Both/And: Fascism in France
“There’s a moment between two brands of humanity when you find yourself thrashing around in a vacuum.”
Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of Night
Origins: The collective Subject
The battle for minds among the far-right in France has become predominantly a battle over cultural memory. With the degree of collaboration with Nazi Germany being brought to the fore by Robert O. Paxton’s Vichy and Marcel Ophul’s groundbreaking documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, the French were forced to confront their perception of their national character, this reckoning counterposed by a stubborn lineage of Holocaust deniers and Vichy apologists. A similar moment is occurring presently among Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, with rather successful attempts being made to soften their historically racist language by breaking ties to the party’s former life as an outgrowth of the wartime collaborationists and veterans of colonial wars. This effort at detoxification is largely being forged in the discursive field, distorting the perception and meaning of historical events “as a way of providing imaginaries for a certain political group.” Fascism’s dissemination consists of the under-development and de-differentiation, or psychological blurring, of modern subjects through a process of forceful propaganda, and we see this clearly in the ideological statements of French proto-fascist and fascist intellectuals historically.
In regard to those nascent elements of fascism, racism and the state of exception later outlined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, theorists had already drawn the topologies of thought by which the French were then implicated in the adjudication of World War II. Racism is given its French roots in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, with race being understood as the development of a collective cultural subject, rather than (initially) a biological one. Arendt details racism as a political ideology founded in “the new body politic of the nation,” tracing the first iteration of this ideology in France to an eighteenth century nobleman, the Comte de Boulainvilliers. Basing his racial philosophy on the “eternal right to conquest,” a rationalization providing a spiritual but not yet biological justification for social hierarchy, Boulainvilliers’ theory was that there had been a conquering Germanic Gaulic force that had swept away the barbaric Francs in some ancient, mythic past, thus granting the French noblemen a relationship with this “international caste” in their struggle against the bourgeoisie. While Boulainvilliers and company were not looking for identification with the Germans but the Romans, “the fact is that Frenchmen were to insist earlier than Germans or Englishmen on this idée fixe of Germanic superiority.”
These philosophies were developed by philosophers Joseph de Maistre and Comte Arthur de Gobineau into a theory of history and civilizational decay, known as the Counter-Enlightenment. Out of fear for the fate of aristocracy, Gobineau concerned himself in his 1853 Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races with the travails of decadence and the fall of civilization due to an inevitable catastrophe resulting from race-mixing. This pessimism was ill-received in the era of Darwinist positivity, in which the doctrine of eternal right to conquest was given new life as the ‘survival of the fittest,’ and his work was not taken up until the first World War.
Richard Wolin, in his penetrating analysis of the relationship of the Counter-Enlightenment to Postmodernism, writes that “the Nazis lionized Gobineau, and employed the Essay as a catechism for racial instruction.” While Gobineau’s theories of decay were analyzed and mobilized as a cudgel against the dirty masses, Steven Kale has argued that Gobineau’s racial hatred stems from his “disaffected legitimist” critique of centralization, or democracy as a result of “ethnic confusion.” One of Gobineau’s few political calls was for a decentralized monarchy styled after the Holy Roman Empire, a desire that could only serve to exacerbate his nihilism as the dialectical clash of civilizations continued.
The state of exception is another bellwether of fascism and a common political tool in post-1789 France, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues. The état de siège effectif/état de siège fictif, or the granting of emergency powers to the emperor in the instance of either a real or fictitious emergency, was first instituted July 8, 1791 and established by these names in 1797. Originally referring only to military locations, Agamben’s argument is that the state of exception as the expanded concept of the state itself emerges from specific laws passed by the French parliament. He writes:
The subsequent history of the state of siege is the history of its gradual emancipation from the wartime situation to which it was originally bound in order to be used as an extraordinary police measure to cope with internal sedition and disorder, thus changing from a real, or military, state of siege to a fictitious, or political one. In any case, it is important not to forget that the modern state of exception is a creation of the democratic-revolutionary tradition and not the absolutist one.
