Passage from Perceptions of the French Revolution in the Historical Imaginary of French Fascism

By @LCbtPndD

In his final work, The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis makes the point that whereas in primitive communities knowledge transmission was unconscious, and in modern society knowledge arises from observation; in the Middle Ages, an inordinate emphasis was put on “book learning.” That is, when a medieval scholar attempted some new intellectual foray, he always tried to root it in some past, preferably Classical, auctour. Now the three writers, pioneers of French Fascism, treated in this article by Franco-Israeli academic Schlomo Sand, were eminently modern men. We would recognize them as such, belonging as they did to modern political movements or being, as two of them were, academics in the modern sense. They emphasized their commitment to founding a modern state, praised social mobility and mass politics, and criticized the sclerosis of contemporary political elites. And yet, in attempting to justify their adhesion to Fascism, to what was perceived as a novel, revolutionary, and yes modern ideology, much like a medieval scribe, they delved into their country's past, seeking to find an auctour or event that would bear them out.

I am referencing here the claim made by these French fascist writers that not only would Fascism be salutary for the France of their day, but more extraordinarily, that France was Fascism's incubator, that she had already had a proto-fascist revolution and that her great revolutionary thinkers and actors were in fact totalitarian precursors. The event that unites these claims is the French Revolution. Why they felt the need to do this was threefold: a French chauvinism, considering themselves as an eminently political people, it stood to reason any political innovation should arise domestically; an attempt to make what was seen as a foreign import from potentially hostile powers palatable to dyed-in the-wool nationalists; and an attempt to reconcile France's traditionally anti-revolutionary right with the new revolutionary Fascism.

As addressed in the essay's opening paragraphs, this strikes as wrong-headed, especially when it has traditionally been the Left — see socialist député Antoine Léaument praising Robespierre on X — which has claimed France's Revolutionary inheritance. On the other hand, it is the Right embodied in the likes of Action Française, that wanted to remove all traces of it. The reader is left to decide whether the three writers found, by tracing the intellectual lineage of 20th-century Fascism from 18th-century thought, a convincing historical justification for their new ideological foray or, like a Medieval scholastic, succeeded only in twisting themselves into knots. It does, however, illustrate that regardless of how pioneering certain ideologues consider themselves, much like the original Revolutionaries themselves who endlessly put on airs of Cato or Cicero, historical precedent is a potent source of legitimacy.

This essay also touches on the debate over the nature of republics and imperialism. There is an assumption that republicanism, a political system based around popular, to whatever degree, participation in politics, draped in imagery and mottos vaunting universal ideals of fraternity and equality, is the antithesis of imperialism, associated with slavery, violence, and extraction. This attitude is perfectly demonstrated by the British republican movement, which seems to see it as a cuddly, flat, inclusive alternative to the monarchy that, to them, is a relic of a dark past. To what extent is this binary valid? As Edward Gibbon remarks in his opening chapter of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it is the end of republican strife and the advent of Augustus' monarchical system that puts, at least for a while, Rome's rapid expansion to an end. In more recent history, one of the main grievances presented by the North American colonists to the British Crown was that they were being prevented from moving West, and it was post-independence, with such arch-democrats as Andrew Jackson, that the continent's conquest gained momentum. Concerning the article at hand, the three writers associate the French Revolution with a liberation of social energy, war-making, centralization, indeed, imperialism, rather than more conventionally, equality and social justice. They award the ignominious honor of installing France's parliamentary tradition, not to the radical Jacobin Republic, but to the moderate Thermidorian Republic or, notably, to the 1815 restoration of the monarchy.

An abridged translation of Perceptions of the French Revolution in the Historical Imaginary of French Fascism

In April 1926, […] Mussolini declared that the principles of Fascism were “the absolute, categorical and definitive antitheses […] of the immortal principles of 1789.” Seven years later, in April 1933, in the wake of National Socialism's triumph in Germany, Goebbels decreed in a speech broadcast over the radio, “We are striking the year 1789 from history.” After the occupation of France in 1940, he would define the German victory as a victory over the outdated ideals of the French Revolution.

Such declarations and others, besides, have led many working in the field that, on the ideological level, Fascism and National Socialism were historically defined by their opposition to the French Revolution. This conclusion also coincided with the traditional left-right divide, it being the case that the concepts of left and right themselves had come into existence to describe either an acceptance, the Left, or a refusal, the Right, of the Revolution. Though the fin-de-siècle French center-right had started to come around to the revolutionary tradition's republican principles, Action Française's emergence onto the ideological scene in the early years of the 20th century and later, in 1940, the creation of the “French State,” reinforced the view according to which the conservative far-right, as well as the radical right, were fundamentally hostile to the republican tradition due, of course, to its universalist and egalitarian premises.

When a few years ago, Italian historian Renzo De Felice called the radical opposition between the spirit of Italy's Fascist Revolution and that of the French Revolution into question, it provoked much gnashing of teeth among left-wing historians. According to De Felice, contrary to the ideology of German National Socialism, the ideology of Italian Fascism contained an ideal striving for the perfection and the improvement of mankind, which, despite many differences, is proximate to the tradition stemming from the French Revolution. And though the majority of Italian fascist leaders and ideologues indeed rejected all affinity between their undertaking and the work of the French Revolution, they adopted without hesitation what Mazzini bequeathed to the nation. An inheritance that bore a certain number of universal messages that ultimately sprang from the French Revolution.

