The Embrace of Unreason
Page 37
“We seize this opportunity”: Nadeau, Histoire du Surréalisme, p. 222.
“I always believed that your movements”: Nouvelle Revue Française, August 1925.
“the years 1924, 1925”: Drieu, Journal, p. 429.
“He wasn’t alone”: Frédéric J. Grover, Drieu La Rochelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 63.
“We took walks”: Andreu and Grover, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 196.
“Representative of the attitude”: D. W. Brogan, France Under the Republic (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), p. 586.
“How would this Europe look?” Desanti, Drieu La Rochelle, pp. 147–48.
“We commented on everything”: Desanti, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 238.
“a new Order—authoritarian”: Wikipédia article on Gaston Bergery.
“If man is old”: Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Le Jeune Européen (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), p. 117.
“We cannot seek our reasons”: ibid.
“Thus, I joyfully cried”: ibid.
“I am thirty-three years old”: Andreu and Grover, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 197.
“His likes are few”: ibid.
“His novels are fast moving”: Curtis Cate, André Malraux: A Biography (New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1995), pp. 159–60.
“I offered him a glass of port,” André Gide, Journal 1889–1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 849.
“I have always had other people’s wives”: Desanti, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 258.
“There is nothing in him”: Andreu and Grover, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 205.
“I have to spend three months”: ibid., p. 219.
“Victoria is something above”: “Victoria Ocampo’s Chronology,” www.villaocampo.org.
“I say painful”: ibid.
“His long, slender hands”: Andreu and Grover, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 73.
“How could he talk about willpower”: Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Le Feu Follet (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 48.
“an epic commentary”: Andreu and Grover, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 242.
“Young Argentinians”: ibid., p. 243.
“Everyone was asleep”: ibid., p. 245.
“fallen state that gives birth”: ibid., p. 259.
“the great rhythmic dance”: ibid., p. 249.
“There I was a leader”: ibid., p. 262.
CHAPTER 9 The Stavisky Affair
“This government devoid of”: L’Action Française, December 3, 1930.
“The springs of the republican regime”: Jean-Pierre Azéma and Michel Winock, La Troisième République (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1976), pp. 225–26.
“He is one of the best brains”: Dansette, Le Boulangisme, p. 772.
“The reigning pope”: Yves Chiron, La Vie de Maurras (Paris: Perron, 1972), p. 351.
“without having a single one”: Weber, L’Action Française, p. 268.
“All good Frenchmen”: L’Action Française, March 3, 1931.
“In both countries”: Le Populaire, March 7, 1931.
“anonymous, irresponsible”: Michel Winock, Histoire de l’Extrême Droite en France (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p. 173.
“The founder of the Gazette du Franc”: L’ Action Française, July 20, 1935.
“The month Spain lost its king”: Paul Jankowski, Stavisky: A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 105.
“And this rapturous beating”: Le Figaro, January 12, 1934.
“While we blame”: Le Matin, January 11, 1934.
“Every day a new name”: L’Humanité, January 9, 1934.
“Besides the Jewish State”: L’Action Française, January 9, 1934.
“Anything but this filthy”: William Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), p. 324.
“formidable purge in the army”: Serge Berstein, Le 6 Février 1934 (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1975), p. 145.
“sporting names as un-French”: Marcel Le Clère, Le 6 Février (Paris: Hachette 1967), p. 124.
“Scandals pass”: ibid., p. 138.
“He invokes preoccupations”: Le Figaro, February 7, 1934.
“The accursed Chamber”: Le Figaro, February 9, 1934.
“I want to draw the attention”: L’Action Française, February 16, 1934.
“who bring us their money”: Michel Winock, La France et les Juifs de 1789 à Nos Jours (Paris: Seuil, 2004), p. 187.
“The scandal of excessive”: ibid., p. 188.
“February 12 will henceforth”: Le Petit Parisien, February 13, 1936.
“parliamentary and individualist,” Berstein, 6 Février 1934, p. 230.
“The royalist and Fascist”: Serge Berstein, Léon Blum (Paris: Fayard, 2006), p. 395.