The use of this tactic did not cease after Napoleon, but continued to be used by leaders throughout World War II and after, with President Charles De Gaulle using Article 16 of the 1958 Constitution to grant himself emergency powers during the war in Algeria. This veil of democracy over the installation of dictatorial imperative is a necessary lens for analyzing the neofascism and alt-Right movements of contemporary France. Marine Le Pen’s new calls for referendums on heated social issues and an expanded executive power can be read as an attempt to institute an emergency form of governance granting the state untold power to police the social sphere.
One final analytical category that must be introduced is Walter Benjamin’s generative concept of fascism as “the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” that becoming-spectacular of political representation by which the masses express their desires in the body of the leader while no substantial change is made to their lives. Culture for the far-right French intelligentsia is political ideology, with the war for political power being largely fought in the realm of literature. Fascism and literature have an “internal” relation, blurring the boundaries between politics and art through the “totalizing tendencies implicit in literature itself,” the Romantic ideal of the “totalized, organic unity of the artwork as both an aesthetic and political ideal” that could inform the fascist subject’s sense of ‘Self.’
I will situate my brief history of French fascism in the writings of protofascist monarchists Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, whose nationalisms and concepts of the ‘Self’ make them undoubtedly the primary theoretical sources for a French iteration of fascism. I will then explore the influence of the intellectual torch-bearers in the second half of the 20th century on the contemporary far-right in France. It is by posing these notions of French tradition as a postmodern and aesthetic representation of tradition against the countervailing theories of the Counter-Enlightenment as outlined above that we will begin to understand the dialectic between the archaic and postmodern French traditions which characterizes French fascism today.
Barrès, Maurras, and their disciples
In a lineage of French fascism encompassing the movements immediately before the twentieth century through World War II, the story necessarily begins with the writing of Maurice Barrès. The author of two important trilogies, Le Culte du moi (The Cult of Self), and Le Roman de l’énergie nationale (The Novel of National Energy), Barrès engaged a generation of young intellectuals across the political spectrum in his nationalist ideological project. Robert Soucy described Barrès’ ideology as in some ways a “potpourri of ideas, attitudes, and values that was seldom digested by any two recipients the same way.” Regardless if the next generation of writers was inspired by or writing against Barrès’ virulent nationalism and cultural anti-semitism, the call to respond to him was formidable.
The major features of Barrès’ ideology were his violent disdain for decadence, his disgust with les dèracinés (the name of his most famous novel, translated to “the rootless”), and his call for a return to la terre et les morts (the soil and the dead), a traditionalism and vitality cultivating a sense of belonging to a French ethnic state. One must make a distinction between the earlier formulations of racial decay proffered by figures like Arthur de Gobineau and early modern figures like Barrès; for the early theorists of French fascism, it was not a war between the noblemen and the bourgeoisie, with the noblemen claiming an ancestral relationship to a mythic Germanic cult; this was instead the defense of a French identity, le culte du moi, a national and collective identity predicated upon taking the state into oneself, replete with the faux-Marxism that would come to characterize National Socialism. “For according to Barrès, it was the masses, especially the peasants, who were the natural carriers of the instinctual truths of the past…less corrupted by the abstract rationalism and artificial notions of a purely bookish education.” Barrès hoped to harness this ‘natural’ relationship of the masses to the land and the dead through a style of writing and a call for national unity under the figure of this symbolic ‘Self’ (state, Body, One).
