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French Thought between Liberalism and Fascism: Bataille and Blanchot in the 1930s

Adrian May

in From Bataille to Badiou: Lignes, the Preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987-2017

Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot were two foundational influences on both Lignes and many of the review’s contributors. Yet, in the period after Lignes’ creation in 1987, the political ... More

Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot were two foundational influences on both Lignes and many of the review’s contributors. Yet, in the period after Lignes’ creation in 1987, the political engagements of both these figures in the 1930s were coming under increasingly scrutiny as they were suspected of fascist sympathies and anti-Semitic views. This chapter returns to the pre-war period to firstly delineate the review’s trenchant defence of Bataille’s political record, and the influence of Bataille on Lignes’ dual political program of anti-fascism and a critique of economic and political liberalism is subsequently delineated. Secondly, the significance of the review’s historic defence and recent exposé of the right-wing past of Blanchot is discussed in depth. The reception of these two thinkers is thus historicised, especially in the 1980s context of the anti-totalitarian ‘liberal moment’ and the growing anxieties of intellectual complicity with fascism following the Heidegger affair.Less

Conclusion

in The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France

This chapter first considers the fate of far-right intellectuals with the demise of the Vichy regime. It then summarizes the themes at the heart of the far-right and fascist writings that these men ... More

This chapter first considers the fate of far-right intellectuals with the demise of the Vichy regime. It then summarizes the themes at the heart of the far-right and fascist writings that these men produced in the interwar period, and suggests a different, synthetic reading that may shed light on the familiar issues of French fascism, anti-Semitism, and citizenship by addressing the remaining gaps in the historiography. The discussion then turns to Littell's Les bienveillantes, the most recent (fictional rather than scholarly) attempt to elucidate the relationship of identity and politics, aesthetics and ideology, fascism and anti-Semitism, sexuality and race.Less

In the Shadow of the Swastika

Norman Ingram

in The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue des droits de l'homme, 1914-1944

The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 caught the Ligue des droits de l’homme by surprise. The Ligue debate on how to respond to Nazism breathed new life into the war guilt debate. Increasingly, ... More

The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 caught the Ligue des droits de l’homme by surprise. The Ligue debate on how to respond to Nazism breathed new life into the war guilt debate. Increasingly, the Ligue’s gaze was directed forward to how to deal with Nazism, rather than backwards to a debate on the Great War, but its political analysis continued to be inspired by a reading of the meaning of the Great War. Both minority and majority initially failed to understand the sea change that Nazism represented, but the minority was transfixed by the idea that resistance to Nazism was going to require a new Union sacrée and the division of Europe into antagonistic blocs. Much of the minority’s opposition to this was the belief that France was complicit in the rise of Nazism. The threat of domestic French fascism was also a major preoccupation.Less

Redemptive Violence on the Eve of the Great War

Kevin Duong

in The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France

This chapter studies how an image of irrationalist redemptive violence saturated French intellectual culture on the eve of the First World War. It links the proliferation of that image of violence to ... More

This chapter studies how an image of irrationalist redemptive violence saturated French intellectual culture on the eve of the First World War. It links the proliferation of that image of violence to the popularity of Henri Bergson. It draws attention to the way his philosophy was adapted into a political theory of decadence and degeneration across the political spectrum after 1900. The chapter highlights the writing of Georges Sorel because a conceptual reconstruction of his Reflections on Violence dramatizes how so many French thinkers could link voluntaristic violence with moral regeneration. It concludes by describing the nationalistic fate of Sorel’s argument as it travelled in and beyond France.Less

Liberal Legacies, Europe’s Totalitarian Era, and the Iraq War: Historical Conjunctures and Comparisons

Jeffrey Herf

in A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq

This chapter attempts to discuss the parallelisms between Europe's era of totalitarianism and the regime of Saddam Hussein. The historical irony of the war that overthrew Iraqi totalitarianism is ... More

This chapter attempts to discuss the parallelisms between Europe's era of totalitarianism and the regime of Saddam Hussein. The historical irony of the war that overthrew Iraqi totalitarianism is that most liberals on both sides of the Atlantic opposed it, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein's Baath regime had ideological lineages and affinities to the fascist and Nazi regimes of Europe midcentury. Yet liberals and conservatives based their judgments, in part, on a set of the then commonly held assertions about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs. It is believed that the Baath Party also drew heavily on the European legacies of French fascism and Nazism. Like the preceding tyrannies of the extreme right, Saddam's Iraq rested on a leadership principle focused on a supreme leader held to be infallible and the use of terror against anyone who challenged his authority.Less