The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  Your assumption of power, Mr. Prime Minister, is unquestionably an historic event. For the first time, this old Gallo-Roman land will be governed by a Jew.… I say what I think—and bear the disagreeable burden of saying aloud what others only think—which is that this peasant nation would be better served by someone whose origins, however modest, reach into the entrails of our soil than by a subtle talmudicist.… The average Frenchman will be uneasy when he considers that M. Blum’s decisions were taken in council with the likes of M. Blumel (his general secretary), M. Moch (his general sec- retary), Messrs. Cain and Lévy (his confidants), and M. Rosenfeld (his penholder).

  The Speaker, Édouard Herriot, finally restored order, but not before deputies on the Right and Left had leapt from their benches and invaded each other’s quadrant of the amphitheater with fists flying.

  During the run‑up to Blum’s premiership, disgruntled workers were occupying airplane factories, mines, large farms, railroad sheds, construction sites, and department stores throughout France. The slow economy ground to a virtual halt, and the right-wing press stoked fears of revolution. L’Action Française, Le Figaro, and other papers suggested that in a scheme devised by the Comintern, Blum had been assigned the role of Kerensky. What credulous deputies thus saw when he delivered his inaugural address was a stooge destined to make way for a Bolshevik despot. If the plot unfolded accordingly, Blum’s prudent agenda would prove to have been a Menshevik fable.16 Blum haters disposed to suspend disbelief cited a pamphlet entitled Les Soviets Contre la France, which read like a well-plotted spy novel, asserting that France’s version of the October Revolution would take place on June 12.

  By June 12, Blum’s government had helped union officials and employers negotiate a settlement, called the Matignon Accords.17 Strikes ended and doomsday passed without incident. But alarmists, above all L’Action Française, did not want for alternate versions of the apocalypse. Maurras declared that Blum’s economic reforms spelled disaster, and especially his proposal to tax the rich. The rich were not wealthy enough to afford additional taxes, as their fortunes were il- liquid. They would be compelled to sell property at a loss. And who would profit? Flocks of Jews from all over the world would darken the sky, like buzzards circling carrion. They would acquire whatever it pleased them to own: factories, ateliers, fields, houses, châteaux, historical and art treasures, sacred relics. “Already, thanks to the state-controlled revenue service, established fortunes are no longer renewing themselves, capital is no longer making up its losses. With a Judeo-Socialist tax collector, the residue will soon evaporate.”

  1Mussolini, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, and Pierre Laval met at Stresa, on Lake Maggiore, to address the issue of Germany rearming in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Mussolini was anxious to shore up his own imperial ambitions by conquering Abyssinia (Ethiopia), and Laval tacitly bolstered them in order to secure what turned out to be a short-lived and disingenuous alliance against Hitler.

  France’s pact with the Soviet Union, which Laval inherited, unfinished and unsigned, from his assassinated predecessor in the ministry of foreign affairs, would never include a military convention and remained toothless.

  2Radek, born Karol Sobelsohn to a Jewish family in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv in Ukraine), participated in the 1905 revolution in Warsaw, became an active Bolshevik functionary in 1917, was one of the passengers on the “sealed train” that carried Lenin through Germany after the February revolution in Russia, and made an unsuccessful attempt to launch a second German revolution in October 1923, before Lenin died. Expelled from the party in 1927 and reinstated in 1930, he helped write the 1936 Soviet Constitution but was accused of treason during the Great Purge of the 1930s and was forced to confess at the Trial of the Seventeen in 1937. He was sentenced to ten years of penal labor and killed in the Gulag on orders from Beria.

  3Malraux was by no means alone in lauding the project. George Bernard Shaw, Saint-Exupéry, Edmund Wilson, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and Harold Lasky, among many other Western writers and intellectuals, hailed it as a Soviet tour de force.

  4The Comintern was also called the Third International, or simply the International.

  5On the contempt for history and the ideology of newness in Soviet Russia, no one wrote more eloquently than Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was sent into internal exile in 1934. In chapter 12 of Hope Against Hope, entitled “The Irrational,” she wrote, “Our encounter with the irrational forces that so inescapably and horrifyingly ruled over us radically affected our minds. Many of us had accepted the inevitability—and some the expediency—of what was going on around us. All of us were seized by the feeling that there was no turning back—a feeling dictated by our experience of the past, our forebodings about the future and our hypnotic trance in the present. I maintain that all of us—particularly if we lived in the cities—were in a state close to a hypnotic trance. We had really been persuaded that we had entered a new era, and that we had no choice but to admit to historical inevitability, which in any case was only another name for the dreams of all those who had ever fought for human happiness.”

