France And The Spanish Civil War: Cultural Representations of the War Next Door, 1936 - 1945 1409420825, 9781409420828

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
: Importing the Spanish Civil War
1 Touring the Spanish Labyrinth: The Far Right in Nationalist Spain
2
The Art of War: The Novels of
Frondaie and Maulvault
3
The Birth of International Fascism: From Brasillach to Drieu la Rochelle
4 From Republican Solidarity towards the Totalitarian Republic
5
Fellow-Travelling to Spain: Malraux, L’Espoir and the Civil War
6
Beyond the Spanish Republic: Journey’s End and New Departures
7
Lessons in the Darkness
Epilogue
: Decisions in the Dark: Sartre’s ‘Le Mur’
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

France and the Spanish Civil War

This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandparents, Les and Edna, Henry and Teresa, who, in similar circumstances to those recounted here, may well have found themselves on opposite sides of the barricade.

France and the Spanish Civil War Cultural Representations of the War Next Door, 1936–1945

Martin Hurcombe University of Bristol, UK

© Martin Hurcombe 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Martin Hurcombe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

France and the Spanish Civil War : cultural representations of the war next door, 1936–1945.   1. Spain – History – Civil War, 1936–1939 – Literature and the war. 2. Spain – History   – Civil War, 1936–1939 – Foreign public opinion, French. 3. Intellectuals – France –  Political activity – History – 20th century. 4. Authors, French – 20th century – Political   activity. 5. French literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 6. France – Politics   and government – 1914–1940.  I. Hurcombe, Martin.   840.9’35846081–dc22

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hurcombe, Martin.   France and the Spanish Civil War : cultural representations of the war next door, 1936–1945 / Martin Hurcombe. p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-4094-2082-8 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4094-2083-5 (ebk.)   1. French literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Spain—History—Civil War, 1936– 1939—Literature and the war. 3. Spain—History—Civil War, 1936–1939—Influence. 4. France— Intellectual life—20th century. 5. Politics and literature—France—History—20th century. 6. Political culture—France—History—20th century. I. Title.  PQ307.S66H87 2011   840.9’46081—dc22 2010050765 ISBN 9781409420828 (hbk) ISBN 9781409420835 (ebk)

IV

Contents Acknowledgements    Introduction: Importing the Spanish Civil War  

vii 1

1

Touring the Spanish Labyrinth: The Far Right in Nationalist Spain  21

2

The Art of War: The Novels of Frondaie and Maulvault  

55

3

The Birth of International Fascism: From Brasillach to Drieu la Rochelle  

81

4

From Republican Solidarity towards the Totalitarian Republic: The French Left and the Spanish Republic  

5

Fellow-Travelling to Spain: Malraux, L’Espoir and the Civil War  149

6

Beyond the Spanish Republic: Journey’s End and New Departures   171 Lessons in the Darkness: Bernanos’s Les Grands Cimetières sous 193 la lune and Pollès’s Toute guerre se fait la nuit   

7

111

Epilogue: Decisions in the Dark: Sartre’s ‘Le Mur’  

225

Bibliography    Index   

233 241

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to the British Academy and to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol for the financial support indispensable to the preparation of this book. My thanks also go to the colleagues and friends who have expressed an interest in its subject over recent years. In particular, I am indebted to David Drake, John Flower, Hugo García, Angela Kershaw, Luc Rasson, Leonard V. Smith and Valérie Steunou. I have always welcomed, listened to, but perhaps not always heeded their advice sufficiently. Consequently any deficiencies are of course entirely my own. I would also like to thank my parents and family for their loyal support and enthusiasm for yet another war book. I am especially grateful to my own trusty band of fellow travellers: Jenny, Antoine, Isobel and Catherine.

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Introduction Importing the Spanish Civil War

‘Everything, all our fears, our confused hopes and beliefs, our half-formulated theories and imaginings, veered and converged towards its testing and its opportunity, like steel filings that slide towards a magnet suddenly put near them.’1 So wrote Stephen Spender of the Spanish Civil War, suggesting that conflict’s significance for the European intelligentsia of the interwar years. The title of the Imperial War Museum’s 2001 retrospective of the same conflict, ‘Dreams and Nightmares’, similarly evoked the tendency of many non-Spaniards to see hopes and fears developed at home embodied in the belligerent parties in Spain: the loyalist Republican forces (supported by international volunteers and the USSR) and the Nationalist rebels (supported by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy). Such was the tendency for the Spanish Civil War to be considered an international dispute fought out on Spanish soil that the conflict has sometimes been considered a single episode in either a European civil war (1914‒45) or the opening battle in the long Second World War (1936‒48). Nevertheless, the conflict’s origins were profoundly Spanish; the Civil War was initially another expression of a long established battle between the forces of reform and those of reaction. The military rebellion of 18 July 1936, led by Generals Emilio Mora and José Sanjurjo, against the Spanish Republic’s legal government therefore appeared at first a pronunciamiento in the Spanish tradition: a conservative corrective designed to halt what its supporters saw as the radical, if not revolutionary, turn of a popular front regime which united the revolutionary and reformist left and a variety of centrist, republican and regionalist parties, and which had been elected to office in February that year. That said, the very means by which the generals and their supporters staged their attempted coup revealed that the conflict had been internationalized from its inception; Nationalist forces, as they were to become, were able to mobilize and assemble in part thanks to the immediate support of the Italian military and to German funding.2 Despite initially appearing to offer continued military support to the Spanish Republic, Léon Blum’s Popular Front government of socialist and Radical Party ministers, considered by many of its supporters and detractors alike as the sister regime of the Frente Popular across the Pyrenees, had by August 1936, and following the British Conservative government’s lead, opted for non-intervention. The Spanish   Quoted in John Lehmann, The Whispering Gallery (London, 1955), p. 273.   For more concerning initial fascist support for the rebellion, see Paul Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (London, 1996), pp. 84‒8. 1 2

France and the Spanish Civil War

2

Prime Minister José Giral had requested that the Blum government supply it with weapons and planes, as France had done in the past, in order to see off the rebels’ coup attempt. Blum at first ordered his Air Minister Pierre Cot to comply with the Spanish request, reversing his decision after a visit to London and the revelation in the right-wing press in France that the government was supplying arms to the Republic and likely to prompt a war with Germany and Italy.3 The subsequent French and British governments’ decision not to intervene in Spain, taken at the end of July and which led to the formation of the Non-intervention Committee on 9 September 1936, was therefore born not of the desire to avoid interference in a domestic dispute, but of an attempt to prevent the spread of that conflict beyond Spain’s borders and a general European conflagration. The Civil War, in what was broadly perceived beyond Spain as its opposition of reform or even revolution to reaction, of left to right, of democracy to dictatorship, of anti-fascism to fascism, of popular forces to military oligarchy, reflected, as Hugh Thomas writes, ‘the consequence of the working of general European ideas upon Spain’.4 It was the recognition of this that set in motion a form of global engagement either in defence of, or in opposition to, the Spanish Republic, particularly among sections of the French, British and American populations reacting against their own nations’ immobilism. Intellectuals and artists from around the world, who had begun to descend from their ivory towers following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and its bitter economic consequences, now, it seemed, hurled themselves ever downwards with still greater alacrity. ‘Never before …,’ Frederick Benson writes, ‘had so many authors from different countries written this passionately from a political point of view concerning a historic event; nor had they been this closely identified with a popular movement embracing so many extra-literary functions.’5 This book is concerned with cultural expressions of this trend among the French intelligentsia. It will examine a variety of such expressions and therefore of genres, from reportage to cinema, produced by a range of committed intellectuals,   See David Wingeate Pike, Les Français et la guerre d’Espagne (Paris, 1975), p. 65 and Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, p. 112. 4   Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (London, 1977), p. 336. For a full analysis of the origins of the conflict see pp. 1‒464. Anthony Beevor similarly points to the influence of international politics upon the war’s origins. Anthony Beevor, The Battle for Spain. The Spanish Civil War 1936‒1939 (London, 2007), p. xxiv. Preston, however, suggests a conflation of the national and the international in a more nuanced reading of the war’s origins. See A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, pp. 9‒10. 5   Frederick Benson, Writers in Arms: The Literary Impact of the Spanish Civil War (London, 1968), p. 40. The same phenomenon is observed by Peter Monteath who describes the Civil War as the single event, matched possibly only by the Vietnam War, which has led intellectuals to engage with one side or the other, viewing events in purely Manichean terms to the extent that the war becomes almost allegorical. Peter Monteath, Writing the Good Fight: Political Commitment in the International Literature of the Spanish Civil War (Westport, Connecticut, 1994), p. xii. 3

Introduction

3

from those associated with the far right to those affiliated with the far left. In order to better understand the extent of interest and hope invested in either Spain, it will not limit itself to a re-examination of the canon, to those writers and thinkers whose representations of the Civil War have survived long beyond the war’s moment. Rather, it will consider the broader terrain in which such representations appeared, examining such canonic re­presentations alongside the more ephemeral and overtly propagandistic for, as Luc Rasson writes: ‘La littérature n’est pas ce cimetière d’éléphants où l’on se recueille, respectueux et admiratif, devant des dépouilles parées, libres désormais de toute souillure. La littérature, c’est ce qui se compromet’ [Literature is not an elephants’ graveyard where one gathers one’s thoughts respectfully and admiringly before polished remains cleaned now of all dirt. Literature compromises itself].6 I therefore propose to focus on a broad selection of works in which a partisan or clearly elaborated vision of Spain and of its significance for the intellectual and for France emerges. For this reason I will not make extensive reference to those more established writers of the canon of committed literature who, like François Mauriac, Paul Nizan and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, wrote only periodically of the Civil War in their journalism. What unites the intellectuals who form the subject of this study, and what underpins their representations of the conflict, irrespective of all that divides them politically, is the perception shared by many other non-Spanish intellectuals that, as Thomas observes, the Civil War constituted a less ‘vulgar’ form of warfare than international conflict with its grubby economic and imperial imperatives, a war in which certain clearly delineated values were set against each other.7 Such an understanding of another’s war was the result of a tendency to impose an external understanding of that conflict informed by the European political context of the 1930s rather than to recognize a more nuanced interaction of the national and the international. Consequently, non-Spanish cultural representations of the war are sometimes dismissed as poorly concealed attempts to portray domestic and broader European conflicts that show scant regard for the Spanish origins and nature of the war. Furthermore, their authors are accused of playing a part in the internationalization of the war through the imposition of ‘an alien set of ideologies upon what began as a civil struggle …’, simplifying it ‘by employing familiar terms, which each believed he [sic] understood, to clarify complex problems which actually very few fully comprehended’.8 For Maryse Bertrand de Muñoz, international intellectual engagement on behalf of Spain constituted a form of invasion, converting what had been a civil dispute into ‘une plaque sanglante où se débattaient les grandes idées du XXe siècle: communisme, fascisme, socialisme, démocratie, monarchisme, catholicisme et liberté religieuse’ [a bloody wound where the great ideas of the twentieth century battled it out:   Luc Rasson, Littérature et fascisme: les romans de Robert Brasillach (Paris, 1991),

6

p. 8.

  Quoted in Benson, Writers in Arms, pp. xix‒xx.   Ibid., p. 5.

7 8

4

France and the Spanish Civil War

communism, fascism, socialism, democracy, monarchism, Catholicism and religious freedom].9 Moreover, critics allege, this sacrifice of political complexity is usually accompanied by an even greater sacrifice of artistic complexity. Benson thus bemoans the inability of the majority of works concerned with the Civil War to transcend the clichés of propaganda and to find their inspiration in humanistic ideals rather than partisan politics’.10 Whilst Peter Monteath avoids both political bias and what he considers the Western humanist fallacy of praising ‘unpolitical’ literature over the explicitly engaged work, he too points to the lack of artistic innovation in such works.11 The same criticisms have all been levelled at French intellectual engagement on behalf of either of the two Spains. Thus, for example, Nicholas Hewitt writes that, in the French novel of the Civil War, ‘The Spanish Left and Right … lose their specifically national qualities and their internal complexity and become reflections of the polarized forces in the France of the Blum government …’.12 According to Bertrand de Muñoz, French literature of the Civil War reflects a French civil war by proxy, but above all a lesson France did not fail to learn. French literary representations of the war allowed intellectuals to expose ‘au grand jour les oppositions sourdes qui duraient depuis quelques années [en France]; en somme, la France risquait constamment de devenir une seconde Espagne’ [to broad daylight the silent antagonisms that had lasted for some years [in France]. In short France was constantly on the brink of becoming a second Spain].13 A second criticism is also made of French cultural representations of the war: just as Spanish political complexities are reduced to a series of international oppositions, so too Spain and the Spanish are simplified through the application of cultural stereotypes. The Spanish are often reduced to the exotic Other, reflecting the persistence of that old French saying that Africa begins at the Pyrenees. In this, these works stand accused of drawing on nineteenth-century French cultural representations of Spain, such as Théophile Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne (1843) and Propser Mérimée’s short stories. Here Spain, in contrast to the industrial modernity and rationalism of nineteenth-century France, is a land of superstition, tradition and of brutal spontaneity. It was perhaps because of these perceived contrasts that writers like Gautier and Mérimée, but also Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset, were drawn to it. The title of the Tharaud brothers’ reportage on the Civil War, Cruelle Espagne, suggests much about the continued prevalence of such prejudices in France. Consequently, French cultural representations of the Civil War are frequently perceived as both politically and culturally reductive.  9   Maryse Bertrand de Muñoz, La guerre civile espagnole et la littérature française (Montreal, 1972), p. 6. 10   Benson, Writers in Arms, p. xxiii. 11  Monteath, Writing the Good Fight, p. xii and pp. 195‒6 respectively. 12   Nicholas Hewitt, ‘“Partir pour quelque part”: French Novelists of the Right and the Spanish Metaphor, 1936‒39’ in Romance Studies, 3 (1983‒84): pp. 103‒21, p. 116. 13   Bertrand de Muñoz, La guerre civile espagnole et la littérature française, p. 16.

Introduction

5

Why then return to a topic that at first sight appears to be of so little historical, political or cultural value? What interest can be found in French (mis) representations of the Civil War? I would contend that there remains much more to be said about their contribution to the displaced, undeclared civil war between the French left and right of the same period evoked but never fully examined by Bertrand de Muñoz. One of the principal objectives of this study, then, is to examine how these representations of another’s war participate in this domestic conflict, constituting cultural expressions of internal, political factionalism in France, a factionalism that reflects a vying for power within the French Third Republic in which intellectuals play a crucial role. Moreover, French cultural representations of the Spanish Civil War, I will argue, need to be considered not only as representations of this factionalism, but also as articulations of alternative, utopian visions of the state which participate in the broader politico-cultural struggle of the 1930s to bring about radical reformulations of the French state (both on the far right and the far left). This struggle does not end, as Bertrand de Muñoz believes, with France’s failure to imitate Spain in 1936, but in the French civil war of 1940 to 1945, which opposed the forces of collaboration to those of resistance and in which the opposition of forces took on material and military as well as political form. This study will therefore seek to demonstrate that these cultural representations of the Civil War are indeed useful tools for understanding not only domestic political tensions, but also the desire among many French intellectuals for radical solutions to the apparent crisis of democracy and of capital in interwar France. Moreover, they also reveal the prevalence of the utopian mentality among many committed French intellectuals of the period and therefore tell us much about the phenomenon of intellectual engagement itself. In order to establish the validity of such assertions, however, we need to reconsider how French intellectual appropriation of another’s war is possible by considering both nations’ political landscape in the interwar years. Parallels beyond the Pyrenees Let us begin by considering whether accusations of the Civil War’s misappropriation by foreign intellectuals have been overstated. In the case of French intellectuals, might this appropriation result from real parallels that can be made between the Spanish Second and French Third Republics, parallels often overlooked in international studies of interwar commitment that tend to prioritize British and American treatments over those published other than in English? Indeed, as Thomas notes, French responses to the war were felt and expressed more bitterly than those published in Great Britain, for example, because of Spain’s proximity, but also because of the relative vitality of the French far right and far left.14   Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, p. 348.

14

6

France and the Spanish Civil War

At the heart of all committed French representations of the war, then, lies an assertion of a fundamental resemblance between France and Spain. Authors’ pleas to their public to engage with or against one or other of the belligerent parties depend upon this resemblance. For intellectuals of the far right, this resemblance is a family one to be found in the shared Mediterranean spirit of latinité and a shared Western civilization that stands in contrast and opposition to the allegedly Eastern spirit of Muscovite communism. The title of Maxime Réal del Sarte’s 1937 reportage Au pays de Franco, notre frère latin is telling in this respect. For left-wing supporters of the Republicans, this resemblance is to be found in a sister Republic, a fellow embattled Popular Front regime at war with the forces of international fascism in the guise of General Franco and his international, fascist sponsors, engaged in ‘[une] lutte … contre la guerre venue du dehors et campée sur son sol’, according to André Chamson.15 More fundamentally still, intellectuals of both the right and left claimed that the situation in Spain was an anticipation of that in France. Thus Jean-Richard Bloch writes that ‘La chute du Front Populaire en Espagne devrait être le prélude de sa chute en France’ [the fall of the Popular Front in Spain ought to be the prelude of its fall in France] since ‘Madrid … n’est que le chemin de Paris’ [Madrid … is on the road to Paris].16 President Manuel Azaña, in an interview with Bloch, goes further: ‘“Dites à vos gouvernants, monsieur Bloch, dites à l’opinion publique française que la défaite du Front Populaire en Espagne ne serait pas seulement la défaite de la démocratie française…”’ [Tell your government, Monsieur Bloch, tell French public opinion that the defeat of the Popular Front in Spain would not just be the defeat of French democracy].17 The emphasis in such representations is placed simultaneously on cultural and political resemblances. Yet, how could any claim to political resemblance, present or future, be made with a nation that was characterized before the 1930s, and as Paul Preston notes, by ‘the continued power of the old landed oligarchy …’, the Church and the army, and ‘the parallel weakness of the progressive bourgeoisie’?18 While France was a modern, industrial nation governed by a secular Republic whose representatives were elected by universal male suffrage and which had recently acknowledged its inheritance of the principles of 1789, Spain had yet to know its own bourgeois

15   ‘[A] battle against the war imposed from beyond its borders and camped on its soil.’ André Chamson, Retour d’Espagne: rien qu’un témoignage (Paris, 1937), p. 79. References to primary sources will be given in full when first mention is made of these. Thereafter references will be given in the text. 16   Jean-Richard Bloch, Espagne, Espagne! (Paris, 1936), p. 160. 17   Ibid., p. 187. 18   Preston adds: ‘Unlike Britain and France, nineteenth century Spain did not see the establishment of a democratic polity with the flexibility to absorb new forces and to adjust to major social change’. Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, p. 11.

Introduction

7

revolution.19 Moreover, whilst France was a highly centralized nation, Spain was still marked by regional differences and by influential autonomy movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Gerald Brenan was one of only a few foreign observers of the Civil War to grasp the significance of regional politics in Spain.20 Indeed, for Brenan, the language of Western European political discourse was entirely unsuited to understanding Spanish political life since: Spain, both economically and psychologically, differs so greatly from the other countries of Western Europe that the words of which most history is made – feudalism, autocracy, liberalism, Church, Army, Parliament, trade union and so forth – have quite other meanings there to what they have in France or England.21

Despite such profound differences, superficial resemblances between the two nations’ recent histories did facilitate the appropriation of the Spanish Civil War by French intellectuals and lent credence to their claims that Spain’s struggle was also that of France. As Preston notes, ‘The Civil War was the culmination of a series of uneven struggles between the forces of reform and reaction which had dominated Spanish history since 1808’.22 The same opposition between reform and reaction had shaped the political history of France since the 1789 Revolution, leading to an alternation between republic and the restoration of the monarchy or the return of empire. Prior to the Civil War, in Spain, as in France, the nation had oscillated between monarchical and short-lived Republican regimes. After experiencing the First Republic (1873‒74), likened by Preston to the European revolutions of 1848 which had seen the creation of the Second Republic in France (1848‒52),23 Spain had reverted to constitutional monarchy through a limited and highly fraudulent exercise of democracy. In the early twentieth century, as the pressure for reform grew and sectors of the Spanish working class, both the industrial proletariat and the peasantry, became more politically radicalized, Spain moved from the initially constitutional monarchy of Alfonso XIII to the military dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923‒30) before, following the latter’s resignation, the Second Republic was established in 1931. 19

  Correspondingly, the Comintern programme of 1928 placed Spain amongst ‘societies of medium capitalist development …’, such as Japan, rather than among highly developed capitalist societies such as France, Britain and Germany. Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven and London, 2004), p. 23. One Spanish communist reported that the Spanish bourgeois revolution remained incomplete in three aspects: ‘persistence of large landholdings, the unresolved problem of national minorities, and a blocked political system of “feudal monarchy”’ (ibid., p. 24). 20   Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth. The Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge, 2003), p. xv. First published in 1943. 21   Ibid., p. xv. 22   Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, p. 10. 23   Ibid., p. 14.

France and the Spanish Civil War

8

The tensions between the supporters of reaction (broadly speaking, large landowners, the Church, the army, but also a sizeable section of the conservative, Catholic bourgeoisie) and those of reform (middle-class republicans, socialists and regional parties of the centre and the left) persisted throughout the early years of the Second Republic, however, resulting in governmental instability, reflecting a more profound lack of consensus among Spaniards as to which model of government Spain should adopt.24 Matters were further complicated by the rise of revolutionary politics in the early twentieth century and, particularly, the influence of anarchism through trade unions, such as the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT) and the influential Federación Anarquista Iberica (FAI), which eschewed the democratic process, predicting the imminent and violent end of the state via the means of the general strike. The Partido Comunista Español (PCE), in contrast to its French counterpart, exerted very little influence on national political life with only 16 deputies elected to the Cortes (the Spanish Parliament) out of a total 437 in 1936. Although this represented an improvement on the single seat gained by the PCE in the 1933 elections, the Spanish right’s fear of an imminent communist revolution in Spain in 1936, one of the reasons invoked in order to justify the military rebellion, was clearly overstated. Thus the Spanish Second Republic, although initially greeted with enthusiasm, met immediate opposition from the right, but also failed to win over the far left, failing to reform Spain’s antiquated agrarian economy and to distribute land more equitably, whilst also overseeing the brutal repression of the miners’ uprising in the Asturias in 1934. It remained a regime with a limited support base. The French Third Republic, despite its relative longevity, suffered from a similar weakness of hegemony. Since its inception in 1870 the Third Republic had been periodically perceived as a regime on the point of collapse; conceived as a temporary institution that would enable the return of the constitutional monarchy following the fall of the Second Empire, the Republic had lurched from one crisis to another, locked into a valse des ministres as one short-lived cabinet gave way to another, apparently poised to totter into the regime’s demise.25 The Republic had only been instituted, as its first president, Adolphe Thiers declared, because in 1870 it was the regime that divided the French the least. The short-lived nature of many governments, a result of the power of the Chamber of Deputies under constitutional laws meant to consolidate the 24

  Until 1932 the Spanish socialist party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), offered a far less radical form of socialism than its French counterpart, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), and was closer to the German Social Democrats, according to Payne. It was only in the wake of its electoral failure of 1933 that it became more radicalized, readopting the rhetoric of revolutionary politics. See Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism, pp. 43‒7. 25   Similarly, Preston describes the oscillation between liberal and conservative governments in nineteenth-century Spain as ‘an exclusive minuet danced out by a small privileged minority’. Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, p. 15.

Introduction

9

Republic after the failed restoration of monarchy in the 1870s, suggested a continued and fundamental instability. Such instability, as was the case in Spain, provided the conditions necessary for a near constant contestation of power, groups jockeying for position and readying themselves for the opportunity to replace the faltering Republic. As in Spain, the French Republic failed to extend its hegemony sufficiently beyond its original support base; as in Spain, the introduction of revolutionary thought, both anarchosyndicalist and Marxist, provided a powerful counterforce to the influence of the state. Both the French socialist party (the SFIO) and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), which emerged from a schism in the former following the Third International, publicly expressed a faith in revolution, envisaging, up until 1934, a reformulation, if not the overthrow, of the regime rather than its long-term survival. Moreover, until the 1910s, the most powerful trade union in France, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), like the CNT in Spain, actively pursued the immediate overthrow of the regime by means of the general strike. Such similarities are superficial, as I have suggested, but their underlying cause, the continued failure of any one regime to exert enduring popular authority, was not. Both regimes were only ever able to exercise a limited form of hegemony over their respective populations, failing to convince a substantial majority for any length of time of their authority. For Antonio Gramsci, the success of any political regime, and therefore of the social class it represents, lies in the regime’s ability to convince the majority of its right to govern the national body. This can only be achieved through the successful exercise of hegemony, which depends upon the ability to balance coercion with consent and is achieved through cultural, moral and ideological leadership. Hegemony is therefore ‘a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria’; that is, it must adapt and make concessions towards other, dominated groups in order to preserve its rule.26 Under such a weakened hegemony the voices of contestation were bound to grow louder. As Gramsci asserts, the weakening of hegemony or its failure to extend beyond the class it represents, leads to a crisis of authority during which the various strata of a society become disoriented as power switches between a rapid succession of leaders and programmes, each desperately endeavouring to retain power for the dominant class before it has time to pass to a rival, emerging group. Under such circumstances, the regime is faced with a choice: to use greater coercion in order to assert its authority, and thereby to disturb the coercion-consent equilibrium, or to forge further alliances to reinforce its power and to disperse emerging groups often, Gramsci claims, by forming a single party.27 The election of a popular front government in Spain in February 1936, uniting socialist, liberal and communist deputies, along with those of some regional parties, can be viewed as such an alliance forged in response to the threat from an increasingly radicalized 26   Antonio Gramsci, A Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916‒1935 (London, 1988), ed. David Forgacs, p. 423. 27   Ibid., p. 218.

France and the Spanish Civil War

10

anti-republican Spanish right and as an attempt to broaden the acceptance of the Republic beyond the liberal middle class. The fact that the CNT and the FAI declined to participate actively in the new government, beyond allowing members to vote for Frente Popular candidates, suggests that the extension of hegemony remained limited, failing to incorporate large numbers of Spanish workers, and anticipates the internal divisions that would later beset the Republic as it fought for survival. The failure of the Frente Popular to incorporate the Spanish army into the politico-military exercise of hegemony, a failure it inherited from the Republic, inevitably led to a further weakening of its hegemony. With Spain’s military leadership effectively beyond the control of the state, it was free to associate with the anti-republican right.28 The result was a fractured political landscape. Spain in 1936 reflected a multiplicity of competing factions; whilst the Civil War opposed two camps (the loyalist, Republican forces to the rebel, Nationalist forces), each camp was also attempting to incorporate and to assimilate its own internal, diverse elements. Whilst the Republican side reflected the divergences of the Frente Popular, the Nationalists incorporated army leaders, Church figures, Alfonsine but also rival Carlist monarchists, conservatives and nationalists of various hues and the more radical Falange, partly inspired by Italian fascism.29 Factionalism was, of course, also the hallmark of French political life in the interwar years. The French far right ranged from the absolute monarchism of Action Française under the influence of Charles Maurras to the right-wing radicalism of the neo-fascist ligues and of the young right, as Paul Mazgaj refers to the more radical inheritors of Maurassianism. As Mazgaj notes, the aim of the latter was quite simply to bring about a National Revolution ‘that would bring down the corrupt Republic, revitalize the nation, and end the threat posed by the Popular Front’.30 The Front Populaire was born of opposition to the perceived fascist threat in France witnessed in the anti-Republican demonstrations of 6 February 1934 in which the ligues had participated, much as the Frente Popular was born in opposition to the Spanish conservative government’s attempts under the quasiauthoritarianism of Gil Robles to undo the Republic’s liberal reforms of 1931‒32. As in Spain, it was at once a confluence of popular working-class forces and the principal parliamentary parties of the centre and left (the Radical Party, the SFIO 28

  The ability of the regime to call upon military force is key to the exercise of authority for Gramsci since military or armed force generally constitutes the means by which coercion is exercised. Ibid., p. 207. 29   For a concise analysis of the Falange’s relationship with foreign forms of fascism, see Bernadette Archer, ‘Revolutionary Charlatanism’ in Roger Griffin (ed.), International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (London, 1998), pp. 275‒84. According to Archer, although originally inspired by Italian fascism, in 1934 its leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera was moving towards a form of more clearly delineated Spanish nationalism, claiming: ‘No true Spaniard will knowingly follow a foreign model’. Quoted, ibid., p. 282. 30   Paul Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism: The Cultural Politics of the French Young Right, 1930‒1945 (New York, 2007), p. 14.

Introduction

11

and the PCF) in which Bloch and numerous other French intellectuals of this study were to play a major part. The Front Populaire, which went on to claim electoral victory in May 1936, several months after the success of its Spanish counterpart, represented an uneasy truce between the revolutionary left on the one hand and the reformist left and centre on the other, united behind the defence of a regime that the former had once sought to sweep aside. As Simon Dell suggests, it represented a means of recasting ‘the threatened relationship between Republican ideology and its subjects’ by returning the bourgeois Republic to its revolutionary origins in an alliance of the liberal middle class and of working-class parties and trade unions.31 As was the case in Spain, popular front politics constituted an attempt to extend hegemony over a social class that had been alienated from the exercise of power, but also to obtain the consent of this class for the continued exercise of power by the Republican, parliamentary regime. It was therefore an attempt both to preserve and to reformulate the Republic, but one that was also to enjoy limited success at masking its internal contradictions and tensions. The broad, fundamental divisions that I have traced in respect to France and Spain can also be understood in the light of Karl Mannheim’s analysis of social forces, Ideology and Utopia, first published in its entirety in 1936. Like Gramsci, Mannheim is interested in the potential for change that follows a crisis of authority, a crisis to which both intellectuals were witness in the interwar years. In his preliminary approach to the roles played by ideology and utopia in modern political and social life, Mannheim argues that the latter is characterized by a fractured worldview that has followed the collapse of the absolute state, and therefore of absolute authority, across the Western world. With this, Mannheim contends, the totality of the national body has been fractured into a multiplicity of parties and factions, each of which lays claim to a new form of totality usually founded in philosophical or scientific conceptions. The result is a competition among opposing worldviews; the object of each is therefore ‘to demolish the basis of its opponent’s social and intellectual existence’.32 Behind each force lies an interested party or group held together by a collective unconscious which informs the individual’s participation in political action and social life, but also the individual’s understanding of reality itself.33 It achieves this through a distortion of the real that either takes the form of an ideology or a utopia. In the first case, Mannheim argues, echoing a Marxist understanding of the term, ideology serves to distort and thereby to mask reality in order to support the status quo. In the second, Mannheim, diverging from Marx, rejects the colloquial definition of utopia as a fundamentally unrealizable project, a whimsical fancy and the product   Simon Dell, The Image of the Popular Front: The Masses and the Media in Interwar France (New York, 2007), p. 12. 32   Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1979), trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, p. 34. First published in 1936. 33   Ibid., p. 28. 31

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France and the Spanish Civil War

of an artistic, but ungrounded individual imagination. Along with Paul Ricœur and Ruth Levitas,34 Mannheim ascribes such a reductive view to the defenders of the status quo, the supporters of ideology to which utopia is opposed. Utopia, both Mannheim and Ricœur argue, differs from ideology in that, whilst it too reflects a form of noncongruence with the real, it is situationally transcendent, possessing the potential ‘to shatter the existing order …’.35 Utopias, when actively pursued in the form of a shared praxis, have the ability to alter the real. Utopias and ideologies, Mannheim argues, constitute the guiding forces that direct those groups that vie for power within a given social situation. Consequently, ‘each group seems to move in a separate and distinct world of ideas and … these different systems of thought, which are often in conflict with one another, may in the last analysis be reduced to different modes of experiencing the “same” reality’.36 For Ricœur, then, groups no longer appear to work from ‘the same presuppositions with which to grasp reality’. We thus live in a process of mutual accusation, each group dismissing the others’ worldviews as a fanciful deformations of the real.37 Whilst the dominant group articulates a vision that masks the real, justifying the status quo, other, emergent groups, driven by utopias, challenge this state of affairs and the givenness attributed to it by the former. Any given social situation, then, becomes an arena in which different experiences and interpretations of the real are opposed. It is the pursuit of radical reformulations of the world that Mannheim perceives around him as he writes Ideology and Utopia. The factionalism that informs Mannheim’s thinking is suggestive of Mannheim’s own experiences as a refugee from the political upheavals of 1930s Europe, but also applicable to the French and Spanish political landscapes of the same period, even if France had yet to experience its own civil war. Furthermore, just as his concept of factionalism can be used to understand the divisions in the two nations, so Mannheim’s typology of utopias has potential applications for understanding the political landscape of both nations. In Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim identifies four types of contemporary utopia: the chiliastic or millenarian, the liberal-humanitarian, the conservative and the socialist-communist, all of which, as we shall see, find their echo in French cultural representations of the Civil War. Each utopian mentality is denoted by a certain re­conceptualization of the experience of time and space. Of the first, 34   Paul Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1986) and Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Utopianism and Communitarianism) (Syracuse, 1990). 35   Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, p. 285. Similarly, John West-Sooby considers that the utopia ‘is conducive to innovation, to the generation of new ideas and modes of action, and is therefore not removed from the present but linked to it through its potential for direct and immediate impact’. John West-Sooby, ‘Nowhere is Perfect’, in John West-Sooby (ed.), Nowhere is Perfect. French and Francophone Utopias/Dystopias (Newark, 2008), pp. 1‒10, p. 3. 36  Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 89. 37   Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, p. 163.

Introduction

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Mannheim considers that this particular utopian mentality, having originated in the peasant revolts of the Middle Ages, now finds expression in modern anarchism’s ecstatic understanding of the immediacy of the revolutionary experience and the concept of revolution as a mode of being rather than as a means to a precise end.38 Of the liberal-humanitarian, he writes that radical change is no longer conceived as imminent, but as gradual, progressive and usually located in a remote unspecified future; the ecstatic and intuitive have given way to the rational. While both the chiliastic or anarchistic and the liberal-humanitarian utopias are future-orientated, the conservative utopia seeks to recover a lost golden age; the present can now only be redeemed in a rediscovery of the past. Finally, the socialist-communist utopia vies with the liberal-humanitarian and the chiliastic in the claims it makes upon the future. Like the former, it locates radical change in the distant future, but places far greater emphasis on the material process of change. As Ricœur observes, Mannheim’s typology reveals a fundamental antagonism between utopian visions, an antagonism predicated upon each utopia’s rival sense of, and claims upon, ‘historical time’, a point to which I shall return.39 If fascism is a notable absence from Mannheim’s typology, as Ricœur observes,40 Mannheim’s typology and concept of utopia remain adaptable tools for interpreting the political forces at work in France and Spain from 1936 to 1945. Indeed, the utopian tensions adumbrated in Ideology and Utopia uncannily echo those at work in both nations and will provide a useful frame of reference for interpreting French cultural representations of the Civil War. After all, is not the desire to shatter the existing order that which motivates many of the groups examined above in both the Spanish and the French political contexts? Yet, while the concept of utopia, as understood by Mannheim, Levitas and Ricœur, may contribute to our understanding of the political landscape, how relevant is it to the French tradition of intellectual engagement more generally? The Utopian Mentality and Intellectual Engagement, 1936‒1945 My aim in revisiting French cultural representations of the Civil War is to understand to what extent these reflect such factionalism and how they articulate a version of the war for consumption by the social forces with which their authors had by now, in the increasingly fractured political situation in which France found itself, become associated. Whether it was through reaction, reform or the pursuit of revolutionary change, French intellectuals had already played a key role in contesting the form and content of the Republic throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For both David Schalk and Philip Dine, what was to become the tradition of French intellectual commitment began  Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 196.   Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, pp. 274‒5. 40   Ibid., pp. 282‒3. 38

39

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France and the Spanish Civil War

with the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s.41 The identification of intellectuals with either the Dreyfusard or the anti-Dreyfusard camp transformed the Affair from a juridical matter into a battle for national values as the forces of reaction fought to enforce a notion of nationality based on race whilst those of reform confronted the Republic with its neglected revolutionary heritage and the principles of 1789. This tradition persisted throughout the early twentieth century, the First World War providing a second rallying point for intellectual engagement under the Third Republic.42 The consequences of the Wall Street Crash and the rise of National Socialism in Germany then provided a third moment of widespread engagement. Jean-Paul Sartre’s realization, coinciding with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, that engagement with one’s time was now inevitable seems, then, somewhat tardy.43 More than a decade before Sartre published Qu’estce que la littérature?, ‘rightly regarded as the Bible of French commitment’ according to Max Adereth, and as Schalk notes, Emmanuel Mounier, editor of the non-conformist review Esprit, had already begun to formulate a concept of engagement.44 This, like Sartre’s, insists less on the intellectual aligning with a particular party and more on action, on taking a public stance. Adereth too insists on the militant and practical nature of French intellectual engagement.45 Although, in line with Sartre, he rejects the wholesale adoption of a particular party line as an abdication of authentic engagement (a form of ‘regimentation’ that denies the writer’s individual responsibility), he nevertheless affirms that the committed intellectual ‘must side with certain social forces …’ in order to engage with, and to shape, the real.46 Whilst Mannheim considers the relationship of the individual 41   David L. Schalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton, 1979), p. 5, and Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War: French Fiction and Film, 1954-1992 (Oxford, 1994), p. 5. 42   For an analysis of commitment and the literature of the First World War in France, see Martin Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict: Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the Great War (Amsterdam-New York, 2004). 43   1936 represents an epiphany for Sartre and the literary generation he seeks to construct in Qu’est-ce que la littérature?: ‘L’historicité reflua sur nous; dans tout ce que nous touchions, dans l’air que nous respirions, dans la page que nous lisions, dans celle que nous écrivions, dans l’amour même, nous découvrions comme un goût d’histoire, c’est-àdire un mélange amer et ambigu de l’absolu et de transitoire’ [Historicity swept back over us. In everything we touched, in the air that we breathed, in the page that we read, in that which we wrote, in love even, we were discovering something like the taste of history; that is to say, a bitter and ambiguous mixture of the absolute and of the transitory]. Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris, 1996), pp. 213‒14. 44   Max Adereth, Commitment in Modern French Literature. A Brief Study of ‘Littérature engagée’ in the Works of Péguy, Aragon, and Sartre (London, 1967), p. 38, and Schalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement, p. 20. 45   Adereth, Commitment in Modern French Literature, p. 32. 46   Ibid., pp. 28 and 34 respectively.

Introduction

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to social forces an unconscious one, commitment, for Adereth, Schalk and more recently Angela Kershaw, is marked by ‘a conscious and willed decision [taken] by a reasoning subject’; it therefore originates in an individual rational consciousness.47 Yet, as Kershaw goes on to state, citing Alexandra Makowiak, it is a choice that inevitably links the individual to the other as soon as it finds cultural and political expression.48 It is through this alignment with the social forces of the day, and the ensuing dialogue between the intellectual and these, that French intellectuals had gained some influence in shaping and contesting the Third Republic. The work of committed intellectuals, then, has to be considered both in relation to their individual intellectual and political itinerary and the given, collective, historical and socio-political circumstances in which this is produced and received; not as an unconscious expression of clan allegiances but as a willed and deliberate response to the historico-political context in which they find themselves. Indeed, detailed examination of individual works rarely reveals an entirely uncomplicated concordance between individuals and collective movements with which they are associated. A further aim of this study will therefore be to gauge not only the relationship between individual intellectuals and the social forces they appear to represent, or with which they are aligned, but to gauge gaps and dissonance in order to elucidate more fully the intellectual and political itinerary both of individual figures, but also of the groups themselves. Here then, when dealing with individual works, it is more productive to move away from Mannheim’s primary interest in the collective unconscious and to turn to Mikhail Bakhtin and, more specifically, to the Bakhtinian concept of language, a concept founded on a tripartite understanding of the word and which informs Bakhtinian dialogism more generally. Bakhtin perceives in each word three different, inter-related definitions: that which the individual speaker gives to it in a precise context, that which other speakers have given to it in their own utterances and the generally accepted, neutral dictionary definition of this word.49 Language, for Bakhtin, ‘is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions

  Angela Kershaw, Forgotten Engagements: Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s France (Amsterdam-New York, 2007), p. 107. For Richard Golsan, commitment is also ‘a conscious and articulated support of a political, ideological, or national cause’. Richard J. Golsan, French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s (Baltimore, 2006), p. 8. 48   Commitment is thus ‘le passage d’une parole privée, énoncée par un sujet, à une parole intersubjective, qui s’adressant à autrui me lie aussi à lui …’ [the passage from a private expression, uttered by a subject, to an intersubjective expression which, addressed to others, binds me to them …]. Quoted in Kershaw, Forgotten Engagements, p. 107. 49   M.M. Bakhtin, ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, in M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. by Vern McGee (Austin, 1986), pp. 60‒102, p. 88. 47

France and the Spanish Civil War

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of others’.50 Individual representations of the Civil War are therefore inevitably inflected with the interpretations and understanding of the individual author, but also of the Other; they constitute deliberate, willed responses to a collective, preexisting dialogue from which they emerge. As such, French cultural representations of the war are alive with the utopian aspirations and tensions of both individual authors and of the social forces with which they align. It is within this framework and the context of the factional battle for the real outlined above that I propose to examine French representations of the Spanish Civil War, considering these attempted metamorphoses of the world designed to inspire and to motivate a domestic public that continues to contest the Republic, seeking its abolition or its radical reformulation. For it is in the reimagining or re-working of the world that the utopia acts upon it. This re-working is achieved through the spatial and temporal reorientation of the world affected by the utopia.51 Here again Bakhtinian theory and principally the concept of the chronotope prove useful in adapting Mannheim’s sociological theory to cultural analysis. The chronotope is defined by Bakhtin as ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relations that are artistically expressed …’.52 Variants in the perception of time and space in art, according to Bakhtin, are suggestive of emergent and challenging new ways of viewing and representing the world. In this way the chronotope (or chronotopes, as more than one may exist dialogically within a work) becomes the driving force behind the representation of sociopolitical and historical change within the realm of culture. Whilst the chronotope is primarily a literary device in Bakhtin’s analysis, Michael Holquist observes that ‘chronotope may also be used as a means for studying the relation between any text and its times, and thus as a fundamental tool for a broader social and historical analysis, within which the literary series would be only one of several interconnected types of discourse’.53 Cultural representations are therefore vital expressions of this re-working of space and time and it is through them that we can examine what Mannheim considers the utopian mentality and Ricœur the social imagination.54 As such they   Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’ in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), pp. 259‒422, p. 294. 51  Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 189. 52   Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 84‒259, p. 84. For Bakhtin, this is principally true of the novel, his favoured genre. 53   Michael Holquist, Dialogism. Bakhtin and His World (London and New York, 2002), p. 113. 54   Indeed, for Ricœur symbolic and therefore cultural mediation is an integral part of both ideology and utopia. The Marxist distinction between superstructure and infrastructure is therefore an artificial one as ‘symbolic systems belong already to the infrastructure, to the basic constitution of human being’ (Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, p. 259). In this, these works reflect the committed work’s ability to reshape time, to reveal, as Aragon 50

Introduction

17

supply productive images, ‘an imagining of something else, the elsewhere’,55 an expression of an elsewhere that provides the French public with the evidence of an otherwise applicable to their own domestic circumstances. Cultural representations therefore constitute ‘a kind of intellectual midwifery …’ that contribute to the bodying forth of the utopia from the collective unconscious to which, through intellectuals’ alignment with the social forces of their day, they also belong.56 Behind the appropriation of the Civil War by the French far right and left lies a shared, but never explicitly avowed belief that its cultural representation constitutes a way of affecting real political change in France. French representations of the Civil War are imbued with the belief shared by Gramsci that culture more generally constitutes, alongside the economic and political domains, an essential terrain for political transformation.57 In this way, this study attempts to translate the political and sociological considerations of Levitas, Mannheim and Ricœur to the realm of cultural history. As will already be apparent, this study will not examine works that explicitly label themselves as utopian. Neither will it limit itself to the examination of a specific genre; to do so would be to overlook what Penny Boumelha considers utopia’s cultural hybridty.58 Rather, it is the creative contribution of intellectuals more generally to the expression of the social forces of their day that will form its stated of committed literature, the ‘instantaneity of the present which is linked to the past and which already contains the future’ (Quoted in Adereth, Commitment in Modern French Literature, p. 194). Similarly, Schalk notes of Mounier’s concept of engagement that it reveals a ‘double polarity, prophetic and political …’ (Schalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement, p. 20). 55   Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, p. 266. 56   Ibid., p. 298. 57  Gramsci, A Gramsci Reader, p. 194. 58   Penny Broumelha, ‘Regeneration: Time, Place and Gender in Fin-de-siècle Utopian Narrative’ in John West-Sobby (ed.), Nowhere is Perfect, pp. 123‒38, p. 123. Studies of reportage, for example, also suggest the productive exchange that exists by dissolving the distinctions between genres. For, whilst Hewitt considers that a crucial difference exists between documentary literature of the war and its fictional representation, arguing that the latter is primarily concerned with metaphorical expression, studies of reportage and fiction have suggested a certain resemblance between the two genres (Hewitt, ‘“Partir pour quelque part”’, p. 117). John Romeiser points to French reportage’s tend­ency to adopt literary techniques, techniques which facilitate the translation of the conflict beyond the immediate (John B. Romeiser, ‘The Limits of Objective War Reporting: Louis Delaprée and Paris Soir’ in John Beals Romesier (ed.), Red Flags, Black Flags: Critical Essays on the Literature of the Spanish Civil War (Madrid, 1982), pp. 135‒6). Myriam Boucharenc goes further still, advancing that reportage of the 1930s did not seek to merely reproduce the real but, like literature, to ‘réveiller la potentialité poétique des objets usuels’ [awaken the poetic potential of everyday objects] (Myriam Boucharenc, L’Ecrivain-reporter au cœur des années trente (Lille, 2004), p. 129). Neither Romeiser nor Boucharenc consider metaphorical expression a function restricted to literary fiction alone.

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central focus. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 will examine pro-Nationalist representations of the conflict. Beginning with far-right reportage written by those who associated with Action Française and its intellectual figurehead of the period, Charles Maurras, I will examine how representations of the Nationalist camp reflect the restorationist utopia that informs Maurras’s movement and its nostalgia for the authority of absolute monarchy. In Chapter 2 I will consider two now largely forgotten novelists of the interwar years (Pierre Frondaie and Lucien Maulvault) and their apologies for, respectively, Italian fascism and Carlism, arguing that both novelists are pivotal in preparing a French readership for radical and violent political action through the rehabilitation of war. The radical, violent political engagement at the heart of two Civil War episodes in fiction by the fascist novelists Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle will form the focus of Chapter 3. Here I will argue that both works, despite key differences, facilitate French accommodation with fascism, advancing the possibility of an international fascism in which French fascists might find a spiritual home. I will conclude these opening chapters by considering how such cultural representations of Nationalist Spain are then remobilized during the Occupation of France in order to assert one divergent trend of collaboration over the other, the restorationist utopia of the Maurrassians coming into conflict with the fascist utopia of collaborationists such as Drieu la Rochelle. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 will be concerned with pro-Republican representations of the conflict. In Chapter 4, I will examine reportage by four anti-fascist intellectuals: Jean-Richard Bloch, André Chamson, Marguerite Jouve and Simone Téry. Here I will argue that the war represents in heightened form the very battle in which the Front Populaire is engaged: the defence of republican democracy and of civilization itself from the onslaught of fascism. In addition to this, however, I will show how these also promote a radicalization of republican democracy through a renewal of the Western revolutionary tradition. The Frente Popular, as it is represented by some French intellectuals of the left, thereby constitutes a contrast to the limitations of the Front Populaire. Chapter 5 is devoted entirely to the most celebrated and canonical French cultural representation of the Civil War: André Malraux’s L’Espoir (1937). Here I will examine how Malraux’s novel draws upon a chronotopic tension inherent in the author’s representation of the Frente Popular and of the anti-fascist alliance, represented by the novel’s international volunteers. This tension derives from rival, incompatible utopian visions that seek to assert themselves in Republican Spain. Yet another rival force emerges in the course of Malraux’s treatment of the war: that represented by nature which offers the stillness and indifference of cosmic time which, occasionally, appears to undermine the novel’s propagandist thesis. In Chapter 6, however, I will examine how Malraux, both in L’Espoir and in his film of the Civil War, Espoir: Sierra de Teruel (1939), offers the myth of fraternity as a counterforce to such despair. Here I will argue that this myth, particularly as it is expressed in Malraux’s film, anticipates his turn from revolutionary politics towards the conservatism of Gaullism. In the same chapter I will also examine Simone Téry’s socialist realist novel of the Civil War,

Introduction

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Où l’aube se lève (1945), arguing that this too seeks to move beyond the confines of the conflict in order to suggest its broader significance for French readers. I will also consider how the memory of the Spanish Republic in both Espoir: Sierra de Teruel and Où l’aube se lève is mobilized by Gaullism and the PCF respectively in post-Liberation France. The final chapter will consider two authors who appear to run counter to the utopian trend, openly expressing reservations about the political communities with which they had become associated and which had invested so heavily in the Spanish experiment: Georges Bernanos, the former member of Action Française, and Henri Pollès, an active member of the anti-fascist community in France, now largely forgotten. Here I will examine how Bernanos’s essay, Les Grands cimetières sous la lune (1938), and Pollès’s novel, Toute guerre se fait la nuit (1939), constitute critiques of, and dialogic responses to, the utopian projects pursued by their former comrades. Yet here too, I will demonstrate that the utopian trend among French intellectuals of the interwar years persists. I will conclude by examining Sartre’s short story ‘Le Mur’ and what it suggests about the form French engagement will take in the wake of the Second World War.

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Chapter 1

Touring the Spanish Labyrinth: The Far Right in Nationalist Spain1 While the notion of the French far right today corresponds predominantly to a single political body, the Front National, it would be wrong to think of the far right as a unified whole in the France of the 1930s. Despite occasional opportunities for unity that resulted from the threat posed by antagonistic regimes abroad and by the various crises that marked the Third Republic, the right remained divided on a number of principles, reflecting a diversity that stretched from conservative republicanism to the proto-fascism of the far-right ligues that appeared to pose a direct threat to the Republic in the mid 1930s. It is these divisions within the context of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath with which the first three chapters of this book are partly concerned. The origins of the French far right can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. Indeed, one cannot separate the emergence and development of the Republic in the early 1870s from right-wing opposition to the regime; the Republic survived in its difficult early years largely thanks to the inability of French monarchists, divided between supporters of rival branches of the French royal family, to unite behind a single candidate to the throne. In the 1880s, a new generation of opponents of Republican democracy threw their support behind the populist nationalism of General Boulanger and of Paul Déroulède’s Ligue des Patriotes, founded in 1882. Once again, the Republic survived thanks to a combination of its own guile and the inadequacies of its opponents. It was the Dreyfus Affair, however, which provided a real glimpse of the power that organized political opposition on the part of the right, in the form of the concerted efforts of the right-wing press and of right-wing intellectuals, might bring to bear on the regime. Here populist and intellectual nationalism fused in a symbiotic exchange that found its expression in a viciously anti-Semitic far-right press to which a new generation of right-wing intellectuals contributed. One such intellectual who was to enjoy much influence over the far-right French intelligentsia in the early twentieth century was Maurice Barrès. Combining the 1   The present chapter draws in part upon, and revises, two previously published essays: ‘Touring The Spanish Labyrinth: The French Far Right and the Spanish Civil War, 1936‒1939’, in Forum for Modern Language Studies, 41/2 (April 2005): pp. 161‒73, and ‘In Search of the National Revolution: French Nationalist Narratives and the Spanish Civil War’ in Martin Procházka and Ondřej Pilný (eds), Time Refigured: Myths, Foundation Texts and Imagined Communities (Prague, 2005), pp. 256‒67.

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activities of novelist, essayist, journalist, editor and populist politician, Barrès had come to the public’s attention during the Boulanger crisis. It was the Dreyfus Affair, however, that led him to see in French anti-Semitism a mobilizing force that might further galvanize popular nationalism. Authoritarian, yet mindful of France’s revolutionary past and of the need for radical social transformation, Barresian thought in the early twentieth century was, as Zeev Sternhell writes, ‘Fondée sur un déterminisme psychologique, sur un relativisme moral, et sur un irrationalisme extrême’ [based on psychological determinism, on moral relativism and on an extreme irrationalism] and indicative of ‘une nouvelle orientation intellectuelle’ [a new intellectual turn].2 The most enduring political and intellectual movement to emerge from this period, however, was Action Française, of which Charles Maurras became the intellectual figurehead in the early twentieth century. Whilst Action Française remained elitist, intellectualist and a supporter of absolute monarchy, advocating the abolition of France’s revolutionary tradition, its daily newspaper, marked by an increasingly populist Germanophobic and broadly xenophobic tone, continued to reflect the exchange between populist sentiment and intellectual thought throughout the late 1900s and 1910s. It was during this period that Action Française reached its height. Despite postwar reaction to the bellicose nationalism that many French citizens now rejected in the movement, it continued to exert an influence upon those French intellectuals opposed to the republican regime. Throughout the interwar years, as Catherine Pomeyrols and Claude Hauser argue, Action Française constituted a magnetic field into which many right-wing radical thinkers were drawn.3 Moreover, its daily newspaper also provided a journalistic apprenticeship for a younger generation of intellectuals, including Robert Brasillach and Thierry Maulnier. As Mazgaj demonstrates, Action Française, primarily through the intersession of Henri Massis, provided until the mid-1930s an intergenerational point of contact between the anti-Dreyfusards of Maurras’s generation and that which Mazgaj terms the young right.4 Under the influence of Maurras, Action Française sought a return to a golden age governed by absolute monarchy. This would mean a return to a France where traditional hierarchy and Catholic values would supplant those of a Republic sponsored by the vast international Judeo-Masonic conspiracy it perceived behind French political life since 1789. The Revolution, Maurras and Action Française contended, had elevated the individual above the collective modes of existence that had shaped national and individual life for hundreds of years and which had culminated in the triumph of Louis XIV’s reign. Democracy had allowed individual interests to dominate national life, creating divisions and fuelling   Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (Paris, 1972), p. 23.   Catherine Pomeyrols and Claude Hauser, ‘Introduction’ in Catherine Pomeyrols and Claude Hauser (eds), L’Action Française et l’étranger: usages, réseaux et représentations de la droite nationaliste française (Paris, 2001), p. 6. 4  Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism. 2 3

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rivalries between social classes through the myth of equality, divisions that now needed to be dissolved into a national unity that only monarchy could restore; the absolute monarch was the sole guarantor of national cohesion, Catholicism the natural religion of the Latin people to which the French belonged.5 The return to monarchy was therefore a necessary step on the path to national recovery. The Revolution that had swept aside monarchy, Maurras argued, had been inspired by the Germanic influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s destructive influence upon France also extended beyond the political to the cultural, however, in the influence he then exerted upon Romanticism. Both the Revolution and Romanticism had served to deflect France from its own classical tradition, a tradition preserved by monarchy and which, like France itself, had achieved its highest expression under Louis XIV. As David Carroll observes, the political and the aesthetic are inextricably intertwined in Maurrassian thought; Maurras’s integral nationalism is ‘an uncompromizing, dogmatic application of a classical organicist model to poetics and politics, with the nation in the political realm corresponding to the Poem in the poetic realm – the nation as the original community and fundamental political artwork, the artwork of all artworks’.6 The return to monarchy would create the conditions essential to the production of great art in France once more by creating a leisured intellectual elite, the inheritors of that which had produced France’s greatest contribution to European culture: the poets and dramatists of the seventeenth century. It was therefore a truly reactionary and anti-modern movement, driven by what can be termed a restorationsit utopia, a term to which I shall return shortly. However, as Mazgaj notes, by 1930 the movement was beginning to show its age, as was Maurras who was increasingly developing a reputation for dogmatism, a reputation reinforced by his worsening hearing. Its opposition to the Republic was seen by many as largely intellectual and essentially rhetorical.7 While Action Française was predominantly a relic of the nineteenth century, albeit an immensely influential one in right-wing intellectual circles, other politically active groups 5

  ‘La France a été mise par la Révolution dans un état matériel sensiblement voisin de l’individualisme démocratique. Toutes les organisations nationales ont été brisées, l’individu sans lien est devenu poussière’ [France has been placed by the Revolution in a material state roughly equivalent to democratic individualism. All national organizations have been broken up. The individual, deprived of all ties, has turned to dust.]. Charles Maurras, Mes idées politiques (Paris, 1973), p. 204. Maurras himself, however, was an atheist; his recommendation that Catholicism be reinstated as the state religion of France was informed by his analysis of those structures and organizations that had contributed, in his view, to the nation’s past greatness. 6   David Carroll, French Literary Fascism. Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, 1995), p. 83. 7   Imagining Fascism, p. 63. Younger members of the movement, in reaction to this emphasis, would go on to establish the Cagoule, a secret far-right terrorist unit bent on destabilizing government in order for a strong chef to seize control of the state, responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in the 1930s.

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suggest far more the contemporary influence of fascist Italy and German National Socialism. Already, in 1925, Georges Valois had broken with Action Française in order to establish the Italian-inspired, proto-fascist Faisceau. The 1930s then saw the emergence of a plethora of apparently fascist inspired movements in the form of the ligues and far-right paramilitary units. The Croix de Feu, for example, was initially established as a war veterans’ movement seemingly imitating, with its uniforms, military parades and leadercult, the squadristi and Freikorps which had shaped Italian and German fascism respectively. Under the war hero Colonel de la Rocque, and with the support of François Coty, the perfume magnate, membership was extended in 1931 beyond the ranks of France’s war heroes thereby rejuvenating the movement. The Croix de Feu’s rhetoric of anti-communism was increasingly supported by strike-breaking and violence directed against the left, leading to the group being banned in 1936 and partially resurrected in the form of the parliamentary Parti Social Français. The rural counterpart to the predominantly urban Croix de Feu was Dorgérisme. This was similarly based on the anti-communist sentiment and activities of its veteran and peasant membership, but sought to return France to an agrarian economy in which la France profonde would have final say over the métèques of Paris. Uniformed, pitchfork-wielding and occasionally violent, Henri Dorgerès’s men were far more prone to anti-Semitism and, in much of their rhetoric and many of their actions, anticipated France’s future under Vichy far more than those groups already outlined and, indeed, France’s only pre-war fascist party, the Parti Populaire Français. Founded in 1935 by the erstwhile athletic leader of the French Communist youth, Jacques Doriot, the PPF began by espousing a fusion of revolutionary socialism and French nationalism. Increasingly, though, as a second war with Germany loomed on the horizon, and as Doriot’s girth similarly swelled before the French public’s eyes, it lurched towards National Socialism. From 1938, Doriot and his supporters began to adopt both the trappings and rhetoric of German Fascism. The result of this rapprochement, however, was, as Pierre Milza notes, the coupling of National Socialism’s conservative features with uniformclad pacifism in the face of, and deference to, German military ambitions.8 This diversity of the far Right might suggest to some a broad consensus among the French for alternatives to Republican democracy in the 1930s. In reality, however, there was very little appetite for the forms of radical change offered by many of the above groups. As Eugen Weber suggests, there was no perceived need for a far-right regime among the vast majority of ordinary French people. After Versailles and even during the economic difficulties of the 1930s, ‘France was a sated nation; it had no territories to reclaim, no oppressed minorities to redeem, no honor to reconquer’.9 Consequently, the French far Right lacked a common political praxis. It was united only by its shared rhetoric: its opposition to Communism, democracy, modernity, political and economic corruption and to that non-French Other said to lurk behind these, the Muscovite or the Jew.   Pierre Milza, Le Fascisme français: passé et present (Paris, 1987), pp. 177‒8.   Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (London, 1996), p. 120.

8 9

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A first potential point of convergence had appeared to offer itself in the winter of 1933‒34, however. The involvement of two Radical Party members in the fraud perpetrated by Alexandre Stavisky seemed to prove the underlying thesis of many far-Right groups; here was evidence of the democratic Republic’s complicity in a financial scandal behind which the hand of the Jew could be detected.10 Stavisky’s suicide in January 1934 only suggested to the opponents of the Republic, communists included, that the extent of corruption extended beyond the individual politicians concerned to encompass the state itself. The convergence of ligueurs and war veterans on the Place de la Concorde on 6 February, following the resignation of the chief of the Paris police, the anti-Communist Jean Chiape, seemed to herald the fusion of thought and action for which many of the far right had long hoped. Yet, the far right failed to fill the momentary vacuum created by the resignation on 7 February of the recently elected Daladier government. The idea then that the various ligues and parties formed around the Stavisky Affair constitute a single French fascist movement does not stand up to the scrutiny of each individual political constituent of the far right in those times. Indeed, the Stavisky affair and its aftermath highlight precisely the far right’s inability to unite. The absence of any charismatic figure to offer an alternative to the beleaguered parliamentary regimes of that year and to draw together discontented veterans and ligueurs suggests both a lack of internal unity and of popular support.11 Indeed, according to Charles Micaud, it was symptomatic of the far right’s general failure in the 1930s to fuse the reactionary intellectualism of Action Française, and of those drawn into Maurras’s circle, and the largely lower middle-class ligues into a single body.12 Unable to unite in the face of a domestic crisis, France’s foreign policy in the 1930s and, more particularly, the rise of fascism across France’s borders in Italy and Germany created further divisions among the far right. Whilst foreign forms of fascism elicited curiosity and indeed enthusiasm among the young right, Maurras 10   Alexandre Stavisky, a businessman of Jewish ancestry who had previously been investigated for various fraudulent activities, but who had always escaped prosecution, issued a series of bonds in 1933 whose value was guaranteed by jewellery which later turned out to be fake or of little value. He was aided in this by two members of the Radical Party, one of whom was a deputy mayor. Sought by the police, Stavisky committed suicide in Chamonix in January 1934. The far-right and communist press immediately suspected that the suicide was in fact an assassination carried out on behalf of the governing Radical Party. 11   For Weber, the only credible candidate for dictator in 1934 was Colonel de la Rocque, described as ‘too much of a gentleman, hopelessly legalistic and republican’ (The Hollow Years, p. 120). For Alastair Hamilton, it is Maurras who could have seized the initiative and power, but who failed to do so (Alastair Hamilton, The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism 1919‒1945 (London, 1971), p. 194). 12   Moreover, Micaud suggests a fundamental difference between the two factions, considering the ligues and their supporters to be the inheritors of Bonapartism and a deeply entrenched predilection for l’homme fort in times of crisis. Charles Micaud, The French Right and Nazi Germany 1933‒1939: A Study of Public Opinion (New York, 1964), pp. 15‒16.

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insisted upon measuring fascism against the standards of Action Française’s monarchism. Italian fascism’s radicalism and initial revolutionary phase were downplayed by Maurrassians who insisted instead upon its ‘restoration of order, the emphasis on hierarchy, and the reassertion of authority …’.13 If fascist Italy’s radical reaction could be absorbed into an on-going struggle by Western and more especially Latin nations against the Eastern, communist Other, the rise of National Socialism in Germany was to prove far more problematic. For the Maurrassians, Germany remained the traditional enemy and Nazi totalitarianism a threat from the East not entirely dissimilar to that posed by Soviet communism. Increasingly for the young right, but also for long-standing Germanophiles such as Drieu la Rochelle and Adolphe de Chateaubriand, it represented a pole of attraction, however. Yet, it had become difficult by the mid 1930s for both Maurrassians and enthusiasts of foreign fascism to ignore the threat that Germany and Italy posed for the French, Italy constituting a military threat to the French empire through its own imperialist project, but also through the Berlin-Rome Axis (1936) which allied it to a newly revitalized Germany whose leader openly spoke of the inevitability of a future Franco-German war. Even the military threat posed by fascism to the French nation failed to unite the right, however. Like Georges Oudard, many intellectuals of the far right preferred to berate the left for its increasingly organized opposition to European fascism rather than to admit the necessity of defending France in a future war with the Axis Powers. For Oudard, France has been corrupted by Un ramassis d’aventuriers étrangers aigris et vaniteux [qui] nous donnent des leçons de patriotisme et nous poussent à la guerre pour satisfaire, sur notre dos et avec notre sang, des rancunes de race ou de religion et assouvir leur vengeance au nom d’un prétendu antifascisme qui devient un peu trop le cri de ralliement des métèques politiques.14 [A ragbag of bitter and vain foreign adventurers who give us lessons in patriotism whilst forcing us into war in order to satisfy racial and religious grievances, at our expense and with our blood, and to sate their vengeance in the name of so-called anti-fascism which is rapidly becoming the rallying cry of political half-casts.]

The left, then, becomes the refuge of warmongers whilst the right becomes equated with pacifism, pandering, as Micaud observes, to the short-term interests of a nation eager to avoid a second world war.15

 Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism, p. 105.   Georges Oudard, Chemises noires, brunes et vertes en Espagne (Paris, 1938), p. 272. 15  Micaud, The French Right and Nazi Germany 1933‒1939, pp. 61‒2. 13 14

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Nevertheless, the summer of 1936 was to hint at a more propitious time for the French far right. Yet, it was initially marked by a concerted challenge from the left, a left which had united far more effectively in the aftermath of the Stavisky Affair than the right. Following Stalin’s blessing of popular-front politics in 1934, and as a way of combating the mounting threat of the far right, an alliance of radicals, socialists and communists gained, on 3 May 1936, a majority of 158 seats over the electoral alliance of the parliamentary right. The result was a Chamber dominated by the left and a Popular Front government made up of Radical Party and socialist ministers under the leadership of Léon Blum.16 The Front Populaire now offered a sister regime to the Frente Popular elected to office in February of that year. Again, the far right was united through its opposition to all that the Popular Front stood for, rather than through any praxis of its own. Despite the absence of communists in Blum’s cabinet, the far-right press set out to convince its readers that this was enslaved to Moscow. It was further tainted by the presence of the radicals who, through their alliance with the left, had revealed once again their political opportunism. The association of the Popular Front with social disorder was confirmed in the eyes of many of the far right when electoral success was followed by a protracted series of strikes that summer. One need hardly mention the political capital that was also made of Blum’s Jewish ancestry in the antiSemitic press. Yet, while the Popular Front embarked on a series of social reforms made to appear more radical than they actually were in the far-right press, the pronunciamiento of 18 July offered the far right a vision of how the unholy alliance of democracy and communism and its reformist agenda might be contested. The military revolt in Spain appealed to many members of the far right as it shared the same oppositional and reactionary mentality. Yet, its appeal also lay in the apparent unity of the Spanish right in staging the revolt; here old-style conservatism, militarism, Catholicism, monarchism (supporters of both the Carlist and Alfonsine houses) along with the fascist Falange had come together in order to overthrow the newly united Spanish left. It also offered a divided French far right a foreign regime that it could admire unambiguously; the Spanish Nationalists, unlike the German and Italian regimes, offered no direct threat to France as long as the civil war, which the revolt soon became, endured. Moreover, theirs was a domestic crisis, a battle against a Soviet-sponsored regime that threatened the very fabric of Spanish civilization, but one which illustrated the real perils awaiting France under the Popular Front. Furthermore, by taking on the perceived communist threat in Spain, the Nationalists could be projected as defenders not only of Spanish civilization, but of Western civilization as a whole. As Massis and Brasillach enthused in the autumn of 1936: ‘Par deux fois, contre le Maure et contre le Turc, à Grenade et à Lépante, l’Espagne a sauvé 16   Of the 380 Popular Front seats in the Camber of Deputies, 147 were occupied by socialists (SFIO), 106 by radicals and 72 by communists (PCF). The PCF declined to join the new government, but lent its support to the government in the new chamber.

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la civilisation occidentale contre un péril venu d’Orient. C’est contre un autre péril aujourd’hui qu’elle se dresse, contre un Orient plus subtil, et peut-être plus dominateur’ [Twice, against the Moor and the Turk, at Grenada and at Lepante, Spain has saved Western civilization from a peril originating in the East. Today she is rising up against another peril, against a more insidious and perhaps more domineering East].17 As the Nationalists gained territory in the summer of 1936, it became clear to many associated with the far right that here, at last, was a regime which deserved their attention and admiration. The Spanish military rebellion of July 1936 appears to have had a galvanizing effect on the various branches of the far right. Throughout the Civil War, far-right writers from Maurras to Drieu la Rochelle were to travel to Nationalist Spain in order to witness the war for themselves, to inspect the regime behind it and to report back on what they perceived to be the new society emerging there. The pilgrimage to Nationalist Spain in the late 1930s therefore became, for a range of writers and artists opposed not only to the politics of the French Popular Front, but also to the twin evils of communism and democracy it represented, what the journey to Moscow had been for many of the left earlier that decade. The result was a plethora of articles, pamphlets and reportage concerning the resurgence of a fellow Latin nation. For Maurras and his disciples, Nationalist Spain and Action Française shared common cause. Like Maurras, Franco was engaged in the defence of the Catholic Church, hierarchy, tradition, authority and therefore the Latin values which had shaped European civilization. Franco’s rejection of parliamentary democracy (an Anglo-Saxon import unsuited to the Latin temperament), his insistence on family and a corporatist, as opposed to capitalist, economy were also those of Action Française and of all those Frenchmen who had been able to resist the perfidious influence of the Judeo-Masonic-communist plot that was the Front Populaire. As subsequent chapters will reveal, more youthful elements of the French far right were equally drawn to Nationalist Spain by the activities and perceived influence of the fascist Falange, an exponent of the corporatist state with an apparently radical social agenda. This chapter is concerned with those far-right intellectuals who came within the magnetic field of Action Française in the 1930s, those maurassiens, maurrassophiles, maurrassomanes and maurrassoïdes evoked by Pomeyrols and Hauser, and who were permitted to travel to Nationalist Spain in order to inspect the regime and who reported on it during the course of the conflict.18 It will aim to demonstrate how Nationalist Spain represented for Franco’s French far-right guests the potential unity of a broad right in opposition to left-wing unity already   Henri Massis and Robert Brasillach, Les Cadets de l’Alcazar (Paris, 1936), p. 92. Thomas notes: ‘The Right in France, who were more distinguished intellectually, more unconstitutional and more determined than in any other surviving democracy, saw Spain as the one country where communism was being resisted’. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, p. 348. 18   Pomeyrols and Hauser, ‘Introduction’, L’Action Française et l’étranger, p. 6. 17

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demonstrated in the form of the French and Spanish popular front governments.19 It will therefore consider how representations of the Civil War are used by farright intellectuals in order to provide a rallying point for a divided French right and to supply a model civil war which a galvanized French right might follow in its opposition to the Front Populaire and the Republic. As such, this treatment of the war as model can be considered a utopia: an imaginative re-orientation of the real designed to impact upon and ‘to shatter the existing order …’ known to its readership.20 L’Invitation au Voyage As Judith Keene’s study of international supporters of Franco reveals, two fundamental types of reporting emerged from Nationalist territory in the course of the war: that produced on a more or less daily basis by professional journalists, subject to censorship and intense scrutiny, and that produced by invited guests of the regime whose political affinity could largely be guaranteed.21 It is this second type of reportage produced in France that will form the subject of this chapter because, unlike the first type, it produces a coherent image of Spain that, if not free from self-censorship, can be guaranteed to be free from direct Nationalist censorship. Such reportage includes works by authors who operated in French nationalist circles and, in most cases, within the orbit of Maurras’s Action Française. Amongst these we find: Georges Oudard, author of Chemises noires, brunes et vertes en Espagne (1938), a rare report on, and admission of, the presence of foreign troops in Nationalist Spain; the Tharaud brothers, who published Cruelle Espagne (1937) following Jérôme Tharaud’s visit to Spain in 1936; Claude Farrère, a member of the Académie Française and author of Visite aux Espagnols (1937); and Bernard Faÿ, author of Les Forces de l’Espagne that same year. To this can be added a body of reportage produced by active Action Française intellectuals who also contributed to the movement’s daily newspaper: the sculptor Maxime Réal del Sarte, author of Au pays de Franco, notre frère latin (1937) and head of the Action Française’s youth wing, the Camleots du roi; Robert Brasillach, still a member of Maurras’s monarchist movement when, in 1936, he

19

  Thus, for Brasillach, the Spanish Civil War represented, as Mazgaj contends, ‘the first theater of a vast European civil war where Popular Front coalitions, led by Communists fighting in the name of “anti-fascism”, were pitted against a nationalist front’. Imagining Fascism, p. 190. 20  Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, p. 285. 21   Judith Keene, Fighting for Franco: International Volunteers in Spain During the Spanish Civil War, 1936‒39 (London, 2001), p. 45.

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co-wrote Les Cadets de l’Alcazar; and Henri Massis, Brasillach’s co-author, who also recounts his 1938 encounter with Franco in Chefs (1939).22 Although I refer to these works as reportage, I do so with some reservations. Many of the above authors appear to correspond to the écrivain-reporter of the interwar years identified by Myriam Boucharenc. This figure, like the genre to which he or she contributes, is a hybrid; the écrivain-reporter is both a literary author and a journalist. Moreover, reportage itself, thanks to its conditions of production, the hybrid status of those who produce it and its reception, occupies an intermediary position in literature and constitutes for Boucharenc a genre without clearly discernible contours, one that borrows extensively from other literary genres.23 Unlike the newspaper article, or petit reportage, it takes the form of an enquiry elaborated over time and often necessitates a journey on the part of the author, a journey of discovery as well as of inquiry, undertaken on behalf of the reader in which the subject is construed as an enigma hidden to full public view, but which the reporter penetrates on the public’s behalf.24 Farrère frames his journey to Nationalist Spain precisely in terms of a need to discover and then to inform: Que devient l’Espagne, depuis quinze mois et plus? Les Français n’en savent, sérieusement, à peu près rien. … Quoi! Voici un grand pays, tout proche du nôtre, voici un grand peuple qui tient à nous par le sang, par la culture, par mille contacts dix ou douze fois séculaires, de Charlemagne à Charles-Quint, de Louis XIV au Maréchal Prin. Et ce peuple et ce pays peuvent traverser une crise politique et sociale de la plus tragique gravité, sans que nous tâchions seulement

22

  Farrère visited the Nationalist occupied Basque country, including San Sebastian and Bilbao, Santander, the Asturias, Burgos, Salamanca, Saragossa and Seville in the autumn of 1937. Faÿ, who would go on to become chief librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale under the Occupation, followed a similar itinerary at approximately the same time, taking in San Sebastian, Bilbao and Salamanca before touring a number of religious sites, including Santiago de Compostela and the Navarre. Massis travelled to Burgos in July 1938 to meet with Franco. Maurras’s official visit to Nationalist Spain took place in May 1938, following his release from a French prison. Between 3 and 7 May he visited San Sebastian, Burgos and the Catalan front. Oudard travelled to Nationalist Spain in the summer of 1937, taking in Salamanca, Bilbao and Santander, following the fall of both cities to Italian and Nationalist forces. Réal del Sarte appears to have carried out at least two visits to Nationalist territory: the first in the spring of 1937, when he visited Salamanca, Seville, San Sebastian and Valladolid, and the second in the company of Maurras in 1938. Jérôme Tharaud travelled to Barcelona and Catalonia in the summer of 1936 before returning to Spain via Lisbon in the autumn of that year. In Nationalist Spain he visited Badajoz, Talavera, Toledo, the Nationalist trenches on the outskirts of Madrid and Salamanca where he was one of the last journalists to interview the Spanish liberal intellectual Miguel de Unamuno. 23  Boucharenc, L’Ecrivain-reporter au cœur des années trente, p. 34. 24   Ibid., pp. 125‒6.

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de voir clair dans un problème qui risque pourtant de devenir périlleux pour nous-mêmes?25 [What has become of Spain in the past fifteen months or so? Seriously, the French know more or less nothing. […] Here is a great country bordering our own; here lives a great people related to us by blood, by culture, by thousands of ancient encounters, from Charlemagne to Charles-Quint, from Louis XIV to Marshall Prin. And yet how can this people and country traverse a political and social crisis of the most tragic gravity without we, the French, trying to get to the heart of a problem which risks becoming perilous for us too?]

