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by Jackson, Julian

  It would clearly be absurd to take a figure as strange and original as Céline as representative of his age, or read Voyage to the End of the Night as a novel ‘about’ the 1920s. But equally it would be wrong to overlook the degree to which the novel mirrors the cultural preoccupations of the decade. Like Morand, but to an infinitely more extreme degree, Céline is haunted by the evils of modernity. Their pessimism deepened in the 1930s, and found an outlet in anti-Semitism. Céline wrote two anti-Semitic pamphlets which are almost deranged in their violence. Morand’s book France la Doulce (1934) bemoaned the supposed stranglehold of the Jews over the French film industry. For this reason alone it is not surprising that both Céline and Morand found compensations in the defeat of France in 1940. When Pétain signed the Armistice Morand was in London, attached to the French Embassy. He returned to France to offer his services to the new regime. In 1942 he was in Pierre Laval’s cabinet before being sent to the French Embassy in Bucharest. He ended the war in the Embassy at Berne, and wisely preferred to stay in Switzerland than return to a country where he was now a blacklisted writer.

  Céline, however, had no truck with the bien-pensant tone of the Vichy regime. He spent the war in Paris where he was involved in the fringes of the ultra-collaborationist world, and wrote a third anti-Semitic pamphlet. In August 1944, he fled to Germany with the hard-core collaborators who took refuge in the town of Sigmaringen where the Vichy regime lived out its final days. In the futility of Sigmaringen Céline found a subject whose grotesque absurdity matched anything he had so far created in his fiction. Finally, having followed the collaborationist adventure to its extreme end, he escaped across war-torn Germany to take refuge in Denmark. There was nothing inevitable of course about the trajectories of these two anti-modern literary modernists, Morand and Céline, but the choices they made in 1940 must be understood partly in terms of the cultural anxieties and upheavals of the post-war decade.

  2

  Rethinking the Republic: 1890–1934

  The Vichy regime styled itself the ‘État français’ (French State). This did not define what it was, but it signalled clearly what it was not: the Third Republic, founded in 1875, was dead. The busts of Marianne, symbol of the Republic, were replaced in town halls by statues of Pétain; ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ gave way to ‘Work, Family, patrie ’.

  It was not only Vichy which rejected the Republic in 1940. Many early resisters felt little loyalty to it either. De Gaulle initially refused to identify himself with the defunct regime or with republicanism in general. For a year, the broadcasts of his Free French movement were introduced by the slogan ‘Honour and patrie ’ not ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. The Republic had few friends in 1940.

  This was not altogether surprising in light of the defeat of 1940. The Second Empire, which had triumphed in the plebiscite of May 1870, collapsed four months later in the defeat of Sedan. But, unlike the Empire, or the Weimar Republic, the French Third Republic had put down deep roots in French society. It had been in existence for sixty-five years. It symbols—the tricolour, the Marseillaise, Bastille Day—were intimately bound up with French national identity. How could this heritage be so totally repudiated in 1940? One reason was the polarization of French politics after February 1934 when anti-parliamentary riots took place in Paris. That polarization, which forms the immediate background to 1940, will be considered in the next chapter. But there was a longer tradition of disaffection from the Republic which stretched back beyond 1934. One historian has even asserted, with some exaggeration, that the Republic was ‘culturally dead’ in 1900.1

  Critics of the Republic could be found not only among the doctrinaire anti-Republicans like Charles Maurras, but also within the Republican consensus. Vichy was the victory not only of the Republic’s enemies, but also of those of its friends who despaired of reforming it. In short, the capitulation of France’s elites to anti-Republican values in 1940 had a long prehistory.

  Before 1914: ‘La Fin des notables?’