  One is also put in mind of Jean-Paul Sartre asserting in his later, Marxist years that total transparency between humans was a consummation devoutly to be wished. “I think transparency should always be substituted for what is secret, and I can quite well imagine the day when two people will no longer have secrets from each other, because no one will have any more secrets from anyone, because subjective life, as well as objective life, will be completely offered up, given.” There is a historical resonance in all this with Rousseau’s boast that he would unashamedly present himself in public if his head were made of glass, with everything inside it open to view. The paranoid Rousseau will also be remembered for denouncing theater as a breeding ground of secrets.

  6According to Breton’s biographer Mark Polizzotti, he was made to sit in Freud’s waiting room, given as much time as the doctor had between patients, and told, courteously no doubt, that they did not have much in common. “The two were clearly speaking at cross-purposes. Freud considered the practical techniques and raw materials of psychoanalysis the means to a therapeutic end, whereas for Breton their primary aim should be ‘the expulsion of man from himself.’ ”

  7Elsa Triolet was born Ella Kagan in 1896, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish lawyer, and brought up in Moscow. In 1918 she married a Frenchman named André Triolet. By 1928, when she met Aragon, they had divorced. Her older sister, Lili Brik, had long lived in a ménage à trois with two poets, Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

  8This proved to be immaterial, since the military convention associated with the treaty was never completed.

  9Breton here refers to an article by an editor of the Communist daily L’Humanité and, in particular, this sentence: “If, as Marx said, proletarians, being internationalists, ‘do not have a homeland,’ from now on they have something to defend: the cultural patrimony of France, the spiritual wealth accumulated by all that its artists, its artisans, its workers, its thinkers have produced.”

  10Aragon opened himself to the accusation of shaping Rimbaud and Lautréamont, those icons of Surrealism, to suit the arguments of Marxist dogma.

  11By the end of the year, after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in October, Benda proved to be more politically militant than many left-wing intellectuals, whom he criticized for contenting themselves with endless jeremiads against Mussolini but their unwillingness to demand that Fascist aggression be countered with armed force.

  12Among the young Turks who fought against doctrinal sclerosis in the Radical and Socialist parties were Pierre Mendès France and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

  13The book certainly reflected the influence of Blum’s mother, a woman devoted to the cause of social justice, with whom he had a loving relationship. It also points to Blum’s great admiration for Stendhal, and in some ways takes Stendhal’s De l’Amour as a model. He may not have been aware of a stirring speec
h that a great Radical politician of an earlier generation, Jules Ferry, had delivered at the Sorbonne in 1870, when the institution of a republic hung in the balance: “Bishops know perfectly well that whoever controls a wife controls her husband. That is why the Church wants to hold her fast, and why democracy must make her its own. Citizens, democracy must choose, under pain of death. Woman must belong either to Science or to the Church.”

  14Since the war, membership in the SFIO had increased threefold, with veterans radicalizing the party. As one leader explained, “These new memberships included men severely tried by the bloody tragedy, who had suffered physically and emotionally, in their livelihoods and in their affective life, in their social situation and in their flesh, small tradesmen whose businesses were extinguished, men of the liberal professions who had lost their clientele, ruined households, sons killed, wounded, mutilated. Among casualties of the great storm, the most quixotic and the most desperate.”

  The second of the twenty-one conditions specified that “every organization that wishes to affiliate to the Communist International must regularly and methodically remove reformists and centrists from every responsible post in the labor movement (party organizations, editorial boards, trade unions, parliamentary factions, co-operatives, local government) and replace them with tested Communists, without worrying unduly about that fact that, particularly at first, ordinary workers from the masses will be replacing ‘experienced’ opportunists.”

  Zinoviev (born Osvei-Gershon Aronovich Apfelbaum) served as a member of the Politburo and first executive director of the Comintern. Under Stalin he fell from grace, and in 1936 was the chief defendant in the Moscow show trial called the Trial of the Sixteen. He was of course found guilty and executed.

  15In language common to anti-Semites overt and covert alike, Blum was often portrayed as straining to make himself heard while his parliamentary antagonists spoke in strong, resonant voices.

  16“The mission of the Party, which is to construct the new society, has not varied, but the task of government is different,” said Blum. “We must find out whether we can assure a peaceful, amiable transition from society as it is now to the society whose ultimate realization is and remains our goal. We shall have to be at once bold and wise, to accomplish a long-term project and straightaway take measures that tangibly and effectively affect national life.”