“those of Israel and of Moscow”: Le Clère, Le 6 Février, p. 212.
“When one kills freedom”: Andreu and Grover, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 263.
“The rugby scrums”: Marc Hanrez, ed., Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, (Paris: L’Herne, 1982), p. 93.
“I have never felt”: Andreu and Grover, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 311.
“I should only believe”: Thomas Common, trans., The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1954), p. 40.
“an amalgam of un-civilized tribes”: Le Temps, October 3, 1935.
“They constituted”: Winock, Le Siècle des Intellectuels, p. 240.
CHAPTER 10 The Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture
“We pledge ourselves”: Ian Kershaw, Hitler (New York: Norton, 1998), vol. 1, p. 522.
“Why and how I approve today”: André Gide, Littérature Engagée (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), pp. 22–25.
“one more atrocious episode”: L’Humanité, March 23, 1933.
“expunge from your revolutionary”: Correspondance André Gide et Roger Martin du Gard (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), pp. 553–54.
“Primitive man”: Curtis Cate, Malraux (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p. 258.
“Art is not a submission”: ibid, p. 262.
“requires each of us”: Wolfgang Klein and Sandra Teroni, eds., Pour la Défense de la Culture: Les Textes du Congrès International des Écrivains, Paris, June 1935 (Dijon: Presses Universitaires de Dijon, 2005), p. 197.
“Our encounter with the irrational forces”: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 50.
“I think transparency”: Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Contat, “Sartre at Seventy: An Interview,” New York Review of Books, August 7, 1975.
“Please reply following question”: Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), p. 347.
“The two were clearly speaking”: ibid., p. 162.
“the work of intellectual Bolshevism”: Le Figaro, December 10, 1930.
“This was the first time”: Polizzotti, Revolution, p. 359.
“These young self-described”: ibid., p. 418.
“The silly incident”: Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs 1921–1941 (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1964), p. 307.
“Is it not true”: Klein and Teroni, Pour la Défense, pp. 398–99.
“We Surrealists don’t love”: ibid., p. 399.
“It’s laughable, the scorn”: ibid., p. 469.
“The working class, which is also”: ibid., p. 110.
“I wish to talk here”: ibid., pp. 109–10.
“My colleagues probably agree”: P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 193–94.
“I think it was just after”: ibid., p. 194.
“Léon Blum behaved”: Berstein, Léon Blum, p. 62.
“Bishops know perfectly well”: Jean-Michel Gaillard, Jules Ferry (Paris: Fayard, 1989), p. 157.
“These new memberships”: Berstein, Léon Blum, p. 210.
“a doctrine that I consider”: L’Humanité, October 27, 1920.
“every organization that wishes”: Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International, Petrograd,
July 19–August 7, 1920. www.marxists.org/history/international.
“Short of repudiating”: Berstein, Léon Blum, p. 419.
“Your assumption of power”: Berstein, Léon Blum, p. 497.
“Already, thanks to the state-controlled”: L’Action Française, June 7, 1936.
“We must find out”: Le Figaro, June 1, 1936.
CHAPTER 11 Totalitarian Pavilions
“the sudden power”: Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Histoires Déplaisantes (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 111.
“I had promptly introduced myself”: Drieu, Histoires Déplaisantes, p. 112.
“Clearly suffering from pride”: Marguerite Duras, The Lover (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 67.
“I was bigamous”: Drieu, Histoires Déplaisantes, p. 117.
“The young red leader”: Andreu and Grover, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 360.
“Those who saw Doriot back then”: ibid., p. 361.
“To restore the French nation its unity”: Le Petit Parisien, June 29, 1936.
“You have lived too long hidden”: Andreu and Grover, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 367.
“The Parti Populaire Français will”: ibid., pp. 367–68.
“In a Europe where the great, cadenced”: ibid., p. 368.
“The element of disintegration”: Winock, La France et les Juifs, p. 189.
“In whatever language”: Gilles, p. 553.
“a horde that manages”: Winock, Le Siècle des Intellectuels, p. 335.