Another seminal figure in early French fascism was Charles Maurras. Maurras was an organizer of the Action Française, a monarchist and counterrevolutionary political movement mobilized by the left’s response to the Dreyfus Affair, and Charles Boulanger’s political success in 1899. They found a large body of support among Catholics, although Maurras himself was agnostic. With their own journal, and a youth league known as the camelots du roi, the Action Française molded itself around a Barrès-like “integral nationalism” and the image of the King as the absolute subject, or the embodiment of the Nation as organic unity. Maurras sought the restoration of a lost French imperial tradition. David Carroll’s wonderful French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture provides insight into the ways Maurras utilized his classical aesthetic in the call for a new political ‘Force.’ Maurras believed that “France, in order to realize itself fully, had to activate in the aesthetic-political realms the same violent forces that Napoleon successfully inspired and mastered in the military realm.” The call was to topple the Romantic French aesthetic toward a strict, unified, violent and lashing voice of authority that could carry the arcane forward – what a later figure on the French right will call archeofuturism. Carroll writes that in the instance of this integral or spiritual nationalism taking hold of the cultural sphere, “politics would then become the genuine expression of the work of the nation and would also in turn (re)produce the nation as an artwork.”
For both Barrès and Maurras, there is a decadent individualism inherent to the democratizing spirit of Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau and Tocqueville that needed to be violently fractured in order to be reborn as the collective subject. To return to Benjamin’s aestheticization of politics, this meant that culture needed to become the theater by which this rebirth might occur. There needed to be representations of this virile French subjectivity so that les dèracinés might be alienated more instinctually, and one might associate themselves with this glory of Self-as-collective-dynamism. While these ancestors of French fascism were later overtaken by their more mechanical and modern missionaries, such as George Valois and his Faisceau or Fascist collaborationist writers Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Robert Brasillach, their conceptualization of the aesthetic conditions under which a modern authoritarian leader might come to power served as the stage upon which these fascist actors spoke. Responding to the nominalism and doom of the Counter-Enlightenment or theory of inevitable civilizational decay, these prefigures of French fascism outlined an anti-semitism, racism, and authoritarianism that they believed could save Western civilization from the inevitable destruction these early theorists had predicted. However, we have since seen a synthesis of these two trends – a return of the Counter-Enlightenment, alongside the aesthetic process of cultivating a de-differentiated collective subjectivity as encouraged by these proto-fascists. The blurring of lines between independent subjectivities is a line of thought among both the Right and the Left in twentieth century France, as we will see in the response of the Nouvelle Droite to the uprisings of May 1968.
GRECE and the Ordre Nouveau
The Groupe de Recherche et d’Etude pour la Civilisation Européene (GRECE) was a think tank at the core of what became known as the Nouvelle Droite, or New Right. Their founding philosopher Alain de Benoist began his political journey as a protege of Dominique Venner, a former member of the terrorist Organisation armée secrete (OAS), who fought to keep Algeria colonized. Benoist participated in militant student groups through the 1960s by Venner’s encouragement, but found himself more inclined towards the models of political education that were to be his first grafting of Marxist concepts onto the New Right. Helping to organize journals in the post-Algeria moment, Benoist found his voice as a critic of the traditionalism at the root of French fascism, that of Barrès, Maurras, and the Action Française. Benoist and the GRECE called instead for a synthesis of the Counter-Enlightenment theories of civilizational decay and Teutonic myth with a newly invigorated racism, grounded in the need to defend the European white race against the ugly and colorful masses of the Third World.
The central philosophy of the Nouvelle Droite (New Right) is that of “metapolitics,” a philosophy inspired by the work of Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. While Gramsci himself never used the word, the development of cultural power through political education was the concept Benoist associated with his term metapolitics. We can actually trace the initial appearance of this word to the Counter-Enlightenment. Joseph de Maistre explains the term as the equivalent of ‘metaphysics’ in politics, or that which underpins and comes after politics. Benoist’s charge for the New Right was to engage in “a cultural struggle aimed at changing perceptions, affections and worldviews, so as to naturalize a politics from the right, and to enable the reintroduction of ideas that had become anathema after the Second World War.” The technique Benoist relies on in order to carry out this mission is what Jacob Collins in his book on French political thought after 1968, terms “concealing unconcealement,” or the gesturing to quotations to imply certain political positions and thus avoid personal implication. An example of this technique is Benoist’s insistence on a culture’s “right to difference.” Originally a socialist concept, it was then taken up by the New Right in a disingenuous self-legitimation aimed at influencing mainstream discourse. Purporting to defend this right while upholding the spiritual glory of the white European, GRECE has used this sleight-of-hand as the basis for its creative ontological reordering in which ‘difference’ and ‘diversity’ become predicated upon ‘defense’ and ‘strength’ against the invading hordes. While never directly engaged in party politics, Alain de Benoist has been seen with Marine Le Pen’s onetime compatriot Florian Philippot and appears to be recognizing an opening for his ideology in the current political conjuncture.
