Search Results

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the discussions in this book. The book focuses on far-right intellectuals composed of men such as novelist Robert Brasillach, essayist Thierry Maulnier, music and film critic Lucien Rebatet, and editors Jean de Fabrègues and Jean–Pierre Maxence. The book determines the extent of their redefinition of far-right and fascist politics by exploring the logic by which gender, sex, race, and empire structured and underscored their particular vision of the nation. The chapter also explains the meaning of the term, “aesthetics of hate”, which characterizes the reflections of these far-right intellectuals.

This chapter examines the rhetoric published in the pages of Je Suis Partout, which dealt with issues of race, culture, and fascism. Throughout the 1930s, Je Suis Partout became known for its open embrace of fascist regimes across Europe, its violent denunciation of French politics at home and abroad, and its violent anti-Semitism. In the wake of the “failed days of February 1934,” the accession to power of the Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War, and the growing “bolchevization of Europe,” far-right journalists and intellectuals produced an increasingly violent rhetoric, insulting, denouncing, and berating the politicians and intellectuals they deemed to constitute the “anti-France”.

The years 1930 to 1935 witnessed the emergence of a group of young men who were trained in the ideas of far-right and conservative nationalism and aspired to cultural and political prominence. Ranging from ultra-Catholic journalists Jean de Fabrègues and René Vincent to novelists Robert Brasillach and Georges Blond, music and film critic Lucien Rebatet, energetic polemicist Jean–Pierre Maxence, and the lesser-known but no less dedicated Pierre–Antoine Cousteau and Pierre Monnier, they were a motley collection united in their disgust with the postwar world in which they had come of age. This chapter situates these intellectuals not just within a political genealogy of far-right ideas, but also within the larger context of 1930s French cultural and aesthetic debates. It shows how categories of civilization, race, gender, and sexuality infused contemporaries' debates and discussions, and how these young intellectuals engaged and responded to them.

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.