“physical experience was unknown”: Gilles, p. 61.
“To make a church”: ibid., p. 561.
“Only adversaries of Communism”: Klein and Teroni, Pour la Défense, p. 187.
“national in form”: André Gide, Souvenirs et Voyages (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 788.
“The fate of culture”: ibid.
“In no country have I seen”: Alan Sheridan, André Gide (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 500.
“[I read] the report”: André Gide, Journal, pp. 1254–55.
“Assuming … that basically”: Joseph Davies, Mission to Moscow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1941), pp. 43–44. Note that this is a reference to the subsequent Trial of the Seventeen.
“One encounters Stalin’s effigy”: Gide, Souvenirs et Voyages, p. 776.
“Suppressing the opposition”: ibid., p. 778.
“The Holy Family will always”: ibid., p. 779.
“The spirit regarded as ‘counterrevolutionary’ ”: ibid., p. 774.
“If the mind is so molded”: ibid., p. 682.
“We Bolsheviks”: L’Humanité, November 28, 1936.
“Throughout his literary life”: ibid., December 19, 1936.
“an absurdity”: Le Populaire, November 24, 1936.
“Parallel to the great”: Serge Berstein, La France des Années 30 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2002), p. 125.
“France of the Popular Front”: Henri Noguères, La Vie Quotidienne en France au Temps du Front Populaire (Paris: Hachette, 1977), p. 19.
“As others reminisce”: ibid., p. 27.
“We marched, we sang”: ibid., p. 26.
“What insolence!”: L’Action Française, July 16, 1936.
“if they hadn’t succeeded”: Berstein, Léon Blum, p. 502.
“Roger Salengro’s death”: ibid., p. 504.
“Politics does not justify”: ibid., p. 502.
“It did not for reasons”: Le Figaro, August 1, 1936.
“I would that these words”: Le Populaire, September 7, 1936.
“irresponsible Marxists”: Le Populaire, November 9, 1936.
“Shame mingles”: L’Humanité, September 8, 1936.
“Anyone who has given the subject”: George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 178.
“We have too often reproached”: Le Temps, March 17, 1937.
“assassin of workers”: Berstein, Léon Blum, p. 508.
“For the French, alas”: Karen Fiss, Grand Illusion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 177.
“Frenchmen are reasoners”: ibid.
“The highlight of all these festivals”: Fiss, Grand Illusion, p. 176.
“Rome, Moscow, Berlin”: ibid., p. 182.
“a European salvation”: quoted in Paul Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight: 1930–1945 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), p. 36.
“Let there be no doubt”: Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight, p. 182.
“Negro-American music”: ibid., p. 183.
“The pageant featured”: ibid., p. 182.
“a savage horde”: L’Action Française, July 15, 1937.
“The Fuhrer believes”: “The Hossbach Memorandum,” http://avalon.law.yale.edu./imt/hossbach.asp
CHAPTER 12 The Hero of Verdun
“No man can possibly pretend”: Le Populaire, January 22, 1938.
“a form of terrorism that is not native to us”: Le Temps, September 13, 1937.
“He is rehearsing”: Sir Edward Spears, Assignment to Catastrophe (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1954), p. 208.
“There are people”: L’Humanité, September 14, 1937.
“Seized documents establish”: Le Populaire, November 24, 1937.
“odious burlesque”: L’Écho de Paris, November 25, 1937.
“A dirty stream”: Eugen Weber, L’Action Française, p. 402.
“the natural advantages”: L’Action Française, May 10, 1938.
“As long as the international”: Berstein, La France des Années 30, p. 150.
“ineluctable and sacred”: Le Temps, July 14, 1938.
“Nationalism and racialism”: Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox: The Life of Lord Halifax (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), vol. 1, p. 67.
“We shall continue to earn”: L’Action Française, March 18, 1939.
“There is no time to lose”: ibid., March 17, 1939.
“the men who allowed disorder”: Berstein, La France des Années 30, p. 161.
“How many times”: L’Humanité, March 18, 1939.