Maurice Bardèche during his Trial for Panegyric of Murder, January 22, 1951
Maurice Bardèche
Before confronting the contemporary political moment, I must introduce one last troubled figure into this disdainful milieu. Maurice Bardèche (1907-1998) is a figure less discussed among scholars of fascism, but whose commitment to fascism after World War II provides glaring insight into the character of wartime collaborators, as well as the ways in which coded language became key to the continuation of fascist ideology after the war. Bardèche is succinctly described by Richard Wolin as
the intermediary between two generations of fascist militants: the 1930s generation, which was dominated by an influential coterie of neo-Maurrasians who, as the European crisis worsened, increasingly embraced the idea of establishing a fascisme à la française; and the postwar mélange of neofascists, “Third Positionists,” and Holocaust deniers, who, following the loss of French Algeria, coalesced around the topos of a “Gramscism of the right” — an all-out “metapolitical” struggle to vanquish the ideological hegemony of the political left.
Bardèche is best known for his Histoire du cinéma, a film encyclopedia written with his collaborationist brother-in-law Robert Brassilach. After Brassilach’s trial and execution after the war, Bardèche reappeared in the shadowy realm of the postwar intellectual right, dedicating himself all the more fervently to fascism and publishing a book entitled Nuremberg ou la Terre promise (Nuremberg or the Promised Land) in which he described the Holocaust as a “falsification of history” created by the American media. In an interview conducted by literary theorist Alice Yaeger Kaplan at Bardèche’s home in the summer of 1982, Bardeche says, “my own contention is that the so-called gas chambers were constructed for the first time in 1945, for the Allied propaganda effort after the war.” It is Bardèche’s theories of the theatrical nature of the Holocaust that point to something akin to Walter Benjamin’s aestheticization of politics (something Bardèche himself agrees with enthusiastically in this same interview, although he does not know the reference). Taken up by the French right and left, the notion of an event or simulacrum in which the techniques of Hollywood are directed towards a saturating information war can be read in these vile insinuations made by Bardèche. It is also in this realm of information that meanings may be transformed. By coding hateful language and saturating the media field, one approaches the possibilities outlined in Barrès’ aesthetic nationalism or Benoist’s metapolitics – the possibility of harnessing the ways people think in order to change their sense of Self and make their subjectivity more amenable to fascist control.
I have traced two different traditions of far right ideology in France: one, stemming from the pseudo-monarchism of the Action Française, the other, a convoluted Counter-Enlightenment in which the identity of a European elite must be safeguarded. The common thread uniting these two tracks is well described by Charles Maurras in his Mes idees politiques:
Tradition means transmission. Tradition gathers together the forces of blood and soil. . . . True tradition is critical, and without these distinctions, the past no longer serves as anything, its successes ceasing to be examples, its setbacks, to be lessons. . . . Tradition is not lethargy but its contrary.
Guillaume Faye, a character also present at the outset of the GRECE whose ideas today have lots of purchase with the alt-right in America, uses the phrase archeofuturism to describe this classically fascistic formulation – we have entered the post-modern, in which a transmission of original values must be carried out in order to save civilization from the catastrophe of modernity. As Faye writes, “Modernity already belongs to a past that is over. Is archaism a form of traditionalism? Yes and no. Traditionalism entails the transmission of values…modernity is backward-looking, whereas archaism is futurist.” I would like to conclude by spelling out the hidden or coded friendships that existed between the intellectual figures of Benoist and Bardèche and the mainstream French right, towards a final reckoning on the state of fascism in France today.