Thanks to this imperative to see for oneself, an imperative translated by Boucharenc as ‘le mot d’ordre du vécu …’,26 reportage is often confused with a rival genre: that of travel literature. For Charles Forsdick, however, travel literature is essentially a broad category rather than a formally structured genre, allowing for the inclusion of both the reportage identified by Boucharenc and the novel.27 The desire to witness Nationalist Spain also reflects that impulse shared by many travel writers in the early twentieth century and common to modernism for an alternative to ‘the repressive constraints of home …’.28 Indeed, for Forsdick, the pursuit of diversity and of difference is travel literature’s raison d’être whilst for Odile Gannier it exists in order to promote the awareness of alterity.29 Travel literature therefore fosters a desire for otherness and elsewhere through its revelation of the other; it possesses a potential utopian dimension in its propensity to supply the glance from elsewhere.30 In their propensity to see in Nationalist Spain a model for the French far right, to which these texts contribute, many of these authors supply such a glance. Thus the lure of Nationalist Spain for Faÿ derives not from a desire to witness the destruction of war, but the creation of the New Spain:

  Claude Farrère, Visite aux Espagnols (Paris, 1937), p. 5.   ‘The imperative of lived experience’. L’Ecrivain-reporter au cœur des années trente, p. 37. 27   Charles Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity (Oxford, 2005), p. xii. Moreover, as Odile Gannier’s study reveals, deriving generic structures from travel literature proves as difficult as it does for Boucharenc in respect of reportage and for the same reasons; the former, like the latter, borrows extensively from, and overlaps with, several other genres. See Odile Gannier, La Littérature de voyage (Paris: Ellipses, 2001). 28   Charles Burdett and Derek Duncan (eds), Cultural Encounters: European Travel Writing in the 1930s (New York, 2002), p. 4. 29   Charles Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures, p. ix, and Odile Gannier, La Littérature de voyage, p. 9. 30   La Littérature de voyage, p. 49. 25 26

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‘Je veux voir la vie de l’Espagne; je ne veux pas voir ses morts …. Je veux voir ce qui arrive, ce qui commence et ce qui se maintient; je veux voir ce demain en train de naître au milieu des incendies et des massacres; … je veux comprendre ce qui est et ce qui sera, non ce qui disparaît et ne sera plus. C’est l’existence de l’Espagne, ce sont ses forces qui m’intéressent, non ses tortures ni ses misères.’31 [I want to see living Spain; I do not want to see its dead …. I want to see what is occurring, what is beginning and what is persisting; I want to see this new dawn rising up above these ashes and massacres; … I want to understand what is and what will be, not what is disappearing and will no longer be. It is the very existence of Spain, its strength, that interests me, not its agony and its misery.]

Yet, whilst the decision to journey to Nationalist Spain by French far-right intellectuals corresponds to a desire for otherness, an alternative to the status quo, to be found in the encounter with a new society, it also originates, paradoxically, in a quest for resemblance. The appeal of Nationalist Spain lies in a critique of democracy and of the left that corresponds to one already formulated at home. Paul Hollander’s concept of the political pilgrim therefore provides a more useful term of reference for understanding this group of authors and their reportage. Although limited to a study of intellectual visitors to, and supporters of, communist regimes, and very much a product of the Cold War, Hollander’s analysis of the tropes and themes of pro-communist reportage lends itself extremely well to the study of far-right reportage of Nationalist Spain. Whilst the écrivain-reporter is, for Boucharenc, a ‘flâneur salarié’ who, like Gannier’s travel writer, distinguishes him or herself from the tourist by a refusal of the sanctioned itinerary,32 the political pilgrim is a friend of the welcoming regime, an invited guest subject to certain house rules, but whose loyalty and friendship are already known and more or less guaranteed.33 The authors studied in this chapter, like many examined elsewhere in this book, therefore come to Spain with a fundamentally different mindset to the majority of their predecessors in search of exotic otherness. Thus, whilst Gautier’s journey to Spain is born of the casual remark ‘J’irais volontiers en Espagne!’ [I would happily to go to Spain!], mistaken by his friends as a commitment, a debt ‘qu’il fallait aquitter … au plus vite, sous peine d’être harcelé sans répit par ces créanciers officieux …’ [that had to be paid back as quickly as possible at the risk

  Bernard Faÿ, Les Forces de l’Espagne: Voyage à Salamanque (Paris, 1937), p. 6.   ‘The salaried wonderer’. Boucharenc, L’Ecrivain-reporter au cœur des années trente, p. 138. 33   Maxime Réal del Sarte is thus the guest of His Excellency Quinones de Leon who acts as his guide (Maxime Réal del Sarte, Au pays de Franco, notre frère latin (Paris, 1937), p. 12). Claude Farrère’s biographer suspects that he was invited to Nationalist Spain by the Nationalist Prensa y Propaganda department (Alain Quella-Villéger, Le cas Farrère: du Goncourt à la disgrâce (Paris, 1989), p. 331). 31 32

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of being remorselessly pursued by these officious creditors],34 the far-right visitors to Nationalist Spain examined here are responding to a calling. Furthermore, Hollander contends that the desire to travel to the alternative regime, whilst dressed up in the enquiry of reportage or the curiosity of travel literature, stems from a form of intellectual and political estrangement at home. For the French far right, this estrangement results from a rejection of modern, democratic, Republican France, but also from nostalgia for a lost golden age. In the case of die-hard Maurassians, such as Réal del Sarte, this is the nostalgia for monarchy. For writers only loosely associated with the Action Française, such as the Tharaud brothers who, through their association with Maurice Barrès, had come to the far right from a different nationalist tradition, this lost golden age was less easily locatable in France’s past, but no less intangible in the degraded present of interwar years France. For all the writers of this present chapter, France is no longer the country it once was. All share a predilection for national nostalgia and disaffection with the present. The relationship that exists between the estranged intellectual and the social order of the alternative foreign regime is characterized by a form of onedirectional attraction in the first instance, however. The alternative regime appeals to the disaffected intellectual through the parallels the latter sees between his or her own thinking and its echoing in the regime’s discourse.35 Consequently, the recognition of the intellectual’s own thoughts in the voice of the other is taken for an invitation, drawing him or her towards that alternative society. The invitation to journey therefore often originates in the paradoxical desire to discover resemblance in the otherness of Nationalist Spain. If, as David Wingeate Pike implies, the Maurrassians tended to overstate their friendship with, and influence over, the Nationalists, the former clearly believed that what was happening in Spain bore more than a passing resemblance to the ideals they had developed at home.36 The avowed reasons for wanting to travel to Nationalist Spain during the Civil War were less narcissistic, however. For Farrère, the journey to Nationalist Spain was essential in order to discover the objective reality of Franco’s new society and to counter or to confirm that image of it encountered only in a highly partisan press (Visite, pp. 5‒6). The accounts produced by Farrère, Massis, Oudard and the Tharauds all echo that central desire of much travel literature to correct the erroneous understanding that the sedentary and the ignorant have formed of a world they have never experienced. Undeniably, however, and as the title of Réal 34   Théophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne. Tra los montes (Paris: Fasquelle, 1929), p. 1. First published in 1840. 35   Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba 1928‒1978 (New York, 1981), p. 8. 36   Pike suggests that Maurras’s visit was greeted with general indifference in Nationalist Spain (Pike, Les Français et la guerre d’Espagne, p. 340). The leader of Spanish monarchism before the war, Calvo Sotelo, had frequented Action Française circles during his exile in Paris, however.

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del Sarte’s Au pays de Franco, notre frère latin suggests, it was the anticipation of encountering a family resemblance in the other’s regime which drew many French far-right intellectuals to Nationalist Spain between 1936 and 1939. In the summer of 1936, however, invitations to visit Nationalist Spain were not forthcoming; the call was still one-sided, emanating from the French far-right intellectual. Unlike the loyalist forces, the Nationalists felt no initial compulsion to court favour with foreign sympathizers other than those (German, Italian and Portuguese) in a position to supply something immediately more potent than the expression of their mutual intellectual affinities. It was only when the Nationalists felt a need for justification in the world beyond their newly established borders that the call became bi-directional. In September of that year, the seasoned travel writer and journalist Jérôme Tharaud became one of the first to be allowed access to Nationalist territory. Others were to follow, but, as Keene’s extensive research on the subject reveals, the journey through Nationalist Spain was to follow a strict and well thought-out itinerary, much as the left’s tour of the Soviet Union had earlier that decade.37 Burgos, Salamanca, Talavera de la Reina, Toldeo and the trenches to the west of Madrid were familiar points on the tour in 1937. To these were added the Aragon front and Saragossa in 1938. Ministry of Propaganda officials accompanied foreign writers virtually everywhere.38 In some cases, notably that of Maurras in 1938, their visit was granted official recognition. In many cases, these visitors were able to meet with at least one nationalist hero in the form of the generals Queipo de Llano or Moscardó and even with Franco himself.39 The focus on the New Spain, as opposed to the military means by which this was being forged, is therefore a result both of a highly organized political tour and of a propensity, observed by Elaine Scarry, for literary representations of war to ‘back away from injuring and [to] begin to take as their subject the most incidental or remote activities occurring there, rather than holding onto what is occurring at its center and periphery’.40 The recognition of the French intellectual’s own thinking in nationalist discourse generated an initial predisposition to this regime, then. This was increased by the apparent recognition of the validity and importance of the intellectual’s   Keene, Fighting for Franco, pp. 55‒6. Indeed, Marcel Sauvage, upon his visit to Nationalist Spain, notes ‘l’impression … que cette guerre est entrée rapidement dans le tourisme’ [the impression … that this war has quickly embraced tourism]. Marcel Sauvage, La Corrida. Notes sur la guerre d’Espagne (Paris, 1984), p. 36. First published 1938. 38   Infringing the restrictions imposed on Franco’s guests, as Arthur Koestler reveals in Spanish Testament, led to death threats and imprisonment, regardless of one’s political affiliations. Arthur Koestler, Spanish Testament (London, 1937), pp. 27‒8. 39   Massis, Maurras and Réal del Sarte enjoy a meeting with the caudillo, while Farrère interviews Queipo de Llano. Maurras also met with Serrano Suñer, Interior Minister and Franco’s brother-in-law, and Moscardò in 1938. 40   Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York, 1988), p. 66. 37

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thought by the regime itself reflected in the subsequent invitation to journey to Nationalist Spain or at least the granting of access. This predisposition towards the nationalist regime often underwent a threefold increase once in Nationalist Spain when the intellectual was exposed to what Hollander terms the techniques of hospitality. These techniques, directly modelled on those employed by the Soviet authorities in the USSR and by the Spanish Republicans, as Hugo García has recently demonstrated, are dependent on the intellectual’s original predisposition, but augment this through the generosity and flattery that often accompany the intellectual’s tour.41 The aim is also to further shape the intellectual’s perception of the state through careful manipulation of the sensorial impressions of reality encountered during the visit. Manipulation implies, of course, control and limitation. Ironically, this was often achieved through experiencing excess. The description of food as a sign of cultural difference is an essential trope of much travel writing. In the political tour, it becomes a sign not only of the other regime’s largesse towards the visitor, but of the abundance of resources lacking or mismanaged under one’s own or other regimes. The descriptions of meals in far-right narratives of Nationalist Spain are therefore not simply expressions of a French obsession with gastronomy, but serve to establish a dual contrast between the reader’s misconceptions of the regime and its reality as well as between the management of resources by the Nationalists and the mismanagement of the Republic. Farrère therefore enthuses in his description of one restaurant in San Sebastian: Il ne s’agit guère de restrictions. L’Espagne nationaliste nage littéralement [sic] dans l’abondance. … Les servants apportent, simultanément, trois ou quatre plats contenant les sauces, les condiments, les garnitures, et un récipient gigantesque contentant un amalgame de viandes multiples, de riz et de choux verts …. Il y a de quoi nourrir vingt personnes plutôt que dix…42 [There are hardly any restrictions. Nationalist Spain is swimming literally [sic] in abundance. … The waiters bring simultaneously three or four plates containing sauces, condiments, garnishes, and a giant plate containing a mixture of many meats, rice and green cabbage …. There is enough to feed twenty rather than ten.]

41   Hugo García, ‘Potemkin in Spain? British Unofficial Missions of Investigation to Spain during the Civil War’, European History Quarterly 40/2 (2010): pp. 217‒39, p. 228. García confirms that invitations were only issued by the Nationalists according to the ‘prestige and political trustworthiness’ of the guest (ibid., p. 229). 42   Farrère, Visite, p. 12. Sauvage’s more objective report also suggests that the Nationalist zone suffered no lack of food, but observes that this was due in large part to the fact that it occupied the best agricultural land in Spain (La Corrida, p. 120).

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The quality and quantity of food, along with the associated feting of the intellectual tourist, also engender a greater psychological sense of well-being associated with the regime and, as Hollander observes, ‘an agreeable disposition, a sense of contentment, and a rosy outlook on the world’. This then ‘predisposes to a positive, affirming attitude toward the social environment in which one finds oneself’.43 Réal del Sarte’s account of lunch in his appendix to Maurras’ Vers l’Espagne de Franco is illustrative of this to the extent that the ability to feed one’s guests becomes equated with the ability to order and manage an entire society: ‘Le menu était excellent, les vins magnifiques, les pâtisseries fines; on sentait que l’ordre régnait et qu’avec lui, l’abondance était revenue’ [The menu was excellent, the wines magnificent, the pastries truly fine; one felt that order reigned and that with it came a time of plenty].44 The theme of abundance that springs from the ability to manage one’s social environment therefore begins to extend beyond the restaurant doors as the feted intellectual emerges from breakfast, lunch or dinner to encounter the New Spain. Replete after his meal, Réal del Sarte finds himself more inclined to accept the itinerary proposed by his nationalist hosts ‘organisé de sorte que je puisse voir tout ce que je désirais afin de rapporter aux Français la véritable image de l’Espagne’ [organized so that I might see everything I wanted to in order to take the true image of Spain back to the French] (Au pays de Franco, p. 13). The world around the intellectual tourist then disposes itself much as the intellectual had hoped prior to his visit and much as his hosts, through the process of selection operated on such tours, intended it to. The harvests of 1938 therefore indicate to Massis the broader harmony of Nationalist society: En traversant ces terres de Navarre, de Castille, en parcourant ces provinces rendues à l’abondance, à la gloire de leurs moissons, qui donc, en effet, s’aviserait que c’est là un pays déchiré par la révolution? Ce qui frappe, au contraire, c’est sa tranquillité, cet état de calme, de repos, qui est l’expression même de l’ordre matériel et moral.45 [When crossing the land of Navarre or of Castile, when travelling these provinces that have become a land of plenty once more, that yield glorious harvests once more, who would really believe that this is a country torn apart by revolution? One is struck, on the contrary, by its tranquillity, its calm, its peacefulness, which are the very expression of material and moral order.]

As Farrère suggests, the natural fecundity of Nationalist Spain is to be associated with the order and discipline that reign there, a discipline which cultivates abundance and generates peace and social harmony and which is made visible   Hollander, Political Pilgrims, p. 362 and p. 366 respectively.   Charles Maurras, Vers L’Espagne de Franco (Paris, 1943), p. 211. 45   Henri Massis, Chefs (Paris, 1939), p. 154. 43 44

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in the landscape itself: ‘Et, partout, j’ai vu, vu de mes yeux l’ordre, la liberté, l’abondance et la paix. La paix, oui, sur cette terre encore sanglante, parmi ces ruines et au cœur de ce peuple qui continue à se battre’ [Everywhere I saw with my own eyes order, liberty, abundance and peace. Yes, peace over this still bleeding land, amidst these ruins and in the heart of a people still at war] (Visite, p. 66). Farrère also notes that social harmony is supported by the financial success of the peseta ‘[qui] monte au fur et à mesure que notre franc Auriol, hélas! descend…’ [[which] is rising while our Franc, alas, falls…] (p. 19). Here is a world to be envied in spite of the Civil War. As Hollander contends, the idealization of another country’s regime begins at home.46 As it does for Baudelaire’s traveller, the appeal of one’s destination lies in the resemblance it bears to one’s personal ideal. Beyond the Spleen of 1930s France lies the Ideal of an ordered society: ‘Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté’ [There, all is order and leisure, /Luxury, beauty and pleasure].47 This predisposition to idealization, rather than to the pursuit of an objective truth, is then encouraged by the invitation to travel to Nationalist Spain and by the techniques of hospitality employed in a highly selective tour. In this sense, the political pilgrim reflects for Hollander a Western tradition of utopiaseeking that informs a quest for a ‘form of social organization which has banished scarcity, frustration, and conflict, which maximizes happiness, freedom, and selfrealization …’.48 A Home from Home: The Restorationist Utopia Informing the far-right’s idealization of Nationalist Spain, its belief that here, at last, order, hierarchy and social discipline have been restored and allowed to work upon the world around them, is the image of restored social harmony, of a society that is reversing the social upheavals of modernity. In this sense, its image of Nationalist Spain draws upon and reflects the restorationist utopia advanced by Action Française and Maurrassian integral nationalism prior to the journey to Spain. In many ways, the restorationist utopia resembles Mannheim’s conservative utopia. Like the latter, it is born of its own opposition to other forms of utopia

  Hollander, Political Pilgrims, p. 9.   ‘L’Invitation au voyage/The Invitation to the Voyage’ in Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. by James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 108‒10. 48   Political Pilgrims, p. 30. Hollander’s concept of utopia here echoes that of Isaiah Berlin. Its focus is very much on the content of a specific form of utopia rather than on its function in relation to intellectual estrangement, however. For the most part, Hollander considers the utopian mindset as a form of alienation with no impact upon or potential impact upon the real. 46

47

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and principally to communism and liberal democracy.49 The latter constitute a form of dystopia to which the restorationist utopia is contrasted. Thus, reportage concerning Nationalist Spain usually alludes to the dystopic malfunctioning of the Spanish Republic under the Popular Front, a result of the unholy alliance of the liberal-humanitarian and of the socialist-communist, even if the majority of the authors concerned have no direct experience of the Republic. The Republic is nevertheless conceived of as a land of chaos. A walk along La Ramblas in August 1936 reveals a world turned on its head to the Tharauds. Here, uniformity has replaced diversity and the signs of wealth the visitor could once discern there. Women dress like men, sexual depravity reigns, youth now commands and the social hierarchy is reversed as the anarchist militias speed about the streets of Barcelona in cars they have stolen from the aristocracy, driven by that ‘psychose de toute révolution: on s’élance à fond de train vers le paradis que l’on rêve’ [psychosis of all revolutions: one hurls oneself at breakneck speed towards the paradise of which one dreams] (Cruelle Espagne, p. 18). Faÿ goes so far as to assert that the visitor can be murdered for no reason at any time.50 Similarly Oudard attempts to persuade his reader that: Le sentiment d’absolue sécurité que j’éprouve en rentrant par ces sombres rues désertes, je ne l’aurais point à Valence ou à Barcelone où le passant … est, la nuit surtout, à la merci d’une brute vagabonde …. De pareilles craintes ne m’ont jamais assailli de ce côté. Un ordre impeccable règne qu’on ne sent pas peser sur ses épaules. (Chemises, p. 32) [I would never feel in Valencia or Barcelona, where the passer-by … is, especially at night, at the mercy of any wandering brute …, the absolute security that I feel here when returning via these dark, deserted streets. Such fears have never assailed me here. An impeccable order reigns without one feeling its excessive presence.]

By way of contrast, Nationalist Spain balances security and discipline with freedom. Under the Republic, Farrère contends, Santander suffered ‘une tyrannie d’autant plus terrible qu’elle fut désordonnée. Comme à Barcelone et comme à Madrid, le pouvoir gouvernemental, trop faible pour commander à ses propres partisans, trop indifférent d’ailleurs aux désordres de la rue, … arrêta, condamna, massacre au hasard’ [a tyranny all the more terrible for being disorganized. As in Barcelona and Madrid, government powers, too weak to command their own supporters, too indifferent to the chaos on the streets, … arrested, condemned to death and massacred at random] (Visite, p. 26). Now under Nationalist control, Santander is the city ‘où l’ordre est revenu, où la joie éclate partout …’ (ibid., p. 27).51  Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 206.   Faÿ, Les Forces de l’Espagne, p. 13. 51   ‘Where order has returned and joy radiates everywhere …’ 49

50

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Republican atrocities spring from a lack of discipline, the collapse of order and the resultant inversion of the world. Thus it is Republican women, ‘harpies véritables, sœur des tricoteuses qui assiégeaient nos échafauds de 1793 …’ [veritable harpies, sisters of those tricoteuses who lay siege to our scaffolds in 1793 …] (ibid., p. 32) who, for Farrère, are responsible for ‘les pires horreurs’ [the greatest horrors], as ‘La femme est probablement, comme des moralistes l’ont affirmé, ce qu’il y a de l’humanité de meilleur et de pire’ [Woman is probably, as moralists have contended, the best and the worst of humanity] (ibid., p. 35). By allowing for the disruption of traditional gender distinctions, the Republic has created the conditions in which women’s baser instincts can be given full rein.52 For the Tharauds, disciples of Barrès and therefore of a concept of French nationality rooted in l’esprit de l’est rather than in latinité and the Mediterranean, Republican violence is an expression of a fundamental, racial violence that is fully unleashed in the Republic, but which sometimes also escapes control in Nationalist Spain. Thus the failure of General Goded’s military uprising in Barcelona in July 1936 led to an immediate set of bloody, but spontaneous reprisals on the part of ‘furious’ Republicans, they contend (Cruelle Espagne, pp. 43‒4). This is the natural response of the Catalan character since ‘On jette là-bas une grenade, ou bien on tire un coup de feu, comme on gratte de la mandoline, comme on avale un verre d’anis, comme on frotte un briquet pour allumer une cigarette’ [one throws a grenade there or fires a shot just as one plays the mandolin, knocks back a glass of aniseed, or lights a cigarette] (ibid., p. 38). Since then, however, and under the influence of Marxism, Republican terror has become more systematic, Catalonia as a whole is now characterized as ‘[un] pays inhabitable’ (ibid., p. 109).53 This systematization of Republican terror, Farrère suggests, contradicting his earlier assertion, and not without a degree of historical accuracy given the repression of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) and other Republican purges, echoes techniques utilized and perfected in the USSR.54 Thus, the mass drownings off the coast of Santander, reputedly organized by the Republican authorities prior to the town’s capture, recall in Farrère’s mind those carried out ‘à Odessa il y a vingt ans. Le bout de l’oreille soviétique perce à chaque instant, dans les gestes révolutionnaires de l’Espagne’ [in Odessa twenty years previously. The Soviet hand can be seen at all times in the revolutionary actions of Spain] (Visite, p. 27).

52   The same argument is explored in relation to the liberation of the female libido in Adolphe de Falgairolle’s erotic novel La Milicienne: roman de l’Espagne (Paris: Fayard, 1937). For analysis of this work, see Hewitt, ‘“Partir pour quleque part”’. 53   ‘An uninhabitable land.’ 54   The POUM (or Worker Party of Marxist Unification), which sought the revolutionary transformation of the Republic in the course of the war, was banned by the Republican authorities following an active campaign by the PCE in May 1937, leading to civil war within the Republic itself, famously recounted by George Orwell, who served in a POUM unit on the Aragon front, in Homage to Catalonia (London, 1989). First published in 1938.

40

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Terror, then, is the one thing that the otherwise chaotic Republic is able to organize. When Nationalist atrocities do merit a rare mention in these works, their potential to perturb the reader is usually rapidly neutralized. Oudard thus explains the brutality of the daughter of one prison governor who regularly invites her friends to witness the execution of Republican prisoners as an expression of an eternal Latin characteristic: the desire for vengeance. This enthusiastic spectator to war crimes is thus transformed into the heir of Maria la Brava (or Maria de Monroy), a fifteenth-century vengeresse of her sons’ murders (Chemises, p. 40). For Oudard, such vengeance, whilst regrettable, is understandable on the part of Nationalists (ibid., p. 232). Not only are Nationalist atrocities a response to initial atrocities carried out by Republicans, but they also serve to reconnect with the nation’s inheritance. Whilst Republican violence is other and Eastern, that carried out by the Nationalists derives from a Latin tradition dear to integral nationalism. The Tharauds thus represent an exception to the authors studied here; the cruelty to which the title of their reportage alludes is that of all Spain. In this the Tharaud’s nationalism reflects the continued influence of Barrès upon them and the primacy of l’esprit de l’est located in the formerly lost provinces of Alsace and particularly Lorraine over any Mediterranean or Latin heritage. Nevertheless, whilst the Nationalist slaughter of Republicans at Badajoz is reported in objective terms, it is without commentary on the part of the authors and Cruelle Espagne abounds in anecdotal evidence of Republican atrocities. With the exception of the Tharauds, none of the reportage examined in this chapter responds to an actual visit to Republican Spain. Stories of Republican atrocities consequently have to be drawn from a variety of pre-existing anecdotes that circulated freely in the French press during the conflict. Even the Tharauds, however, are reliant upon the anecdote. Surrounded on a boat to Lisbon in 1936 by refugees from the Republic, Jérôme Tharaud listens to snippets from various conversations which suggest the extent of Republican terror, but he is unable to discern the whole picture of any single episode as ‘chacun garde son secret comme un affreux trésor, et l’on ne saisit guère que des bribes, des lueurs atroces dans la nuit…’ [everybody keeps their secret to themselves as if it were some awful treasure and one only catches snatches of conversation, terrible flashes of light in the dark …] (Cruelle Espagne, p. 117). Together, though, these anecdotes form a narrative of their own which allows the writer to approach the recent events of the war, even if the reality it exposes is chaotic and incomprehensible to the rational French observer: ‘C’est qu’un pareil récit me semble bien donner une idée de ce qui se passe en Espagne: incohérence et folie. Des domestiques éprouvés qui trahissent leur maître on ne sait pourquoi, des gens auxquels vous ne voulez que du bien, qui vous abattent froidement, sans raison ’ [Such tales appear to me to give one an idea of what is happening in Spain: chaos and madness. Servants pushed to their limits who now turn inexplicably on their masters. People to whom you only wish well who now shoot you dead for no reason …]’ (ibid., pp. 120‒21). As the Swiss journalist, travel writer and admirer of Maurras, Eddy Bauer, confesses, all narratives of Nationalist Spain are therefore prone to including uncorroborated

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anecdotes, ‘ces multiples incidents, ces “dit-on”, ces “paraît-il” qui alorudissent notre texte …’.55 Such an admission betrays these authors’ dependence on the other as a source of information, but also the difficulty of bearing direct witness. This is very much the result of the official tour and the conditions authors experienced when trying to access the war itself. Visits to the front were extremely rare as the selectivity of the tour prevented far-right travellers from putting their lives at risk by witnessing combat. Instead, writers were only granted access to former battlefields and newly gained territory usually once these had been purged of the more gruesome signs of battle and of Nationalist atrocities. Access to the Republic, particularly following Pierre Héricourt’s covert reportage, was impossible for those already associated with the Nationalist cause.56 As a result of these restrictions, many of these accounts of war are marked by a sense of their belatedness, of constantly arriving after the event they seek to witness and represent, or betray an impossibility of witnessing for oneself. The Republic of these narratives is therefore a narrative reconstruction produced through an assemblage of anecdotal evidence. This is not to say that Republican atrocities did not take place, but to affirm that none of the writers studied here ever witnessed such atrocities first hand. Nor is it to state that such anecdotes play no useful role in understanding the experience of the Other in war. Rather, it is to suggest a fundamental problem underlying such reportage and a narrative strategy designed to counter this, but also to contribute to the formation of a dystopian image of the Republic in opposition to which a restorationist utopia might stand. For all these writers, the validity of the anecdote lies not in its ability to be authenticated, but in its veracity, its ability, as the Tharauds suggest, to highlight a greater, collective truth behind an individual one. Maurras himself illustrates this by referring to his own royalist apprenticeship of the 1880s when writing of the Spanish Civil War in 1943. Of singular importance to this apprenticeship was an anecdote concerning the Paris Commune of 1870. Its accuracy, Maurras argues, is unimportant as it hides a fundamental truth despite the inability to ground the event it relates in historical fact. As the Louvre is threatened by fire, the anecdote goes, the painter Gustave Courbet expresses his fears for France’s cultural heritage to which a fellow communard responds by declaring that all existing art must be destroyed to make way for revolutionary art:

55

  ‘These repeated events, these “they say”, these “it appears” which litter our writing ….’ Eddy Bauer, Rouge et or: chroniques de la ‘Reconquête’ espagnole 1937‒1938 (Neuchatel, 1938?), pp. vii‒viii. 56   Pierre Héricourt’s Pourquoi mentir? L’aide franco-sovétique à l’Espagne rouge (Paris: Editions Baudinière, 1937) revealed the extent of Soviet aid to the Republic. Héricourt, despite his activities as a far-right journalist, was able to gain access to Republican forces and to supply evidence of Soviet intervention in the conflict before the USSR withdrew from the Non-intervention Committee in response to German and Italian breeches.

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France and the Spanish Civil War De qui étaient ces mots  ? On le disait aussi devant moi  : Vallès. Oui, Jules Vallès ! Ce cicéronien de l’invective, ce rhétoricien de l’engueulade ... Un peu plus tard, j’entendis le même récit dont le héros était changé. On ne me disait plus Vallès, mais Courbet. … Je n’ai du fait qu’une mémoire d’auditeur. Il ne me souvient pas de l’avoir lu nulle part. … Il serait désirable d’éclaircir et de préciser ce témoignage, que je n’ai pas inventé; il fut au contraire pour moi le point de départ des réflexions qui me mèneront où je suis. (Vers l’Espagne de Franco, p. 114) [Whose words were these? I too was told they belonged to Vallès. Yes, Jules Vallès. That Cicero of the invective, that vituperative rhetorician … A little later I heard the same tale, but the hero had changed. I was now told that it was not Vallès, but Courbet. … My memory of the event is only that of a listener. I don’t recall having read it anywhere. … It would be nice to clarify and to pinpoint [the origin of] this statement that I have not invented. It was nonetheless the point of departure for those thoughts that have led me where I am today.]

Unable to witness large parts of the war for himself, the French far-right political pilgrim to Nationalist Spain is forever condemned to Maurras’s mémoire d’auditeur. The tales he hears and which he repeats and reorganizes in the form of reportage contribute to this spatio-temporal reconstruction of the Republic as dystopia where the old order has been reversed, but also where distinctions have been dissolved. Moreover, in its destruction of church and aristocratic property, to which many of these accounts make anecdotal reference, the Republic has erased many of Spain’s cultural points of reference. Consequently, the middle-class reader envisaged in far-right reportage is unable to orientate himself either socially, culturally or temporally. The Republic strips the world of its past, its traditions and inheritance, creating a heightened present marked by the anxiety supplied by the imminence of death. It is a stifling world from which all spirituality and hope of transcendence have disappeared. Thus the Tharauds, visiting the monastery of Montserrat following the departure of its monks (organized by the Republican authorities), remark: ‘Ah! comme cet endroit, hier encore si pénétré de spiritualité, a pris vite un air morne, indifférent, dès que s’est retirée la vie mystique qui l’animait!’ [Ah! How this place only yesterday so full of spirituality has taken on such a doleful, indifferent appearance now that the mystical life that once filled it has withdrawn!] (Cruelle Espagne, p. 87). The opposition of Nationalist order and harmony to Republican disorder and disharmony, of the restorationist utopia to Republican dystopia, stems in part from the propensity of the utopia to emerge from its opposition to alternative utopias, as well as from the idealization of the Nationalist regime developed at home and then fostered during the subsequent pilgrimage. Representations of life in Nationalist Spain therefore serve to re-invert the world, restoring it not to an immediate pre-

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war past, but to the world envisaged by integral nationalism. It therefore supplies a spatio-temporal contrast to the Republican world. In contrast to Barcelona under the control of workers, Nationalist cities are marked by a social hierarchy whereby each social class is allotted its place within the whole. Visiting Badajoz, Jérôme Tharaud must now travel to the suburbs in order to find the relatives of those workers and Republicans who once held the city, whilst the streets of the centre are alive with the uniforms of the various factions of the Nationalist army (Falangists, Carlist requetés and Moroccans) and the newly liberated bourgeoisie sporting Nationalist colours. While the traveller walks the streets of Republican cities in fear of sudden death, life in Nationalist cities is a well ordered spectacle that deploys itself before Faÿ who observes from a café terrace: ‘on allume les réverbères sous les arcades, en sorte que tout et tous désormais sont un spectacle pour tous. C’est la glorieuse apothéose de la Plaza Major de Salamanque’ [the street lights go on under the arcades so that everything and everyone becomes a spectacle for everyone else: such is the glo­rious apotheosis of the Plaza Major in Salamanca] (Les Forces, p. 29). This spectacle reveals to Faÿ, but also to Farrère, a world where ‘Chaque passant porte sur son visage un air de paisible insouciance, et les boutiques ne désemplissent pas’ [Every passer-by carries on his face a look of peaceful insouciance. And the shops are never empty] (Visite, p. 19). The expulsion of Republican forces from the city leads not only to a restoration of order, social harmony and of economic activity, but also of Western civilization. In expelling Republican forces from Toledo, Franco’s troops have driven out, ‘par la rue Karl Marx, des gens qui prétendaient faire triompher ici une idéologie qui n’avait rien à voir avec [son peuple]’ [via Karl Marx Road, those who claimed to have imposed [in Spain] an ideology which has nothing to do [with its people]] (Cruelle Espagne, pp. 203‒4). Like the Jews, the communists represent a direct threat to Western civilization through an influence over Spain that ‘risquait d’enlever à l’Espagne son caractère occidental, chevalresque et religieux’ (ibid., p. 203).57 The conquest of Republican cities, Maurras suggests in his preface to Réal del Sarte’s Au pays de Franco, returns these to Rome and the Latin West, preventing them from resembling the cosmopolitan cities of Moscow, Berlin and Jerusalem (p. 7). This expulsion has also allowed the return of the religiosity that, the Tharauds allege, had deserted Montserrat under the Republicans. The presence of priests on the streets of the city and ‘leur assurance paisible montr[aient] bien qu’ils avaient déjà repris toute leur autorité ancienne’ [their assured confidence revealed that they had already assumed their ancient authority] (Cruelle Espagne, p. 154). These authors therefore frequently highlight the restoration of church property, a sign that religious life is reasserting itself in Spain, but also that, as one Spanish nationalist explains to the Tharauds: ‘L’Espagne se soulève moins, à cette heure, contre un gouvernement qui voudrait changer les formes économiques et sociales, que contre un Etat qui prétend faire d’une vielle nation catholique une nation sans 57

  ‘Risked destroying Spain’s Western, chivalrous and religious character.’

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Dieu’ [Currently Spain is rising up not so much against a government that would like to change the [nation’s] economic and social forms, but against a state which is claiming to make of an old Catholic nation a godless one] (ibid., p. 160). In this reassertion of the Catholic faith and of religious authority, Nationalist Spain is reconnecting with the nation’s tradition; it is therefore realizing that ambition of Maurrassian integral nationalism to abo­­lish th­e legacy of Revolution and to re-set the clock to a time that does not acknowledge the Enlightenment. For Faÿ, as for all the authors of pro-Nationalist reportage, the Civil War is a battle between the Republican materialist-atheist conception of life and the Nationalist religious and spiritual conception. What he witnesses in Spain is a nation ‘sacrifiant tous ses biens et son corps même, exalt[ant] son âme et affirm[ant], avec une audace impitoyable, les exigences de son être moral’ [sacrificing all its material goods and its life itself, exalting its soul and affirming, with a relentless audacity, the demands of its moral self] (Les Forces, p. 49). It is then the Carlists, described by Preston as ‘anti-modern advocates of a theocracy to be ruled on earth by warrior priests’,58 and the deeply Catholic people of the Navarre, their supporters, who represent for Faÿ the predominance of the spiritual over the material. The former constitute a spiritual pole of attraction for ‘Tous ceux qui dans cette lutte désiraient se grouper non autour d’idées politiques, dont ils étaient las, mais d’un idéal héroïque, supérieur aux formules constitutionnelles, et aux préoccupations sociales … La Navarre n’était plus une province de l’Espagne, mais une province de l’esprit’ [All those who wanted to come together not around political ideas, of which they were weary, but an heroic ideal superior to constitutional formulae and social concerns … The Navarre was no longer a province of Spain, but a province of the spirit] (ibid., p. 43). The Navarre, one unnamed American philosopher informs Faÿ, has rejected the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, and ‘a attendu durant le XIXe siècle, dont elle ne voulait pas, qu’arrive un autre siècle’ (ibid., p. 45).59 It rejected industrialization, modernity, but also, by retreating into its Catholic faith, scientism and materialism. Now, through the military action of the Carlist requetés, the people of Navarre are restoring to the nation the past it had abandoned. Whilst such enthusiasm for Carlism is unique to Faÿ, the argument that the Nationalists represent a spiritual order as opposed to a material one is repeated throughout these works. Thus Oudard quotes one Spanish colonel who requests that he does not hide ‘la foi ardente qui nous soulève tous. Nous mourons pour des idées’ (Chemises, p. 175).60 Similarly, the Catholic poet Paul Claudel, in his ‘Aux martyrs espagnols’, casts the war as a struggle against the Enlightenment and its materialist legacy, against:

 Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, p. 29.   ‘[The Navarre] has waited throughout the nineteenth century, with which it wanted nothing to do, for another age.’ 60   ‘The burning faith that elevates us all. We are dying for ideas.’ 58 59

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Robespierre, Lénine et les autres, Calvin, ils n’ont pas épuisé tous les trésors de la rage et de la haine! Voltaire, Renan et Marx, pas encore ils n’ont touché le fond de la bêtise humaine! [Robespierre, Lenin, and the others too, Calvin, they have yet to exhaust the treasure trove of their anger and hatred! Voltaire, Renan and Marx, and they have yet to scrape the barrel of human stupidity!]61

In this way, Nationalist Spain is envisaged not as a socio-political entity engaged in a material, military battle, but as an embodiment of those Western values asserted by Maurrassian nationalism. It is a realm where the Enlightenment is by-passed, where present and past are fused together in the temporal reconnection between the world of the old West and the struggle of the present. As such it is a space where not only the nation as work, to reprise Carroll’s terms, can re-emerge, but where a truly spiritual, but also aesthetic existence can be lived out. However, the insertion of the Civil War into an on-going battle between West and East reveals it to be a world that has been culturally prefigured; the restorationist utopia is one that originates in a peculiarly French understanding of Spain and the Civil War, one that continues to be reflected in far-right narratives of the conflict as they venture beyond the cities and countryside of Nationalist Spain towards the front and combat, one that is grounded in their authors’ French cultural inheritance. Cultural Baggage As Keene suggests, before July 1936, France had paid Spain very little attention. What interest there had been was primarily economic rather than political or cultural.62 France’s cultural interest in Spain, Hewitt argues, revealed only a form of superficial and ‘generalised Spanish exoticism which [ran] through French literature from Le Cid to Montherlant, via Carmen’ and which is prevalent

  Paul Claudel, ‘Aux martyrs espagnols’ in Paul Claudel, Œuvre poétique de Paul Claudel (Paris, 1957). The poem was first published as the preface to a collected volume of atrocity stories, La Persécution religieuse en Espagne, trans. by Francis de Mionandre (Paris: Plon, 1937). 62   Fighting for Franco, p. 137. Giles Trelmett has recently challenged this assertion, however, arguing that, from the nineteenth century onwards ‘France gained a sudden interest in popular Spanish culture thanks, in part, to the wilful, capricious and man-devouring Carmen of Prosper Mérimée and, in turn, Bizet’s opera’. Giles Tremlett, Ghosts of Spain: Travels through a Country’s Hidden Past (London, 2006), p. 408. 61

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in French far-right novels of the conflict.63 The Spain of French literature is a constant battleground between the forces of reason, duty and honour on the one hand and of passion and abandon on the other. This seemingly eternal Spanish conflict between chaos and order thereby supplies the writers of the far right not only with an explanation for the war, but an established narrative form and source of metaphor for the war they seek to represent. The theme of Spain as the site of this eternal conflict between diametrically opposed values permeates the work of all the writers of this present chapter. This originally Spanish conflict is readily conflated by the French far right with a Europe-wide struggle for ideological and moral supremacy. For Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach, the modern conflict between left and right is rendered all the more pertinent because it takes place in Spain: Dans la fumée grise des obus, sous le ciel en feu parcouru par les avions de chasse, russes contre italiens, les contradictions idéologiques se résolvaient en cette vieille terre des actes de foi et des conquérants, par la souffrance, par le sang, par la mort. L’Espagne donnait sa consécration et sa noblesse définitive à la guerre des idées.64 [In the grey smoke of shellfire, under a sky crisscrossed by Russian and Italian fighter planes, through blood, pain and death, ideological contradictions were being resolved in this ancient land of conquerors and acts of faith. Spain was conferring its blessing and its nobility upon the war of ideas.]

Spain makes of the present-day conflict an eternal one, thereby opening the present up to metaphorical interpretation and to appropriation by a French readership. Yet such an understanding is only possible through the cultural inheritance that the French far-right observer perceives not in a conflict he in fact rarely witnesses, due to the restrictions placed on his tour, but which is ever-present in his understanding of the war and of Spain itself. This war may well be ‘la guerre moderne, où la chimie a sa part …’ [modern warfare where chemistry plays its role …], but it is also, for Massis and Brasillach, ‘la guerre de l’Espagne éternelle, celle de la reconquista et celle de Rodrigue, où la bataille est d’abord un combat singulier, où le mépris de la mort et l’honneur restent au premier rang’ [eternal Spain’s war, that of the reconquista and that of the Cid, where battle is above all personal combat and where disdain for death and honour take pride of place] (Les Cadets, pp. 72‒3). In this way, the Civil War is prefigured in the minds of these writers; it is only natural that such a war should take place in Spain, site of an eternal struggle, always upheld by Spain, against the Eastern other. 63   Hewitt, ‘“Partir pour quelque part”’, p. 117. I will return to this in my analysis of far-right fiction in the next chapter. 64   Robert Brasillach and Maurice Bardèche, Histoire de la guerre d’ Espagne (Paris, 1995), p. 406. First published in 1939.

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The siege of the Toledo Alcazar, which forms the subject of Massis’s and Brasillach’s influential 1936 publication Les Cadets de l’Alcazar, is key to the French far-right’s reading of the Spanish Civil War in such terms. The Alcazar immediately recalls in the mind of the French far-right traveller half-remembered histories of the fortress turned imperial palace and provides a link with the legendary Cid, who was its first governor. Between July and September 1936 a handful of army cadets, their officers and local Civil Guards held off the Republican militia until they were relieved by the Nationalist army’s defeat of the loyalist forces. More than any other battle, Toledo came to confirm in the minds of the French far right the equation of the Nationalist cause with an age-old struggle against the East. Indeed, for Massis and Brasillach, enthusiastic historians of the siege, the whole of the history of Spain can be read in the history of the Alcazar: ‘Toute l’histoire de l’Espagne s’inscrit ainsi dans une suite d’images violemment contrastées, couleur de sang et d’or. La résistance des Cadets de l’Alcazar est la dernière de toutes et l’une des plus belles: elle incarne l’âme espagnole en un puissant symbole qui, dès l’abord, a transfiguré ces combats’ [The whole of Spanish history is thus inscribed in a series of violently contrasting images, coloured blood and gold. The resistance of the Alcazar cadets is the most recent and one of the most beautiful; it encapsulates the Spanish soul in a powerful symbol which transfigured these combatants from the first day of the war] (Les Cadets, p. 3). For the Tharauds, therefore, the Alcazar is predestined to become once again, as it has at various points in Spain’s past, the locus of this eternal struggle: ‘Il y a des gens sur lesquels la destinée se plaît à accummuler les plus sinistres aventures. Des monuments aussi. L’Alcazar de Tolède est de ceux-là’ [There are people that destiny has singled out for the most sinister of adventures. Similarly, destiny singles out certain monuments; the Toledo Alcazar is one of these] (Cruelle Espagne, pp. 185‒6). Moreover, the Alcazar’s predetermined role in the conflict seems to be confirmed by the events of the 23 July, which are reported in the majority of works studied in the present chapter. On that day, the Republican militia are alleged to have telephoned General Moscardó, the Nationalist officer in charge of the Alcazar, ordering him to surrender. The price for disobedience will be the death of his son. Father and son are allowed to speak to each other briefly, their conversation, reproduced with slight variants in much far-right reportage, becoming, according to Oudard, a Cornelian dialogue where national duty and paternal love vie (Chemises, p. 122). Moscardó, in response to his son’s assurances that he will do as his father bids, is alleged to have replied: ‘Remets donc ton âme à Dieu, mon enfant, et que sa volonté soit faite’ (Les Cadets, p. 2).65 Moscardó is then said to have heard his son being executed down the line, despite

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  ‘Confide your soul to God, my child, and let His will be done.’ This response differs in Maurras’s later version becoming: ‘Je t’ordonne … de crier: “Vive l’Espagne!” “Vive le Christ roi!” et puis meurs en héros’ [I command you … to shout ‘Long live Spain, Long live Christ the King’ and then to die like a hero] (Vers l’Espagne de Franco, p. 130).

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his execution not taking place until 23 August.66 The historical accuracy of the conversation notwithstanding, the story itself came to embody the grandeur of the Nationalist cause, which, in the antithetical tension that Moscardó is alleged to have experienced between duty and love, recalls to these French writers that felt by the characters of Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid who must negotiate between the desires of the heart and the dictates of honour.67 In French far-right representations of the Civil War, the Alcazar incident resonates with older discourses, discourses that have their origins in the classical education of the French political pilgrim. Yet it also reflects a further aspect of the restorationist utopia: the promised return to a world where the great classical art of the seventeenth century would once again be possible. The echoes of Corneille discerned in Moscardó’s predicament are intimations of the form of aesthetic beauty that, Maurras in particular argued, could only be recuperated under the restoration of monarchy and of the nation as art work.68 By taking on the Eastern other in violent combat, the Spanish Nationalists reveal the potential for the re-creation of such art, but also for its potential as lived, aesthetic experience. Combat, then, is as much an aesthetic act as it is a political one. The Alcazar itself is therefore a privileged space akin to those isolated, closed worlds, inaccessible mountains and walled cities that are, as John West-Sooby observes, the favourite loci of utopias.69 The recollection of Corneille’s work and a cursory knowledge of the Cid legend are further called upon in order to situate the Nationalist rebellion within a broader cultural narrative that would see such events as preserving Latin civilization. Thus, the Cid’s expulsion of the Moors, along with slightly more oblique references to the Inquisition and the persecution of Spanish Jews, are brought forth as a further example of Spain’s enduring role in the war between East and West. The ranks of  Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, p. 94.   According to the legend (promoted through Spanish epic poetry and ballads) and Corneille’s play (first performed in 1636), the Cid is a faithful defender of Catholicism and of the Spanish monarchy, preserving Spain from the Eastern other in the form of the Moors who threatened Spain in the eleventh century. What Corneille adds to the original legend in his seventeenth-century tragi-comedy is the conflict between duty and honour on the one hand and love, passion and personal happiness on the other. The Cid must choose between his love of Chimène and obeying his father’s command that he avenge an affront suffered at the hands of Chimène’s father, Don Gomès, by killing the latter in a duel. The Cid obeys his father. Chimène then asks the king to sentence the Cid to death, but the situation is resolved by the Cid successfully repulsing a surprise attack by the Moors and saving the monarchy. In the light of this, neither the king nor Chimène wish to pursue Don Gomès’s vengeance and Chimène is ordered to marry the Cid, an order she is now only too happy to obey. 68   Paraphrasing Maurras, Carroll explains: ‘France could only be itself by imitating not Greece per se but the aesthetics of Greece, by safeguarding within itself the essence of Greece and Rome, what Maurras saw as the true origin of France, the essence of its identity.’ French Literary Fascism, p. 83. 69   West-Sooby, ‘Nowhere is Perfect’, p. 1. 66 67

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the Republican international brigades, in these narratives, are consequently filled with ‘[des] Juifs communistes et marxistes immigrés d’Allemagne ou venus tout droit de Russie ou de Pologne [qui] compteraient parmi les plus exaltés et les plus cruels …’ [communist Jews and German Marxist immigrants or those who arrived directly from Russia and Poland [who] apparently count among the most fanatical and the cruel …].70 The Spanish Civil War represents another stage in the eternal struggle between West and East, between the Latin race and the Eastern other. This assault on latinité constitutes, for Réal del Sarte, the real aim of Spanish Republicanism: ‘J’ai compris davantage ces jours-ci pourquoi les hordes rouges vociféreraient à Madrid, dans la haine, cette imprécation singulière: “A bas la latinité!” C’était, en effet, leur vrai programme’ [I’ve recently come to understand all the more why the red hordes of Madrid clamour full of hate “Down with Latin civilization!”. This is their real agenda, in fact] (Au pays de Franco, p. 42). The internationally, racially and politically diverse forces of Republican Spain are subsumed under the generic notion of Eastern hordes embroiled in an eternal struggle between chivalry and barbarity. West against East, chivalry against barbarity, the Spanish Civil War is also for the French far right a conflict between believer and non-believer, between the upholder of Catholicism and the infidel. For Oudard: Ce n’est pas assez dire que cette guerre civile est une guerre de religion. L’esprit de croisade qui existe ici, nous reporte aux âges où les peuples soulevés par leur foi, partaient lutter contre les infidèles, et anticipe en même temps sur l’avenir puisque, de plus en plus, le citoyen se transforme en croyant. (Chemises, pp. 162‒3) [It is an understatement to describe this war as a religious war. The crusader spirit which exists here takes us back to an age where peoples, transported by their faith, would set off to fight the infidel and, at the same time, anticipates the future as, increasingly, the citizen is transformed into a believer.]

This reading of the war as a crusade in the Catholic and Western tradition is echoed by Franco himself, quoted in an interview by Farrère: ‘notre guerre n’est pas une guerre civile, une guerre de partis, … mais une croisade: la croisade des hommes qui croient en Dieu, qui croient à l’âme humaine, qui croit au bien …, et qui luttent contre les hommes sans foi, sans morale, sans noblesse, contre … l’athéisme, et le matérialisme, contre tout ce qui abaisse l’humanité ...’ (Visite, p. 52)71 70   Correspondent to La Nation belge quoted by Maurras in Vers l’Espagne de Franco (p. 49). 71   The potentially perturbing presence of Moorish troops in Franco’s army is either ignored by these writers, however, or explained by an assertion, like that made by Réal del

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France and the Spanish Civil War [Our war is not a civil war, a war between parties, … but a crusade; the crusade of men who believe in God, in the human soul, in good … and who are fighting against men without faith, without morality, without dignity, against atheism and materialism, against all that abases humanity.]

According to Caroline Brothers, parallels made between the rebels and crusaders in pro-Nationalist reporting of the war serve to mask political differences within the Nationalist camp. Thus more radical elements, typically represented by the Falange, became associated with Spanish tradition through the articulation of a discourse that emphasizes the steadfastness, stoicism, religiosity and self-sacrifice of Nationalist forces through the crusader myth.72 However, far-right reportage does not always obscure such differences. Indeed, the fusion of the traditional and the modern, of the Carlist and the Falangist, is essential to the restorationist utopia, but also to the project of far-right unification that accompanies it. Indeed, some admission of difference is essential to the construction of the model of unity. For Farrère, the Carlists, ‘resolute royalists’, and the Falangists, ‘soucieux surtout d’action sociale et syndicaliste, … sont ligués et soldés, indissolublement, contre le communisme qu’ils tiennent à l’unanimité pour la tyrannie des criminels de droit commun …’ [concerned above all with social action and syndicalism, [are] united as one, indissolubly, against communism that, to a man, they consider the tyranny of common criminals …]. Moreover, both factions are ‘catholiques fervents, liguées contre l’athéisme soviétique’.73 The problem of reconciling the two remains difficult, however, as one Nationalist confides to Faÿ, ‘car rien n’est plus disparate’.74 However, as Farrère suggests, the two factions are joined through combat in a unifying praxis that combines their competing ideals. Faÿ’s anecdote concerning the exchange of final letters to loved ones between a Carlist and a Falangist combatant is Sarte, that ‘leur religion est aussi menacée par l’affreuse invasion juive et asiatique que représente la révolution rouge’ [their religion too is threatened by the terrible Jewish and Asiatic invasion that the red revolution represents] (Au pays de Franco, p. 21). The presence of Arab soldiers in these works is thus neutralized by the way these soldiers themselves inscribe their role into the broader narrative of the defence of Western civilization. One Moorish officer therefore declares after the capture of Toledo (‘la cité du Romancero et du Cid’, lest we forget): ‘Si les troupes de Franco n’avaient pas été victorieuses, c’en était fait de la civilisation d’Occident!’ [If Franco’s troops hadn’t been victorious here, it would have been the end of Western civilization!] (Cruelle Espagne, p. 205). In this, far-right narratives of the war use a process of vaccination, as Roland Barthes terms it; the reader is vaccinated against the historic complexities of the war through the partial admission of an uncomfortable truth in order to make greater claims on the myth promoted. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris, 2001), p. 225. 72   Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History (London, 1997), p. 65–6. 73   ‘Fervent Catholics, united against Soviet atheism’ (Visite, p. 28). 74   ‘For nothing is more disparate’ (Les Forces, p. 15).

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illustrative of this. The Carlist, through his love of tradition, his land and his peasant ancestry, is linked to eternal Spain, telling his Falangist brother-in-arms that he is fighting for ‘ces champs, cette ferme, cette église [là-bas], tout cela qui reste, qui restera, et qui ne change pas’ [those fields, that farm, that church [back home], all that remains and which never changes]. The latter has no ties. For him ‘il n’y a que cette volonté de faire l’avenir qu’a mis en mon âme José Antonio … pourvu que cette volonté triomphe, qu’elle vive au-delà de moi’ [there is only this will to forge the future that José Antonio … has placed in my soul. That will must triumph and live beyond my death]. The two die ‘côte à côte fraternellement, pour la même cause, en un même enthousiasme, car leurs fois disparates en un passé irremplaçable, en un avenir inaccessible, n’étaient que les formes diverses d’une même nostalgie, qu’il ne se trompaient pas en nommant l’un et l’autre “Espagne”’ [side by side, fraternally, for the same cause, in a shared enthusiasm, for their respective faiths in an irreplaceable past and an in­acces­si­ble future were only different forms of the same nostalgia that neither was wrong to call ‘Spain’] (Les Fo­rces, p­ . 20). In this way Faÿ evokes a process of dialogic exchange, an exchange also at work when he overhears and reproduces the songs of Carlist and Falangist troops as they march to the Aragon front, cutting between both sets of singing: ‘Et chaque fois un autre air lui faisait écho, on lui donnait réponse’.75 Polyphony resolves into harmony. As head of the Nationalist forces, Franco therefore plays a crucial role in uniting the traditional and the modern in order to achieve the Nationalists’ aim, which is, according to Farrère: ‘Refaire une Espagne toute neuve, qui se souviendra certes des Rois catholiques, mais qui regardera vers l’avenir plus encore que vers le passé’ [To remake an entirely new Spain, which will certainly remember its Catholic kings, but which will look to the future more than towards the past] (Visite, p. 44).76 Military action forges the two tendencies through discipline, but also through the reconnection it creates with the chivalry of old (Les Forces, p. 22). The crusade motif therefore works not so much as a mask, but as a unifying myth designed to act politically upon the present through the imposition of a politico-cultural aesthetic developed in France upon Spanish events. What emerges, then, from French far-right reportage concerning the war, its motives and stakes, is a narrative informed by a pre-exiting cultural baggage. The latter is underpinned by a binary system that opposes West to East, chivalry to barbarity and Catholicism to faithlessness. For Monteath, the aim of this recourse to an older and broader cultural narrative as a way of understanding a contemporary event was: ‘to transform the war … from a contest between rival political ideologies into a contest between moral, metaphysical or even mythical 75

  ‘And to each song another was returned in echo or in response’ (ibid., p. 17).   It is Franco, therefore, who provides the connection between the two factions, describing in an interview with Farrère, the Carlists as the roots of the Nationalist tree, anchored in the past and the nation’s Catholic traditions, and the Falangists as the branches and leaves, producing oxygen, seeking out the sun, and reinvigorating the nation. Visite, pp. 70‒71. 76

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elements, the less tangible the better’.77 According to Christopher Flood, the use of existing narratives built on the binary system described above ensures that the war becomes a battle between abstract values that, allegedly, transcend politics.78 The result is that, paradoxically, the Spanish Civil War in far-right reportage at first appears to be both de-politicized and de-historicized, ever receding in terms of its tangibility. As Keene observes in respect of British supporters of Franquism, the accumulation of a series of narratives built upon such a binary system, and which all suggest a greater, universal truth concerning the war, constitutes a form of bricolage in the sense that Claude Lévi-Strauss attributes to the term.79 Like the bricoleur, these authors make use of existing materials, reorganizing old structures and existing elements that possess a familiar language, thereby restricting the possibility of new meanings and new interpretations. As Lévi-Strauss argues, the spirit of the bricoleur lies behind much mythical thought which ‘is imprisoned in the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering and re-ordering in its search to find them a meaning’.80 The result is that the Civil War appears to become a mythical event grounded in an assemblage of foundational narratives and anecdotes rather than in the author’s mimetic representation of real events. However, it is precisely the interpretation of the Spanish Civil War through such narratives which allows for its acculturation and appropriation by a French farright readership in the form of the restorationist utopia. While the diverse factions of Spanish Nationalism are made familiar through the application of the existing cultural narrative of a battle between moral absolutes, contributing to a distancing from its real complexities and from the events of the war more generally, it does not entirely de-politicize or de-historicize the latter. Rather, by considering farright representations as contributors to a restorationist utopia, their political intent and potential impact upon the real become clear once more. The myth of an eternal struggle between East and West serves a function within the restorationist utopia; it is a means and not an end in itself, as Monteath seems to suggest. Essentially, this function is that attributed by Ricœur to the metaphor. For Ricœur, for whom the creative process has the power to recreate the world, metaphors are forms of semantic invention endowed with the potential to forge a new way of seeing and of experiencing the real. Utopias therefore possess a metaphoric quality; they seek actualization rather than to remain a dream. Culture therefore becomes the realm in which utopias find their clearest expression, but cultural expressions of utopias must therefore be considered as means of acting upon the real.81  Monteath, Writing the Good Fight, p. 43.   Christopher Flood, ‘Crusade or Genocide? French Catholic Discourse on the Spanish Civil War’ in Janet Pérez and Wendell Aycock (eds), The Spanish Civil War in Literature (Lubbock, Texas, 1990), pp. 55‒66, p. 61. 79   Fighting for Franco, p. 64. 80   Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (La Pensée suavage) (London, 1966), p. 22. 81   For an analysis of the link between Ricœur’s concept of the metaphor’s transformational potential and the function of utopias see George H. Taylor’s introduction 77

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In negotiating the Spanish labyrinth with the aid of these older cultural narratives and metaphors informed by an established myth, these authors are attempting to bring the war home to their readership. The very real aim of far-right reportage is to suggest the pertinence and potential of the model they perceive in Nationalist Spain. Massis and Brasillach seem to realize this as early as the autumn of 1936. In the conclusion to Les Cadets de l’Alcazar, they openly discuss the potential for the Alcazar to become a mythical counterpoint to the myths of Soviet communism. Like the Cid and those who fought alongside him, the cadets have fought on behalf of ‘l’Occident catholique’ [the Catholic West]. Their example should be magnified and mystified in order to appeal to Western males who must now rise up to confront the threat from the East (Les Cadets, p. 92). Whilst the myth of the Alcazar (as opposed to the historically real siege) is founded on a narrative that has little grounding in concrete historic reality, its value lies in its potential to mobilize the masses, much as George Sorel’s myth of the revolutionary general strike had intended to for the pre-war left.82 The defence of Western civilization becomes the rallying point for a disparate French right just as it has become so in Spain. Yet, the fusion of the traditional and the modern remains problematic in these works; Faÿ therefore wonders who will assure their unity beyond Franco, Maurras arguing in 1943 that only a return to absolute monarchy can provide the solution.83 Moreover, the society recorded in these representations is predicated upon the preservation of existing inequalities and the restoration of old ones. In this, the restorationist utopia resembles the conservative utopia characterized by Ruth Levitas, quoting Patrick Wright, as ‘future-oriented only in the sense of preservation and restoration; its purpose is “to maintain existing inequalities and restore lost ones”, and it means “to command and coerce those who would otherwise reform or destroy”’.84 The radicalism of the Falange, for example, is treated much as a curiosity, an interesting trend, but one which will not outlive the restoration of order. For a generation of younger writers who had not necessarily gravitated to Action Française it was precisely this right-wing radicalism that would draw them to Spain.

to Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, pp. xxiv‒v. 82   See Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925), trans. by T.E. Hulme, pp. 135‒6. (First published in 1905.) Thus the Cid was not the steadfast defender of the West that these writers would have him be, but a mercenary who fought for both Catholic and Moor depending on his allegiance of the moment. The myth of Spain evoked in these works is therefore one that, as Barthes argues of myth more generally, reduces complexities and denies historicity (see Barthes, Mythologies). 83   Les Forces de l’Espagne, pp. 70‒71, and Maurras, Vers l’Espagne de Franco, pp. 189‒91. 84  Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 188.

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Chapter 2

The Art of War: The Novels of Frondaie and Maulvault The stated objective of far-right reportage of the Civil War was to present, through the alleged objectivity of the genre, an honest rather than partisan appraisal of the emergent Nationalist Spain. As the previous chapter demonstrated, this was far from the case. Furthermore, the resultant representations of the Civil War focused first and foremost on the construction of the new state rather than on the process by which this state was established; namely through combat and the destruction of a rival, alternative Spain in the form of the Republic. The restorationist utopia that emerges in such representations is therefore a projection of an end designed to facilitate action in the present, of what might be achieved by a united right in France, rather than a meditation on the precise means by which this might come about. It is a goal towards which the French right might move, but no concrete details as to when or how this might be achieved are given. As such it reflects the intellectualism and abstraction that, according to a growing number of increasingly frustrated younger right-wing radicals, characterized Maurrassian integral nationalism of the interwar years. For these, the appeal of the Spanish Nationalists lay precisely in their fusion of principle and action. In this chapter I will examine the work of two popular novelists of this generation who also lent their support to the Nationalists: Pierre Frondaie and Lucien Maulvault. The latter was the author of the first French novel to relate the Civil War, El Requeté (1937), the story of a Carlist volunteer, and of Glaïeul noir (1938), a romance. In 1938 Frondaie published Le Volontaire, a eulogy of Italian Fascism and engagement in Spain. Unlike the reportage examined thus far, both El Requeté and Le Volontaire are concerned with the military engagement of their heroes and with action in the banal sense of the term, but also in the sense that Hannah Arendt attributes it; that is to say, both the doing of great deeds and the speaking of great words, the novel serving to articulate the former in the relation of its heroes’ actions.1 Both novels articulate an aesthetics of engagement and share an aesthetic worldview which, as we shall see in this chapter, results from an emulation of the dialectical dynamics of Cornellian theatre with its thematic opposition of political or public duty to personal happiness, reflected in: ‘un cas de conscience à résoudre douleureusement, une impossible conciliation entre l’honneur et le bonheur’ [a crisis of conscience   Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (London, 1959), p. 173.

1

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that has to be painfully resolved, an impossible reconciliation between honour and happiness], as Georges Couton states.2 Yet, whilst the Cid legend and Corneille’s re-articulation of it constitute an inter-textual and intercultural point of reference for reportage, it is Corneille’s tragedy generally and Horace in particular that serve a similar role in the two novels that form the initial focus of this chapter. Here Juan, the hero of El Requeté, and Giacomo Mazzucato, the young Black Shirt of Le Volontaire, must choose between personal happiness and a public duty that demands action in military combat. In the case of Juan, the temptation of personal happiness lies in his family, whilst in that of Giacomo it is to be found in the love of Lorenza, Giacomo’s young stepmother. The family or the lover thus come to represent the realm of private, domestic happiness sheltered from the world, while the Spanish Civil War is the realm in which the abstractions and ideals of far-right thought are made manifest in the words and deeds of the novels’ heroes. Yet, it is also the event and the location where these two spheres enter into conflict and where resolution must be sought. In both cases Cornellian tragedy becomes a way for Frondaie and Maulvault to understand and, ultimately, to appropriate the war for a French audience, rendering more familiar for their readership the two wings of the far right identified by far-right reportage: the monarchist Carlists and modern fascism. In so doing, both authors also seek to explain their military engagement to a French public that, even as war with Germany approached, continued to demonstrate distaste for such engagement if not a more diffuse pacifism, the result of France’s great losses in the First World War. Thus both novels propose themselves as a means of understanding the Other.3 Furthermore, both novels reflect that tendency noted by Bertrand de Muñoz for French authors to perceive a lesson for their domestic audience in the Spanish war.4 Yet, whilst for Bertrand de Muñoz this lesson is essentially that of a warning well-heeded, the lessons of El Requeté and Le Volontaire, as this chapter will demonstrate, are more ambiguous. Maulvault suggests as much in his preface, where he dedicates El Requeté to ‘tous les Français de cœur généreux qui, demain, pourraient se trouver emportés dans une tourmente analogue’ [all Frenchmen of noble heart who tomorrow could find themselves embroiled in a similar torment].5   Georges Couton, Corneille et la tragédie politique (Paris, 1984), p. 21.   In his preface to Le Volontaire, for example, Frondaie claims that his novel is not designed to incite a French form of fascism, but to promote peace and understanding between the Latin nations (Pierre Frondaie, Le Volontaire (Paris, 1938), p. vii). Frondaie’s preface is also directed at the ‘jeunes hommes d’Italie’ [youngmen of Italy] in a plea for France not to be mistaken as Italy’s enemy and to be recognized as a peace-loving ‘sœur latine …’ [Latin sister …] (ibid., p. vii). 4   Maryse Bertrand de Muñoz, La guerre civile espagnole et la littérature française, p. 16. 5   Lucien Maulvault, El Requeté (Paris, 1937), p. 7. For Hewitt, Maulvault’s novel comes the closest to portraying the war as a Spanish concern. Nicholas Hewitt, ‘“Partir pour 2 3

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Although Frondaie does not expect a youthful French readership to imitate the Italian fascist heroes of Le Volontaire, he too considers the novel to provide a lesson, ‘un sujet de méditation’ (Le Volontaire, p. x), and is quick to suggest fascism’s utopian potential.6 For Frondaie, the marvel of Mussolini lies in the fact that, ‘pour la première fois, dans l’Histoire de l’Occident, un chef révolutionnaire a voulu fonder sur la morale et créer sur le spirituel. Il scuplte l’Idéal pour dresser le Réel’ [for the first time in the history of the West, a revolutionary leader has set out to establish [a society] on a moral code and to build it upon the spiritual. He is sculpting the ideal in order to erect the Real] (Le Volontaire, p. vi). Frondaie, then, is interested in the means by which the ideal takes real form in the world. His novel tells of the trials, tribulations and temptations faced by its young hero, who at first refuses to engage in Spain, and of his father, Amilcare, a founding father of fascism, who then feels obliged to take his son’s place in order to protect the family’s honour. Giacomo’s subsequent rediscovery of duty, a rediscovery that leads him to join the Tercio, the Spanish foreign legion, is also a rediscovery of fascism’s youthful ideal, which can only be made real again in the activity of combat. El Requeté presents a similar process of trial and temptation through which its hero, Juan, is reborn as an enthusiast for the Carlist cause. After his initial shock at the brutality of war and at both Nationalist and Republican atrocities, in which war becomes ‘un travail de chien, harrassant, que nous accomplissions dans un cauchemar fiévreux’ (El Requeté, p. 35),7 Juan, like Giacomo, re­discovers his duty and his spiritual ideal in military engagement. Both novels are therefore also concerned with the relationship between the utopia and the means by which it is achieved and far more so than the reportage discussed in the previous chapter. As such, both must also be considered as apologies for violent political action, an aspect of the conflict which far-right reportage largely ignores except when detailing Republican atrocities. In both novels, war is rehabilitated before a French reading public which, throughout the interwar years, had been extensively exposed, through the novels of Barbusse, Céline, Dorgelès, Giono, Romains and many others, to a literature which had largely refused war all grandeur and meaning. More than this, however, and via the interpolation of the thematics and structures of Cornellian tragedy, war is elevated by Maulvault and Frondaie to the realm of the aesthetic, becoming an experience that adds an aesthetic dimension to the individual’s existence. Both novels therefore reflect a central desire of the restorationist utopia, a desire that derives from Maurras’s integral nationalism but which pervades much of the interwar literature of the far right, to recreate a realm where great art, that France last knew under absolute monarchy, might flourish once more. The Cornellian dynamics of both novels therefore serve to invest the Civil War in both novels with the potential not only to restore an order cast aside by quelque part”’, pp. 113‒14. 6   ‘A subject to meditate upon’. 7   ‘An exhausting dog’s lot that we carried out in a feverish nightmare.’

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modernity and democracy, but to create the conditions in which tragedy is possible and where it can be recorded and celebrated by an intellectual elite.8 Whilst farright reportage hints at the possibility of an aesthetic renaissance through a rediscovery of the spiritual in the triumph of the West, Frondaie and Maulvault locate this in physical combat on behalf of the West. Thus, while the leader of Giacomo’s fascio repeats the platitudinous assertion that the Civil War is a battle for Western civilization, he also asserts that fascism is actively engaged in the final battle on behalf of Europe against the anti-Western left (Le Volontaire, p. 169). In this, both these admittedly minor authors reflect a growing trend among younger writers of the far right to see in revolutionary activity, combat and engagement in the streets and on the battlefield the possibility of spiritual and aesthetic renewal.9 The Re-Birth of Tragedy The central assertion behind much re-assessment of French literary fascism in the late twentieth century, an assertion often informed by Walter Benjamin’s equation of fascism with the aestheticization of politics, was that the aesthetic preoccupations of many far-right writers who would later associate or collaborate directly with Vichy, if not Nazi Germany, could not be separated from their political actions.10 Carroll’s study of the phenomenon goes further, asserting that it is the formulation of literary and aesthetic principles within the realm of the political across the far right that leads directly to intellectuals’ pursuit and support of exclusionary principles in society.11 For the Maurrassians in particular, the return to ‘a classical aesthetics and order of taste …’ was one of the three essential conditions for a restoration of national grandeur, the other two being the restoration of monarchy and of Catholicism as state religion.12 Integral nationalism therefore elevated classical poetics to an absolute aesthetic principle, but posited that such poetics could only become possible once more with the restoration when a postclassical modernism might emerge.  8

  For Mazgaj this desire is formulated by Thierry Maulnier in particular and in the radical separation he envisages between work and leisure in a post-democratic France which would allow for the creation of a leisured elite who would be free from the constraints of work in order to create great art. Imagining Fascism, pp. 90‒91.  9   Mazgaj locates this moment in the mid 1930s. It is reflected in attitudes towards the events of February 1934 and in Maulnier’s rival publication to Action Française, Combat. Imagining Fascism, p. 129 and p. 158 respectively. 10   Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production’ in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London, 1992), trans. by Harry Zohn, pp. 211‒44, pp. 234‒5. 11  Carroll, French Literary Fascism, pp. 7‒8. Similarly, Luc Rasson argues that Brasillach’s political perception originates in his aesthetic perception (Littérature et fascisme, p. 13). 12  Carroll, French Literary Fascism, p. 76.

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French classical poetics was the direct descendent of the Greek and Roman classical tradition, of which France was the principal inheritor according to the Maurrassian thesis. Under the pre-Revolution monarchy, this had found its highest form in the classical poetry and theatre of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite the Revolution and its ‘suite littéraire, philosophique et morale’ [its literary, philosophical and moral successor], the equally Germaninspired Romanticism, Maurras argued, French cultural life still retained its role as ‘l’héritière légitime du monde grec et romain’ through which ‘la mesure, la raison et le goût ont régné sur notre Occident …’ [the legitimate inheritor of the Greek and Roman world through which measure, reason and taste have reigned over our Western world …].13 As Mazgaj reveals, Maurras’ aesthetico-political influence over the young right continued throughout the 1930s in spite of a growing discontentment with the policies of Action Française itself. The resultant aspiration towards classical poetics can therefore be found in a variety of writers spanning several generations. The thematic and structural use that is made of Cornellian tragedy by both Frondaie and Maulvault is more than aspiration, however; it is designed to suggest to the reader that the conditions in which great tragedy was produced are beginning to re-appear in the Western world. The location for this rediscovery of tragedy is, of course, the Spain of the Civil War. Let us begin, then, by considering the thematic echoes of Cornellian tragedy in El Requeté and in the dilemma facing Juan, Maulvault’s hero and the narrator of much of the novel. Juan tells in his testimony, which forms the body of the novel, of how he decided to desert his Carlist unit in order to secure the release of his father held by the Republicans in San Sebastian. For Juan, participation in the Nationalists’ struggle represents the making real of an idealized form of life, but, while the ideal itself is never scrutinized in the detail of its content, Juan’s commitment faces three major challenges in the course of the novel, challenges that must be overcome so that Maulvault might rehabilitate war and political violence in the eyes of his readers. The first is that posed by the absurdity of war itself. Juan’s own descriptions of his baptism of fire employ the tropes of much French anti-war literature of the interwar years, focusing on the dislocation of bodies and the reduction of the body to a purely physical and vulnerable entity. Thus Juan likens the spasms of one eviscerated requeté to ‘la tragique énergie de reptation, qui subsiste des heures dans les corps des anguilles, après qu’on les a débitées en tronçons …’ [the tragic pulses of movement that persist for hours in the body of an eel after it has been cut into sections …] (El Requeté, p. 21). Later he bemoans the death of another Carlist youth as all that has contributed to his individual being is annihilated by a single bullet: En une seconde, tout: cette patience, cet amour qu’il avait fallu à ses parents pour amasser et composer la matière d’un homme neuf et à Dieu pour en modeler  Maurras, Mes idées politiques, p. 146.

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France and the Spanish Civil War l’âme, s’était trouvé détruit par un des ces insectes invisibles, qui bourdonnaient dans l’air moite de cette chaude matinée de juillet. (Ibid., p. 23) [In a second, everything, the patience and the love that his parents had needed to assemble and compose the raw material for this new man and that God had required to model his soul, had been destroyed by one of these invisible insects that buzzed around us in the humidity of this sweltering July morning]

As Rasson has argued, drawing upon Scarry’s The Body in Pain, pointing to the physical horror of war is a traditional device of the pacifist novel. The author’s principal aim here is to distract the reader’s attention away from the legitimizing, essentialist discourses of war towards its physical horror. The corpse of the combatant ‘n’est plus que surface, apparence, fiction: signe univoque de la violence perpétrée par la guerre, il se situe désormais en dehors de toute essence’ [is now only a surface, an appearance and a fiction. As an unequivocal sign of the violence perpetrated by war, it now resides beyond essence].14 Maulvault therefore has to reverse the process identified by Rasson in the pacifist novel in order to rehabilitate war; death has to be imbued once more with essential meaning. However, the death of a former fellow student, the Republican officer Benito Perez, supplies Juan with his second challenge. Perez, like Juan, is driven by an ideal, but has chosen to fight and to die for ‘la légalité …’ whilst Juan represents ‘la révolution – il faudrait dire la “restitution”’ (El Requeté, p. 47).15 Perez’s execution at the hands of the Nationalists troubles Juan as it offers a glimpse of another ideal. Consequently, ‘Notre cause ne me paraissait plus aussi belle, nos objectifs aussi légitimes …’ (ibid., p. 63).16 If there is no single ideal, but only a plurality of conflicting ideals, then how can the young hero be sure of defending an absolute? The war risks becoming a war of equally valid, or perhaps invalid, competing factions. As we shall see, it is only by experiencing the Republic for himself that Juan, like Giacomo in Le Volontaire, can rediscover his ideal. Thus far El Requeté appears very much to be a novel of ideological apprenticeship with its trials and temptations, its helpers and hinderers akin to those identified elsewhere by Susan Suleiman.17 The third and principal distraction from military duty is that represented by the private sphere and by the appeal from his mother and sisters to desert the Carlists in order to do all he can to secure the release of his father. The love of his family constitutes a bourgeois distraction, but also a comforting temptation and a pressing moral obligation:

14   Luc Rasson, Ecrire contre la guerre: littérature et pacifismes 1916‒1938 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997) p. 39. 15   ‘The revolution or, better still, the restitution.’ 16   ‘Our cause no longer seemed so beautiful to me, our objectives so legitimate.’ 17   Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Genre (Princeton, 1993).

