Jacques Doriot addressing members of the Fascist Parti Populaire Français.
Being absolutely devoid of all these virtues, the Jew emerged as their negative exemplar in Drieu’s outpouring of journalism and in his novel Gilles. Anti-Semitic caricatures were widespread. By the late 1930s, there existed an abundant literature portraying Jews as rootless individualists, neurotic champions of modernism, and foreigners pernicious to the body politic. “The element of disintegration, the element of division, the microbe is the JEW,” Darquier de Pellepoix wrote in his journal L’Antijuif. “[We] assert that the solution to the Jewish problem is the prerequisite for any French renovation.” Drieu may not have had in mind the same solution as Darquier, who eventually played a direct role in the Holocaust, but they quoted from the same text. “In whatever language decadence slavers, whether it be Marxism or Freudianism, the words of Jews inform the drool; biology will have its way,” says the titular hero of Drieu’s novel Gilles. From the perspective of the aesthete, Jews were ineligible by nature and temperament to participate in France’s communal dance. They didn’t know the steps for it; they didn’t have the legs. Gilles’s friend Preuss, for example, “was the most disjointed, the most indecorous, the most ill-assembled Jew ever produced on Christian soil. Wherever he appeared, the senseless disorder of his limbs, of his clothes, and of his statements created a little whirlwind that caught all the Christians or Aryans present in its vortex and dulled their wits.”4 Hectic in speech and spastic in movement, he is herky-jerky even in his ambitions: “Like many Jews, he wasn’t patient or organized in his quest for success. Bolstering him were two or three generations who had acquired material security in France, among whom the hunger for wealth was not as sharp as it had once been. Money lust had become an appetite for success, which haunted him episodically, like a recurrent neurasthenia.”
Jacques Doriot six years after founding the PPF, greeting crowds on the Champs-Élysées during the German occupation.
Preuss is only a superlative specimen of his kind. Referring to Gilles’s Jewish wife, whom Drieu modeled after Colette Jéramec, he writes that in her deracinated milieu “physical experience was unknown, whether it be sport, love, or war.” Theirs was a world of abstraction in which bodies didn’t couple, clash, weigh, belong here rather than there, and generally accord with nature. Being estranged from the natural world led them, like the potion that deranges Titania, to embrace a Bottom of grotesque images celebrated as modernity. The Jew is modernity incarnate.
Whence Drieu’s chimera of a medieval golden age. The obloquy he heaped on rationalism, the Enlightenment, Freemasonry, Jewry, and the “intellectual individualism” fostered by the French school system was bound up with his enthusiasm for the communal spirit that reared churches in which the individual found refuge from his personal history, his conflicts, and daily impostures. “To make a church, there was audacity, risk, the creative expression of faith in the architect’s calculations. There was the tree and next to it the church.… There was French reason in that furious, proud, passionate 12th century gushing with epic poems, cathedrals, Christian philosophies, sculpture, stained glass, illuminations, crusades.” The stone cut from French quarries and the tree rooted in French soil are the stuff of “French reason.” Had Drieu been of age in the 1880s to observe the rising of the Eiffel Tower, he would no doubt have joined the protest of writers and artists who denounced it as an insult to the “august proliferation of stone” that is Paris.
Although Drieu’s political vow was noted with dismay by friends in the opposing camp—for he still had some there—a greater splash was made in 1936 by André Gide’s recantation. At the international congress, which he cochaired, Gide had praised the Soviet Union for marrying nationalism to internationalism in its celebration of the idiosyncratic cultures under its broad sway. He contended likewise that the great literary works of every country—Don Quixote, Gargantua and Pantagruel, the theater of Shakespeare and Racine—did the same, expressing the universal in the particular. What reflected badly on French literature was its infatuation with form and appearance. A penchant for abstraction marred even those works that offered the travails of the common man a prominent place in the realm of literature: Hugo’s Les Misérables, Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart. He tipped his hat no higher than that to the creed of realism, but his peroration made up for his restraint. “Only adversaries of Communism can see in it a will to create total uniformity,” he said. “What we await from it, and what the USSR has begun to show us after its embattled period … is a social state that encourages the greatest possible flowering of every man, the realization of all his possibilities. In our woeful West, we fall far short.”
