The End of the French Intellectual by Shlomo Sand

Author:Shlomo Sand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

The attraction of Nazism

The ideological mosaic of the PPF’s fascist intelligentsia, however, would see its components gradually evolve. The defeat of fascism by Nazism in Austria, and the application of racial legislation in Italy in 1938, encouraged an ethnocentric radicalization on the part of Drieu and his companions, some of whom had already adopted a more incisive Judeophobia before their collective resignation from the party in the wake of the Munich agreements.26 Not all of Drieu’s fellow travellers shared in this perverse slippage (Jouvenel, for example, could not do so on account of his mother’s Jewish origin), yet Nazification increased nonetheless with the decline in the PPF’s influence and the hope of seeing a genuine fascist regime established in France.

Moreover, although Doriot’s party could certainly not be defined as Nazi in the 1930s, it had been joined and supported by some intellectuals whose ideas were far less inhibited. Alexis Carrel is a good example of this: a famous surgeon and biologist who had received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1912, he developed racist theories in the 1930s. This ‘scientific’ racism, which had its antecedents in the French intellectual world of the nineteenth century, was now also represented by other men of science, such as Ernest Fourneau, a member of the Institut, and Victor Balthasar of the Académie de médicine; both became fellow travellers of the PPF.

The Nazification that affected these fascist intellectuals well matched the heavy Judeophobic atmosphere of the late 1930s,27 but it had already flourished earlier within another group, which emerged directly from the far right and not, like Doriot’s party, from the left. The weekly Je suis partout, founded in the 1930s, was originally simply conservative. From 1936, after breaking away from its Fayard publisher, it acquired a tone that can be termed genuinely Nazi, even if it was still possible after this date to find some articles that expressed reservations towards the simplistic nature of Nazi propaganda (in September 1939, it was even anti-German for a short period). However, its verbal violence against the Front Populaire government, its crude racism, its rampant Judeophobia and proclaimed sympathy for Nazi repressive methods and displays of force, were exceptional even in the French fascist milieu.28

The writers and journalists who took part in this literary enterprise were a different kind of intellectual: Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet, Georges Blond, Alain Laubreaux and other members of the editorial team came in the main from Action Française, having left it out of dissatisfaction with the ponderous conservatism of the monarchist movement. They kept its traditional anti-Semitism, but in contrast to those who had left Action Française in the 1920s, infused this with an ever more essentialist and venomous content. Anti-Semitism had become fashionable throughout Europe at this time. The perspective of a national revolution that would cleanse France of ‘foreign elements’ that sullied its culture, and especially Jews from Eastern Europe who were seen as dangerous, became the leitmotif of these crude publicists, whose desire was also to see France join the camp of strong states.

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