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avec les Carlistes, je servais un idéal, je m’incorporais à une idée, à l’Espagne historique, celle qui voulait qu’une génération fût détruite pour que d’autres grandissent plus dru, avec plus de dignité. … De l’autre côté, j’allais défendre mon père, exclusivement, c’est-à-dire l’intégrité numérique de ma famille, son patrimoine moral, sa douceur, et … mes sœurs, celles qui avaient encore besoin de tant de choses et d’années avant de pouvoir quitter le nid. (El Requeté, p. 83) [with the Carlists I was serving an ideal, I was becoming part of an idea, of historic Spain, a Spain that demanded that a generation should be destroyed so that others might grow stronger still and with more dignity. … On the other side, I was about to defend my father exclusively; that’s to say, the numerical integrity of my family, my moral patrimony, its comforts and … my sisters who still needed so many things and so much time before they could leave the nest.]

This opposition between public responsibility and filial duty, between political action and private happiness, mimics that found in numerous plays by Corneille, including Le Cid and Horace of course. Its application to the tropes and strictures of the ideological novel identified by Suleimen, however, reveals that both novelists are attempting to adapt that genre and suggests that their resulting works, as aesthetically flawed as they are, need to be considered as something of an experiment. Having overcome the absurdist temptation alluded to above, Juan’s moment of reconciliation with Carlism is interrupted by his sense of filial duty towards his loved ones and the movement towards political action and spiritual transcendence is halted by the temptation of domestic happiness. It is therefore this rediscovered spirituality that Juan sacrifices by fleeing to the Republican zone. When he arrives in Republican territory, Juan is forced to make a pact with the anarchist leader Gil Harispe in order to save his father’s life: he must fight for the anarchist militia against his former comrades. He does so but is subsequently driven to desert once more, rejoining his spiritual allies, the Carlists, who promptly arrest him before allowing him to rejoin his unit in one last, desperate battle in which Juan is redeemed by his bravery and death. In Le Volontaire the distracting temptation of the private sphere is embodied in the lover who threatens to draw the hero away from political activity. Here it is the young Black Shirt and veteran of the Abyssinian campaign, Giacomo, who is distracted from his political duty to enlist as a volunteer in Spain by his love for his young stepmother, Lorenza. His refusal is born of his new sense of duty to love, ‘un dieu, éternel dictateur des hommes …’ (Le Volontaire, p. 71).18 He therefore attempts to flee his fate, the seemingly inevitable betrayal of his filial duty through the pursuit of his private happiness, by escaping to ‘les mols enfers de la France’ (ibid., p. 68),19 but by so doing he betrays his political duty and his 18

  ‘A god, eternal dictator of men.’   ‘The yielding hell that is France.’

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honour. When Lorenza follows him to Paris, he succumbs briefly to temptation. Hearing of his son’s dereliction of duty, Amilcare enlists with Giacomo’s fascio in order to preserve the family’s honour in the public sphere. In so doing, he reflects the ultimate Cornellian value of ‘générosité’, sacrificing himself ‘au nom de l’idéal tenace auquel il a donné sa vie’ (ibid., p. 281).20 When he learns that his father has been wounded in a war that he, the son, should be waging, Giacomo joins the Tercio, abandoning the pregnant Lorenza. The latter, the narrator tells us, was always doomed in her battle ‘contre des forces plus grandes qu’elles …’ (ibid., p. 262).21 Her death in childbirth, like Camille’s death in Horace, is ‘la punition de [son] tort …’ (ibid., p. 276) which lay in her elevation of love and personal happiness over public and familial duty.22 While this thematic opposition is Cornellian in inspiration, Frondaie, who was also a popular playwright, self-consciously and deliberately draws on some of the devices of tragic theatre in a manner which reveals his use of Cornellian structural dynamics to be far more explicit and willed than Maulvault’s. Giacomo’s love for Lorneza is the result of a chance encounter where neither character is able to reveal their true identity. They meet for the first time on the train that is taking Giacomo to the port, from where he will leave for Ethiopia and she will depart to Amilcare’s home town, where she will marry the fiancé she has yet to meet and whose existence she hides from Giacomo. In their brief encounter in the hours before his departure, Giacomo has a vague premonition of the future com­plications that will arise from the love he already feels for this young woman, later recalling: ‘J’avais eu … l’impression de me rappeler l’avenir. Mais, déjà, je l’avais oublié’ (Le Volontaire, p. 115).23 There is also an imitation of tragic irony in the inability of Giacomo to make his name known to Lorenza before his ship sets sail and he heads to war: ‘De nouveau, il cria plus fort, la sirène couvrit sa voix. Maintenant il écrivait en hâte quelque chose sur un carnet qu’il me jeta avec furie, dans un effort si téméraire que, debout sur le garde-fou, il faillit lui-même tomber dans l’eau où le carnet tomba … [Once again, he shouted even more loudly but the siren covered his voice. He wrote something hurriedly on a note pad that, standing on 20

  ‘In the name of the tenacious ideal to which he has dedicated his life.’   ‘Against overwhelming forces ….’ 22   ‘The punishment for her wrongdoing ….’ In Horace (first performed in 1640) the domestic happiness of the Horace and Curiace families, who are linked by marriage, is destroyed by the war between Rome, represented in combat by the three Horace brothers, and Alba, represented by the three Curiace brothers. Horace, the only surviving Horace brother, fulfils his public duty by killing the Curiace brothers, including his brother-in-law. Faced with the revolt of Camille, his sister, who continues to place passion and private happiness before public and familial duty, Horace turns his sword on his own blood before being cleared of responsibility for Camille’s murder. Love is thus sacrificed to the greater Cornellian value of gloire. 23   ‘I had had the impression that I was remembering the future, but I just as soon forgot it.’ 21

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the railings, he threw to me [Lorenza] so desperately and so rashly that he nearly tumbled into the water where his note pad fell …] (ibid., p. 130). Moreover, Amilcare’s failure to mention the existence of his son before his marriage to Lorenza leads the narrator to comment: ‘il avait apporté son ressort à un engrenage de faits qui aboutissaient maintenant aux actes de Giacomo furieux’ [he had contributed to a chain of events that now resulted in the acts of an enraged Giacomo] (ibid., p. 132). The narrative tension of Le Volontaire lies in the contribution that characters make to their own predicament and the reader’s frequent awareness of where this will lead. Whilst Lorenza talks of not drawing destiny’s attention upon herself by writing to Giacomo in Ethiopia, refusing thereby to reveal her true identity and the fact that she is now his stepmother, the reader, aided by the narrator, is already aware of the consequences of her decision. It is the narrator, imbued with the knowledge, foresight and tragic vision that one also finds in Cocteau’s narrative voice in La Machine infernale (1934), who then reveals the tragic situation in which the modern heroes find themselves.24 It is also the narrator who directs the reader towards a tragic interpretation of events. Commenting on Amilcare’s and Lorenza’s silence, he remarks: ‘Il reste qu’un tel double silence, né des jeux de la délicatesse, eut peut-être l’effet fatal de précipiter deux cœurs purs dans un drame qu’un mot, un seul eût pu, sans doute, faire avorter: leur malheur sortit de leurs vertus’ [Nevertheless, this mutual silence, dictated by discretion, perhaps had the fatal result of precipitating two pure hearts into a drama that a word, one single word, might possibly have avoided. Their misfortune was born of their virtue] (ibid., p. 134). 25 Whether through silence or action, characters find that each decision only further mires them in the dilemma and that a resolution between the two opposing poles remains impossible. The separation, but also the conflict, of the domestic and the political spheres is reflected in the house Amilcare and Lorenza share; Amilcare’s bedroom is a shrine to his public past, decorated with grenades and the flag of his old squadristo, and remains off-limits to his wife. Lorenza’s bedroom is only slightly less inaccessible since Amilcare is obliged to request ingress in order to perform the private act of lovemaking. This enforced separation contributes to their unhappy marriage. It is therefore also a distinction informed by a gender opposition further reflected in, and 24   The terminology of the narrator echoes that of Cocteau’s narrative voice that opens La Machine infernale, staged for the first time four years earlier, and reflects a more general fascination of interwar theatre with the mechanisms of tragic theatre: ‘Regarde, spectateur, remontée à bloc, de telle sorte que le ressort se déroule avec lenteur tout le long d’une vie humaine, une des plus parfaites machines construites par les dieux infernaux pour l’anéantissement mathématique d’un mortel’ [Behold, spectator, fully exposed, in such a way that the spring uncoils with the slowness of a human life, one of the most perfect machines constructed by the infernal gods for the crushing of a mortal]. Jean Cocteau, La Machine infernale (Paris: Grasset, 1993), p. 17. 25   Silence and discretion also play a significant and fatal role in the downfall of Jean Racine’s characters in Phèdre, first performed in 1677.

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fuelled by, the political indifference of Lorenza. In Le Volontaire, as in Brasillach’s Les sept couleurs, to which I shall turn in the next chapter, the principal female protagonist is largely indifferent not only to fascism, but to politics altogether. Lorenza has few opinions on the subject of fascism because it fails to impinge upon her private life: ‘Si, parfois, elle était, non pas opprimée mais gênée en de petites choses, par quelque règlement d’Etat, elle s’y pliait de bonne grâce, sans se mêler d’y applaudir ou avoir soif de regimber’ [If, sometimes, she was not so much oppressed as inhibited in certain trivial matters, by some rule of state, she yielded with good grace without applauding enthusiastically or feeling the urge to complain] (Le Volontaire, p. 61). She is equally impervious to the arguments and ideas of fascism: ‘elle continuait de n’entendre rien à ces débats, ces histoires d’hommes, et ne voyait que, de beaucoup, ils dépassaient la politique pour se hausser à une morale’ [She never understood anything about these discussions, this man’s business, and failed to see that they went well beyond politics attaining a moral order] (ibid., p. 189). Love, for Lorenza, becomes a counter-ideal to fascism with the ability to transfigure her existence and to which Giacomo’s public duty must be sacrificed, as Frondaie suggests in a narratorial observation which adumbrates the Cornellian dynamics of the novel in a direct reference to Horace: ‘Que n’eût-elle pas sacrifié à l’idéalisme de l’amour? Elle était en cela “cornélienne”, mais à la manière de Camille, qui eût voué sa ville à la défaite pour sauvegarder un amant qu’elle entendait garder pour elle’ [What wouldn’t she have sacrificed to her idealism of love? She was in this sense ‘Cornellian’, but in the same manner as Camille who would have condemned her city to defeat in order to protect a love of her own] (ibid., p. 220). It is as a counter-force to fascism and the political duty of the Mazzucato males that love poses the greatest threat. Love offers the individual an alternative aesthetic order, one which, as is the case with great art, reveals the existence of beauty in the female form. Lorenza’s body provides ‘une preuve que la Nature connaît le fin mot de l’esthétique’ (ibid., p. 79).26 The full-length mirrors with which her bedroom is bedecked, and in which she too can contemplate the power of her beauty, ‘eussent rendu jaloux Ingres, Renoir et Raphaël, car ils refletaient à la fois la pureté de lignes légères, une sensualité puissante et l’inachevé de l’art classique’ [would have made Ingres, Renoir and Raphael jealous as they reflected simultaneously the purity and delicacy of lines, a powerful sensuality and the unfinished quality of classical art] (ibid., p. 48). The temptation offered by the female form is more than purely aesthetic, however. It is also a physical, material distraction that expresses itself in the voyeuristic attention that male characters sometimes pay to women in both novels. To Amilcare, Lorenza appears naked and therefore available even in her nightdress (ibid., p. 54). The desire that she prompts in Giacomo, and to which he yields in Paris far from fascism’s iron discipline, is likened to a pain (ibid., p. 97). Thus women, as Klaus Theweleit has argued, threaten to undermine the fascist 26

  ‘Proof that Nature knows the true essence of aesthetics.’

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male.27 Moreover, for Juan in El Requeté, troubled witness to the rape of various Nationalist women in Republican territory, they represent a pervasive materiality that threatens to further degrade war. Whilst Juan seeks a form of spirituality in combat and is troubled (albeit briefly) by Nationalist atrocities, his cousin Pepita, in a letter sent from the safety of France, urges Juan to commit further atrocities. The thought appears to excite her and to serve as a sort of promise: La lettre de Pepita, chef d’œuvre d’insouciance féminine, se terminait par cette phrase qui me laissait la gorge sèche: ‘Avant ton départ, je t’attendais dans ma chambre, mon Juanito. Ah! si tu étais seulement entré. Je t’aurais donné tout ce que je t’ai refusé jusqu’ici, à toi et aux autres …’. (El Requeté, p. 78) [Pepita’s letter, a masterpiece of feminine insouciance, ended with this sentence that left me with a dry throat: ‘Before you left, I was waiting for you in my bedroom, my Juanito. Oh, if only you had come in. I would have let you have everything I have refused to you, and to others, up until now …’]

It is women, then, ‘qui nous poussent au carnage’ (ibid., p. 26), Juan observes, as men attempt to defend or impress them.28 Yet, paradoxically, women stand accused in both works of threatening to strip war of any reassuring meaning through their opposition to the public duty that obliges men to wage war. In Le Volontaire, when both Amilcare and Giacomo abandon Lorenza for combat in Spain, she begins to hate fascism without ever understanding what it brings to the men in her life, seeing only in its actions an endless cult of violence itself: Elle avait la guerre en horreur et croyait que ceux qui y courent, c’est que la guerre les attire. … Leurs actes lui paraissaient les fruits d’une démence affreuse, barbare, plus pitoyable que sublime. Leur idéal l’épouvantait. Elle … comprenait mal que l’important, à qui veut donner à sa vie une signification profonde, n’est pas d’avoir un idéal accessible à tous les esprits, mais d’en choisir un difficile et de s’y tenir jusqu’à la mort … (Le Volontaire, pp. 219‒20) [She hated war and believed that those who hurry towards it are attracted by it. … Their actions appeared to her to be the result of a terrible, barbaric madness, 27   Women are perceived by the fascist male as an ‘inchoate “mass” of viscera and entrails, its “soft” genitalia, its “lower half” is translated into the threat of the “masses” in the social sense of classes …’. Quoted in Melanie Hawthorne and Richard J. Golsan, ‘Introduction: Mapping the Terrain’, in Melanie Hawthorne and Richard J. Golsan (eds), Gender and Fascism in Modern France (Hanover, N.H., 1997), pp. 1‒11, p. 8. 28   ‘Who prompt us to massacre.’ Again, in this Maulvault resurrects a trope of the pacifist novel of the First World War. For detailed analysis of this, see Pierre Schoentjes, Fictions de la Grande Guerre. Variations littéraires sur 14‒18 (Paris, 2008), pp. 194‒5.

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more pitiful than sublime. Their ideal appalled her. She … struggled to grasp that the important thing for whoever wants to give their life a deeper significance is not to be driven by an ideal accessible to all, but to choose a difficult one and to pursue it to the death …]

Thus, while the lure of love and personal happiness is strong, the appeal of public action also holds sway over the characters of these novels and must stand firm in the face of the lover’s claim over them. This action is to be found in the heart of an exclusively male spiritual community which then stands opposed to the private community of the loving couple or family. Thus, for Amilcare, political action within the fascio provides a spirituality that offsets love’s deceptions; he counters any hurt resulting from Lorenza’s indifference towards him through the words of Mussolini and the latter’s assertion that fascism is ‘“un phénomène spirituel” et [tend] vers “un sommet de perfection morale”’ (Le Volontaire, p. 64).29 For Amilcare, the Ethiopian campaign was a spiritual conquest and it is towards this conquest of spirituality through political action and combat, this time in Spain, that he turns again when his wife abandons him for his son. For both Amilcare and Giacomo, as the narrator suggests above, the decision is a difficult one, one only available to a spiritual elite, and one that almost certainly will lead to death (ibid., pp. 219‒20). It is also this discovery of spirituality to be found in embracing the Nationalist cause that inspires the agnostic Juan to risk his life alongside the Carlists of El Requeté. Engagement with the requetés was therefore: [Un] choix irrésistible. Eh bien, c’était absolument clair: primauté de l’esprit. Qu’on nous retire cœur et raison, nous ne sommes plus que les moins doués des animaux de la création, nous salissons la terre de notre pullulement insolent, de notre génie mécanique, bon tout juste en pareil cas à multiplier la puissance de nos mauvais instincts. (El Requeté, pp. 30‒31) [An] irresistible choice. Well, it was absolutely clear: the primacy of the spirit. Were one to remove our heart and reason, we would be nothing more than the least gifted animals of God’s creation, polluting the earth with our insolent proliferation, and our mechanical genius which only serves to multiply our baser instincts.]

Furthermore, Carlist spirituality forms part of an aesthetic conception of both their cause and combat. Thus one requeté explains his commitment in the following terms: ‘Cuestion de estetica’, répondit-il …

29

  ‘A spiritual phenomenon’ tending towards ‘a summit of moral perfection’.

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On ne pouvait mieux résumer la chose, à mon sens. Mon cœur se desserra. En vérité, je crus un moment que ces paroles m’avaient délivré, que j’allais me réconcilier avec la Navarre. (Ibid., p. 69) [‘A question of aesthetics’, he replied . One couldn’t have put it better, in my view. My anguish abated. I really believed for a moment that these words had saved me, that I was going to be able to reconcile myself with the Navarre.]

As Maurice Rieuneau observes, Juan’s participation in the war is less a commitment to a particular ideology and more a stand against ‘la vulgarité essentielle et l’absence d’idéal spirituel des “marxistes”, qui lui font prendre en horreur l’image d’une humanité sans transcendance et sans discipline’ [the essential vulgarity and absence of a spiritual ideal amongst the ‘Marxists’ who awaken in him a horror of a humanity deprived of transcendence and discipline].30 Juan therefore opts for discipline and hierarchy embedded in an order that seeks to raise man from ‘sa nature abjecte, l’élévant au-dessus de lui-même …’ [his abject nature, raising him above himself …].31 When Juan manages to return to the Carlists, it is again the spirituality of their movement that draws him back: ‘Qu’importait, au fond, leur Dieu, leurs convictions étroitement dévotes. Une seule chose suffisait à nous unir: cette conscience infuse de la prépondérance des choses de l’esprit qui les faisait, simples montagnards, s’incliner devant l’inconnaissable et l’adorer’ [What did their God and their narrow religious convictions really matter? One thing alone sufficed to unite us: this total awareness of the primacy of the spiritual which made this simple mountain folk bow before the unknowable and worship it] (El Requeté, p. 160). In both novels, then, the combatant community is elevated to the status of a spiritual community. It is here in the midst of this community that the ideal which they serve, be it the traditionalism of Carlism or the radicalism of fascism, is made real in deeds and in words. In Le Volontaire it is amidst such a community and in combat that ‘Le ­fas­c­isme [qui] est sorti vivant de l’imagination du Duce …’ (p. 152) comes into being.32 In short, it is the space within which the utopia takes concrete form while the Spanish Civil War supplies the stage for such a becoming. Combat is thus invested with a spiritual-aesthetic and, indeed, a transcendental potential that stands in contrast to the predominant pacifist tone of many French treatments of war in the 1930s. Furthermore, there is in the opposition adapted from Cornellian theatre an echoing of another tension; that identified by Arendt between the private and the political worlds of the Ancient Greeks. Arendt defines the former, represented 30   Maurice Rieuneau, Guerre et Révolution dans le roman français (Fontenay-leComte: 1974), p. 535. 31   Ibid., p. 536. 32   ‘Fascism [which] was born of the Duce’s imagination ….’

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by the household, as a product of humanity’s physical needs; households were created in order to ensure the physical survival of its occupants. The household and, by extension, the private sphere are concerned with the physical survival and well-being not only of individual householders, but of the human species. Their interests are therefore primarily animal and special. Politics, by way of contrast, did not exist in order to master or protect society, but as a domain where those exceptional individuals, freed from the animal interest of survival and the concomitant enslavement to nature, could meet and perform acts of individual distinction among their admiring peers.33 The latter therefore formed a spiritual elite, the polis, whose interaction appeared divorced from the material and domestic concerns of existence. The combatant community, with its emphasis on the spiritual over the material, therefore constitutes a further attempt by both novelists to suggest the possibility of a new classicism since it constitutes a modern variant on the polis. It is within this realm, and before an admiring elite, a band of fellow warriors, that great deeds are performed. The war in Spain thus serves not so much as a defence of Western civilization, as the arena in which what Arendt terms a ‘sphere of appearance’ is created, a sphere in which our heroes can achieve immortal deeds of enduring beauty, much as, according to Arendt, the Ancient Greeks sought to within the polis. Such deeds, in both cases, are total and extinguished in the very completion of their performance, but are designed to establish the immortality of the hero from whom they emanate.34 By returning to their ideal, by redeeming themselves in heroic combat, and ultimately by extinguishing themselves in this process, Giacomo and Juan achieve the solidity that had seemed threatened by earlier choices. Thus, in Le Volontaire, Giacomo appears at his father’s bedside in Spain as ‘Le seul vrai, celui que son père avait connu, avant qu’un malheur l’eût changé, la fleur, l’espérance de leur race, l’un des chevaliers du fascisme’ [the only true [Giacomo], the one his father had known before a misfortune had changed him, the flower and the hope of their race, one of the knights of fascism] (p. 252). Juan overcomes the absurdist temptation and the distraction of personal happiness, so as to supply in death ‘devant Dieu et devant nous tous, un témoignage après lequel nul autre ne paraît nécessaire’ [before God and us all, a testimony after which no other seems necessary] (El Requeté, p. 178). Such deeds, as Arendt argues, require a certain completion and finality in order to escape the cycle of the purely domestic. In both novels this completion is achieved in the hero’s death. In El Requeté, Juan rejoins his Carlist unit, is cleared of the charge of desertion, and allowed to die in combat alongside his chosen comrades-in-arms. In Le Volontaire, the lure of personal happiness is overcome, allowing for redemption in Giacomo’s engagement in the Tercio and subsequent death. The problematic Lorenza, to whom Amilcare is still married, dies whilst giving birth to Giacomo’s son, whom Amilcare will now raise as his own. The two  Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 30‒31.   Ibid., pp. 207‒8.

33 34

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young lovers expiate their sins in death and the father forgives his son as the latter gives his life for fascism. It is the task of the novelist, then, to record these deeds, to give them aesthetic expression after the fact. Both novels fulfil the task of supplying ‘a premonition of immortality, not the immortality of the soul or of life but of something immortal achieved by mortal hands, [that] has become tangibly present, to shine and to be seen, to sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read’.35 Fulfilling the role envisaged for the author in Bakhtinian theory, Frondaie and Maulvault are the suppliers of form, a form that the individual hero cannot perceive for himself without the presence of the admiring other, a form which can only become complete with the completion of the deed and of a life itself and their subsequent retelling.36 It is therefore the storyteller and not the hero who imbues the story with meaning and, in the case of Le Volontaire and El Requeté, an echo of tragic form, a hint of the war’s potential to transform the conditions of existence through engagement with the Nationalist cause in the name of fascism and Carlism respectively. From Civil War to Class War According to Arendt, the polis could only come into existence through violence. Vio­lence, the pre-condition of its foundation, was nevertheless excluded from the polis itself in order to make way for immortal deeds and their telling. However, for Frondaie and Maulvault violence is the means by which both the sphere of appearance is created and maintained; it is therefore both pre-condition and condition. Indeed, violence becomes the very means by which the spirituality of the combatant community is established and preserved and this through its violent opposition to the material forces of the Spanish Republic. Whilst violence is denied in the Ancient Greek polis, once rehabilitated it can be actively celebrated in the communities of Maulvault’s and Frondaie’s fiction. For both novelists, the Spanish Civil War is essentially a war of competing and irreconcilable ideals that seek to cancel each other out in combat, as Frondaie suggests in Le Volontaire: ‘L’ennemi, lui aussi, foisonne en acharnés: ce sont deux rages qui s’étreignent, ce sont deux pensées qui se mesurent, deux idées, dont chacune d’elles croit, de bonne foi, l’autre infernale et … de trop dans le monde’ [The enemy too is full of fanatics. These are two passions embracing, two thought systems measuring themselves up against each other, two ideas, both of which consider, in all good faith, the other as evil and … surplus to requirement] (p. 249). Yet, while the Nationalists’ ideal is a form of spirituality, reflected in the cuestion  Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 168.   M.M. Bakhtin, ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. by Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom (Austin, 1990), pp. 4‒256, p. 14. See also Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 192. 35 36

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de estetica of El Requeté’s Carlists, which allows both the Italian fascist and the agnostic bourgeois to fight in Franco’s name, the Republicans’ cause is a purely materialistic one. While those who fight for the Nationalists seek transcendence, those who fight in the name of the Republic are concerned purely with the hereand-now. Combat therefore opposes the would-be heroes of tragedy in El Requeté and Le Volontaire to the forces of materialism in what is a debased form of tragedy that ultimately exposes the class interests of the authors concerned. For heroes who seek transcendence, the Republicans and their earth-bound appetites possess something of the demonic. Juan’s agreement with Harispe is essentially a Faustian pact whereby Juan sacrifices his sense of immortality to be found amidst the Carlists in order to gratify his domestic needs. Harispe’s demonic aspect is suggested by Juan’s allusions to his past; Harispe is a fallen angel, a brilliant student who has abandoned his religious calling with the Trappist order after losing his faith, and who now languishes as a pervert, ‘un révolté, un Raskolnikof’ (El Requeté, p. 105).37 Harispe’s devilish credentials are further reinforced when Juan’s father is freed. Replying to Juan’s thanks, he states: ‘Nos perteneces, Juan …. Tu nous appartiens’ [You belong to us] (ibid., p. 154), leading Juan to conclude: ‘Je lui avais vendu mon âme, et il entendait la conserver pour la cause de l’anarchie, contre celle du respect humain’ [I had sold him my soul and he intended keeping it in the service of anarchy and in opposition to that of human respect] (ibid., pp. 163‒4). Like Milton’s Satan, however, he is not always without charm. This demonization of the Republicans reflects a Manichean understanding of the conflict that sets the transcendental possibilities of the Nationalist cause in direct opposition to the earthly, material concerns of the Republicans. As Denis de Rougemont argues, the Manichean tradition and its legacy are deeply entrenched in Western thought. Manicheanism taught that the human soul was exiled to the earth, but still craved transcendence whilst distracted from the pathway to transcendence by the lure of physical pleasure.38 Maulvault’s Spanish Republic, as we shall see, is the antithesis to the spirituality his characters crave, but also sometimes a tempting distraction for them. On joining the Republican ranks, Juan instantly measures the gulf between his Carlist unit and the anarchist militia, remarking that the Republican cause ‘n’était plus que bas appétits, haines, rancune. Elle sombrait, faute d’idéal spirituel, faute d’une éthique’ [was now only base appetites, hatred, rancour. It was collapsing for want of a spiritual ideal, of ethics] (ibid., p. 116). Republicans are only motivated by their desire to take what has traditionally and materially been denied them. 37

  ‘A rebel, a Raskolnikov.’   Denis de Rougemont, L’Amour et l’Occident (Paris, 1962), p. 52. In the twelfth century, Rougemont, asserts, the Manichean influence is translated into the Cathar heresy; here, the earthly and all that pertains to physical existence are the creation of the devil, a material prison for the soul from which it can only escape through the refusal of material existence (ibid., p. 65). 38

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Harispe’s speech following the Carlist bombing of San Sebastian makes this explicit, whilst reinforcing once again Juan’s sense of having sold his soul, of now existing as a ‘damné’ (ibid., p. 121). In it, Harispe, reminds the crowd that they are ‘les immondes, … les sales gueules, le virus de l’humanité … voués à traverser la vie sans en jouir’ [the disgusting, … dirty bastards, humanity’s virus, … condemned to go through life without taking pleasure in it] (ibid., pp. 124‒5). Their aim, he reveals, is the annihilation of the old order, leaving only chaos and indolence as their legacy: ‘Du travail? Nous n’en voulons plus. … Nous ne payons plus, nous prenons. … Nous ferons de cette ville un désert, de leurs biens des décombres. … Enfin, nous ferons la terre entière à l’image de ce qu’ils nous donnaient en partage’ [Work? We don’t want it anymore. … We won’t pay any more, we’ll take. … We’ll turn this city into a desert, their goods into ruins. … In short, we’ll remake the world in the image of the share they used to leave to us] (ibid., p. 126). The materiality of the Republic with its bestial and carnal needs constitutes a temptation for the Nationalist sympathizer lost in its midst. In particular, it is the lure of female flesh, a lure that the hero of Maulvault’s Gaïeul noir must also battle, which prompts Juan to worry for his moral wellbeing. At several points in El Requeté he insists upon his role as the unwilling, but fascinated spectator to the rape of female Nationalist supporters. This fascination is reflected in his own narration of events. Thus, in one instant, we find him stressing the slowness with which the victim undresses, the gradual process by which she reveals ‘son corps merveilleux, [prêt] au sacrifice’ [her marvellous body, [readied] for sacrifice], almost as if this were a striptease. ‘La sueur me coulait au front au spectacle de cette abjection’ [The sweat was pouring down my forehead at the spectacle of her abjection], he recalls (ibid., p. 135). In the subsequent case of Lola and of another Nationalist prisoner, the voyeuristic gaze of Juan achieves a penetrative intensity: ‘Elles étaient vêtues avec recherche mais maculées de boue et la chevelure en désordre. Je les verrai tou­ jours. Elles cachaient sous leurs jupes leurs jambes gaînées de bas fins déchirées’ [They were dressed elegant­ly, but splattered with mud and their hair was unkempt. I will always be able to pic­ture them. They hid beneath their skirts their legs clad in fine, laddered stockings] (ibid., p. 141). Again, the degradation suggested in such descriptions of the female body is conveyed through a lingering voyeuristic gaze, which expresses both the voyeur’s discomfort, but also hints at his burgeoning desire. Indeed, Juan even goes on to fantasize about meeting Lola after the war when ‘Il me semble que je l’aimerai bien. En secret je lui don­ner­ai mon cœur’ (El Requeté, p. 144).39 Here, then, Juan is able to contain his desire within the spiritual exigencies of courtly love, transforming base physical desire into that transcendental force that Rougemont notes in the phenomenon.40 In their depiction of Republicans as base creatures totally given over to the pursuit of their animal instincts, these novels reduce their adversaries to the status of animal laborans, as defined by Arendt. The latter labours in order to 39

  ‘It seems to me I will love her very much. I will secretly give her my heart.’  Rougemont, L’Amour et l’Occident, pp. 36‒7.

40

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preserve the life of the species, freeing other men, allowing them to engage in activities which do not merely save the species from extinction, but which also enhance others’ collective or individual life. Animal laborans only produces consumables, whilst homo faber, the craftsman, creates durable objects with which he fills the world. Labour, Arendt argues, ‘always moves in the same circle, which is prescribed by the biological process of the living organism …’, feeding its products into the human life process.41 It is associated therefore with physical pleasure, but also with enslavement towards the exigencies of nature and of the body.42 Maulvault’s bestialized Republicans are liberated labourers, no longer condemned to produce for their masters with whom they are now at war. Yet, for Maulvault, they remain animals dedicated to physical pleasure and to the process of consumption, permanently raping, copulating, eating and drinking to excess. The Spanish Republic in both El Requeté and Le Volontaire is nothing more than a violent Bacchanalian outpouring of animalistic urges. It is a monstrous carnival, ‘un grand désordre …’ [a great disorder …] (El Requeté, p. 98), ‘cette satanique folie …’ [this Satanic madness …] (Le Volontaire, p. 284) which has turned the world on its head, dissolving all distinctions of class and gender, prompting the ‘disintegration of social institutions and the collapse of the cultural order’, as René Girard writes of Euripides’ The Bacchae,43 just as Republican Barcelona had appeared to the Tharaud brothers.44 In opposition to this stand the heroes of the pro-Nationalist novel, just as the political actor of The Human Condition stands in contrast to animal laborans. Yet, this dichotomy and the reduction of the enemy to the status of brute reveal the class allegiances and prejudices of Maulvault and Frondaie. In opposing the alleged spirituality of the far right to the materialism of the left, an intellectual, spiritual warrior elite to the bestialized masses engaged in a slave revolt, and in attempting to structure an unresolved, contemporary conflict on the structures of classical tragedy, the novels of Maulvault and Frondaie reveal concrete class concerns. These are the desire for the creation of that leisured class of aesthetes to which the far right intellectual aspires and the fear of their own class’s despoliation by the class that once served them and which now, in the form of the two Popular Front regimes, appears to threaten their existence. If Juan makes his antagonism towards the urban working class explicit in El Requeté, the class prejudices of Frondaie’s characters and his own allegiances

 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 98.   Ibid., pp. 99‒100 and p. 115. 43   René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, 1979), trans. by Patrick Gregory, p. 127. 44   The same thinking also informs Adolphe de Falgairolle’s La Milicienne, which associates the ‘Marxist revolution’ of the Republic with the sexual liberation of its principal protagonist, the former nun, Christeta, who becomes an advocate for free love and communism. 41 42

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are implicit in Le Volontaire. Passing through Republican Barcelona on his way to join the Tercio, Giacomo briefly considers the Spanish origins of this conflict: Il ne lui échappait pas que, dans l’Espagne rouge, beaucoup d’honnêtes pauvres gens avaient cru … accéder bientôt à une vie moins soucieuse et moins dépourvue que celle dans laquelle, hélas! les ont confiés, depuis des siècles, l’égoïsme et l’aveuglement des grands propriétaires du sol. Que de générations coupables de la détresse de la nôtre! (pp. 293‒4) 45 [It did not escape his attention that, in red Spain, many honest poor people had believed … they were on the brink of a less troubled and impoverished life to that which, alas, they had been confined for centuries by the selfishness and blindness of the large landowners. So many generations are guilty of our present distress!]

There is in this a brief admission of the scarcity gap, the difference between the haves and the have-nots, which, according to Levitas, all utopias must consider.46 Nevertheless, the choice of defending the Republic is a wrong one and Giacomo’s participation in the war, as well as being a way of atoning for his dereliction of duty, also serves to ‘ramener [le peuple] à la sagesse de discerner ses vrais amis’ (ibid., p. 294).47 One method he considers is ‘des représailles qui, … par leurs duretés, feraient frémir la pensée chrétienne’ (ibid., p.295). 48 The extent to which the spiritual ideal of characters conceals a materialist motive is also hinted at in the short story which follows El Requeté, ‘Lasarte, maison morte’.49 Here Maulvault’s narrative voice is entirely absent, but for a short preface. The majority of the story is focused through the eyes of a group of Carlists engaged in the desperate defence of their land from the invading Republican forces and principally through those of Don Leandro and his son Amedeo. Like Juan, both consider their cause a spiritual one, but the story also dwells upon the relationship of the people of the Navarre to their land. This relationship is primarily characterized as ancestral, Maulvault revealing here a certain Barresian influence largely absent in the novel; that of Barrès’s concept of la terre et les morts whereby the living’s relationship to their national, regional and natural environment is conditioned by the influence of generations of the dead who lie buried there.

45   Moreover, Giacomo asserts that fascism poses a direct threat to the existing order that it will not always defend (Le Volontaire, p. 157). 46  Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 164. 47   ‘[To] bring the people back to its senses so that it can recognize its true friends.’ 48   ‘[R]eprisals that, … by their harshness, would make good Christians quiver.’ 49   Lucien Maulvault, ‘Lasarte, maison morte’, in El Requeté (Paris, 1937), pp. 179‒249.

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Yet, this relationship is also territorial and proprietorial. Don Leandro thus opines: ‘Ils étaient de Lasarte, et Lasarte le leur renadit bien. … Le bonheur, c’était d’aimer ce qu’on possède et de le posséder bien’ [They belonged to Lasarte and Lasarte rewarded them well for it. … Happiness was to love what one possessed and to possess it well] (p. 213). If Amedeo, like Juan, asserts that the perfection of humanity is what motivates his action, he also affirms that ‘la possession était sainte, un peu comme la première dignité de l’homme. Au demeurant, ses négateurs étaient les mécréants, les barbares’ [property was sacred, a little like man’s original dignity. In fact, those who claimed otherwise were the miscreants, the barbarians] (p. 220).50 The dichotic assertion of Nationalist spirituality over ‘Marxist’ materialism cannot entirely mask the material interest of Frondaie’s and Maulvault’s characters. Moreover, it also reveals that combat, whilst elevated to an aesthetico-spiritual plane by authors and characters, also remains the means by which the privileges of the elite are re-instated. The civil war between the spiritual warrior elite, supported by the aestheticizing activity of the novelist through which war is rehabilitated, reveals itself to be a class war between a proprietorial elite, supported by far-right intellectuals, who aspire to become an intellectual elite on the one side and the modern masses on the other. Behind the aesthetico-spiritual utopia of Maulvault and Frondaie lie real material aims, the preservation and extension of class privileges, that reveal the utopia’s rootedness in socially and historically specific conditions.51 Moreover, the endings of both El Requeté and Le Volontaire prove problematic for the tragic aestheticization of the conflict they portray. While both borrow from the structural and thematic opposition of Cornellian tragedy, their treatment of the Civil War frequently descends into melodrama; the characters of these novels find themselves in situations far more analogous to a genre which, as Albert Camus argued, fails to sustain that equilibrium between ‘[deux] forces … également légitimes, également armées en raison’ that fuels tragic tension.52 This is particularly true of El Requeté where the resolution of the conflict allows Juan 50

  Here too a Barresian influence is discernable. For Barrès, the barbarian is the alien Other who does not share the same past and who therefore must be repelled in order to preserve one’s identity and sense of self; hence, for Zeev Sternhell, the origins of Barresian racism. Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français, p. 58. 51   For Levitas all utopias are historically and socially specific, resulting from a gap between the needs of one group at one particular moment and what is materially available to this group. There are no universal utopias, but many are totalitarian in outlook, making claims on behalf of humanity and universalist principles. See Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, pp. 183‒5. 52   ‘Two forces … equal in power and legitimacy’, Albert Camus, ‘Conférence prononcée à Athènes sur l’avenir de la tragédie’ in Albert Camus, Théâtre Récits Nouvelles (Paris, 1962), pp. 1699–1709, p. 1703. Moreover, Camus contends that Corneille anticipates the end of the tragic genre in plays where individual morality and reason triumph over the obscure, mystic forces that used to govern the human condition (p. 1705). Girard also argues that the preservation of tension is essential to tragedy (Violence and the Sacred, pp. 45‒7).

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to satisfy his public duty, to attain, at least in the eyes of the French narrator, a form of Cornellian gloire, whilst also fulfilling his personal duty towards his family. Similarly, the public and the private are reconciled in the death of the young lovers in Le Volontaire and the continuation of the Mazzucato family line. The reader of these novels does not experience catharsis in their conclusion, but a sense that order has been restored, that things are now as they should have been and that honour, both public and domestic, has been satisfied. It is indeed, as Juan inadvertently suspects, a case of restitution rather than revolution. The Persistence of Otherness Despite such limitations, the desire to give tragic form to the Spanish Civil War in these novels reflects a more general desire to elevate the reality of the 1930s and, more especially, the actions of the far right in Italy, Germany and Spain to a higher realm. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, quoting Friedrich Schiller, tragedy is not concerned with ‘the embarrassing task of copying reality’, but with creating a realm that exists between the everyday and the eternal, ‘a world having the same reality and credibility as Olympus possessed for the devout Greek’.53 Such a world must be populated by individuals who are able to transcend mundane existence and all its temptations in order to achieve that form of spirituality found by Maulvault’s and Frondaie’s characters in combat against those who would tether existence to its material reality alone. However, the transcendental possibilities of such individuals’ actions can only achieve recognition through the presence of the admiring other and can only receive aesthetic form through the creative activities of the author. The hero is therefore not able to gauge the success of his efforts without the latter. Thus, in El Requeté, Juan suggests that the individual experience of the engaged subject defies aestheticization as it is experienced in the problematic present: Entre l’idée que nous en formons [de la guerre] et la réalité, il y a autant de différence qu’entre un roman d’amour où l’on souffre et un vrai amour malheureux. Dans le roman, lorsque le pauvre diable a espéré dix jours la lettre de sa bien-aimée qui l’oublie, l’auteur marque un nouveau chapitre. Dans la vie réelle, entre la dernière ligne du précédent et la première ligne du nouveau, il y a eu la place d’une douleur, sans gloire aucune, mais qui a usé l’homme, usé, usé … (El Requeté, p. 17) [There is as much difference between the idea that we form [of war] and its reality as there is between the suffering of characters in a love story and a real romantic deception. In the novel, when the poor devil has spent ten days waiting 53   Quoted in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (New York, 1956), trans. by Francis Golfing, p. 50.

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for a letter from his loved one, who has forgotten him, the author starts a new chapter. In real life, between the last line of the previous chapter and the first of the next this space has been filled by an inglorious pain which has worn the individual down …]

Maulvault therefore acts much like the author conceived by Bakhtinian theory. According to this, the individual can only experience his or her life as an unresolved tension in the present, a tension that results from engagement in a yet to be completed project. Consequently, individuals experience their life as spirit; for Bakhtin, ‘spirit cannot be the bearer of a plot or storyline, for the spirit is not present, it does not exist – at every given moment, it is set as a task, it is yet-to-be’.54 In order to gain any sense of completion, finality and solidity, the characteristics that Bakhtin associates with the temporally denser soul, the individual depends upon the presence of the other who is able to totalize the actions and words of the subject in order to perceive rhythm. As Bakhtin writes: ‘Rhythm takes possession of a life that has been lived: the requiem tones at the end were already heard in the cradlesong at the beginning.’ It is therefore conferred by the aestheticizing activity of the author as he or she who is able to perceive the life of the hero as a whole, shaping the present in relation to a death which will be invested with meaning.55 It is the narrator of El Requeté who is thus able to point to the exemplarity of Juan’s sacrifice, not Juan himself. Maulvault and Frondaie, as the recorders of their heroes’ deeds and words, and as the aesthetic form-givers to these, are akin to Arendt’s story teller who records the doings of the man of action. The former is like homo faber, he who creates beyond the immediate material needs of survival, inscribing actions from the sphere of appearance into culture.56 In so doing, however, both writers attest to their otherness. The deeds and words that they record are those of the heroes of what remains a non-French drama and it is this sense of otherness that now troubles Maulvault in his second and more circumspect novel of the Civil War, Glaïeul noir. Here Maul­vault’s sympathy, not to say his identifi­cation, with the rebels persists. However, the novel’s principal protagonist and narrator is now a French Red Cross doctor, Alain Destagel. The latter tells of how he encounters Laura Sandoval, the French wife of a pro-Franquist industrialist, forced to work as a nurse in Acocha Hospital, Madrid. Her fate is doubly perverse: obliged to care for those she despises and periodically raped by Republican officers, she is also the unintentional target of those whose values she shares as she shelters from the nightly Nationalist air raids. The novel tells of Destagel’s and Laura’s escape from

54

  Bakhtin, ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, p. 110.   Ibid., p. 131. 56   ‘Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants’ (Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 192). 55

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the Republic, their capture by suspicious rebel forces, Laura’s difficult return to her husband, who now sees her as tarnished, and her failed relationship with Destagel. Like Juan in El Requeté, Destagel is repulsed by the Republicans, who again are depicted as entirely subject to their baser material interests. Unlike Juan, however, Destagel is an outsider, a self-proclaimed unwilling spectator, who is politically indifferent to the Nationalists, anxious to complete his mission and to return to France, but also to save Laura, who also happens to have been the object of his first teenage crush. Furthermore, he is unable to gauge any aesthetic appeal in the Nationalist cause. Rather, his sympathy for the Nationalists is intuitive and class-based. Explaining his identification with approaching rebel troops, Destagel simply states: ‘Ils étaient les nôtres pour moi … parce que nous savions qu’ils nous réservaient de l’indulgence’ [They were on our side, as far as I was concerned … because we knew they would be lenient towards us].57 The conflict itself offers Destagel no opportunity for transcendence. Indeed, he refuses the stupidity of war, as he sees it, which in turn leads to a refusal to enter into dialogue with the rebel forces as to do so would be to acknowledge his entry into the game of war and a conflict of ideologies: ‘Une interrogatoire? Ah! non! Pas d’interrogatoire. Je ne rendrais de comptes à personne de ma présence ici. Et expliquer quoi? L’expliquer à qui? Rien à expliquer. Absolument rien! Il y a des sujets qui nous appartiennent à nous tout seuls …’ [An interrogation? Absolutely not! No interrogation. I owed no one an explanation for my presence here. And, in any case, what would I explain? And to whom? There was nothing, absolutely nothing to explain. There are some things which belong to us alone] (Glaïeul noir, pp. 100‒101). Destagel’s distance from the experience of war is therefore one he imposes upon himself through a withdrawal, a refusal of engagement with the Spanish Other. And yet, he is unable to withdraw from the spectacle that unfolds around him because of his growing love for Laura. Love once again constitutes a temptation for Maulvault’s hero, but now becomes the only hope of transcendence for Destagel beyond the tawdry realm of the here-and-now. As the novel progresses, Laura exists increasingly in Destagel’s mind as a passage to something more than the present-at-hand. This intimation of transcendence that lies in full loving relations with the other is suggested as Laura comforts José, an army deserter imprisoned by the Nationalists for trying to join the Republicans. Believing he is to be shot at dawn, Laura allows the condemned adolescent to caress her while Destagel looks on: ‘On eût dit [que José] venait de découvrir tout un monde, celui de l’amour et de la douleur’ [It seemed as if José had just discovered a whole new world: that of love and pain] (ibid., p. 137).

  Lucien Maulvault, Glaïeul noir (Paris, 1938), pp. 101‒2. In this, Maulvault’s second civil war novel distances itself from the first. In post-Liberation France Maulvault would distance himself further from the right, arguing in a collection of essays titled L’Avenir de la Résistance (Paris: Julliard, 1945) for the adoption of US-style democracy under a new Republican constitution. 57

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However, Glaïeul noir, like ‘Lasarte, maison morte’, also hints at Mauvault’s pessimism as to the ability of his heroes to transcend the materiality of existence. While the love of Laura suggests the possibility of transcendence in the midst of a conflict that denies this to Destagel, Maulvault’s protagonist fails to escape the material reality of his existence. His love is unreciprocated. Even when Laura’s husband abandons her to Destagel, after learning that she was raped and suspecting that Destagel and she are lovers, Destagel is unwilling to have intercourse with Laura until she reciprocates his love. The novel ends with the sense that the couple has reached an impasse, Laura deciding that Destagel has indeed bought her by not insisting that the Sandoval family pay the expenses he incurred rescuing her from the Republicans. Base, bourgeois material concerns finally sour relations between the two characters. The novel concludes with Destagel asserting the impossibility of existing beyond oneself in engagement with the other: ‘Je ne crois pas à la possession [d’autrui]. Je sais que, dussions-nous être cœur contre cœur, l’un dans l’autre, nous serons toujours des êtres distincts …’ [I don’t believe that one can ever possess another. I know that, were we to remain heart to heart, under each other’s skin, we would always remain two distinct beings …] (Glaïeul noir, p. 183). In this, Glaïeul noir reflects what Paul Gifford terms ‘the adventure of modernity, of metaphysically autonomous self-awareness …’ that one might not expect to find in a novel perhaps a little too readily dismissed as erotic fantasy.58 Destagel, then, is denied both the participation in meaningful action and the passion that Juan and Giacomo have experienced; he remains a spectator to the Spanish tragedy rather than an active agent. Moreover, and unlike the narrators of Le Volontaire and El Requeté, he refuses to aestheticize the events to which he is witness. This failure of transcendence through love hints at a more general failure of trans­ cendence and the triumph of the material. Maulvault here gives novelistic form to the doubts that had manifested themselves as contradictions in El Requeté and, to a lesser extent, in Frondaie’s Le Volontaire. Moreover, Destagel’s sense of separation from the Other in Spain suggests a persistent sense of otherness that the exemplarity of Juan, Giacomo and Amilcare does not overcome. While the latter, and by extension the Civil War, exist as a spectacle to the French author and reading public, Destagel, the only French protagonist of pro-Nationalist French fiction of the Civil War produced in the course of 1936 to 1938, remains a subject forever confined to the war’s peripheries, cast in the role of unwilling spectator, unable to penetrate its core and therefore to discover the form of transcendence Maulvault and Frondaie claim is possible for the real men of action at work in Spain. 58   Paul Gifford, Love, Desire and Transcendence in French Literature: Deciphering Eros (Farnham, 2005), p. 99. For Gifford, this adventure is less the anguish caused by the discovery of freedom following the ‘death of God’ and more a sense of ‘loss which strikes the innermost being of Desire. … There is grievous trauma in being amputated from the “other world” posited and desired by human Eros; such that the cosmos itself is put out of joint …’ (ibid., p. 100).

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The reportage examined in Chapter 1 created the conditions whereby the Spanish Civil War could be viewed as a potential model through which the restorationist utopia was articulated. Frondaie and Maulvault set about creating an aesthetic realm through their representations of the conflict. Here war is rehabilitated and the individual lives of the committed, combative elite are reinvested with meaning, form and, to use Bakhtin’s terminology, spirit. Both attempt to do so through a redeployment of the dynamics of Cornellian theatre in an attempt to appropriate the war for a French readership, to render it culturally intelligible and to suggest the re-birth not only of tragedy, but of great art that can only accompany the death of democracy and the return to order. However, both Le Volontaire and El Requeté reveal the war to be a degraded form of tragedy, both authors betraying the concrete, material and class interests that lie behind their heroes’ engagement. Moreover, in their choice of heroes, the Civil War remains someone else’s war, a spectacle to be admired from a distance and, in the light of Destagel’s failure, a reminder of the persistence of otherness. Yet, in spite of these limitations, both works serve an important function in terms of the far right’s understanding of the conflict. As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, far-right reportage adumbrates the utopian potential of the Civil War for a disunited French right without dwelling upon the means by which the utopia might be actively brought about. It reflects a tendency that Levitas identifies among many utopias where ‘the transition to the good society is frequently not addressed, because utopia is the expression of desire …’.59 Le Volontaire and El Requeté allow the French reader to ponder the potential of violent political action whilst aestheticizing this very action when associated with the far right in Spain; both novels therefore point to the ‘additional effort …’ and collective action required in order to bring about utopia.60 That is to say, both novels, adopting the myths deployed by the restorationist utopia, go further still and point to the process by which the utopia can be brought into being. It is, of course, precisely this coming into being of the ideal through action that Frondaie emphasizes in his portrait of Mussolini in the preface to Le Volontaire. The recourse that both authors have to the dynamics of Cornellian theatre allows for a further rapprochement to be made between the radicalism of fascism and the traditionalism of absolute monarchy. As Mazgaj contends, this was important at a time when the issue of fascism, and particularly of foreign forms of fascism, had become increasingly divisive for the French far right.61 As the dissident monarchist Georges Bernanos reminded the French right in 1938: ‘Le parti de l’ordre … reste encore à former. Ce que vous appelez de ce nom n’est qu’un amalgame’ [The party of order … has yet to be formed. What you call by this name is nothing other

 Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 164.   Ibid., p. 171. 61  Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism, pp. 176‒7. 59 60

than an amalgam].62 Rather than reassure the reader as to the ultimate possibility of a reconciled and unified right, Le Volontaire with its eulogy of Italian fascism reminds French readers that a more radical conceptualization of engagement in Spain than that proposed by the restorationist utopia existed. As we shall see, in subsequent novelistic representations of the Civil War, an alternative utopia was to emerge in the form of the fascist utopias proposed by Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.

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62   Georges Bernanos, Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (Paris, 1995), p. 281. First published in 1938.

Chapter 3

The Birth of International Fascism: From Brasillach to Drieu la Rochelle At first glance, neither Robert Brasillach nor Pierre Drieu la Rochelle exhibited the hesitancy and distance that characterize ultimately both Frondaie’s and Maulvault’s fascination with the far right and political violence. By 1939, the year of publication of both Brasillach’s Les sept couleurs and Drieu’s Gilles, both writers had declared themselves fascists. Moreover, these two novels openly explore the possibility of fascism within the French and European contexts and this partly through their depiction of the Spanish Civil War. Both must therefore be considered as informed by and informing the political itineraries of their authors and not, as has sometimes been the case with studies of Brasillach’s oeuvre, as expressions of a romantic, idealized fascism removed from contemporary political reality. If ever there was an era when political idealism impacted upon the real it was the 1930s. Les sept couleurs, published in February 1939, appeared after Brasillach’s break with Action Française. By this time he had become editor of the fascist weekly Je suis partout. This shared Action Française’s anti-Semitism and its tone of the violently indignant outcry in its outspoken attacks upon the right’s enemies among the radicals and the left. Unlike Action Française, however, Je suis partout took an enthusiastic interest in events beyond France’s border. Although wary of Nazi Germany, it was clearly intrigued by National Socialism as well as by other European forms of radical far-right politics. Brasillach was particularly fascinated by the Belgian Rexists, their leader Léon Degrelle, the Spanish Falange and its leader, the poet-cum-jefe José Antonio Primo de Rivera.1 These movements combined youth and vigour, qualities that many of the young right had failed to find in the aging Maurras and Action Française. Throughout much of the 1930s, Je suis partout’s youthful team, which included Lucien Rebatet and Brasillach’s brotherin-law, Maurice Bardèche, employed representations of such foreign movements in order to encourage a similar spirit, if not a precise movement, among French youth. When this movement failed to emerge, and as middle-class support for the far right fell away with the collapse of the French Popular Front in 1938, Brasillach retreated into ‘an increasingly uncritical embrace of a mythic fascism, which by definition, resisted reasoned criticism’, of which Les sept couleurs can

1   For Mazgaj, José Antonio, as he was simply known, became ‘the most revered of [Brasillach’s] fascist heroes’. Imagining Fascism, p. 190.

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be considered an expression.2 Indeed, this chapter will seek to demonstrate that this mythic dimension of Brasillach’s fascism emerges in his treatment of the Civil War specifically. If, for Jeanine Verdès-Leroux, Brasillach is to be placed on the right of the fascist spectrum in France, Drieu belongs to its left.3 The erstwhile decadent and friend of Malraux had expressed his fascist leanings as early as 1934, becoming subsequently the intellectual spokesman of the fascist Parti Populaire Français (PPF). However, whilst Brasillach had come to fascism through the monarchism of Action Française, Drieu’s journey had been dictated by the pursuit of a higher European order beyond the nation state, as Carroll illustrates.4 The French fascism advocated by Drieu in Socialisme fasciste (1934) is a stage towards a form of higher, transnational fascism. As a member of the PPF, however, Drieu found himself constrained by the party’s increasing conservatism as it sought to wrestle voters from its main rival, Colonel de la Rocque’s Parti Social Français. At the same time Drieu had become increasingly disillusioned with the PPF’s leader, Jacques Doriot, and he left the party in January 1939. 1939 marked for Brasillach and Drieu alike a moment of disillusionment with the prospects of a peculiarly French fascism. Aspects of Drieu’s itinerary, but also of his own confused political state of mind of that year, are echoed in the plot of Gilles, first published in October 1939. Here too the Spanish Civil War episode serves to elaborate an alternative vision of a fascism that lies beyond the deceptions of the present, a vision which, despite the sizeable differences between Brasillach and Drieu’s political outlooks, is not without its parallels to Brasillach’s, as this chapter will illustrate. These differences reveal themselves formally in both novels. Perhaps influenced by Maulvault, whose El Requeté he had favourably reviewed in 1937, and like Frondaie, Brasillach evokes the structural dynamics of Cornellian tragedy. In Les sept couleurs, however, it is Polyeucte, Corneille’s tragedy of Christian martyrdom, which functions as intertext. Not only is the novel concerned with a love triangle which mirrors that of Polyeucte, but each of the seven sections forming the novel is prefaced by a quotation from Corneille’s tragedy.5 The male heroes of the novel, as Catherine observes of them, thus consider themselves the heroes of a modern form of tragedy: Ces hommes d’aujourd’hui, ils jouent à la tragédie à tous les coins de rue, avec leur carte de parti ou leur fascicule de mobilisation, ils brisent les statues, les 2

  Ibid., pp. 197‒8.   Jeanine Verdès-Leroux, Refus et violences. Politiques et littérature à l’extrême droite des années trente aux retombées de la Libération (Paris, 1996), pp. 20‒21. 4   Carroll, French Literary Fascism, pp. 133‒6. 5   First performed in 1641, Polyeucte depicts the martyrdom of its eponymous hero, the tensions that his Christian faith causes in his relationship with his wife, Pauline, his father-in-law, the Roman governor Félix, and with Sévère, Pauline’s suitor. 3

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idoles dans le temple, ils veulent pour eux les tourments relevés des rois et des reines, ils veulent les masques des anciens tragiques contre les gaz et contre le bonheur.6 [Men today play at tragedy on every street corner. Armed with their party cards or their call-up papers, they break statues, the idols in the temple. They demand the torments once reserved for kings and queens. They demand the masks of Greek tragedy to fend off gas attacks and happiness.]

As Carroll observes, however, Brasillach was neither a slave to classicism nor an enemy of modernism.7 Les sept couleurs, is not therefore a reworking of tragedy in the contemporary context. Rather Brasillach’s principal formal concern is to deconstruct and thereby to reveal the constitutive elements of the novel as genre, as his novel’s title insists. Consequently, Les sept couleurs is divided into seven elements with a single chapter corresponding to each: récit [narrative], letters, diary, reflections, dialogue, documents and discours [interior monologue]. As Rasson observes, the Cornellian intertext therefore operates as ‘un facteur de lisibilité, comme un dispositif cohérent et structuré grâce auquel le roman dispersé affirme son unité’ [a source of readability, as a coherent and structured element thanks to which the fragmented novel asserts its unity] whereby the classic and the modern are able to coexist.8 By way of contrast, Drieu’s Gilles is primarily a novel of apprenticeship, but one which employs many of the tropes and the structures identified by Suleiman in Authori­tarian Fictions. Gilles’s journey to fascism is peopled by a selection of helpers and hinderers. For Suleiman, it is essentially a roman à thèse. Indeed, it often reads as a self-conscious rendering of a genre that had developed in the late nineteenth century and which should have appeared obsolete in the wake of subsequent modernist experimentation. Whilst Les sept couleurs draws on the formal experimentation of André Gide and Roger Martin du Gard among others, Drieu’s influences in Gilles are Barrès and Paul Bourget, two of the greatest decriers of fin-de-siècle decadence. Whilst Brasillach was formed as a writer and political thinker by the rationalist Maurras, Drieu drew literary and political inspiration primarily from Barrès and his insistence upon instinct, intuition, the irrational and enthusiasm as ‘les forces profondes qui déterminent le comportement humain’.9   Robert Brasillach, Les sept couleurs (Paris, 1958), p. 244. First published in 1939.   Carroll, French Literary Fascism, p. 103. 8   Rasson, Littérature et fascisme, p. 119. 9   ‘The basic forces that determine human behaviour’ (Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français, p. 271). Similarly, Robert Soucy notes: ‘Like Barrès, Drieu believed – and this was a recurring theme in many of his novels – that combat and struggle provided the individual with an opportunity to prove that, in a Darwinian universe, he was one of Nature’s fittest.’ Robert Soucy, Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barrès (Berkley, 1972), p. 293. 6 7

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Consequently, as I have already suggested, both novelists set out with very different conceptions of fascism. Drieu’s insistence upon French decadence as a national trait, for example, is largely absent in Brasillach’s literary work. Brasillach’s association of Catholicism with fascism is often matched in Drieu’s work by the evocation of fascism as a return to a virile, pagan era; Catholicism, when it is considered by Drieu, is usually subsumed under a pantheistic vision. Drieu’s fascism is pessimistic in that it depends upon a sense of decadence from which it will emerge and assert itself. Brasillach’s fascism, according to Tarmo Kunnas, is optimistic; it is the constant and spring-like assertion of youth and vigour over death and corruption.10 Yet, despite such differences, both novels share a thematic preoccupation and offer the French reader a fascist apprenticeship born of the experience of, and deception with, the politics of the interwar years. Les sept couleurs, as we shall see, traces the political evolution and hesitancy of Patrice in interwar Europe before shifting its focus onto François Courtet, the communist-turned-fascist who fights on behalf of the Nationalists in the Tercio. Gilles too depicts the political progression of its eponymous hero throughout the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in his encounter with the Falange and death in defence of Nationalist Spain. Both novels therefore use the Civil War as the setting for the political epiphany of their heroes. I would contend, then, that the Spanish epilogue in both novels constitutes more than a feeble response on the part of French fascism to Malraux’s L’Espoir, as Jean-Guy Rens has asserted in respect to Gilles in particular.11 Rather, for both Drieu and Brasillach in 1939, the rise of the right in Spain appeared to offer another form of fascism; one that compensated for the inadequacies of those currently available elsewhere in Europe and in France, and therefore a way beyond the impasse of the present. In particular, both writers point to the existence, in the international diversity of those who fight for Franco, of a fascist international and thereby to the existence of a broader form of fascism. In both novels, we are guided towards the existence of this body by the novel’s hero who has partially withdrawn from the world only to re-engage with it more radically in the struggle against the Spanish Republic and its ‘red’ army. Gilles and François thus embody the values of this new form of fascism, a European fascism which is beginning to take shape amidst the ranks of those who fight on behalf of Nationalist Spain. In both novels, therefore, we witness not so much the return to an old system of Latin values sanctioned by tradition, as Maurras had hoped, but the birth of a new type of individual in the figure of the international fascist combatant. As this chapter will demonstrate, and as Georges Moskos states, the Spanish Civil War is the locus for both novelists of a creation myth where humanity progresses from a horizontal world lacking in distinction and definition 10   Tarno Kunnas, Drieu la Rochelle, Céline, Brasillach et la tentation fasciste (Paris, 1972), p. 77. 11   Jean-Guy Rens, ‘L’Espagne les yeux fermés’ in Marc Hanrez (ed.), Les Ecrivains et la guerre d’Espagne (Paris, 1975), pp. 237‒40, p. 238.

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to a vertical world of new distinctions. Here ‘l’homme nouveau, conscient, surgit verticalement de son existence préconsciente à l’horizontale’ [new man awakens, rising vertically from his preconscious horizontal existence].12 The Spanish Civil War, whilst only an episode within each novel, therefore exists as the culminating point of each protagonist’s apprenticeship. More than this, however, it allows both authors to formulate within the space of Spain a fascist utopia predicated upon the existence of an international and, above all, European fascism. The myths of the international fascist combatant and the community to which he belongs constitute the very foundation upon which this utopia is constructed. As this chapter will argue, the fascist utopia represents a radical alternative to that other utopia offered by the French far right in Spain: the restorationist utopia examined in Chapter 1. Like this latter, it too aims to impact upon and to shatter the existing order. Furthermore, it will inform the conduct of its authors beyond the text and into the Occupation. The Need for Fascism The publication of Les sept couleurs and of Gilles coincides with a moment of deception in both novelists’ political itineraries; both Brasillach and Drieu had become aware of the limitations offered by embryonic French fascism. Just as it had become apparent to Drieu that the PPF could never match his own aspirations for fascism, so it must have appeared obvious to Brasillach that French fascism could never enjoy the same national-popular appeal enjoyed by both Italian and German fascism. And yet both novels set out to display fascism’s continued potency; fascism is seen to respond to and to fill a continued need experienced both nationally and internationally. In Les sept couleurs this need is expressed not through a politically informed critique of interwar French society, with the sort of constant insistence upon contemporary decadence that can be found in Gilles, but through the need for magic. As Rasson argues, the quest for magic and for magic’s ability to transform reality informs many of Brasillach’s earlier novels, but Les sept couleurs represents the first novel where Brasillach explicitly associates the power of magic with fascism and its transformational potential.13 The young Patrice is thus portrayed as a character in search of a force with which to counter the monotony of reality. Thus he comments, whilst still a student in Paris, ‘Maintenant, nous vivons une époque plate et ridicule’ (p. 22).14 Even before his exposure to Italian fascism, he condemns ‘la démocratie universelle, … la République allemande, … l’art oratoire 12   Georges Moskos, ‘Mythe, écriture et révolution’ in Hanrez (ed.), Les Ecrivains et la guerre d’Espagne, trans. by Françoise Girbal, pp. 47‒54, p. 48. 13   Rasson therefore contends that, in Les sept couleurs, ‘les masques sont jetés bas …’ [the masks are removed …] (Littérature et fascisme, p. 28). 14   ‘We live now in a flat and ridiculous era.’

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et … la Société des Nations …’ [universal democracy, … the German republic, … the art of public speaking and … the Ligue of Nations. …] as ‘tant de vieilleries’ [so much old rubbish], believing that the best has gone before his generation (p. 21). Patrice is then drawn to radical politics, the narrator commenting ‘Patrice est séduit par la politique’ (p. 21),15 as if this constituted an alternative realm. Having lived in fascist Italy, whose youth and vigour favourably impress him, Patrice takes up a post in the French chamber of commerce in Nuremberg where the magic of German National Socialism will appeal to him more profoundly. Reprising and re-editing his own reports from the French nationalist press concerning the 1936 Nuremberg rally, Brasillach now places these words in Patrice’s diary entry. Here, the Lichtdom [cathedral of light], created by multiple spotlights, becomes ‘l’enceinte magique [de] l’office hitlérien’ (p. 110) and ‘[une] cage mystérieuse, … le lieu sacré du mystère national …’ (p. 112).16 Hitler’s appearances in the novel (via references to radio broadcasts and newsreels) further illustrate Brasillach’s equation of fascism with the magical. Thus, like a magician, Hitler conjures up, through ceremony and incantations, a world where totality has been achieved and where words are no longer divorced from their referent. Hitler’s speeches are, as Rasson argues, using Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology, énoncés performatifs, enabling the physical transformation of the world through the verbal expression of an idea system.17 Thus, for Patrice at Nuremberg, Hitler’s histrionics have a direct bearing on reality: ‘Tout cela n’est point vide, mais signifie. Tout cela est fondé sur une doctrine, sur une intelligence, une sensibilité, et ces spectacles grandioses sont liés à une représentation du monde, aux idées les plus dures sur la valeur de la vie et de la mort’ [None of this is vacuous; everything signifies. Everything is founded on a particular doctrine, knowledge and sensitivity; these grandiose spectacles are connected to a representation of the world, to the most rigorous ideas concerning the value of life and death.] (p. 114). The fascist and in particular the fascist leader, according to Brasillach and Patrice, possess a transformational power absent in everyday life. In this, Brasillach echoes the celebration of Mussolini and his transformational potency as he who makes real the utopia already found in Frondaie’s preface to Le Volontaire. Yet, Brasillach also retains some of the reservations he had expressed earlier in his journalism concerning National Socialism in Patrice’s account of Nuremberg. Patrice, like Brasillach the journalist, warns immediately: ‘C’est parce que ces cérémonies et ces chants signifient quelque chose que nous [les Français] devons y faire attention et songer à parer à ce qu’ils signifient’ [It is precisely because these ceremonies and songs mean something that we [French] must pay attention and think about fending off what they mean] (p. 114). Similarly, he criticizes aspects of the militarization of civilian life under National Socialism, particularly the wearing 15

  ‘Patrice is charmed by politics.’   ‘The magic circle [of] Hitler’s office’ and ‘a mysterious cage, the sacred site of the national mystery’. 17   Luc Rasson, Littérature et fascisme, p. 242. 16

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of military uniforms by German women. Despite Hitler’s galvanizing effect upon the German people, Patrice is disappointed by his physical appearance: ‘Un petit homme. Plus petit qu’on ne le croirait à l’écran, triste, avec sa veste jaunâtre, son pantalon noir, sa mèche, son visage fatigué. Plus vieux aussi qu’on ne pensait’ [A short man. Shorter than one would think on the screen. Sad, with his yellowish jacket, his black trousers, his fringe, his tired face. Older than one thinks, too]. However, our attention is soon drawn back to Hitler the magician. His eyes are the ‘des yeux d’un autre monde, des yeux étranges …’ (p. 122).18 He is still a ‘dieu pour son pays … descendu du ciel, tel l’archange de la mort, … appelé à une mission qu’il croit divine …’ [god for his country descended from heaven like the archangel of death, … called to a mission that he believes divine …] (p. 123). However, Patrice’s sense of alterity and exclusion from the effects of Hitler’s magic can still be perceived beneath his sense of wonder when faced with the spectacle of Hitler. Like his fellow Frenchmen, Patrice is condemned to ‘y [assister] en spectateurs, en infidèles admis à prendre leur part de la beauté mais non du sacrifice …’ [to attend as spectators, as infidels admitted in order to participate in its beauty but not in the sacrifice itself …] (p. 114). Hitler is a god for his country alone and not necessarily for fascism more generally. In Bourdieu’s terms, Hitler may be ‘le porte-parole doté du plein pouvoir de parler et d’agir au nom du groupe, et d’abord sur le groupe par la magie du mot d’ordre’ [the spokesperson granted full authority to speak and to act on behalf of the group and, above all, to act upon the group through the magic of the word of command],19 but the group to which he belongs is not necessarily that of the narrator, Patrice, nor, by extension, that of the French reader. Equally, reference to his mission is qualified by the ambiguous ‘that he believes divine’. This representation of Hitler and of National Socialism does not constitute a rejection of the latter, however, as indeed Rasson argues. Rather it is characterized by both fascination and hesitation; National Socialism is at once invigorating and terrifying.20 Yet neither does it offer a precise model. Its significance lies in the equation of the magic potential to transform the real through fascism, but also in what it reveals about fascism’s universal potential beyond National Socialism’s narrow confines. Patrice’s diary entry is immediately followed by a set of reflections, the author of which at first appears to be Patrice but who might just as well be François, a recent convert to fascism following his return from the Soviet 18

  ‘Eyes of another world, strange eyes ...’   Pierre Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire (Paris, 1982), p. 101. 20   Littérature et fascisme, p. 122. Verdès-Leroux also contends that Brasillach’s journalism reveals his seduction by National Socialism in spite of his reservations and argues that these may have often been tailored to suit the more nationalistic readers of La Revue universelle for which they were intended (Verdès-Leroux, Refus et violence, p. 101). According to Carroll, however, ‘at least until after the defeat [of 1940], his political position was overtly anti-German and intent on developing an effective counter-force to German authority and domination’ (Carroll, French Literary Fascism, p. 116). 19

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Union and who subsequently comes to supplant Patrice as the novel’s fascist hero. Here the images of other nations’ nationalist movements prompt the question among French youth ‘Pourquoi pas nous?’ (p. 154).21 These movements suggest, beyond their national specifications, the birth of a new human type: ‘uomo fascista né en Italie sans doute, mais qui peut réclamer … la désignation universelle de l’entomologie [sic] latine’ [uomo fascista born in Italy doubtless, but who can legitimately claim … a universal designation from [the term’s] Latin entomology [sic]]. Uomo fascista is identified as an international sub-species of humanity, like ‘le chevalier Chrétien, appuyé sur la croix et l’épée, ou le pâle conspirateur révolutionnaire dans ses imprimeries clandestines et ses cafés fumeux …’ [the Christian knight, inspired by the cross and the sword, or the pale revolutionary conspirator in his clandestine print works and his smoky cafés …] (p. 156). Like these earlier figures, he is destined to become a mythical figure designed to inspire others to engage in the radical transformation of the world around them. He is therefore a constituent element of Brasillach’s fascist utopia. However, Patrice cannot embrace a form of fascism founded on another’s sense of nationalism and he turns away from both National Socialism and Germany in order to pursue personal happiness and Catherine, who has now married François. If the reflections that follow his diary entries suggest a recognition of fascism’s universal, transnational potential, they cannot be imputed to him with any certainty. Indeed, Patrice never completes his fascist apprenticeship. Along with Catherine, he is the product of an era and a nation characterized by légerté, the very quality which at first draws Patrice to Catherine (p. 16). Both are judged by the narrator to constitute little more than shadows, ‘deux fantômes sans trait, sans ligne, sans épaisseur ni limite …’ (Les sept couleurs, p. 47).22 In contrast to the insubstantial ghost of Patrice stands François, ‘un garçon un peu sérieux, un peu lourd peut-être …’ (ibid., p. 68), as Catherine describes him in a letter.23 Ultimately, however, it is this very weight in opposition to Patrice’s slightness that wins Catherine’s heart. Whilst Patrice might be drawn to the magic of radical politics, he remains a spectator at another nation’s regeneration, as much an outsider as Destagel in Maulvault’s Glaïeul noir. As a ghost and a man of dreams, he is unable to translate thought into action. François, the engineer, by way of contrast, spends his life transforming the material world: ‘Mon combat est avec les soucis matériels, les constructions mécaniques, les rapports, les traitements, … le plaisir qu’on gagne et qu’on touche’ [My struggle is with material concerns, mechanical constructions, relationships, solutions, … tangible and realizable pleasures] (p. 188). It is François who will become the hero of the novel and to which attention turns when, believing mistakenly that Catherine has chosen Patrice over him, he leaves for Nationalist Spain and engages in the fascist 21

  ‘Why not us?’   ‘Two ghosts without any traits, definition, depth or edge ….’ 23   ‘A slightly serious and perhaps slow-witted [literally, heavy] lad ….’ 22

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transformation of the world. However, before we consider the Civil War episode in Les sept couleurs, let us first examine the journey of Gilles’s eponymous hero. If the author of ‘Réflexions’ in Les sept couleurs is drawn to fascism by its equation with youth, vigour and transformative action, the appeal for Gilles lies in a glimpse of transcendence witnessed briefly during combat in the First World War and that fascism appears to promise. In this way, Drieu’s fascism in Gilles echoes the nostalgia for the experience of war that often informed the engagement of those veterans who formed the squadristi and Freikorps in postwar Italy and Germany respectively. It therefore appears to evoke what Milza considers firstphase fascism characterized by the nostalgia for combat and anti-communist, antibourgeois reaction against a society which had failed to grant returning veterans the credit and fulfilment they had gained in war.24 In Gilles, however, modern warfare, through its association with the scientific spirit, is also held responsible for the debilitation of the body and the degradation of the individual. Yet it remains an essential experience since, despite the decadent form it took in trench warfare, it supplies Gilles with ‘une révélation inoubliable qui avait inscrit dans un tableau lumineux les premiers articles de sa foi: l’homme n’existe que dans le combat, l’homme ne vit que s’il risque la mort’ [an unforgettable revelation which had inscribed the first articles of his faith in a luminous image: man only exists in combat, man only lives when he risks his life].25 Modern warfare may be a pale, degraded imitation of nature’s eternal war, Gilles realizes as he observes the battle between the Norman cliffs and the sea (p. 88), but it has nevertheless served to reveal this fundamental principle, a principle that Drieu derives directly from Barrès.26 Even modern warfare supplies the possibility of transcendence: ‘C’était à ces instants-là qu’il avait été le plus tenté par la mort comme plus secrètement vivante que la vie. Au delà de l’agonie l’appelait une vie intime. Il avait eu, dans les tranchées, des heures d’extase …’ [It was at those moments that he had been most tempted by death as something secretly more alive than life itself. Beyond its pain a profound life was calling him. He had known hours of ecstasy in the trenches …] (p. 65). By comparison, postwar life can only pile deception upon deception as Gilles endeavours to rediscover this intimation of transcendence in a series of failed love affairs and the radical politics of the surrealist group Révolte. It is these failed endeavours that make up the bulk of a novel which is therefore structured upon what Lucien Goldmann terms the genre’s ‘degraded quest’ informed by a pursuit George Luckács associates particularly with the nineteenth-century novel: that for a totality of meaning located in a lost or imagined past and rendered problematic by   Pierre Milza, Fascisme français, p. 47.   Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Gilles (Paris, 1939), p. 75. All subsequent references are to this edition of Gilles except where indicated in footnotes. 26   Barresian racial determinism informs, for Sternhell, ‘la conception selon laquelle les lois de l’existence sont celles de la guerre’ (Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français, p. 250). 24 25

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its constant absence in the present.27 Love and, perhaps more particularly, physical intimacy with women provide once more a glimpse of ‘la science la plus précise, mais aussi la plus rétive aux formules’ (Gilles, p. 136),28 but Gilles the veteran is only ever ‘un homme divisé, souillé …’ (ibid., p. 158).29 Ultimately, therefore, he proves unequal to the lover who marks him the most and who reveals love also to be a part of the world’s constant war: Dora. As Carroll observes, Gilles’s encounters with women lead him to fascism not so much through misogyny, as is conventionally advanced, but through what they reveal to him of himself. Of all Drieu’s erotic encounters, it is the Arian Dora who comes to constitute an ‘idealized, aestheticized woman, whose body displays the creative, aesthetic force from which the male is in fact separated and which he must “repossess” [through conquest] to realize himself fully as man. … The aesthetic (woman) in this sense is always the model and the foundation for the political (man)’.30 She therefore heads a racial hierarchy of female characters and it is only in the wake of his relationship with Dora, and not in reaction to it, that Gilles is able to come to fascism.31 Similarly, political life in interwar France provides glimpses of something more than the absent totality of the present. After Révolte agree to respect communist orthodoxy, opting for a purely materialist understanding of the human condition, and following the failure of Clérences, a fellow veteran, to steer the Parti Radical in a truly radical direction, Gilles turns to nationalism. Like Drieu the journalist, he gives expression to his political thought in the dissident nationalist press. Gilles’s nationalism, like that of many of the young right in the 1930s, such as Maulnier, is a composite, influenced by a range of nationalist thought. The review he creates (L’Apocalypse) draws upon the nationalist counter-current of the early twentieth century, revealing an eclectic indebtedness from de Maistre to Péguy (p. 364). Predicting the return of a golden age or imminent destruction (p. 250), and as the name of his review suggests, Gilles can only conceive of a nationalism that is called into being in order to put a violent end to the inadequacies of the present. Lacking in doctrine, L’Apocalypse, Gilles admits, is a prayer; a quest for resemblance among his fellow countrymen and an expression of a political desire.   Lucien Goldmann, Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris, 1964) and George Luckács, The Theory of the Novel (London, 1978), trans. by Anna Bostock, p. 56. For Luckács, in the nineteenth-century novel and its primarily biographic form, ‘completeness is immanently utopian [and] can be objectified only in that organic quality which is the aim of biography’ (ibid., p. 77). 28   ‘The most precise knowledge, but also that which is the most resistant to formulation.’ 29   ‘A divided, impure man ….’ 30   Carroll, French Literary Fascism, pp. 166‒7. 31   Dora’s supremacy over both Gilles and his French lovers suggests a fascination with the Nordic and more particularly the Germanic that had always been present in Drieu’s work, but which appears ominous in the light of Drieu’s collaboration in the years that followed Gilles’s publication and following France’s defeat to Germany in June 1940. 27

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Increasingly, his journalism leads him to travel to undisclosed Central and Eastern European states where he witnesses the emergence of truly collective nationalist movements. It is in France, however, during the riots of 6 February 1934, that Gilles glimpses the political potential of the nation. Initially mocking the ability of ‘les foules de cette ville assoupie …’ [the crowds of this sleeping city …] to match ‘la vieille énergie encore [visible] dans le ciel, à la frise de ces palais …’ [the old energy still visible in the skyline, in the friezes of these palaces …] (p. 415), Gilles is nevertheless ‘transfigured’ when violence erupts. In the midst of a street battle il se vit entouré par le couple divin revenu, la Peur et le Courage, qui préside à la guerre. Ses fouets ardents claquèrent. Il s’élança à contre-courant de la foule qui refluait. Comme un soir en Champagne, quand la première ligne avait cédé; comme ce matin à Verdun où il était arrivé avec le 20e Corps, alors que tout était consommé du sacrifice des divisions de couverture. (p. 418) [he found himself surrounded by the divine pairing of Fear and Courage who preside over war. Their whips cracked. He headed against the crowd that was now retreating. It recalled in him an evening in Champagne when the front line had yielded, a morning in Verdun when he had arrived with the 20th Corps after everything had been consumed in the sacrifice of the covering divisions.]