Being France’s preeminent fellow traveler earned Gide an invitation from the Soviet Writers’ Union, and in June 1936 (after several changes of mind prompted by conversations with his friend Pierre Herbart, who had visited the Soviet Union and peeked behind the facade of Potemkin village), Gide arrived in Moscow. He was carried to an official reception on the shoulders of airport employees, as the novelist Louis Guilloux, the publisher Jacques Schiffrin and other members of his entourage followed on foot. But a dark shadow fell over events the next morning when Mikhail Koltsov, editor in chief of Pravda, informed Gide that Maxim Gorky, who had been ailing, had died during the night. Credible rumors, which reached Gide’s ear, began to circulate that Stalin, fearful of Gorky’s opposition, had had him assassinated. Gide was denied access to Gorky’s villa but joined the honor guard at his coffin in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. A day later, he stood on a podium overlooking Red Square, beside Stalin, and delivered a funeral oration that might as well have been scripted for him by a party hack. Willful naïveté was the most sympathetic construction placed upon it. Literature of the future, he prophesied, would be “national in form and in content.” Writers “of value” had always striven to encourage the ferment of insubordination and revolt in society, but in a revolutionary society, such writers were no longer insubordinate. “The fate of culture is bound in our minds to the very destiny of the USSR,” he said. “We shall defend it.”
The state set in motion its propaganda machine for Gide’s benefit during the nine weeks he spent touring the Soviet Union, from Moscow and Leningrad to Tiflis and Sebastopol. It distributed three hundred thousand postcards with his photograph. He was toasted at an endless round of receptions, housed in large hotel suites, chauffeured in Lincoln limousines. His itinerary was planned to a fare-thee-well and armed against improvisation.5 He was taken to model factories and surrounded with smiling workers. He visited Bolshevo, a model labor colony with its own industrial plant, where convicts attended classes in proper Soviet etiquette and recited well-rehearsed accounts of their crimes for the distinguished visitor. Long queues at state stores, uniformly drab clothes, and other depressing sights observed on forays through the streets of Moscow gave him pause, but every respect in which the workers’ paradise obviously departed from an ideal narrative had its justification. Did Boris Pasternak and Isaac Babel, who were now prevented from publishing their work, say nothing to disabuse him when he visited their dachas in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino, outside Moscow?
Gide delivering a eulogy to Maxim Gorky on Red Square in 1936, during his tour of the Soviet Union. To the right are Molotov—chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars—and Stalin.
Two years earlier, in April 1934, a frightened Pasternak had warned Osip Mandelstam that the walls had ears, and maybe even the benches on the boulevard, after hearing the doomed poet recite his satirical poem “The Stalin Epigram.” Babel was not arrested until 1939. Inevitably, he would suffer the same fate as Mandelstam. But Gide, for all his misgivings about the Communist utopia, returned from the USSR clinging publicly to his belief. The Great Purge, which began soon thereafter, in August 1936, with a show trial of Bolsheviks Stalin wanted to eliminate, including Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, disturbed him. “[I read] the report about the Moscow trial (which the Journal de
Moscou of 25 August gives in extenso) with indescribable uneasiness,” he wrote in his journal on September 5. “What is one to think about these sixteen defendants accusing themselves, all in almost the same language, while lauding a regime and a man for whose destruction they allegedly risked their lives?” Gide’s qualm was by no means the least skeptical reaction among Western Russophiles. In America, Corliss Lamont, Lillian Hellman, and eighty-seven other public figures published “An Open Letter to American Liberals” denouncing criticism of the Moscow trials. Joseph E. Davies, the United States ambassador to the USSR, declared in Mission to Moscow,
Assuming … that basically human nature is much the same everywhere, I am still impressed with the many indications of credibility which were obtained in the course of the testimony. To have assumed that this proceeding was invented and staged as a project of dramatic political fiction would be to presuppose the creative genius of a Shakespeare and the genius of a Belasco in stage production. The historical background and surrounding circumstances also lend credibility to the testimony.… The circumstantial detail, apparently at times surprising even to the prosecutor as well as to other defendants, which was brought out by the various accused, gave unintended corroboration to the gist of the charges.
L’Humanité served up a report from Pravda that the authorities had indisputable proof of the sixteen “Trotskyites” conspiring with the Gestapo to overthrow Stalin. It excoriated Le Populaire for wondering whether the defendants, guilty though they may have been, had received legal counsel and other benefits of due process during their trial. Editors of that paper, like Gide, felt “malaisés.”