  17The Hôtel Matignon, on the Rue de Varenne, is the official residence of the premier.

  CHAPTER 11

  Totalitarian Pavilions

  Pierre Drieu La Rochelle asserted that the riots of February 6 had been a cure for his infirmity of purpose, that manhood required a weight around one’s neck and the will to leap. We last saw him leaping in 1934. We find that he had not yet touched bottom in 1936. Two years in midair had given him ample opportunity to wonder whether bottom would be Fascism or Communism; to court the immensely rich wife of the automobile manufacturer Renault; to write about their affair in the guise of a Persian tale entitled Beloukia; to feel liberated by his father’s death and imprisoned by his father’s ghost; and to write a long short story about a Russian double agent.

  “L’Agent Double,” as he entitled that story, says much about his own doubleness. Torn between Bolshevism and orthodox czarism, the nameless agent cannot exist except at extremes, and rallies to revolution rather than reaction after falling under the spell of a “leader.” In Drieu’s phallically charged language, he feels “the sudden power that spurts from a circle of men.” What they think matters less than the fact that they think it together and fanatically. Ideology is the bond of a virile brotherhood and, without really believing its articles of faith, the double agent masters its rhetoric. Drieu’s character possesses the fluency that served Drieu himself for good and ill throughout his life. It gives him prosthetic muscle. It embellishes a void.1 “I had promptly introduced myself into the ideas proposed to me and argued them to their ultimate consequences. I liked doing that and did it well, too well.… Some people were dazzled by my rapid train of thought, which ended up at an absolute that bordered on nothingness.” His assignment is to spy on radical czarists led by an orthodox pope.

  A demonstration of the Popular Front in June 1937. Banners call for the government to provide old-age pensions.

  The evangelist of other men’s gospels and the seducer of other men’s wives soon transfers his allegiance to the pope on whom he spies, but in whom he finds instead a new source of virility: “I was bigamous. I had two loves. The soul can be completely separated from itself. I served God and the Devil.” He becomes a double agent, doubly spellbound, when the Rasputinish pope orders him to befriend and betray a young French Communist named Lehalleur. “From the first I recognized all that was precious in [Lehalleur]. He was a leader. And in calling him a leader, I know whereof I speak.… Nothing could be farther from the blurry world of democrats, which reserves high office for mustachioed sopranos always ready to submit their letters of resignation, to drop their burdens.” What makes Lehalleur “precious” is not his wide compass but his narrow focus. For the leader, reason is the servant of action. It doesn’t shed light; it burns like a glass that concentrates the sun’s rays into a laser. Whether Fascist or Communist, he belongs to that singular race of men whose every word and minute count. They are destined. They are the protagonists of history.

  In Jacques Doriot, who founded the French Fascist Party (the Parti Populaire Français) several weeks after Léon Blum took office, Drieu, like the hero of Maurice Barrès’s L’Appel au Soldat, believed he had found the charismatic leader ordained to save him from the randomness of his life and cast him in a legendary drama.

  Doriot was five years younger than Drieu. The son of a blacksmith, he had left the Picardy countryside at seventeen, settled in the populous, working-class Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, joined the automobile workers’ union and a youth group before being drafted for service on the eastern front, where he witnessed the Communist revolution in Hungary in March 1919 and D’Annunzio’s invasion of Fiume several months later.

  Discharged from the army with the Croix de Guerre, Doriot took up where he had left off as a militant member of Socialist Youth, leading his group into the Soviet camp at the Congress of Tours in 1920. This exploit earned him an official invitation to the Third Congress of the Communist International at Moscow, where he rubbed elbows with Lenin and, during a sojourn of fourteen months, conferred with Trotsky on the Commission of Latin Countries. He was twenty-four and intoxicated by his sudden eminence, according to Drieu, who published a biographical essay in 1936: “The young red leader hardly gave a thought to the immense toll of human lives taken by the Bolshevik regime, the material and spiritual wreckage.” Two years later he became a member of the executive committee of the Comintern and secretary-general of the Communist Youth, whose numbers quintupled under his leadership, to the consternation of the Poincaré government, which imprisoned him for violently demonstrating against the occupation of the Ruhr. All these credentials served him well in 1924, when Saint-Denis elected him to Parliament, but he continued to distinguish himself in the streets with his bold protests rather than at the Palais Bourbon with his oratory. “Those who saw Doriot back then, alone, defying two hundred policemen, plunging into their midst while twirling a café table over his head … know that in France there is at least one political man who is a man,” wrote Drieu.