Conclusion
On May 21st, 2013, Dominique Venner shot himself in the head inside the Notre Dame cathedral, in an act of despairing rebellion against the perceived threats Islam and homosexuality posed to the French nation. His suicide note reads, “I give myself over to death to awaken slumbering consciences. I rebel against fate. I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity…While I defend the identity of all peoples in their homes, I also rebel against the crime of the replacement of our people.” Venner’s words echo the “right to difference” of his GRECE, as well as the reversal of the language of ‘occupation’ we see amongst the Great Replacement theorists and Marine Le Pen. This deceptive concession to racial difference by raising the concept of ‘rights’ is a defensive maneuver, a false signifier in which racial glory is retained for the European who must commit himself to warding off the insatiable masses of the Middle East and Global South. Soon after on that same day, Marine Le Pen wrote on Twitter:
A tweet, translated: “All our respect to Dominique Venner whose last gesture, eminently political, was to try to wake up the people of France.”
In Le Pen’s commemoration, we see the technique of concealed unconcealment characterized by Jacob Morris, by which she is able to signal the fascist element of her base without making a wholly explicit ideological statement. There is a clear parallel to her Vichy denialism – while she is not denying the horror of genocide, she is saying that the French had no ideological complicity in it. The same method is used in her statement above.
Realizing the impossibility of continuing the Front Nationale in her father’s image, Marine Le Pen has worked since 2012 to code a more palatable language into the platform of her party, without having to change their positions. While the intellectual GRECE has never been affiliated with a political party, and while both these alt-right intellectuals and mainstream hard-right politicians have sought to distance themselves from accusations of racism and fomenting violence, there has developed a fine-tuned language and method for signaling their radical supporters. The less subtle signals have been Jean-Marie Le Pen’s predilection for Holocaust denial: in a manner akin to Maurice Bardèche he enjoys couching his denial in a reluctant acceptance of the events without blame. He was fined for a third time for claiming the gas chambers were a mere “detail” of the Second World War. In an obituary for Bardèche, Le Pen wrote:
Let us bet that his powerful and courageous work will endure for a long time to come and that his memory will constitute a model of righteousness and intelligence for generations to come, he whose heart always hesitated between Sparta and Gettysburg. Brother-in-law of Robert Brasillach, in whose memory he will remain all his life, he suffered without justification and for this simple fact the most cruel persecutions.
These less-than-subtle vindications of Nazi collaborators and Vichy apologists who proceeded defiantly after the war speak to the resurgent state of fascism in France. We cannot ignore their continued resonance today. In the sanitizing of the Front Nationale, Le Pen has not swayed from her positions but has brought them into the mainstream political conversation. Receiving 41% of the vote in the second round of elections in 2022, in the best showing the far-right party of the Le Pens has ever had, it appears that Marine Le Pen’s strategy to gain popularity by sanding the rough edges from the party is working. It is also shifting the language of President Emmanuel Macron, who has in recent years spoken out against “la woke culture,” and “Islamo-gauchism”, blaming post-colonial academic theories from the United States for contributing a pervasive and insidious identitarian discourse to French politics. These changing rhetorical grounds, accompanied by a rise in right-wing extremist violence, prelude an unfortunate era for French politics. It is estimated that there are 3,000 far-right militants in France, and recent protests over the stabbing of a teenager in Dublin displayed a new national coordination among the militant groups. These material developments, accompanied by the discursive battle being waged for the memory of France’s fascist history, are the French iteration of the neofascism sweeping Europe. To conclude with a warning, “just because today’s neofascists come outfitted in Italian suits rather than brownshirts and jackboots does not mean they should not be taken seriously.” By centering the margins of the French right in the figures and ancestors of the Nouvelle Droite, we can see the conflation of traditionalism and postmodernism at the core of contemporary French fascism.