  Almost as soon as the liberal conservative Orleanists had accepted the Republic in the 1870s, they wondered if they had made a mistake. The crisis of the Republic was almost as old as the Republic itself. The Constitution of 1875, in which the influence of the Lower House—the Chamber of députés—was counterbalanced by a President and Senate, had embodied the Orleanist ideal of checks and balances. In practice, however, from the early 1880s, the Chamber emerged as supreme: the President became a mere cipher. This was not the Republic in which the Orleanist liberals had believed, and they started to discuss how the situation could be remedied.2 Most of the proposals to reform the Republic in the inter-war years can be traced back to the 1890s—to the writings, for example, of the liberal conservative parliamentarian, journalist, publicist, and academic Charles Benoist (1861–1936). Author of books like La Crise de l’État moderne (1895) and L’Organisation de la démocratie (1900), Benoist argued that the dominance of the democratically elected Chamber over the Senate and Presidency had betrayed the spirit of the constitution. The democratization of politics was creating a chasm between France’s political institutions and her bourgeois elites, between her political leaders and those social groups which had professional competence and social standing—les compétences, as they were described.

  Benoist’s ideas appealed not only to those liberal conservatives nostalgic for a world they had lost, but also to new republican elites which had come through the Paris Bar or the École libre des sciences politiques (Sciences Po). Such people dominated the higher reaches of the administration, staffed ministerial cabinets, and sometimes entered politics. But they had little in common with the average député or with the rural notables and lay schoolteachers who were the ballast of the regime in the provinces. This cultural chasm between republican elites and the parliamentary rank and file deepened after the turn of the century when the Dreyfus Affair brought to power the Radical Party, representing the petite bourgeoisie of provincial France. Benoist’s worst fears were realized: the Radicals heralded the advent of the professional politician. In 1906, parliamentary pay was raised from 9,000 francs (where it had been since 1875) to 15,000 francs. From this period dated the stereotype of the député as a provincial windbag, usually from the Midi, good for nothing except electioneering and intrigue: the Republic of ‘country vets’ had replaced the Republic of compétences.3 To remedy this situation, Benoist and other centre-right critics of the system proposed a whole battery of reforms: proportional representation, shorter parliamentary sessions, restriction of the right of députés to initiate financial legislation, reinforcement of the authority of the President of the Republic.

  Criticism of the parliamentary Republic did not only come from the centre-right. There was also a centre-left critique exemplified by Robert de Jouvenel’s La République de camarades (1914), a savage attack on parliamentarians as a caste. De Jouvenel was one of a group of progressive Radicals arguing for a republic technically equipped to deal with the problems of the modern world. This critique, which could be described as proto-technocratic, overlapped with the ‘Orleanist’ one only in requiring the Republic to be reconnected with those social groups who had professional expertise and authority.

  Such critics of the Republic argued from within the Republican consensus: they wanted the Republic to work better. This distinguished them from the uncompromising anti-Republicanism of Charles Maurras’s movement, Action française. Maurras came to prominence in 1898 when he wrote an article defending the ‘patriotic forgery’ of the officer who had fabricated a document to incriminate Dreyfus. Apart from a genius for such provocations, Maurras’s real achievement was to synthesize royalism, nationalism, and Catholicism into a single doctrine which he called ‘integral nationalism’. Convinced of France’s decadence, he believed that the solutions must be political; his slogan was ‘politique d’abord’. The keystone of his doctrine was the ideal of classical order. For Maurras, who came from Provence, started as a literary critic, and liked to thi
nk of himself as a poet, France represented the continuation of Mediterranean classical civilization, and the antithesis of the cultural values of her hereditary foe Germany. France’s enemies were individualism and romanticism—whether in literature, politics (the French Revolution), or religion (Protestantism).

  Maurras’s model was the pre-revolutionary ancien régime. The antidote to romantic disintegration was the restoration of the monarchy and the authority of the Catholic Church (although Maurras was himself a non-believer). Maurras distinguished between what he called the ‘pays légal’—the formal structure of Republican institutions—and the ‘pays réel’—the true France of community, family, region, and workplace. Maurras also wanted to exclude from influence what he called the four ‘confederated’ states sapping France’s unity: Protestants, Freemasons, Jews, and méteques (half-breeds). Nonetheless Maurras claimed not to be a racist—racism was German—and he justified the exclusion of the Jews on grounds not of race but cultural inassimilability.

