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54 2 NEW MEN, NEW WOMEN gender and the totalitarian drift One of the seminal political developments in the western world at the end of World War I was the advent of international communism. The birth of communism destabilized Europe by introducing a genuinely revolutionary element to mass democratic politics and sowing fear among the middle and upper classes, thereby opening the door to right-wing authoritarianisms. The presence of the Soviet Union, which refused to participate in multilateral institutions such as the League of Nations, also undermined the international order. Many of the defining features of interwar Europe, including the rise of fascism and Nazism and the breakdown of the international security system established by the Treaty of Versailles, can accordingly trace their origins at least in part to international communism and, by extension, the Russian Revolution. During the second meeting in 1920 of the communist or Third International in Moscow, Lenin outlined the twenty-one conditions that socialist parties would have to meet in order to join the Comintern, as the organization came to be known. These conditions amounted to agreeing to follow Moscow’s lead and embracing the strategy of violent revolution rather than the gradualist reformism espoused by more moderate voices. In France, the result of the twenty-one conditions was the “schism at Tours” in December 1920, which saw the Socialist Party split in two. Led by Marcel Cachin and Ludovic-Oskar Frossard, those willing to submit to Lenin’s conditions formed the nascent Communist Party; while those who wished to maintain their independence from Moscow, led by Léon Blum and Marcel Sembat, stuck with the Socialist Party and the Second International. Thus, French politics underwent a profound shift whose effects would be felt throughout the interwar period and beyond. Perhaps in no area was this impact more obvious than in the politics of gender. The Communist Party introduced new visions, at least at times, of both masculinity and femininity, which historians have sometimes referred GENDER AND THE TOTALITARIAN DRIFT 55 to as the Communist “new man” and, less frequently, the Communist “new woman.” These deviations from mainstream gender ideals threatened to destabilize cherished institutions such as the French family just as communism itself threatened the social order. Contemporary critics worried most about the at-times unconventional view of femininity that was articulated in the Communist Party, which cast aside biological essentialism and envisioned a society where women would be men’s intellectual, social, cultural, and physical equals. In these ways, the Communist woman was indeed a radical departure. This perceived threat proved fleeting, however, as the party silenced its advocates by the 1930s; it was in fact the new man who made the more long-lasting and indeed subversive impact. Thus, this chapter primarily focuses on the phenomenon of the new men. The Communist new man helped inspire a fascist equivalent and together the fascist and Communist new men aroused a creeping totalitarian drift within French politics. In an attempt to staunch the bleeding of popular support from the center to the margins centrist parties began to flirt with the new men, as their own youths, in particular, adopted political masculinities more typically found on the extremes. The substance of these new men was problematic for French democracy. The Communist new man embodied the fraternalist rhetoric of the left, while giving that fraternalism a more militant, youthful, revolutionary, and violent gloss. The fascist new man borrowed heavily from the Communists’ rhetoric of brotherhood but abandoned their underlying egalitarianism, preferring instead to fuse the left’s fraternalism with the traditional right’s paternalism via the militarized language of discipline and order. So while the Communist new man was meant to be disciplined in aiding the overthrow of the political and social order so as to establish an egalitarian utopia, the fascist new man was instead directed to follow orders unquestioningly within the social and political hierarchy. He, however, retained the violent predispositions of the Communists’ new man without directing those energies toward social revolution; rather, his violence targeted the nation’s enemies, as defined by fascist leaders. The timing as well as the substance of the emergence of these new gender identities in French politics, moreover, suggests strongly that both the fascist and Communist new men were products of World War I. Their emphases on physicality, youthfulness, manly camaraderie, and discipline appear to reflect millions of men’s wartime experiences in the military and the militarization [18.118.126.241...

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