“There is, outside of Germany”: Winock, Le Siècle des Intellectuels, p. 329.
“Republicans cannot abdicate”: Le Populaire, March 18, 1939.
“You are asking”: Shirer, Collapse, p. 404.
“the physical image”: Le Figaro, March 16, 1939.
“I can work two weeks”: Herbert Lottman, Pétain (Paris: Seuil, 1984), p. 222.
“an old fetish”: ibid.
“Certain official milieux”: ibid., p. 236.
“It was as if the ineffective”: Spears, Assignment, p. 147.
“The victor of Verdun”: ibid., p. 241.
“It is reported”: L’Ouest-Éclair, May 19, 1940.
“Not only is he vain”: Lottman, Pétain, p. 251.
“Jews, or friends of Jews”: Shirer, Collapse, p. 482.
“infinitely pitiable”: ibid.
“who had always been defeatist”: ibid., p. 254.
“A French renaissance”: ibid., pp. 255–56.
“All Frenchmen, wherever they are”: La Croix, June 15, 1940.
“The earth does not lie”: Lottman, Pétain, p. 270.
“It stemmed from our laxity”: La Croix, June 27, 1940.
“Why did God permit”: Aron, Chroniques, p. 30.
“the summons of a great humiliated nation”: Lottman, Pétain, p. 270.
“The capitulation of the government”: Aron, Chroniques, p. 30.
“Great fortune has crowned us”: Weber, L’Action Française, p. 441.
“The labor of Frenchmen”: Le Figaro, July 12, 1940.
“People have spoken about”: Weber, L’Action Française, p. 447.
“This providential man”: ibid., p. 446.
Epilogue
“weld into one metal”: Andreu and Grover, Drieu la Rochelle, 371.
“Gilles had associated his loneliness”: Drieu, Gilles, p. 560.
“Jews, Communist sympathizers”: Andreu and Grover, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 432.
“Aragon is more Communist”: ibid.
“I can’t think my thoughts through”: ibid., p. 434.
“I feel Hitler’s movements”: Drieu, Journal, p. 196.
“I tell myself”: ibid., p. 274.
“I know what I’m doing”: Correspondance André Gide et Roger Martin du Gard, vol. 2, p. 229.
“Gide, Valéry, Claudel”: Drieu, Journal, p. 295.
“I can no longer get interested”: ibid., p. 293; April 11, 1942.
“D. I don’t doubt”: Drieu, Correspondance avec André et Colette Jéramec.
“The Jews tricked me”: Drieu, Journal, p. 348.
“in due course”: ibid., p. 354.
“I’ve always been scared to death”: ibid., p. 396.
“Should I soon commit suicide”: ibid., p. 310.
“Where am I, in any sense?” Andreu and Grover, Drieu La Rochelle, p. 547.
“I wanted to be a complete man”: Drieu, Journal, p. 447.
Principals
Louis Aragon: 1897–1982
Maurice Barrès: 1862–1923
Léon Blum: 1872–1950
André Breton: 1896–1966
Aristide Briand: 1862–1932
Édouard Daladier: 1884–1970
Léon Daudet: 1867–1942
Jacques Doriot: 1898–1945
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle: 1893–1945
André Gide: 1869–1951
Jean Jaurès: 1859–1914
Colette Jéramec: 1896–1970
Joan of Arc: 1412–1431
André Malraux: 1901–1976
Charles Maurras: 1868–1952
Philippe Pétain: 1856–1951
Raymond Poincaré: 1860–1934
Alexandre Stavisky: 1886–1934
Chronology
1870
July: France declares war against Prussia and her German allies.
September 1: Defeated at the battle of Sedan, Napoleon III abdicates. Three days later, on September 4, the empire is supplanted by a Government of National Defense, whose animating spirit is Léon Gambetta.
September 19: The German army besieges Paris.
1871
January: An armistice is declared. The siege lasts four months and results in mass starvation. It ends when, on Bismarck’s command, shells from Krupp cannons are lofted into the city.
February: Nationwide elections of a National Assembly are held, to form a government with which Germany can treat.