Lyricism, Aesthetic Tradition, and the Debates on Nationalism in La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1909-1914

This paper traces the early aesthetic orientation of the literary journal La Nouvelle Review Française (NRF), from its emergence in 1909 to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. My goal is to examine the NRF's role in shaping France's early twentieth-century cultural politics through the nationalist debates that involved literary tradition.¹ One of the most influential nationalist movements that emerged in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair was the Action Française. Its founder, Charles Maurras, praised ancestry and the native soil and approached the French nation as an organic entity. In his appeal for a distinctly French aesthetic tradition, Maurras used classicism to support the monarchist, anti-parliamentary and counter-revolutionary tenets of the Action Française. That is, Maurras called for a turn to seventeenth-century aesthetics and rejected nineteenth-century aesthetics, which he saw as a direct product of the French Revolution. The Action Française's most vocal opponents emerged within literary circles, from a group of literary critics led by André Gide and gathered around the Nouvelle Revue Française journal. In its founding years, the NRF developed the concept of classicisme moderne, or, modern classicism, with the aim of extending French classical thought into twentieth-century literature. The early NRF's aesthetic direction was, however, polemical in nature, because it developed largely in opposition to the Action Française. The NRF's classicisme moderne emerged largely in response to Charles Maurras, whose view of classicism combined literary history and political discourse in an equivocal manner.

Thus, I approach the NRF's early aesthetic orientation through the lens of literary polemics in order to consider the developing disparity between the NRF's modernist interest in classicism and the review's need to develop a version of tradition that would serve as an alternative to the Action Française. Although the NRF emerged as a distinctly twentieth-century review rooted in modernist pursuits, early on it also favored symbolism and romanticism in its public debates with Charles Maurras. This paper focuses on features of the NRF's conception of classicisme moderne and its role as a counter-example to the conceptions of literary tradition that came from the political right. Although the NRF founders wanted to distinguish themselves from nineteenth-century aesthetics, they devised a conception of aesthetic tradition that included nineteenth-century movements in order to argue for literature's separation from politics. In contrast to Maurras' juxtaposition of classicism and romanticism and his fusion of literary classicism with the doctrines of the right-wing movement of L'Action Française, the NRF grounded its classicisme moderne exclusively within literature, insisting on the continuity of aesthetic thought. Moreover, in its support of aesthetic autonomy— one that would counter the Action Française's conception of aesthetic tradition— the NRF turned to lyricism. It is through the revival of lyrical elements across literary genres that the early NRF attempted to separate literary tradition from political thought. The early NRF emphasized lyricism within its classicisme moderne in order to counter the Action Française's powerful absorption of literature into royalist political discourse. This paper approaches the NRF's vacillating aesthetic orientation from 1909 to 1914 as a critique of the Action Française in order to conclude that, for the NRF, the separation of aesthetic tradition from political issues and an emphasis on lyricism represented a means of countering the political right's problematic advocacy for nationalism.

The NRF's emergence in 1909 coincided with a significant development within the Action Française movement. By the early 1909, the Action Française had gained momentum in the French intellectual scene and had even included a daily namesake publication.² The Action Française journal was launched on March 21, 1908 by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois, with Léon Daudet as the editor-in-chief. Its editorial board included historians, literary critics, and economists such as Jacques Bainville, Jules Lemaître, and Georges Valois, all of whom praised Maurras' royalist politics in their writings...