“Malaise” was a euphemism for something much worse. Just as the Socialists could not voice their incredulity without splintering the Popular Front, so Gide could not voice his disillusionment without fearing the clatter of his fall from Marxist grace and the comfort his palinode would give the enemy. He had been placed on a very high pedestal. Still, he wished to make amends for championing a despotic regime, all the more after learning at first hand that it tortured and imprisoned homosexuals.6 When word spread of the possibility that he might write critically about the USSR, Louis Aragon and others begged him not to, arguing that the insurrection of Fascist troops in Spain demanded solidarity. Two years later in his novel Man’s Hope, Malraux would declare that it was necessary in war to cast a blind eye on the abominations of one’s ally. War is Manichean, he wrote, anticipating Churchill’s famous line, also spoken with the Soviet Union in mind: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
Once Gide made up his mind, with moral support from Schiffrin and Guilloux, who had quit the Russian tour in disgust, nothing could deter him. Retour de l’URSS was written quickly and appeared on November 13. In a preface, Gide warned the reader that the short book was not a rebuff but an expression of tough love. His mind, he said, was so constituted as to treat most harshly what he would have liked to approve unreservedly. His calling attention to its flaws was not to be understood as disparagement of the Soviet Union but as concern for a revolutionary order whose prodigious accomplishments had stunned the world. If his guide had wandered off a path that promised salvation for the suffering of the earth, was blame to be placed on the path or the guide?
Gide then proceeded to describe the reign of a despot. “One encounters Stalin’s effigy everywhere,” he wrote. “His name is on every tongue, praise of him inevitably enters every speech. Especially in Georgia, I couldn’t enter an occupied room, however humble and squalid, without noticing a portrait of Stalin nailed to the wall, where an icon formerly hung no doubt. I don’t know whether it’s out of adoration, love or fear, but he is always and everywhere there.” Conformism, or what Gide called “the spirit of submission,” was mandatory. Every deviation from the official line was denounced as counterrevolutionary and labeled “Trotskyite.” In a country kept ignorant of events and conditions beyond its borders, truth issued from the head of its leader.
Suppressing the opposition in a State, or simply preventing it from forming, from articulating itself, is a very grave matter. Terrorism is born of it. It would undoubtedly be a great convenience to rulers if all citizens thought alike. But who, in view of such impoverishment, could still dare speak of “culture”? … There is great wisdom, I think, in listening to adversaries, in nurturing the opposition if need be, while preventing it from doing harm: of combating it but not suppressing it. Suppressing the opposition—it’s a good thing Stalin is so bad at it.
Gide went on to write that humanity is not simple, that attempts at simplification, unification, or reduction imposed from above were odious, and ultimately futile.
“The Holy Family will always escape Herod” was Gide’s way of saying that one purge would never suffice. There would always be partisan voices to silence, as well as inconvenient memories. Like a conscience that convicts by its mere existence, “old Bolsheviks” faithful to the spirit of the revolution had become an unacceptable limit to the will of the tyrant. If there was some one thing that finally convinced Gide to throw caution to the winds in Retour de l’URSS it was the show trial of 1936. “The spirit regarded as ‘counterrevolutionary’ today is the same revolutionary spirit that staved in the half-rotten casks of the old czarist world,” he asserted.
One would like to be able to think that an overwhelming love of man, or at least an imperious need of justice filled hearts. But once the revolution triumphed, they were no longer an issue. Feelings of that sort, which spurred the first revolutionaries, became encumbrances.… I compare them to the wedges needed to build an arch but superfluous once the keystone has been inserted. Now that the revolution has stabilized, now that it compounds with its conscience and (some would say) has learned to behave, those who regard its successive concessions as so many betrayals are reviled. Would it not be better, instead of playing with words, to recognize that the revolutionary spirit (and even, simply, the critical spirit) is outmoded? Conformism is the order of the day. What the powers that be want is approbation of everything done in the USSR—and sincere, enthusiastic approbation at that. Astonishingly, they get it. Or not so astonishingly, for any protest, however meek, is subject to the most extreme penalties. I doubt if there is any country, even Hitler’s Germany, in which the mind is less free, more bowed, more fearful, more vassalized.
When backs were turned, Gide had had dangerous conversations during his tour, in one of which an unidentified interlocutor lamented that the Soviet experiment was remarkably successful at breeding incuriosity. For the most part, Russian youths ignored forbidden fruit. It wasn’t necessary to put Dostoyevsky (about whom Gide had written at length) on an index, as the young read only what the state prescribed. “If the mind is so molded that it obeys watchwords even before hearing them, it has lost the very awareness of its servitude,” Gide wrote, paving the way for Orwell.
Within a year, almost 150,000 copies of Retour de l’URSS had been sold, more than any other book on the best-seller list for 1936–37. It had been translated into fourteen languages and banned in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Gallimard reprinted it eight times in ten months. Declaring that the book had obviously been written to make money, a Communist youth club informed Gide that he was no longer worthy of being its honorary president. Gide replied that if they could be taken in so easily by that slur, they would not be disposed to believe that he was losing more in the royalties for his collected works that would have come from Russia than he had earned from the sale of this one in France.
The Embrace of Unreason Page 29