French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture by Jewel Spears Brooker (review)

66Rocky Mountain Review investigation into Eliot's position in the culture of high modernism, Mastery and Escape proves to be a consistently rewarding study. JANGORAK University ofDenver DAVDD CARROLL. French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, AntiSemitism , and the Ideology of Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. 299 p. As the title indicates, David Carroll's emphasis is on the aesthetic rather than the political in this thoughtful analysis ofthe relationship between political ideology and literature. "Literary fascism," as he defines it, is "not the application offascist ideology to literature," but instead "concerns the 'internal ' relations of fascism and literature" (7), since it involves a reciprocal exchange of ideals based on an aesthetic of totalization. In other words, Carroll asks: To what extent did literature and aesthetic theory serve to support and develop the political extremism and anti-Semitism of French literary fascists during the first half of the twentieth century—and to what extent did their political and fascist ideals inspire their aesthetic and literary expression? To answer the question, Carroll focuses on the different kinds of exchange between the two areas, starting with the protofascist "father " figures at the turn of the century, then studying the so-called "literary " fascists of the 1930s and 1940s. It is not surprising that the first group of fascist prototypes contains such anti-democratic and anti-Semitic extremists as Barres and Maurras, but the author himself admits that his choice of Charles Péguy might seem controversial to some. Carroll maintains, however, that Péguy's political utopianism had its "darker side" that later appealed to literary fascists linked with the Action Française movement. In the chapter entitled "The Beautiful Community: the Fascist Legacy of Charles Péguy," Carroll examines the question of how Péguy, "socialist, republican, Dreyfusard, severe critic of anti-Semitism, Catholic mystic" could have become one of the "founding fathers of fascism" (44). He demonstrates convincingly that the broad outlines (though certainly not all the details) of Péguy's mystical and aestheticist nationalism were easily absorbed into extremist nationalisms and literary fascism. The second half of the book treats those writers whom the author more specifically designates as "literary" fascists. In the case of Robert Brasillach, Carroll is careful to insist upon treating him as both writer and fascist, and he refuses to de-emphasize the ultimate political consequences of his "poetic" ultranationalism. Brasillach's aesthetics, while based upon Maurrassian extremist, nationalist, antiromantic, classical poetics and politics , were also directed toward a constant reawakening of tradition through an ongoing revolt against the emptiness ofthe present. Book Reviews67 Drieu la Rochelle, proponent of an extranationalist, European fascism, nevertheless shares with his fellow fascists in this work a hatred of modernity and democracy as well as the dream of a new "total man"—warrior, athlete, artist and thinker—whom he would associate with the birth of a new fascist order in Europe. In the end, Carroll argues, Drieu was "more of a Nazi than the Nazis, even more faithful to Hitlerism than Hitler himself" (145) because his aesthetic and political project was apocalyptic in scope, entailing the complete extinction of everything if the ideal of totalitarian man could not be accomplished. A more complicated problem, in the works of Drieu la Rochelle and others, is that of the relationship of gender differences to fascism. On the surface, there seems no question that a totalitarian masculinist ideology such as fascism can be a symptom of a deep fear of women—particularly nonsubservient women—but as Carroll shows, the issue is infinitely more complex. Hence one can find in Drieu's writing a certain ambiguity and ambivalence concerning the "gender" of fascism as well as its relation to homosexuality. In the two chapters analyzing literary anti-Semitism, Carroll demonstrates that the aesthetic and cultural ideology of an anti-Semitic summa such as Drumont's La France Juive (1885), in its all-encompassing condemnation of the Jew in every domain—social, political, economic and cultural —laid the groundwork for Celine's poetics, which Carroll designates a "total poetics" that "serves as the foundation on which his particular form of hallucinatory, totalitarian politics of race was built" (186). Avoiding the pitfall so common to Celine...