De la beauté comme violence: l'esthétique du fascisme français, 1919-1939, and: French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Movement of the 1970s (review)

Walter Benjamin's famous definition of fascism as the permeation of the aesthetic into modes of everyday life, brilliant as it was, has since become a cliché. It is impossible to discuss Italian fascism without recourse to its origins in F.-T. Marinetti's Futurism or Gabriele d'Annunzio's Legionnaires at Fiume. For German Nazism, the conscious theatricality of the torchlight processions and set-piece rallies went hand in hand with the exploitation of the new mechanical means of artistic reproduction, in particular on the part of Goebbels and Hitler, devotion to the possibilities of the cinema. Nor were these aesthetic elements merely adjuncts to a political project: they were at its core as both the means and expression of the will to control. In comparison with its neighbours to the north and to the south, French fascism has always appeared more problematic, to the extent that some historians, such as René Rémond, questioned its existence, seeing the French extreme right as being the continuation of the indigenous political traditions of Bonapartism or Boulangism. It is certainly true that one missing link in the French right of the 1930s was not merely a single acknowledged leader, let alone a single recognized party, but the ability to understand or manipulate the aesthetic to political purposes. Indeed, as Michel Lacroix shows in this study, it was the Front Populaire rather than the right who developed the politics of spectacle, through the great carnevalesque processions and the mass rallies at Luna-Park. A potentially richer field of exploration is the reaction of writers, and this is the real subject of Lacroix's book, though in this area he is embarking on a well-trodden path: Drieu, Brasillach, Céline, Maurras are discussed in relation to the great fascist themes of youth, leadership and war, though Maurras was far too patrician to be a fascist and Céline too maverick. In fact, less concentration on the major figures and more on the bit-players, such as the rest of Brasillach's team at Je suis partout, especially the art and film critic Rebatet, would have been useful. Nor is the reader helped by a scandalously inadequate index of just 100 entries.

In contrast, Michael Scott Christofferson's study of the antitotalitarian movement of the 1970s is more modest in ambition, but provides more illumination: and it does have a decent index. Like Lacroix, Christofferson begins on fairly well-charted territory, the gradual defection of fellow-travellers during the Fourth Republic, faced with an increasingly intractable PCF and a highly authoritarian and expansionist USSR. Where the story becomes interesting is in his discussion of May 68 and its aftermath in the context of the international reaction to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and the rise of the 'nouveaux philosophes' during the presidency of Giscard d'Estaing. For all that, Christofferson exaggerates the decline of the PCF before 1982 and the fact that initially it owed its demise to overly close collaboration with Mitterrand during the Mauroy governments. In fact, it is not clear that the book's title adequately reflects the story: in many ways, apart from the 'nouveaux philosophes', is not so much a case of 'intellectuals against the left' as intellectuals within the left trying to find that oldest of political Holy Grails, a non-Stalinist or post-Stalinist home. And one of the ironies, and dangers, as Sartre was only too aware, was that of turning to traditional right-wing discourse, which had continued unabated since the Second World War and derived from the fascists of the inter-war years and the Occupation.