The riots recall the First World War, its intimation of transcendence and of the process of creation and the revelation of meaning as inherently bound to that of death and destruction. Moreover, they also recall that moment when Gilles the leader and hero emerged, one of those rare occasions when he had experienced a totality of being in the present moment. As with love, this promise remains unfulfilled. The revolt against the Republic fails for lack of a leader, although it is the radical Clérences who hesitates in Gilles and not Maurras or de la Rocque. Two days later, as his wife Pauline lies dying of ovarian cancer, Gilles concludes that ‘Les ponts qu’il avait lancés dans sa vie vers les femmes, vers l’action, ç’avait été de folles volées, insoucieuses de trouver leurs piliers’ [the bridges he had sought to build in his life between himself and women, himself and action had turned out to be absurd stairways with no consideration for what might support them] (p. 424). It is too late to create anything from contemporary France, he now realizes, and, in any case, in his nationalistic ponderings, ‘Il avait plutôt songé à l’Europe qu’à la France …’ (p. 425).32 The coincidence of the right’s failure in February 1934 and of the death of his wife, Pauline, plunges Gilles back into a solitude where he doubts even the fascism to which he believed he had committed himself: ‘Ne croyant pas au communisme, pouvait-il croire au fascisme? Il ne savait guère ce que c’était. N’était-il donc pas du siècle? N’était-il donc point fait pour fonder dans ce siècle?’ 32

  ‘He had rather thought of Europe than France … .’

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[Not believing in communism, could he believe in fascism? He scarcely knew what it was. Was he of another age entirely? Was he therefore destined to establish nothing in this century?] (p. 425). Drieu would have us believe that the answer to this last question resides in the novel’s epilogue and the re-emergence of Gilles in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. Spain and the Fascist Utopia In different ways both Les sept couleurs and Gilles point to the failings and limitations of national forms of fascism. While Les sept couleurs does so through the reservations that Patrice expresses concerning German National Socialism, Gilles highlights the inability for a uniquely French form of fascism to emerge in the 1930s. Both novels suggest from such limitations that a transnational approach provides a way beyond the present impasse. For Drieu, the spiritual death of decadent France becomes a pre-requisite to national regeneration within the European context. As Carroll observes, the new ‘total’ man that Drieu so often sought in his political writings was to be born of the old national warrior myth. Similarly, his ‘idea of Europe as a spiritual community is born in the death of the nation as a political-cultural community’.33 For Brasillach, whilst the images of young nationalists abroad might excite the imagination of their right-wing counterparts in France, no image of French national fascism emerges in Les sept couleurs. Rather, Patrice’s musings on Italian and German fascism give way to the anonymous considerations of ‘Réflexions’ concerning the emergence of a new type of man, uomo fascista, bearer of a potentially universal fascism. In the light of this, we need to read both novels’ representation of the Spanish Civil War as responses to those limitations and frustrated desires raised earlier in each novel and not only as a far-right riposte to Malraux’s L’Espoir. As Levitas contends, utopias are driven not so much by hope and a belief in their imminent realizability, but by the desire for a better way of being. This desire finds expression in utopian visions that remove or resolve contemporary problems through a re-imaging of the world in which the gap between desire and reality is closed.34 The representation of the Spanish Civil War represents an attempt by Drieu and Brasillach to close their respective gaps and to call into existence a vision of a better way of being for French fascists, but also for the disunited French far right as a whole. In both Les sept couleurs and Gilles, the fascist hero undergoes a withdrawal from the world before re-emerging radically transformed in order to fight on the side of the Spanish Nationalists. In Gilles, following Pauline’s death and Clérences’ failure to direct a revolt against the Republic, Drieu’s eponymous hero disappears for four years only to re-appear as a spy operating in Republican Barcelona. In   Carroll, French Literary Fascism, pp. 130‒31.   Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 191.

33 34

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Les sept couleurs, François imitates Patrice’s earlier gesture, following the end of his relationship with Catherine, and joins the Legion. Unlike Patrice, however, he chooses the Tercio over the French Legion. Despite the novel’s shift of focus, François remains an elusive character throughout the remainder of the novel. In Chapter 6, which combines general documentation and accounts of the Civil War in which François features, he contributes just one letter to an acquaintance of his wife and a note recounting his encounter with a German legionnaire and excomrade of Patrice. In Chapter 7 he becomes the object of Catherine’s thoughts as she travels to the South West of France to visit him in hospital after he has been wounded out of the Tercio. It is only in Chapter 5 that we really hear François speak for himself. Yet, despite the disparate nature of the documents which form Chapter 6 and the sporadic appearance of our hero himself, a certain image of François as an international agent of fascism wrapped in all the mystique and romance (in the broadest and most banal sense of the term) does emerge in the final two chapters of Les sept couleurs. François’ decision to join the Tercio is never explained by François himself. Rather, the reader is left to guess at his reasons. We might assume that these result from François’ earlier adoption of fascism following the deception he felt upon visiting the Soviet Union. The reasons suggested within Chapter 6 itself seem to suggest a more conventional explanation stemming from his imagined loss of Catherine to Patrice. In a letter found on a dead legionnaire, François is described as ‘très gai, très chic. Mais il ne parle pas de lui, c’est son affaire. Ça a tout l’air d’un gars qui a eu des malheurs’ [very cheerful, very chic. But he never talks about himself and that’s his business. He seems like a lad who has had his share of troubles] (Les sept couleurs, p. 208). When he is evoked in the short story ‘Les Cara­mels’, the narrator describes a misogynist hurling abuse at nightclub singers, frequently subject, according to one of his companions, to dark thoughts (pp. 227‒8). François’ own contribution to the chapter, a solitary, brief letter to a mutual acquaintance of the main protagonists, also adds to the idea that François’ motives are primarily sentimental rather than political. His decision to write, he admits, is motivated by the desire to ‘à la fois informer, et me taire, être connu et rester caché’ (Les sept couleurs, p. 214).35 His reason for engaging suggests a private, personal motive rather than a public, political one. This seems to be very much in the romantic tradition of the legionnaire who, either imagining a slight or seeing himself wrongly slighted by another, joins the Legion in order to disappear, to remain hidden, then only to re-emerge, his integrity and honour fully restored. This is further re-enforced by the inclusion of the ‘Song of the Legion’ which begins: Je suis soldat de l’héroïque Légion,/ Sur mon âme pèse un douloureux calvaire/ Qui dans le feu cherche sa rédemption

35

  ‘Both inform and remain silent, to make myself known and to remain hidden.’

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Nous sommes tous des héros inconnus./ Nul ne cherche à savoir qui nous sommes./ Et mille et mille tragédies/ Font le cycle de notre vie. (pp. 220‒21) [I am a soldier of the heroic Legion,/ A heavy burden weighs upon my soul/ Which seeks redemption in the fire We are all unknown heroes./ None seeks to know our name./ And a thousand and one tragedies/ Mark the cycle of our lives.]

François therefore appears to constitute a conventional and culturally clichéd legionnaire rather than the bearer of a political vision, whose actions respond to a hidden, personal agenda rather than to those of an identifiable political community. References to his bravery simply draw further upon this cliché. A letter from the military hospital in San Sebastian where François convalesces at the end of the chapter makes no direct reference to his personal, political engagement on behalf of the Franquist cause, but rather thanks him vaguely ‘d’avoir représenté auprès de la hidalguia espagnole la chevalerie française’ (Les sept couleurs, p. 232).36 Moreover, the details of his arrival in Spain, crossing a river at night whilst under fire from Nationalist troops, form part of the traditional and generic heroism of the legionnaire. Thus François’ personal heroism is incorporated within the general heroism of ‘plusieurs dizaines, si ce n’est plusieurs centaines de Français [qui], dès les premières heures, ont passé la frontière, dans des circonstances parfois terriblement romanesques et difficiles, pour s’engager, par goût du risque et par conviction, dans les troupes de Franco’ [several dozen, if not several hundred Frenchmen [who], from the very start, crossed the border, sometimes in the most romantic and difficult of circumstances, to enlist, through conviction and love of danger, in Franco’s army] (p. 202). Initially, Brasillach deliberately fosters a hesitation on the part of the reader as to whether to classify the elusive François among ‘les désépérés qui ont trouvé [en Espagne] une autre Légion, avec le même climat romanesque, sentimental et dangereux’ [those without hope who have found in Spain another [Foreign] Legion with the same romantic, sentimental and dangerous character] (p. 202) or among ‘les combattants par doctrine …’ [ideological combatants …] (p. 201) who people both sides of the conflict. Soon, however, he seeks to place his hero’s activities within the broader context of international fascism. Indeed, François declares to the Nationalist authorities (in a report included in Chapter 6) his intention to ‘s’engager dans “les Brigades internationals nationalistes” (c’est son expression) …’ (ibid., p. 204).37 The failure on the part of the authorities to recognize the existence of such a body suggests immediately a certain utopian inventiveness on the part of François, an inventiveness that is then grounded in the inclusion by François of overtly ideological documents, such as extracts from Mussolini’s ‘Message for Year 9 (1931)’ and Notre combat: introduction à l’esprit   ‘For having represented French chivalry amidst the Spanish hidalguia [chivalry].’   ‘To join the “international nationalist Brigades” (his expression).’

36 37

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fasciste.38 These inscribe both the Spanish Civil War and François’ actions within the broader struggle of international fascism. The detailing of various far-right nationalist movements in the latter document suggests a universal awakening of the type of fascist consciousness alluded to by Mussolini who claims: ‘le fascisme … est universel par l’esprit qui l’anime … Il est donc permis de prévoir une Europe fasciste …’ [fascism … is universal because of the spirit that drives it. One can therefore predict a fascist Europe …] (p. 204). As François’ encounter with a former legionnaire acquaintance of Patrice, the Nazi Kast, suggests, Spain is an arena for the universal values of international Fascism just as it is for those of the international anti-fascist movement. This international dimension is further emphasized by the various discrete references to the presence of foreign and particularly French nationals in the Franquist ranks. There is undoubtedly here an attempt to counter the real involvement of so many Frenchmen in the Republican cause with the myth of a widespread French presence in Franco’s army. Thus, extracts from Brasillach and Bardèche’s Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne, the fictitious La revue grise and the short story already cited all suggest a considerable French and international presence amidst the rebels. In this sense, François is clearly intended to be part of an emerging fascist international in which the French play a large part.39 Quoting himself, then, Brasillach is able to overcome the problem posed by particular nationalist and fascist movements and especially that of German National Socialism. Reprising an argument advanced in his journalism of the late 1930s, he reminds the reader that the latter is part of a wider, European phenomenon: the nationalist revolution to which Germany ‘apporta évidemment sa personnalité propre, qu’il n’est pas question de transférer aillleurs’ [obviously brought its own personality and which cannot be transferred elsewhere]. That said, and ‘sans vouloir entrer dans le détail de ses dogmes raciaux, religieux ou impérialistes, il est certain qu’elle a donné au national-socialisme universel tout au moins son souci de prosélytisme et tout au moins ses fêtes’ [without wanting to go into detail concerning its racial, religious or imperialist doctrines, it is certain that Germany has at the very least contributed its desire to proselytize and its festivities to universal national socialism]. German National Socialism therefore provides an aesthetic model, a form rather than a precise content, and each subsequent nationalist revolution has further reinforced ‘la notion d’une révolution universelle, analogue à celle qui brûla toute l’Europe en 1848 par exemple’ [the notion of a universal revolution similar to that which raged throughout Europe in 1848, for 38

  The latter, a fictional publication, draws again upon Brasillach’s earlier reportage.   Keene estimates that French volunteers in Nationalist forces numbered fewer than 500, considering 250 to be a more accurate estimate. Moreover, Pike observes that the Nationalists, given the national character of their movement, often claimed that they had no need of, or desire for, foreign volunteers. German and Italian forces present in Nationalist Spain were often designated as advisers. See Keene, Fighting for Franco, p. 152, and Pike, Les Français et la guerre d’Espagne, p. 165. 39

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example] (Les sept couleurs, p. 205). What drives all these diverse movements, Brasillach contends, is less a precise content and more the spirit of youthful vigour he associates first and foremost with fascism. Spurred on by this spirit, such movements are able to re-energize more established nationalist movements, uniting the traditional and the modern in an ‘appel au sacrifice, à l’honneur, à la discipline …’ (ibid., p. 206).40 Reprising an idea developed in Histoire de la guerre d’ Espagne, Brasillach then elevates the Civil War to a conflict between two transnational ideas: fascism and antifascism: ‘L’Espagne ainsi achevait de transformer en combat spirituel et matériel à la fois, en croisade véritable, la longue opposition qui couvait dans le monde moderne’ [Spain thus completed the transformation into material and spiritual combat, into veritable crusade, that long opposition that had been smouldering in the modern world] (p. 207). Here again Brasillach insists on the fusion of the traditional and the modern, however. The Spanish Nationalists therefore embody ‘Le double idéal de la “Sainte Tradition”, comme chantent les carlistes, et de “l’aube” nouvelle, du “printemps” qui vient rire sur l’Espagne, comme chante la Phalange …’ [The dual ideal of the ‘Sacred Tradition’, of which the Carlists sing, and the new ‘dawn’ and the ‘spring’ that smiles upon Spain, of which the Falange sings … ] (pp. 229‒30), Brasillach writes, echoing the polyphony of the old and the new alluded to already by Faÿ. Whilst the Falange are depicted as the active agents of radical social change in Les sept couleurs and youth is advanced as the motor for a more profound, continent-wide revolution, Brasillach, like the Maurrassians in Spain, pays homage to the fusion of the old and the new. Indeed, observing the charitable, social action of the Falange, he considers whether Nationalist Spain might bring forth a new variant of fascism able to resolve the tensions within the far right, both in Spain and in France: L’Espagne pourrait étonner, si elle le voulait, l’univers … en instaurant une sorte de catholicisme fasciste, dont l’originalité lui appartient en propre. C’est le sentiment de la fraternité, de la communion des fidèles dans la nation et dans l’amour, qui sert de philosophie agissante à cette nation qui s’élève. Et ce qui émerveille est de voir comment ce sentiment a si rapidement su quitter le plan de la doctrine pour entrer dans celui de l’action. (p. 212) [Spain could astound the world, if it wanted to … by instituting a sort of fascist Catholicism, whose originality would be its own. It is the spirit of fraternity, of communion between those who are united in their faith in the nation and love, which acts as an active philosophy in this nation that is arising. And it is truly marvellous to see how this spirit has succeeded in translating itself from doctrine into action.]

40

  ‘[A] call to sacrifice, honour, discipline … .’

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Spain therefore offers an example that ‘est loin de l’esprit national-socialiste, dont d’ailleurs nous devons admirer les réalisations pratiques’ [is far from the nationalsocialist spirit whose practical achievements we must nevertheless admire] (p. 212), an alternative that appears to allow for the inclusion of Maurrassian nationalism, but which subordinates this to the spirit of youthful vigour to be found in the more radical Catholic fascism offered by the Falange. (As Bernadette Archer contends, in spite of their association with nationalist conservatism in the mid 1930s, the Spanish Falange retained throughout much of the 1930s an anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois tradition more readily abandoned by other forms of fascism.41) So, while Brasillach draws on the cultural clichés that surround the image of the legionnaire, the politically explicit documentation and journalism that François adds to Chapter 6 is intended to promote another dimension to our understanding of his engagement which thus becomes both banal romantic gesture and radical action.42 We shall return to the latter’s utopian dimension shortly. Whilst François comes to Spain and fascist engagement through the romanticism of the Legion, Gilles’s journey takes a no less escapist turn. Moreover, the epilogue to Gilles marks a rupture with both the tone of the main body of the novel and the apprenticeship mode more generally; suddenly we are transported to the Spanish Civil War and Republican Barcelona. The main protagonist appears to be a certain Paul Walter, a very nervous Belgian trying to escape the confines of the Catalan capital. Walter, it emerges through a series of peripeteia that eventually lead him across the lines and into the hands of the Falange, is in realty Gilles, now a spy preparing a report on Soviet aid to the Spanish Republic. There has been a dramatic change in generic register: the didacticism of the roman à thèse has given way to the more ludic quality of the spy novel. The Manichean world-view of the political apprenticeship, with its clear distinctions between good and bad, right and wrong, indeed, right and left, appears to have been replaced by a world of shadowy figures of indeterminate identities. Once he has convinced the Falangists of his pro-Franquist sympathies, albeit by declaring himself a Rexist, Gilles is co-opted into an attack upon a Republican village on Ibiza. It is during this return to combat that Walter/Gilles encounters two fellow international fascists: the Pole Zabulowksi and the Irishman O’Connor. Only before these two kindred spirits does Gilles speak more openly of his identity and of the organization and vision that now directs his actions in a section of the novel which was in part censored in its 1939 edition, before appearing in a significantly re-edited form, to which I shall return, in a second edition of 1942. 41

  Bernadette Archer, ‘Revolutionary Charlatanism’, p. 283.   It is this which, for many, confirms Brasillach as a fascist romantic. For Danielle Vieville-Carbonel, Les sept couleurs therefore reveals Brasillach to have abandoned the politics of Maurrassian reaction and to have become ‘partisan d’un fascisme romantique, martial, exulté, jeune en un mot ...’ [a partisan of romantic, martial, exultant and, in a word, youthful fascism …]. Danielle Vieville-Carbonel, ‘Le cas de Brasillach’ in Hanrez (ed.), Les Ecrivains à la guerre d’Espagne, pp. 231‒6, p. 233. 42

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In both editions, however, he explains his principal motive, which is shared by O’Connor and Zabulowski, as being the desire to rediscover ‘Le catholicisme mâle, celui du Moyen Age’ (Gilles, p. 463) in the defence of Catholic civilization.43 As Gilles and his companions return to France, they discuss the possibility of fusing fascism and Catholicism in order to rediscover the great chivalrous society of Europe’s past. It is only by giving fascism an international dimension, one which is achieved through the internationalism of Catholicism, that the entire continent can avoid the decadence into which France has descended. Consequently, Gilles and the organization for which he now works believe, the notion of nationalism must be divorced from that of fascism: ‘Le triomphe du Fascisme ne peut pas se confondre avec le triomphe d’une nation sur les autres nations …’ [The triumph of fascism must not be confused with the triumph of one nation over other nations … ] (p. 475). Like Brasillach’s understanding of international fascism in Spain, Drieu’s is founded, albeit somewhat unconvincingly given the novel’s earlier insistence on a more pervasive pantheism, on a fusion of the traditional and the modern, on Catholicism and fascism. Fascism, Gilles continues, can therefore only triumph by becoming international. German National Socialism, in the 1939 edition of Gilles, is doomed to defeat. Rather, it is Britain and France that will become the harbingers of a fascist Europe. Thus, as the three combatants discuss whether they should join their nations in a war against Germany, Gilles asserts: ‘La nécessité de la défense et de la contre-attaque transformeront inévitablement et inexorablement les pays démocratiques en pays fascistes. L’Angleterre et la France deviendront fascistes en guerroyant contre l’Allemagne et l’Italie fascistes; et aussi la Russie qui l’est déjà pratiquement. C’est dans ce mouvement dialectique que nous trouverons, nous autres, notre soulagement. Chaque fait qui se produira nous donnera raison’. (pp. 475‒6) [The necessity of defence and counter-attack will inevitably and inexorably transform the democratic nations into fascist countries. England and France will become fascist by waging war against fascist Germany and Italy; and Russia, which is practically fascist already, too. It is in this dialectical movement that we fascists will find comfort. Each event that occurs will show us to have been right.]

Furthermore, Gilles continues, between the twin threats of Soviet communism and American capitalism, ‘il naîtra un patriotisme européen entre les nations européennes toutes devenues fascistes. Devant l’urgence de ce patriotsime, l’Allemagne et l’Italie devront abandonner leur rêve d’hégémonie’ [a European patriotism will emerge in all the European nations, now all converted to fascism. Faced with the threat of this patriotism, Germany and Italy will have to abandon 43

  ‘That male Catholicism of the Middle Ages.’

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their dream of hegemony]. The defeat of Germany, in 1939, is therefore ‘à souhaiter … pour que triomphe un fascisme plus large …’ (p. 476), Zabulowski concludes.44 The tone of the above exchange is clearly designed to justify military engagement against Germany and alongside Britain to a far right that had become increasingly pacifist in respect to any future war with Nazi Germany. It might also be viewed as a cynical ploy to circumvent wartime censorship in order to continue to advance a role for French fascism. Furthermore, its assertion concerning both Britain and France seems hopeful, if not far fetched, and its proselytizing tone does nothing to alleviate that sense, shared by Gilles himself, that he is nothing more than one of ‘l’espèce d’anachorètes qui crient dans le désert …’ (p. 425).45 More than this, though, the Civil War episode constitutes a last desperate attempt by Drieu, before France’s defeat, to articulate his dream of a revitalized Europe, united in a return to a chivalrous age denied, but never extinguished, by modernity, in which the social and economic crises of the present are resolved through socialist fascism.46 Shortly afterwards Gilles’s true identity is revealed by the narrator. The Spanish experience has completed the transformation of Gilles from reluctant decadent to first in a new breed of international fascist combatants. The identity game was only a mask behind which this agent of international fascism was able to operate. If the reader had been in any doubt as to Gilles’s identity, the suggestion running throughout the epilogue is that he is not prone to the same sense of indeterminacy. If his identity is hidden to the other, it remains transparent and fixed in his own mind and this through his adhesion to international fascism. For Gilles, the nonfascist is like the drunkard he tries to engage in conversation in Barcelona, ‘un idiot indéfinissable qui le regardait avec ces yeux surpris, méfiants, stupides qu’il avait généralement vus dans la vie en face des siens’ [an indeterminate idiot who watched him with the same surprised, suspicious, stupid eyes he had so often seen in others] (p. 439). The international fascist, by contrast, is subject to an ‘ordre rigoreux ...’ [rigorous order …] (p. 444) which gives him ‘une force certaine’ [an assured strength] (p. 464) that comes to the fore in the encounter with like-minded combatants engaged in the same cause. In this way Drieu draws on the same distinction encountered in Frondaie and Maulvault between those characters who, through their adoption of the correct political understanding of the world, perceive themselves as, and are perceived in terms of, possessing what Bakhtin refers to as a ‘soul’ and those who consider themselves and are considered as open and problematic, possessing a ‘spirit’. For the former, life is marked by rhythm and its ensuing sense of purpose lacking in

44

  ‘Desirable so that a more inclusive fascism might triumph ….’   ‘The species of anchorites who cry out in the desert ….’ 46   In this Drieu belongs to those ‘nostalgic intellectuals, usually with a strong religious bias, who are bemused by the “unity” of medieval culture and who would like to see return to it’. Northrop Frye, The Modern Century (Toronto, 1967), pp. 117‒18. 45

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the incomplete latter.47 Consequently, Gilles’s life now possesses direction and a solidity he had not experienced in interwar France. His death in the desperate defence of Nationalist positions at the novel’s end is intended to confer form upon a life which finally achieves that moment of totality sensed in the trenches of the First World War as Gilles promotes himself to godhead: Un blessé … gémissait: ‘Santa Maria.’ Oui, la mère de Dieu, la mère de Dieu fait homme. Dieu qui crée, qui souffre dans sa création, qui meurt et qui renaît. Je serai donc toujours hérésiarque. Les dieux qui meurent et renaissent: Dionysos, Christ. Rien ne se fait que dans le sang. Il faut sans cesse mourir pour sans cesse renaître. Le Christ des cathédrales, le grand dieu blanc et viril. Un roi, fils de roi. (p. 484) [A wounded soldier … was groaning: ‘Santa Maria.’ Yes, the mother of God, the mother of God made man. God who creates, who suffers in his creation, who dies and is reborn. I will always be a heresiarch, then. Gods who die and are reborn: Dionysus, Christ. Nothing is created other than through blood. One must constantly die in order to be constantly reborn. Christ of the cathedrals, the great white and virile god. A king, son of a king.]

As Alice Kaplan argues in respect of Gilles, the Civil War episode largely constitutes a ‘self-consciously “stillborn” attempt to conclude’ the hero’s apprenticeship.48 The limited artistic merit of the episode aside, Drieu’s intention was to point to something, somewhere and someone, in the form of the new total, fascist man, which lay beyond the stagnation of the present. The fact that Gilles dies within the stone walls of an arena, an enclosed space, that, like Brasillach’s Alcazar, hints at the episode’s utopian dimension.49 This theme of solidity through political commitment also emerges in Les sept couleurs. The novel concludes with Catherine, who has now learned of her husband’s injuries and whereabouts, setting out to rejoin François. Through interior monologue, Catherine examines her reasons for choosing François over Patrice. 47

  As I have argued elsewhere, commitment to the novel’s political ideology in French committed literature of the 1930s fulfils a similar role. See Martin Hurcombe, ‘The Committed Novelist and the Impossibility of Authority’ in C. Emerson, E. O’Brien, L. Semichon (eds), Auctoritas: Authorship and Authority, (Glasgow, 2001), pp. 105‒23. I use the term ideology here in the sense of a system of ideas rather than in the Marxist sense of a masking of reality. 48   Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature and Intellectual Life (Minneapolis, 1986), p. 106. 49   On the relevance of the enclosed space for utopian thought, see West-Sooby, ‘Nowhere is Perfect’, p. 1.

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Whereas Patrice initially impressed as an idealist, François has demonstrated the ability to act. He therefore possesses a solidity and a certain reality confirmed by his actions in Spain. Patrice is merely ‘le fantôme ...’ whilst François is ‘l’homme vrai ...’ (Les sept couleurs, p. 238).50 She therefore contrasts sexual intercourse with François, a genuine physical and spiritual exchange, to the night she once spent by Patrice’s side, a highly spiritual experience made all the more intense by the absence of physical contact, but now referred to as ‘un rêve de ma jeunesse abstraite’ (p. 241).51 Ultimately, in his treatment of both Catherine and fascism, his failure to act in respect to either of them, Patrice belongs to ‘un temps indécis, facile, [un] temps de rêve’ (p. 245).52 By contrast, François has gained a solidity and reality in Catherine’s life that result directly from his political and physical engagement with the world.53 Whilst Catherine, as a woman and therefore a defender of the domestic over the public, may not understand the motives of the man of action, she nevertheless accepts to bask in the reflection of the gloire that her loving gaze supplies. Like Drieu’s international fascist, François therefore also possesses direction, solidity and vigour in opposition to the other’s indecision. He represents the fusion of idea and action that Patrice recognized in Hitler and appears to exist not as the isolated idealist, the phantom spectator at fascism’s spectacle, but as participant. Similarly, the narrator of Gilles comments of the latter: ‘Il vivait une idée’ (Gilles, p. 477).54 Like the fascist heroes of Le Volontaire, both François and Gilles are able to impact upon the real and to body forth the utopia they embrace in the real world through their engagement in Spain. Both characters are therefore the heroes of a particular vision of the world, but they also constitute new forms of humanity in a fusion of the old (chivalrous) and the modern and in their ability to mould reality and humanity to the ideal that drives them; they have both become examples of that species predicted by the anonymous author of ‘Réflexions’: fascist man. In this sense they are both the harbingers of a totalitarian utopia that seeks, as John Gray argues, not only a totality of being absent in modern life, but ‘to remake human life’.55 The consequences of such a pursuit were to become apparent in the years that followed both novels’ first publication. 50

  ‘The true man.’   ‘A dream [born] of my youthful abstractions.’ 52   ‘An indeterminate facile time, [a] time of dreams.’ 53   For Peter Tame, this represents a move away from ‘le personage fantomique de Patrice [qui] symbolise le premier accès d’espoir et d’enthousiame enivré …’ [the ghostlike character of Patrice [who] symbolizes initial euphoria and unfettered enthusiasm …] towards a hero who symbolizes ‘la dure réalité du combat à l’appui de cette même cause’ [the harsh reality of combat in the name of the same cause]. Peter Tame, Le mystique du fascisme dans l’œuvre de Robert Brasillach (Paris, 1986), p. 248. 54   ‘He was living out an idea.’ 55   John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York, 2007), p. 39. 51

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Of the two novelists, it is Brasillach who makes his utopian intentions most explicit, reprising part of his contribution to Les Cadets de l’Alcazar, but now placing this within the context of international fascism by inserting it within François’ Civil War documents. Quoting Sorel, the mythic potential that Brasillach had invested three years earlier in the defenders of the Alcazar and the Nationalists is now extended to Spain as a whole, but also to fascism; that is to say, the conflict of the present now reveals the future possibility of fascism with an international dimension in which French fascists, alienated by the nationalist expansionist projects of National Socialism and Italian fascism, will finally find not only a spiritual home, but also an arena in which to act. As with Sorel’s myth of the general strike, so the international fascism of Gilles and Les sept couleurs is revealed to the reader as a potential reality that can be achieved through engagement with the forces of the radical far-right; the present can thus be modified through adhesion to the myth.56 One might argue that, in their insistence upon a return to a certain chivalry, their preference for hierarchy and the vague gestures both Brasillach and Drieu make towards social and economic reform, that there is little that separates the fascist utopia from the restorationist utopia. Indeed, both Brasillach and Drieu, in their fusion of the traditional and the modern, make concessions to the Maurrassians.57 Yet, whilst the works of those writers studied in Chapter 1 equate the cause of Spanish Nationalism with a restorationist project, both Drieu and Brasillach place it within a European radical right/right-revolutionary phenomenon. Whilst Drieu may reveal a hankering for a lost, Medieval golden age, both he and Brasillach insist on a fusion of the modern and the traditional that removes the possibility of a return to old hierarchies, implementing instead a hierarchy determined by the emergence of the new, fascist man to whom others will be subjugated. As Gray asserts, it is in fascism’s elevation of new elites and hierarchies, particularly those

56   Indeed, Brasillach cites Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence directly in Les sept couleurs: ‘il importe fort peu ... de savoir ce que les mythes renferment de détails destinés à apparaître sèchement sur le plan de l’histoire future ... Il faut juger les mythes comme des moyens d’agir sur le présent ...’ (p. 207) [it is of little importance to know what contained within myths is actually destined to come to fruition in the future. … Myths must be judged as means of acting upon the present … ]. For Zeev Sternhell, the Sorelian myth ‘was thought and action; it was a creation of legend, and it enabled the individual to live that legend instead of living out history. It enabled one to pass beyond a detestable present’. See Zeev Sternhell, with Mario Sznajden and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. by David Maisel (Princeton, 1994), p. 59. As Rasson argues, fascism’s ‘récit mythique’ ‘prétend, par son énonciation même, exercer un effet d’action sur le réel’ [mythic narrative claims through its very enunciation to exercise effective action upon the real] (Rasson, Littérature et fascisme, p. 24). 57   Yet, for Gilles French monarchists represent a spent force (Gilles, pp. 497 and 568), Maurassianism ‘[une] vaine vérité’ [a Pyrrhic victory] (ibid., p. 638).

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determined by race, that it differs profoundly from restorationism.58 Moreover, by 1939, Brasillach’s and Drieu’s fascist utopia has ‘pushed beyond and outside the confines and form of the nation’, as Carroll observes of Drieu in particular, ‘to project other, less well formed, undetermined “forms” of the communal’.59 Both spatially and temporally, therefore, Brasillach’s and Drieu’s fascist utopia extends beyond the limits of the restorationist utopia, casting backwards and forwards, bursting open the national and European boundaries of the past in the pursuit of newer forms. Les sept couleurs therefore reveals an opening up on the part of Brasillach to the potential of European fascism as an antidote to the deceptions of a purely French fascism, a deception Drieu had felt earlier and against which he had already been partially immunized by his faith in Europe. Whilst Mazgaj locates the expansion of Brasillach’s politico-cultural horizon in the experience of Occupation and collaboration with Nazi Germany, it is clear that the process begins earlier in Brasillach’s itinerary.60 This bursting of boundaries and the opening up to Europe for Drieu was to be preceded by the death of France.61 With the defeat of France in June 1940, that death seemed imminent, but the Occupation was to then offer both authors the opportunity to put into action what might have appeared to many readers in 1939 political flights of fancy. The Spanish episode therefore helps to further understand the collaboration of both writers during the Occupation, but its underlying utopian vision also informs that form of collaboration known as collaborationism at the heart of which lay the pursuit of a fascist Europe. Collaboration, Collaborationism and the Memory of Spain As Mannheim, Ricœur and Levitas have all argued, utopias aim to act upon the real. Rejecting the assumption that utopias are by their very nature unrealizable, an assumption that persists from Marx to Gray, along with Mannheim’s attempts to interpret utopias through their realizability, Levitas emphasizes instead utopias’ galvanizing potential: ‘utopia does not need to be practically possible; it merely needs to be believed to be so to mobilize people to political action’.62 If we follow Levitas’ thinking, utopia’s interest lies not so much in whether the ends achieved match those mapped out at the outset of the utopian project, but in understanding how specific utopias subsequently impact upon the real. We need then to consider their actual concrete, social and political consequences.   Gray, Black Mass, p. 63. For Gray, then, fascism is primarily a revolutionary movement. 59   Carroll, Literary Fascism, p. 126. 60   Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism, p. 240. 61   Carroll therefore observes that the ‘desire for the death of France certainly offered a justification for collaboration long before the fact, a justification that had nothing to do with the presence of Nazi troops in France …’. Literary Fascism, pp. 135‒6. 62   Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 191. 58

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The German occupation of France from 1940 to 1944 provided both Drieu and Brasillach with an opportunity to put their utopias into action through active col­ laboration. Yet, the restorationist utopia of the pro-Nationalists also comes to bear upon political reality following France’s defeat in 1940. Maurras and his supporters saw in the figure of Maréchal Philippe Pétain, the head of the new Vichy state in 1940, a quasi-monarch and potential leader of a moral restoration of the nation. The defeat and the subsequent collapse of the Third Republic were to become, in the words of Maurras, ‘la divine surprise’. Moreover, Maurras and his supporters were to enjoy some influence over the Vichy government, following the armistice with Germany. Indeed, Mazgaj contends that there was a widespread belief that ‘Maurras was the éminence grise behind the reassuring figure of Pétain’, leading his supporters ‘to believe that their long-coveted dream of becoming modern-day advisers to the prince had finally been realized’.63 The reality was that Maurrassian nationalism became one voice, albeit one of the more influential ones, among those that sought to make themselves heard by Pétain and his government as it adopted a policy of collaboration in the autumn of 1940. Julian Jackson therefore places the Maurrassian influence within a broad conservative base upon which Vichy’s National Revolution was built.64 The latter, the official ideology of Vichy France, advocated a return to old hierarchies, to authority, order and racial distinctions, sweeping aside democracy and the values and memory of the Revolution, among other policies that aimed to restore France to a pre-modern era in order to ‘raise’ the nation from its current, fallen state.65 Although the National Revolution drew on a French conservative tradition, Vichy itself was riven by internal tensions, not only between conservative factions, but also between social reformers, technocrats and the military, as well as those members who possessed a more radical vision for France, one more closely modelled on that of Nazi Germany, and who would rally behind Vichy’s first prime minister, the former Radical Party minister, Pierre Laval. The figure of Pétain was essential in the attempt to draw these factions together, Yves Durand argues, whilst the National Revolution was designed to bridge differences and to give direction to Vichy policy.66 However, French fascists were excluded from the first Vichy government and the PPF soon withdrew from the Unoccupied Zone to occupied Paris where it would court favour with the occupying authorities, and in particular the Gestapo and the SS, whilst lending its support to the collaborationist policies of Laval. Both Brasillach and Drieu would remain for much of the war in Paris, Brasillach resuming editorship of

  Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism, p. 213.   Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940‒1944 (Oxford, 2001), p. 154. 65   As Yves Durand observes, the National Revolution transposed a Christian moral metaphor to French society as a whole. Yves Durand, Vichy (1940‒44) (Paris, 1972), pp. 65‒6. 66   Ibid., pp. 52 and 63. 63 64

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Je suis partout and Drieu heading La Nouvelle Revue Française, both of which became collaborationist organs of Nazi propaganda. Yet, the line between Vichy collaboration and fascist collaborationism was a fine one. Moreover, both factions continued to be united by their opposition to the old Republic, uniting in their support for Pétain, the moral saviour of the nation. For Mazgaj, the principal difference between the two is one of degree rather than of substance.67 Jackson, however, contends that it is the two sides’ distinct visions of the nation itself and, more precisely, of the nation’s future role internationally that constituted the principal and fundamental source of division.68 Thus, while Maurras and many collaborators argued for French independence and for France’s ability, by remaining above the fray (as they interpreted the Occupation), to offer a new model for the West, an alternative to Anglo-Saxon democracy and to both German and Soviet totalitarianism, the collaborationists argued for increased collaboration in the military struggle being waged by Germany in the endeavour to forge a fascist Europe in which a totalitarian France might share.69 How far, then, might the appearance of Drieu’s second version of Gilles in 1942 and of a collection of Maurras’ writings on the Spanish Civil War in 1943 reflect such divisions? Employing all the tropes and narrative strategies of the restorationist utopia and of the reportage examined in Chapter 1, Maurras’s Vers l’Espagne de Franco, originally planned for publication in June 1940, suggests an agenda in its title alone.70 Recounting his own official visit to Nationalist Spain in 1938, but also drawing upon his earlier writings on the conflict, Maurras’s book places the Nationalist cause within a tradition of anti-communist and anti-democratic resistance. Indeed, the Nationalists’ struggle is that of the West generally; Western civilizations, France included, face two enemies, one external (in the form of enemy foreign powers, predominantly the USSR) and one internal (anarchy and communism). The latter is the forme aiguë et toujours présente, tantôt patente, tantôt latente et larvée, du barbare d’en bas. Aucune civilisation historique n’a été pure, n’a été libre de ce frère inférieur et des secousses qu’il peut imprimer et des horreurs qu’il peut imposer. (Vers l’Espagne de Franco, p. 96)

  Imagining Fascism, pp. 212‒13.   See Jackson, The Dark Years, Chapter 9. 69   Thus Brasillach began to distance himself from both Vichy and Maurras, arguing for a single party state and for universal fascism in the course of 1942. By 1943, he was arguing that German National Socialism was the only way to a universal form of fascism. See Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism, pp. 231‒2 and p. 251. 70   I examine Maurras’ reportage in more detail in ‘Touring the Spanish Labyrinth: The French Far Right and the Spanish Civil War, 1936‒1939’. 67 68

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[the ever present and bitter expression of the barbarian beneath, sometimes evident, sometimes latent, underlying. No civilization in history has ever been pure, free of this inferior brother and the upheavals and horrors he can inflict.]

Civilization therefore requires a hierarchy that constantly suppresses the ‘barbarian beneath’ rather than his or her eradication. Civilization can only flourish, Maurras goes on to argue, not under a strong, centralized, authoritarian state, but under a state that, whilst authoritarian, preserves ‘[les] libertés réelles, et notamment … celles du sol, du sang, du métier’ through decentralization and the restoration of communities (p. 101).71 Franquism, Maurras suggests, is not the sort of étatisme that one encounters in the totalitarian regimes of the East; rather, it is a counterrevolutionary and not a revolutionary one as Brasillach contends.72 Franco’s movement is therefore the restoration of an old hierarchy, but Franco is also the representative of an old nation threatened by modernity, the real Spain as opposed to the legalistic Spain of democratic government. It is, like Action Française, a restorationist utopia in action, attempting to remodel the present upon a lost past, whilst German fascism, it is implied, fails to reinstate an old order, establishing a new elite instead. Franco is thus invested with qualities that Maurras perceives in Action Française’s thought. His action, his thought and his method reflect the will of true Spain, but also provide an exemplary model for France and ‘notre guerre intérieure …’ [our internal war] (ibid., p. 119): ‘Jamais l’efficacité pratiquée des énergies d’une minorité ayant pour elle le droit – jamais l’utilité d’une brigade de fer au service de la vérité politique – n’auront été plus clairement démontrées …’ [Never have the exercised efficiency of an energetic minority with right on its side and the utility of a hardened band in the service of political truth been so clearly demonstrated …] (ibid., p. 148). Through his app­lication of ‘les lois rigoureuses de la raison, dans cette douloureuse et brillante histoire de la reconquête …’ [the rigorous laws of reason in this painful yet brilliant (shining) history of the reconquest …] (ibid., p. 157), Franco is able to modify reality itself, imposing ‘une volonté réorganisatrice …’ [a reorganizing will …], leading Maurras to paraphrase his own celebrated maxim: ‘Politique militaire d’abord’ (p. 158).73

71

  ‘Real freedoms, and notably … those of land, blood and toil.’   While revolution ‘[met] dessus ce qui était et devait être dessous’ [places what should be above below], ‘la contre-révolution fait la manœuvre inverse; elle remet dessus ce qui eût dû y rester, et cela ne va pas sans une certaine parenté … dans la méthode’ [the counter-revolution operates in reverse; it places above what should have remained there in the first place and does so with a certain similarity … in its methodology] (Vers l’Espagne de Franco, p. 170). 73   ‘Military policy before all else.’ 72

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Maurras then likens Pétain, the former French ambassador to Nationalist Spain, to the Spanish military head of state, suggesting that he may even be a French version of the caudillo. Pétain is a ‘trésor si rarement ouvert de la France réelle; de la cassette des réserves des puissances, des vertus du pays réel où l’on puise d’ordinaire, le moins que l’on peut…’ [rarely opened treasure belonging to the real France; from the treasure chest of strength, of the real country’s virtues into which we delve so rarely] (ibid., p. 187). He is then touted as a potential saviour for France, able to provide ‘une clarté de direction et une efficacité que les politiciens doivent enregistrer et subir sous peine d’être emportés’ [a clarity of direction and an effectiveness that politicians must recognize and to which they must submit at the risk of being replaced] (ibid., p. 188). Although drafted in the spring of 1940, Maurras’s book can be read in 1943 as a defence of the increasingly embattled leader of the Vichy state, assailed now by the evidence of Germany’s military vulnerability, but also by the continued charges by collaborationists that Pétain and Vichy remained half-hearted in their commitment to the armed struggle against the far right’s enemies. Maurras’s representation of Spain can be construed as an attempt to lend further support to the restorationist project that many pro-Nationalists saw behind Vichy France and Pétain’s Révolution Nationale, but also as an assertion of Action Française’s continued relevance and its cult of reason over the collaborationists’ corresponding increased enthusiasm for a Nazi inspired cult of violence and instinct.74 The second version of Gilles, published in occupied France in 1942, contains an important re-working of the Spanish Civil War epilogue which must be viewed as an apology for collaborationism. In the conversation between Gilles and his fellow international combatants, it is now through Nazi Germany, and not France and Britain, that Europe will become fascist. O’Connor thus argues that ‘Ce que les puissances démocratiques n’ont pas réussi à Genève, les puissances fascistes le réussiront. Elles feront l’unité de l’Europe’ [The fascist powers will succeed in doing what the democracies failed to do in Geneva: they will unite Europe]. National Socialism is therefore a necessary step in the cre­ation of European Fascism. Gilles and his acolytes, by embracing fascism, ‘[re­tour­neront] le Fascisme contre l’Allemagne et l’Italie’ [will turn fascism against Germany and Italy].75 Germany, as the most powerful fascist nation, will have to foster a European fascist spirit in order to counter the threat of Soviet Communism: ‘Alors seulement elle pourra remplir efficacement le rôle qui lui est dévolu par sa force et par la tradition du Saint Empire romain-germanique [sic] de diriger la ligne européenne de demain’ [Only then can it effectively fill the role allotted it by its strength and the tradition of the Holy Romano-Germanic Empire: to lead tomorrow’s Europe].76 Drieu, who rejoined the PPF in January 1942, now   For more analysis of this opposition, see Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism, p. 219.   Drieu la Rochelle, Gilles (Paris, 1942), p. 475. 76   Ibid., p. 476. 74

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stresses the necessity of armed combat against communism, but the European fascist project still lies at the heart of the Spanish epilogue just as it remained at the heart of Drieu’s collaborationism. Whilst the Spanish episode of the second edition of Gilles corresponds to Drieu’s public collaborationist position during the Occupation, its central vision was also shared by a large number of his fellow collaborationists. Indeed, it was a vision that was increasingly shaping Laval’s projects for France’s future and causing a rift between supporters of the prime minister and the head of the Vichy state. Increasingly, by 1942, collaborationism had become associated with German military action, through the action of Joseph Darnand’s Milice, an armed French militia that supported the Gestapo and operated throughout France, but also through the military involvement of Frenchmen in the Ligue des Volontaires Français (LVF), an initiative of the PPF whish saw 5,000 Frenchmen fight on behalf of Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. What had appeared fanciful thinking when published in 1939 now became real; Frenchmen were dying on behalf of a new European fascist order. The fascist utopia was being made real by the politics of Laval and the armed struggle of the LVF.77 Representations of the Spanish Civil War by the French far right therefore provide an insight into the divisions that had emerged in far-right thinking by the late 1930s. If these took concrete form in the detail and extent of collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Occupation, they had nevertheless proceeded from competing utopian understandings of the Civil War and of Spanish Nationalism in representations that had initially sought to unite the French far right. French far-right representations of the war therefore fail to resolve fully the far right’s internal differences and to act as the point de ralliement they were originally conceived to be. Rather, as Verdès-Leroux observes, ‘La guerre d’Espagne est le nœud d’éclatement de l’extrême droite …’.78 Such representations serve, then, to articulate two different, but not entirely unconnected utopias that will take real, concrete but also competing forms during this period. Both utopias share an intellectual tradition based on the pursuit of an aesthetic elitism in the realm of the political, resulting in a series of ‘rhetorical practices and discursive strategies …’, as Mazgaj writes of the young right’s relationship to Maurrassian orthodoxy. However, whilst Maurrassian nationalism remains largely unchanged by events beyond France’s borders, French fascist thought is increasingly characterized by a regenerationist discourse predicated upon ‘the palingenetic myth of decline and rebirth’.79 Representations of the Civil War are therefore weapons in a war within a war, ‘notre guerre intérieure’, as Maurras refers to it. Although one can 77

  For another recent treatment of collaboration as a form of utopian expression, see Kay Chadwick, ‘Philippe Henriot’s Utopia: Propaganda and the Last Days of Vichy’ in West-Sooby (ed.), Nowhere is Perfect, pp. 61‒70. 78   ‘The Spanish Civil War is the point at which the far right falls apart’. VerdèsLeroux, Refus et violences, p. 56. 79   Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism, pp. 261 and 267 respectively.

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assume that Maurras is writing of the undeclared war between right and left in France that had raged since the Dreyfus Affair, might he also be evoking an equally undeclared, but no less bitter war within the ranks of a disunited French right, fought out throughout the period 1936 to 1944 in its literature?

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Chapter 4

From Republican Solidarity towards the Totalitarian Republic: The French Left and the Spanish Republic The French left’s mobilization on behalf of the Spanish Republic was more immediate and spontaneous than that of the far right on behalf of the Nationalists. On 19 July 1936 L’Humanité, the national daily of the PCF, was already calling for the French Popular Front government to support its Spanish counterpart against what it saw as a fascist insurrection.1 That said, the pronunciamiento merited less coverage that day than the Tour de France. This was to change over the coming days, however, as the Civil War became one of the dominant stories of the French press more generally and of the far-left press more specifically. As Thomas suggests, the French far left’s interest in events in Spain resulted in large part from its own radical tradition and a revolutionary agenda that, in the case of the PCF, had been put on hold when it had joined the anti-fascist Front Populaire coalition.2 The latter, comprising SFIO, independent socialist and radical ministers elected to office on an essentially reformist platform and led by Léon Blum, nevertheless represented an attempt to reconcile the revolutionary left in France to the Third Republic. For Dell, Blum’s Popular Front government in 1936 ‘committed itself both to maintaining the bourgeois state and to recasting the relations between capitalist production and the state’. In addition to rescuing the revolutionary Republic born of 1789 from those social tensions that had developed over the course of the nineteenth century, characterized by the dissonance between political equality, embodied in universal male suffrage, and the social inequalities produced by capitalism, Blum’s government was also endeavouring to resist the rise of the far right. As Dell writes, ‘This recasting was to be a renewal of what was threatened by the night of rioting [on 6 February 1934], a renewal of nothing less than the Republican ideal of government by and for the people’.3

  On the 23 July 1936 the communist weekly photo-journal Regards repeated this association of the Nationalists with fascism in its editorial headline ‘Barcelone oui! Berlin non!’, mapping the opposition of the Spanish Popular Front and international fascism onto that between the rival Popular Games, taking place in the Catalan capital, and the Olympic Games, held in the German capital that month. 2  Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, p. 348. 3  Dell, The Image of the Popular Front, p. 4. 1

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The spirit of Blum’s first popular front government was informed by a belief in the need to complete the French Revolution, a revolution that had deviated from its original course. In this it was a continuation of the Jacobin project, which sought, according to Gramsci, to extend its hegemony over the nation by convincing the oppressed that the Jacobin Republic represented national values and was best placed to satisfy the nation’s needs; the notion of the people as a class entity was therefore side-stepped in France through the notion of the peopleas-nation, but the Jacobin Republic duly recognized that, in order to achieve this, concessions would have to be made to the more radical elements within the French working classes whilst simultaneously reining these in through a dualistic process of coercion and consent.4 Like the Jacobins, the Front Populaire sought to efface the gap between ‘le peuple defined as le populaire …’, an exploited class, and ‘[l]’e peuple defined as les hommes français … free to exercise their will as political subjects’.5 To restore this lost hegemony, however, concessions would once again have to be made to the former and the parties of the left would have to re-establish their relationship with the mass of working-class male voters. French socialists and radicals had to reclaim a revolutionary heritage that the latter in particular had long neglected and which had become in the mouths of the former a rhetorical conceit, descending into the streets whilst continuing to participate in parliamentary politics. In turn, however, French communists had to suspend plans for immediate revolution, giving precedence, like the SFIO before them, to participation and the minimum programme of partial gains over the maximum programme and international revolution.6 This convergence of the centre-left and left-wing parties, as the PCF turned to the right and the SFIO and radicals to the left, appeared to mirror that of the Spanish communists, the Partido Comunista Español (PCE), on the one hand and the Spanish socialist party, the Partido Socialista Orbrero Español (PSOE), and Republican Left (Izquierda Republicana) across the Pyrenees.7 Yet such convergence did not mask the central paradox of  Gramsci, A Gramsci Reader, pp. 260‒61.  Dell, The Image of the Popular Front, p. 17. 6   As Ronald Tiersky argues, it is the oscillation between these two programmes, ‘the dual mini-maxi strategy [that] condemned [twentieth-century socialist and communist parties] to a perpetually equivocal position … Condemned to being neither totally revolutionary nor totally nonrevolutionary, the Marxist mentality was rendered permanently schizophrenic towards nonsocialist societies’. Ronald Tiersky, French Communism, 1920‒1972 (New York-London, 1974), p. 17. 7   Of the PSOE, Payne notes that, although traditionally closer to social democracy than to French socialism, a new generation of radical socialists and young activists were asserting themselves in the party by 1933, leading to the adoption of revolutionary rhetoric by PSOE leaders in the mid 1930s and a radicalization of the party primarily under the influence of Largo Caballero. Izquierda Republicana also went through a process of radicalization, coming to resemble a social democratic movement far more than the Parti Radical in France. See Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism, pp. 44‒50. 4 5

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popular frontism, which was, as Gino Raymond writes of the French experiment, that ‘the factor which had facilitated the success of the Front was also its greatest weakness: the Front was an alliance designed to obtain electoral success which gave Léon Blum a mandate to manage the crisis of capitalism, but not one which extended to a maximalist transformation of the socio-economic system’.8 The Front Populaire may well have represented an attempt to extend the hegemony of Jacobin Republicanism, but it contained within its own ideological project aspirations for a more rapid reformulation of the social order than the Front could ever hope to achieve. In this the Front’s endeavours reflect Levitas’s assertion that the dichotomy established and maintained by Mannheim between ideology and utopia is a false one, that ideologies can contain utopian elements under whose influence they can be modified.9 Yet those in France who hoped for more fundamental change under the Front Populaire, and who had contributed actively to its formation, were to be rapidly disappointed from the summer of 1936. The commitment to the Spanish Republic on the part of a range of intellectuals associated with the left, from the radical André Chamson to the card-carrying communist Simone Téry, has to be considered within the context of engagement in, and support of, the Front Populaire more generally since those who supported the Frente Popular most actively had usually also supported the Front Populaire with equal vigour and for similar reasons. Indeed, left-wing intellectuals had been active in creating the conditions in which unity between French socialists, communists and radicals at party level was possible. Whilst traditional histories of the Front Populaire insist upon the role of formal political parties and their leaders in its creation, adopting a top-down approach, the Front needs to be viewed in its early years as a convergence of forces in which the various strata of the left’s political communities play their part. Whilst the general strike of 12 February 1934, the left’s first response to what it perceived as the coup attempt of 6 February, was sanctioned by the leadership of the CGT, the SFIO, the PCF and even by the radical government of the day, the spontaneous conjoining of socialists and communists on the Place de la Nation that afternoon to cries of ‘Unité! Unité!’ reflected a de facto unity from beneath that, although arguably a sign of the PCF’s successful pursuit of such a policy prior to the Front Populaire, by its very nature escaped party control, forcing the parties to associate, Ronald Tiersky argues.10 As Blum was to write, the Front was born of a ‘grouping of forces rather than of parties …’ generated in response to the crisis of 6 February ‘by a sort of survival instinct for the defence of democratic principles’.11   Gino Raymond, The French Communist Party during the Fifth Republic. A Crisis of Leadership and Ideology (Basingstoke-New York, 2005), pp. 8‒9.  9  Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 78. 10  Tiersky, French Communism, pp. 55‒6. For Jean-Paul Brunet the Popular Front also begins life at grass-root level. Jean-Paul Brunet, Histoire du Front Populaire (1934‒1938) (Paris, 1991), pp. 14‒15. 11   Quoted in Tiersky, French Communism, p. 54.  8

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If the birth of the Front was facilitated by grass-root level association, leftwing intellectuals nevertheless played their part. Whilst the SFIO and PCF leadership met to discuss tactics in the summer of 1934, French intellectuals had already been active in the formation of various anti-fascist cultural organizations, culminating in the influential Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes (CVIA) in March 1935. Indeed, such organizations were anticipated in earlier intellectual front movements, such as the Amsterdam-Pleyel Movement and the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (AEAR) created in 1932.12 The Amsterdam-Pleyel Movement was the principal organizer of a popular rally on 14 July 1935 at which the electoral coalition of the Radical Party, the SFIO and the PCF was consecrated before the parties’ rank and file in imitation of the Fête de la Fédération of 1790 and, Dell argues, the Tennis Court Oath of 1789.13 Moreover, the oath taken that day by all present was drafted by three prominent popular front intellectuals: André Chamson, Jean Guéhenno and Jacques Kayser. By early 1936, the Amsterdam-Pleyel Movement, the CVIA and many other anti-fascist organizations had been fully integrated into the Popular Front, leading Géraldi Leroy and Anne Roche to conclude that intellectuals did not so much drive or inform the movement, finding themselves rather ‘au service des politiques …’.14 For Dell, however, the role of such intellectuals was pivotal, serving to re-establish an exchange between the leaders and led and, principally, to recast this relationship as one between leaders and the people-as-nation rather than the people as oppressed social class.15 In so doing, they contributed to, and enabled the fusion of, popular, party and intellectual forces that characterized the Front in its early years of unity. Such unity was short lived once the Popular Front came to power in May 1936. The massive wave of strikes in June that year suggested not only a desire for rapid, radical change on the part of French workers but also that the popular, grass-root agenda did not coincide entirely with the national agenda of Blum’s government. It took the intervention of the PCF and its postponement of the revolution to end the spontaneous wild-cat strikes that had brought French industry to a halt and had led the right to claim that the Popular Front was really a Soviet front. As the salary gains made by workers in the summer of 1936 through the Matignon Agreement 12

  As David Caute observes, whilst anticipating the Popular Front, both movements were Communist Party front organizations aimed at bypassing unity at party level. David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers. Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven and London, 1988), p. 143. 13  Dell, The Image of the Popular Front, p. 60. The 1789 Revolution, which reached its apotheosis of national unity during the celebrations surrounding its first anniversary, therefore constitutes an original, foundation myth upon which the Front Populaire draws in the period 1935‒36. 14   ‘[In] the service of politics ...’ Géraldi Leroy and Anne Roche, Les Ecrivains et le Front Populaire (Paris, 1986), p. 10. 15  Dell, The Image of the Popular Front, p. 48.

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were lost in the re-evaluation of the Franc that autumn, Blum’s government was to provoke enthusiasm and frustration in equal measure among its working-class and intellectual supporters. The suspension of the Front’s reform programme in February 1937 marked the end of its attempts to recast the relationship between the state and the worker and a recognition perhaps that the balancing act between reform and revolution was impossible to sustain. Consequently, the Front’s hegemonic control over its diverse constituency was weakened; differences began to emerge as competing visions of the future held by different constituent parties began to reassert themselves over the new policy of stasis, a policy upheld by those popular front governments which followed the collapse of Blum’s first cabinet in June that year. Whilst the limited and slow pace of domestic, economic reform was a major source of disillusionment from the autumn of 1936, the Front had already been weakened at all levels by the divisions occasioned by the Blum government’s adoption of the policy of non-intervention on 25 July 1936. In the first days of the war, it had seemed that the French government would continue to honour existing contracts and to supply arms to the Spanish Republic. However, either fearful of alienating Great Britain, its only military ally, or profiting from this relationship in order to cover its own reticence to support what many considered a sister regime, Blum’s government followed the British Conservative government’s lead in asserting that the Civil War was a purely Spanish affair. Amongst the factors that contributed to this reluctance, Pike cites the government’s anxiety not to antagonize the French far right, not to prompt war with Germany and Italy, at a time when France was ill prepared for conflict, and not to risk making an enemy of another far-right regime on France’s borders were the Nationalists to win.16 By the end of July, however, the PCF had already thrown its weight behind the Spanish Republic and in August L’Humanité was asserting that the Civil War had to be viewed within a European context and as a European event. Although the PCF fell short of calling for armed intervention by French forces, it demanded vociferously and constantly that arms sales to the Republic resume and, from autumn 1936, facilitated the flow of volunteers across France into the Republic. The culmination of such divisions at party level was the PCF’s decision to withdraw parliamentary support for the Front’s foreign policy on 5 December 1936. In the meantime, French workers continued to strike in support of the Spanish Republic, to raise funds for arms and aid, and constituted the major part of French volunteers for the International Brigades.17 At the same time, left-wing intellectuals also threw their support behind the call for arms for the Spanish Republic and   See Chapter 5 of Pike, Les Français et la guerre d’Espagne for analysis of the policy of non-intervention. 17   For a comprehensive analysis of the make-up of the French contingent of the International Brigades and recruitment practices, see Rémi Skoutelsky, L’Espoir guidait leurs pas: les volontaires français dans les Brigades Internationales 1936‒1939 (Paris, 1998). 16

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in contravention of popular front unity. This chapter will examine the reportage of four writers to do so, writers who represent the political range of the Front: André Chamson, a centre-left Republican and one of the editors of Vendredi, a weekly established in November 1935 in order to promote the Front, author of Retour d’Espagne (1937);18 Marguerite Jouve, who was resident in Spain between February 1936 and February 1937 and who frequented the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) during this time, author of Vu, en Espagne (1937); the former communist Jean-Richard Bloch, editor of Europe and Ce soir, who would rejoin the PCF in the autumn of 1938, author of Espagne, Espagne! (1936);19 and the communist journalist and novelist Simone Téry, daughter of Andrée Viollis and Gustave Téry and regular contributor to L’Humanité and Regards, author of Front de la Liberté (1938). All four visited Republican Spain in the course of the conflict.20 All four reflect the attempts made by intellectual supporters of the Spanish Popular Front ‘to extend that front across the Pyrenees’,21 dissolving the natural barriers that separate the two nations in a gesture of Republican and popular front solidarity, as André Warmser’s lead piece in Vendredi on 24 July 1936 (‘Il n’y a pas de Pyrénées’) had seemed to urge.22 Such assertions are informed by the belief that the two fronts’ futures are closely linked, that Spain’s anti-fascist struggle is also that which awaits France if the far right is allowed to continue to act unchecked by the Republic. The Spanish Civil War once again anticipates a French civil war for the French intelligentsia. Yet, as it does for the French far right, the Civil War also provides the French left, in the form of the Spanish Republic, with an alternative to another more problematic foreign regime whose demand for admiration abroad tended to divide the left rather than to unite it: the USSR. In the summer of 1936 the Spanish 18   Chamson’s co-editors on Vendredi were Jean Guéhenno and Andrée Violllis, the former associated with French socialism, the latter with communism, but none actually party members. Together the three represented for Leroy and Roche ‘un dosage équilibré …’ [an equal balance …] of Popular Front tendencies (Les Ecrivains et le Front Populaire, p. 99). Moreover, Vendredi is also credited with having rallied the support of the nonaligned to the Front from its inception to the spring of 1936 (ibid., p. 107). 19   Bloch was a member of the PCF from 1921 to 1924. Although he allowed his membership to lapse during the Bolshevization of the Party, he continued to associate with communist and fellow-travelling organizations throughout the 1920s and 1930s. 20   Bloch visited Barcelona, Valencia, and Madrid in the summer of 1936; Chamson toured the Republic in July 1937; Jouve was already resident in Spain when the Civil War broke out, recording the election of the Frente Popular and events up to her departure in February 1937; Téry reported for the French communist press and Vendredi from the Republican zone between February 1937 and March 1938. 21  Dell, The Image of the Popular Front, p. 133. 22   ‘There are no Pyrenees.’ Wurmser’s lead piece is illustrative of such thinking, but falls short of calling for aid for Spain or for identification with the Republic, using the Republic’s plight to warn against a similar fate for France. Vendredi’s position on aid for Spain would shift significantly in the coming days.

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Republic provided a useful distraction around which the French left might unite from the Moscow Trials and communist attacks on André Gide following the publication of Retour de l’URSS in which Gide expressed his disaffection with Soviet communism. Moreover, and as we shall see, the Spanish Republic retains a revolutionary potential that has been lost at home. As such the Frente Popular and its people are perceived in these writings as both victims of far-right aggression, but also as a beacon of hope for disillusioned intellectual supporters of the Front Populaire. Both are therefore invested with a utopian dimension, constituting a reminder to their readership of what these intellectuals had perceived as the Popular Front’s revolutionary potential. In this, the Spanish Republic appears to conform to the role allocated to it by the Comintern in the early 1930s. According to the Comintern’s programme for international revolution, Spain had yet to complete its bourgeois-democratic revolution and to evolve into a highly developed capitalist society, like those to be found in France, Great Britain and the USA. The advent of the Second Republic in 1931 prompted a reassessment; now, as Stanley Payne writes, the Comintern judged that ‘capitalism and existing institutions had been so weakened that Spain was poised to pass rapidly from bourgeois-democratic revolution to the proletarian-socialist revolution’.23 Along with Germany, still considered by the Comintern in the early 1930s as the most likely location of the next revolution, Spain would exert a revolutionary influence across its borders upon the French. Whilst the role of Spain as revolutionary vanguard was played down by the Communist Party during the years of anti-fascist alliance, the association persists in the texts examined in the present chapter. Thus, writing in Vendredi on 7 August 1936, Jean Cassou was to assert: Les prédictions s’accomplissent: c’est en Espagne que, après la Russie, se déroulent les événements qui doivent changer la condition de l’homme. [C]e qu’on pressent nettement [en Espagne], c’est la portée universelle de l’effort qui est en train de s’accomplir, l’exemple et le retentissement que, dans la crise actuelle du monde, il nous apporte. [Predictions are coming true; after Russia, it is in Spain that the events which must change the human condition are taking place. [W]hat one senses so clearly [in Spain] is the universal significance of the work that is being realized here, the shining example that in the present global crisis it offers us.]

However, as we shall see, these pro-Republican representations of the Civil War rarely take the form of explicit criticism of the French Popular Front other than in the condemnation of the policy of non-intervention. Moreover, they continue  Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism, p. 30. Payne records how this analysis was rejected by the leadership of the PCE, prompting the replacement of its politburo with a younger generation of leaders trained in Stalinist orthodoxy (ibid., pp. 31‒3). 23

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to work within a cultural corpus that contributes to the mystique of popular front politics, refusing to openly align themselves with calls for immediate revolution or for the maximum programme, remaining mindful of the oath sworn by so many on 14 July 1935 and of the commitment to evolutionary change. Nevertheless, what emerges across the corpus of reportage studied here is the image of a community engaged in the radical reformulation of Spanish society, a community that draws on a long humanist and revolutionary tradition and which appears to resolve those metaphysical dilemmas Marxism set out to overcome in the discovery of a renewed totality of being that destroys the alienation inherent in capitalist society. The Spanish Republic in these works therefore contains within it the seeds of a state where such totality is possible through its continuation of the interrupted revolutionary process. Whilst these authors remain respectful of the Front Populaire’s attempts to extend Republican hegemony across the classes in France, they nevertheless reveal the tensions and that fundamental paradox at the heart of the Front alluded to above. The hegemony that the latter seeks to extend is not homogenous and contains radical alternatives within it. The ideology of the Front, its attempt to efface differences within the notion of the nation-as-people, contains within it utopias that are never entirely absorbed and which express themselves as internal tensions, threatening to burst the Front apart. The View from the Republic All four of the writers studied in the present chapter, in spite of their individual party associations or affiliations, are united by their declared opposition to the French government policy of non-intervention. Their individual representations of the Civil War need to be considered as attempts to renegotiate the Front Populaire through a view of the Spanish Republic that challenges the government’s official understanding and representation of the war. This attempted renegotiation is not only concerned with the Front’s foreign policy, but also with the reimplementation of an agenda for radical social transformation. In each case, it is the visit to the Republic which appears to lead to this challenge. However, like the far-right intellectuals who visited Nationalist Spain, none arrives in Spain disinterestedly and all had undergone an earlier political apprenticeship in interwar France. Moreover, Bloch, Chamson, Jouve and Téry constitute political pilgrims who, like earlier pilgrims to the Soviet Union and their counterparts in Nationalist Spain, operated within ‘the closed universe in which foreigners moved and [which] was supposed to shape their outlook’, as Hollander writes of the former.24 As García’s research on the subject of British missions of investigation to the Republic has revealed, left-wing intellectuals sympathetic to the Republic were subject to an officially organized and controlled experience of the Republic that employed techniques developed in the USSR, inspired by the Comintern and then also  Hollander, Political Pilgrims, p. 386.

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imitated by the Nationalists.25 Like their pro-Nationalist counterparts, they too were subject to the techniques of hospitality employed in a highly selective tour of the Republican zone. Whilst none of these writers acknowledges the presence of interpreters, guides or officials, it is almost certain that their experiences were largely co-ordinated by the Foreign Press Office and then, from early 1937, the Special Department for Foreigners staffed by personnel from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, War and Propaganda.26 As was the case with tours of the Nationalist zone, several were permitted interviews with leading figures within the Republic: Bloch meets President Manuel Azaña, Luis Companys, the President of the Generalidad in Barcelona, and the Spanish socialist leader, Largo Caballero; Téry interviews Jésus Hernandez, the communist Minister of Education, and Colonel Miaja, head of the military junta in Madrid, among many others; Jouve, like Téry, encounters and interviews Margarita Nelken, the feminist and socialist deputy, despite otherwise excluding from her account ‘tout ce qui rapportait à des personnages de premier plan’.27 As Hollander writes of intellectuals’ travels to communist regimes, such tours are often characterized by ‘organized spontaneity’ designed to give the impression of immediacy, but which had already been invested with much thought and planning.28 The impression of unfettered access is therefore either reflective of a certain complicity on the part of authors with the policy of organized spontaneity or a perhaps no less flattering sign of naivety. Indeed, García argues that such tours were ‘based on a “tacit contract” between host and guest, the former offering hospitality and openness, the latter promising to circulate his impressions back home’, impressions that had already been shaped prior to the journey by a preexisting affinity which continued to be shaped through the sanctioned tour.29 Despite the techniques of the sanctioned tour operated within the Republic, the contact with the very real business of war was far more immediate and visceral for left-wing intellectuals in Republican Spain than it was for the majority of rightwing intellectuals visiting the Nationalist zone; while battle remained off-limits to those writers studied in Chapter 1, the activity of war (both the war inflicted upon the Republic and the war waged by the Republic against the Nationalists) is central to much pro-Republican reportage. One of the key features which differentiate the reportage of pro-Republican French writers from the pro-Nationalists, as well 25

  García, ‘Potemkin in Spain?’, p. 219.   Ibid., p. 220. 27   ‘Everything related to the most prominent personalities.’ Marguerite Jouve, Vu, en Espagne. Février 1936-février 1937 (Paris, 1937), p. 6. Also, given that all four were invited to Spain in their capacity as journalists, they associated with their fellow professionals, Jouve travelling with Andrée Viollis and an unnamed British journalist, whilst Téry reported on the Battle of Teruel alongside Ernest Hemingway and Sefton Delmer of the New York Times. 28  Hollander, Political Pilgrims, p. 398. 29   García, ‘Potemkin in Spain?’, p. 226. 26

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as from many reporters who wrote about earlier major European conflicts, was their proximity to the principal effect of violence: human suffering. As García reveals, this proximity was facilitated by the Republican government eager for foreign visitors to report on the destruction of Republican cities and the death of civilians. However, as Jouve’s and Téry’s reportage in particular reveals, this exposure was also largely accidental and a result of inhabiting Republican cities for months on end, so often the target of Nationalist bombings. So, whilst the experience of the Republic was a politically mediated one, it was also one in which the French intellectual was personally implicated. The resulting commitment to the Republican cause was therefore reinforced by personal experience. Moreover, whilst these writers may have appeared happy to respect the tacit contract with the Republican government, this does not mean that literature always surrendered unconditionally to propaganda; as Kershaw has argued, by the mid 1930s there was an awareness and wariness of the techniques of hospitality to which left-wing intellectuals so readily succumb in Hollander’s assessment.30 Indeed, Kershaw argues that writers often problematize their own narrative accounts of travelling to the USSR, thereby reflecting aspects of ‘new reportage’ in the 1930s, and are often aware of their own subjectivity, suggesting that the naivety Hollander associates with intellectual idealism is less pervasive than he believes. In this respect, the four writers studied in this chapter also reflect aspects of the engaged reporter as envisaged by Egon Kisch, producing deeply and explicitly committed works of reportage. Like Kisch’s committed reporter, who contrasts with the distanced, objective reporter of old-style journalism, they allow their individual temperament to shape the reality witnessed in order to produce a certain reaction on the part of the reader, rather than attempt to reflect reality passively and objectively as it is presented to them.31 Subverting the belief in the possibility of neutral, disengaged observation, committed reporters do not so much apply a pre-existing understanding of the world that they then reveal to the reader in their reportage; rather, as Malraux claimed in the preface to Viollis’s Indochine S.O.S., this understanding of the world emerges in the discovery made together by reporter and reader.32 Committed reporters are therefore those who find themselves and their own engagement in the world in the course of their own subjective experiences of that world. For Bloch, then, reporting becomes an act in the struggle to which, and in which, he is both witness and participant; the result is an inextricable link between 30

  Angela Kershaw, ‘French and British Female Intellectuals and the Soviet Union. The Journey to the USSR, 1929‒1942’ in E-rea. Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone, 4/2 (2006): pp. 62‒72, p. 65. 31  Monteath, Writing the Good Fight, p. 128. For Kisch, this reaction should preferably awaken a revolutionary consciousness on the part of the reader. 32   Reportage is ‘l’intrusion d’un personnage dans un monde qu’il ne découvre en le découvrant lui-même’. Andrée Viollis, Indochine S.O.S. (Paris, 1935), p. vii.

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reportage and commitment: ‘L’heure est aux correspondants de guerre, non aux écrivains. L’heure est aux combattants, non aux historiens. L’heure est aux actes, et non à la méditation sur les actes’ [the time is for war correspondents not writers, for combatants, not for historians, for acts, not for meditation upon acts].33 Bloch’s reportage takes on the value of an act in the Republic’s armed struggle: ‘Je ne l’ai pas assemblé pour me servir, mais pour servir’ [I have not pieced these [reports] together to serve myself, but in order to serve] (Espagne, Espagne!, p. 10). The writer’s ego is thus set aside, but not his or her experience which, as Téry suggests, remains central to the narrative. Admitting in the introduction to Front de la liberté that ‘Ceci est un livre de partisan’,34 she goes on to add, pointing to the centrality of the involved, experiencing subject in the new reportage: Ceci n’est qu’un témoignage. Je ne vous dirai que ce que j’ai vu, entendu, senti. Je veux vous prendre par la main et que vous fassiez le voyage avec moi. Je veux que vous connaissiez ce peuple comme je le connais, que vous le voyiez combattre et souffrir, soulevé d’enthousiasme, de douleur, de fierté. (Front de la liberté, p. iii) [This is only a testimony. I will only tell you what I have seen, heard, felt. I want to take you by the hand and for you to make this journey with me. I want you to know this people as I know it, to see it fight and suffer, lifted by enthusiasm, pain and pride.]