  Action française did not fight elections before 1918. Its influence derived from the construction of an intellectual counterculture based upon its newspapers, its institute, and its publishing house. As Maurras used to put it about his activities at this time: ‘we were working with 1950 in mind’.4 Although not all Maurras’s followers subscribed to every detail of his system—many were monarchists only in the most perfunctory sense—intellectually he reinvigorated a monarchical tradition living on nostalgia and sentiment. As he wrote in his Enquête sur la monarchie: ‘The necessity of monarchy is demonstrated like a theorem. Once the wish to defend our French homeland is admitted as a postulate, everything unfolds, everything follows ineluctably.’5 Maurras made it intelligent to be monarchist, or at least anti-Republican. He had a considerable following among students of the Latin Quarter.

  Once Maurras had worked out his doctrine, he had nothing new to say. But he went on saying it for forty years, as if the deafness afflicting him since childhood cut him off from the sounds of the modern world, immuring him in his certainties. This bestowed an aspect of impregnability and granite-like coherence on his thought. The conservative novelist Paul Bourget once declared that Action française, along with the British House of Lords, the Papacy, and the Prussian General Staff, was one of the four European fortresses against revolution.6

  One surprising initiative taken by Action française was the attempt to build bridges to the working class through the ‘Cercle Proudhon’, an economic and social study group, created in 1911 by Georges Valois. Unusual among Action française members in displaying an interest in social problems, Valois hoped to win syndicalist leaders to the monarchist cause. Although attracting few workers, Valois did win over some syndicalist intellectuals. Even if the Cercle Proudhon proved abortive, it demonstrated that there was some common ground between the ultra-conservative critique of the Republic and the syndicalist one. Both deplored the individualistic Republican ideal of the abstract citizen. Against Republican individualism, Maurrasianism celebrated the ‘organic’ communities of the ancien régime, and the syndicalists the community of the workplace.

  Syndicalism was rooted in the Proudhonian ideal of the moral dignity of labour. As a producer in control of his labour, an individual obtained real freedom as opposed to the formal freedom of the Republican citizen-voter. Syndicalists believed in the self-sufficiency of labour to protect working-class interests, and were suspicious of all politicians, even Socialist ones. Syndicalism was successful in France because the working class received so little from the Republic that it made sense to opt out of formal politics entirely. The syndicalist utopia was a decentralized society of producers where the State would lose its raison d’être and disappear. This vision was plausible in France where artisans and small-scale industry were numerous. Since 1906, the French trade-union federation, the CGT, had been committed to the most revolutionary version of syndicalism, believing its objectives could be achieved through direct action: the general strike. Although the number of syndicalists genuinely committed to revolution was diminishing before the war, the broader syndicalist vision, especially the distrust of politics, remained influential. It appealed to those on the left who felt that politicians had betrayed the idealism of the Dreyfus Affair.

  No one better exemplified the mood of post-Dreyfusard disillusion than the writer Daniel Halévy. Halévy is particularly interesting because he stands at the confluence of many of the intellectual currents described above: his entire career is emblematic of the drift away from Republican values by a part of France’s elite. He was born into a grand Parisian haut-bourgeois family, son of the librettist Ludovic Halévy. This was a deeply Orleanist milieu—‘you belong to one of the most noble families of the old Orleanist Republican tradition’ wrote Péguy— and when in 1930 Halévy published his classic book La Fin des notables, an elegiac history of the passing of the Orleanist era in the 1870s, he was casting a nostalgic eye upon the world of his childhood.

  The turning point of Halévy’s life was the Dreyfus Affair. Convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, he collaborated closely with Péguy on the Cahiers de la quinzaine. Although much of his later life was spent memorializing Péguy, the hero of his youth, their actual relations cooled after Halévy wrote his Apologie pour notre passé (1910) questioning whether the Dreyfusards had not been duped. It was this book which gave rise to Péguy’s famous Notre jeunesse which defended the battles of their youth, while sharing the same sense of betrayal.

