Monday, September 26, 2022

Antisemitism and the French intellectuals - 1920-1945

 In an article in Combat in 1938, the far right critic Thierry Maulnier made a stab at analyzing antisemitism. Unlike, say, Sartre's essay ten years later, Maulnier's does not start out from the premise that it is a deadly bigotry, but instead is a search for "reasonable antisemitism". He finally comes up with a core program founded on resistance to the "disproportionate power" of the Jews and their "irreducible heterogreneity".

It would be nice to think that Maulnier represented an aberration, an eccentric violence, like Celine's.
This isn't the case. In the first half of the twentieth century, a depressing number of intellectuals in France were raving antisemites. Maulnier was, in particular, in dialogue with Charles Maurras. Maurras is pretty much forgotten now, but in his day he had an influence in France and in the Anglophone world - he was considered a master by T.S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis's aesthetics definitely runs in parallel - an anti-modernist modernism. Albert Thibaudet, the great critic for the NRF, devoted almost a whole book to him in a series he called "Thirty Years of French Life" -published in the 1920s.
Thibaudet was a French liberal/social democrat. He has a cool way of showing how absurd Maurras's "philosophy" was - for instance, Maurras's insistence that the Bible is a "Jewish" book - and thus evil - while Christianity is a good thing in as much as it remains Catholic and monarchical. That Thibaudet felt Maurras was important enough to write a book about shows us how out of whack French intellectual culture was. .
It is depressingly the case that many of the minor but revered figures of the time turn out to be antisemites. Alain, whose small essays - Propos - were Pleiadized in two thick volumes, and whose teaching was legendary - Simone Weil was his pupil - is the latest case. Fifty years after his death, his journal for the thirties and forties was published, and it is full of admiration for Hitler and antisemitic shit.
Jean Grenier, Camus's teacher, published his journal of the war years and one finds a steady stream of observations about people who he considers "isrealite" (a word with a distinctly yellow star tinge), and not a word about the massacres of Jews, their transport to the camps, the theft of their property, the blowing up of the synagogues, etc. The man missed the mass murder under his very nose, but he does complain about shortages of meat.
The period's racists, except for Celine, have faded into the background, but their project of rationalizing hatred did result in arguments that are plastic enough to extend, today, to "illegal immigrants" in the U.S. and "moslems" in Europe.
One shouldn't extrapolate from the far right to public policies in France in the 1920s and 30s. France then was exemplary in accepting immigrants - 150,000 Yiddish speaking immigrants fled from pograms in Central Europe to France in the 20s, and around 80,000 from German speaking countries in the 30s. They were part of a massive movement of peoples - some 500,000 from Italy, 200,000 from Spain, hundreds of thousands of Poles. At one point in the thirties nearly a fourth of the population of Paris was from another country.
It was a cruel turn that this population was trapped when the Germans decisively defeated the French in 1940.
As Europe turns right - as for instance in Italy today, with the triumph of the right-far right - we should remember this history. Cause it is coming to get us. It was always crazy that the Cold Warriors played with the fascists - the fascist party in Italy, responsible for blowing up the Bologna train station in 1980 and the Milan bank in 1969 was in contact with the CIA, which at that time had very good relations with the Greek Junta - and they have come back in relation with the present rightwing ruler of Russia. It is as if we can't get over some collective neurosis.
Like
Comment
Share

No comments:

The philosopher as spy: the case of Alexandre Kojeve

In the Spring of 2019, the rightwing French journal, Commentaire, published a story about the philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by Raymond Nar...