Téry’s reflections on the relationship between herself as both writer and involved spectator on the one hand and the reader on the other echo those of Malraux and Kisch. As with Bloch, witnessing, reporting and commitment are conflated in Téry’s assessment of her role and that of her text; the latter’s success depends upon its ability to shape the reader’s response but also the very reality of Spain in the mind of the reader. The issue so often overlooked in the study of such narratives of the Civil War, then, is not so much the extent to which a particular regime succeeds in shaping the apparently naïve intellectual’s perception of the real; rather, it is the extent to which the intellectual attempts to shape the real for the reader, for at the heart of committed reportage lies the quest to possess the real, as

  Jean-Richard Bloch, Espagne, Espagne!, p. 9. Similarly, Jouve writes ‘Mais l’actualité de l’Espagne est trop brûlante pour qu’on puisse attacher sur les événements qui l’ensanglentent le froid regard de l’historien. Il appartient à chacun de ceux qui les ont vus de près de parler selon ses connaissances et sa conscience’ [But the urgency of the bloody events in Spain is too burning for the cold gaze of the historian to settle upon them. It is up to each one of us who has seen them close-up to speak out within the limits of our knowledge and conscience]. Marguerite Jouve, Vu, en Espagne, p. 8. 34   ‘This is a partisan’s book.’ Simone Téry, Front de la liberté. Espagne 1937‒1938 (Paris, 1938), p. i. 33

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Malraux observed.35 In this respect the works studied here offer more than a passive reflection of the political manipulation of reality; the Spanish Republic constitutes more than a Potemkin village for the visiting left-wing French intellectual who sees in their own participation in the Republic’s struggle for survival an idealized, revolutionary struggle now denied in France. These works therefore work on two levels, garnering support for an end to non-intervention and serving as a utopian model for disaffected supporters of the Front Populaire. They are both immediate, specific to the moment and the needs of the Spanish Republic, but also futureoriented, participating in ongoing attempts to remould the Third Republic. Key to both endeavours is the creation of solidarity across the Republics. La République solidaire The expression of these writers’ opposition to non-intervention ranges from the implicit in Vu, en Espagne to the explicit in Front de la liberté. Thus, Jouve, falling short of a direct call for arms, writes of one unit of Republican troops, isolated, underarmed and tearful at their predicament: ‘Et ce sont vraiment des enfants perdus, des hommes abandonnés, ces jeunes gens qui, défendant une cause d’une portée universelle, n’ont plus que leur courage à opposer à l’armement de plus en plus perfectionné, de plus en plus abondant de l’agresseur’ [And these really are lost children, men who have been abandoned, young people who, defending a universal cause, have nothing other than their courage with which to oppose the aggressor’s increasingly sophisticated and abundant weaponry] (Vu, en Espagne, pp. 145‒6). Téry, by way of contrast, resorts to the techniques and subtleties of the political cartoon and of caricature in an open attack on French foreign policy, representing the Spanish Republic as ‘un paisible citoyen’ [a peace loving citizen] assaulted in the street by a thug whilst the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yvon Delbos, passes by, refusing to hand the Republic the revolver he had previously agreed to sell the latter since, Delbos states, ‘votre agresseur est puissamment armé, ce revolver ne vous servirait de rien. Non, le plus sage c’est de piquer d’honneur cet apache’ [your aggressor is powerfully armed and this revolver won’t be of any help. No, the wisest thing to do is to wound this thug with your honour] (Front de la liberté, p. 196). Despite the difference in tone, both draw attention to the failure of the Non-intervention Committee, charged with preventing the supply of arms to both sides by foreign powers and thereby with upholding the British and French policy of non-intervention, to prevent German, Italian and Portuguese support for the Nationalists. More fundamentally still, both Jouve and Téry insist on the Republic as innocent, suffering victim. The depiction of Republican suffering becomes key in French reportage to this immediate aim of undermining the apparent logic of non-intervention and its claim to prevent a European conflict, a conflict, Chamson   See Malraux’s preface to Andrée Viollis, Indochine S.O.S., p. vii.

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claimed, that had already begun in the summer of 1936 (Retour d’Espagne, p. 79). This focus on suffering falls primarily upon the civilian dead and wounded as writer-reporters take it upon themselves to reveal the consequences of unchecked foreign intervention on behalf of the Nationalists. For Jouve, it is essential to draw the reader’s attention to the civilian victims of the Civil War if one is to understand the true nature of the conflict. She therefore demands of her readers ‘Qu’on me pardonne cette accumulation de détails macabres’ as she lists and describes the wounds she witnesses after a bombing in Madrid,36 apparently perpetrated by the Fifth Column. She continues: ‘Je pourrais la corser encore … Des femmes enceintes aux ventres énormes, des troncs sans jambes, des visages sans mâchoire. … Oui, qu’on me pardonne, mais c’est ça la guerre!..’ [I could spice it up even more … Pregnant women with enormous stomachs, torsos without limbs, faces with no jaws. … Yes, forgive me, but this is war!] (Vu, en Espagne, p. 162). These writers call upon the reader to witness the reality of war, the basic purpose of which, as Scarry argues, is to inflict pain, to wound the other. The infliction of pain and the resultant destruction of the other’s material well-being, both in the pain inflicted upon his or her body and the damage inflicted upon his or her habitat, become the measure by which one side gauges its success. By inflicting destruction, one belligerent party deconstructs the world of the other in order to silence the other’s discourse about the world around it (its reason for being, its difference from the other belligerent party, its view of this other and so on).37 It is to the silence of dead and wounded civilians that the reader’s attention is so often drawn in these works. In his conclusion to Retour d’Espagne, Chamson closes on a group of village children singing defiantly despite their proximity to the front in what appears to be a symbol of Republican resilience. Chamson approaches and interviews a group of women who, it emerges, are refugees from the massacre of Republicans at Badajoz in which their husbands were killed. The singing is then interrupted as one refugee silently raises her skirt: Sur une cuisse ronde qui avait la couleur du pays, celle des champs, des maisons et du soleil, je vis une blessure à peine refermée… Autour de moi, sur tous les visages, des larmes coulaient et j’ai pleuré, mois aussi, sans même penser à mettre mes mains devant les yeux. (Retour d’Espagne, p. 128) [On a rounded thigh the colour of the land, of its fields, its houses and the sun, I saw a recently healed wound… Around me the tears flowed on every face and I too cried without even thinking to cover my face with my hands.]

36

  ‘Forgive me for this accumulation of macabre details.’  Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 92‒3.

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The wound here resembles that of an entire nation and of an entire people. It lurks behind the thin veil of a peasant woman’s skirt and has the power to perturb any assurance felt in the singing of the children that somehow this people will inevitably endure. The theme of silence is also present in Téry’s evocation of a morgue in Barcelona; here we are confronted with a world reduced to silence, but one which is also deprived of form, deaf and blind to the shaping influence of discourse. Téry notes and focuses upon the destruction of precisely the faculties of speech, hearing and sight. One old woman’s face reveals ‘[une] bouche comme un trou noir, tordue par l’épouvante’ [a mouth like a black hole twisted by terror]. A young boy, ‘qui n’a jamais entendu parler du Comité de non-intervention’ [who has never heard of the Non-intervention Committee], lies ‘sa petite main sur son ventre nu, avec un air d’étonnement et de reproche’ [with his little hand across his naked stomach with a look of surprise and reproach on his face]. Elsewhere she observes small piles of unidentified body parts, ‘un doigt, un nez, un oeil qui vous regarde’ [a finger, a nose, an eye that watches you]. She travels from one ‘chamber’ to another, each one identical to the last, all leading to the impression of being trapped in an endless nightmare of disarticulated bodies (Front de la liberté, p. 326).38 Such descriptions appear to lend support to Scarry’s assertion, drawn from her reading of Arendt, that pain dwarfs and has the potential to silence discourse and meaning. The expression of pain and suffering either remains ‘inarticulate or else the moment it first becomes articulate it silences all else: the moment language bodies forth the reality of pain, it makes all further statements and interpretations seem ludicrous and inappropriate, as hollow as the world content disappearing in the head of the person suffering’.39 The Nationalist bombing of civilians in Madrid and Barcelona is viewed in these works as an attempt to silence the Republic, but also the audacity of a popular front government that had dared to resist the power of the generals. The deconstruction of Republican civil society affected through aerial bombing reflects that aim of wounding central to warfare in Scarry’s thinking: to destroy the other’s material world in order to clear the ground for territorialization and world-building. The injuring of the other, the destruction of his or her material well-being, reflects the desire of each belligerent party to give material form to their own previously ‘derealized and disembodied beliefs …’.40 Material and human destruction thus becomes a way of giving material form to discourse, of making real the abstractions of the political imaginary in times of war; the National Revolution cannot be achieved other than by the systematic destruction of its incompatible other, the Republic. It can only assert itself upon the world through a radical material modification of that world.

  This reportage was originally published in Regards on 31 March 1938.  Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 60. For Arendt, pain is ‘the most private and least communicable of all [experiences]’. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 50‒51. 40  Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 128. 38 39

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Many of these descriptions focus not only on the silence of the dead and the wounded, however, but on the gaze that they appear to cast upon the world around them. Indeed, the sightless gaze of the dead was most strikingly and famously employed in the disturbing centrespread of Regards on 11 November 1936. This shows nine chest and head shots of children killed by the Nationalist bombing of Madrid that month. Here the reader’s eye is often drawn to the wounds around the children’s eyes, their fixed unseeing gaze or their gaping, silenced mouths. As Brothers remarks in relation to this set of photographs: ‘Here is nothing symbolic, incidental, euphemistic or aesthetic; death is looked in the eye.’41 Yet such images and descriptions of corpses in the four texts studied in this chapter appear to return to the reader an accusatory gaze suggested in the title of the Regards feature itself: ‘Nous accusons.’42 The ‘nous’ of the title at first appears to be a reference to the editorial team of Regards, but could just as easily be the dead children featured. The dead are thus mobilized by the French left in the defence of the Republic; whilst Arendt asserts that pain is the only experience ‘which we are unable to transform into a shape fit for public appearance …’, pro-Republican reportage makes public the corpse precisely because of its ability to perturb and disrupt the realm of public appearance.43 The gaze of the dead thus serves to contest complacency. In Front de la liberté Téry also extends the accusatory gaze of the dead towards the French nation as a whole, but via her own individual sense of trauma. Téry’s first encounter with the civilian dead occurs in Madrid in 1937 when she comes across a corpse whose eyelids refuse to remain closed in death: ‘Mais les paupières se relevèrent. Et le mort, le visage ensanglanté, continua à me regarder fixement. Il me tenait sous son regard. Je ne pouvais pas m’échapper’ [But the eyelids opened again and the corpse with its bloody face continued to stare at me, holding me in its gaze. I could not escape]. Her immediate response is, like Chamson, to break down into uncontrollable tears until a fellow journalist reminds her ‘Si nous ne donnons pas l’exemple, nous autres, qui le donnera?’44 That night as she is haunted by the gaze of the corpse once more, she concludes ‘Et il me semble que c’est parce que j’étais Française qu’il me poursuivait ainsi de son regard accusateur’ [And it seems to me that it is because I was French that it followed me about with its accusatory gaze] (Front de la liberté, p. 44). The gaze of the dead is thus turned towards the French reader; Téry’s sense of guilt is extended beyond her individual self to the French nation as a whole. The sequence of tenses, whereby Téry’s nationality is recast as a thing of the past, inadvertently reflects a sense of conversion that pervades Front de la liberté: Téry, like Malraux’s reporter, is now ahead of the reader in the sense that she has discovered and understood the causes of the violence perpetrated and determined where responsibility lies. She is at once one with the reader and other, one with  Brothers, War and Photography, p. 176.   ‘We accuse.’ 43  Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 51. 44   ‘If we don’t set an example, who will?’ 41 42

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the French nation and something more than French. In short, in her own mind, she is beginning to dissolve the barriers between her self and the suffering other and now reveals this to the reader through the narrative of the process by which she has achieved her own engagement, which the reader is then also charged with assuming.45 Téry is thus able to assume the role of the reader’s guide, she who accompanies the reader but who also possesses advance knowledge of what is to come and its reason for being. Front de la liberté concludes with the visit to the Barcelona morgue mentioned above, a veritable descente aux enfers where Téry and the reader are forced to stare into the eyes of the dead and to make amends for ‘[les] jours où nous avons pensé à autre chose, où nous avons détourné les yeux, parce que nous nous sentions impuissants …’ [the days when we thought of other things, when we turned our face away because we felt powerless … ]. Both writer and reader are, in a proto-Sartrean turn, ‘responsables. Il faut donc aujourd’hui que vous ayez avec moi le courage de voir ce que nous n’avons pas su empêcher. De le voir afin de puiser dans ce spectacle affreux assez de force pour rendre impossible de nouvelles hécatombes’ [responsible. You must now have the courage to see with me what we failed to prevent, to see it in order that we draw sufficient strength from this terrible spectacle to make future massacres impossible] (ibid., p. 325). Téry emerges from the Barcelona morgue reassured of her role: ‘Pour tous les crimes, il faut des témoins. Nous sommes là pour porter témoignage. Nous crierons tant qu’il faudra bien qu’on nous entende. Nous crierons jusqu’à ce qu’on arrête le bras des assassins. Jusqu’à ce que les innocents soient vengés, jusqu’à ce que les bourreaux soient châtiés’ [All crimes require a witness. We are here to bear witness. We will shout as long as it takes in order to be heard. We will shout until the murderers’ hands are halted, until the innocent are avenged, until the executioners are punished] (ibid., p. 329). The body destroyed by war is therefore mobilized in such reportage in defence of the Republic. In this way, it is reclaimed from the Nationalists whose intent, as Scarry notes of all those who wage war, is to deny the ideology associated with the wounded and dead.46 By dissolving the sense of otherness, the sense that the writer is witness to someone else’s war, and by destabilizing the association of national policy with the individual French observer, Téry, Chamson, Bloch and Jouve are able to lay the foundations for a solidarity that traverses the Pyrenees. Téry is therefore anxious that her readers recognize something of themselves and of their own lives in the victims of the Nationalists. Thus the dead of the Barcelona mortuary reflect Republican social diversity to Téry, a diversity that transcends class and parties to embrace suffering humanity as a whole:

45   As García notes, however, visits to the morgue after a night of bombing were part of the sanctioned tour of the Republican zone from 1937 onwards. García, ‘Potemkin in Spain?’, p. 224. 46  Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 117.

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Ils sont tous ensemble, côte à côte, dans la terrible promiscuité du néant, au hasard de leur arrivée, les hommes, les femmes, les enfants, les vieux, les jeunes, les beaux, les laids, les ouvriers et les femmes du monde, les vieux employés à col de celluloïd, les messieurs respectables, les enfants à fossettes, tous égaux dans la mort comme dans les danses macabres. Danse immobile comme dans les sculptures de nos cathédrales … (Ibid., p. 326) [They are all together, side by side, in the terrible promiscuity of the void, placed according to their time of arrival, men, women, children, old people, young people, the beautiful, the ugly, workers and society women, old office workers with their celluloid collars, respectable gentlemen, children with dimples, all equal in death as in a dance macabre. Locked in an immobile dance like those we see in our cathedrals …]

Similarly, in Retour d’Espagne, Chamson is able to equate Spanish Republican suffering with both past European suffering and future French suffering; the Spanish Republic becomes a projection of France’s future, but also an echo of past European wars in the theme of innocent humanity as war’s eternal victim: Je réalisais que la guerre essayait de frayer un passage à travers notre occident qu’elle a déjà couvert, voici quelques années, de ruines et de deuils. … On tolérait la guerre en Espagne et c’était maintenant pour moi comme si l’on tolérait l’assassinat dans une des rues de la ville où j’habite. (pp. 87‒8) [I realized that war was trying to forge its way across the West having already covered it in ruins and death only a few years ago. … War was being tolerated in Spain and now for me it was as if murder were being tolerated in one of the streets in the town where I live.]

If Chamson and Jouve stop short of joining Bloch and Téry in an assertion that a victory of the far right over the Spanish Republic will necessarily lead to similar defeat for France, they too contribute to this translation of the Spanish Republican cause to an international plane of immediate relevance to the supporters of the French left.47 Yet, as Chamson suggests, events in Spain have to be understood   See Jean-Richard Bloch, Espagne, Espagne!, p. 160. There is here an uncanny mirroring of Maurras’s understanding of the conflict’s significance for France. In Vers l’Espagne de Franco, Maurras reports the conversation of ‘un délégué de Moscou ...’ [a delegate from Moscow …], responsible for the burning of Irún, to a royalist source (pp. 52‒3). The former, thinking the latter to be a Republican, declares; ‘Sachez bien que la révolution espagnole n’était que l’amorce de la révolution française. La France nous intéresse bien plus que l’Espagne’ [Note that the Spanish revolution was nothing more than the spark with which to light the French revolution. France interests us far more than Spain] (p. 54). 47

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within a historical continuum and not in isolation. Their significance is therefore double, stretching beyond the immediate moment, connecting with a shared past and possibly a shared future. In order to establish solidarity through a spatiotemporal dimension that enlarges the significance of the conflict, all of the writers examined here reveal certain literary preoccupations, preoccupations that all four claim to have set aside in the need for immediate communication and communication of the immediate.48 At first glance, purpose and clarity of expression would appear to be the order of the day in pro-Republican reportage. Monteath, too, argues that the overriding concern for writers who recount the Civil War, either in the novel or in reportage, is with the referential rather than poetic quality of their work; in their abandonment of modernist experimentation and in their pursuit of journalistic truth, writers renounce the prolongé of literature for the quotidien of reportage, as Bloch himself willingly admits.49 However, as Boucharenc contends, rather than exclude the former, Bloch’s documentary art employs a dialectic of the prolongé and of the quotidien that endows it with some of the durability of literature rather than the pure disposability of the moment.50 Indeed, it is precisely this dialectic in left-wing reportage of the Civil War that enables such work to extend beyond immediate political concerns and for representations of the Republic to gain a utopian relevance for French readers. 48   All four writers assert that only the immediacy of ‘témoignage’, a literature of witnessing, can convey the urgency of the Civil War. Téry thus writes ‘il n’est pas question ici de littérature …’ [there is no question of literature here …] (Front de la liberté, p. iii). 49   Peter Monteath, Writing the Good Fight, p. 196. As Bloch suggests elsewhere in respect of the writer, the latter needed to suspend his or her literary activity in order to respect the duty he or she owed as a reporter: ‘Le même homme, à moins d’avoir du génie, ne peut être accordé sur deux rythmes aussi différents que celui du quotidien [du reportage] et du prolongé [de la littérature]’ [The same man, unless a genius, cannot be attuned to two rhythms so different from one another as the quotidian [of reportage] and the prolonged [of journalism]] (quoted in Boucharenc, L’Ecrivain-reporter au cœur des années trente, p. 114.) And yet Bloch, catches himself whilst listening to an endless stream of official radio announcements, all preceded by the cry of ‘Attencion! Attencion! Notizia ufficide!’, and all routinely ignored, wondering what reception his own message will receive through time: ‘Quelle sera la figure de la fortune quand vous lirez ces lignes? Je les lance vers cet inconnu comme, enfant, je lançai, un jour, mon chapeau de paille dans l’Adour, du haut du pont de Bayonne, en pensant à l’enfant de la plage américaine qui le verrait arriver à lui, flottant. Mes paroles aborderont-elles jamais la plage où tu te tiens, mon lecteur? Quelle tempête, en cours de route, les aura tordues, lacérées?’ [What will fortune have in store when you read these lines? I cast them out towards the same stranger towards whom I once, as a child, cast my straw hat from the height of the bridge in Bayonne into the River Adour, thinking of the child on an American beach who would see it floating towards him. Will my words ever reach the beach where you stand, reader? What storm might twist and lacerate them on their way to you?] (Espagne, Espagne!, p. 102). 50  Boucharenc, L’Ecrivain-reporter au cœur des années trente, p. 114.

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While all the writers examined in this chapter profess a need for immediate expression and clarity of communication via the suspension of literature, they nevertheless invoke a need to record the Republic in aesthetic form. Thus, in Vu, en Espagne, Jouve argues that only poets and not historians ‘pourront résoudre le problème posé par l’inviolabilité de Madrid et rendre à cette ville l’hommage qu’elle a mérité’ [will be able to solve the problem of Madrid’s inviolability and pay adequate tribute to this city] (p. 135). Jouve thus distinguishes, like Aristotle, between history and poetics, associating the latter with the universal. Along with Chamson, she contends that the writer’s aim is to perceive deeper, more profound and persistent tendencies within and beyond the everyday. For Chamson, however, this is precisely the task of the historian; not the disinterested historian envisaged by Jouve, but the engaged intellectual to whom Chamson allocates the name of historian. For Chamson these tendencies reside au-delà de la politique, au-delà des événements, dans les réalités humaines les plus permanentes et dans ce que nous pouvons projeter d’elles sur l’écran presque immobile de l’histoire. Toute politique est infirme qui rend ce dépassement et cette projection impossibles. … Je crois que les passions que je porte et que la volonté qui m’anime ne limitent pas l’homme, mais lui gardent ses chances dans la durée. (Retour d’Espagne, pp. 8‒9) [beyond politics, beyond events, in the most human realities and what we can project of them upon the almost immobile screen of history. Politics that prevent such an extension are flawed. … I believe that the passions I carry in me and that the will that drives me do not limit mankind but ensure its chances of enduring.]

Although Monteath’s contention that Spanish Civil War literature as a whole represents a retreat from modernism, from the self-referential to the referential, is partly true, the reportage examined in this chapter suggests that it is not absolute and that behind the call to immediate engagement lies a more profound appeal. Indeed, and as I shall now argue, the call for engagement directed at the French readership of these works, and which relates to resurrecting the project of the Popular Front in France, depends entirely upon such an extension of the text’s relevance. Towards the Totalitarian Republic The immediate case for Republican solidarity across the Pyrenees examined thus far is largely of an ethico-political order that casts the Spaniard as victim. Yet, like Nationalist Spain for the writers examined earlier, so too the Spanish Republic constitutes a positive pole to which its French supporters are drawn. For Chamson, Republican re­sistance to international fascism reveals ‘une stoïque affirmation

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de l’allégresse et de la vie’ (Retour d’Espagne, p. 79)51 and, although writers do not openly admit to being drawn to Spain other than by the desire to record the consequences of non-intervention, they too are fascinated by the society they discover there in a process of construction. Indeed, for Bloch, Spain has always constituted something of an ideal. It is for all Frenchmen, he rhapsodizes with no hint of irony, ‘une partie de leur honneur, une nationalité supérieure et secrète, une réserve de noblesse, une ligne de retraite devant les offenses de la vie’ [a part of their honour, a superior and secret [second] nationality, a sanctuary for nobility, a line drawn in the sand before life’s insults] (Espagne, Espagne!, p. 105). Moreover, in Republican Spain these writers discover an active alternative to the stalled reimplementation of the Revolution under the Front Populaire. This alternative resides in what they perceive and represent as a revolutionary popular front community at work in the Spanish Republic, a community that appears to transcend the left’s party-political divisions. Underpinning and infusing this representation is a symbolic system common to the four texts examined here, ‘a configuration of factors which permeates the whole range of ideas and feelings’ expressed, illustrative of a utopian perspective.52 Bloch again suggests this utopian potential of the Republic in euphoric terms. Spain, he writes, has persistently offered French visitors ‘une forme de transcendence qu’ils poursuivaient vainement chez eux’ (ibid., p.105).53 It is a land of absolutes that strives for purity, constituting ‘un objet de songe et d’obsession pour tant de Français, … une patrie d’élection …’ (ibid., p. 106).54 In this, Bloch reflects the continued power of dream for communists and communist fellow-travellers, and this despite Marxist ambivalence towards utopianism and, more specifically, the power of the utopian dream; while Marxist orthodoxy condemned nineteenth-century socialist utopians for an imagining of the future that failed to grasp the basic principles of the social and economic forces upon which the Marxist interpretation of history was based, Lenin nevertheless claimed a place for political dreams provided these connect with lived reality, providing goals to which the worker could strive.55 Bloch’s choice of expression here mirrors that of his pro-Nationalist counterparts for whom purity and nobility are bound up in the defence of civilization undertaken, so they believe, by Franco. Yet a radically different symbolic system underpins pro-Republican representations of Spain and of the Spanish people. Whilst Bloch also makes ‘de la civilisation espagnole une forme de l’inaccessible’ [of Spanish civilization a form of the inaccessible] (ibid., p. 106), he opposes the Spain he witnesses to that pursued by the Nationalists: 51

  ‘[A] stoic affirmation of joy and of life.’  Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, p. 274. 53   ‘[A]form of transcendence that they pursued in vain at home.’ 54   ‘The object of dream and obsession for so many Frenchmen, … a nation of choice ….’ 55   For a fuller discussion of this ambivalence, see Chapter 2 of Levitas, The Concept of Utopia. 52

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‘un délicieux îlot non moderne, anti-moderne, pas du tout européen, un îlot sans industrie …’ [a delightful little island, un-modern, anti-modern, entirely unEuropean, a little island from which industriousness has been excluded …] (ibid., p. 107). As Brothers argues in respect to pro-Republican press coverage of the Civil War, this system was constructed on a memory of the French Revolution shared and cherished by a popular front readership, a revolution where the middle classes, the peasants and the workers had joined in a movement against autocracy characterized by social unity and popular élan.56 Underpinning Bloch’s Spanish utopia, then, is a sense of revolutionary legacy and impetus. The revolutionary utopia that emerges in these works more generally is inexorably progressive in marked contrast to the restorationism of the Maurrassians. The construction of an effective symbolic system is essential to organizing an immediate political response to the plight of the Republic, playing on, as Estelle Jussin writes, ‘present assumptions and unconscious motivations of individuals and groups, relying on the universal mythologies of specific societies’.57 It is therefore central to attempts to radicalize French popular front politics by extending the representation of the Spanish Popular Front beyond its national and immediate specificity. This was achieved by infusing representations with a spatial, but also temporal depth in the ties that were created between the Spanish Popular Front, the Republic and its people, and a European revolutionary tradition. Even for the more moderate and pacifist Chamson, the defenders of the Republic reconnect with a more acceptable and honourable warrior past than the Nationalists. The latter, along with their fascist allies, are symptomatic of the modern soldier in a mechanized army: ‘des machines entraînées par la fatalité d’une autre machine’.58 Although Chamson claims to remain resolutely anti-militarist, his Republicans are more akin to the soldiers of old whose eventual disappearance he bemoans, ‘des soldats de métier défendant un Etat [ou] des soldats citoyens défendant une patrie …’ [professional soldiers defending a state [or] citizen soldiers defending a homeland … ] (Retour d’Espagne, p. 118), since this war is: la lutte entre le monde civil et le monde militaire, non pas au sens habituel des mots où militaire et civil sont unis les uns aux autres par l’ordre de l’état et le service de la nation, … mais dans un sens nouveau où le militaire apparaît seulement comme technicien de la destruction et de la tuerie. (Ibid., pp. 107‒8) [the fight between the civil and the military worlds, but not in the usual sense of these words where military and civil are united by the order of the state and

 Brothers, War and Photography, p. 40.   Quoted in Brothers, War and Photography, p. 35. 58   ‘Machines drawn ineluctably into battle by another machine.’ Similarly, Jouve portrays the Nationalists as ruthless, mechanized agents of modernity (Vu, en Espagne, p. 87). 56

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service towards the nation, … but in a new sense where the soldier appears only as the technician of death and destruction.]

Whilst the parallel between the soldier-citizens of revolutionary times and the defenders of the Republic is implicit in Retour d’Espagne, elsewhere it is made explicit. Bloch likens the Republican seizure of the Montana barracks in Madrid to the storming of the Bastille ‘et son récit deviendra pareillement classique’ (Espagne, Espagne!, p. 124).59 The event reminds Bloch of the social unity of the oppressed in 1789, revealing that ‘les gros cannons ne portent et que les gros murs ne tiennent, qu’à la condition que la garnison des murs et les servants des pièces possèdent une volonté de vaincre aussi têtu, aussi mystique, aussi élémentaire, aussi rocheuse, que la volonté des assaillants’ [large cannons only work and large walls only hold when the garrison walls and the artillery crews possess the same stubborn, mystical, elementary and rock-like will to win as the assailants] (ibid., p. 113). Bloch’s Republican militiamen and women, like the 1789 revolutionaries, are driven by hope, a hope that is born of a mystical idealism, but which is grounded in a connection with the real world of lived experience.60 They thus embody Lenin’s fusion of the dream and of the real, possessing a transformative potential witnessed in France at the end of the eighteenth century and which the French Popular Front had tried to harness once again. Yet this phenomenal revolutionary spontaneity belongs to what Bloch, even in the summer of 1936, considers ‘le stade picaresque de la guerre civile, son heure sublime, atroce et romantique’ [the picaresque stage of the civil war, its sublimely atrocious and romantic moment] (ibid., p. 128). Nonetheless, the Republic reveals to him ‘un monde en fusion’ [a world in the process of becoming] which recalls Russia in 1917 and which has set out on the ‘“ligne idéale”’ [ideal line] that led to ‘la Russie nouvelle’ [the new Russia] (ibid., p. 20). It therefore participates in the dual civilizing and revolutionary process that Bloch detects at work in Europe from Ancient Greek times whereby one civilization-revolution is born of another, older, declining civilization.61

59

  ‘And its telling will become similarly classical.’   Similarly, Jouve notes: ‘J’ai un peu l’impression, maintenant, d’avoir assisté aux guerres de Religion et à celles que soutenaient les soldats de l’An II’ [I feel as if, now, I have witnessed the wars of religion and those waged by the soldiers of the French Revolution] (Vu, en Espagne, pp. 87‒8). One journalist nevertheless endeavours to convince Jouve that the Spanish people are above all engaged in ‘la vielle lutte entre le gros propriétaire terrien … et lui, le paysan sans terre, le bracero ’ [‘the old struggle between the big landowner … and the landless peasant, the bracero] (Vu, en Espagne, p. 92). 61   For Bloch, the Renaissance renewed this neglected tradition in Europe through the rediscovery of the Ancients. See Michel Trebitsch, ‘Jean-Richard Bloch intellectuel européen’ in Tivadar Gorilovics (ed.), Retrouver Jean-Richard Bloch (Debrecen, 1994), pp. 141‒52, pp. 145‒8. 60

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If, for Bloch, the communist fellow-traveller, the community of the Spanish Republic stretches back to reconnect with a primarily European revolutionary tradition, the echoes of revolution in Chamson’s Retour d’Espagne evoke a broader Western, liberal-humanist heritage, of which revolution is part, but to which it is subordinated. Thus the Republican salute of peasant women who greet Chamson’s delegation in one village reminds him of statues of Antiquity as their raised arms and clenched fists ‘semblent reprendre le geste des porteuses d’amphores’ (p. 36).62 The respect for culture he discerns in the Republican protection of artworks reveals that these revolutionaries ‘savent mieux [que les révolutionnaires de 1789] reconnaître la marque de l’homme’ (ibid., p. 42) [better recognize than the revolutionaries of 1789 the mark of man] and what defies the immediately useful or political. With every artwork preserved, each Republican ‘jette chaque jour un pont fragile et indestructible entre ce morceau de civilisation et la culture universelle’ [builds every day a fragile yet indestructible bridge between this fragment of civilization and universal culture], reconnecting ‘l’ordre humain et l’ordre transcendant qui est justement celui de la civilisation et de la culture’ [the human and the transcendent order which is precisely that of civilization and culture] that the Nationalists threaten to destroy (ibid., p. 43). In this, Chamson reflects a trend among many intellectuals who travelled to Republican Spain and who saw in the Spanish peasant and worker a more noble embodiment of the humanist and Enlightenment values than they had encountered at home.63 Reference to the preservation of Spain’s cultural inheritance, on which all four authors insist in order to counter a pro-Nationalist emphasis on the destruction of culture in the Republican zone, thus serves to ground the Republic in a broad revolutionary-humanist tradition, which incorporates the French Revolution’s liberal-humanitarian and socialist-communist interpretations, allowing them to co-exist within the same overarching symbolic structure and despite differences of emphasis between writers. It also provides a temporal depth, casting Spanish Republicans as inheritors and defenders of the Western tradition in what sometimes appears a mirror image of pro-Nationalist reportage. The journey through Republican Spain therefore supplies Jouve with a ‘magnifique leçon d’histoire …’ [magnificent history lesson] in a journey ‘qui ne s’effectuait pas seulement à travers l’espace mais aussi, dans une certaine mesure, à travers le temps!’ [which was undertaken not only through space, but, in some way, through time!] (Vu, en Espagne, p. 87). However, if Jouve also sees in Republican efforts to preserve Spain’s cultural heritage a ‘liberté d’esprit …’ (ibid., p. 183)64 unfettered by party-political considerations, her recording of this process suggests a more radical agenda. In 62

  ‘Appear to adopt the gesture of women bearing amphora.’  Benson, Writers in Arms, pp. ix‒xx. Once again, exposure to Republican attempts to preserve Spanish culture and heritage from the effects of war were a feature of the sanctioned tour. 64   ‘Freedom of mind.’ 63

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Vu, en Espagne the classification and storage of artworks, the seizure of property abandoned by the aristocracy in Madrid and the conversion of convents into museums reflect a national-popular reorganization of culture whereby what was once private property becomes public.65 Furthermore, such activity denotes a revolutionary displacement and reversal of ownership, as Jouve draws the reader’s attention to the signs and symbols of this process: ‘Des drapeaux aux insignes révolutionnaires flottaient aux frontons des demeures patriciennes tandis que la couronne et le blason avaient été pudiquement recouverts d’un voile rouge, et des miliciens en combinaison bleue, un peu partout, remplaçaient les portiers en livrée’ [Flags with revolutionary insignia fluttered on the front of aristocratic residences whilst the crown and coat of arms had been discreetly covered with a red veil and militiamen in blue boiler suits replaced livery-clad porters more or less everywhere] (ibid., pp. 66‒7). That said, Jouve is at pains to suggest that the situation in the Republic in July 1936 is characterized less by radical change and more by a form of spontaneous discipline following the destabilization of ‘les normes de la vie et [d]es valeurs morales et sociales, … un aussi vertigineux renversement de situation …’ [life’s norms and social and moral values, … a quite dizzying reversal of the situation … ] (ibid., p. 44). To prevent imminent collapse, however, the Spanish people, like the French people before them, joined together with the parties of the left to save the Republic. Jouve’s description of a de­monstration in Madrid immediately following the pronunciamiento, in which ‘la foule en­tonne l’Internationale, immédiatement suivie de l’Hymne de Riego …’ [the crowd sings the International immediately followed by the anthem of the Republic …] (ibid., p. 50), resonates with earlier left-wing coverage of 12 February 1934 demonstrations where the singing of the Internationale was followed by the singing of the Marseillaise. If Chamson, Jouve and Téry do not openly place Spanish Republican reforms within a direct and clearly determined revolutionary trajectory, as Bloch does, their image of the Republic and of its defenders is subtended by the same symbolic structure which not only draws upon a revolutionary heritage, but which also casts the defenders of the Republic as active agents of historical change in the present. Vu, en Espagne is thus described by Jouve as ‘un portrait du peuple espagnol en guerre’.66 This is so because:

65   Jouve’s interview with the curator of a former convent reveals how religion is now considered a thing of the past, the convent a mere artefact worthy of preservation for its historical interest, but no longer a part of an existing, functioning social order. The curator thus explains to Jouve: ‘Il faut que chaque visiteur puisse clairement comprendre ce qu’était [my emphasis], en bien comme en mal, la vie monacale’ [Every visitor must understand clearly what was [my emphasis] right and wrong about monastic life] (Vu, en Espagne, p. 184). 66   ‘A portrait of the Spanish people at war.’

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on ne comprendra jamais rien à l’Espagne tant qu’on ne donnera pas la prééminence à l’homme de la rue sur le personnage public, aux réactions émotionnelles sur les attitudes politiques. En outre, dans nulle autre guerre … le peuple n’a été aussi directement engagé. … C’est son destin qui se joue. … Il est à la fois l’acteur principal et l’enjeu. (Ibid., p. 7)67 [We will never understand anything about Spain until prominence is given to the man on the street over the public figure, to emotional responses over political attitudes. Moreover, the people have never been as involved in any previous war as they are in this. … Their very destiny is at stake. … They are both the main actor and the issue.]

Underlying such an understanding is the concept of the people as a national and unproblematic whole united against tyranny; the defenders of the Republic embody that spirit and dynamism of the people as nation in which internal political divisions, and indeed the civil nature of the conflict as a whole, are obfuscated. They are essentially a mythical construct, a reorganization of earlier narratives akin to that carried out by pro-Nationalist reportage, but modelled on the primary myth of the French Popular Front: that built on the memory of 1789.68 The Spanish Nationalists, by way of contrast, remain in such reportage an over privileged minority, disconnected from the national whole and virtually entirely dependent on foreign fascist aid. When they are acknowledged as a Spanish phenomenon, they are again absorbed into a French revolutionary or popular front tradition. Thus, for Bloch, the Carlist Navarre region is dismissed as a ‘Vendée espagnole ...’ (Espagne, Espagne!, p. 89), an anachronism, and the Falange becomes, in a blurring of internal differences reminiscent of the far right’s refusal to distinguish between the parties of the left, ‘l’équivalent espagnol des Croix de Feu ou des Camelots du Roi …’ (ibid., p. 92).69 The Civil War is thus appropriated as an extension of French popular front politics not only in order to gain support for the Spanish Popular Front through the evocation of ties of kinship, but in order to create a refuge for those elements of the French Popular Front who, having renewed with the nation’s revolutionary heritage, now felt that real radicalism lay

67   Indeed, for Brothers, the French left’s interest in the early stages of the Civil War in particular is characterized by a fascination with ‘the emergence onto the historical stage of a mass society and mass movement within it …’. War and Photography, p. 43. 68   For Gramsci, this concept of the people-as-nation is peculiarly French and enabled class differences to be more readily transcended, constituting a powerful unifying myth and ‘a type of political and cultural nationalism that breaks through the limits of the strictly nationalistic parties and impregnates the whole culture’. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. 2 (New York, 1996), ed. and trans. by Joseph A. Buttigieg, pp. 80‒81. 69   ‘The Spanish equivalent of the Croix de Feu or the Camelots du Roi ....’

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beyond the Pyrenees. As Dell puts it, by 1937 the French Popular Front was in exile in Spain.70 Nowhere is this more acutely suggested than in Téry’s representation of French International Brigadiers in Front de la liberté. Téry’s shame at her French citizenship is alleviated by the presence of Frenchmen in the Republican ranks. Indeed, she insists on their national character, on their ability to stand in for the French people-as-nation. They are, in words that ought to have made communist anti-militarists and internationalists of the 1920s despair, ‘l’orgueil de notre peuple, chair de notre chair et sang de notre sang’ (Front de la liberté, p. 204).71 Central to this sense of pride is the assertion that French brigadistes represent, like their Spanish Republican brothers-in-arms, a continuation of a revolutionary tradition, one that is grounded in France’s national heritage and the myth of the universal French Revolution: ‘Ils ont écrit ici l’une des pages les plus glorieuses de l’histoire de France. Les historiens de l’avenir recueilleront tous les témoignages de leurs exploits, les Victor Hugo de l’avenir chanteront l’épopée des ces nouveaux soldats de l’An II’ [Here they have written one of the most glorious pages of French history. Future historians will gather together the testimonies of their deeds. The Victor Hugos of the future will write the epic tales of these new Soldiers of Year II] (ibid., pp. 199‒200). In addition to this, the various portraits of French brigadistes throughout Téry’s reportage are anchored in the contemporary, generating the image of the popular front community in exile evoked by Dell. Thus the French brigadiste is recognizable as a solid working-class type thanks to ‘cette manière inimitable de poser de travers sa coiffure … cet oeil gouailleur, ce visage toujours en movement, cette protestation de tout le corps, des épaules, des mains et de la voix’ [this inimitable way of not wearing his headwear straight, … this cheeky look in his eye, this lively face, this reluctance in his movements, his shoulders, his hands and voice] (ibid., p. 202).72 When she visits them in their front-line positions, Téry notes how, ‘sur leurs lèvres, comme le nom des femmes aimées, revenaient les noms de Billancourt, de la Canebière, de Villeurbanne ou du boulevard de Charonne. Français de France venus en cette terre étrange défendre leur foyer de la rue Lepic ou du Faubourg Saint-Antoine’ [upon their lips, like the names of loved ones, those of Billancourt, the Canebière, Villeurbanne or the Boulevard de Charonne return. Frenchmen of France who have come to this strange land in order to defend their home in the Rue Lepic or the Saint-Antoine district] (ibid., p. 227). As the locations evoked by Téry suggest, however, these are predominantly working-

 Dell, The Image of the Popular Front, p. 145.   ‘The pride of our people, flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood.’ 72   For a discussion of the concept of gouaille and the French working-class soldier in the early twentieth century, see Libby Murphy, ‘Gavroche and the Great War: Soldier gouaille and the Legend of the poilu’ in The Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2/2 (2009): pp. 121‒33. 70 71

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class Frenchmen and, it is suggested in at least one exchange, fellow communists.73 In this Front de la liberté helps project the image of French communists, an image encouraged by the PCF more generally, as the true guardians of the ideals of the Popular Front, an image predicated upon the PCF’s claim to embody a popular legitimacy the government now lacked. French brigadistes thus become, in French communist coverage of the war generally, the true combatants in ‘an anti-fascist struggle from which the French government ha[d] abdicated’.74 There is, however, a large degree of accuracy in such representations of the extent of communist participation in the International Brigades; Rémi Skoutelsky estimates that between 49 and 58 per cent of French brigadistes were either PCF or Jeunesse Communiste (JCF) members.75 Téry’s inclusion of brigadistes in her eulogy of the Republic therefore allows for the inclusion of the French working classes and the PCF within the revolutionary utopia with which the Spanish Republic is invested. This utopia, subtended by a symbolic system that inscribes the defence of the Republic within a revolutionary tradition that unites France and Spain, is also seen to be actively transforming the Spain of the present. The defenders of the Republic exist as more than the mere inheritors of a tradition neglected in France; they are also perceived as active agents in the transformation of the present and in history in its unfolding. Just as pro-Nationalist reportage is fascinated by the construction of the new Spain, so pro-Republican reportage is intrigued by the reformulation of the state that accompanies the activity of war. Yet, as we have already seen, the proximity to the effects of war reveals the fragility of that state to the French observer. For Chamson in particular, war possesses a force of its own, one that escapes the human agency from which it originates. International fascism, despite its origins in specific national forms, and through its cult of death, has become divorced from any specific national tradition or civilization. It is ‘Nation sans territoire propre, sans culture, sans civilisation, sans responsabilité, sans devenir, mais nation terrible qui n’est tenue par rien que par le service des engins de massacre qui sont devenus sa patrie’ [A nation without a land of its own, without culture, civilization, responsibility or a future, but a terrible nation which is held together only by the work demanded by the weapons of destruction that have become its homeland] (Retour d’Espagne, pp. 108‒9).  One brigadiste near Belchite enquires of Téry: ‘Et Maurice? Et Vaillant? Et Cachin? Ah! ça fait plaisir d’entendre parler de Paris!’ [And Maurice [Thorez]? And Vaillant [-Couturier]? And [Marcel] Cachin? Oh it’s good to hear you speak about Paris!] (Front de la liberté, p. 91). All three were leading figures within the PCF of the 1930s. That said, Téry is careful to avoid referring openly to the party affiliations of those she interviews except when they do not belong to the Communist Party. 74  Dell, The Image of the Popular Front, p. 145. 75  Skoutelsky, L’Espoir guidait leurs pas, p. 154. Yet, he warns against assuming that reasons for en­gaging were purely political and that every volunteer automatically considered himself a soldier in the anti-fascist struggle (ibid., p. 170). 73

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Chamson therefore contends that ‘Ce dont Franco dispose, c’est en quelque sorte de la guerre en soi, de la guerre séparée de toute justification nationale, de toute excuse, réduite à sa nature propre, qui est de détruire et de tuer’ [What Franco has at his disposal is in some ways war in its purest form, separated from any national justification or excuse, reduced to its essence, which is to destroy and kill] (ibid., pp. 105‒6). The war waged by the Nationalists therefore seeks not only to deconstruct the Republic in order to territorialize it, but to disrupt the revolutionary-humanist continuity with which the Spanish Republic is endowed by these authors, to disturb the revolutionary teleology reengaged by the Spanish Republic. Yet, as Brothers observes, pro-Republican reportage regularly counterbalanced images of the disruption of civil society in the Republican zone with images of continuity.76 Further to the images of revolutionary continuity already examined, then, we can also find images that affirm Republican resilience more generally. Chamson counterbalances pessimism born of his pacifism and of the memory of the First World War with a eulogy of the people of Madrid’s ‘mépris de la mort et de la souffrance qui n’est explicable que par un total amour de la vie’ [contempt for death and suffering that can only be explained by a total love of life] (ibid., p. 57). The Republican therefore opposes the will to live to a fascist acceptance and cult of death (ibid., p. 63). In this, the Republican opposes the very spirit of war and his military action becomes a form of bellicose pacifism.77 The dialectic of disruption and continuity also pervades Front de la liberté. Amidst the destruction caused by the Nationalist bombing of Madrid, Téry too suggests resilience, but here resilience that is associated specifically with a popular front spirit of resistance in the anti-fascist struggle. Thus, for Téry, photographs and the act of photographing amidst the ruins also seem to be a way of eliciting order and of incorporating the suffering civilian population into the writer’s discourse concerning the popular front revolutionary utopia, rather than simply a way of recording the unmaking of the Republican world. During her first account of the bombing of Madrid in February 1937, she tells how, when she takes out her camera to photograph two workers looking for corpses in the rubble of one building, ‘les deux ouvriers ont répondu d’un simple geste aux questions que je  Brothers, War and Photography, p. 122.   Rasson distinguishes bellicose pacifism from ‘pacifisme plaintif’ [plaintive pacifism], defining the latter as a mode of representation that points relentlessly to the destructive activity of war and the physical suffering it engenders in order to disgust humanity and to point to war’s total futility. Bellicose pacifism, by way of contrast, exhorts ‘les peuples à faire la guerre pour mettre fin à celle-ci’ [peoples to wage war in order to put an end to it] (Rasson, Ecrire contre la guerre, p. 37). Chamson’s contributions to Vendredi in the course of the Civil War reveal a realignment and reconceptualization of his pacifism. In the issue of the 12 February 1937, he admits that old-style pacifism that opposed an armed response to fascism has failed. ‘Le vrai pacifisme’ [true pacifism], aimed at preventing a European war, must oppose non-intervention. 76

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n’avais plus la force de leur poser: devant mon objectif, sur ces décombres où gisaient sans doute encore des cadavres, ces deux terrassiers de Madrid ont levé le poing’ [the two workers replied with a simple gesture to the questions I no longer had the strength to ask. Before my lens, on these ruins where doubtless bodies still laid buried, these two Madrid labourers raised their fist in salute] (p. 4). This raising of the Republican salute at the sight of Téry’s camera and in response to Téry’s temporary inability to carry out her task as committed intellectual, to ask the necessary questions and to draw the inevitable conclusions, happens on several other occasions. Thus, still in Madrid in 1937, ‘Une vieille paysanne paralysée m’a regardée d’un air hébété, mais quand j’ai sorti mon appareil pour la photographier, elle a extrait péniblement un bras noueux de sa couverture, elle l’a levé, et elle a fermé le poing’ [A paralysed old peasant woman watched me, bewildered, but when I took out my camera to photograph her, she painfully extracted a gnarled arm from under her blanket, raised it and closed her fist]. Consequently Téry is able to draw from this single gesture a general assertion about the Spanish Republic and the people who inhabit it: ‘Tel est le peuple espagnol’ (ibid., p. 29).78 Téry’s periodic inability to articulate the suffering to which she is witness is overcome when her camera is produced. The camera becomes for Téry an almost magical object, able to transform the attitude of her subjects. For these, the camera offers a medium through which, like Roland Barthes as he strikes a pose for a formal portrait, one can attempt to establish a genuine sense of self, of what persists in spite of the flight of time and the erosion of being, an image of how one would like to appear in the world; in short, a medium where one can attempt to portray oneself as fixed rather than transient and as an agent of one’s own creation.79 The suffering of the Spanish people is thus transfigured by its incorporation within a continuum characterized not only by the revolutionary humanist tradition, but by resilience and the spirit of resistance more generally. In this, these writers resist the disruption that the Nationalists attempt to inflict upon the Republic rather than merely record it; writing the defence of the Republic once again becomes an act of commitment rather than the disinterested activity of the objective journalist. Moreover, for Bloch, Jouve and Téry, suffering suggests more than resilience; it becomes part of the process by which radical changed is achieved. Thus Bloch considers the dead that litter the streets of Valencia the morning after the barracks had been seized from rebel troops as the very material through which history is being forged in Spain. Whilst the natural world looks on with an indifference reminiscent of that to be found in the novels of Malraux, the pro-Republican intellectual is able to invest such sacrifice with meaning: ‘deux cents cadavres gisent sous cette pureté, dans cette dureté [du ciel de cette matinée méditerannéenne]. Il y a une heure, leurs yeux voyaient ce soleil paisible, reflétaient ce ciel minéral et indifférent; ils vivaient. L’histoire est en marche …’ [two hundred corpses lie under the pure 78

  ‘Such is the Spanish people.’   Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris, 1980), pp. 25‒7. For Barthes, however, any resulting impression of coincidence is purely illusory. 79

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and harsh sky of this Mediterranean morning. An hour ago their eyes could see this peaceful sun, reflected the sky’s mineral indifference; they lived. History is on the move …] (Espagne, Espagne!, p. 64). For Jouve, then, revolution can only be realized through the suffering of those who willingly undertake it. Revolution cannot be considered in abstract or idealized terms; it is characterized by radical material change and therefore real action and pain are required in order that these changes be made real: Il est bon et beau que beaucoup, même parmi les plus fervents révolutionnaires, portent en eux une image sublimée de la révolution. Mais ce schéma intellectualisé manque d’épaisseur, la réalité ne peut se couler dans ce moule trop étroit. Ce n’est pas avec des rêves que l’on soutient une lutte efficace: c’est avec des bras, avec des cœurs, avec de la chair. (Vu, en Espagne, p. 208) [It is well and good that many, even amongst the most ardent revolutionaries, carry within themselves a sublimated image of the revolution. But this intellectualized outline lacks depth; reality cannot flow into such a shallow mould. An effective fight is not waged with dreams, but with arms, hearts and flesh.]

Again, the revolutionary utopia allows a restricted place for the dream, for the grand scheme, but subordinates this to effective planning and action undertaken in the real world and therefore with real physical consequences for its perpetrators. Furthermore, Téry’s description of the Republican victory at Teruel in December 1937 recasts the suffering of Republican troops and of the civilian population in a trope plagiarized from far-right narratives of warfare; death now becomes the process by which a new society is born as she celebrates ‘la vie nouvelle qui venait de naître dans le sang’.80 Pain and suffering, essential to establishing solidarity between the observed Republicans and the observing French readership of reportage, thus also becomes the process by which the new state is created; Nationalist deconstruction is reversed as the suffering it occasions becomes the means by which the radical Republic is brought into being through the assertion of persistence and resilience over passivity and victimhood. In this way, these representations of the Civil War reflect Scarry’s assertion that war more generally lies at a mid-way point between the total destruction and negation of being she associates with torture and the world-making activity proper to civilization.81 Téry’s accounts of the bombings of Madrid and Barcelona are thus counterbalanced by references to the Spanish Republic as a regime that is still in   ‘The new life which had just been born in blood’ (Front de la liberté, p. 289). Quoting Azaña, Bloch also suggests the restorative potential of suffering occasioned by violence: ‘Le goût de la flamme purificatrice a toujours été un goût spécifiquement espagnol’ [The predilection for the purifying flame has always been a specifically Spanish one] (Espagne, Esapgne!, p. 42). 81  Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 144. 80

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the process of being created; Nationalist destruction is therefore offset and resisted through Republican construction. As the communist education minister Jésus Hernandez informs Téry: ‘Mais à côté des hommes en armes, des villes détruites, des enfants massacrés, des femmes douloureuses, il y a l’Espagne au travail. Nous faisons la guerre aux fascistes, mais dans le même temps nous édifions l’Espagne de demain’ [Besides [its] combatants, destroyed cities, slaughtered children, there is industrious Spain. We are waging war on the fascists, but at the same time we are constructing the Spain of tomorrow]. Téry’s horror in Madrid is temporarily forgotten as she admits to being ‘stupéfait[e] de l’œuvre constructive réalisée par l’Espagne républicaine en un an, au milieu de la guerre la plus cruelle, la plus inégale …’ [stupefied by the construction work carried out by Republican Spain in one year and in the midst of the cruellest, most unfair war …]. What follows is admiration for ‘L’Espagne loyale [qui] est si sûre de la victoire qu’elle n’attend pas la paix pour s’accomplir’ [Loyalist Spain [which] is so certain of victory that it is not waiting for peace in order to realize itself] (Front de la liberté, p. 100) and its achievements in the areas of education, reconstruction and agriculture.82 Similarly, Jouve comments: Peu de choses sont aussi émouvantes que cette lutte entreprise simultanément sur des fronts si divers. Dans l’ordre militaire, dans l’ordre économique, culturel, social, les hommes du Front Populaire se devaient de réaliser les aspirations profondes du peuple, étant bien entendu que chaque victoire, quel que soit le terrain sur lequel on la remporte, deviendrait le gage d’autres victoires. (Vu, en Espagne, p. 201) [Few things are as moving as this struggle undertaken simultaneously on such different fronts. In the military, economic, cultural and social spheres, the men of the Popular Front took the duty upon themselves to realize the profound hopes of the people, understanding that each victory, on whichever ground it was won, would ensure further victories.]

The organization of an effective Republican army and educational, cultural and social policy cohere in the Spanish Republic since they emanate from a coincidence of popular will and government. Moreover, the construction of the new state is an embodiment of the will of the people reflected in the policies of Frente Popular ministers; it is therefore a reflection of that coincidence of wills between leaders and led felt by many supporters of the Front Populaire to be lacking in France from the summer of 1936. 82

  Narratives of the destruction of the cityscape are counterbalanced by images of reconstruction. Thus Chamson writes: ‘Tout est vivant, tout est laborieux. Partout, s’élèvent des échafaudages, partout montent des constructions nouvelles’ [Everything is alive and a hive of activity. Everywhere scaffolding is going up. Everywhere new buildings arise] (Rien qu’un témoignage, p. 26).

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Death and destruction in narratives of Republican life are also counterbalanced by new life as Téry, quoting Hernandez once more, reveals that, so optimistic are the women of Madrid and so confident in victory, they have produced 20,000 children since the outbreak of war.83 In Rien qu’un témoignage this fecundity and productivity spills over into the countryside: ‘Mais, rouge ou jaune, humide ou poussiéreuse, des deux côtés de la route, vers les horizons sans cesse renouvelés, la terre portrait partout le marque de l’homme et rendait en fécondité ce qu’elle avait reçu de travail et d’amour’ [Whether red or yellow, damp or dusty, the earth that rose up on either side of the road and stretched endlessly beyond our horizon, bore the mark of man and returned in fecundity what it had received in toil and love] (pp. 16‒17). Again, a mirroring of the trope of the return to order found in pro-Nationalist reportage is discernible here. Yet the discovery of a harmony between peasant and nature is a direct result of Republican land reforms and of radical social change, of ‘le partage des terres [qui] venait de bouleverser ici les rapports de l’homme et du champ qui le nourrit’ [the distribution of land which had recently overturned the relationship between man and the field that nourishes him] (ibid., p. 17). It is therefore the result of a policy change that has destroyed, so Chamson believes, the alienation previously inherent in the peasant’s condition. The resulting peace and order that Chamson sees in both city and countryside is the consequence of the abolition of an alienated lifestyle, of a new harmony between the individual and the state. Reflected in such images of peace, harmony and meaningful labour is the revolutionary utopia of a state of affairs marked by ‘the abolition of the division of labour, the development of individual potential, the transformation of work and increase in material prosperity …’, as Levitas writes of Marx’s communist utopia.84 The constructivist activity of the Republic reflects once more the utopian potential with which these authors have invested the Spanish Republic in response to their domestic deceptions. Moreover, the dialectical tension between construction and deconstruction is resolved in favour of the seeming inevitability of a Republican victory that guarantees the triumph of the former since, according to Téry, Spanish Republicans luttent et ils meurent au nom de la vie, pour cette vie de la nouvelle Espagne qui, endormie pendant tant de siècles, fait son entrée irrésistible dans l’histoire, de cette nouvelle Espagne qui restera vivante à jamais, quand bien même elle serait écrasée par la mitraille étrangère, quand bien même la botte fasciste se poserait sur le dernier pouce de sa terre. Cette Espagne-là se relèverait, cette Espagne est immortelle …. (Front de la liberté, p. 188)

83  Téry, Front de la liberté, p. 104. In the same interview, Téry expresses gushing admiration for Republican education reforms, far superior to those already achieved in France (ibid., p. 103). 84  Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 42.

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[are fighting and dying in the name of life, for this life of new Spain which, dormant for so long, is now bursting irresistibly onto the stage of history, of this new Spain that will live forever, even if it were to be crushed by foreign arms, even if the fascist boot were to stamp its mark on to every last piece of land. That Spain would rise up again. That Spain is immortal ….]

Like Mannheim’s socialist-communist utopia, the revolutionary utopia evoked in these works draws upon the materiality of the lives of the oppressed, its physical challenges and difficulties, transforming these through ‘a glorification of the material aspects of existence, which were formally experienced merely as negative and obstructive factors’.85 The future is now seen to be forged through the struggle of the present. The people of Madrid, according to Téry, ‘a la conscience que la lutte sera longue et dure, la volonté farouche de supporter dans l’avenir tous les sacrifices qu’on a supportés dans le passé, et de plus durs s’il le faut’ [are aware that the struggle will be long and hard. They are fiercely determined to make in future all those sacrifices that have been made in the past and still harsher [sacrifices] if necessary] (Front de la liberté., p. 117). The problematic present and near future are now transfused with meaning by the promise of a still distant post-revolutionary end of history suggested in the rebuilding of the Republic. The present thus becomes a single point in a series of strategic points experienced along the way to the revolutionary utopia. Here again it resembles closely Mannheim’s socialist-communist utopia. Like the latter, the present is three dimensional, belonging to the here and now, but also reflecting past events on the path to revolution, drawing on a long revolutionary tradition, whilst simultaneously pregnant with the hope of a postrevolutionary future at an as yet unspecified point in time.86 In this, the revolutionary utopia, like Mannheim’s socialist-communist utopia, assimilates its three principal rival utopias: the conservative, the liberalhumanitarian and the chiliastic or anarchist utopias. Of the conservative utopia, it retains a sense of determinism; hence the ability of these authors to employ some of the tropes also encountered in pro-Nationalist reportage and its restorationist utopia in an uncanny mirroring across the political divide. Of the liberal-humanitarian utopia, it retains a sense of progression; educational, social and military reforms thus become staging posts in these narratives on the way to more radical change as the minimal programme sets out to rejoin the maximum programme, anticipating it. Of the anarchist utopia, the promise of radical transformation is retained, but its imminence denied as the revolution is suspended; thus authors remain faithful to the popular front principle of the postponement of the revolution whilst betraying an eagerness to see this in the construction of the new Spanish Republic. Bloch’s enthusiastic, but ultimately restrained response to the first days of war in Republican Barcelona is telling in this respect:  Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 217.   Ibid., pp. 219‒21.

85 86

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The revolutionary utopia totalizes the experience of time; the chaos of the present is saturated with inherited meaning and pregnant with future hope. The resultant image of the Spanish Republic is totalitarian in the sense that every experience is imbued with meaning and placed in relation to the coming revolution in which any remaining gaps between need and reality will be bridged. All aspects of life, including the private sphere, are invested with revolutionary directionality and saturated with meaning. Thus, for example, Téry’s visit to the family home of the anarchist general Cipriano Méra, incorporates the intimacy of Méra’s private life within a public, revolutionary trajectory: ‘Comme tout est devenu clair, alors, la vie de Cipriano Méra, son caractère, et toute la tragédie espagnole, et la certitude de la victoire!’ [How everything then became clear: the whole of Cipriano Méra’s life, the whole of the Spanish tragedy and the certainty of victory!] (Front de la liberté, p. 139).87 In this, pro-Republican images of the Republican zone reflect what Northrop Frye considers a twentieth-century propensity for a form of governing totality applicable in every sphere of life: For all our dislike of the word totalitarian, we have to recognize that there is a profound and genuine, if ultimately specious, appeal in any form of social activity which promises to expand into a complete way of life, engaging all aspects of one’s interests and providing fulfilment for one’s cultural, spiritual, and intellectual as well as social needs.88

87   Ironically, Méra, whose conversion to the principles of discipline and organization over spontaneity and to that of the postponement of the revolution is celebrated by Téry, like Miaja, another hero of Front de la liberté, would join Colonel Cassado and other officers and troops (known as the Cassadists) in their revolt against the PCE’s influence over the Republican regime in the last days of the war. He would die in exile in Saint Cloud, a working-class district of Paris, having returned to his original profession of builder. 88  Frye, The Modern Century, pp. 100‒101.

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Yet, whilst the totalitarian fascist utopia examined in the previous chapter is organic, magical and aesthetic, the totalitarian revolutionary utopia evoked in the works studied in the present chapter is material and self-made by humanity. The result of this total coincidence of past, present and future, of the public and the private, is a totality of being embodied by a new species of man to be found in both Bloch’s and Téry’s accounts of Republican Spain. For Bloch, this new man, whose coming is anticipated in Spain, will resolve the Marxist problem of alienation. Espagne, Espagne! is a celebration of L’homme nouveau, … l’homme renaissant, … l’homme qui cesse d’être divisé contre lui-même, l’homme qui cesse d’être en lutte contre la nature, contre la société et contre lui-même, l’homme qui enfin crée de ses mains une société où le cœur et l’esprit retrouvent leur accord, où l’intelligence et la volonté peuvent marcher du même pas. (pp. 109‒10) [The new man, … the renascent man, … the man who is no longer divided against himself, the man who is no longer at war with nature, against society and himself, the man who creates with his own hands a new society where heart and mind rediscover their accord and where intelligence and will march arm in arm.]

Once again, the revolutionary utopia anticipates radical change without announcing its imminent arrival.89 The revolution thus remains suspended rather than postponed in these works, held before its French popular front readership. To achieve the illusion of totality of being encountered in the four writers studied here, the illusion of a total coincidence of political wills, objectives and means amidst the disparate elements of both the Front Populaire and the Frente Popular must be maintained. The representation of the Frente Popular as the embodiment of the revolutionary utopia therefore requires an obfuscation of internal differences, differences that became only too manifest from May 1937 when an internal civil war broke out between the quasi-Trotskyist POUM and government forces in Barcelona, an internal conflict that led to the repression 89

  As one Spanish communist points out to Bloch, reassuringly for most French readers, this coming-into-being of the new man is not yet at hand: ‘Nous, communistes et socialistes castillans, nous pensons qu’il faudra des générations pour nettoyer l’homme et lui faire perdre des habitudes qu’il a mises des siècles à prendre. Quand il naîtra avec de nouvelles façons de penser, généreuses et désintéressées, quand il sera élevé dans un monde où il n’y aura plus de classes sociales ni de misère physique et intellectuelle, alors on ne verra plus de gens mesquins et moralement bas. … Nous savons que cela demandera du temps’ [We Castilian communists and socialists believe that it will take generations to purify man and to make him abandon habits he has spent centuries acquiring. When he is born with new, generous and disinterested ways of thinking, when he is brought up in a classless world with no physical or intellectual misery, then we will no longer see mean spirited people of lowly morals. … We know that this will take time] (Espagne, Espagne!, pp. 74‒5).

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of the POUM throughout the Republican zone at the behest of Stalin and the PCE.90 While Téry makes reference to the POUMist policy of collectivization in contravention of government policy and Bloch alludes to the difficulty of reining in FAI-CNT, most references to internal Republican divisions remain veiled.91 Jouve merely invokes a need for military discipline in the wake of the fall of Toledo, the result of ‘Ordres donnés au petit bonheur et qui appellent un immédiat contre-ordre’ (Vu, en Espagne, p. 131),92 while Chamson’s assertion that ‘L’Espagne [républicaine] paraît avoir trouvé la force de surmonter ses contradictions’ [Republican Spain appears to have found the strength to overcome its contradictions] (Retour d’Espagne, p. 76) merely hints at these without elucidating them. The totalizing potential of the revolutionary utopia, superficially, appears in tact and to correspond to a unified, popular front perspective rather than to derive from the utopian inclinations of a particular constituent party. Closing the Gap Although Jouve, having returned from Spain, which she now contemplates from the safety of the Hendaye bridge, reminds the reader that discipline and military efficiency are henceforth imperative for a Republican army still too prone to gestures of spontaneity and disorganization, the utopian potential and its promise of a radically transformed future still shine through: ‘Les lueurs rouges que nous voyons de l’autre côté des Pyrénées ne sont pas uniquement des lueurs d’incendie. Il brille en elles les rayons d’une lumière venue de très haut’ [The red lights that we see from the other side of the Pyrenees are not only those emanating from fires. They reflect within them a light from on high]. This light is that of a new dawn, Jouve contends (Vu, en Espagne, p. 211). The appeal of Republican Spain for Bloch, Chamson, Jouve and Téry lies, as Hollander states of political pilgrims to the USSR, in the appearance it gave of ‘closing, at long last, the gap between social ideals and their realization, implementing the age-old ideal of Western civilization and religions … [T]he distasteful gap between ideal and actual, thought and deed was being bridged …’.93 As such pro-Republican reportage is indicative of a political lack on the part of 90   By now the Republic was dependent on Soviet aid, thereby allowing the PCE to exert further influence on the regime. It was in the wake of the events of May 1937 that Prieto, Minister of War in the Negrín government of the day, set up the Soviet-inspired Republican secret police, the Servicio de Investigacíon Militar (SIM). For analysis of these events, see Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, Chapter 37, and Beever, The Battle for Spain, Chapter 23. 91  See Front de la liberté, p. 113, and Espagne, Espagne!, p. 45. 92   ‘Randomly issued orders that are immediately countered.’ 93  Hollander, Political Pilgrims, p. 124.

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these writers; hope resides amidst the civil war raging in Spain rather than in the Front Populaire’s reformist activities in France, to which Jouve’s back is turned. In this the revolutionary utopia expressed in pro-Republican reportage reflects utopianism’s precondition described by Levitas as ‘a disparity between socially constructed experienced need and socially prescribed and actually available means of satisfaction’.94 It is the idealized Spanish Republic that emerges in such reportage which appears to remedy this disparity, but which also points to its very existence. In this respect, such reportage, through its elaboration of the revolutionary utopia, reflects the three primary functions of utopia: a compensation of present inadequacies, a criticism of these and ‘the expression or education of desire …’ that all aim to shape the readership’s desire for an elsewhere and an otherwise.95 The writer’s task, then, is akin to that associated by Jouve with another new figure to emerge from the Civil War: the clerc engagé [engaged intellectual or scholar] or the clerc laïque [secular intellectual or scholar]. The latter exists, like the political commissar who will replace him in the Republican ranks from October 1936, in order to reveal ‘la haute signification de la bataille, [pour] éclairer les points de doctrine obscures et tirer la morale de la fable’ [the higher significance of the battle, to explain obscure points of doctrine and to draw out the moral of the tale] (Vu, en Espagne, p. 88). This figure also appears in Front de la liberté in the form of Gustavo Durán, the musician turned general, and the German novelist and political commissar Gustav Regler. The former has abandoned ‘la plus ésotérique des musiques …’ [the most esoteric music] and ‘le suréalisme absolu’ [the most absolute surrealism] for ‘les mots précis’ [the precise words] of command. War, Durán implies, is now a more urgent and all-consuming ‘métier d’intellectuel’ [an intellectual’s job] (Front de la liberté, pp. 148‒9). Similarly, Regler, has been transformed from ‘l’écrivain émigré – un homme d’une pâleur maladive, silencieux …’ [the silent émigré writer of a sickly palour … ] into ‘un soldat en uniforme, … le teint hâlé par le grand air, le regard direct, … rayonnant d’une autorité allègre’ [a uniformed soldier, … his complexion tanned by exposure to the open air, an ability to look you in the eye, … exuding a light-hearted authority] (ibid., p. 256). Like Durán he has abandoned art. Like these French authors, Regler possesses a utopian vision predicated on a synthesis of past, present and future that, like Bloch, associates civilization and revolution, as he declares to Téry: ‘Sauver la démocratie, sauver les droits de l’homme, ce n’est pas seulement sauvegarder les conquêtes du passé, c’est entrer dans une ère nouvelle’ [Saving democracy and the rights of man is not only a question of safeguarding the past; it’s also a question of entering a new era] (ibid., p. 258). The pro-Republican intellectuals examined in this chapter all assume this task of synthesizing past, present and future within a revolutionary utopia that is designed to offset their own domestic political frustrations. Like these figures, however, 94   In this way, a utopian impulse is socially and historically specific rather than a revelation of an immutable human nature. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 183. 95  Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 180.

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they have had to suppress a certain complexity associated with art and artistry. Whilst all manifest an interest in the literary quality and durability of their work, employing certain literary devices, this interest is almost immediately masked by a profession of disinterest and of the need for immediate communication. Indeed, for Kershaw, this choice of reportage, témoignage or travel literature over the novel by authors who had also published as novelists reflects ‘a particular relationship to engagement’ usually characterized by ‘a negative choice against fiction …’ which prompts Kershaw to ask: ‘Did [writers] fear an inevitable link between fiction and polysemy that might betray their protestations of certainty in other contexts? Did they fear the tendency of fiction to escape interpretive control?’96 Could the popular front revolution sought by these writers and by certain elements of the Front only be sustained through an ultimately reductive treatment of the Spanish Republican regime and its people? Could art combine a complex, polyphonic representation of the Republic and sustain the myth of a united left whilst simultaneously exposing its internal tensions without undermining the cause it embraces or betraying a deception with the reality of the Republic? To the monologism of reportage, we now turn to the polyphony of art and André Malraux’s fictions of the Civil War.

96

  Kershaw, ‘French and British Female Intellectuals and the Soviet Union’, p. 69.

Chapter 5

Fellow-Travelling to Spain: Malraux, L’Espoir and the Civil War Like the intellectual supporters of the Spanish Republic discussed in the previous chapter, André Malraux’s defence of the regime emerged directly from his antifascist activities and support for the Front Populaire. He too was a member of the AEAR. He too had rallied to the defence of German communists and intellectuals persecuted by the Nazi regime. He too had spoken publicly of the need for popular front unity in order to defeat fascism at home and abroad. In addition to this, his novels of the 1930s had closely associated him with international revolutionary politics. Furthermore, his 1935 novel, Le Temps du mépris, had constituted a first literary broadside against Nazism and appeared to reflect his rapprochement with the Communist Party in its sympathetic depiction of Party fraternity in adversity.1 Malraux’s literary and political activity had therefore become closely associated in the mid 1930s. This pattern continued following the failure of the pronunciamiento and the outbreak of civil war. A degree of mystery, to which Malraux contributed himself, surrounds his actual involvement in fighting the Nationalists, but his part in establishing a Republican air force via the España squadron he founded in the summer of 1936 is well documented, even if the squadron’s effectiveness is sometimes questioned.2 So too are his efforts to encourage North American support for the Republicans during a propaganda tour in the spring of 1937. The André Malraux of the mid 1930s and of the Civil War years is therefore perceived by many as a text-book communist fellow-traveller. For Winock, and despite his indifference to Marxist economic theories and his   Malraux’s first novel, Les Conquérants (The Conquerors), describing the general strike in Canton in 1926, was published to much critical acclaim in 1928, receiving the Prix Interallié. His second novel, La Voie royale (The Royal Way), published in 1930, was set amidst tribal revolts in the French colonial territory of Indochina. His third novel, La Condition humaine (The Human Condition), published in 1933, is set against the revolutionary context of China in 1927 and won the Prix Goncourt that year. 2   Michel Winock cites the criticism of Ignacio de Cisneros, the communist head of the Republican air force, in particular (Le Siècle des intellectuels, p. 280). However, such criticism is often informed by Cold War antagonisms and the resentment felt at Malraux’s postwar conversion to Gaullism and his attacks upon the USSR from 1947. For further considerations on this, see Robert S. Thornberry, André Malraux et l’Espagne (Geneva, 1977), pp. 72‒5. Further information on Malraux’s part in the Spanish Civil War can be found in Olivier Todd’s André Malraux: une vie (Paris, 2001). 1

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hostility to a dialectical concept of history, he remains throughout the 1930s ‘un compagnon de route exemplaire. Pour le meilleur et pour le pire’, if not exactly married to the Party, engaged to and with it through his belief that international communism remained the most effective way to defeat international fascism.3 L’Espoir, the novel he wrote in the summer of 1937 and which was published in December that year, forms part of Malraux’s propaganda efforts on behalf of the Republic, reflecting this association of political activism and literary activity. Consequently, for Geoffrey Harris, it is the first novel in which Malraux draws directly on his own lived experience, published with the aim of gathering further financial support for the Spanish Republic abroad.4 For John Romeiser, L’Espoir was conceived with the intention of denouncing non-intervention through ‘an implied critique of the leaders of the remaining democratic governments … unable or unwilling to help Spain …’.5 As Philippe Carrard observes, Malraux’s novel imposes the legitimacy of the Republican cause as self-evident rather than attempting to prove it.6 It is therefore widely considered Malraux’s most committed work, but one which, like any form of propaganda, is prepared to bend historical fact in order to achieve its immediate aims.7 That L’Espoir, a work of fiction, falls short as a history of the Civil War is perhaps one of the more naïve criticisms levelled at Malraux’s novel. For many, and it is here that the charge of communist fellow-travelling applies most convincingly, Malraux’s primary propagandistic intention in publishing the novel was to highlight the continued possibility of a Republican victory in late 1937, a victory that was only possible through the application of discipline and the reorganization, along Communist Party lines and under centralized control, of the Republican armed forces, a line of argument which legitimized the incorporation of the militias and, arguably, the suppression of those who resisted. For Goldmann, therefore, L’Espoir reveals that, at its time of publication, Malraux, along with many other intellectual ‘paraxmarxists’, had accepted the Party’s position on the 3   ‘An exemplary fellow-traveller in good times and in bad’ (Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, p. 286). For David Caute, however, it is precisely this refusal of Marxist doctrine and his persistent interest in the question of leadership and elites that disqualify Malraux as a communist fellow-traveller (Caute, The Fellow-Travellers, p. 190). 4   Geoffrey T. Harris, André Malraux: A Reassessment (London: MacMillan Press Ltd, 1996), p. 8 and pp. 145‒6. 5   John B. Romeiser, ‘His Master’s Voice: Leadership Lessons in L’Espoir’ in Geoffrey T. Harris (ed.), André Malraux. Across Boundaries (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 117‒39, p. 117. 6   Philippe Carrard, Malraux ou le récit hybride: essai sur les techniques narratives dans ‘L’Espoir’ (Paris, 1976), p. 123. 7   See, for example, François Trécourt, ‘Le Traitement du cadre historique dans L’Espoir: l’exemple de l’Acazar de Tolède’ in Robert S. Thornberry (ed.), André Malraux et la guerre civile espagnole (1936‒1937). Essais sur la genèse de ‘L’Espoir’ réunis par Robert S. Thornberry (n.p., 1988), pp. 56‒75, p. 72.