  At the time of the Affair Halévy defined himself as a Socialist, and he was involved in the Universités populaires where intellectuals sought to bring culture to the people. The ‘people’ in whom Halévy believed were sturdy independent artisans not the modern proletariat. His other idol, after Péguy, was Proudhon. ‘Proudhon’s socialism’, wrote Halévy, ‘respects natural groups, the family … the old artisanal France which Péguy had known and which he defended.’ Halévy’s ‘people’ also included the peasantry. An intrepid walker, he wrote four books recounting his visits to the countryside and his observations on the peasantry. In the first of these, in 1907, he was a young man of the left looking for pioneers of peasant syndicalism; by the last, in 1934, he was writing an elegy for a disappearing world, which represented the only barrier against modern uniformity and proletarian levelling.

  By the 1930s, Halévy was a pessimistic conservative, displaying even a cautious admiration of Maurras. He became a formidable anti-Republican polemicist. In books like Décadence de la liberté (1931) and La République des comités (1934), which are contemporaneous with his historical evocations of the last days of Orleanism, he denounced a political system dominated by professional politicians operating through Masonic committees. The link between Halévy’s nostalgia for the ‘Republic of Notables’ and his cult of the independent artisan and peasant, between his Orleanism and his Proudhonism, is the idea that both incarnated a real France from which the Republic had cut itself off. By 1940, he was ready to welcome the Vichy regime as the last chance to preserve that France.7

  The 1920s: The Maurrassian Moment

  Halévy’s journey from Dreyfus to Vichy, with Péguy and Proudhon as its central threads, started well before 1918, but it was certainly accelerated by the upheaval of the Great War. The consequences of the war for republicanism were, however, more ambiguous than this single example suggests. After all, the Republic had proved effective enough to win the war. While Willhelmine Germany had succumbed to defeat under the military dictatorship of Hindenburg, in France the war was won under the leadership of the intransigently Republican Georges Clemenceau, a leader whom even Maurras could admire. Did this mean that anti-Republicans were now ready to swallow their historic objections to the Republic?

  Even after 1918, there were conservative families for whom the Republic remained the incarnation of evil. Indeed in the Vendée there are still families today who will not receive descendants of people who bought biens nationaux during the Revolution.8 During the inter-war years, the family o
f the future historian Philippe Ariès left Paris on 14 July to avoid being present in the capital on this revolutionary day.9 In 1919, the government was worried enough about the susceptibilities of anti-Republicans to abandon its idea of burying the Unknown Soldier in the Panthéon because the building was too identified with the Republic.10 Instead he was buried under the Arc de Triomphe.

  Nonetheless the war did give the iconography of the Republic greater legitimacy than it had enjoyed before 1914. The victory parade of 14 July 1919, with Foch and Joffre at its head, displaced the central axis of the Bastille Day celebrations from the poor quarters of eastern Paris to the Champs-Élysées in the west: 14 July 1919 celebrated not the victory of republicanism over reaction but France’s victory over Germany.11 Similarly the Marseillaise received its apotheosis during the war, sung on the Marne as it had been at Valmy: in 1917 it was the monarchist Louis de Joantho who published a book entitled Triomphe de la Marseillaise.12

  These developments can be read in two ways: after 1918, the symbols of Republicanism were less contested than they had ever been before, but the meanings attached to them became less precise.13 Clemenceau may have triumphantly reasserted the primacy of Republican government over military power, but the military had also emerged from the war with unprecedented prestige. In 1914–15 the cult of Joffre had reached unbelievable proportions, to be equalled in the twentieth century only by that of Pétain after 1940. Pétain and Foch had also emerged from the war with titanic reputations. The funerals of Foch in 1929 and Joffre in 1931 were massive occasions on a scale not witnessed since that of Victor Hugo in 1885. In short, although it is often pointed out that after 1918 the French people hated war, it is less often noted that this was not the same thing as hating generals.