  More important than the Republican Parliament was the Comintern, which summoned Doriot to Moscow during the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky and later dispatched him to Shanghai, where he found Chiang Kai-shek and Communists led by Mao Tse-tung locked in civil war. By age thirty, Doriot had acquired as much as he needed of political experience to survive in a world of divided loyalties and to engage in safe transgression, asserting his independence but ultimately toeing the line.

  He ceased to toe the line in the early 1930s when his proletarian constituency elected him mayor of Saint-Denis. Greatly admired at home, the burly, stentorian Doriot made h
imself increasingly objectionable to Moscow with arguments that ran counter to Soviet policy. In 1934, a year before Stalin and his French deputies sanctioned the idea, he championed a popular front. It cost him his membership in the party, but it freed him to form his own, which he did on June 28, 1936. The inaugural meeting of the Parti Populaire Français was held at Saint-Denis. Doriot spoke for almost three hours, promising the thousand people present—among them Pierre Drieu La Rochelle—that their salvation lay in a political model for France akin to Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. He prosecuted internationalism as a crime subversive of the nation’s soul and inveighed against the Soviet Union for holding France hostage to its global designs. The PPF would be national and its program National Socialist.

  To restore the French nation its unity, its prosperity, its security, and its place on the world stage, to give each producer his share of social progress, it is imperative that the country rid itself of foreign influence and vanquish the egoism of the propertied classes. To accomplish this goal, an instrument is needed. Our party will serve that purpose.

  “Left” and “right” were insidious distinctions bound up with a history of internecine warfare. If there was to be one France, only one party could unify it.2

  Doriot drew one thousand people to the Saint-Denis town hall on June 26.

  Before long, the PPF’s members numbered 130,000 and its meetings filled the immense Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris.3 It also published a newspaper, L’Émancipation Nationale, to which Drieu contributed regularly between 1936 and 1938; its circulation exceeded 200,000. Did he finally have ground under his feet? Did he stand as tall as Aragon? To readers who had never read Le Feu Follet or heard of Drieu’s novels, he became known for his political enthusiasms. When the Popular Front was passing social legislation in great earnest during the summer of 1936, Drieu, who wore the label “Fascist” as a badge of honor and claimed his place in the line of Maurice Barrès’s ideological heirs, was preaching the transcendent virtue of the corporate state. “You have lived too long hidden in your houses, cocooned in your little lives and individual histories,” he wrote on August 1. “You no longer know what it is to be together, all together.… People everywhere have taken to the streets, have broken the petty chains of the small individual life, have reimmersed themselves in great communions. Sing, shout, squirm, stretch your arms, invoke the Holy Spirit, it will descend upon you. Remember that you are the people who gave Europe its cathedrals, those powerful monuments of collective fervor, of unanimous faith.” Membership in the PPF was not a matter of paying dues and subscribing to newspapers but an all-pervasive commitment. At stake was not merely one’s political wholesomeness but one’s very reason for being. “The Parti Populaire Français will be nothing or it will be the basis for a riotous multiplication of cells and sections.… One will no longer belong to it for an hour a day, a day a month, a month a year. One will belong to it at every moment. We must retune our lives to one another. We must rediscover the daily rhythm of communal life.” Having witnessed the Nazi Party congress at Nuremberg and likened the spectacle of a human mass animated by the will of a magister ludi to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which had sent shock waves through Paris in 1913 with the pagan eruption of The Rite of Spring, Drieu continued in the same vein. The ideal Fascist society would be harmonious and choreographed. It would make him complete, as the mind had not. “In a Europe where the great, cadenced, reharmonized masses of Fascism, of Hitlerism, of Stalinist Russia have risen, we must quickly breathe in lungfuls of grandeur. If we don’t, history will blow away our côteries, our wretched political parties, our crabbed individualities like so much dust.” Physical culture obsessed him. Much of what he wrote for L’Émancipation Nationale suggests that the self-proclaimed Fascist of 1936 could still recite Thus Spake Zarathustra chapter and verse. But also lingering in him was the adolescent hero worshipper besotted with Kipling and Carlyle, who admired his Anglo-Saxon schoolmates romping on the pitches of Shrewsbury. The PPF was the “party of the living body,” he wrote. “The most profound definition of Fascism is this: it is the political movement that charts its course most straightforwardly, most radically toward a great revolution of mores, toward the restoration of the body—health, dignity, plenitude, heroism.”