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Spanish conflict. Its central thesis of discipline and organization over revolutionary spontaneity, Goldmann argues, is essentially Stalinist.8 Yet, while Suleiman also sees in L’Espoir the defence of the same thesis, she refutes Goldmann’s claim that all dissenting voices are ultimately subjugated to this; rather, L’Espoir is a roman à thèses, a dialogical reformulation of a genre primarily associated with monologism, clarity of meaning and ideological closure.9 It is therefore simultaneously experimental fiction and work of propaganda.10 This chapter will focus on the immediate political aims of L’Espoir and how Malraux’s dialogism draws upon, and attempts to resolve, the tensions that exist between a series of competing utopian visions within the Republic. Unlike the pro-Republican accounts examined in the previous chapter, L’Espoir does not shy away from evoking the political divisions of the Republic. Whilst the former often simplify the ideological diversity of the Republicans, pointing to the existence of a single revolutionary utopia associated with the Frente Popular, L’Espoir exploits the Front’s political diversity in order to advance the argument for discipline and organization. While the war constitutes primarily a dispute between loyalists and rebels in the reportage of Téry, Chamson, Bloch and Jouve, for Malraux it also exists, as it does for George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, as an explicit object of disputation among Republicans. The novel’s adumbration of methodological differences as to how to prosecute the war amidst anarchists, communists, socialists and liberals frequently suggests fundamentally different worldviews and ultimate aims informed by competing utopian visions, which are precariously held in abeyance in the pursuit of a single, immediate goal: the defeat of the Nationalists. However, in L’Espoir, as is in all of Malraux’s fiction, the engagement with the present, the desire to impact upon the real through the act of writing, is wedded to a preoccupation with the human condition that transcends the immediate. Malraux’s heroes are, by and large, individuals who intellectualize their political experiences, contextualizing these within an ongoing and seemingly permanent struggle for human meaning in a hostile world. The political and the metaphysical therefore vie for the reader’s attention in Malraux’s fiction and it is the metaphysical considerations of Malraux’s heroes that explain at least in part the longevity of his oeuvre. The second part of this chapter will therefore consider how such considerations emerge from, and merge with, Malraux’s representation of the Civil War, but also how these complicate and potentially undermine the political immediacy of L’Espoir and its call for a broad anti-fascist coalition in support of the Spanish Republic.

 Goldmann, Pour une sociologie du roman, p. 144.  Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, pp. 136‒41. 10   For Carrard, therefore, L’Espoir reveals Malraux’s interest in not only communicating ideas, but in crafting an accomplished tale. Carrard argues that the work reveals throughout ‘la médiation d’une écriture’ [the conscious mediation of a writer’s mind]. Carrard, Malraux ou le récit hybride, p. 112.  8  9

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Popular Front Tensions and the Struggle for the Moment While the revolutionary utopia examined in the previous chapter reflects the will of an apparently single, unified group, Malraux does not depict the Frente Popular as a single homogenous unit. The argument for discipline and organization is therefore not simply stated, but elaborated through the dialogic exchange of characters from different political perspectives. This central argument is an object woven together by the criss-crossing of divergent discourses on the subjects of revolution, the Civil War and its conduct. Malraux’s argument for organization and discipline exists therefore as an utterance that reveals the existence of other voices around and within it for, as Bakhtin writes, ‘The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological con­sciousness around the given object of an utterance …’.11 If the reader is attentive enough, Bakhtin argues, these continue to make themselves heard in the utterance. The Frente Popular of L’Espoir is alive with dialogic tensions and oppositions, the most immediately apparent of which is that between those who seek to maintain the ‘illusion lyrique’ [lyrical illusion] of spontaneous revolutionary action, outlined in the first part of the novel, and the organizers of an eventual Republican victory who come to the fore in the second and third parts of the novel. This opposition is simplified in Goldmann’s analysis to that between the forces of anarchy on the one hand and those of communism and military discipline on the other. The first group are embodied in characters such as Puig and Le Négus, whose enthusiastic spontaneity proves effective only in the first desperate hours of the rebellion as they resist courageously, but not always effectively, the military uprising in Barcelona. The second group are embodied by communist characters such as Manuel, whose successful transformation from bohemian to military commander proves the novel’s dominant thesis, and military leaders, such as Ximénès, the Civil Guard commander who remains loyal to the Republic and who tutors Manuel in the ways of military command.12 The opposition between revolutionary spontaneity and military organization in L’Espoir becomes more generally, however, an opposition between means and ends and between modes of being, between être and faire; the spontaneity of being and the necessary pursuit of a set of actions through which the war can be won. The problem for Malraux is an ethical as well as political one, then, and it appears that strategy and the postponement of the revolution ultimately win out: Puig’s Catalan anarchists are 11

  Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p. 276.   Malraux’s characters are not novelized versions of the real leading players in the Republican camp, but do reflect some traits of the latter. Manuel therefore bears a certain resemblance to the musician-turned-military commander Durán. Ximénès’s exploits in Barcelona are based on those of Colonel Escobar. Malraux’s aviators resemble those he encountered in Spain, Magnin reflecting some of Malraux’s own experiences and dilemmas. 12

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decimated as they advance on the rebels in the Hotel Colon, Puig himself dying at the wheel of a lorry in a suicidal assault on enemy lines. Shortly afterwards, Manuel and Barca witness the massacre of militiamen of all parties as they advance carelessly towards Nationalist machinegun posts. In both cases, it is the example not of the communists, as in the work of Téry, but of the Civil Guards and the Assault Guards respectively that suggests the necessity of organization. As Harris cautions, and as the above suggests, the primacy of the leadership thesis in L’Espoir should not be equated with the primacy of communism over the other constituent elements of the Frente Popular. Indeed, the role of party affiliation in the novel has sometimes been exaggerated; the need for discipline and organization is announced and embodied not only by communists, such as Manuel and Heinrich, but also by the Catholic Ximénès and the non-affiliated intellectual Garcia, among others.13 Similarly, the ‘illusion lyrique’ is less a form of anarchist revolutionary spontaneity specific to FAI and CNT members, where the immediacy of engagement replaces the strategy demanded by praxis, and more a form of popular enthusiasm born of a revolt in which not only anarchist characters share. Liberal humanists, such as the French volunteer Mercery and the Republican army commander of the siege of the Toledo Alcazar, Hernandez, are also associated with a form of gestural combat, where ethics dominate effectiveness, where the outcome is personal and immediate and which proves to be ultimately ineffective against the fascists, as Malraux designates the Nationalists and their foreign allies throughout L’Espoir. Between these two positions we find the more complex character of Magnin, the leader of an air squadron of international volunteers and mercenaries who, whilst gradually convinced of the need for organization, fears the loss of revolutionary fraternity it will entail, a loss that threatens the very spirit of popular frontism. Caught between these two tendencies, Magnin’s volunteers serve as both a reminder of the popular front spirit and of the transience of party affiliation. Thus, while Magnin defines himself as a socialist, ‘Mais gauche révolutionnaire’ [But revolutionary left], he does so in response to a question that is asked in the imperfect tense: ‘Au fait, que’est-ce que tu étais?’ [By the way, what were you?], suggesting that issues of party affiliation, for the aviators at least, are now obsolete.14 Magnin’s primary allegiance is to a broader left: ‘j’étais à gauche parce que j’étais à gauche … et ensuite, il s’est noué entre la gauche et moi toutes sortes de liens, de fidélités; j’ai compris ce qu’ils voulaient, je les ai aidés à le faire et j’ai été de plus près d’eux chaque fois qu’on a voulu davantage les en empêcher …’ (pp. 97‒8)

13   Geoffrey T. Harris, ‘L’Espoir: Party Propaganda or Leadership Lesson?’ in Thornberry (ed.), André Malraux et la guerre civile espagnole (1936‒1937), pp. 112‒17, p. 114. 14   André Malraux, L’Espoir (Paris, 1992), p. 98, © Editions Gallimard.

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[I was on the left because I was on the left … and then all sorts of ties, loyalties developed between me and the left. I understood what they wanted and I helped them to achieve this. And each time someone tried to stop them, I grew closer to them …]

One anonymous voice then asserts, in response to Vallado’s interjection that one’s ideas change, ‘Les gens que je défends, eux n’ont pas changé. Et il n’y a ça qui compte’ (p. 98).15 For Magnin, political engagement is primarily an impulse to which explanations are later attached.16 The various tensions at work in L’Espoir should be considered as resulting from that opposition of utopian visions within the Republican camp identified in the introduction and which Malraux considers to be less an opposition between parties and more one between mentalités.17 The ‘illusion lyrique’ therefore needs to be examined as the representation of a utopian impulse shared by a variety of actors within the Spanish Republic, a utopian impulse which then comes up against a counter-utopia proposed by the advocates of organization, discipline and the conquest of the future through the deployment of military strategy in the present, which I shall term the strategic revolutionary utopia. Malraux’s Frente Popular is not characterized by a single utopian vision, but by an antagonism between rival utopias. In this way, it resonates with polyphonic tensions, a characteristic that Ricœur discerns in Mannheim’s concept of utopia more generally.18 Characters are estab­lish­ed, particularly in the novels’ early chapters, as the bearers of ideologemes that exist in dialogic, but also fraternal relation to one another. Each individual character, as Bakhtin states more generally of novelistic characters, ‘is always more or less an ideologue’ and, as Carrard notes, often belongs to a particular social class.19 Differences are aired through dialogue between characters, but also through differing perceptions of the war as the perspective of individual characters is adopted by a narrator who, for the most part, refuses a form of interventionist omniscience associated predominantly with the nineteenthcentury realist novel. Characters, such as Magnin, Scali and Garcia become what Carrard terms the privileged reflectors of the novel.20 Descriptive motifs in the 15

  ‘The people I defend, they haven’t changed. And that’s all that counts.’   ‘Magnin admire les justifications que l’intelligence des hommes apporte à leurs passions’ [Magnin admires the justifications that men’s intelligence applies to their passions] (L’Espoir, p. 97). 17   Moreover, this opposition is not one limited to the Spanish Republic since it is an opposition already discernible in some of Malraux’s earlier novels, notably Les Conquérants and La Condition humaine. It is one therefore that pertains to revolutionary activity more generally and one that transcends the moment. 18  Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, p. 275. 19   Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, pp. 3‒40, p. 38, and Carrard, Malraux ou le récit hybride, p. 47. 20  Carrard, Malraux ou le récit hybride, p. 45. 16

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novel are inflected by the perception of characters associated with a particular experience and vision of the Civil War. Consequently, the opposing visions of L’Espoir are articulated primarily through an understanding of time, but one that is also predicated upon particular experiences of space. The tension at the heart of the novel derives, then, from what Bakhtin would consider a chronotopic tension; one that draws on the dialogic opposition of two opposing conceptualizations of time and space. The ‘illusion lyrique’ is played out in the early street battles in Madrid and Barcelona in July 1936, in skirmishes with Falangists, climaxing in the Apocalypse that is the failure to defeat the Nationalists in Toledo in September that year. It is also an experience of time suggested not only in the exchange of views between characters within the Republican camp, but also in descriptive motifs. It is initially denoted by an atmosphere of popular front camaraderie as anarchists, communists and socialists work together, suggested in the cooperation of the FAI and the UGT; ‘la nuit n’était que fraternité’ (p. 19), the narrator notes.21 The outbreak of civil war appears to dissipate the tension between the parties of the left, directing their energies towards their real, common enemy so that ‘cette nuit de guerre semblait une immense libération’ (p. 18).22 The left therefore appears united through a shared praxis, as Manuel realizes: ‘il y avait cette nuit chargée d’un espoir trouble et sans limites, cette nuit où chaque homme avait quelque chose à faire sur la terre’ [there was this night full of a troubled, limitless hope, this night when every man had something to do on earth] (p. 21). As Manuel suggests, the left’s hope, like that ultimately posited by the novel’s title, operates on two levels: it concerns the immediate aim of defeating the rebels, but it is also limitless, stretching beyond the specificity of the moment, and conferring on humanity not only a task, but, through this, meaning and direction; it is simultaneously of immediate significance to those defending the Republic and of ahistorical significance. For Malraux’s contemporaneous readership, however, the descriptions of the first confrontations between Republicans and Nationalists point to a supreme moment of popular front unity, one which had been lost in France at the time of publication, which overwhelms participants irrespective of their party affiliations. Thus Barca, a communist joining an attack on Falangist machine guns in the Sierra above Madrid, ‘courait aussi, transporté, plongé dans une confusion fervente qu’il appelait le peuple … qui maintenant montait, en un seul corps, à l’attaque des canons fascistes’ [ran, transported, plunged into a confused fervour that he called the people … which was now rising as one body against the fascist cannons] (pp. 80‒81). The experience of the ‘illusion lyrique’ is marked not only by a temporary absorption into the spontaneous unity of the people, but also by a sort of sensorial excess. It is a deafening experience: in Barcelona workers fight amidst ‘le tocsin haletant des sirènes d’usine’ [the breathless tocsin of factory sirens] (p. 27) to 21

  ‘The night was nothing but fraternity.’   ‘This first night of war seemed an immense liberation.’

22

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the extent that ‘le hurlement tour à tour long et précipité des sirènes emplissait les maisons, les rues, l’air, et tout le golfe jusqu’aux montagnes’ [the alternately protracted and shortened wailing of the sirens filled the houses, the streets, the air and the entire gulf right up to the mountains] (p. 28). In Madrid, ‘l’hymne républicain diffusé par vingt radios …’ (p. 133) can be heard.23 The ‘illusion lyrique’ not only assails the combatants’ ears, but also their noses. Barca’s attack is carried out to the accompaniment of the thundering of a Republican cannon and to the oppressive smell of ‘la résine des pins [qui] emplissait de son odeur de cercueil l’air qui tremblait …’ (p. 75).24 The deafening playing of the Republican anthem in Madrid is also complemented by the smell of burning leaves that fills the air. This overloading of the aural and olfactory senses, reflected in the consciousness of many of those characters who experience combat in the first few days of the war, is suggestive of a world apparently poised on a moment of monumental change. The indiscipline, spontaneity and enthusiasm with which the militias fight in the Sierras transcend party political divides as time is experienced by the majority of participants as kairos; informed by the impression that a radical, transformational moment is at hand. The present is invaded by a sense of the imminence of a sudden transformation of the real that will burst into being, shattering the present order of things. In this way, the ‘illusion lyrique’ echoes Mannheim’s chiliastic utopia, a utopian mentality and experience of time derived from the Christian millenarian tradition, whose principal descendents were to be found in early twentieth-century anarchist movements. According to Mannheim, anarchism, like chiliasm, prizes revolution as a ‘value in itself, not as an unavoidable means to a rationally set end, but as the only creative principle of the immediate present …’.25 The revolutionary, like the chiliast, lives in an ecstatic state in a heightened present. This primacy of the present for the militias of 1936 is suggested by Le Négus who defines the aim of the anarchist as ‘Vivre comme la vie doit être vécue, dès maintenant, ou décéder. Si ça rate, ouste. Pas d’aller-retour’ [To live life as it must be led: immediately, or to die. If we fail, so what? It’s a one-way journey] (p. 236). Thus, according to Garcia’s analysis, the militias attacking the Toledo Alcazar give priority to an ecstatic revolutionary experience within the framework of revolutionary fraternity rather than to a revolutionary praxis within which the defeat of the Alcazar would constitute a single strategic point: ‘Ils sont saouls d’une fraternité dont ils savent qu’elle ne peut pas durer comme ça. Et ils sont prêts à mourir après quelques jours d’exaltation – ou de vengeance, suivant les cas – où les hommes auront vécu selon leurs rêves. Notez [que Hernandez] nous l’a dit : avec leur cœur … Seulement, pour eux, cette mort justifie tout.’ (p. 244) 23

  ‘The Republican anthem played on twenty radios … ’   ‘The pine resin that filled the trembling air with its coffin odour … ’ 25  Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 196. See also Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 71. 24

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[They are drunk with a fraternity that they know cannot go on. And they are ready to die after a few days of exaltation, or vengeance, according to the individual, where men will have lived according to their dreams. Remember what Hernadez told us: with their hearts … It’s just that this death justifies everything for them.]

For Garcia, however, the Republican’s cause is not a revolutionary one. As he points out to Magnin: ‘Nous sommes le peuple, oui; la révolution non, bien que nous ne parlions que de ça’ [We are the people, yes, the revolution, no, although we talked of nothing but], thereby echoing official popular front policy. The combatants of the summer of 1936, he contends, are aping ‘deux ou trois mythes assez dangereux’ (p. 136);26 notably, those of the French and Russian Revolutions.27 The lyrical illusion is ultimately an apocalyptic phase of the war; a potentially selfdestructive one, exemplified by the generous, suicidal act of Puig, which must be organized if the Republic is not to be defeated since ‘l’Apoc­alypse n’a pas de futur’ (p. 140).28 The failure to defeat the besieged Nationalist troops in the Toledo Alcazar proves Garcia’s point. The fall of Toledo acts as a magnification of earlier individual examples of heroic, but ultimately futile gestures that were rescued by the intervention of the forces for order and discipline. Malraux’s depiction of the siege highlights the romanticism of individual militiamen: their eclectic uniforms and weaponry, their resistance to the command of a loyal, serving Republican army officer (the Catholic Hernandez), their lack of military savoir-faire reflected in the militiaman who fires blindly at the walls of the Alcazar or at the salvo aimed at a flare sent up by the besieged Nationalists. The lack of discipline is not restricted to the militias alone, however. Hernandez himself allows a letter from Moscardò to be delivered to the general’s wife in Madrid in a gesture that aims to reproduce the nobility of a bygone age. The uncensored letter carries information about Republican positions that will allow Franco’s Moors to dislodge the militias and to relieve the Alcazar. Hernandez’s resignation towards the fate of Toledo and his inability to rein in the militias suggest to Garcia once more the extent of apocalyptic thinking among the Republican forces. While the apocalypse is a societal event for the anarchists: ‘Pour [Hernandez] le drame que nous vivons est une Apocalypse personnelle. Ce qu’il y a de plus dangereux dans ces demichrétiens, c’est le goût de leur sacrifice: ils sont prêts aux pires erreurs, pourvu qu’ils paient de leur vie’ [For [Hernandez] the drama through which we are living is a personal Apocalypse. What’s most dangerous in these half-Christians is their 26

  ‘Two or three quite dangerous myths.’   Garcia’s observation appears born out in the text by the parallels Malraux’s privileged observers create between the events of July 1936 and previous revolutions in an echoing of the process already observed in pro-Republican reportage of the war. The unruly fire of cannons captured by FAI-CNT in Barcelona thus recalls engravings of the French Revolution (L’Espoir, p. 49). 28   ‘The Apocalypse has no future.’ 27

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taste for self-sacrifice; they are ready to make the worst mistakes provided they can pay with their lives] (p. 244). Correspondingly, the motifs of the lyrical illusion are multiplied. Toledo is denoted by a sensorial saturation surpassing that associated with Madrid and Barcelona in July. As Garcia arrives, his ears are assailed by explosions, but also by the Ride of the Valkyries blaring out on the radio in the town square (p. 144). Later this gives way to a Flamenco tune: ‘guttural, intense, il tenait du chant funèbre et du cri désespéré des caravaniers. Et il semblait se crisper sur la ville et l’odeur des cadavres comme les mains des tués se crispent sur la terre’ [guttural, intense, it resembled a funeral song or the despairing cry of nomads. And it seemed to grip the town and the odour of corpses like the hands of the dying grasp the earth] (p. 146). The deafening sounds are accompanied and associated with the smell of decomposing bodies that fills the air. Unlike the defeat of the Nationalists in Barcelona achieved through the conjoined efforts of anarchists and Civil Guards, Toledo is depicted by Malraux as the moment at which the apocalyptic intensity of the lyrical illusion collapses back in on itself. As Franco’s troops advance on Toledo and the Republican forces there become increasingly disorganized and panicstricken, the smell of burning fills the air, mingling with that of rotting corpses. This then combines with the sound of devouring flames, rendering ‘dérisoire le canon, les appels éloignés, et tout ce qui venait de l’agitation des hommes: l’odeur de feu et de cadavres mêlée, si épaisse qu’il semblait que l’Alcazar n’y pût suffire, qu’elle ne pût être que l’odeur même du vent et de la nuit’ [the cannon, the distant cries and all human agitation derisory. The smell of fire mixed with the odour of corpses, so thick that it seemed as if the Alcazar alone could not be the cause, that it could only be the smell of the wind and of the night] (pp. 259‒60). The looming loss of Toledo seems to point to the ultimate futility of all human action in an indifferent universe as well as to the military failings of the lyrical illusion in an early intimation of the metaphysical dilemma that the novel poses the reader. Indeed, spontaneous revolutionary activity, considered in Malraux’s novels of the early 1930s as a potential, if only temporary, antidote to the absurdity of the human condition in a world that denies the validity of our existence, thus becomes equated with those self same natural and cosmic forces against which the heroes of those novels fought and to which we shall return in Chapter 6. For the defenders of the novel’s central thesis the principal lesson derived from the loss of Toledo and the shambolic retreat by Republican militias before the advancing Moors is that Republican forces suffer from ‘une crise du com­ mandement’ (p. 202). Yet, it is from a crisis of command that the leader emerges, according to Ximénès. It is therefore against the backdrop of impending defeat that the plans for a possible victory emerge through a reconceptualization of the means of action in response to the militias’ deficiencies. Garcia’s role is key here. Yet, while, as a military intelligence officer, Garcia defines his function as that of organizing the Apocalypse (p. 140), he is not insensitive to the risks such organization runs. As he makes clear to Manuel, ‘Le besoin de la fraternité contre la passion de la hiérarchie, c’est une opposition très sérieuse dans ce pays …’

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[The need for fraternity as opposed to the love of hierarchy is a very important source of conflict in this country …] (p. 243). The resistance to military organization and to the postponement of the revolution among certain characters stems from the realization, as Garcia notes, that to accept these is to stifle the revolutionary and popular élan on which victory depends: ‘La question est tout bonnement: une action populaire comme celle-ci, – ou une révolution ou même une insurrection – ne maintient sa victoire que par une technique opposée aux moyens qui la lui ont donnée. Et parfois même aux sentiments’ [The question is simply this: a popular action like this one – or a revolution or even an insurrection – can only maintain its victory through the application of techniques contrary to those which enabled it. And sometimes contrary to the feelings [that inspired it]] (p. 140). The success of the revolution can only be secured by reconfiguring the present revolutionary moment as a stage in the progression towards a post-revolutionary end state, as Pradas, a Soviet technocrat, suggests in reaction to Le Négus’s criticism of a communist tendency to edify the Party: ‘Quand nous avons dû être soldats, … nous avons été soldats. Après, nous avons dû être constructeurs, nous avons été constructeurs. Nous avons dû être administrateurs, ingénieurs, quoi encore? Nous l’avons été. … Mais nous avons fait un Etat révolutionnaire, et, ici, nous ferons l’armée. Concrètement. Avec nos qualités et nos défauts. Et c’est l’armée qui sauvera la République et le prolétariat’. (p. 237) [When we had to be soldiers, … we were soldiers. Afterwards, we had to become builders, so we became builders. We had to become administrators, engineers, and more besides. So we did it. … But we built a revolutionary state and here we will build the army. Practically and with our qualities and our faults. And it is the army that will save the Republic and the proletariat.]

Here the Spanish Revolution is subordinated to communist policy concerning popular front politics and the present reinterpreted as a stage on the long road to international revolution. For the advocates of discipline, then, communist or otherwise, the present is experienced primarily in relation to an unspecified future state. Thus, by August 1936, Manuel is already acting in relation to History in the sense of responsibility he is now beginning to feel towards the future through his actions in the present.29 The defenders of the strategic revolutionary utopia do not therefore deny the possibility of revolution, simply its imminence, arguing for a transformation of the Republican experience of the moment so that it becomes an historical experience and ‘thereby [part of] a truly strategic plan. Everything in history,’ as 29   Similarly, the newly organized International Brigades defending Madrid in the autumn of 1936 ‘pensent aussi que, dans ce matin de brume, ils sont l’Histoire’ [believe too that, in this misty morning, they are History] (p. 389).

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Mannheim writes of the socialist-communist utopia, ‘may now be experienced as an intellectually and volitionally controllable phenomenon’.30 The strategic revolutionary utopia opposes chronos, understood by Frank Kermode as the banality of temporal chronology, to the more ‘significant season’ of kairos found in the ‘illusion lyrique’.31 The utopia anticipated in the revolution is postponed, not cancelled, and time is reconfigured as a series of strategic points. Like Mannheim’s socialist-communist utopia, the strategic revolutionary utopia in L’Espoir preserves a tension between the near and the remote, between the need for preparatory action in the present and the ultimate aim of the revolutionary transformation of the real.32 In this way, both attempt to channel the energies associated with the chiliastic mentality into a concerted plan of action rather than to dissipate such energies. Faire comes to dominate être, as Manuel asserts to one former party member: ‘Je ne m’intéresse pas à ce que sont les gens, je m’intéresse à ce qu’ils font’ (p. 197).33 The ability to act effectively, to impact upon and alter the real, comes to take precedence over action per se in L’Espoir. The issue of leadership then becomes central to the effective pursuit of the revolution through the defence of the Republic. The fall of Toledo is thus recuperated by its insertion into the development of Manuel as a military commander, an insertion which ultimately confers meaning upon the defeat, a meaning that becomes fully apparent at the novel’s close. It is during the retreat from Toledo that Manuel demonstrates a knowledge of command, organizing the defeated rabble into defensive positions, preventing them from falling back on Madrid and demoralizing the defenders of the capital. This knowledge has been acquired through his contact with other exponents of discipline and organization; namely Garcia, Heinrich and Ximénès, who, in addition to teaching Manuel the basics of military strategy, also induces him into the way of commanding others while the two men help capture a village from the Nationalists. If Ximénès teaches Manuel how to command, it is nevertheless the communist Heinrich who teaches him ‘comment on dirige’;34 that is to say, the strategic significance of leadership only becomes apparent within a communist conceptualization of the present action. It is through Heinrich that the utopian potential of disciplined military action is first experienced: ‘[Manuel] avait cru apprendre la guerre, et depuis deux mois, il apprenait la prudence, l’organisation, l’entêtement et la rigueur. Il apprenait surtout à posséder tout cela au lieu de le concevoir’ [Manuel had thought he was learning about war and for two months he had been learning prudence, organization, stubbornness and rigour. He was above  Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 222.   Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York, 1967), p. 46. 32   See also Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, pp. 279‒80. 33   ‘I’m not interested in who people are; I’m interested in what they do.’ 34   ‘How to direct.’ 30 31

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all learning to possess all that instead of conceiving of it] (p. 258). Leadership is no longer conceived as theory, but as a means of possessing and altering the real. The success of Manuel and of Malraux’s central argument is confirmed by the Republican victory at Guadalajara, a victory due in no small part to Manuel’s command of the newly organized Popular Army, where reality bends to the will of the commanding officer. We shall return to this episode of L’Espoir shortly. As was the case with the ‘illusion lyrique’, the strategic revolutionary interpretation of the Civil War is evoked through a series of motifs that suggest a rival understanding of space as well as of time. Whilst the imminence of the ‘illusion lyrique’ is suggested by sensorial saturation, the progressive nature of the strategic revolutionary utopia is suggested by sounds and sights of forward movement, in particular those associated with marching or steps. Ximénès’s authority and the veracity of his faith in leadership are suggested by ‘Le talon de sa jambe blessée sonnant régulièrement sur les pierres …’ (p. 205) after the fall of a village held by Falangists.35 Later, as the apprentice begins to overtake the master, Ximénès’s wounded leg now impedes him and is ‘en retard sur celle de Manuel’ (p. 214).36 Later still, and as the first International Brigades are formed, the sound of marching suggests the same sense of progression and organization but on a collective scale. As Magnin’s mer­cenaries play knucklebone whilst awaiting repatriation following the profession­alization of the Republican air force, the disjointed rattle of the game is interrupted by the rhythmic pounding of the volunteer army: accompagnant le roulement des gros osselets d’Espagne, un martèlement entra [par la fenêtre], aussi net que celui des fers des chevaux, mais ordonné comme celui des battoirs des forges: c’était le piétinement assourdi des troupes. … Le martèlement des bottes maintenant sous les fenêtres, faisait trembler les maisons de pisé: le jeu même était secoué par le rythme de la guerre. (p. 325) [accompanying the rolling of the large Spanish knucklebone pieces, a stomping as distinct as that of horse shoes, but regular like that of a forge came in [through the window]. It was the muffled stamp of soldiers. … The stomping of boots now below the windows made the adobe houses tremble. The game itself was shaken by the rhythm of war.]

The rhythm of the strategic revolutionary utopia thus stands in contrast to the discordant, deafening sounds of the ‘illusion lyrique’. Time and space are consequently invested with a directionality not apparent in the earlier phase of combat. However, the strategic revolutionary utopia remains problematic for several of the committed intellectuals who people L’Espoir since it elevates action over 35

  ‘The heel of his wounded leg ringing out regularly on the stones … ’   ‘Behind that of Manuel.’

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all else in the pursuit of a distant end state. The intellectual operates in a world of nuance and difference whereas, as Garcia observes, ‘les moyens de l’action sont manichéens parce que toute action est manichéenne. … Tout vrai révolutionnaire est un manichéen-né. Et tout politique’ [The means of action are Manichean as all action is essentially Manichean. … All real revolutionaries are born Manicheans. And all policies too] (p. 462). The implication is therefore that intellectuals are not natural revolutionaries and that engagement in revolutionary acts, but also in politics more generally, entails an inevitable compromise. Nevertheless, although the committed intellectual risks compromising the purity of his initial élan through engagement in political action, action remains human because it results from the dialogic interaction of those human beings who undertake such action. Consequently, a political organization, be it the Frente Popular or a party, remains complex and open to new possibilities: ‘Les intellectuels croient toujours un peu qu’un parti, ce sont des hommes unis autour d’une idée. Un parti ressemble bien plus à un caractère agissant qu’à une idée! Pour nous en tenir au psychologique, un parti est bien plutôt l’organisation pour une action commune d’une … constellation de sentiments parfois contradictoires, qui comprend ici: pauvreté – humiliation – Apocalypse – espoir – et quand il s’agit des communistes: goût de l’action, de l’organisation, de la fabrication, etc. ….’ (p. 461) [Intellectuals always believe that a party is a collection of men united around an idea. A party is more like an active character than an idea! To speak only of its psychological aspect, a party is rather the organization for collective action of a … constellation of sometimes contradictory feelings that include here poverty, humiliation, the Apocalypse, hope and, when it comes to the communists, a taste for action, organization, construction, etc … ]

Action is therefore subordinate to the dialogic exchange within the group and to a dialogue alive with different voices continually disputing the same object. The various characters and perspectives of L’Espoir form a dialogic community: a community whose dialogue is structured in such a way as to form a hierarchy of ideas that drive an identifiable praxis; in this case, the argument for military discipline and organization among the Republican ranks. L’Espoir does not, as Goldmann claims, eradicate debate and difference between the various parties defending the Republic in order to advocate the thesis of military efficiency.37 It does, however, organize these so that the argument is clearly made; just as, according to Bakhtin, the novel as a genre is an artistically organized structuring of voices ‘subordinated to the higher stylistic unit of the work as a whole …’,38  Goldmann, Pour une sociologie du roman, p. 144.   Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p. 262.

37 38

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so L’Espoir’s central thesis concerning the moment of its publication is formed through a hierarchy and structuring of voices within the novel. Yet, Manuel’s military ascendancy leads to both a loss of self and a distancing from L’Espoir’s dialogic community. As he rises through the ranks, Manuel can no longer experience the fraternity he felt that first night of hostilities in Madrid. While Manuel’s apprenticeship constitutes an exemplary progression aimed at communicating the immediate argument of the novel to the reader of 1937, it also involves a form of regression: Manuel is drawn gradually further away from the dialogic community of the novel’s characters. This withdrawal from dialogue is suggested during Manuel’s hesitation concerning the execution of two Republican deserters. While Manuel sees his decision as a choice between victory and pity, the situation also presents a conflict between language and silence. The plea of one condemned man is based on the need for speech (‘Faut … leur dire’) as speech will draw Manuel back into humanizing dialogue where pity is still a possibility.39 Manuel ‘ne trouvait rien à dire … et restait immobile devant le regard fou de l’autre …’ [found nothing to say … and remained immobile before the other’s insane gaze …] (p. 458). His exclusion from the fraternal community is acknowledged by the final words of the condemned: ‘Alors, t’as plus de voix pour nous, maintenant?’ (p. 459),40 words that haunt Manuel beyond the execution (p. 480). Ultimately, Manuel admits his growing isolation to Ximénès: ‘il n’est pas un des échelons que j’ai gravis dans le sens d’une efficacité plus grande, d’un commandement meilleur, qui ne m’écarte davantage des hommes. Je suis chaque jour un peu moins humain’ [there is not one step on the ladder I’ve climbed towards greater efficiency and better command that has not distanced me ever more from men. Every day I am a little less human]. Ximénès’ reply evokes that problem earlier adumbrated by Garcia: ‘Vous voulez agir et ne rien perdre de la fraternité; je pense que l’homme est trop petit pour cela’ [You want to act and lose nothing of their fraternity; I think man is too small for that] (p. 479). For Harris, then, the price of leadership is a loss of individuality. L’Espoir accordingly ‘devalorizes the hitherto centre-stage individual [of Malraux’s fiction] together with his abstractly formulated often emotionally charged humanism’.41 Furthermore, Harris contends, Malraux ultimately occludes the ethical and metaphysical aspects of his thought in L’Espoir; just as the novel advocates realpolitik vis-à-vis the conduct of the war, so too characters learn to adopt a ‘realethik’ and a ‘realmetaphysik’.42

39

  ‘You must tell them.’   ‘So, you’re no longer our voice now?’ 41  Harris, André Malraux, p. 132. 42   Ibid., p. 147. 40

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‘L’Espoir’ and the Temptation of Despair Like Harris, Vinh Dao asserts that L’Espoir, as one of Malraux’s most politically engaged novels, reflects a shift in emphasis in the novelist’s preoccupations. The revolutionary hero of the early novels was first and foremost engaged in a metaphysical combat that often took the form of an individualistic struggle against the destiny of the human condition; political engagement was a means to a metaphysical end. This destiny, the inescapable end that awaits every individual, the anticipation of which haunts the heroes of La Voie royale and La Condition humaine, has the power to negate all individual actions and meaning. It results directly not so much from the inconsequentiality of the individual, however, but from that of the human species and, more particularly from humanity’s contingency to the natural world, an inconsequentiality that becomes apparent in the world’s permanence and, as Malraux stated, the resulting ‘conscience qu’a l’homme de ce qui lui est étranger et de ce qui l’entraîne; du cosmos dans ce’qu’il a d’indifférent et dans ce qu’il a de mortel; l’univers et le temps, la terre et la mort’ [awareness that man possesses of what is beyond him and what debases him, of what is indifferent and mortal in the cosmos; the universe and time, the earth and death].43 For Vinh Dao, the enemy of the new Malrucian hero in L’Espoir is no longer cosmic, but social; it is a society that condemns humans to live as little more than beasts, of which fascism, with its hierarchy and racial politics, is now the cruellest manifestation.44 Yet, Malraux’s depiction of the Spanish Civil War suggests that his characters continue to find themselves engaged in a combat with a world whose persistence and indifference deny not only individual but all human value. The dialogic exchanges concerning the immediate aims of the war are set against a landscape and a sky which together constitute a continued and continual metaphysical challenge to the conflict of utopian visions outlined thus far. References to cosmic or natural indifference and the problem of acting meaningfully do not constitute a complacent nod and a wink to the preoccupations of the earlier novels, as Harris suggests;45 they are part of the fabric of a portrait of the war that extends beyond the immediate to suggest a broader significance. Indeed, I would contend that in L’Espoir Malraux succeeds in balancing the immediacy of engagement with a metaphysical preoccupation that is never absent from his writing. This is so because the description of the natural world, to which such considerations are bound in the novel, does not serve a merely decorative function; as Carrard   Quoted in Carrard, Malraux ou le récit hybride, p. 227. In this, Malraux’s characters anticipate Camus’s sense of ‘l’hostilité primitive du monde … cette épaisseur et cette étrangeté du monde [qui] est l’absurde’ [the world’s primitive hostility … this density and strangeness of the world that is the Absurd]. Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (Paris, 1987), pp. 30‒31. 44   Vinh Dao, André Malraux ou la quête de la fraternité (Geneva, 1991), p. 142. 45  Harris, André Malraux, p. 140. 43

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observes, action and description are tightly bound through the perception of the engaged character.46 The parallel battles, characteristic of Malraux’s earlier novels, between revolutionary action and the forces of political stasis on the one hand and the struggle for human dignity against the forces of nature on the other are maintained in L’Espoir. Rare are the novel’s characters who are not susceptible, at one moment or another, to a sense of human futility in the face of the earth’s indifference and the stillness and permanence of cosmic time. Nowhere is this more evident than in the episodes involving flight. Flight in L’Espoir, confronts Malraux’s heroes with the forces of nature and provides a glimpse of the cosmos in the escape from the earth itself. Thus, after the successful bombing of the Nationalist barracks in Talavera, and as the Republican bomber rises above the cloud in the night sky, Malraux’s aviators sense that the glimpse of the cosmic afforded by flight has the potential to negate their human achievements: ‘aucun geste humain n’était plus à la mesure des choses; … l’euphorie qui suit tout combat se perdait dans une sérénité géologique, dans l’accord de la lune et de ce métal pâle [de l’avion] qui luisait comme les pierres brillent pour des millénaires sur les astres morts’ [No human gesture was now comparable to the [world of] things; … the euphoria that follows all combat was lost in geological serenity, in the accord between the moon and the [plane’s] metal which shone like stones shine for millennia on dead stars] (pp. 256‒7). A similar sense of futility in the face of the eternal assails Scali as an antique clock chimes during his interrogation of an Italian pilot: ‘Ces pendules … donnaient à Scali une telle impression d’indifférence et d’éternité; tout ce qu’il disait, tout ce qu’il pouvait dire lui semblait si vain qu’il n’eut plus envie que de se taire’ [These chimes … gave Scali such a feeling of indifference and eternity; everything he was saying, everything he could ever say seemed so vain that he now only wanted to fall silent] (pp. 168‒9). Nature’s permanence is further suggested in the frequent references to the passage of animals in the novel. As Madrid is devoured by flame, the animal kingdom invades what appears to be a crumbling civilization: ‘Un troupeau de chiens abandonnés commença à hurler, absurde, dérisoire, exaspérant, comme s’il eût régné sur cette désolation de fin de monde’ [A pack of feral dogs began to howl, absurd, derisory, exasperating as if it ruled over this apocalyptic desolation] (p. 461). The dogs are followed by sheep: ‘les troupeaux invisibles, maîtres du Prado comme ils le seraient après la fin des hommes, avançaient, pressés et chauds …’ [the invisible flocks, now masters of the Prado as they would be after the end of mankind, pushed forward, hurried and hot …] (p. 463). Nature’s persistence is also evoked in the frequent reference to 46   ‘[L]e décor ne précède pas le personnage, il n’existe pas comme le lieu immuable d’une aventure particulère; il est inséparable de l’action, et, en un mot, apparaît toujours relatif à ce qu’entreprend celui qui s’y meut’ [Decor does not precede the character; it exists as the immutable location of a particular adventure; it is inseparable from the action and, in short, always appears relative to the character’s actions within it]. Carrard, Malraux ou le récit hybride, p. 209.

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the flight and migration of birds. Even after the Republican victory at Guadalajara with which the novel concludes, Malraux’s heroes are reminded by the guide who escorts them around a church, symbol of a human yearning for meaning, that ‘Le principal ennemi de l’homme, messieurs, c’est la forêt. Elle est plus forte que nous, plus forte que la République, plus forte que la révolution, plus forte que la guerre. Si l’homme cessait de lutter, en moins de soixante ans la forêt recouvrirait l’Europe. Elle serait ici, dans la rue, dans les maisons ouvertes, les branches par les fenêtres, – les pianos dans les racines …’ (p. 585) [Man’s principal enemy, gentlemen, is the forest. It is stronger than us, than the Republic, than the revolution, than war. If mankind were to give up the fight, in less than 60 years the forest would cover Europe once more. It would invade the roads, here, the houses it would open up, pushing its branches through the windows, pianos ensnared in its roots …]

The natural world opposes its own chronotope to those of the ‘illusion lyrique’ and of the strategic revolutionary utopia. Whilst the first is experienced in the present and the second subjugates the present to an unspecified future, the chronotope of the natural world is denoted by the cycle through which its eternal, cosmic life is guaranteed and from which humanity seems to be excluded. The permanence and indifference of the natural world is thus not experienced indifferently by the novel’s heroes. Indeed, in its opposition to their understanding of the present, the natural world is perceived, as in the earlier novels, as a hostile presence that actively conspires against humanity and the revolutionary cause characters serve and against which they struggle. The civil war thus appears at various points in the novel as a battle against the forces of nature itself, as if these were indeed humanity’s real enemy. Thus, at the Battle of Guadalajara, when one enemy assault is repulsed, Manuel notes that it is: comme si [la vague ennemie] n’eût pas été défaite par les anciens miliciens mais par la pluie éternelle qui déjà mêlait beaucoup de leurs mots [sic] à la terre, et renvoyait vers d’invisibles tranchées les vagues d’assaut ennemies, effilochées et dissoutes, à travers le voile de pluie aux détonations aussi nombreuses que ses gouttes. (p. 426) [as if [the enemy wave] had not been defeated by the former militiamen but by the eternal rain which already was dissolving their [dead] into the earth and pushing back, through the veil of rain and to the accompaniment of explosions as numerous as the raindrops that now fell, the dwindling, exhausted enemy assault towards its invisible trenches.]

Nature is perceived as capable of eradicating humanity’s presence, of dissolving the latter into its murky indifference.

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Malraux’s depiction of the bombing and siege of Madrid by the Nationalists is also illustrative of this broader conflict and its metaphysical dimension. In the flames that light the night sky, the city appears to Shade as if it has been returned to the elements as ‘Tout ce qui était humain disparaissait dans la brume de novembre crevée d’obus et roussie de flammes’ [Everything that was human was disappearing in the November fog peppered by shells and reddened by flames] (p. 454). Whereas time and space are experienced as progression through the strategic revolutionary utopia, and the present had been experienced as a form of imminence through the ‘illusion lyrique’, here humanity experiences entrapment. In Malraux’s descriptions, Madrid is lit only by ‘la sombre lueur de l’incendie’ [the dark light of the fire] (p. 407), ‘une rougeâtre lumière d’église, avant l’obscurité finale’ [a reddish church light before final obscurity] (p. 383); it is lit by a ‘darkness visible’ akin to that of Milton’s Hell.47 During the day, it is entombed in mist. Even when the mist lifts, ‘on ne voit personne: des explosions, un bois désert’ (p. 388).48 This entrapment is reinforced by ‘Le ciel uni de fin d’après-midi [qui] commençait à peser sur Madrid …’ with its odour of burning buildings and corpses (p. 437).49 The present is thus deprived of meaning, future or present, becoming stasis delineated only by the imminence of death, ‘Cette mort qui descendait au hasard [qui] faisait horreur à Shade’ (p. 416).50 In this the natural world constitutes a spatial configuration of the chronotope of the Absurd that, as I have argued elsewhere, haunts the early twentieth-century committed writer.51 In contrast to evolutionary and progressive concepts of time, which interpret the present through its relationship to the past and/or the future, the chronotope of the Absurd isolates humanity in the present moment, cutting it off from any sense of a temporal continuum and thereby reinforcing the contingency of individual presence.52 Indeed, the Nationalist bombing of the capital is perceived less as a human act and more as an act of nature designed to spite humanity. Mercery, now a firefighter, pitches himself against the fire that threatens the city, ‘un adversaire plus vivant que l’homme, plus vivant que tout au monde. En face de cet ennemi gesticulant de mille tentacules comme une pieuvre folle Mercery se sentait extraordinairement lent, – minéralisé’ [an enemy more alive than man, than anything in the world. Faced with this enemy and its thousand twisting tentacles, like a mad octopus, Mercery felt extraordinarily slow as if turned to stone] (p. 471). Fascism, in the guise of the Nationalists, is subsumed in the novel’s many descriptions of modern warfare under a cosmic force that contributes to the metaphysical problems Malraux’s fiction as a whole attempts to solve. Thus, the sound of the approaching   John Milton, Paradise Lost (London: Penguin Classics, 1989), Book 1, line 63.   ‘One sees no one: explosions, a deserted wood.’ 49   ‘The uniform sky of a late afternoon which began to weigh upon Madrid …’ 50   ‘This death which descended haphazardly and which horrified Shade.’ 51  Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict, pp. 84‒91. 52   Ibid., p. 94. 47

48

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Nationalist bombers is equated with the deathly forces of night itself by Guernico: ‘Et cette vibration profonde et grave … emplissait le ciel et la ville comme les emplissait la nuit …’ [And this low, penetrating vibration … filled the sky and the city just as the night did …] (p. 399). Fascism becomes a factor that further contributes to the absurdity of the human condition, emphasizing it, exaggerating an age-old problem in the further degradation it inflicts upon those who already suffer in life: the people. On many occasions, the war against the Nationalists appears merely as an episode in a wider war against the absurdity of the human condition rather than the Republicans’ principal enemy; the Spanish Civil War is thereby incorporated into a broader and eternal conflict and simultaneously translated to an ahistorical and metaphysical plane.53 Yet combat further exposes Malraux’s heroes to the absurdity of the human condition since it reveals the precarious nature of existence itself. Consequently, characters are sometimes assailed by periodic doubts as to the worth of their actions, doubts that are not concerned with the political or military efficacy of particular actions, but with the efficacy of all human action in a world that denies human worth. Thus, Garcia’s sight of the cemetery in Toledo before the city’s fall momentarily undermines his faith in action: ‘il se sentit humilié, comme si ces pierres et ces mausolées très blancs dans l’étendue ocre eussent rendu tout combat dérisoire’ [he felt humiliated as if these very white stones and mausoleums set against the ochre expanse had rendered all combat derisory] (p. 152). The reminder of death evokes a sense of cosmic time and leads to a momentary disengagement from the present combat. The waging of war is therefore problematic for Malraux’s characters; to engage in combat is to risk a loss of human dignity through suffering. However, the only way to avoid the denigration inherent in the human condition is to engage in combat with all that denies our human worth. It is this fundamental futility and the paradox of action in Malrucian thought that contributes to what some consider Malraux’s tragic perception of the human condition. Suffering, then, acts as a constant reminder of the metaphysical as well as the physical consequences of revolutionary engagement since it is seen to remove the wounded from the flow of revolutionary time, confining them to temporal stasis and entrapment, suspending them in the eternal present of the Absurd, as the description of the wounded in a Madrid hospital suggest: Ce jour verdâtre, ces murs immenses … et ces personnages en pyjamas dont les corps noués glissaient sur les béquilles dans la paix inquiète de l’hôpital, 53   As Carrard notes in respect to L’Espoir: ‘il y a deux niveaux du combat, … en luttant contre l’oppression fasciste pour la conquête de libertés politiques ou économiques, l’homme lutte également … pour la conquête de sa dignité et la maîtrise de son destin’ [There are two levels to this struggle; … in fighting against fascist oppression in order to gain political or economic freedoms, mankind is fighting also … for the dignity and mastery of its destiny]. Carrard, Malraux ou le récit hybride, p. 153.

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ces ombres vêtues de pansements comme d’un costume de mi-carême, tout cela semblait un royaume éternel de la blessure, établi là hors du temps et du monde. (p. 109) [This greenish light, these huge walls … and these characters in pyjamas, their twisted bodies gliding on crutches in the tense peace of the hospital, these shadows dressed in bandages as if they were wearing a Maundy Thursday costume; all this seemed to belong to an eternal kingdom of the wound established beyond time and the world.]

Individual suffering is a form of exile akin to that of Camus’ l’homme absurde ‘privé des souvenirs d’une patrie perdue ou de l’espoir d’une terre promise’,54 an exile that isolates the individual from the usual flow of social time, but also from a sense of belonging to a human community that progresses through time. Pain and suffering therefore refuse an unproblematic heroic representation of the Civil War and do not allow Malraux to express the necessity for combat unopposed or as self-evident. The glimpses of the absurdity of the human condition afforded to the reader of L’Espoir provide more than a point of continuity with Malraux’s earlier, metaphysical novels. Rather, their very presence threatens periodically to undermine the immediate political hope embodied in the transformation of the militias into the Popular Army and of Manuel into an effective commander to which the defence of the Republic is bound. It is therefore to an alternative force beyond that offered by the strategic revolutionary vision of the Civil War that Malraux turns in order to rescue the Republic. That force, as we shall now see, is to be found in the Malrucian myth of fraternity.

54   ‘Deprived of the memories of a lost homeland or the hope of a promised land.’ Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, p. 20.

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Chapter 6

Beyond the Spanish Republic: Journey’s End and New Departures The previous chapter established the problematic, perhaps incompatible relationship between Malraux’s politico-ethical solution to the Republic’s crisis of command and his enduring interest in the metaphysical dimension of human activity. We now need to consider the emergence of fraternity in L’Espoir as a counterforce to the sense of the Absurd that permeates Malraux’s vision of the Civil War. Indeed, this force, already present in Le Temps du mépris, was to gain in importance for Malraux throughout, but particularly beyond, the years of communist fellow-travelling. It is therefore also to be found in Malraux’s other representation of the Civil War: his only film, titled, upon its official, but limited release in the autumn of 1945, Espoir: Sierra de Teruel in the hope that it would be viewed as an adaptation of the novel and benefit from the latter’s success. The film had in fact been completed in France in 1939 and shown privately in July that year at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, amidst growing government hostility to the PCF and its fellow-travellers and just before it was banned.1 Based on three key episodes from the novel and in the face of the Republic’s impending defeat, Sierra de Teruel abandons the central propagandist thesis of L’Espoir in order to further develop the theme of fraternity through the trope of resistance. It is therefore not simply an adaptation of the novel and the second part of this chapter will examine Malraux’s shift in emphasis in Sierra de Teruel, arguing that it suggests, in the wake of his Civil War experiences, the primacy of a more conservative world view underpinned by the powerful mobilizing myth that is fraternity and which appears to supplant the competing revolutionary utopias of the novel, thereby signalling the end of Malraux’s period of communist fellow-travelling and anticipating his association with the postwar conservatism of General de Gaulle. Indeed, in the final part of this chapter, I will consider how the film was co-opted by de Gaulle’s supporters and mobilized on behalf of a celebration of popular national resistance to fascism in France whilst also considering the not entirely dissimilar attempts made by Simone Téry to mobilize the memory of the Spanish Republic, and more particularly of the Communist Party’s part in its defence and the European antifascist struggle, in her roman à thèse of the Civil War, Où l’aube se lève (1945).   For the sake of clarity, I shall refer to the film as Sierra de Teruel. The film was only shown once more in Paris in 1949 and then not until 1970. Nevertheless, its reputation as a masterpiece of French cinema endures. For details of the film’s history, see Thornberry, André Malraux et l’Espagne. 1

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The Myth of Fraternity In spite of the connection between suffering, degradation and the Absurd established in Malraux’s depiction of warfare and revolutionary activity, it is when engaged in action that Malraux’s characters experience moments of enduring hope; the hope of the novel’s title is not just the immediate hope of a Republican victory, then, but a reference to the potential resolution of the metaphysical task Malraux’s fiction sets itself: that of establishing a meaningful existence in a world deprived of inherent meaning. In L’Espoir, flight, like the action of earlier Malrucian heroes, comes to constitute a revolt against the natural world in the name of human dignity. Consequently, the fraternity of Malraux’s aviators becomes a force for countering the sense of the Absurd. During the Battle of Guadalajara, the fraternal struggle of the aviators with the elements constitutes a rival force to the latter: L’indifférente mer de nuages n’était pas plus forte que ces avions partis aile contre aile, en vol … vers un même ennemi, dans l’amitié comme dans la menace cachée partout sous ce ciel tranquille; que ces hommes qui acceptaient tous de mourir pour autre chose qu’eux-mêmes, unis par le mouvement des compas dans la même fatalité fraternelle. (L’Espoir, pp. 533‒4) [The indifferent sea of clouds was no stronger than these planes flying in formation … towards a common enemy, united in their friendship as they were by the shared risk hidden everywhere in this placid sky. It was no stronger than these men who all accepted to die for something other than themselves, united by the movement of the compass in the same fraternal fate.]

The experiences of Moreno, a Marxist and an officer who has remained loyal to the Republic, are illustrative of the potential for fraternity to infuse the experience of combat with meaning. Moreno continues to be marked by his experience of imprisonment in the Nationalist zone, where he awaited execution in isolation, and by the revelation that his individual death appears deprived of any potential meaning through the lack of communication that exists between the condemned and those who will survive them. Shortly before the fall of Toledo, he tells Hernandez: ‘Il n’y pas de héros sans auditoire. Dès qu’on est vraiment seul, on comprend ça. On dit qu’être aveugle est un univers; être seul c’en est un aussi … Là-dedans on s’aperçoit que ce qu’on pense de soi est une idée de l’autre monde. Du monde qu’on a quitté. … Les deux mondes ne communiquent pas. Il y a le monde où les hommes meurent ensemble, en chantant, en serrant les dents ou comme ils voudront, – et puis, derrière, mon vieux, il y a ce couvent avec …’ (pp. 265‒6)2 2   It is perhaps the knowledge of this separation from the other that informs Hernandez’s desperation to find his troops as Toledo falls: ‘Lutter jusqu’au dernier moment? Avant tout,

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[There are no heroes without an audience. As soon as you are really alone, you understand this. They say that being blind is a world in itself. Being alone is one too … There you realize that what you think of yourself is an idea from the other world, the one you’ve left. … The two worlds do not communicate. There’s the world where men die together singing, gritting their teeth or however they want, and then, behind it, my friend, is that convent with …]

Yet, as Moreno acknowledges subsequently, the possibility of fraternity in death lies in combat and in the confrontation with death itself. As he explains: ‘“Il y a une fraternité qui ne se trouve que de l’autre côté de la mort”’ (p. 436).3 Combat and the confrontation with all that denies our humanity can be rehabilitated through the presence of the fraternal other. Moreover, fraternity allows individuals to place the possibility of their death within a meaningful whole. Thus, the aviators awaiting the return of Magnin’s plane are able to anticipate the fraternal presence of the other in an imagined version of their own deaths based on the anticipated non-return of Magnin: ‘Maintenant ou demain – bientôt – le premier avion ne reviendrait pas. Chacun savait que, pour ceux qui l’attendraient, sa propre mort ne serait pas autre chose que cette fumée de cigarettes nerveusement allumées, où l’espoir se débattait comme quelqu’un qui étouffe’ [Now or tomorrow, soon in any case, the first plane would not make it back. They all knew that, for those who were waiting, their death would be nothing other than this smoke of nervously lit cigarettes where hope would struggle like someone being suffocated] (p. 66). The fraternal bond and communion between the dying, the dead and the surviving other is witnessed when, after Marcelino’s plane crashes at the airfield, the dead are gathered up by those whose death they will eventually share: ‘sous cette lumière cadavérique, les morts immobiles semblaient protégés par des morts agités’ [in this deathly light the immobile dead seem protected by the agitated dead] (p. 191). Fraternity posits the possibility of a relational death in contrast to the non-relational and ultimately absurd death posited by existentialism.4 Suffering and death therefore supply the possibility for fraternal communion, a fraternity that is galvanized by the struggle with the forces that deny our humanity, over the failure of meaning. Thus, in contrast to the earlier hospital scene set in Madrid, in the hospital near Malaga to which Sembrano’s crew are taken and where those too wounded to transport await the arrival of the Nationalists gun in hand, the threat of a meaningless, isolated death is surmounted by ‘la fraternité

ne plus être seul, ne plus être seul’ [Fight to the bitter end? Above all, no longer be alone, no longer be alone.] (p. 286). 3   ‘There’s a fraternity that can only be found on the other side of death.’ 4   Thus, for Martin Heidegger, for example, my individual death is always mine alone; it cannot be shared and therefore is non-relational. See Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’: A Section-by-Section Interpretation (New York, 1970), p. 150.

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des naufragés’ (p. 514);5 the fraternity of those who are doomed, but who have also decided to die together. As Moreno affirms, following his reintegration into the Popular Army, combat in the company of the fraternal other transforms the threat of suffering and death into an integral part of a meaningful life, transforming what once might have constituted an interruption and a denial of the individual life as project into a collective, human experience. Fraternity in such instances constitutes a song of the dead, as Moreno explains: ‘Tu es seulement un suicidé, et, en même temps, tu possèdes ce qu’il y a de meilleur en tous. Tu possèdes leur … ce qu’ils ont de meilleur, enfin, comme la joie de la foule au carnaval. … J’ai un copain qui appelle ça le moment où les morts se mettent à chanter. Depuis un mois je sais que les morts peuvent chanter.’ (p. 435) [You are only a suicide and yet you possess what is best in everyone. You possess their … their best, you know, like the joy of the carnival crowd. … I’ve a friend who calls that the moment when the dead begin to sing. For a month now I’ve known that the dead can sing.]

Combat is thus rehabilitated and the threatened absence of meaning is transformed into a glimpse of human fraternity through a carnavalesque dethroning of death’s ascendancy over the individual. As Gino Raymond states of the value of fraternity in Malraux’s fiction: ‘From utter negation, death may be metamorphosed into a positive component of the mystery of man.’6 The experience of fraternity in the face of death is not only limited to the intellectual heroes of L’Espoir, however. Rather, it is a facet closely associated with the Republican cause, thereby directing the reader simultaneously to a contemp­ oraneous political community and to a broader sense of a fraternal human community. For Shade, popular front unity represents a counterforce to the destruction of human value through the assertion of its own endurance in the face of suffering: Et du fond de la Gran Via … commença à monter couvrant parfois la cloche des ambulances qui descendaient sans arrêt la rue, un son de litanies barbares. Shade écoutait de toute son attention ce son venu de très loin dans le temps, sauvagement accordé au monde du feu: il semblait qu’après une phrase périodiquement prononcée, la rue entière, en manière de répons [sic], imitait le battement des tambours funèbres: Dong-tongon-dong.

5

  ‘The fraternity of the shipwrecked.’   Gino Raymond, André Malraux: Politics and the Temptation of Myth (Aldershot, 1995), p. 131. 6

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Enfin Shade, plus qu’il ne comprit, devina, car il avait entendu le même rythme un mois plus tôt: en réponse à une phrase qu’il n’entendait pas, le bruit de tambour humain scandait: no passaran [sic]. (pp. 455‒6) [From the end of the Gran Via … a raucous litany began to rise up, sometimes covering the sound of ambulances heading down the road. Shade listened extremely attentively to this sound that had travelled from afar, across time, savagely attuned to this world of fire. It seemed that after a periodically repeated phrase, the entire street, as if in response, was imitating the beating of a funeral drum; dong-bedong-dong. At last Shade made it out, rather than understood it, as he had heard the same rhythm a month before; in reply to a phrase he could not hear, the human drum pounded out: no passaran [sic].]

Genuine political divisions within the Republic, divisions that were being played out in the Republic’s internal civil war as Malraux was preparing to begin work on L’Espoir, are therefore transcended and obfuscated in Malraux’s vision of the Frente Popular through the primacy of suffering as a mode of fraternal being.7 Arguably, Malraux’s primary interest in popular frontism and more particularly in an emerging concept of the people is revealed here, however. In their resilience, the poor of Madrid suggest a timeless, immutable presence that transcends the moment. In this they share a quality associated throughout L’Espoir with the Spanish people not as a revolutionary force, but as one that endures in spite of all that would deny human permanence. The suffering of the Spanish people, both industrial working class and peasantry, is inscribed throughout the novel into a continuum of human suffering. For Hernandez, as he awaits his execution following the city’s fall, Spain is ‘ce pays de femmes en noir, … le peuple millénaire des veuves’ (p. 301).8 The exodus of civilians from Toledo forms a briefly glimpsed backdrop to the military problems of the day, but again suggests a relationship between the people and a sense of the eternal in the biblical analogy established by the narrator. This is infused with ‘la séculaire détresse des fuites en Egypte’ [the ancient sorrow of flights to Egypt] while ‘L’exode coulait, … dans cette odeur de feu, scandé par le battement profond et rythmé du canon’ [The exodus flowed on, … amidst the smell of smoke, accentuated by the deep, rhythmic pounding of the cannon] (p. 268). Similarly, the flight of refugees from the working-class districts 7   For Ramos, observing the flight of the poor from the Cuatro-Caminos district of Madrid, the suffering of the Popular Front constitutes a rival force to that represented by the Nationalist bombers: ‘Anarchistes, communistes, socialistes, républicains, comme l’inépuisable grondement de ces avions mêlait bien ces sangs qui s’étaient crus adversaries, au fond fraternal de la mort …’ [Anarchists, communists, socialists, republicans, how the endless rumbling of the planes mixed the blood of those who had believed themselves to be enemies in the fraternity of death …] (p. 408). 8   ‘This land of women in black, … this ancient people of widows.’

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of Madrid is described as ‘un exode séculaire’ [an ancient exodus] born of ‘une longue habitude de la détresse’ [a long established familiarity with distress] (p. 408). Whilst the suffering of the wounded in the Madrid military hospital suggests to Manuel stasis and entrapment in the present, the biblical allusion here serves to translate the suffering of the Spanish people to an ahistorical plane. As Carrard notes, such allusions constitute a form of ‘culturisation’ where the immediate crisis of the Spanish Civil War is translated to a larger, human context, evoking an age-old human crisis rather than that of a particular moment.9 In its battle with the misery of existence and in its stubborn persistence, the people in L’Espoir attain something of the eternal. Thus, while Manuel struggles with the immediate lessons of Toledo, the people are momentarily glimpsed in the background engaged in their perennial struggle with the earth, threshing wheat (p. 283). Just as Malraux’s combatants are engaged in a struggle that simultaneously threatens their existence and elevates it beyond the limitations of the self, so the people are engaged in an age-old struggle with an indifferent earth, a struggle that confers on them a certain grandeur. It is of course in the celebrated descent from the mountain, when local peasants come to the rescue of one of Magnin’s planes that has been shot down over the Sierra de Teruel, that the suffering of Malraux’s combatants and that of the people elide. The ascent of the mountain to retrieve the dead and the wounded is largely seen through the eyes of Magnin during which he perceives the eternal still rooted inaccessibly in nature. While human activity seems to suggest a succession of military events, each supplanting the other, reflected in the sight of Segunte and its fortresses where Christian, Roman and Punic ramparts have all been constructed on top of one another, the sight of an apple tree that thrives amidst geological indifference, feeding off the ring of apples rotting at its roots, suggests both the world’s indifference to human activities and its natural permanence in contrast to humanity’s fragility.10 Yet, the presence of ‘timeless’ Spanish peasants reminds Magnin that ‘il entrait dans une Espagne éternelle’ (p. 547).11 The description of the wounded suggests a parallel between the eternal suffering of the people and that now endured by Magnin’s aviators. Magnin is thus reminded of ‘des gravures de vieux supplices …’ (p. 550),12 whilst one aviator’s disfigured face suggests a Presentation of combat (p. 554). This recognition of the eternity of suffering is echoed in the peasants’ recognition in this aviator of ‘l’image même que, depuis des siècles, les paysans se faisaient de la guerre’ (p. 561).13 As the cortege descends the mountain, it takes on a rhythm which itself suggests an affinity between the suffering of humanity and the eternal, cyclical movement of nature: ‘et ce rythme accordé à la douleur sur un si long chemin semblait emplir la gorge immense où criaient là Carrad, Malraux ou le récit hybride, p. 218.  Malraux, L’Espoir, pp. 544‒9. 11   ‘He was entering eternal Spain.’ 12   ‘Engravings of ancient torture …’ 13   ‘The image that, for centuries, the peasants had painted of war itself.’  9 10

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haut les derniers oiseaux, comme l’eût emplie le battement solennel des tambours d’une marche funèbre’ [and this rhythm tuned to their pain seemed to fill the immense gorge, where the last of the birds screeched, as the solemn beating of the drum during a funeral march would have done] (p. 559). In the descent from the mountain, Malraux’s aviators momentarily echo nature’s eternal rhythm not through a transcendental relationship with the natural world around them, but through the recognition of what binds them to the people: the shared suffering reflected in a people engaged in an age-old struggle with the earth and thereby bound up in its eternal rhythm. The sound of the peasants’ clogs descending the mountains makes itself heard therefore ‘entre [my emphasis] l’éternel cri des rapaces et ce bruit clandestin de sanglots’ (p. 561).14 Human activity is not integrated into the natural world, which continues to be at odds with it; rather, fraternity posits a second nature, a space and a conceptualization of time within which the individual is able to perceive his or her part in the collective life struggle of humanity, a struggle that constantly threatens to denigrate and to elevate us.15 The role of the aviator, and particularly of Magnin, is key to the process of creating a second, rival world and thereby translating the on-going battle for the Republic into an ahistorical struggle. It is the aviator who, through flight, is most keenly aware of cosmic indifference. It is also the aviator who, having returned to earth, is afforded a perspective on human activity which allows him to place it within a universal, cosmic context. As Raymond asserts, Malraux’s aviators are Promethean, engaged in an act of revolt on behalf of humanity.16 Moreover, as Carrard argues in respect of Magnin, their ability to translate the immediate to an ahistorical plane derives from an aestheticizing vision. For Carrard, vision is essential to the discovery of fraternity in L’Espoir; fraternity originates in a look, a look that discovers the presence of others and reveals a fundamental solidarity, a solidarity born of the recognition of a shared set of values and of a shared condition revealed in the sight of the suffering, the dying and the dead.17 Fraternity generates meaning from suffering, as Carrard suggests, by aestheticizing it, recasting

  ‘Between the eternal cry of the birds of prey and the muffled sound of sobs.’   As Raymond writes: ‘In the descent from the mountainside, the amoral force of nature is counterbalanced by the vigour of the spirit which animates the peasants and fliers, and which establishes the parameters of the real space to be occupied by man in the world …’ This space, Raymond goes on to state, is ‘not a space captured in an allencompassing ideological or proprietorial net, but a sense of place rooted in man; his compassion, moral autonomy and fraternity’. Raymond, André Malraux, p. 129. 16  Raymond, André Malraux, p. 182. 17  Carrard, Malraux ou le récit hybride, pp. 159‒60. It is therefore an understanding of the world that emanates primarily from Malraux’s intellectual characters. However, the mountain rescue exemplifies for Harris ‘a new synthesis between the elite and the people’. Harris, André Malraux, p. 139. 14

15

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suffering within a collective, cultural frame.18 The image of eternal human suffering is therefore central to the notion of fraternity; it reveals our collective, human condition and thereby binds the individual to the human community, a community that now transcends class and moment. As Raymond argues, fraternity constitutes an important myth within the novel, a myth which translates its events to an ahistorical plane rather than, as Harris contends, ‘the end of an era, the last evocation of a lyrical illusion finally overtaken [in the novel’s concluding chapter] by political events and military expediency’.19 As such, it offers a glimpse of the possibility of human permanence predicated on a vision that reconnects present, past and future, not in a dialectical, revolutionary interpretation of events where contradictions between the three temporal states are resolved, but in one that insists upon a fundamental, unchanging continuity characterized by our stubborn resistance to the precariousness of our existence and to all that denigrates us. Through its association with the Promethean figure of the aviator, it possesses a mystical quality and maintains, as Mannheim writes of the mystic, that ‘there are truths and values beyond time and space, and that time and space and all that occurs within them are merely illusory appearances, when compared with the reality of the mystic’s ecstatic experience’.20 The aviator, then, introduces a third conception of time, bound to the myth of fraternity, and constitutes an aevum; a being, as Kermode writes, who is ‘independent of time and succession, [but who] co-exists with temporal events at the moment of occurrence …’ and who points to the perpetuity of certain human constructs, ‘the entire cycle of created life, with its perpetuation of specific forms, [imbued with] the same kind of eternity within a non-eternal world’.21 As Carrard suggests, but without fully examining the implications of his own statement, the experience and elevation of fraternity run counter to a revolutionary, teleological understanding of engagement.22 In elevating the 18

  ‘[I]l s’agit d’ancrer la lutte révolutionnaire dans le passé espagnol, de la rapprocher aussi d’autres entreprises humaines, notamment de cette entreprise privilégiée qu’est la création artistique’ [It is a question of anchoring the revolutionary struggle in the Spanish past, to create links with other human endeavours and notably that privileged endeavour that is artistic creation] (Carrard, Malraux ou le récit hybride, p. 218). Moreover, as Malraux himself wrote, ‘les grands artistes ne sont pas les transcripteurs du monde, ils en sont les rivaux’ [great artists are not those who transcribe the world, but those who rival it] (quoted in Harris, André Malraux, p. 174). I discuss the link between fraternity and aestheticization and its relationship to Malraux’s passage from revolutionary politics to Gaullist conservatism in Martin Hurcombe, ‘Down to Earth: André Malraux’s Political Itinerary and the Natural World’ in Louise Lyle and David McCallam (eds), Histoires de la Terre. Earth Sciences and French Culture 1740‒1940 (Amsterdam-New York, 2008), pp. 247‒63. 19  Harris, André Malraux, p. 138. 20  Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 81. 21  Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, pp. 72 and 74 respectively. 22  Carrard, Malraux ou le récit hybride, p. 166.

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conflict to an eternal human struggle with those forces that seek to undermine and deny human value and meaning, Malraux translates the action of the novel to a form of cyclical time discovered by Magnin in the descent from the mountain. The hope of the novel’s title for the postwar readership of L’Espoir appears to run counter to revolutionary concepts of time embraced by many of the parties of the left engaged in Spain in 1937, whether these are predicated on revolutionary imminence or praxis; the discovery of fraternity counters the alienation inherent in action, but it posits no end state and denies any Marxist concept of the new man and an end to history, preferring instead l’homme fondamental who will come to dominate Malraux’s postwar writings. A tension therefore exists towards the end of the novel between Malraux’s emerging concept of fraternity predicated upon eternal human suffering and the strategic revolutionary concept of the present as a staging post to a better future; the former is not unproblematically subsumed under the latter, as Harris argues.23 This tension results from competing spatiotemporal visions, but also from the novel’s very treatment of the Civil War as both a matter of immediate political concern and of ahistorical human value. For Denis Boak, then, the real tension at the heart of L’Espoir is not that between être and faire, but that between ‘the transient political struggle and a timeless view of man’s destiny transcending it …’.24 Malraux’s depiction of the Republican victory at Guadalajara in March 1937 can be read as an attempt to resolve such tensions, much as the defeat at Toledo endeavours to resolve the tension between revolutionary spontaneity and military organization. This victory is a result of the conjunction of the Republican air force, represented by Magnin and his assorted remaining aircraft, and the new Popular Army, under the command of Manuel. The former, an echo of the ‘illusion lyrique’, ‘cette délégation de l’Apocalypse …’ [this envoy of the Apocalypse] (p. 568), contrasts with, but now complements the precision of Manuel’s attack, an expression of his will as leader, to which it bears witness: ‘En bas, les tanks républicains, avec un ordre d’exercice sur la Place Rouge, attaquaient, revenaient, attaquaient, de nouveau’ [Below Republican tanks were attacking, returning, attacking once more with the order of a Red Square display] (pp. 571‒2). Magnin’s aviation is only a distant echo of the apocalyptic phase of combat and is now under centralized command. The arrival of Republican aviation breaks the stalemate and allows for the army on the ground to progress against the enemy. Yet the aviation’s battle is also with the elements once more. This time, however, it is the planes that impose themselves ‘malgré le ciel bas et la neige menaçante …’ [despite the low sky and the threatening snow …], filling the sky ‘d’un grondement qui faisait palpiter la neige sur la terre et sur les morts …’ [with a rumbling which shook the snow covering the earth and the dead …], transforming the horizon into ‘un horizon de bataille …’ [a battle horizon …] (p. 569). Momentarily, the natural world is mastered  Harris, André Malraux, p. 139.   Denis Boak, ‘L’Espoir: from the Transient to the Timeless’ in Thornberry (ed.), André Malraux et la guerre civile espagnole (1936‒1937), pp. 102‒11, p. 110. 23

24

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by Malraux’s heroes.25 The result, as Magnin notes, not without enthusiasm, is ‘la fin de la guérrilla, la naissance de l’armée’ (p. 570).26 Nevertheless, the army below is still, in Magnin’s eyes, a revolutionary force, but one which, through its incorporation of the Spanish peasantry, also echoes the latter’s eternal struggle: Les paysans rageurs qui combattaient sous lui combattaient pour élever ces petits murs, la première condition de leur dignité. Et … Magnin sentait dans tous les rêves où il se débattait depuis des mois, simple et fondamentale comme l’accouchement, la joie, la douleur ou la mort, la vieille lutte de celui qui cultive contre le possesseur héréditaire. (p. 571) [The enraged peasants fighting below him were fighting to take these small walls, the first condition of their dignity. And … Magnin perceived in all the dreams in which he had been struggling for months now, as simple and fundamental as birth, joy, pain and death, the old struggle between cultivators and landowners.]

Malraux’s evocation of the Battle of Guadalajara attempts to marry the strategic revolutionary utopia to the fraternal via Magnin’s perception of the new Popular Army as a fraternal community battling simultaneously fascism and the indignity of the human condition. L’Espoir does not conclude therefore with the uncontested triumph of its propagandist thesis. Moreover, the battle is followed by a discussion between the main actors where the limitations of the Communist Party are discussed, notably by Garcia (pp. 582‒3). Furthermore, L’Espoir concludes with another attempt to fuse the two competing and contradictory visions that have come to dominate Malraux’s novelistic representation of the war, focusing on the increasingly isolated Manuel. Unable to commune directly with his fellow combatants as a result of his position and role, Manuel retreats into music.27 The romances sung by his victorious soldiers and the playing of a piano reflect once more art’s ability to contribute to the construction of a rival, humanized world. As water cascades through the streets of Brihuega, forcing its way between the detritus of battle, Manuel discerns ‘un autre bruit [mêlé] à celui de l’eau, cristallin comme lui, accordé à lui comme un accompagnement: des notes de piano’ [another sound mixed with that of the water, crystalline like it, attuned to it like an accompaniment: the notes of a piano] 25   In this Malraux echoes a tendency Rasson discerns in communist literature; the desire to overturn our relationship with the natural world that derives from the communist, constructivist impulse but which, in the case of Paul Nizan in particular, also derives from a Promethean urge to mark the landscape with mankind’s presence. Rasson, Littérature et fascisme, p. 212. 26   ‘The end of guerrilla warfare and the birth of the army.’ 27   For Romesier, ‘music … evokes for Manuel an extra-temporal dimension that he has neglected since the war began’. John B. Romeiser, ‘His Master’s Voice: Leadership Lessons in L’Espoir’, p. 131.

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(p. 588). He returns to his room and plays a recording of a Beethoven symphony, allowing a communication with the past he has abandoned for military command. As he does so, the sounds of running water and of the Beethoven symphony merge with the sound of boots pounding the street as an endless stream of Nationalist prisoners march past his window. This fusion of sounds, suggesting the permanence of the natural world, the possibility of a rival, human world embodied in art and the onward march of history associated with his earlier interpretation of the war, reveals to Manuel: la voix de ce qui est plus grave que le sang des hommes, plus inquiétant que leur présence sur la terre, – la possibilité infinie de leur destin; et il sentait en lui cette présence mêlée au bruit des ruisseaux et au pas des prisonniers, permanente et profonde comme le battement de son cœur. (p. 590) [the voice of something graver than the blood of men, more troubling that their presence on this earth: the infinite possibility of their destiny. And he felt within himself this presence that blended with the sound of streams and the march of prisoners, permanent and profound like the beating of his heart.]

Malraux therefore attempts to reconcile Magnin’s vision of the war as part of an eternal human struggle for dignity and a place in the world with Manuel’s acceptance of the exigencies of political immediacy in the need for discipline in the Republican ranks through the figure of the novel’s central protagonist. The novel concludes with the opening up of Manuel to the infinite possibilities of both his own and human potentiality; Manuel’s position as a successful military commander distanced from those he leads, removed from the spontaneity and enthusiasm he encountered in July 1936, is a temporary one, Malraux suggests. The self is never complete and closed to the possibilities of the new: ‘Un jour il y aurait la paix. Et Manuel deviendrait un autre homme, inconnu de lui-même, comme le combattant d’aujourd’hui avait été inconnu de celui qui avait acheté une petite bagnole pour faire du ski dans la Sierra’ [One day there would be peace and Manuel would become another man, as yet unknown to him, just as today’s combatant had been unknown to the man who had once bought a small car to go skiing in the Sierra] (p. 589). Manuel’s re-insertion into the fraternal, dialogic community remains a possibility beyond the novel’s timeframe; his isolation at the end of L’Espoir is a temporary exile.28 What then should we make of his total absence from Malraux’s civil war film, Sierra de Teruel, and its elevation of both the aviators and the Spanish people?

