficially or polemically. Proust seems instead to have used irony to mock the forced French interpretations of Nietzsche of the time.

The chapter ends with reference to the important works of Henri Lichtenberger, Charles Andler, Jules De Gaultier, Gide, Bataille, Paul Valéry, and Gilles Deleuze, as well as to Daniel Lesuer’s novel, Nietzschéenne, of 1908, the story of a young woman living according to Nietzsche’s ideas that raised the question of the relation between his thought and the feminine.

In the second chapter, Gonzi examines Nietzsche’s criticism of traditional values as being based on the distinction between pessimistic, or decadent, and Dionysian nihilism. She discusses Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s moralism in the light of Jules de Gaultier’s treatment...