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L'Esprit Créateur David Carroll. French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. Pp. 299. $29.95. How did prominent French writers of the interwar period, men of high learning and artistic sensitivity and achievement, come to embrace fascism's crude authoritarianism and the racist violence that drove some 75,000 Jews out of France during World War Il and sent them to their death at Auschwitz? In French Literary Fascism, David Carroll demonstrates that the pro-fascist xenophobia and nationalism of a Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rebatet, like the anti-Semitic venom Louis-Ferdinand Céline spewed in Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), were not aberrations of modern France's literary and political culture. Rather, the ideology that nourished these writers' contempt for Jews —and a host of other social categories and political identities—was of a piece with the aesthetic principles of unity, symmetry, harmony and order inherited from Classical Humanism. This totalizing ideal had been championed by an earlier generation of cultural and literary purists that included Maurice Barrés, Charles Maurras, Edouard Drumont, and even the militant Republican and Dreyfusard, Charles Péguy. The notions of autonomous , undivided subjectivity to which these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anti-Semitic and nationalist writers subscribed decisively influenced France's fascist and racist intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s, providing the philosophical and ideological underpinnings for the "particular literary and aesthetic convictions and ideals that led [French literary fascists] to and supported the anti-Semitic prejudices and extremist political positions they formulated and defended in their literary and critical texts as well as in their more directly political writings" (7). In his masterfully synthesizing analyses of texts drawn from a variety of genres, Carroll illustrates how monologic constructions of national, ethnic, racial, gender and linguistic identity turned French literary fascism's quest for the perfectly unified and ordered human collectivity into an almost spiritual artistic endeavor. Stridently marking the boundaries between inside and outside, this segment of France's interwar and wartime literary elite imagined a joyfully cohesive community of truly French Frenchmen mastering, by any means necessary, the menacing, sullying forces of difference. The same aesthetic doctrine that in their own writing practice dictated "the transformation of disparate elements [...] into organic, totalized works of art" (7) came to legitimate the dictatorial imposition of political, cultural and racial oneness that fascism had so spectacularly achieved in Germany and Italy. Yet Carroll makes a compelling case for locating the roots of French fascism not in neighboring political successes and traditions, but in France's own much revered literary and cultural heritage. In deconstructing the binary logic ruling the aesthetic ideology upon which a number of French literary fascists drew in imagining the totalitarian New Order for which they yearned, Carroll repeatedly points up the indigenous and normative, rather than foreign and marginal character of their textual practice and production. Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, who after the war claimed that French intellectuals who had been seduced by fascism were wholly outside of the national community, Carroll recognizes the lure the principle of oneness had for these writers and finds ample textual evidence of the reactionary force it has exerted in modern French political and cultural life. He is also keenly aware of the aggression toward unconforming others this ideal has historically fostered and authorized and is intent on alerting readers to the exclusionary violence undergirding the monolithic view of national community and identity French literary fascists aggressively promoted in the 1930s and early 1940s. Unfortunately, that view continues to define the terms of current political and legislative discussions in France regarding who is and who is not to be considered authentically French. Carroll's French Literary Fascism illuminates 92 Summer 1997 Book Reviews much about the historical antecedents of the political tensions and struggles surrounding France's current wars of national and cultural identity. It is a highly instructive, thoroughly researched work of historical and literary scholarship that merits a wide readership in a variety of disciplines. Rosemarie Scullion 77ie University of Iowa Pierre Nora et al. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Volume I: Conflicts and...

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