  For Cecil Jenkins, however, L’Espoir fails to resolve the tension between être and faire. This opposition ‘is represented and debated, often in anguished terms, from beginning to end and Malraux, not being a propagandist, does not conclude’. Cecil Jenkins, André Malraux (New York, 1972), p. 88. 28

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Revisiting Spain in the Light of Resistance Malraux’s conversion from communist fellow traveller to supporter of and, briefly, member of de Gaulle’s post-Liberation government seemed to many of his contemporaries a spectacular transformation, not to say betrayal of the left. Subsequent re-evaluations of Malraux’s novels and his extra-literary activities have suggested that this was less transformation and more evolution; the seeds of Malraux’s rapprochement with Gaullism are to be found in the ‘non-rational and ahistorical dimension in which the Malrucian hero assumes his sense of being’, according to Raymond.29 For Janine Mossuz-Lavau, they are to be found in his extra-literary interest in the concepts of state and nation.30 Malraux himself locates the rapprochement with Gaullism in his own experiences of the Resistance during the Second World War. Here, through his involvement in the maquis and his contact with the ‘ordinary’ French man and woman, he encountered that concept dear to Gaullism: la France éternelle, a people that remained unchanged and true to itself despite the vicissitudes of history.31 For Malraux, as for de Gaulle, it was the spirit of la France éternelle that characterized the Resistance. All three explanations are underpinned by the recognition of Malraux’s lifelong interest in the collective human endeavour to endure, however. Fraternity becomes the myth through which the promise of endurance is kept alive, a value which, in L’Espoir, Malraux’s characters had discovered in collective action and which is captured in the descent from the mountain. A descent from the mountains forms the climactic scene of Sierra de Teruel. In this, and in the absence of an exemplary military apprenticeship, fraternity now displaces L’Espoir’s interest in the strategic revolutionary interpretation of the war, refusing the fusion attempted in the latter’s conclusion. In many ways, this is a reflection of the state of the war at the time of filming. Filming throughout the summer of 1938 and early 1939, Malraux’s film crew was forced to abandon Catalonia days before Barcelona fell to the Nationalist army. Consequently, some of the final scenes of the film had  Raymond, André Malraux, p. 20.   Janine Mossuz-Lavau, André Malraux et le gaullisme (Paris, 1982). 31   Captured by the Nazis in 1944, it is the memory of the Resistance, the Resistance not just as a virile, armed struggle, but a silent struggle undertaken by a people whose individual actions constitute a source of reassuring fraternity, which sustains Malraux. In his Antimémoires, Malraux would note of his arrest: ‘Mon passé, ma vie biographique, n’avaient aucune importance. Je ne pensais pas à mon enfance. Je ne pensais pas aux miens. Je pensais aux paysannes athées qui saluaient mes blessures du signe de la croix, à la canne apportée par le paysan craintif, au café de l’hôtel de France et à celui de la Supérieure [du couvent]. Il ne restait dans ma mémoire que la fraternité’ [My past, my biography held no importance. I did not think of my childhood nor of my loved ones. I thought of the atheist peasant women who had crossed themselves at the sight of my wounds, of the cane one fearful peasant brought me, of the Hotel de France’s and the Mother Superior’s coffee. My memory was filled only with fraternity]. André Malarux, Antimémoires (Paris, 1967) p. 230. 29 30

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to be shot across the Pyrenees in France in February 1939, the same month that France officially recognized Franco as the head of the Spanish state. Even by the start of filming, the Republican struggle had become for many a rearguard action, a form of resistance with little or no hope of final victory. Indeed, the Spanish Prime Minister of the time, Juan Negrín, called precisely for resistance, arguing that the war had become an attempt to liberate those territories occupied by the Nationalists and their foreign sponsors.32 Having witnessed the departure of the International Brigades in Barcelona in the autumn of 1938, Malraux is reputed to have remarked to one US journalist: ‘C’était toute la révolution qui s’en allait.’33 Malraux’s pessimism (or was it realism?) regarding the future of the Republic is reflected in the two titles he also considered for the film: Sang de gauche and Chant funèbre pour les morts de la guerre.34 As Marcel Oms argues, whilst too late to influence the foreign policy of the Western democracies, Sierra de Teruel was nevertheless initially conceived as ‘une arme antifasciste universelle, au seuil de la Seconde Guerre mondiale qui approchait’ [a universal anti-fascist weapon on the eve of the approaching Second World War].35 That said, the film is less insistent on the internationalism of the Republican forces and, arguably, the Republican cause itself; its real heroes are the Spanish peasantry and working class united in a popular resistance to the Nationalists and aided by the film’s squadron of international airmen. The squadron, however, is under the command of a Spaniard, Commander Peña (José Sempere). The theme of resistance is emphasized by the film’s focus on a single action in contrast to the novel’s multiplicity of perspectives and events: the destruction of the bridge at Liñas which will prevent Nationalist troops from falling back on Saragossa. This single action requires the conjoined efforts of Peña’s airmen and the Republican villagers who have risen up behind enemy lines against the Nationalist occupation. The film still insists on the international dimension of the conflict, yet grants a far greater role to the Spanish people as agents of a national resistance to Franquism, emphasizing further still the conjunction in L’Espoir already examined. While this conjunction between the people and Malraux’s privileged combatants occurs primarily in the descent from the mountain in L’Espoir, Sierra de Teruel is structured upon three principal points of conjunction. 32

  Negrín coined the slogan ‘To resist is to win’. For Beevor, however, the failure to arm the militias on 18 July 1936 had immediately placed the Republic on the defensive, a position they maintained throughout the war (Beevor, The Battle for Spain, p. 61). 33   ‘It was the revolution slipping away.’ Quoted in Robert S. Thornberry, André Malraux et la guerre d’Espagne, p. 68. 34   Blood of the Left and Requiem for the Dead of the Spanish Civil War respectively. Marcel Oms, La guerre d’Espagne au cinéma: mythes et réalités (Paris, 1986), p. 127. For Oms, the film is therefore one of désespoir rather than espoir, a transfiguration ‘de l’agonie du peuple espagnol abandonné à son destin’ [of the Spanish people’s death throes once abandoned to their fate] (ibid., p. 130). 35   Ibid., p. 126.

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The first occurs when Peña and his political commissar, Attignies (Julio Peña), attempt to borrow the cars and trucks of the local villagers to light the runway and thereby allow the squadron’s two remaining bombers to destroy a Nationalist airfield and the bridge. In an echoing of the same event in the novel, the sequence involves repeated car journeys by Peña and Attignies between villages. The arrival in each village is preceded by shots of Peña’s car headlights struggling to cut through the darkness of the night with their solitary beams. The dialogue between Peña and the villagers in each village is essentially the same: all the villages’ drivers have been working all day and are tired, the cars are needed by the local popular front committee, only a few can be spared, but the committee always promises to see what it can do. The sequence ends with the final preparations of the bomber crews. As they begin to head along the runway convinced that they will not clear the orange trees at its end, a row of car headlights stretching across the width of the screen lights up and guides the planes into the air. The second point of conjunction occurs in one of the bombers itself. José (José Lado), a peasant whose journey across enemy lines the viewer followed earlier in the film, attempts to direct Peña’s bomber to a secret Nationalist airbase. As the plane pitches, alternately rising above and descending below the cloud line to gain a sense of its position in relation to the earth below, José is unable to recognize the land he knows so well. The anxiety he feels at the possibility of failing in his mission is doubled by the anxiety of the bomber’s crew who await the arrival of enemy fighters. Both peasant and crew oscillate between an interminably blank sky, traversed at one point by the flight of birds, reminding us of nature’s eternal rhythm, of the seeming distance between humanity and the natural world, and a rapidly approaching earth. The camera focuses on the vastness of the sky before plunging viewer and characters towards the earth at speeds which prevent immediate recognition of objects. Finally, José recognizes the secret airbase and the bombers are able to complete their mission as the Nationalist air force bears down upon them. In the ensuing battle, one of the bombers, piloted by Muñoz (Andrés Mejuto), is shot down, crashing into the sierra above Teruel. Here again an episode from the novel is reproduced as the film concludes with the final conjunction between the people and the Republican forces in the descent of the dead and the wounded from the mountain. As in the novel, a vast cortege of local people is formed to bring the wounded and dead down from the mountain. As in the novel, the descent from the mountain seems to place the characters within a continuum of eternal human suffering. This is suggested here by the visual parallels between the descent from the mountain and the descent of Jesus from the cross in Italian Renaissance art, to the extent that Oms considers that the film’s greatest achievement is its fusion of two aesthetic orders: the Christian tradition and the art of faces and crowds perfected by the Soviet film makers Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovjenko.36  Oms, La guerre d’Espagne au cinéma, p. 130.

36

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Suffering is once more redeemed by Malraux through its aestheticization and the concomitant sense of meaning through fraternity. Again, the flight of birds during the descent suggests, as it has throughout the film, nature’s rhythm. Elsewhere in the film, the same motif serves to indicate the imminence of death and is accompanied by a rise in tension among characters faced with the indifference of the world around them. Yet, here, the flight of birds as Schreiner (Pedro Codina), a dying aviator, contemplates suicide in order to avoid an agonizing and inevitable death, is countered by the cortege’s echoing of the mountain’s force and permanence. This echoing of nature’s permanence, like the sound of clogs descending the mountain in L’Espoir, is suggested as the film closes on a shot of the people, into which the airmen have now been absorbed, processing down the mountainside. Here the camera pans out from the intimacy of earlier shots of the wounded to reveal a Greek Z set against the mountainside, suggesting, Oms argues, immortality.37 In this, we sense the people emerging from the mountainside, but sharing with it something of its permanence, a permanence that is suggested in the inexorable and interminable forward movement of the cortege which, as Malraux wrote in his own screen directions, stretches beyond view.38 The representation of the Spanish people in Sierra de Teruel shares much with the novel; the people in both works are engaged in a permanent struggle with the world around them, but it is the very eternity of this struggle and the endless suffering that it engenders which finally leads to a form of communication between humanity and the natural world from which so many of Malraux’s earlier characters had seemed alienated. Yet, while the people in L’Espoir are both timeless and stateless (in the sense that Malraux insists only rarely on Spanish, Catalan or any regional specificity), in Sierra de Teruel their national specificity seems far clearer. The film’s focus on the conjunction of military action and popular insurrection casts the Spanish people in a far more active role than in L’Espoir; there is a far greater sense that the territory they defend is their own. This is reinforced by the film’s evocation of the intimate struggle between the peasants and the world they inhabit. Thus, in the penultimate sequence, the peasants emerge from their homes, which themselves seem carved out of the face of the mountainside, suggesting both their struggle with the earth, but also their very rock-like permanence. Their arms then rise ritualistically, but spontaneously in the Republican salute, referring the viewer to what Ricœur terms a ‘cultic system, [placed] within a whole set of conventions, beliefs and institutions that make up the symbolic framework of a culture’.39 The salute refers us to the concrete existence of a people within a nation that, by the time of viewing, was the Spanish Republic. Yet, the clenched fist of the Republican salute, whilst primarily associated with the Spanish Republic and the Frente Popular, is a gesture which can also transcend cultures, generations, even ideologies. As Bruno Forrestier, the 37

  Ibid., p. 130.   André Malraux, Espoir: Sierra de Teruel: scénario du film (Paris, 1997), p. 165. 39   Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative (London, 1984), vol. 1, p. 58. 38

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protagonist of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1963) suggests, the Republican salute constitutes a refusal of oppression. It is therefore a gesture which transcends time and space to become available to all those who refuse to be humiliated by a militarily superior other; it is a gesture of resistance in the broad sense of the term. The penultimate scene of Sierra de Teruel, as does the film’s representation of the people more generally, allows for both a culturally specific reading as well as an acculturated one; had the film been released in 1939, many would have seen in it not only a requiem for the Republic, but for popular frontism generally. Yet, with its insistence upon a continuous human struggle for meaning in the face of death, Sierra de Teruel clearly posits the ahistorical force of fraternity as ultimate human value. Although the film portrays a spontaneously disciplined resistance on the part of workers and peasants and an effective, if depleted air force under centralized command, the dominant chronotope is that of the human cycle and not one predicated on a revolutionary, teleological understanding of the Civil War. This teleological understanding of the Civil War persists, however, in Simone Téry’s novelization of some of her own war experiences in Où l’aube se lève, drafted during her exile in Mexico in the 1940s and published in 1945, to which I shall turn briefly. Here, the initially politically and emotionally naive Jeannette is substituted for the experienced writer and dutiful Party-member Téry. Before arriving in the Spanish Republic, where she has landed a job as a reporter for a medical journal, Jeannette has no political allegiances. Indeed, she has chosen to travel to Spain in the hope of being killed following her upper-class lover’s rejection of her. The Civil War initially merely constitutes the setting of her own personal drama as the novel’s opening line suggests: ‘Jeannette allait en Espagne pour mourir.’40 Through her encounter with the defenders of the Republic, however, and more particularly with the Spanish working class and PCE members, Jeannette discovers a political direction and understanding of the world denied to her until then. Moreover, through her relationship with two Party men, she also discovers a form of emotional and erotic fulfilment again denied to her in the stifling atmosphere of bourgeois respectability she had known in France. Like Sierra de Teruel, Où l’aube se lève conceives the Republican cause as a form of anti-fascist resistance. As Paco, Jeannette’s first communist lover explains: ‘“Il ne s’agit pas de nous …, de tous nos gars qui se font tuer, il s’agit de Madrid, il s’agit de l’Espagne, il s’agit de la liberté du monde!”’ [It’s not about us, … about all our lads who are being killed; it’s about Madrid, it’s about Spain, it’s about the freedom of the world] (Où l’aube se lève, p. 189). Unlike Malraux’s treatments of the war, however, Où l’aube se lève is rarely concerned with its potential metaphysical dimension, emphasizing its political significance within the European context through an interpretation consonant with the Communist   ‘Jeannette was going to Spain in order to die.’ Simone Téry, Où l’aube se lève (New York, 1945), p. 11. The novel was republished by Editions Hier et Aujourd’hui in France in 1947 as La Porte du soleil. Here the heroine is renamed Josette and there is some reordering of the original 1945 text. 40

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Party’s understanding of the war in 1945. As Kershaw observes, its originality resides in the way it negotiates between and merges two potentially incompatible genres: the Bildungsroman, traditionally predicated upon the mastery of the world by an individual male hero, and the romance narrative of popular fiction.41 It is therefore through her love of three committed men encountered in Republican Spain (the French aviator Guirec, the communist Paco, both of whom die in combat, and ultimately the political commissar Ramos) that Jeannette achieves a form of political, emotional and erotic plenitude in her love of the Party and of the Party man. Jeannette’s and Ramos’s departure for France as the Republic collapses at the end of Où l’aube se lève therefore suggests the possibility of ‘a new model for a successful romantic relationship between a heterosexual couple based on a shared commitment …’.42 Written in the knowledge of the Republic’s demise, Où l’aube se lève, like Front de la liberté, upon which it draws in part, nevertheless considers the Civil War through the same revolutionary utopia, placing the activities of the Republicans within a historical and revolutionary continuum. Like Malraux’s humanism, Téry’s insists upon a struggle to assert the human dignity of the oppressed. Each Republican encountered by Jeannette reveals: ‘le sens de l’universel de l’Espagnol. … Et aujourd’hui tous les soldats de l’Armée Populaire savaient et disaient … qu’ils ne se battaient pas seulement pour l’Espagne mais pour la liberté du monde’ [The Spaniard’s sense of the universal. … And now all the soldiers of the Popular Army knew and repeated … that they were not only fighting for Spain, but for the freedom of the world] (p. 244). Yet, the struggle of Téry’s universal Spaniard is a primarily social one informed by her new understanding of the Civil War as a form of class warfare and which, according to Marxist doctrine, will one day know an end point; it is not a necessary constant of the human condition as it has become for Malraux. Où l’aube se lève therefore refuses pessimism, despite its subject matter and the knowledge of the Republic’s defeat. Like Sierra de Teruel, it is not only a homage to the Republic, but to a form of anti-fascist resistance which, at the time Téry was drafting the novel, had already translated itself in France into resistance against the forces of occupation and collaboration. The omniscient narrator therefore likens the situation in Madrid in 1939, when civil war erupted once more in the Republican ranks, now between Casadists eager to negotiate with Franco and the PCE determined to fight on until the end, to the fall of Paris in 1940: ‘Madrid l’héroïque ne se rendit pas: elle fut livrée à l’ennemi par les traîtres, comme Paris fut livré par Pétain’ [Madrid did not surrender; she was handed to the enemy by  Kershaw, Forgotten Engagements, p. 83. Such a negotiation reveals that female committed writers like Téry were attempting to operate within a male dominated genre (the committed novel of the interwar years) whilst also modifying the genre from within through their representations of female experience. They were ‘positioned precariously on the dividing line between inclusion and exclusion’ (ibid., p. 102). 42   Ibid., p. 83. 41

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traitors just as Paris was handed over by Pétain] (Où l’aube se lève, p. 425). Téry’s novel therefore celebrates the Spanish Republic as a first act of resistance in the European war against international fascism. The war lost by the left becomes a battle lost through the treachery of the Casadists.43 Whilst in Front de la liberté communism rarely declared itself, in Où l’aube se lève it is the activity of the communists within the Republican resistance that is emphasized. They are credited with the creation of the Popular Army, the victories of Guadarrama and Navacerrada, the setting up of effective military training, officer cadet schools and a centralized military command, and the preservation of Spanish cultural heritage (p. 142). Moreover, the figure of the dynamic, communist leader, as both effective organizer and lover, is often foregrounded in Téry’s eulogy. Through Paco the Communist Party becomes associated with solidity, strength and discipline in a world otherwise threatened by chaos and dissolution: il n’y avait en lui [Paco] ni problèmes ni doutes, jamais il n’hésitait, et jamais il ne se trompait, et toutes ses paroles, tous ses actes étaient justes et pleins. Jeannette sentait en lui l’instinct tranquille, invincible, de la plante qui pousse vers la lumière, du vent qui répand les semences, du fleuve qui coule vers la mer, du soleil qui mûrit les moissons. Il avait la dureté … des pierres, et Jeannette se reposait sur ce roc. (Ibid., p. 279) [Paco had no doubts, no problems. He never hesitated and was never wrong. All his words and deeds were just and complete. Jeannette felt in him the calm, invincible instinct of a plant growing towards the light, of the wind scattering the seed, of the river flowing to the sea, of the sun ripening the harvest. He had the hardness … of stones and Jeannette could depend upon this rock.]

In this Paco anticipates the new man promised in Téry’s earlier account of the Civil War by the revolutionary utopia, reflecting a longed-for totality of being and coincidence of self, the ultimate embodiment of whom is Jeannette’s third lover, Ramon, the political commissar. Thus, as the Republic falls, and as the communist couple escape to France, Ramon is able to recast the defeat of the moment within both a political and personal teleology: ‘Voilà’, dit Jeannette à mi-voix, ‘tout est perdu … C’est fini.’ Alors il y eut un sourire sur le visage douloureux de Ramon. Il releva la tête de Jeannette et la regarda dans les yeux, et toujours il souriait, comme si ce soleil couchant eût été pour lui une aurore:   Miaja, the avuncular general of Front de la liberté who would join the Casadists against the Party he had joined only months earlier, and the socialist leader Prieto are now derided for their corpulence, for example, ‘Dans cette Espagne affamée où chacun perdait dix à vingt kilos de son poids …’ [In this starving Spain where everyone lost ten to twenty kilos …] (Où l’aube se lève, pp. 285‒6). 43

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‘Non,’ dit-il. ‘Ça commence.’ (Ibid., p. 434) [‘There,’ said Jeannette, ‘all is lost … It’s over.’ Then a smile appeared on Ramon’s pained face. He lifted Jeannette’s head and looked her in the eyes and, still smiling, as if the setting sun were a new dawn for him: ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s just beginning.’]

Dusk becomes a new dawn as the Civil War is absorbed into the personal trajectory of the communist couple. The couple thus becomes a liberated utopian space able to transform the disaster of the Republic from which it emerges into a new form of being. As Kershaw asserts, the communist couple in Où l’aube se lève resolves many of the tensions between the sexes through commitment whilst simultaneously allowing for female participation in the political arena and for female sexual and emotional fulfilment.44 More significantly for this study, the Republican cause can be read throughout Où l’aube se lève as an anticipation of the spirit of resistance and, indeed, of the Resistance itself. In the wake of the Liberation the novel served as a reminder to its French readership of the leading role played by the Communist Party in the European anti-fascist struggle that was the long Second World War and, more particularly, in the French Resistance. Indeed, its publication coincided with attempts by the PCF to unite the two leading post-Liberation Resistance organizations, the PCF dominated Front National (FN) and the more disparate Mouvement de Libération Nationale (MLN). In its circumspection regarding popular frontism, but also in its refusal to attack socialists and the Republican liberal left explicitly, Où l’aube se lève leaves the door open to future collaboration between former partners in the anti-fascist struggle. However, in highlighting, simplifying and overstating the positive role of the communists in Spain, Téry is attempting, like the PCF in the aftermath of the Liberation, to present the Party as the people’s tribune, as the true defender of national democracies and as their moral and political saviour. In this, Où l’aube se lève constitutes a weapon in the struggle for influence in the aftermath of the Liberation, positing a communist utopian vision born of the ruins of the Republic which once again emerges as a strategic point on the path to a better future somewhere over the horizon. The PCF’s attempts to force a merger between the FN and MLN failed in January 1945 when the latter rejected Pierre Hervé’s pro-merger motion calling for Soviet style collectivization of the means of production in a fusion of the best of the French and Russian revolutionary traditions. Instead, the MLN adopted by 250 votes to 119 a counter-proposal launched by none other than Malraux,  Kershaw, Forgotten Engagements, pp. 151‒60. Sexual fulfilment becomes the prize that accompanies commitment to the correct ideology in the novel: ‘Thus female sexuality and commitment are united, forming a productive unity which benefits the female subject politically, ontologically and physically’ (ibid., p. 202). 44

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supporting the nationalization of industry and of credit, measures that would ultimately provide for the dismantling of capitalism. As Mossuz-Lavau observes, Malraux emerged in post-Liberation France distanced from his earlier emphasis on revolutionary action and closer to a form of reformist, progressive socialism akin to that of the British Labour Party of that era.45 It would not be until June 1945 that Malraux would meet de Gaulle for the first time, accepting an advisory post in his first postwar government in August that year. It was to be the beginning of a lasting friendship between the two men and a new period of political fellowtravelling that led ultimately to the association of Malraux with the conservative politics of Gaullism. Malraux’s new emphasis in his understanding of the Spanish Civil War, as I have already argued, anticipates this subsequent reconfiguration of Malraux the politician. The release of Sierra de Teruel in 1945 coincided with Malraux’s rejection of PCF strategy and his participation in de Gaulle’s unity government.46 Indeed, the film was co-opted upon its release, via an introduction by Maurice Schumann, an ally of de Gaulle during his time in London and spokesman for the Free French, as a celebration of the Resistance. Schumann’s introduction emphasizes the metaphysical value to be found in its representation of the Spanish people as an enduring entity over the historic specificity of the Spanish Civil War. In his injunction ‘Regardez Teruel et reconnaissez Paris’, Schumann urged the 1945 French viewer to understand the French Resistance in the light of the film’s emphasis on fraternity.47 Thus, he contends, appropriating the Civil War for domestic consumption, ‘le drame de l’Espagne, c’était déjà notre drame; la guerre de l’Espagne, c’était déjà notre guerre; et ces hommes que nous allons voir mourir mouraient déjà pour nous’ [Spain’s drama was already our drama; Spain’s war was already ours; and these men that we are about to see die were already dying on our behalf]. The film’s metaphysical dimension allowed for this attempted translation of one cultural and political event into the memory of another, but it also allowed Schumann to side-step the cultural and political specificity of the Liberation period in France and, in particular, the bitter rivalry developing between competing communist and Gaullist calls upon, and memories of, Resistance. By appropriating the Republican struggle, Schumann endows the French people’s own resistance to Nazi occupation with the same aesthetic and metaphysical qualities as those of Malraux’s fictional characters. Schumann’s assertion that ‘notre victoire, un jour, serait la sienne, comme sa guerre avait été la nôtre’ equally translates the Liberation and its aftermath to an ahistorical plane.48 It depoliticizes the events of that summer, transporting them to the realm of myth for, as Barthes argues,  Mossuz-Lavau, André Malraux et le gaullisme, p. 47.   Indeed, the film’s original publicity poster suggests that it is supported by the Mouvement de Libération Nationale. 47   ‘Look at Teruel and recognize Paris.’ 48   ‘Our victory, one day, would be its victory, just as its war was ours.’ 45 46

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myth reduces complexities and denies historicity in order to suggest an eternal, immutable and ultimately obvious and indisputable truth removed from the unresolved tensions of the quotidian and the political.49 Schumann thus sought to co-opt Sierra de Teruel into the creation of the myth of national resistance and thereby into that of la France éternelle; a nation united in a constant struggle to preserve its very being through a collective refusal to succumb to the forces of oppression and a collective resistance to the vicissitudes of history through which it remained ever true to itself. In short, it was the very myth upon which postwar Gaullist conservatism would be founded. The idea that there could be any connection between Malraux’s representation of the Spanish Republican struggle and a Gaullist memory of the Resistance was considered risible by some of the audiences who viewed Sierra de Teruel and Schumann’s introduction upon the film’s re-release in 1970 and in the wake of de Gaulle’s resignation one year earlier. Yet, Schumann’s encouragement to see in Teruel the recent struggle for the liberation of Paris is founded on a crucial difference of emphasis that distinguishes the novel from the film, one that is constructed upon a spatio-temporal reorientation of Malraux’s understanding of the war and which had gradually come to occlude any revolutionary utopian interpretation of it. The myth of fraternity developed in L’Espoir and aggrandized in Sierra de Teruel ultimately reveals what will become Malraux’s enduring interest: the collective human endeavour to transcend history. Whilst Malraux the aesthete will pursue the expression of this through his writings on art, Malraux the politician will do so through his considerations on the importance of national communities. The French nation will become in Malraux’s thinking, as he himself later wrote, ‘un personnage surnaturel …’ [a supernatural character … ], the Republic: ‘l’intercesseur entre la vie humaine et le monde inconnu, entre la misère présente et le bonheur futur, et d’abord entre la solitude et la fraternité’ [the intercessor between human life and the unknown world, between our present suffering and future happiness, and above all between solitude and fraternity] (Antimémoires, p. 169). General de Gaulle will henceforth fulfil the Promethean role of Malraux’s aviators, interceding between the nation and its destiny. These twin trajectories (the aesthetic and the political) will fuse in Malraux’s role, following de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, as Minister of Culture. It was above all the pursuit of fraternity through the nation that informs Malraux’s period of fellow-travelling with Gaullist conservatism. In this Sierra de Teruel contributes significantly to our understanding of Malraux’s political itinerary in post-Liberation France, his eventual adoption of Gaullist nationalism and his public rupture with the PCF in 1947.

 Barthes, Mythologies, pp. 223‒4.

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Chapter 7

Lessons in the Darkness: Bernanos’s Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune and Pollès’s Toute guerre se fait la nuit The works examined thus far have all reflected enthusiasm for one of the belligerent parties in Spain, suggesting the conflict’s utopian potential even when, in the case of the Republic, defeat appeared inevitable; even the setting sun at the end of Téry’s Où l’aube se lève can be recast by the communist characters as a new dawn. The war represented in these works is intended to provide an illuminating lesson, a lesson that has often been simplified for assimilation by a targeted section of the French public. By way of contrast, the present chapter focuses on two works that dispute this lesson. Both Georges Bernanos’s Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938) and Henri Pollès’s Toute guerre se fait la nuit (1939) constitute a form of criticism from within. Bernanos, who has enjoyed a more enduring reputation than the now largely forgotten Pollès, had been associated with Maurras’s Action Française and French monarchist circles since the 1910s. Furthermore, his son Yves fought in the Falange in Majorca where the Bernanos family were resident from 1934 to March 1937. The author of a number of celebrated novels examining the trials and tribulations of the Catholic faith under the secular Third Republic, Bernanos had already begun to distance himself from Action Française in 1919, however, following the latter’s decision to field candidates in the parliamentary elections that year. This distance increased in the early 1930s following Bernanos’s collaboration with François Coty on Le Figaro and the divorce was finally consummated, according to Winock, by the publication of Les Grands Cimetières in May 1938.1 The latter is essentially a polemical essay in which, as we shall see, Bernanos offers a critique of the Spanish Nationalists, a critique based on the atrocities he witnessed in Majorca and which acts as a springboard for a much broader critique of the Maurrassians, the young right in France, European fascism and the institution of the Catholic Church. Henri Pollès, in contrast to Bernanos the middle-aged war veteran, was a young writer still cutting his teeth in the profession when he published Toute guerre. Yet, in some ways, Pollès’s career in this period offers a mirror image of that of Bernanos. Operating in the literary milieu of the left, Pollès too had enjoyed some 1   Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, p. 304. For Michael Tobin, 1938 also marks the height of Bernanos’s attack on his former monarchist allies. See Michael Tobin, Georges Bernanos. The Theological Source of His Art (Montreal et al, 2007), p. 3.

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success as a novelist prior to the Spanish Civil War, gaining Le Prix du roman populiste in 1932 for his first novel Sophie de Tréguier. Like Bernanos, he too combined a career as a novelist with journalism, contributing to the Paris-based Italian anti-fascist publication Giustizia e Libertà. Pollès’s disillusionment with internal Republican politics if not the Republican cause, one imagines, resulted from his experience of Republican Spain from where he reported on behalf of Vendredi. Moreover, whilst Pollès chooses the novel over the essay or reportage, he too uses his representation of the Civil War as a means of formulating a critique of both the Republicans and the political community with which he had become associated: the European anti-fascist left. Pollès’s sprawling Civil War novel, drafted in the very atmosphere in which Sierra de Teruel was filmed and which was published in late July 1939, is simultaneously a satire of the Republic and its requiem song. It narrowly missed out on the Prix Goncourt in 1945.2 Published when either the Nationalist victory seemed assured or in the wake of that ensuing victory, both works place the Civil War far more explicitly than any of the works already examined within European political debates of the interwar period and the context of the coming world war. The night to which the titles of both works allude is both that of this approaching conflict, but also the moral darkness into which the radical right and the radical left have descended according to both authors. Spain, then, is symptomatic of a broader European malaise for both; its lesson lacks the illuminating quality and clarity that many of those French intellectuals examined thus far claim it provides for the French public. More specifically, and as this chapter will demonstrate, at the heart of both works is an attempt to expose the limitations of specific utopian visions that lie behind pro-Nationalist and pro-Republican representations of the war in France. Like the literary dystopias examined by Krishan Kumar, the representation of Spain in both works responds directly to existing utopias.3

2   Toute guerre lost out to Jean-Louis Bory’s novel of the Occupation, Mon village à l’heure allemande, which no doubt responded to what Katherine Ashley notes as the Académie Goncourt’s preference for the depiction of recent events or of issues of actualité. See her introduction to Katherine Ashley (ed.), Prix Goncourt, 1903‒2003: essais critiques (Oxford etc., 2004), pp. 14‒15. Jane Cavani provides a useful analysis of the context in which the prize was awarded in post-Liberation France in her essay ‘Elsa Triolet et le prix Goncourt 1944: consécration littéraire ou expédient politique?’, ibid., pp. 125‒38. Pollès would miss out twice more on the Prix Goncourt: in 1963 and 1964 for Amour, ma douce mort and Le Fils de l’auteur respectively. 3   Thus, Kumar writes: ‘Anti-utopia draws its material from utopia and reassembles it in a manner that denies the affirmation of utopia. It is the mirror-image of utopia – but a distorted image, seen in a cracked mirror’ (Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford-New York, 1987), p. 100). Kumar prefers the term anti-utopia to dystopia, but, as Levitas argues, the two terms are fundamentally identical. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 165.

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In this, both Les Grands Cimetières and Toute guerre anticipate the dampening of ‘utopian ardour’ that Kumar perceives in the wake of the Second World War.4 In Les Grands Cimetières, for example, Bernanos refutes any association of the Civil War with a quest for an ideal, pointing instead, in the colourful imagery that sustains many of his political observations, to its brutal reality, to the compromised means by which all parties attempt to achieve their utopian end: La guerre d’Espagne est un charnier. C’est le charnier des principes vrais et faux, des bonnes intentions et des mauvaises. Lorsqu’elles auront cuit ensemble dans le sang et la boue, vous verrez ce qu’elles seront devenues … S’il est un spectacle digne de compassion c’est bien celui de ces malheureux accroupis depuis des mois autour de la marmite à sorcière et piquant de la fourchette, chacun vantant son morceau – républicains, démocrates, fascistes ou antifascistes, cléricaux et anticléricaux, pauvres gens, pauvres diables. (Les Grands Cimetières, p. 136) [The Spanish Civil War is a bloodbath. It is a bloodbath for true and false principles, for good and bad intentions. When these have all cooked together in blood and in mud, you will see what has become of them. If there is a sight worthy of pity, it is that of all these poor wretches squatting for months around the witch’s cauldron, stabbing with their forks, each boasting his morsel – republicans, democrats, fascists or antifascists, clericals and anti-clericals, poor people, poor devils.]

Whilst Spain is the victim of half-famished, blood-thirsty utopians of various political hues in Bernanos’s image, for Domni Valmayor, the intellectual Republican hero of Toute guerre, the victim is the committed combatant possessed by utopian ardour. Thus, he asserts of both Nationalists and Republicans: ‘Ils vont tous [à la guerre], emportés par le rêve d’un monde où il n’y aurait plus de haine, où l’on ne vivrait qu’entre amis absolus; ils rêvent de vider le vase de la haine, et ils ne vident que le vase de leur vie …’ [They are all heading off [to war], carried away by the dream of a world where there is no more hatred, where they will live among best friends only. They dream of emptying the vessel filled with their hatred and only ever empty the vessel that contains their life …].5 The combatants of Pollès’s novel are predominantly political dreamers immune to the bloody reality of the war they wage: ‘Dans la merde, la pourriture, la terre, la neige, ils allaient vers tous les rêves …; loin du passé, … ils construisaient dans leur âme un monde autrement renouvelé qu’il ne l’est par la plupart des révolutions …’ [In the shit, the dust, the earth and the snow, they were heading towards every dream …; leaving the past behind, … they were constructing in their souls a world more 4   Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, p. 381, although Kumar locates this particularly with respect to the deception intellectuals now felt with the USA and USSR as new model societies. 5   Henri Pollès, Toute guerre se fait la nuit (Paris, 1939), p. 201, © Editions Gallimard.

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radically transformed than it ever is by the majority of revolutions …]. Yet, as the narrator never tires of pointing out, ‘la réalité vexe toujours ce qu’imagine l’esprit’ (Toute guerre, p. 75).6 The bloody consequences, the material reality of modern warfare, but also its spiritual consequences are therefore constantly juxtaposed to the vaunted idealism of the belligerent parties in both works. In this way, both writers point to a fundamental conflict between the reality of war and the dream pursued through it. In both, then, we are faced with a questioning, if not a refusal, of others’ idealism, a questioning that often highlights the tawdry means by which the actors in the conflict attempt to make real the dream. As Pollès writes, ‘Plus facile de parler d’un autre monde que d’y entrer. La guerre n’était qu’une porte d’on ne savait quel royaume’ [Easier to talk of another world than to enter it. The war was the doorway to God knows what kingdom] (Toute guerre, p. 54). In this, Bernanos and Pollès offer an ethical opposition to the means employed by both sides, but more particularly those employed by their own respective political communities. This ethical opposition originates in both Toute guerre and Les Grands Cimetières in an individual moral consciousness. In the latter, this emerges in Bernanos’s voice throughout his work as that of a free individual able to rise above the clan mentality of modern politics. Les Grands Cimetières is thus ‘le témoignage d’un homme libre’ [the testimony of a free man] (p. 291) in response to earlier testimonies from those enslaved by their utopian projections. In the case of Toute guerre, this individual moral consciousness is that of Domni. The novel is primarily concerned with the forging and persistence of Domni’s ethical understanding of the conflict in response to, and often in spite of, his experiences of the Civil War through the musings and reflections that form the bulk of the novel. Both works therefore constitute moralistic ripostes to some of the assertions already examined, elevating an ethics of engagement above the end sought and invoking the moral consciousness of the individual as the measure by which political means and ends are to be judged. Winock’s assertion that Bernanos ‘se flatte de faire de la politique avec son cœur, avec des sentiments, et aussi avec de la morale’ [prides himself on conducting politics with his heart, feelings and morality too] might also be applied to Pollès.7 To achieve this end, and despite differences of tone between their work, Bernanos and Pollès resort to biting humour. Bernanos, trained in the ways of the vituperative right-wing press of the Third Republic, often resorts to diatribe and to caricature of his enemies.8 Whilst he professes to ‘parler sans ironie’ [speak 6

  ‘Reality always contradicts whatever the spirit imagines.’   Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, p. 297. 8   Thus Monique Gosselin-Noat writes of the style of Les Grands Cimetières: ‘[Bernanos] crie littéralement son indignation … Il a recours alors tout naturellement à la rhétorique propre au pamphlet avec l’amalgame, l’accumulation … et l’ellipse avec le discours indirect libre, absurde et impitoyable, qu’il prête à ses adversaires …’ [[Bernanos] literally shouts his indignation … He then resorts naturally to the rhetoric of the pamphleteer combining amalgam, accumulation … and ellipsis with the free indirect, absurd and 7

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without irony] (Les Grands Cimetières, p. 67), like Pollès, he too employs satire as a means of subverting the discourse of his targets: the Church, the French far right and Italian and German fascism. Both works therefore constitute satires of the political communities with which their respective authors had become associated. Yet, as Kumar states, satire is at once a tool of utopianism and dystopianism: ‘It criticizes, through ridicule and invective, its own times, while pointing … to alternative and better ways of living.’ Like Saturn, the god who inspires it, and the saturnalia from which it derives, it is richly ambivalent; a force that destroys, but which also creates. Satire thus contains both utopian and dystopian elements.9 And if Bernanos resists irony with difficulty, he nevertheless admits that ‘Elle n’est elle-même trop souvent que le gémissement d’un cœur blessé’ (Les Grands Cimetières, p. 67).10 Like Pollès, he remains attached to the political community he now attacks; as this chapter will seek to establish, both works use their critique of the utopias developed by their authors’ respective political communities as a means of subsequently adumbrating alternative utopias for these since, as Domni contends: ‘Un beau rêve a bien de façons d’être mal réalisé; – mais aucune ne le nie’ (Toute guerre, p. 65).11 Utopia Denied The longevity of Les Grands Cimetières is attributable to its reputation as a searing critique of European fascism and totalitarianism. For Monique GosselinNoat, therefore, the work’s central motif is its analysis of totalitarianism and of contemporary dictatorships.12 However, it was the attack within it on the French far right and on Bernanos’s erstwhile allies that most immediately struck many readers in 1938. Like Orwell’s Animal Farm for the far left, its critique is all the more trenchant, and therefore more prized by opponents of the far right, for having originated in the very ranks of those it attacks. Yet Bernanos, like Orwell, was never a heart-and-soul party man; he too was a libertarian and an individualist, spiritually and emotionally rather than intellectually or rationally drawn to the right, as Orwell was to the left. Before all else a committed Catholic nostalgic for the monarchy and the chivalry of the Middle Ages, Bernanos had little in common with Maurras the positivist atheist, who viewed the restoration of the monarchy and Catholicism as the necessary framework within which national renovation could begin. Since his initial difference with Action Française in 1919, merciless speech he then attributes to his enemies]. Monique Gosselin-Noat, Bernanos. Militant de l’éternel (Paris, 2007), p. 53.  9   Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, pp. 104‒5. Saturn is associated with creation, bounty and benevolence, but he is also a castrator and a devourer of children. 10   ‘It is only ever all too often the cry of a wounded heart.’ 11   ‘A beautiful dream can more often than not be poorly achieved, but never denied.’ 12   Gosselin-Noat, Bernanos, p. 54.

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Bernanos had developed the reputation, through his novels and essays, as ‘un curieux sympathisant [de la droite française] réservant ses coups les plus durs à ceux de son propre camp’ [an odd sympathizer [of the French right] who reserved his hardest blows for those of his own side].13 Les Grands Cimetières reflects this tendency, developing from its critique of the Spanish Nationalists a critique of the French far right and European fascism through the assertion of a persistent faith in Catholicism and the restoration, all of which leads Michael Tobin to ponder: ‘Was he a political oxymoron, an anti-fascist disciple of the extreme Right?’14 Yet, Bernanos’s original reaction to the pronunciamiento had been enthusiastic. Indeed, even before the military rebellion, he had castigated Spanish Catholics for their indifference to anti-Catholic violence under the Popular Front and had privately expressed admiration for the Falange, seeing in the latter a version of Action Française which, unlike the latter, remained loyal to its principles, his home in Majorca becoming a meeting place before the summer of 1936 for local Falangists.15 Indeed, Winock advances that Bernanos at first saw in the rebellion the realization of ‘le rêve de ce que préconsie Maurras, que le vieux rabâcheur n’a jamais été capable de mettre en œuvre depuis le début du siècle’ [the dream of what Maurras recommends and that the old bore had failed to implement since the beginning of the century].16 This initial enthusiasm appears to echo that of other Catholic intellectuals in France in the early summer of 1936; François Mauriac, no friend of Bernanos, warned in Le Figaro on the 25 July against French support for the Republic, suggesting the potential significance of the rebellion for French Catholics. Yet, by the autumn of that year, both Mauriac and Bernanos had become more circumspect. In October 1936, Bernanos made public his objections to the techniques of repression employed by the Nationalists in the articles he regularly contributed to the Catholic newspaper Sept. From then on until his family’s departure from Majorca on the 27 March 1937 Bernanos became an increasingly vociferous critic of the Spanish Church’s role in the war, foreign intervention and the oppression of the Spanish people by the Nationalist authorities. By the spring 13   Serge Albouy, Bernanos et la politique: la société et la droite française de 1900 à 1950 (Toulouse, 1980), p. 68. To this end, from the spring of 1935 Bernanos began contributing regularly to Emmanuel Berl’s Republican newspaper Marianne whilst continuing to write for the French Catholic press. (ibid., p. 151). 14   Tobin, Georges Bernanos, p. 4. As Tobin notes, Les Grands Cimetières was also the work of which Bernanos was proudest, considering it an example of his own moral courage in the pursuit of truth. Never one to care much for possessions, Bernanos nevertheless treasured the letter sent to him by Simone Weil, a renowned French supporter of the Spanish Republic, congratulating him on his integrity (ibid., p. 29). 15   According to Jospe Massot i Muntaner, in the most comprehensive study of Bernanos’s relationship with the local Falange, it was also a hiding place for their pistols. Jospe Massot i Muntaner, ‘Bernanos and Majorca (1934‒1937)’, Renascence, XLI 1‒2 (1988): pp. 29‒42, p. 37. 16   Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, pp. 298‒9.

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of 1937, and in the wake of the destruction of Guernica by the German airforce, Mauriac too had publicly opposed the Nationalists, rejecting the notion of the rebellion as a crusade in defence of Catholic values. Les Grand Cimetières therefore belongs to a growing body of French Catholic opposition to the Nationalists. It is, as Bernanos states, the product of two years of reflection, an attempt to draw the conflict’s ‘vrai visage, celui que j’ai vu, non un autre’ (p. 101),17 in order to prompt the reader to similar reflection (p. 245), but also to ‘prouver que l’opinion catholique unanime n’était pas avec ces gens-là’ (p. 104).18 The Nationalist cause in Les Grand Cimetières is essentially a degraded crusade. Whilst Bernanos maintains his admiration for ‘l’ancien Phalange …’ [the old [former] Falange …], he now admits: ‘il ne me viendrait pas à l’esprit de comparer un magnifique chef tel que Primo de Rivera aux généraux roublards qui pataugent depuis dix-huit mois … dans un des plus hideux charniers de l’histoire’ [it would never cross my mind to compare a magnificent leader like Primo de Rivera to the crafty generals who, for eighteen months, have floundered about … in one the most hideous bloodbaths in history] (p. 200). Bernanos’s Catholicism is central to this shift and to his ensuing critique of the Nationalists. The latter have abandoned several key tenets of the Catholic faith and principally that which commits the Christian to acts of charity. This lack of Christian charity is manifest in the Nationalist treatment and oppression of the Spanish people. Such behaviour, Bernanos contends, is the antithesis of charity and an abdication of the Christian’s duty to attempt to body forth the reality of Christ in our fallen world. Furthermore, it results in the fracturing of the national whole and the nation, for Bernanos, is essentially a gift from God, a shared, integral community. Addressing the Nationalist authorities directly, Bernanos intones in an image worthy of any parable: ‘Ce n’est pas votre maison que vous habitez, c’est la maison commune, bénie par le Christ. Si vous la démolissez sous prétexte d’ensevelir sous les décombres ceux qui la pillent, où coucheront donc vos enfants?’ [It is not your house that you inhabit, but the common house blessed by Christ. If you demolish it in order to bury those who pillage it beneath its ruins, where will your children sleep?] (p. 102). The Nationalists’ cause is not therefore a Christian one but that of a social clan. The Civil War itself is recast as that between a dominant proprietorial class on the one hand and the socially excluded and the poor on the other. It is the product of a fractured and poorly managed social whole. Thus Bernanos comments acerbically: La Société s’accommode assez bien de ses pauvres, aussi longtemps qu’elle peut absorber les malcontents soit dans les hôpitaux, soit dans les prisons. Lorsque la proportion des malcontents s’augmente dangereusement elle appelle ses gendarmes et ouvre en plein ses cimetières. … Faute de mieux, on rétablit l’optimisme en diminuant le nombre de malcontents. (pp. 175‒6) 17

  ‘True face, the one which I saw and no other.’   ‘Prove that the entirety of Catholic opinion was not with those people.’

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[Society copes with its poor reasonably well so long as its malcontents can be absorbed either into the hospitals or the prisons. When the proportion of malcontents increases dangerously, it calls upon the police and opens up its cemeteries. … For want of a better alternative, one re-establishes optimism by reducing the number of malcontents.]

All civil wars, and the Spanish Civil War is no exception, are ‘d’abord essentiellement des opérations policières’ (p. 164).19 The Nationalists’ crusade and ‘la Contre-Révolution espagnole’ are inspired above all by ‘l’esprit de Peur et l’esprit de Vengeance …’ (p. 104); the fear of social spoliation and a desire to avenge the losses suffered under the Frente Popular.20 The notion of crusade is invoked not then as a genuine end in itself but as a rhetorical device aimed at whipping up the modern masses, ‘une foule perpétuellement tenue en haleine par l’Orateur invisible, [qui s’applique] à parler le langage même de ses désirs, de ses haines, de ses terreurs’ [a crowd constantly held on the edge of its seat by the invisible Orator [who endeavours] to speak the very language of its desires, its hatred, its terror] (p. 22). It is thus revealed to be nothing other than a mask behind which the social, political and temporal interests of the Nationalists, and principally the Spanish middle classes, hide. In short, the dream of the crusade and its utopian dimension are denied, exposed now as merely a tool of ideology. The Nationalists, Bernanos suggests, are therefore blind to their own real motives. Bernanos’s understanding and use of the term ideology echoes that of Mannheim whereby ‘There is implicit in the word “ideology” the insight that … the collective unconscious of certain groups obscures the real condition of society both to itself and to others …’. Mannheim asserts that the term is only attributed ‘when we no longer consider [our adversary’s views] as calculated lies and when we sense in his total behaviour an unreliability which we regard as a function of the social situation in which he finds himself’.21 For Bernanos, however, writing in La Grande Peur des bien-pensants (1930), ideology is the product of willed human behaviour, an expression of our inalienable, God-given free will. It gathers together ‘en un petit nombre d’images sommaires qui prennent l’homme simple 19

  ‘First and foremost essentially police operations.’   ‘The spirit of Fear and the spirit of Vengeance … ’ For Bernanos, referring to many Nationalists’ part in the founding of the Second Republic, the rebellion is flawed since: ‘Derrière le général Franco on retrouve les mêmes gens qui se sont montrés également incapables de servir une Monarchie qu’ils ont finalement trahie, ou d’organiser une République qu’ils avaient largement contribué à faire, les mêmes gens ‒ c’est-à-dire, les mêmes intérêts ennemis … C’est ça que vous appelez une révolution nationale?’ [Behind General Franco you can find the same people who showed themselves equally incapable of serving a monarchy that they finally betrayed and a republic, the construction of which they also largely contributed to; that is to say, the same enemy interests … And this is what you call a national revolution?] (pp. 139‒40). 21   Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 36 and 54 respectively. 20

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aux entrailles, remuent en lui le meilleur comme le pire, tour à tour exaltent son sentiment de la justice ou font écumer son envie, une espèce d’évangile, enfin, mais ramenée à la mesure des singes supérieurs …’ [in a small number of summary images that grab the simple man by his guts, bring out the best and the worst in him, arouse alternately his sense of justice or make him foam at the mouth with envy, a sort of bible, in short, but one that is accessible to superior monkeys].22 Such images are generated and manipulated by an intellectual elite that has abandoned its Christian responsibility towards national and social cohesion. The greatest intellectual and spiritual betrayal in Les Grands Cimetières in this respect is that perpetrated by the Spanish Church through the complicity of the faithful who have subsequently attributed to the Nationalist cause a religious character (p. 104). The Spanish Church has thereby revealed its own temporal interests to which it has sacrificed its real duty, a duty shared by all genuine Christians: that of incarnating the divine on earth. Consequently, the Spanish Church is held responsible for a broader spiritual crisis as central to Les Grands Cimetières as Bernanos’s political analysis; that of the counter-incarnation: ‘Car, à la fin des fins, si Dieu se retire du monde c’est qu’il se retire de nous d’abord, chrétiens’ [For, in the final analysis, if God is withdrawing from the world it is because he is withdrawing from us Christians first] (p. 184). The counter-incarnation, as John Cooke argues, proceeds through the appropriation and ultimately the reversal of a series of divinely inspired ideas. Freedom becomes anarchy, duty is reduced to servility, fidelity to blind obedience, divine harmony to a ‘Satanic order based on illegitimate force …’, equality becomes conformity, charity morbid curiosity and ideas become ideologies.23 The condemnation of the Spanish Nationalists could not be more damning; the Nationalists, aided by the Spanish Church, embody nothing other than the anti-Christ for Bernanos. Their sin is all the greater for having appropriated the trappings of virtue, but it is also suggestive of the Catholic Church’s more general connivance with the temporal powers of its day, whether these be embodied by the French Third Republic, Nationalist Spain or Fascist Italy. Such arguments are outlined in the agnostic’s sermon, which, as Tobin observes, is central to Les Grands Cimetières. Accordingly, Tobin argues that Bernanos’s essay reflects his continued shift in emphasis, initiated by his essay La Grande Peur des bien pensants, away from the political towards the theological.24 Yet, while Bernanos’s critique of the political is informed by his theological concerns, and primarily by his fear that the battle between God and Satan is being fought out between those who genuinely incarnate the divine on earth and those who abet Satan, Les Grands Cimetières remains firmly rooted in the debates of its day. It must be considered first and foremost an utterance in the dialogic dispute in France concerning the Civil War and its primary interest, for this study   Georges Bernanos, Essais et écrits de combat, vol. 1, (Paris, 1971), p. 212.   John E. Cooke, Georges Bernanos: A Study of Christian Commitment (Amersham, 1981), p. 45. 24   Tobin, Georges Bernanos, p. 32. 22

23

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at least, is the manner in which it challenges French far-right utopias constructed through the representation of Nationalist Spain. The charges laid against the Spanish Nationalists are therefore extended into a critique of Franco’s supporters in France and, principally, of the Maurrassians and of the new right. Both groups reflect the descent of patriotism into a form of nationalism based on capitalist principles given mass, popular appeal by the press to which they contribute since ‘les puissants maîtres de l’or et de l’opinion universelle l’ont vite arraché [le concept de nationalisme] aux mains des philosophes et des poètes. Ma Lorraine! ma Provence! ma Terre! mes Morts! Ils dis[ent] mes phosphates, mes pétroles, mon fer’ [the men of power and wealth, those who control public opinion, have snatched [the concept of nationalism] from the hands of the philosophers and poets. My Lorraine! My Provence! My Earth! My Dead! They [now] say my phosphates, my oil, my steel] (p. 68). In the French context, the responsibility of the Maurrassians and of Action Française in this process is emphasized. French monarchists, Bernanos contends, have betrayed their original principles, invoking the great and the good of French nationalism of yore, such as Bernanos’s inspiration, the anti-Semite Edouard Drumont, to mask their real ends. They and not Bernanos have changed: ‘Je ne les reconnais plus. Ils peuvent d’ailleurs changer sans risque, les témoins irrécusables sont presque tous sous la terre, et Dieu sait s’ils les font parler, les morts!’ [I no longer recognize them. They can, in any case, change without fear of contradiction: the irreproachable witnesses are now nearly all at rest and God knows how they make the dead talk!] (p. 51). Maurrassian nationalism has become a constant rhetorical reorganization of old discourses, but also an abstraction lacking any grounding in reality. Maurras, who, along with Paul Claudel constitutes one of Bernanos’s favourite targets, is forever conjuring up ‘quelque nouvel aspect du Pays réel, d’une France non moins imaginaire et poétique que la Provence de Mistral et dont le destin est de finir comme l’autre, dans un musée, dans un musée maurrassien’ [some new aspect of the Real Country, of a France no less imaginary and poetic than Mistral’s Provence and whose destiny is to end up, like the latter, in a museum, a Maurrassian museum] (p. 72). As a pure abstraction, Maurrassian nationalism fails to fuse thought and action; ‘Le par tous les moyens de M. Charles Maurras …’ [Monsieur Maurras’s by every means …] is dismissed as a ‘formule dont trente-deux ans d’expérience ont assez prouvé le caractère inoffensif …’ [formula whose inoffensive nature has been proved by 32 years of experience] (p. 86). As Tobin observes, by 1938, Bernanos had come to realize that Maurras’s enthusiasm for monarchy was rooted in the concept of the king as the guarantor of conservative interests. Similarly, Maurras’s embrace of Catholicism was primarily cerebral and born of admiration for the Church’s political power (pp. 40‒41). The restorationist utopia that informs Maurrassian nationalism, revived by enthusiasm for Nationalist Spain, is therefore dismissed as a form of dissimulation, an ideological deception, but also as a utopian failure. It is accused of simultaneously reflecting what Ricœur considers to be the pathology of ideology, ‘some dissimulating processes by which an individual or a group

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expresses its situation but without knowing or recognizing it’, and the pathology of utopia, ‘a social dream without concern for the real first steps necessary for movement in the direction of a new society’.25 The result is the preservation of the status quo; in the first case, through acceptance of it, in the second through failure to challenge it effectively. Maurrassian nationalism serves only to preserve the established bourgeois order and has failed to effect the radical trans­formation of society it promises; it is dismissed by Bernanos as both baseless utopian fantasy and an ideological masking of real motives and concerns. Yet, the life of the ‘social dream’, the life of the idea, is not contained within the moment it is expressed. As I have argued in Chapter 3, and as Bernanos fails to anticipate in Les Grands Cimetières, the restorationist utopia was to enjoy an after-life beyond the Civil War, influencing a radical transformation of French society under Vichy, but a transformation that nonetheless consolidated bourgeois power. Maurras may be mocked as ‘[ce] vieil écrivain entre la viellesse et la mort …’ (p. 79),26 but the new radical right, Bernanos contends, has nothing new or radical to offer. Indeed, it too is marked by Action Française’s ‘esprit de vieillesse’, rehearsing the tired old politics of 1870.27 Addressing Brasillach’s generation, evoking the fascist cult of youth, he writes: ‘vous êtes des types de plein air, mais c’est votre pensée, mes amis, qui sent la tisane et l’urine, comme un dortoir d’hopsice’ [You are lovers of the great outdoors, but it’s your thought, my friends, which smells, like a hospice dormitory, of herbal tea and urine] (pp. 241‒2). French far-right youth are dismissed as ‘des hommes nains, avec les haines de l’homme mûr dans un corps de nain’ (p. 248).28 Their radicalism and, more particularly, their flirtation with foreign forms of fascism, their enthusiasm for the Falange, for example, mask that same interest that lurks behind the restorationist utopia: the desire to preserve, consolidate and then to accrue bourgeois privileges. The new right’s interest in foreign forms of the radical right derives primarily from a concern for the preservation of order, an order that they consider to be threatened not by Hitler and Mussolini, but by the French worker.29 The new right’s rejection of humanism and its disdain for justice are nothing other than the tools by which bourgeois privileges are maintained. It therefore sacrifices the nation in order to ensure the order offered by European fascism: ‘Et la France? Quelle France? On n’ose plus la montrer, elle inspire du dégoût aux vertueux dictateurs’ [And France?

  Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, p. 1.   ‘That old writer between old age and death … ’ 27   ‘Spirit of old-age.’ 28   ‘Dwarf-men, with the hatreds of the old-aged trapped in the bodies of dwarfs.’ 29   For the French far right generally, Bernanos argues, the worker has replaced the German as the national enemy: ‘Jadis ces innocents s’excitaient contre les Boches. L’ouvrier syndiqué a pris aujourd’hui la place du Boche’ [Once these innocents raged against the Boche. The unionized worker has now taken the place of the Boche] (Les Grands Cimetières, p. 264). 25 26

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Which France? They no longer dare speak its name; it revolts these virtuous dictators] (p. 256). Les Grands Cimetières constitutes both a refusal of far-right enthusiasm for the Nationalists, a refusal ‘[de] faire d’un Gallifet de cauchemar une sorte de héros chrétien à l’usage des jeunes Français’ [to make of a nightmare Gallifet a sort of Christian hero destined to inspire young Frenchmen] (p. 268), and of the utopian model that French far-right intellectuals had perceived in their cause and Nationalist Spain itself. It is a ‘[mise] en garde contre les écrivains italiens de langue française qui nous somment d’aller, nous aussi, en croisade, derrière des chefs qui ressemblent, comme des frères, aux initiateurs de Movimiento’ [warning against Italian writers in the French language who urge us likewise to launch a crusade led by commanders who resemble like two pins the Movimiento’s instigators] (p. 101). For Bernanos, this incitement to a French civil war is flawed, not only because civil war divides the national whole against itself, thereby splitting asunder what God had created, but because it draws its forces from an impotent bourgeoisie. Les Grands Cimetières, as Bernanos reveals in an address to the French far right, sets out to warn against those enthusiasts for the Nationalists ‘qui, après avoir vécu si longtemps de votre sottise, de votre timidité, de votre impuissance, chatouillent le bourgeois français entre les cuisses et lui soufflent à l’oreille qu’il est un mâle, qu’il peut faire sa terreur tout comme un autre …’ [who, after having lived for so long from your idiocy, from your timidity, from your impotence, now tickle the French bourgeois between the legs and whisper in his ear that he too is a male and can wage his terror like another … ] (p. 118). Neither the French left nor the French right is in a position to launch a civil war, Bernanos goes on to argue, reminding the latter of its multiple failures to instigate an insurrection since the 6 February 1934. Moreover, the far-right is intellectually incapable of the task with which it charges itself: ‘Vous ne savez même pas poser des ventouses, et on vous chargerait d’une opération chirurgicale qui ne donne à notre pays pas plus d’une chance sur vingt de s’en tirer!’ [You don’t even know how to place a suction cup and now you’re to be charged with a surgical operation that gives our country no more than a one-in-twenty chance of survival!] (pp. 118‒19). Yet, if Les Grands Cimetières is a rebuttal of French far-right representations of Nationalist Spain and the Civil War as utopian models, it also reveals in moments of prophetic lucidity the real, political consequences of the far right’s social and political imaginary since 1936. The acceptance of fascism and especially the rehabilitation of the old enemy, Germany, by the French far right in order to protect against the perceived threat of the working classes allow for a fascist territorialization of the nation that anticipates the Occupation years: ‘Les maniaques qui furent sans pitié pour l’Allemagne vaincue, exsangue, l’honorent maintenant. Ils finiront sans doute par l’aimer. Le redoutable Orient qui commençait hier encore à Sarrenbruch a pris position au centre même de Paris, rue Lafayette’ [The maniacs who were pitiless towards a vanquished, drained Germany now honour it. They will end up loving it, no doubt. The formidable East, which only yesterday began in Sarrenbruch, has been installed in the heart of Paris itself in Rue Lafayette]

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(p. 277). In an image which prefigures what Hawthorne and Golsan term a gyno/ homophobic understanding of collaboration that will emerge after the Liberation, Bernanos therefore predicts that, ‘Au premier signe d’un maître étranger, [la classe moyenne] se couchera sur le dos, écartera les jambes: “Prenez-moi, rendez-moi heureuse!”’ [At the first sign of a foreign master, the middle class will roll on to its back and spread its legs. ‘Take me. Make me happy!’] (p. 273).30 Like Les Grands Cimetières, Toute guerre elaborates from the context of the Civil War a series of meditations upon the modern condition, linking the political crisis of the late 1930s to a deeper spiritual and ethical crisis. Whilst Bernanos’s essay is primarily a form of criticism from within the author’s political community, Pollès’s novel offers the considerations of both the narrator and its hero on the revolutionary left and the far right in Spain, considering, like Malraux, the Nationalists as exponents of a more pervasive, international fascism. Toute guerre therefore attempts an ultimately contrived overview of the conflict. It does so through the ability of the film maker Domni to change camps on a regular basis; from a non-aligned Republican, Domni becomes alternately an anarchist militiaman, a member of the PCE, a deserter who joins and briefly fights with the Nationalist army before deserting again and, ultimately, via a stint in Republican propaganda, a regular soldier in the Popular Army. His political itinerary takes him not only across Spain and the internal border created by the Civil War, but to France and to the USSR. For good measure, Pollès also arranges to send Domni’s best friend, the orthodox Marxist Disco, to Nazi Germany. Spain once again serves as a springboard to European considerations. The geographical scope of Pollès’s novel is an obvious reflection of its political ambitions; Toute guerre craves a total understanding of the conflict and of the world in which it arises. It is nostalgic for earlier attempts made by nineteenthcentury French realists to grasp reality in its complex totality, to know the world and to reveal this knowledge through the relation of the causal chain that underlies it. To this end Domni’s itinerary and constant musings are matched by the repeated, tiresome interventions of an omniscient narrator armed with an arsenal of maxims and metaphors. This attempted emulation and exaggeration of the Balzacian narrative voice suggest, however, the artificiality of Pollès’s exercise and, indeed, the impossibility of the novel’s task. Toute guerre therefore lacks the clarity and the craft of Les Grands Cimetières, but, as I made clear in the introduction to this study, it is not necessarily the quality or the longevity of a particular cultural representation or the past or current standing of its author that help us best understand its relevance for French political culture of the interwar 30   Hawthorne and Golsan identify a tendency in post-Occupation literature to sexualize collaboration, casting collaborators either in the role of a female or in that of the homosexual both in awe of, and yielding to, the superior force of the Nazi male. Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1945 essay ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?’ in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations III (Paris, 1949), pp. 43‒61, is illustrative of this tendency. Hawthorne and Golsan, ‘Introduction: Mapping the Terrain’, p. 4.

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period. Despite all its faults and the oblivion into which it has fallen, Toute guerre continues to offer an important ethical critique of the revolutionary left, one that will be more fully developed in the Cold War and which will come to be more fully developed in the famous Camus–Sartre schism of the 1950s. For this reason, I will limit my study of the novel to its representation of the Spanish Republic and of the revolutionary left, excluding Pollès’s treatment of the Nationalists and of fascism. There is a dilemma at the heart of Pollès’s representation of those who defend the Republic. Pollès, like Domni, retains his sympathy for the revolutionary left’s broad cause; that is to say, the radical transformation of capitalist society along lines which will narrow and ultimately eliminate the gap between need and availability, but which will also allow for a renewed, more fulfilling relationship between the individual and the world. Yet, he questions the means by which this end will be obtained and, more particularly, ponders, in the pacifist tradition, whether any good can come of war itself since ‘toute guerre est fasciste’ (p. 36).31 Pollès’s questioning of the means employed is not an abstract consideration; it results directly from his interpretation of the Spanish Republic as an arena in which the competing utopian visions of the international revolutionary left confront each other. The Spanish Republic in Toute guerre attracts a variety of international volunteers, constituting: cet espace qui semblait se fondre dans le temps, dans une autre époque, où le bonheur coulait à flots; à l’horizon ils [les volontaires] entrevoyaient ce vers quoi ils avaient toujours tendu les bras; s’ils traversaient ces montagnes inconnues, ils soulèveraient l’âme des plaines paresseuses de leur patrie. (pp. 57‒8) [this space which seemed to melt into time, into another era where happiness flowed aplenty. On the horizon the [volunteers] began to make out that towards which they had always endeavoured. If they crossed these unknown mountains, they would raise the spirit of those inhabiting the indifferent plains of their own nations.]

Pollès clearly identifies the revolutionary left’s tendency to see utopian potential in the Republic. The Republic is consequently experienced by combatants, both Spanish and international, as a different experience of time itself and as a transformational moment in the historical trajectory of the world. Even death in combat can be interpreted within the revolutionary utopian conception of the war: ‘Ils se sentaient en s’éloignant du monde vivant, en avant du monde, au-devant des idées, de toutes les choses qui naîtraient; beaucoup plus haut sur l’échelle de la vie que ces êtres à la petite vue …’ [They felt, in leaving the world of the living behind them, ahead of this world, ahead of ideas, of everything that would follow them; so much higher in the order of things than these short-sighted others …] (p. 146). 31

  ‘Every war is fascist.’

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As in L’Espoir, the initial months of the war are experienced as a form of spontaneous fraternity between the factions of the left. However, even in July 1936, Domni suspects that such fraternity cannot last. ‘Tous copains’ [All pals], he writes in his diary. ‘Trop facilement: cette chaleur immédiate dissuade de chercher quelque lumière sur ce qu’a d’unique chacun de ceux qui ne sont pas nous’ [Too easily so: this immediate warmth dissuades us from seeking out the unique quality of those who are not us] (p. 35). Domni’s remark can be understood in two ways. It may refer to a loss of individuality that he will later bemoan in those who adhere too closely to a particular party line, a trait he discerns above all in Disco. It may also refer to an inability in the summer of 1936 to perceive more precise party political differences that will undermine the Republic, differences that lead to the formation of ‘cinq armées, cinq états-majors, cinq prétentions de vaincre le fascisme, cinq projets de croisade. Chaque organisation avait sa vision du monde, et expérimentait sa théorie. Chacune avait ses cobayes; tous les autres’ [five armies, five chains of command, five claims to beat fascism, five plans for a crusade. Each organization had its vision of the world and was testing out its theory. Each had its own guinea pigs: everyone else] (p. 37). These differences come to the fore in the internal conflict between CNT-FAI and the POUM on the one hand and the CPE and Republican government on the other in May 1937. For Pollès, this conflict is essentially one between competing utopian visions that have now emerged from the failure to preserve the revolutionary élan of 1936. The revolutionary harmony that many thought they had seen in the early days of war has now become a polyphony of voices that attempt to out-shout each other: ‘Chacun parlait, avec son idée fixe, son ton étragement prétentieux d’image folle de Dieu ayant perdu le plan de la création et cherchant … à tout rebâtir, sur une seule pierre qui lui fait de l’oeil particulièrement’ [Each spoke with his fixed idea, his strangely pretentious tone, a deranged image of God who, having lost the plan for creation, now tries … to rebuild everything on a particular rock that has caught his eye]. The revolutionary vision of a common horizon has disappeared as each constituent party of the revolutionary left sets its own course: ‘on cherchait à deviner vers quelle terre voguaient les bateaux; on ne percevait que le bruit de la mer, heureuse de son mouvement sans but …’ [they were trying to guess towards which land the boats were drifting. They could make out only the sound of the sea, content with its own aimless movement …] (p. 116). The revolutionary end has therefore been lost in Spain and focus instead has turned to the immediate concerns of the present; means have overtaken and ultimately obscured the end. The central opposition in Pollès’s portrait of the revolutionary left is that between the anarchists and the communists. The former, like Mannheim’s chiliasts, live in the present moment, experiencing their utopian end as a form of immanence. As Domni observes in his diary, ‘Ils ont fait pour eux-mêmes, dans leurs possessions, leur univers, le communisme; c’est pourquoi les communistes les détestent tant …’ [They have constructed communism for themselves in their possessions and their world; that’s why the communists hate them so much …]

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(p. 141). However, Domni goes on to explain, the anarchists represent and defend only a sub-section of the left and of humanity more generally: A quoi s’accrochent-ils en fin de compte? au Parti comme les autres, au bonheur de la bande, à une sorte de franc-maçonnerie aussi solide que celle des durs, des maquereaux, … ou des Jésuites, – catégories d’hommes tristes qui ne veulent pas regarder en face l’ensemble des biens, des problèmes humains … N’est-ce pas là un type d’homme avec des idées pour ceux qui leur ressemblent plutôt qu’une nouvelle idée d’humanité – pour tous les hommes? (pp. 143‒4) [In the final analysis, to what do they cling? To the Party, like all the others, to the happiness of the clan, to a sort of freemasonry as solid as that of hard men, pimps, Jesuits – all sorts of sad men who refuse to consider the commonwealth and our common problems in their entirety … Are we not faced here with a type of man with designs for those who already resemble this type rather than a new idea of humanity – for all men?]

Party political interests have therefore superseded the original nobility of the summer of 1936 where anarchists, ‘tous candidats à l’humanité …’ [all candidates of humanity … ] ‘allaient perdre la vie pour ne pas continuer à vivre de morceaux de la vie’ [were going to lose their lives so as not to go on living from only fragments of a life] (p. 28). Of course, Pollès is merely providing the briefest of caricatures of Iberian anarchism here; he, perhaps like many of his contemporaneous readers for whom anarchism was a peculiarly Spanish and outmoded phenomenon, is more interested in what the divisions of May 1937 reveal about the limitations of the left’s revolutionary project more generally and in what continues to prevent the radical transformation of the world predicted for so long now. His portrait of both Spanish and international communists in Spain is similarly sketchy and short on detailed political understanding. Drawing on the opposition established by Malraux between the ‘illusion lyrique’ of revolutionary immediacy and spontaneity and the strategic revolutionary utopia, Pollès echoes criticism of this latter, accusing the Communist Party particularly of sacrificing the present to an as-yet unspecified future. Thus, the fate of the mass ranks of the Popular Army is inconsequential to the utopian communist mindset bent on the pursuit of its ideal, Domni contends, somewhat contradicting Pollès’s portrait of Republican combatants as essentially utopian dreamers: ‘Le jeune Marx dit: “Le monde possède depuis longtemps le rêve d’une chose, dont il lui suffirait de posséder la conscience pour la posséder réellement”; le monde, oui, mais pas les hommes qui meurent pendant la révolution, en essayant de réaliser le rêve du monde’ [The young Marx said: ‘The world has possessed for a long time the dream of a thing, the awareness of which alone would suffice for it to be possessed in reality’; the world, yes, but not the men who die during the revolution trying to achieve the world’s dream] (p. 91). Whilst the Communist Party may possess a sense of the end state it pursues, this may not be the case for those members who are sacrificed

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on the Party’s behalf. There is therefore a potential lack of coincidence between communism and party members, but they too sacrifice the present to the future: ‘Ces matérialistes qui ne croient pas à l’éternité aliènent leur temps humain – le temps d’une seule vie – au temps qui mesure l’évolution des espèces …’ [These materialists who don’t believe in eternity are alienating themselves from human time – the time of a single life – on behalf of that time which measures the evolution of species …]. Consequently, the significance of the individual life is entirely obscured by the future plan; the individual is lost in ‘cette étrange foule où aucune absence ne fait de trou, de blessure’ [this strange crowd where no absence makes a hole, leaves a wound] (p. 92). Domni deplores, in an apparent caricature of Téry, ‘cette journaliste française, … communiste néophyte, … qui ramassait au front les hauts-faits …’ [this female French journalist, … a communist neophyte, … who gathered from the front the great deeds …], the inability of communist strategists to perceive ‘la mort qui rôdait un peu aussi autour de tout cela …’ [death which also prowled a little around all that …] (p. 99). In this way, Toute guerre anticipates and begins to formulate a criticism of the Marxist-Hegelian revolutionary tradition that will be more fully developed by Camus and others in the wake of the Second World War. As Camus will come to do, Pollès rejects the elevation of the end state above the present and the means employed to achieve this state. For Camus, this constitutes absolutisme historique. Deemed to be of Germanic origin, inspired by the philosophies of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, and deriving then from what Camus terms l’idéologie allemande, it is characterized by ‘[Un] âge d’or renvoyé au bout de l’histoire et coincident, par un double attrait, avec une apocalypse, [qui] justifie tout’ [A golden age postponed until the end of history and coinciding through the dual appeal of an apocalypse [that] justifies everything].32 Put crudely, the ends, usually a utopian state where total justice and total freedom coexist without mutual contradiction, justify the unpleasant means employed in the present to attain them. As Camus will, Pollès bemoans the fate of the individual reduced in the face of this absolutisme historique to a disposable element easily sacrificed in the name of future humanity. As in L’Espoir, the Republic is torn between those who experience revolution as a form of immanence and those who remove it to an unspecified point in the future, recasting the present moment as a strategic point on the way to that future. For Pollès, these two competing visions are fundamentally incompatible and this incompatibility comes to the fore when, having deserted to the Nationalists, Domni is forced to witness the execution of anarchists and communists. Here one condemned communist spits when an anarchist is shot. Another, crying out 32   Albert Camus, L’Homme révolté (Paris, 1957), p. 257. Writing in the Cold War context, Camus contends that absolutisme historique now informs the revolutionary politics of the far left in Europe; the left only offers a violent and oppressive révolution autoritaire and the hope of a better life at an unspecified point in the future. It is this contention that in part informs the attacks launched against Camus by Sartre and his team at Les Temps modernes.