Notes
1. Daniel Rueda, “A Certain Idea of France’s Past: Marine Le Pen’s History Wars,” European Politics and Society, 24:4, 447, DOI: 10.1080/23745118.2022.2058751
2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Orlando: Harvest Books, 1968), 161.
3. Arendt, Totalitarianism, 162.
4. Arendt, Totalitarianism, 165.
5. Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 290.
6. Steven Kale, “Gobineau, Racism, and Legitimism: A Royalist Heretic in Nineteenth-Century France” in Modern Intellectual History, 7, 1 (2010), 44.
7. Stephen Kale, Gobineau, 45.
8. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.
9. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations,
edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, from the 1935 essay (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 19.
10. David Carroll. French Literary Fascism Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 7.
11. Robert Soucy, “Barres and Fascism,” French Historical Studies 5, no. 1 (1967), 71.
12. Soucy, Barrès, 82.
13. Carroll, Literary Fascism, 78.
14. Ibid.
15. Jacob Collins, The Anthropological Turn: French Political Thought after 1968 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 40.
16. Karl Ekeman, “On Gramscianism of the Right” from Critique and Praxis 13:13, November 11 2018. https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/karl-ekeman-on-gramscianism-of-the-right/
17. Collins, Anthropological Turn, 51.
18. Collins, Anthropological Turn, 78.
19. Richard Wolin, “‘The Leprosy of the Soul in Our Time’: On the European Origins of the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory,” LA Review of Books, August 4 2022. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-leprosy-of-the-soul-in-our-time-on-the-european-origins-of-the-great-replacement-theory/.
20. Maurice Bardèche, Nuremberg or the Promised Land, trans. AARGH, (Internet: AARGH, 2007), 7.
21. Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproduction of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 187.
22. Quoted in David Carroll, French Literary Fascism, 84 from Charles Maurras, Mes idees politiques.
23. Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age, trans. Sergio Knipe (United Kingdom: Arktos Press, 2010), 41.
24. Dominique Venner, “The Reasons for a Voluntary Death.” counter-currents. May 21 2013. https://counter-currents.com/2013/05/the-reasons-for-a-voluntary-death/
25. “Jean-Marie Le Pen fined again for dismissing Holocaust as ‘detail,’” The Guardian, April 6 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/06/jean-marie-le-pen-fined-again-dismissing-holocaust-detail#:~:text=7%20years%20old-,Jean%2DMarie%20Le%20Pen%20fined,for%20dismissing%20Holocaust%20as%20%27detail%27&text=Jean%2DMarie%20Le%20Pen%2C%20the,a%20%E2%80%9Cdetail%E2%80%9D%20of%20history.
26. Jean-Marie Le Pen, “In memoriam Maurice Bardèche.” Vie publique, August 1 1998, https://www.vie-publique.fr/discours/216104-jean-marie-le-pen-01081998-maurice-bardeche-deces
27. “Présidentielle: Macron se dit contre le déboulonnage de statues et "la woke culture." BFMTV.comMarch 23, 2022,
https://www.bfmtv.com/politique/elections/presidentielle/en-direct-presidentielle-j-18-les-candidats-vont-s-exprimer-sur-le-handicap-hidalgo-tacle-melenchon-suivez-ce-mercredi-de-campagne_LN-202203230083.html
28. Ishaan Tharoor, “France and the spectral menace of ‘Islamo-leftism,’” The Washington Post, February 22 2022, .
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/02/22/france-macron-islamo-leftism/#
29. Juliette Jabkhiro and Layli Foroudi, “French far-right protests over stabbing were stirred by Dublin riots - source.” Reuters, November 28 2023. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/french-far-right-protests-over-stabbing-were-stirred-by-dublin-riots-source-2023-11-28/#:~:text=The%20Dublin%20riots%20on%20Nov,as%20good%20as%20the%20Irish.%22
30. Wolin, Unreason, 260.
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