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‘vivent les Soviets’ [long live the Soviets], prefers the imagined community ‘des milliers de copains avec qui il aurait pu construire des ponts merveilleux pour enjamber tous les abîmes’ [thousands of pals with whom he could have constructed marvellous bridges with which to span every abyss] to any potential fraternity in the anarchists alongside whom he is about to die since ‘Ils se tenaient pour responsables l’un l’autre de tout ce qui leur arrivait autant qu’ils accusaient les fascistes’ [They held each other as responsible as the fascists for everything that was happening to them] (p. 175). The Republic is therefore riven by the left’s ‘haines des semblables’ (p. 61).33 As the strategic approach, with its discipline and order, wins out over revolution­ary spontaneity, Pollès writes: ‘La guerre prenait un ordre, tout en restant chaotique pour les hommes … En vérité, [toute guerre] est une discussion, mais entre deux usines, que les ouvriers doivent servir aveuglément …’ [The war was becoming ordered whilst remaining chaotic for the men. In truth, every war is a discussion, but one that takes place between two factories that the workers must serve blindly …] (p. 230). By organizing the spontaneous violence of 1936 into state violence in 1937, the Republicans now resemble the Nationalists. The present reality of the Republic experienced by the novel’s characters is consequently tinged with dystopianism; Domni is constantly under the suspicion of all sides. He is forced in turn to collaborate in the anarchist, communist and Nationalist terrors. He is imprisoned both by the Republicans and the Nationalists whilst his loyalties are tested, his connections investigated and his potential worth to the respective parties assessed while the war destroys his friends, family and lovers one by one. By focusing on the means by which the competing factions attempt to impose their respective utopias in Spain, Toute guerre, as Kumar writes of the task of dystopian fiction, ‘makes [the reader] live utopia, as an experience so painful and nightmarish that we lose all desire for it’.34 Yet, while the dystopian fiction is often a ‘weapon in the armoury of philosophical conservatism …’, it is also equally as often a revenge against past hopes and ‘the anguished cry of a single divided self’.35 Nationalists and Republicans therefore continue to be separated by the utopian ends they serve in Toute guerre: ‘les uns regardent plutôt vers la vie, les autres vers la mort (mais ni les uns ni les autres n’osent pas regarder en face ce qu’ils font) …’ [one side tends to look towards life, the others towards death (but neither dares contemplate what they are doing) …] (p. 232). Republicans look to the transformation of life, whilst the Nationalist utopia is constructed upon a dead past, and it is clear that both Domni’s and Pollès’s sympathies remain with the former. The problem remains one of means, however. Whilst the aspirations of the Republicans remain noble and, for Pollès, primarily spiritual in spite of the materialist philosophical systems on which they draw, the waging of war necessarily complicates any spiritual end. Pollès points relentlessly 33

  ‘Hatred of its bedfellows.’   Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, p. 103. 35   Ibid., pp. 103‒4. 34

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to the absurdity of combat. Employing many of the tropes and motifs of pacifist fiction of the interwar period, he draws the reader’s attention to war’s physical reality and its primary objective: wounding, ‘le viol de la chair par la matière: le plus abject, terrestre matérialisme’ (p. 108).36 The revolutionary utopian project of constructing the future through the material transformation of the present is therefore flawed, according to Pollès’s pacifism, by the means employed. Domni thus feels in battle that the real target of the rebels’ weapons is not the enemy but: ‘la connaissance des mœurs, la prétention des hommes d’être les maîtres de leur action, … le pouvoir qu’ont les hommes de dominer la puissance des choses …’ [the memory of decency, men’s pretension to be the masters of their action, … the ability men possess to dominate the power of objects …] (p. 96). The distrust of warfare as a means of achieving radical change leads Domni and Pollès to reject that other utopia made available to a pro-Republican audience in France: Malraux’s fraternal utopia. For Domni, who acts as an interpreter for Malraux in the course of his war experience, Malrucian fraternity requires warfare in order to sustain itself since it is predicated primarily on a resistance to human suffering, a resistance that, as we saw in the previous chapter, begets further suffering. ‘Malraux aime le destin, la tragédie’ [Malraux loves destiny, tragedy], he confides in his diary. ‘[I]l faut qu’il y ait des conflits entre deux mondes pour entretenir son principe dialectique: il pense là où deux races d’hommes comme deux charbons dans la lampe à arc brûlent et souffrent’ [In order for his dialectic principle to be maintained, there must be conflict between two worlds; his thought emerges when two races of men burn and suffer like two pieces of coal in an arc lamp] (p. 292). This suffering then becomes the very material from which the fraternal utopia emerges in Malraux’s fiction via the aestheticization of pain, death and destruction. Thus he notes, referring to the role aviation plays in this process: ‘avec [son] pouvoir d’évasion, [ses] ailes pour embrasser le monde, il peut rester tout le jour fixé sur un point de l’action … Il est toujours vainqueur; la défaite même est pour lui une victoire; … il fera un beau livre triomphal de l’horrible désastre’ [with his power of escape, his wings with which he can envelop the world, he can spend the entire day focused on one point of the action . He is always victorious; even defeat is a victory for him; … he will write a beautiful, triumphant book recounting the horrible disaster] (p. 294). Behind fraternity, then, lies ‘l’amitié du désespoir, de la fin du monde, non du commencement de la vie’ [the friendship of despair, of the end of the world, not of the beginning of life] (p. 296). By way of contrast, Domni refutes the relational death established in fraternity by Malraux, dubbed the red d’Annunzio (p. 291), reasserting the fundamental absurdity of death, claiming ‘on peut vivre ensemble de la même vie, mais non mourir de la même mort’ (p. 296).37 Moreover, like anarchism and communism, the fraternal utopia is founded on an illusion of humanism since fraternity is only established within a despairing faction of humanity; consequently, it is limited and lopsided: 36

  ‘The rape of the flesh by matter: the most abject, earthly materialism.’   ‘One can live the same life together, but not die the same death.’

37

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Malraux monologue: il tourne d’un seul côté comme les horloges; il embrasse le monde comme une hélice; il n’a pas de vision panoramique; il pose toujours les mêmes problèmes et impose les mêmes points de vue aux hommes et aux choses, comme le cinéaste qui n’aime que certaines lumières … (p. 297) [Malraux is engaged in a monologue. He only turns in one direction like the hands of a clock. He envelops the world like a rotary blade. He has no panoramic vision; he constantly asks the same question and imposes the same points of view on men and things alike, like the filmmaker who prefers certain lights …]

Pollès’s critique of the revolutionary left is informed by the rejection of the fractured human community that informs it and to which it further contributes; in this, it resembles that levelled by Bernanos at both the Spanish Nationalists and their French supporters. For Pollès, though, this fractured totality results from the revolutionary left’s pursuit of a new form of humanity: the total man identified by Bloch and embodied in Téry’s heroes. This pursuit that takes the form of the violent material reorganization of society, but mostly that of the act of killing: Il fallait tuer. … Domni, lui, était inquiet parce qu’on ne tue jamais assez bien, qu’on n’est jamais sûr de tuer d’abord le plus coupable … Sans doute, hésite-til, y a-t-il beaucoup de têtes à abattre pour que la Tête Humaine se dégage de sa hure couronnée de nuages, mais ce travail est toujours fait approximativement … (pp. 52‒3) [One had to kill. … Domni was worried, though, as one never kills well enough and one is never sure if one is killing the guiltiest party … Perhaps, he hesitated, there are many heads to remove before the Human Head can fully emerge from its head crowned with clouds, but such work is always carried out haphazardly …]

For Pollès, then, ‘Toute révolution est la caricature d’un départ de la vie pour une vie totale’ (p. 27).38 Revolutionary violence and terror are inextricable elements, or so it seems, of this quest for a renewed totality of being dear to the revolutionary left. Toute guerre is thus one of the first cultural expressions of revolutionary deception to emerge from the Spanish Civil War. As one disaffected intellectual explains of the revolutionary process he has come to reject: ‘Les révolutions font toujours songer à d’immenses avions pleins de tempêtes qui fauchent la forêt d’hommes autour d’eux pour se faire un terrain d’où ils pourraient s’envoler; mais après quelques tours de piste, la vitesse diminue déjà, et jamais le géant ne décolle vraiment; et le monde reste à peu près au même niveau.’ (p. 128)

38

  ‘All revolutions are the imitation of a departure from life towards a total life.’

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[Revolutions always remind one of enormous, tempestuous planes that flatten entire forests of men around them in order to clear a strip from where they can take off. But, after several sweeps of the runway, the speed is already dropping, and the giant never really gets off the ground. And the world remains more or less as it was.]

Here too Pollès’s novel anticipates Camus’s later rejection of unfettered violence as a means for carrying out the radical material change of our conditions of being demanded by the pursuit of an end state.39 More than this, however, Toute guerre reads at times as a condemnation of the utopian mentality more generally for, behind the utopian dream, Domni argues, lies ‘l’illusion d’aujourd’hui, de toujours, [où] les hommes cherchent l’homme …’ (p. 85).40 Pollès, it seems, shares Gray’s view that, although utopianism does not necessarily entail totalitarianism, the latter ‘follows whenever the dream of a life without conflict is consistently pursued through the use of state power’.41 For both Pollès and Gray, terror is the tool by which a utopian belief in a totality of being is forged. The result, as Domni realizes in the Soviet Union, which is also Gray’s model, is conformity and the abandonment of self to the state: ‘Les âmes sous la répétition des lieux communs, des mots d’ordre, [les] même idéaux, deviennent aussi plates que la viande sous les coups de maillet …’ [Through repeating the same commonplaces, the same commands, [the] same ideals, souls become as flat as a piece of meat under the blows of the tenderizer …] (pp. 343‒4). What begins, then, as a critique of the means employed by the utopias of the revolutionary left becomes also a critique of their end and, more par­ticularly, of its impact upon the individual. It is the same denial of the individual, but more specifically the denial of our individual God-given free will, that Bernanos also berates in the far right’s pursuit of a totalitarian society. The far-right totalitarian regimes and Nazism in particular, ‘ridiculisant tout scrupule, … favorisent une espèce d’anarchie morale d’où sortira tôt ou tard une anarchie politique et sociale pire que [celle de la gauche]’ [making a mockery of every scruple, … favour a sort of moral anarchy from which will arise a political and social anarchy worse than [any of the left]] (Les Grands Cimetières, p. 279). All forms of totalitarianism, Bernanos contends, deny our spirituality, spirituality being evidence of our ability to share in Christ’s divinity, since both fascism and communism are founded on ‘l’exploitation rationelle du travail et du génie humains mis au service de valeurs purement humaines’ [the rational exploitation of work and of human genius conscripted for purely human values] (ibid., p. 289). In France, ‘L’idée totalitaire est encore servie librement par des hommes libres. Leurs petits-fils ne connaîtront plus que la discipline totalitaire’ [The totalitarian idea is still served by free men. Their grandchildren will only   See Camus, L’Homme révolté, pp. 353‒62.   ‘The illusion of today, of all time, [whereby][ men seek out Man … .’ 41   Gray, Black Mass, p. 53. 39

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ever know totalitarian discipline] (ibid., p. 302). This is the same discipline of the soul, the self-policing of the individual reinforced by state power, which Domni witnesses in the USSR and towards which the Spanish Republic appears to be heading. The defence of the beleaguered individual conscience is a theme that runs throughout Les Grands Cemitières and Toute guerre. For Bernanos, the real significance of the Spanish Civil War lies not in any utopian model it may offer the French, but in the challenge it represents for the man of good will, he who tries to live honourably and by his conscience: La tragédie espagnole, préfiguration de la tragédie universelle, fait éclater à l’évidence la misérable condition de l’homme de bonne volonté dans la société mod­erne qui l’élimine peu à peu, ainsi qu’un sous-produit inutilisable. L’homme de bon­ne vol­onté n’a plus de parti, je demande s’il aura demain une patrie. (Ibid., p. 202) [The Spanish tragedy, a rehearsal for the universal tragedy, reveals beyond all doubt the wretched condition of the man of good will in modern society which is eliminating him little by little as if he were some useless by-product. The man of good will no longer has a party. I wonder if tomorrow he will have a country.]

The lesson to be drawn from Spain therefore takes the form of a warning for French nationalists in Les Grands Cimetières. Yet, despite such pessimism, the individual con­science remains central to the formulation of both Bernanos’s and Pollès’s critique of the far right and left respectively. In the case of Les Grands Cimetières, this derives from Bernanos’s belief that the individual is ‘both the focus and the chief protagonist (hence the supreme importance of free will) of the struggle between Good and Evil …’. Each individual, as Cooke goes on to explain, is therefore called to commit acts of heroism; individual life is conceived as ‘a struggle for awareness of [the individual’s] own divinely inspired greatness’.42 Les Grands Cimetières’s critique of the far right emanates from an individual convinced that it is his Christian duty not only to expose the fallacies of the far right in Spain and France, but to combat Satan himself. It is an expression of Bernanos’s Christian commitment.43 In Toute guerre, the possibility of humanity incarnating the spirit of Christ appears limited to Domni. Indeed, God appears distinctly distant from human activity, Domni decides as he witnesses Nationalist atrocities: ‘Dieu pendant

 Cooke, Georges Bernanos, p. 28.   As Cooke observes of Bernanos’s novels, art and commitment combine through Bernanos’s belief that the Christian artwork reflects a search for the absolute and is consequently a manifestation of the spirit and making real of the Word of God. Cooke, Georges Bernanos, p. 9. 42

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ce temps-là avait l’air de se passer la main dans la barbe …’.44 Yet, Domni the filmmaker imitates such divine distance. Resisting the urge to protect his former brothers-in-arms, he reasons: ‘il fallait regarder cela calmement comme dans le studio le metteur en scène suit impassible tous les gestes du vieux qui se prépare à violer la jeune fille’ [He had to watch all this calmly just as in the studio the director observes impassively all the gestures of the old man who is preparing to rape the young girl] (Toute guerre, p. 228). Distance, Domni claims, enables him to retain his humanity in that it separates him from the perpetrators of terror on both sides of the Spanish divide. It is achieved through a refusal to compromise a lucid, moral conscience: ‘Il n’y a qu’un moyen d’être au-dessus des humiliateurs, de ceux qui vont nous séparer de notre corps: garder l’âme plus claire qu’eux. Aucun homme, dans aucun monde, ne manque jamais de l’occasion d’être humain: voilà un bon slogan que je conserve …’ [There is only one way to remain above those who humiliate us, who plan to separate us from our bodies: by maintaining a purer soul. No man in whatever circumstances lacks the opportunity to be human. Now there’s a good slogan I maintain …] (ibid., p. 169). This conscience can not only survive the horrors to which it bears witness but testify against these; it is therefore through it that the criticism of the revolutionary left in Toute guerre is formulated. It is for this reason that the intellectual in the novel automatically comes under the suspicion of the parties of the left, but also those of the right; indeed, of all those who seek a totalitarian solution. The trajectory of one communist volunteer, the German Hans Béber, recounted with the ironic distance characteristic of Domni, but also of the novel’s narrative voice, is illustrative of this: Béber avait fait des ‘réflexions’ à ses professeurs quand il était petit, et il avait été battu; à ses parents et il avait été battu; à ses patrons et il avait été chassé; aux nazis, et il avait été battu; enfin aux hommes de son parti bien-aimé, et il avait été tué; c’était un intellectuel au fond, qui préférait les ‘réflexions’ à la vie. (Ibid., p. 253) [Béber had made ‘observations’ before his teachers when he was little and he had been thrashed; before his parents and he had been thrashed again; before his employers and he had been sacked, before the Nazis and he had been beaten up, before the men of his beloved party and he had been killed. Basically, he was an intellectual who preferred ‘observations’ to life.]

For Pollès, ‘[l]a sincérité, la libre-pensée, et le sacrifice constituaient un double front d’où l’on “disparaissait” aussi souvent que du front de guerre’ [sincerity, free thinking and sacrifice constituted a second front from which one ‘disappeared’ as frequently as from the frontline] (ibid., p. 253).45 44

  ‘During this time God seemed to be stroking his beard …’   The narrator’s irony is again suggestive of a sense of deception resulting from a tarnished ideal, but the narrative voice then goes on to suggest this very deception: 45

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In both Les Grands Cimetières and Toute Guerre, then, the Civil War is reinterpreted through a highly developed, individual moral conscience that sets out to challenge the conduct of the factions of the far right and the far left. More than this, however, this individual conscience, through the preservation of the Christian principles of honour and good will in Les Grands Cimetières, principles that guide Bernanos’s oeuvre as a whole, and through the preservation of a less well defined, but equally keen critical sense in Toute guerre, denies the utopian ends that sections of the French far right and far left had developed in their earlier representations of the conflict. Utopia Postponed If both Bernanos and Pollès deny specific forms of utopia that derive from their own respective political communities’ reading of the Spanish Civil War, neither accepts the status quo nor renounces the quest for an otherwise. Cooke’s assertion that Bernanos is torn between a call ‘to bear witness to a future which his faith dictated must take place …’ and the experience of a degraded reality in the present can in part be applied to Pollès;46 both Les Grands Cimetières and Toute Guerre contain within them the seeds of a utopian vision set to contend and displace those they deny. In this both writers exhibit the persistence of a utopian mindset in spite of the deceptions of the present; utopia is postponed rather than cancelled in each work. Indeed, for Albouy, Bernanos is essentially a romantic utopian, resorting to myth, feeling and the dream, whilst Maurras is the rational observer of historic fact.47 André Germain’s assertion that ‘toute sa vie, Bernanos n’a demandé qu’à se battre et la question du drapeau sous lequel il se battait n’était pas essentielle’ [all his life Bernanos had sought a fight and the question of the flag under which he fought was not important] overlooks the underlying utopian vision of Bernanos’s committed writings.48 This vision is predicated upon the restoration of monarchy in France; not, as I have already stated, the rational, centralizing monarchy he saw in the Maurrassian model, but a monarchy based on a system of feudal rights and duties. In this way, Les Grands Cimetières contributes its part to the elaboration of the peculiarly Bernanosian restorationist utopia, a vision of the nation that ‘Le plus désolant sacrifice est celui qui non seulement n’est pas reconnu, mais est pris pour un crime; quand ceux à qui on donne son sang vous accusent d’y avoir entretenu un virus pour empoisonner le leur …’ [The most distressing sacrifice is that which is not only not recognized, but which is mistaken for a crime; when those to whom you give your blood accuse you of passing on a virus which will infect their own blood …] (Toute guerre, p. 253). 46  Cooke, Georges Bernanos, p. 8. 47   Albouy, Bernanos et la politique, p. 117. 48   Quoted in Albouy, Bernanos et la politique, p. 13.

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has already been examined in much detail by scholars of Bernanos, but which I will summarize here.49 Like the restorationist utopia examined in Chapter One, Bernanos’s utopia evokes a golden age upon which the future should be modelled. Unlike the former, though, it is evoked in response to the inadequacy of the Spanish Nationalist model. Moreover, for the Maurrassians, the French Revolution and Romanticism represented the twin cultural-political event that had swept aside order and stability. For Bernanos, the Renaissance had achieved the same end centuries earlier, destroying the social unity that had characterized medieval life in Bernanos’s view. The Renaissance, through the creation of the bourgeoisie, to which it ultimately contributed, led to the fracturing of national communities into social classes; since then, and as Mannheim also claims, ‘the internal unity of a [single] world-view’ has collapsed in the face of a multiplicity of competing viewpoints.50 Bernanos remains nostalgic for a form of social unity that was preserved by the absolute monarchy of feudal France. He rejects therefore any class-based notion of the people in favour of le petit peuple, an eternal, national entity: ‘Il n’y a pas de peuple de gauche ou de peuple de droite, il n’y a qu’un peuple’ (Les Grands Cimetières, p. 51).51 The middle classes are an artificial creation, disrupting the God-given unity that existed between the people and the monarchy. The latter was the guarantor of the people’s security, but also of their honour, ruling on their behalf, leading Bernanos to declare that the sort of dictatorship of which the people really dreams is that of absolute monarchy (ibid., p. 55). The absolute monarchy of Bernanos’s restorationist utopia is the best reflection of popular, national will. In this, and as Winock observes, Les Grands Cimetières reveals a dubious historical memory at work.52 Yet, as Winock goes on to state, in spite of this, Bernanos’s vision is informed by a faith at the heart of which lie the notions of justice and honour. The latter in particular constitutes an absolute for Bernanos; it is, as Gosselin-Noat notes, where the divine and the human meet in a fusion of human honour and divine charity.53 The preservation of French national honour in the realm of international politics was therefore a Christian duty since France’s vocation was that of Christ’s chosen kingdom.54 Maurras and other future supporters of the Munich Agreement, in their willingness to sacrifice allies to whom France was bound not only by treaties but by honour, were therefore guilty of a double betrayal of political and Christian duty. For Bernanos, the model for the future monarch, but also for the modern Christian, is to be found in the former defenders of national honour: the crusader 49   See, in addition to the works already cited, Chapter Three of Gosselin-Noat, Bernanos. 50   Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 6. 51   ‘There is no people of the left or people of the right; there is only one people.’ 52   Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, p. 304. 53   Gosselin-Noat, Bernanos, pp. 58‒9. 54   Bernanos quoted in Tobin, Georges Bernanos, p. 39.

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king Louis IX (or Saint Louis), Henri IV and Joan of Arc. All three embody these values of justice and honour through chivalry. Moreover, such figures exist as intermediaries between God and humanity, facilitating the process of incarnation through which the redemption of humanity will occur. In an anticipation of Resistance discourse, Bernanos contends that their spirit will rise up once again against Hitler when ‘la vieille chevalerie franque commencera de remuer sous la terre. Le mot de liberté … reprendra le sens que lui donnèrent jadis nos ancêtres celtes. La liberté française deviendra du même coup la liberté du genre humain’ [ancient Frank chivalry will begin to stir beneath the soil. The word freedom … will regain the meaning our Celtic ancestors once accorded it. French freedom will simultaneously become the freedom of all humankind] (ibid., p. 302). Les Grands Cimetières constitutes therefore not only a warning against the far right, but also a call to arms in order to achieve an authentic national restoration, but one predicated upon universal Christian values. Bernanos’s essay adumbrates a new form of Christian commitment in response to the esprit de vieillesse [spirit of old-age] that characterizes the French far right, a commitment based, somewhat predictably, on an esprit de jeunesse [spirit of youth]. This is no cult of youth for the sake of youth, however, since, as the agnostic reminds the congregation he addresses in Les Grands Cimetières: ‘jeunesse et viellesse sont affaire de trempérament ou, si lon veut, d’âme. … Il y a un peuple de la jeunesse’ [youth and old age are a matter of temperament or, if you prefer, of soul. … There is a youthful people] (p. 232). It is this people, the agnostic claims, who might yet turn to Christians for a new political direction if only they were to abandon their attachment to the present order: ‘La réaction est nécessaire, la révolution n’est pas de trop. Réaction et révolution ensemble ne seraient pas assez. Dieu! laissez votre vieux scrupule de ménager un ordre qui se ménage si peu qu’il se détruit lui-même à mesure’ [reaction is needed, revolution too. Reaction and revolution together would not be enough. God! Abandon your old scruples which lead you to humour an order which takes so little care of itself to that it is slowly destroying itself] (ibid., p. 231). The agnostic’s sermon, whilst a theological challenge to the Christian reader, as Tobin argues, is informed by Bernanos’s utopian vision which is designed to impact upon and alter the real conditions of the society in which it is uttered.55 As Camus observed in a review of Les Grands Cimetières, Bernanos remained a man of the right and an opponent of democracy.56 At the heart of Bernanos’s utopian vision, Cooke contends, lies not so much a mystique, but an image of a mystique drawn from ‘Childhood dreams [that] interposed chivalric conquest and saintly penitence …’. Such an image required human suffering, casting it as a step 55

  The agnostic’s words are an echoing of Bernanos’s earlier plea to the Church: ‘appelez cette jeunesse aux armes, appelez-la, et vous verrez frémir la chrétienté comme la surface d’une eau prête à bouillir’ [call this youth to arms, summon it, and you will witness Christianity tremble like the surface of water about to boil] (Les Grands Cimetières, p. 196). 56   Quoted in Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, p. 305.

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towards redemption, and indeed demanded that humanity cherish such suffering.57 Suffering, an inevitable consequence and proof of our fallen, sinful state, also exists in order to generate compassion amidst humanity, compassion constituting ‘the form of love that is … the only one that gives substance to pious sentiment’.58 Social reform and the liberal notion of progress are therefore incompatible with Bernanos’s vision since they prevent the material conditions necessary to it.59 The suffering of others becomes an opportunity for the Christian to perform acts of charity through which his or her compassion is expressed; hence Bernanos’s nostalgia for the charitable acts he committed as a child towards the local poor (pp. 47‒8). The suffering he witnesses as a consequence of the Nationalist terror in Majorca therefore allows Bernanos to assert his own faith, but also to call his Catholic readership to do the same. Yet, his political vision was immediately criticized as a form of utopian escapism of the pathological variety identified by Ricœur, predicated upon a romanticized view of the Middle Age. It found few echoes among Bernanos’s fellow French far-right intellectuals or the political movements with which they had become associated, even if, as Winock notes, his critique of the Nationalists echoes that of Emmanuel Moulnier’s liberal Catholic review Esprit.60 Nevertheless, it denotes the persistence of the utopian mindset among those French intellectuals who continued to contest the Third Republic, even if some, like Bernanos, were unable now to find a home amidst their own. Whilst Bernanos takes pride in his splendid isolation, Pollès’s characters frequently give vent to a sense of anguish which results from the exclusion from the utopian projects of their erstwhile comrades. Thus Domni observes of Laîné, a French communist placed under investigation by the Party: ‘Il est aussi malheureux … d’être chassé du chantier de la foi que s’il avait été chassé du paradis …’ [He is as unhappy … at being banished from the building site of his faith as if he had been banished from Paradise itself …] (Toute guerre, p. 127). Even Domni, the focalizer of Pollès’s critique of the revolutionary left’s utopian visions, asserts the persistence of an ideal beyond the compromised means used to pursue this end: ‘Qu’importe que les hommes salissent l’eau en fouillant la vase pour trouver des dollars ou brouiller la gloire des autres; nous savons qu’elle était pure, qu’elle peut sans cesse le redevenir …’ [What does it matter that men dirty the water when searching the silt for dollars or to besmirch the renown of others? We know the water was pure, that it can be so once more …] (ibid., p. 129). Despite his distance, Domni represents a form of humanist idealism that persists in spite of the tarnished present: ‘sans doute était-il plus lié à l’espoir, à la croyance au miracle humain, au rêve en un mot qu’aux pauvres camarades comme ils sont’ [doubtless he was more  Cooke, Georges Bernanos, p. 39.   Tobin, Georges Bernanos, p. 52. 59   Progress is the great myth of liberal democracy for Bernanos. Faith in progress as an ineluctable force justifies individual inertia and an abdication of free will and responsibility. Les Grands Cimetières, p. 30. 60   Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, p. 303. 57

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closely bound to hope, to the belief in the human miracle, to the dream in a word than to poor comrades as they really were] (p. 132).61 Pollès’s critique of the revolutionary left is therefore accompanied by Domni’s pursuit of an alternative utopian model to those he and Pollès call into question. Domni’s first recourse is to art. He discerns in an icon rescued by a Nationalist deserter ‘l’image d’une vie si parfaite qu’elle semblait ignorer la guerre …’ [the image of so perfect a life that appeared to exist in ignorance of war …], an image that awakens a more fundamental desire to move beyond the pain of the present and to ‘être au delà de ces temps, vivre au delà de tous les temps …’ [to be beyond these times, to live beyond all time …]. Domni therefore begins to conceive of, and to take on, the intellectual and artistic responsibility of giving aesthetic form to the suffering of the ordinary Republican soldier, of redeeming his experience of the moment and of translating it through time as an expression of an eternal ideal that persists in spite of everything. In terms that echo aspects of Bernanos’s Christian faith, Domni muses: ‘Les uns prouvent la petite divinité humaine en vivant et créant et chantant; les autres en mourant pour que le progrès de tout cela soit possible’ [Some prove our tiny human divinity by living, creating and singing, others by dying so that progress in these areas is possible] (p. 89). However, Domni’s aesthetic ideal is never fully developed and is quickly abandoned. It nevertheless reveals a tenacious idealism and anticipates Domni’s second recourse: religious faith. While he rejects organized religion of the type represented by his brother, a Catholic priest who has fled to Nationalist Spain, whilst in Nationalist territory Domni begins to discern, a divine presence behind the ideals he serves in the Republican cause: ‘il retrouvait Dieu tout simplement comme une idée quand les nuages sont écartées. … Le Dieu des philosophes: un soleil plus haut que le soleil, un soleil éclairant les causes, comme celui qu’on voit éclaire les effets …’ [quite simply, he was rediscovering God like an idea when the clouds part. … The God of the philosophes: a sun higher than the sun, a sun illuminating all the causes, like that which we see illuminates the effects …] (p. 161). God, then, remains a mystery, but offers hope of understanding and of resolution beyond the present: ‘il n’a ya qu’en Dieu qu’on ne souffre plus de la bêtise, en Dieu le créateur de la bêtise, mais aussi du rêve’ [it is only in God that one no longer suffers because of stupidity, in God the creator of stupidity, but also of the dream] (p. 166). Once again, though, having barely outlined a solution, Domni abandons it or, rather, Pollès neglects to develop it further. 61

  Indeed, Pollès gives expression to his own persistent utopianism in an essay praising Thomas More’s Utopia published in Vendredi on 8 January 1937, whilst also suggesting that utopianism constitues an essential human quality: ‘Le progrès commence par le rêve: l’anticipation est une sorte de rêve rationnel et social. [S]i les hommes rêvaient tous à un monde meilleur, il ne tarderait pas à être réalisé. Et s’il est irréalisable, on rêve sans le savoir à un autre monde …’ [Progress begins with dream; anticipation is a sort of rational, social dream. [I]f men all dreamed of a better world, it would not take long for it to be achieved. And even if it is not achievable, we all dream nonetheless of another world …].

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Domni’s third recourse is to the love of the other in the form of the committed couple. Various characters in the novel reflect the quest that only Domni will ultimately resolve: the creation of ‘deux êtres capables de chercher la certitude d’un côté d’un bonheur qui rende un son humain pour tous les hommes’ [two beings capable of seeking out the certainty of a form of happiness that might offer a human sound for all men] (p. 199). The couple, it is suggested in spite of the multiple failed relationships of Toute guerre, can form the basis for a renewed humanist faith.62 Love, like art and Christian faith, has the potential to elevate the individual above the mire of the present, but is rooted in the experience of the other and in the here and now. Anioucha, the Russian émigré with whom Domni falls in love and returns to the Spanish Republic, is therefore described as ‘l’ange du présent, qui fait sortir de l’histoire’ (p. 306).63 The couple therefore experiences ‘une sorte de vertige tout spirituel de s’aimer mieux, plus haut que tous les autres …’ [a sort of spiritual vertigo from loving each other better, higher than all others …] (p. 311). The discovery of love reveals to Domni the redemptive potential for all of humanity in the gift that one can make of oneself to the other. He subsequently abandons the safety of Paris, where the couple first love, having realized: Il vaut beaucoup mieux se donner puisqu’un jour l’on nous prendra. Non pas se donner pour n’être pas pris; – se donner parce que c’est dans le sens de la beauté de la vie; non pas offrir ce qu’on a pour qu’on nous donne davantage en échange, mais parce que la main qui s’ouvre est la main toute vivante … (p. 319) [It is much better to offer oneself since one day they will take us anyway. Not so much offer oneself so as not to be taken, but offer oneself as this contributes to the beauty of life itself. Not so much offer what we have so that we receive more in exchange, but because the open hand is a living hand …]

In this way, Domni’s itinerary leads him to place the love of the other at the heart of his political and spiritual enterprise. Having sought to understand the war in its totality from a position of God-like indifference, Domni now takes as his starting point his immediate relationship with the individual other. Consequently, he begins to reconceptualize the conflict; meaning can now be gauged from the chaos of the present by limiting one’s focus to those around one: ‘La guerre n’est pas à

62   A similar response to the political deceptions of the Spanish Republican cause is discernible in some French novels of the 1950s and 1960s. For analysis of some of these, see Martin Hurcombe, ‘Back to Spain: Commitment in Crisis in Four French Novels of the Spanish Civil War (1958‒62)’ in Helen Vassallo and Paul Cook (eds), Alienation and Alterity: Otherness in Modern and Contemporary Francophone Contexts (Bern, 2009), pp. 117‒36. 63   ‘The angle of the present who helps one escape history.’

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résoudre dans l’enselmble; il faut travailler dans son coin’ (p. 336).64 In this, once again, we can discern a certain anticipation of Camusian commitment formulated in la pensée de midi, which stands in contrast to the Marxist-Hegelian dialectic of l’idéologie allemande. The former, Camus contends, insists upon the immediacy of human solidarity forged from the concrete relations of the present, ‘la société concrète contre la société absolutiste, la liberté réfléchie contre la tyrannie rationnelle, l’individualisme altruiste enfin contre la colonisation des masses …’ [Concrete society as opposed to absolutist society, considered freedom as opposed to rational tyranny, finally altruistic individualism as opposed to the colonization of the masses …].65 Yet, the return to the Republic and to the Popular Army is also determined by Domni’s (and Pollès’s) continued adherence to the revolutionary left. As Domni notes in his diary, ‘Je cherche la vérité, du côté où parurent ses rudiments’ (p. 335).66 He therefore accepts a degree of moral relativism, facilitated by the fact that, by the novel’s conclusion, the Republicans are no longer engaged in a revolutionary war of conquest but a form of anti-fascist resistance, deciding that the Republicans ‘sont moins salauds que les autres …’.67 However, the Republicans and the revolutionary left generally retain a transformative potential so that those around Domni now realize, in spite of impending defeat, that ‘une vie entière ne suffit pas pour changer le monde entier, mais pour faire avancer d’un quart de millimètre l’immense sphère d’espérance d’une vie plus riche’ [a whole life is not enough to change the whole world, but suffices in order to advance by one quarter of a millimetre the immense hope in a richer life]. Domni concludes that ‘la chance d’un univers un peu plus habitable qu’ils [les républicains] portent en eux, c’est ce qu’on appelle la vérité’ [the chance of a slightly more inhabitable universe that they [the Republicans] carry in them. That is what’s called truth] (p. 321). The Republicans and the revolutionary left continue to contain within them the seeds of a radically alternative way of being. Domni must ‘travailler jusqu’au bout avec les hommes, en espérant et en leur donnant l’espérance, comme si les rêves pourraient se réaliser …’ [work to the end with men, hoping and giving them hope, as if dreams could be realized …] (p. 354). He must rejoin the Republican struggle, not only to repel fascism, but to further the cause of humanity in its struggle against the darkness that threatens to envelope it: ‘Comment toute guerre ne se ferait-elle pas la nuit, même celle en laquelle un camp poursuit l’idéal d’ajouter quelques bougies à la lumière du soleil …?’ [How else could any war be fought other than at night, even that in which one camp is pursuing the ideal of contributing a few candles to the light of the sun …?] (p. 355). The light of utopia is not entirely extinguished in Toute guerre; rather, it is revealed to be much further down the tunnel than the left had originally believed 64

  ‘War cannot be resolved in its entirety; we must each work away in our corner.’  Camus, L’Homme révolté, p. 369. 66   ‘I am seeking out truth where its rudiments first appeared.’ 67   ‘Are less rotten than the others ….’ 65

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in Spain in 1936. Indeed, the ‘as if’ of ‘comme si les rêves pourraient se réaliser’ suggests that it is the journey and not its final destination that matters to the individual in pursuit of the dream. In this, Pollès’s novel belongs to a dystopian tradition, born of a deception with the present, which often concludes nevertheless that it was not the utopian enterprise that was to blame for the contemporary predicament nor the values it embodied, but the means by which these had until now been pursued.68 Utopia, once again, is indefinitely postponed rather than entirely denied. This position is best summed up by Domni’s earlier refusal of both the anarchist and communist interpretations of the Civil War: ‘Non, ni eux ni les autres; ni anarchiste, ni communiste … Vraiment, je suis de la Xe Internationale’ [No, neither them, nor the others. Neither anarchist, nor communist … Truly I belong to the 10th International] (p. 144). In this way, both Les Grands Cimetières and Toute guerre reflect what Kumar perceives as the intimate relationship of utopianism and dystopianism whereby ‘utopia and anti-utopia flow into and out of each other in an intricate pattern of fervent affirmation mixed with bleak pessimism’.69 Whilst the authors Kumar examines tend to express this dualism in works that belong to one sub-genre or the other, Bernanos and Pollès reflect this mental dualism in a single work. Here the critique of other utopian projects does not serve to extinguish utopian ardour, merely to dampen it. Moreover, while the completion of the project is modified and delayed, it continues to shape both authors’ response to the moment; the present continues to be interpreted through a utopian paradigm upon which it seeks to act. This paradigm, however, is formulated and located within an individual moral conscience in both works. It emerges in response to the critique supplied by this conscience of existing collective utopian models generated by French intellectuals associated with the far right and far left in response to the Civil War. Furthermore, it is now the individual who, through his conduct, not only challenges these, but offers an alternative utopian paradigm to a French readership. This centrality and exemplarity of the individual conscience are suggested by Domni: On ne droit aux hommes que le travail. … On ne peut pas donner plus à l’humanité – même en donnant sa vie – qu’en lui donnant l’exemple d’un homme. … Celui qui donnerait une image assez pure du bonheur d’un homme avec le monde ferait sans doute plus que ceux qui ont édifié des théories différentes du bonheur qui sont devenues signes de contradiction. (Toute guerre, p. 351) [All one owes men is work. … One can offer humanity nothing more, even in giving one’s life, than the example of a man. … He who would offer a reasonably pure image of human happiness in the world would doubtless achieve more than 68   For Kumar, however, it is precisely this condemnation of the utopian enterprise that he detects in the works of utopians-turned-dystopians, such as those written by H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and Orwell. Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, p. 111. 69   Ibid., p. 130.

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France and the Spanish Civil War those who have constructed different theories of happiness, all of which have become sources of contradiction.]

It is in this shift in emphasis from the collective utopian projects of the far right and far left towards the notion of individual responsibility before the mass sociopolitical projects of the interwar years, albeit in diametrically opposed directions, that the relevance of Les Grands Cimetières and Toute guerre becomes apparent. Whilst the utopian projects suggested by both authors may well appear fanciful, both failing to find any sustained or influential echo among political organizations, other writers or thinkers, they nevertheless anticipate a reformulation of the French intellectual’s concept of commitment, a concept that now centres on individual conduct and responsibility toward the other.

Epilogue Decisions in the Dark: Sartre’s ‘Le Mur’

If the Spanish Civil War is credited by some with stimulating intellectuals’ enthusiasm for political engagement, it is equally often credited with dampening it, leading to the war’s paradoxical association with intellectual désengagement and disenchantment with political activity. The reality of the conflict and its concomitant political compromises, as Stephen Spender noted of his generation, soon ‘dragged us all deeper into the morass of ideological conflict, putting to the sharpest test the idealism that the advance of fascism in Central Europe had awakened in us’.1 Marcel Sauvage reflects the same process, closing his reportage on the Civil War with a description of the deafening noise produced by the loudspeakers of the propaganda departments of both sides, a noise that reduces the idealism and motives of the combatants to a series of political speeches, bad jokes, insults and competing anthems targeted at the non-believers across the front.2 The oft-cited model for this reversal is Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which is then read as a rehearsal for, and an anticipation of, the dystopian Nineteen EightyFour. Yet, despite his exposure to the Republican repression of the POUM, Orwell is still able to state of his experience of Spain: ‘the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings’.3 So too the French experience of the Civil War reveals a persistence of belief; a belief in the power of the social imaginary to reconfigure the world and, through the articulation of the utopian vision, to act and impact upon it even when, as in the case of Bernanos and Pollès, the utopias advanced have become primarily the personal responses of a wounded individual consciousness rather than the reflection of a collective enterprise of the sort envisaged by Mannheim. The utopia’s ability to survive its apparent denial by the reality of the Civil War and its attempted translation to the realm of domestic political activity therefore suggest the persistence of the utopian mentality among French intellectuals in the period under review. Here the intellectual’s activity attempts to represent and to formulate a vision for consumption and then translation by a politically engaged public into the realm of reality; representations of the Civil War are therefore first and foremost conceived of as collective undertakings. The works of Bernanos and Pollès are essentially anomalies, filtering events through an individual moral conscience whilst retaining a faith in collective action. In so doing, however, they anticipate a   Quoted in John Lehmann, The Whispering Gallery, p. 332.  Sauvage, La Corrida, p. 226. 3  Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, p. 186. 1 2

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shift in emphasis in the French history of intellectual political engagement, a shift that is also anticipated in the work of the French author and philosopher who will become most closely associated with the same phenomenon in postwar France: Jean-Paul Sartre. First published in La Nouvelle Revue Française in July 1937 and then in January 1939 as the first story in a collection published under the same title, Sartre’s ‘Le Mur’ is set in a Nationalist prison and narrated in the first-person by the anarchist Pablo Ibbieta. Like his two cell mates, Tom Steinbock, an Irish brigadiste, and Juan Mirbal, the brother of an anarchist activist, Pablo has been sentenced to death. The story focuses principally upon Pablo’s tortured and ultimately futile attempts to conceive of his own death before, at dawn, he is offered a reprieve in exchange for information concerning the whereabouts of a fellow anarchist, Ramon Gris. Unwilling to betray Gris, despite his realization in the face of death that ‘je me foutais de l’Espagne et de l’anarchie: rien n’avait plus d’importance’, Pablo sends the Nationalists to the local cemetery safe in the knowledge that Gris would never hide in so obvious a place.4 The story concludes with the news that Gris has indeed been arrested in the very cemetery to which the Nationalists were directed by Pablo ‘pour leur faire une farce’ (p. 36).5 For Jean-François Sirinelli, the Civil War serves in ‘Le Mur’ as a backdrop to Sartre’s existential considerations rather than as the springboard to considerations on political engagement, considerations that would dominate Sartre’s intellectual activity from the 1940s and beyond.6 Similarly, Walter Redfern’s analysis of ‘Le Mur’ concentrates on the philosophical dilemma posed by ‘the wall of mystery, – what is death? – against which Pablo bangs his head’.7 Redfern therefore discerns in the story Pablo’s passage ‘from engagé to dégagé’ as the latter acquiesces before the apparent absurdity of all life in the face of an imminent, all-negating death.8 Sartre too contributed to the tendency to consider ‘Le Mur’ as a work that eschews issues of commitment, describing his central protagonist in one postwar interview as an incomplete re­volutionary insufficiently devoted to the cause.9 By way of contrast, for Anne Mathieu, ‘Le Mur’ reveals Sartre’s interest in 1937 in anarchism. Indeed, she goes so far as to contend that, in its focus on Pablo the 4   ‘I couldn’t care less about Spain and anarchism; nothing mattered anymore.’ JeanPaul Sartre, ‘Le Mur’ in Le Mur (Paris, 1986), pp. 11‒39, p. 35. 5   ‘To play a trick on them.’ 6   Jean-François Sirinelli, ‘Le jeune Sartre ou la non-tentation de l’histoire’ in Les Temps modernes, October–December 1990: pp. 1051‒2. 7   Walter Redfern, ‘Praxis and Parapraxis: Sartre’s “Le Mur”’ in Harold Bloom (ed.), Jean-Paul Sartre (Broomall, PA, 2001), pp. 148‒58, p. 150. 8   Ibid., p. 156. 9   ‘Il n’est pas suffisamment dévoué à une cause pour que sa mort ne lui paraisse pas absurde … parce qu’il n’est pas formé complètement comme un révolutionnaire’ [He is not sufficiently devoted to a cause for his death to appear anything other than absurd … because he is not a fully formed revolutionary]. Quoted in Redfern, ‘Praxis and Parapraxis’, p. 156.

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anarchist, his dislike of Tom the brigadiste and Pablo’s loyalty to Gris, even when he feels his friendship for his comrade ebbing away, the story constitutes ‘un hommage aux anarchistes, à leur façon de penser et de lutter’.10 Underlying all of the above interpretations of ‘Le Mur’, however, is the recognition that, as both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir later noted, the Spanish Civil War marked a first encounter with History, an encounter that would ultimately lead them to radical forms of political engagement in postwar France.11 Indeed, the Civil War supplied Sartre the writer with the first great circumstance on which he would build an entire littérature des grandes circonstances of the type he demands in Qu’est-ce que la littérature?12 Moreover, it would be around the experience of war that Sartre would attempt to develop his concept of engagement more fully, a concept predicated upon the individual’s inalienable freedom to choose and an ensuing sense of responsibility towards others encountered in the collective struggle against oppression. War becomes Sartre’s favoured milieu for such considerations; witness, its centrality to his unfinished cycle of novels Les Chemins de la liberté and his postwar theatre, notably Les mains sales. Whilst Mathieu’s reading of ‘Le Mur’ as homage to Iberian anarchism may seem extravagant, it nevertheless replaces the short story in its historical context and allows us to reconsider ‘Le Mur’ not only in relation to the time, the ideas and the aspirations amidst which it first appeared, but also in relation to the Sartrean concept of commitment which would ultimately follow. Although it offers none of the utopianism and hope posited by both Bernanos’s and Pollès’s works, like these ‘Le Mur’ employs the motif of darkness in order to point to the complexities faced by an individual consciousness struggling to find meaning in the world around itself. ‘[N]ous avions toute la nuit pour comprendre’ (p. 17), as Pablo states.13 As Redfern argues, the risk to meaning is supplied by the imminence of Pablo’s personal demise. Whilst in the archbishopric, his former prison, he was able to imagine his past reflected in the sky above, now he is only able to make out a solitary star through an open coal chute. Consequently, ‘le ciel ne m’évoquait plus rien’ [the sky no longer roused anything in me] (p. 21) and the darkness becomes suggestive of yet another wall, a barrier to comprehending what Tom suggests (much to Pablo’s annoyance) is the fundamental but insoluble problem of the condemned: to imagine a world continuing to exist beyond their physical disappearance: ‘Il faudrait que j’arrive à penser … à penser que je ne verrai plus rien … et que le monde continuera pour les autres. On n’est pas faits 10

  ‘Homage to the anarchists, their way of thinking and of fighting.’ Anne Mathieu, ‘Jean-Paul Sartre et l’Espagne. Du “Mur” à la preface au Procès de Burgos’ in Roman 2050, 43 (2007): pp. 111‒24, 115. 11   Thus Beauvoir described the war as ‘le drame qui pendant deux ans et demi domina toute notre vie …’ [the drama which for two-and-a-half years dominated our entire lives …]. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge (Paris, 1980), p. 315. First published in 1960. 12  Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? p. 223. 13   ‘We had the whole night to understand.’

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pour penser ça, Pablo’ [I would have to think … to think that I will no longer see anything … and that the world will carry on for everyone else. We’re not designed to think of that, Pablo] (p. 23). Pablo’s error, then, is to believe that the wall of death negates all that has led up to it and his subsequent effort ‘to try to live his death in advance, to be one of the living dead’.14 In this, as Redfern also writes, ‘Le Mur’ is a refusal of Pascal’s vision of humanity and human life as that of the condemned awaiting their execution, expressing the ‘firm conviction that no one can prepare for dying, live life guided by its end, live willingly towards death’.15 The antagonism that Pablo exhibits towards Tom and Juan reveals that any notion of revolutionary fraternity in death and suffering, so central to Malraux’s understanding of the Republican cause, is unable to resist death’s ultimate negation of the individual: ‘Au fond je n’avais pas beaucoup de sympathie pour Tom et je ne voyais pas pourquoi, sous prétexte que nous allions mourir ensemble, j’aurais dû en avoir davantage’ [Basically I didn’t have much sympathy for Tom and I couldn’t see why just because we were destined to die together I should have felt any more] (p. 24). Things would have been different with Ramon Gris, Pablo opines, but ultimately Gris and anarchism more generally go the way of all of Pablo’s past activities: Ça me fit sourire. Avec quelle âpreté, je courais après le bonheur, après les femmes, après la liberté. Pour quoi faire? J’avais voulu libérer l’Espagne, j’admirais Pi y Margall, j’avais adhéré au mouvement anarchiste, j’avais parlé dans des réunions publiques: je prenais tout au sérieux, comme si j’avais été immortel. (p. 27) [It made me smile. With what desperation I used to run after happiness, women, freedom. And to what end? I had wanted to liberate Spain, I used to admire Pi y Margall, I had joined the anarchist movement, I had spoken in public meetings. I used to take everything seriously as if I had been immortal.]

Death, in Pablo’s eyes at least, negates his previous political engagements, unbinds him from the human community for which he had fought; the absurdity of the human condition renders all human activity equally absurd and invalid. Sartre’s later analysis of Pablo, now informed by his rapprochement with communism, attributes this failure of fraternity to a case of bad faith, but also to an underdeveloped revolutionary consciousness, suggesting that the postwar Sartre has shed his earlier interest in, or perhaps enthusiasm for, anarchism, seeing it now as a more naïve expression of revolutionary politics. By reconsidering ‘Le Mur’ within the corpus of French representations of the Civil War, however, a further dimension to the work begins to emerge. Whilst the tragi-comic climax to the story reveals Pablo’s existential error, it also says something of the dilemmas that 14

  Redfern, ‘Praxis and Parapraxis’, p. 157.   Ibid., p. 151.

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Sartre’s own concept of commitment will have to overcome. The starting point for Sartrean commitment is the individual consciousness and its inalienable freedom: ‘l’homme est un être chez qui l’essence est précédée par l’existence, … un être libre qui ne peut, dans des circonstances diverses, que vouloir sa liberté’ [man is a being for whom existence precedes essence, … a free being who can only ever (albeit in different circumstances) want his own freedom].16 Existence for Sartre is marked by a series of choices, decisions made in a universe, unlike those of Bernanos and of Pollès, deprived of any divinely inspired moral order designed to illuminate our way through the darkness; each individual is alone in the night, but every decision, as ‘Le Mur’ indeed illustrates, has the potential to impact upon those around us and to curtail their freedom in some way. The drama of ‘Le Mur’ is then a drama of limits; Pablo’s unwitting betrayal of Gris reveals our inability to gauge with absolute certainty the ultimate consequences of our individual actions. Furthermore, Pablo’s ‘farce’ highlights the folly of a retreat into the self; the individual conscience cannot become a refuge from the world and our relationship with those who surround us. As Mathieu notes more generally, ‘Le Mur’ is suggestive of Sartre’s developing political awareness, but also an expression of the powerlessness that both he and Beauvoir felt in the face of events in the late 1930s.17 It is therefore already indicative of Sartre’s need for a concept of engagement predicated upon responsibility, a concept that Sartre is not yet able to offer but which begins to emerge, although not entirely unproblematically, in his 1945 lecture L’Existentialisme est un humanisme and in his postwar fiction. Here, then, Sartre advances that the pursuit of individual freedom can only relieve the anguish that Sartre’s characters so often experience in their encounter with the limits of their actions through the pursuit of freedom for all: ‘dès qu’il y a engagement, je suis obligé de vouloir en même temps que ma liberté la liberté des autres, je ne puis prendre ma liberté pour but que si je prends également celle des autres pour but’ [as soon as there is commitment I have to desire along with my own freedom that of others; I cannot adopt my own freedom as a goal without also adopting that of others as my goal].18 Despite its impasse, ‘Le Mur’ is suggestive of a passage away from the identification of engaged French intellectuals with the collective social forces of their day towards an interest in the centrality of the individual consciousness and conscience, leading to a focus on the ethics of individual engagement. By way of contrast, the committed art and literature that has been the subject of this study is more broadly indicative of the social tensions and factionalism which marked not only the interwar period in France, but also the Occupation and Liberation, in   Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris, 1998), p. 70.   Mathieu, ‘Jean-Paul Sartre et l’Espagne’, p. 123. 18  Sartre, L’Existentialisme, p. 70. Illustrating this principle proves problematic in Sartre’s fiction, however; witness the aborted forms of commitment represented by Mathieu and Brunet in Les Chemins de la liberté and Sartre’s abandonment of the cycle’s final volume. 16

17

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a ‘guerre franco-française’ that does not begin with the defeat of June 1940 but which was already being played out in French politico-cultural encounters of the 1930s. As expressions of the social imaginary of that time, they reflect a battle for political power and influence, but also for reality itself played out in a cultural opposition of competing worldviews articulated around, as Winock writes, ‘une sorte de guerre civile mimétique, par Espagnols interposés’.19 They therefore contribute to a series of collective responses that offered radical solutions to the twin crisis of democracy and capital of that decade and its immediate legacy. Whilst for the majority of the authors of this study, Resistance and collaboration can be understood in terms of, and are informed by, the struggles of the 1930s, for Sartre and a younger generation of committed intellectuals emerging in postwar France, Resistance and Collaboration are essentially understood as individual choices. For Sartre and Beauvoir, the French experience of war is interpreted throughout the late 1940s as an illustration not only of existentialism’s principal assertions concerning the human condition, but also of both thinkers’ burgeoning concept of political commitment. Thus, for example, in his analysis of collaboration, Sartre considers the phenomenon as a form of mauvaise foi [bad faith], an abnegation of personal freedom and of responsibility.20 In the wake of a series of highly publicized trials (those of the Epuraion in France and the Nuremberg Trials in Germany), in which individuals were held to account for their participation in the collective crimes of the war, this younger generation of French intellectuals was attempting to reformulate the very notion of the individual’s responsibility towards history. It is perhaps this process which has contributed to the obscurity into which many of the works of this study have fallen, an obscurity that arises, unsurprisingly, from the greater shadow that the Second World War has cast over the Spanish Civil War as a whole. Moreover, the trauma of the Occupation and the story of Resistance that had then to be constructed and told helped hide further not only these works but the very memory of the Civil War and what was, for some at least, France’s shameful role in it. Indeed, French national memory of the retirada (the retreat of Republicans across the Pyrenees from 1938), France’s internment of many of these refugees in disease-ridden open-air camps in the South-West of France, the deportation of Spaniards from France during the Occupation and the role played by Spanish Republicans in the French Resistance is a patchy one.21 19   ‘A sort of mimetic civil war played out on their behalf by Spaniards.’ Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, p. 280. 20   See Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?’. 21   The monument to Republican deportees in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, Paris is a rare exception. It is mainly at a local level that the role of the Spanish in the Resistance is commemorated in France. The memory of the retirada in France is now also beginning to emerge, particularly at local level. I am grateful to Simon Davies and James Mitchell for the information and observations they have provided on aspects of the war’s memory in contemporary France.

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Should we, like Spender and Sauvage perhaps, see in the end of this generation’s idealism an end to the utopian mentality? In the aftermath of the Second World War, the optimism which had sometimes animated French intellectuals of the 1930s would have seemed misplaced in the extreme. With the collapse of fascism and Franco’s strategic retreat into isolationism, there were few remaining foreign models imposing enough to enthuse the French far right, which could then only fall back into nostalgia for pétainisme. Moreover, tensions between the PCF and its former allies, tensions stoked by the Cold War, finally brought about a schism which would see the former excluded from government and ultimately influence.22 From 1947, the USSR and then the Soviet Bloc only constituted a counter-model to the Republic for those intellectuals who, having succumbed entirely to the Party’s line and to the ‘regimentation of writers …’ had committed what Adereth terms the ‘Zhdanov mistake’, surrendering independence of thought and their artistry to the Party.23 Yet, not even Beauvoir and Sartre would prove in the course of the mid-twentieth century to be entirely immune to the lure of elsewhere. Moreover, their various attempted rapprochements with the revolutionary left testify to both thinkers’ desire for a liberated otherwise in which more authentic individual and collective forms of existence might be achieved.24 Might then the pursuit of authenticity, of a free future-oriented subjectivity able to associate in total innocence with all others, which dogs Sartre’s characters throughout his fiction, be a form of utopianism? In this case, it is perhaps premature to fear the end of utopia as Mannheim already did in 1936.25 Indeed, the renewed appeal of radical alternatives to the current twin crises of democracy and capital suggests the persistence of utopian thought which both Levitas and Gray consider to have an enduring influence upon the political and social imaginary even if, as Levitas does, utopia’s transformative element is ‘no longer primary’.26 As Ricœur states, ‘We cannot imagine … a society without utopia, because this would be a society without goals’.27 Utopia is not necessarily a declared genre. Rather, utopias take the form of new departures, metaphorical and real journeys, even when these are attempted retours en arrière. The current study has given an indication of how prevalent the 22   Tiersky observes that fellow-travelling declines as a cultural and political phenomenon from 1947 with PCF membership stabilizing between 250,000 and 350,000. French Communism, p. 323. 23  Adereth, Commitment in Modern French Literature, pp. 28‒9. Andrei Zhdanov was the principal architect of socialist realism. 24   Whilst Hollander’s Political Pilgims focuses almost predominantly on British and US intellectuals and their fascination with communist regimes throughout the twentieth century, it also traces some of Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s interest in these, particularly Cuba and China. See Chapters 6 and 7. 25  Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 236. 26  Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 196. See also Gray, Black Mass, p. 71. 27  Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, p. 283.

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utopian mentality was among French intellectuals of the interwar years. It offers a framework with which other journeys of that time can now be examined and a way to understanding the social imaginary and the intellectual’s relationship to it at this turbulent moment in French history, but it may also lend itself to the further study of the phenomenon of French intellectual engagement more generally. The journey to Spain, both metaphorical and real, was one journey among many taken by French intellectuals in the 1930s and since beyond the apparent stagnation of the Republic. It is to these other journeys that attention should now turn.

Bibliography Primary Sources Publications Bernanos, Georges, Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (Paris: Seuil Points, 1996). Bloch, Jean-Richard, Espagne, Espagne! (Paris: Editions Sociales Internationales, 1936). Brasillach, Robert, Les sept couleurs (Paris: Plon, 1958). Brasillach, Robert and Bardèche, Maurice, Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne (Paris: Editions Godefroy de Bouillon, 1995). Chamson, André, Retour d’Espagne: rien qu’un témoignage (Paris: Grasset, 1937). Claudel, Paul, Œuvre poétique de Paul Claudel (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1957). Drieu la Rochelle, Gilles (Paris: Gallimard, 1939). ——, Gilles (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), revised edition. Farrère, Claude, Visite aux Espagnols (Paris: Flammarion, 1937). Faÿ, Bernard, Les Forces de l’Espagne: Voyage à Salamanque (Paris: SGIE, 1937). Frondaie, Pierre, Le Volontaire (Paris: Plon, 1938). Jouve, Marguerite, Vu, en Espagne. Février 1936‒février 1937 (Paris: Flammarion, 1937). Malraux, André, Antimémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). ——, L’Espoir (Paris: Folio, 1992). ——, Espoir: Sierra de Teruel: scénario du film (Paris: Folio, 1997). Massis, Henri and Brasillach, Robert, Les Cadets de l’Alcazar (Paris: Plon, 1936). Massis, Henri, Chefs (Paris: Plon, 1939). Maulvault, Lucien, El Requeté (Paris: Fayard, 1937). ——, Glaïeul noir (Paris: Fayard, 1938). Maurras, Charles, Vers L’Espagne de Franco (Paris: Editions du Livre Moderne, 1943). ——, Mes idées politiques (Paris: Fayard, 1973). Oudard, Georges, Chemises noires, brunes et vertes en Espagne (Paris: Plon, 1938). Pollès, Henri, Toute guerre se fait la nuit (Paris: Gallimard, 1939). Réal del Sarte, Maxime, Au pays de Franco, notre frère latin (Paris: Collection la Caravelle, 1937). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Le Mur (Paris: Folio, 1986).

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Sauvage, Marcel, La Corrida. Notes sur la guerre d’Espagne (Paris: Grasset, 1984). Téry, Simone, Front de la liberté. Espagne 1937‒1938 (Paris: Editions Sociales Internationales, 1938). ——, Où l’aube se lève (New York: Brenteno’s, 1945). Tharaud, Jérôme and Jean, Cruelle Espagne (Paris: Plon, 1937). Film Malraux, André (dir.), Espoir. Sierra de Teruel Cinématographiques, Collection Classique, 2003).

(Les

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Non-French Representations of the War Bauer, Eddy, Rouge et or: chroniques de la ‘Reconquête’ espagnole 1937‒1938 (Neuchatel: Editions Victor Attinger, 1938?). Koestler, Arthur, Spanish Testament (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937). Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia (London: Penguin, 1989). French Cultural Studies Adereth, M., Commitment in Modern French Literature. A Brief Study of ‘Littérature engagée’ in the Works of Péguy, Aragon, and Sartre (London: Victor Gollancz, 1967). Albouy, Serge, Bernanos et la politique: la société et la droite française de 1900 à 1950 (Toulouse: Privat, 1980). Ashley, Katherine (ed.), Prix Goncourt, 1903‒2003: essais critiques (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004). de Beauvoir, Simone, La Force de l’âge (Paris: Folio, 1980). Bernanos, Geroges, Essais et écrits de combat, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). Boucharenc, Myriam, L’Ecrivain-reporter au cœur des années trente (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2004). Burdett, Charles and Duncan, Derek (eds), Cultural Encounters: European Travel Writing in the 1930s (New York: Berghahn, 2002). Carrard, Philippe, Malraux ou le récit hybride: essai sur les techniques narratives dans ‘L’Espoir’ (Paris: Minard, 1976). Carroll, David, French Literary Fascism. Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Caute, David, The Fellow-Travellers. Intellectual Friends of Communism, revised edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988). Cooke, John E., Georges Bernanos: A Study of Christian Commitment (Amersham: Avebury, 1981).

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Index

6 February 1934 riots 10, 91, 111, 204 Absurd 59, 61, 68, 158, 164n, 167–9, 17–23, 211, 226, 228 Action Française 10, 18–19, 22–53, 58n9, 59, 81–2, 106–7, 193, 197–8, 202–3 Action Française 81, Adereth, Max 14–15, 17n, 231 AEAR, see Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires Albouy, Sege 198n23, 216 Alfonso XIII 7 Alfonsine monarchism 10, 27 alienation 37n48, 118, 142, 145, 179, Amsterdam-Pleyel Movement 114 anarchism 8, 13, 156, 208, 211, 226–8 anti-fascism 2, 18, 19, 26, 29n19, 95, 111, 114, 117, 137–8, 151. 182, 186–7, 189, 194, 222 anti-Semitism 21–2, 24, 27, 81 anti-war, see pacifism Archer, Bernadette 10n29, 97 Arendt, Hannah 55, 67–72, 76, 124–5 Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (AEAR) 114, 149 Asturias uprising 8 Azaña, Manuel 6, 119, 140n80. Badajoz 30n22, 40, 43, 123 Bakhtin, Mikhail 15–16, 69, 76, 78, 99, 152, 154–5, 162 Barcelona 30n22, 38–9, 43, 72, 92, 97, 99, 116n20, 119, 124, 126, 140, 143, 145, 152, 155, 157n27, 158, 182–3 Bardèche, Maurice 46, 81, 95 Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne, see Brasillach, Robert Barrès, Maurice 21–2, 33, 39–40, 73, 74n50, 83, 89, Barthes, Roland 50n71, 53n82, 139, 190

Basque Country 7, 30n22 Bauer, Eddy 40–41 de Beauvoir, Simone 227, 229–31 Beevor, Anthony 2n4, 183n32 Benjamin, Walter 58 Benson, Frederick 2–4 Bernanos, Georges 19, 79, 193–224, 225, 227, 229 Grande Peur des bien-pensants, La 200–201 Grands Cimetières sous la lune, Les 19, 193–224 Bertrand de Muñoz, Maryse 3–5, 56 Bloch, Jean-Richard 6, 11, 18, 116–48, 151, 212 Espagne, Espagne! 116–48 Blum, Léon 1–2, 4, 27, 111–15 Boucharenc, Myriam 17n58, 30–32, 128 Boulanger, Georges 21–2 Bourdieu, Pierre 86–7 Bourget, Paul 83 Brasillach, Robert 18, 22, 27–30, 46–7, 53, 58n11, 79, 81–106, 203 Les Cadets de l’Alcazar 28n17, 30, 46–7, 53, 102, Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne 46n64, 95–6 Les sept couleurs 64, 81–106 Brothers, Caroline 50, 125, 131, 135n67, 138, Caballero, Largo 112n7, 119 Camus, Albert 74, 164n43, 169, 209, 213, 218, 222 Camus-Sartre schism 206 Carlism 18, 44, 61, 67, 69 Carrard, Philippe 150, 151n10, 154, 164–5, 168, 176–8 Carroll, David 23, 45, 48n68, 58, 82–3, 87n20, 90, 92, 103

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Casadists 187–8 Catalonia 7, 30n22, 39, 144, 182 Catholic Church 6–8, 10, 28, 193, 197–8, 201–2, 218n55 Caute, David 114n12, 150n3 CGT, see Confédération Générale du Travail Chamson, André 6, 18, 113–14, 116, 122– 34, 137–8, 141n82, 142, 146, 151 Retour d’Espagne 6, 116, 122–34, 137–8, 146 Chronotope 16, 166–7, 186 Cid legend 46–8, 49n71, 53, 56 Claudel, Paul 44, 202 ‘Aux martyrs espagnols’ 44–5 classicism 68, 83 CNT, see Confederación Nacional de Trabajo Cold War 32, 149n2, 206, 209n32, 231 collaboration 5, 18, 31, 103–4, 187, 205, 230 collaborationism 18, 103–8, Comintern 7n19, 117–18 Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes (CVIA) 114 commitment 2–5, 13–19, 32, 55, 59, 66–7, 76–9, 89, 94, 97, 10–102, 113, 118, 120–21, 126, 129, 139, 148, 151, 153–4, 162, 164, 168, 178, 187, 189, 196, 214, 218, 222, 224, 225–32 Communist Party 114n12, 117, 136n73, 149–50, 171, 180, 186, 188, 189, 208; see also Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and Partido Comunista Español (PCE) Companys, Luis 119 Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT) 8–10, 146, 153, 157n27, 207 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) 9, 113 Cooke, John 201, 214, 216, 218, 219n57, Corneille, Pierre 48, 56, 61, 74n52, 82 Croix de Feu 24, 135 CVIA, see Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes Decadence 83–5, 98 Delbos, Yvon 122

Dell, Simon 11, 111, 114, 135–6 Dialogism 15, 151 Dine, Philip 13, 14n41 Doriot, Jacques 24, 82 Dreyfus Affair 14, 21–2, 109 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre 18, 26, 28, 79, 81–109 Gilles 81–109 Socialisme fasciste 82 Durán, Gustavo 147, 152n12 dystopia 38, 42, 194n3 end state 159, 162, 179, 208–9, 213 engagement, see commitment Esprit 14, 219 ethics 70, 129, 152–3, 163, 171, 196, 205–6, 229 existentialism 173, 226, 229–30 FAI, see Federación Anarquista Iberica Falange 10, 27–8, 50, 53, 81, 84, 96–7, 135, 193, 198–9, 203 de Falgairolle, Adolphe 39n52, 72n44 Farrère, Claude 29–39, 43, 49–51 Visite aux Espagnols 29–39, 43, 49–51 fascism 2, 4, 6, 10, 13, 18, 21, 24–6, 55–109, 111n1, 129, 137, 138n77, 149–50, 164, 171, 180, 188, 193, 197–8, 203–7, 213, 222, 225, 231 Faÿ, Bernard 29–32, 38, 50, 43, 96 Les Forces de l’Espagne 30–32, 38, 50, 43–4, 51, 53 Federación Anarquista Iberica (FAI) 8, 10, 146, 153, 155, 157n27, 207 Figaro, Le 193, 198 First World War 14, 56, 65, 89, 91, 100, 138 France éternelle, la 182, 191 Franco, Francisco 6, 26, 28, 29–30, 34, 49, 51, 53, 84, 94, 106, 130, 137, 183, 187, 200n20 Franquism 52, 106, 183 Fraternity 18, 96, 149, 153, 155n21, 156–9, 163, 169, 171–9, 182, 185–6, 190–91, 207, 210–11, 228 French Resistance 182, 189–91, 218, 230

Index

243

French Revolution 7, 22–3, 44, 59, 104, 112–14, 130–31, 132n60, 136, 157n27, 217, French Third Republic 5, 8, 14–15, 21, 104, 111, 122, 193, 196, 201, 219 Frondaie, Pierre 18, 55–79, 82, 99, Le Volontaire 55–79, 86, 101 Frye, Northrop 99n46, 144, 144n88

Izquierda Republicana 112

García, Hugo 35, 119–20, 125n45 de Gaulle, Charles 171, 183, 190–91 Gaullism 18–19, 149n2, 182, 190 Gautier, Théophile 4, 33n34 Gide, André 83, 117 Giral, José 2 Girard, René 72, 74n52 Goded, Manuel 39 Goldmann, Lucien 89–90, 150–52, 162 Golsan, Richard 15n47, 65n27, 205 Gosselin-Noat, Monique 196n8, 197, 217 Gramsci, Antonio 9–11, 17, 112, 135n68, Gray, John 101–3, 213, 231 Guadalajara, Battle of 161, 166, 172, 179, 180

Keene, Judith 29, 34, 45, 52, 95 Kershaw, Angela 15, 120, 148, 187, 189 Kisch, Egon 120–21 Kumar, Krishan 194–5, 197, 210, 223

Harris, Geoffrey 150, 153, 163–4, 177n17, 178–9 Hauser, Claude 22, 28 Hawthorne, Melanie 65n27, 205 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 209, 222 hegemony 8–11, 99, 112–13, 118 Hernandez, Jésus 119, 140–41 Hewitt, Nicholas 4, 17n58, 39n52, 45, 56n5 Hitler, Adolphe 86–7, 101, 203, 218 Hollander, Paul 32–7, 118–20, 146, 231n24 human condition 74n52, 90, 117, 151, 158, 164, 168–9, 178, 180, 187, 228, 230 humanism 163, 187, 203, 211 Humanité, L’ 111, 115–16 Ideology 11–14, 16n54, 43, 67, 100n47, 104, 113, 118, 126, 189n44, 200, 202–3 integral nationalism, see Maurrassianism International Brigades 49, 115, 136–7, 159n29, 161, 183, 226–7

Jackson, Julian 104–5 Je suis partout 81, 105 Jouve, Marguerite 18, 116, 118–23, 126–9, 131–51 Vu, en Espagne 116, 118–23, 126–9, 131–51

Laval, Pierre 104, 108 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 45, 130, 132 Leroy, Géraldi 114, 116 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 52 Levitas, Ruth 12–13, 17, 53, 73, 74n52, 79, 92, 103, 113, 130n55, 142, 147, 156n25, 194n3, 231 Louis XIV, King 22–3, 30–31 Luckács, George 89–90 Madrid 6, 30n22, 34, 38, 49, 76, 116n20, 119, 123–5, 129, 132–4, 138–43, 151, 155–60, 163, 165, 167–8, 173, 175–6, 186–7 Majorca 193, 198, 219 Malraux, André 18, 82, 120–22, 139, 149–91, 205, 208, 211–12 Espoir: Sierra de Teruel 18–19, 171–91 L’Espoir 18, 149–69, 171–81, 183, 185, 191 Mannheim, Karl 11–17, 38, 103, 113, 156, 159–60, 178, 200, 217, 225, 231 Marx, Karl 11, 45, 103, 208–9 Marxism 9, 16n54, 39, 74, 100n47, 112n6, 118, 130, 145, 149, 150n3, 179, 187, 205, 209, 222 Massis, Henri 22, 27, 30, 33, 34n39, 36, 46–7, 53 Les Cadets de l’Alcazar, see Brasillach, Robert. Chefs 30, 36 Mathieu, Anne 226–7, 229 Maulvault, Lucien 18, 55–79, 82, 99

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France and the Spanish Civil War

El Requeté 55–79, 82 Glaïeul noir 55, 76–8, 88 Mauriac, François 3, 198–9 Maurras, Charles 10, 18, 22–5, 28, 30n22, 34, 36, 40–41, 43, 48, 49n70, 53, 59, 81, 83–4, 91, 104–9, 127n47, 197–8, 202–3, 216–17 Vers L’Espagne de Franco 36, 104–9, 127n47 May 1937 39, 145–6, 207–8 Mazgaj, Paul 10, 22–3, 26n13, 29n19, 58n8, 58n9, 59, 79, 81n1, 103–5, 107nn74, 108 Mérimée, Prosper 4, 45n62 Miaja, José 119, 144n87, 188n43 Micaud, Charles 25–6 Milza, Pierre 24, 89 Monologism 148, 151 Monteath, Peter 2n5, 4, 51–2, 120n31, 128–9 Mounier, Emmanuel 14, 16n54 Mora, Emilio 1 Moscardó, José 34, 47–8, 157 Moulnier, Emmanuel 219 Mussolini, Benito 57, 66, 79, 86, 94–5, 203 myth 18, 50–53, 79, 81–5, 88, 92, 95, 102, 108, 114n23, 131, 135–6, 148, 157, 169, 171–2, 178, 182, 190–91, 216, 219n59 National Revolution 10, 104, 124, 200n20 National Socialism 1, 14, 24, 26, 58, 81, 86–8, 92, 95, 98–9, 102–8, 149, 205n30, 213 nationalism, French 21–4, 37, 40, 43, 44–5, 55, 57–8, 88, 90, 97, 135n68, 191, 202–3 nationalism, Spanish, 52, 102, 108, 202 Navarre 30n22, 36, 44, 67, 73, 135 Nazism, see National Socialism Negrín, Juan 146n90, 183 Nietzsche, Friedrich 75, 209 Nizan, Paul 3, 180n25 non-intervention 1–2, 41, 115, 117–18, 122, 124, 130, 138n77, 150 Nouvelle Revue Française 105, 226

Occupation of France 18, 30n22, 85, 103–5, 108, 187, 190, 204, 205n30, 230 Oms, Marcel 183–5 Orwell, George 39n54, 151, 197, 223n68, 225 Oudard, Georges 26, 29, 30n22, 34, 38, 40, 44, 47, 49 Chemises noires, brunes et vertes en Espagne 26, 29, 38, 40, 44, 47, 49 Pacifism 24, 26, 56, 138, 211 Parti Communiste Français (PCF) 9, 11, 19, 27, 111–16, 136n73, 137, 171, 189, 190–91, 231 Parti Populaire Français (PPF) 24, 82 Parti Social Français 24, 82 Partido Comunista Español (PCE) 8, 39n54, 112, 117n23, 145–6, 186–7, 205 Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) 39, 145, 207, 225 Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) 8n24, 112 Payne, Stanley G. 7n19, 8n24, 112n7, 117 PCE, see Partido Comunista Español PCF, see Parti Communiste Français Pétain, Maréchal Philippe 104–5, 107, 187 Pike, David Wingeate 2n3, 33, 95n39, 115 political engagement, see commitment Pollès, Henri 19, 193–224, 225, 229 Toute guerre se fait la nuit 193–224 Polyphony 96, 148, 207 Pomeyrols, Catherine 22, 28 Popular Army 161, 169, 174, 179–80, 187–8, 205, 208, 222 Popular Front (France) 1, 6, 10–12, 18, 27–9, 72, 81, 111–8, 122, 129–32, 135, 137, 145–9 Popular Front (Spain) 6, 38, 72, 131, 141, 145, 152–63 POUM, see Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista PPF, see Parti Populaire Français Preston, Paul 1n2, 2n3, 2n4, 6–7, 8n25, 44 Prieto, Indalecio 146n90, 188n43 Primo de Rivera, José Antonio 10n29, 81, 199

Index

245

Primo de Rivera, Miguel 7 Prix Goncourt 149n1, 194 PSOE, see Partido Socialista Obrero Español

Stavisky, Alexandre 25, 27 Sternhell, Zeev 22, 74n50, 83n9, 89n26, 102n56 Suleiman, Susan Rubin 60, 83, 151

Queipo de Llano, Gonzalo 34

Tercio 57, 62, 68, 72, 84, 93 terror 23n7, 39–40, 204, 210, 212–13, 215, 219 Teruel, Battle of 119n27, 140 Téry, Simone 18, 113, 116–48, 151, 153, 171, 186–9, 209 Front de la liberté 121–48 Où l’aube se léve 171, 186–9 Tharaud Jérome and Jules 4, 29, 30n22, 33–4, 40, 43, 72 Cruelle Espagne 4, 29, 40 Tiersky, Ronald 112n6, 113, 231n22 Thomas, Hugh 2–3, 5, 28n17, 111, 146n90 Thornberry, Robert 149n2, 150n7, 153n13, 171n1, 179n24, 183n33 Tobin, Michael 193n1, 198, 201–2, 217n54, 218 Toledo, Battle and siege of 30n22, 43, 47, 49n71, 146, 153, 155–60, 168, 172, 175–6, 179 totalitarianism 26, 74n52, 101, 105–6, 144, 197, 213, tragedy 56–9, 70, 72, 74–83, 144, 211, 214

Radical Party (Parti Radical) 1, 10, 25, 27, 90, 104, 112n7, 114 Rasson, Luc 3, 58n21, 60, 83, 85–7, 102, 138n77, 180 Raymond, Gino 113, 174, 177–8, 182 Réal del Sarte, Maxime 29, 30n22, 32n33, 33, 34n39, 36, 49 Au pays de Franco, notre frère latin 29, 32n33, 36, 49 Redfern, Walter 226–8 Regards 111n1, 116, 124n38, 125 Regler, Gustav 147 Ricœur, Paul 12–13, 16–17, 52, 103, 154, 185, 202–3, 219, 231 Robles, Gil 10 Roche, Anne 114, 116 de la Rocque, Colonel 24, 25n11, 91 Romeiser, John 17n58, 150, 180n27 Sartre, Jean-Paul 14, 205n30, 209n32, 225–32 ‘Le Mur’ 225–32 Scarry, Elaine 34, 123–6, 140n81 Schalk, David 13–15, 16n54 Schumann, Maurice 190–91 Second World War 1, 19, 182–3, 189, 195, 209, 230–31 Skoutelsky, Rémi 115n17, 137 Sorel, Georges 53n82, 102 Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) 8n24, 9–10, 27n16, 111–14 SFIO, see Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière Spanish Second Republic, foundation of 7–8, 117, 200n20 Spender, Stephen 1, 225, 231 Stalin, Joseph 27, 145, 151

UGT, see Unión General de Trabajadores Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) 116, 155 Vendredi 116–7, 138n77, 194, 220n61 Verdès-Leroux, Janine 82, 87n20, 108 Vichy State 24, 58, 104–5, 107–8, 203 Viollis, Andrée 116, 119n27, 120, 122n35 Weber, Eugen 24, 25n11 West-Sooby, John 12n35, 48, 100n49, 108n77 Western Civilisation 27–8, 49n71, 133 Winock, Michel, 149, 150n3, 193, 196, 198, 217, 218n56, 219, 230,