[…]

In the writings of Georges Valois in the 1920s, those of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle in the 1930s, and those of Marcel Déat in the 1940s, years during which these authors self-consciously identified and defined themselves as fascists, one comes across surprising ways of perceiving the French Revolution. Now certainly, other French fascists can be found whose conception of the French Revolution differed from that of the three aforementioned intellectuals, but if Fascism was always marginal on the French political scene, these three intellectuals were not so within the French fascist movement. Indeed, all three are representative of fascist thought in France, and an analysis of their historical vision of the French Revolution will allow us to better conceive of both the emergence of an authentically French fascism and the origins of its failure to take hold.

On November 11th, 1925, France's first fascist movement, the Faisceau, was created. Its founder and uncontested leader, Georges Valois, had, for 20 years, been at the head of Action Française's “leftist” current. […] As early as 1922, Georges Valois was an admirer of Mussolini, and as a result, from its founding, the movement was confronted by a dilemma which haunted all subsequent French attempts at Fascism: how can one identify oneself with a foreign regime and yet continue to be the representative of a nationalism of the most complete and consequent variety? How can one draw on the triumph of the new regime beyond the Alps, all while remaining French in a way that leaves no doubt? The solution for Valois, and as we shall see further on for other fascists, was to be found in the claim, naively repeated, that Fascism was born among the French, that its fundamental principles were first set out in France, and that it only then migrated successfully to Italy. […]

In June 1926, before the movement had even definitively opted for its ideal form of government, monarchy or republic, Valois came out in a solemn declaration in favor of the 1789 Revolution, calling it “that great Revolution, which, by throwing open the doors of power to those meritorious men, created a vigorous dynamic of social mobility on which fascism looks favorably.” By casting his lot in with Fascism, Valois showed he had lost faith in the dynastic mechanism and moved closer to republican principles. On July 14th, 1926, with a front-page article in the Faisceau's leading journal entitled “Fascism: The Logical Conclusion of 1789 Movement,” the matter was conclusively settled. Therein, Valois announced to his followers that Fascism was not a movement of the anti-revolutionary Right whose aim was to erase the spirit of the 1789 Revolution but was, according to him, a movement, embodied in the Faisceau, that drew equally on left-wing sources as on right-wing ones: […]

“Fascism is precisely a continuation of the 1789 movement. Fascism is connected to it by a long thread in history. It carries it forward and surpasses it, providing it with a logical conclusion that the people have been seeking for over a century.”

Something that must be highlighted in Valois' approach is the importance of the idea that the Revolution was left unfinished and that it is incumbent upon Fascism to see it to completion. According to Valois, the reason why Fascism can present itself as a direct descendant of the French Revolution owes principally to the fact that “the 1789 movement was nothing more than the first attempt to create a modern State.” The reason for his use of the term “movement” to describe 1789 is clear: Fascism was also a movement and not a party. Therefore, for him, these two historic movements were created and developed with the aim of renewing the bases of the modern State.

When one reads Valois' analysis of the causes of the 1789 Revolution, one cannot help but recall that of Auguste Comte, and it would be wrong to characterize it as Marxist. The Revolution took place because in 1789 feudalism had already ceased to fill most of the functions it once had in the previous ages of history. The aristocracy was becoming an anachronism, holding up new economic transformations and, consequently, having to be eliminated. The casting aside of the old parasitical elites, which constituted the main work of the Revolution, did not necessarily generate a new generation of elites suited to the task. France was still seeking those elites, making it necessary to complete the Revolution.

Valois had, by that time, put sufficient distance between Action Française and himself to praise the Revolution's political centralization and its revolutionary patriotism that brought the process of absorbing France's outlying regions to an end. The Revolution also displayed some negative aspects, principally its ideas, which owed to the period's social decadence. The most dangerous of the deviations produced by the Revolution was, according to him, its “destructive parliamentarianism” that had to be eliminated. Valois does recall, however, that the Revolution also gave birth to both nationalism and socialism, the two great ideas at the heart of the fascist project. Fascism would bring 1789 to an end because the fascist State would cease to be a State for one class in particular, instead becoming a State for the nation in its totality: one State united at whose head stands one leader supported by corporate assemblies.

[…]

In 1936, less than a decade after the disintegration of the Faisceau, Jacques Doriot founded the Parti Populaire Français (PPF). This second noteworthy attempt at a fascist movement in France after the failure of Valois', formed in opposition to the politically ascendant Front Populaire, did not, however, unlike the Faisceau, initially define itself as fascist. However, its identification in its own publications with anti-liberal and anti-communist regimes became progressively more marked. While Doriot and his close circle, for the most part ex-communists, hesitated in openly rallying to the fascist flag, this was not so for the most respected intellectual who joined the party. Upon its creation, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle became a member of its central committee and one of its most important spokesmen. As early as 1934, the writer was defining himself as a fascist, and the 1936 creation of the new organization seemed to him as a first concrete step towards the beginnings of an authentically French fascism.

Doriot himself, who had no formal intellectual training to speak of, was not interested in the issue of the affinities between historical traditions and new political movements. In his writings on the other hand, Drieu, who always eager to feel as if he were living through history, made abundant comparisons with the past. Much like Valois, he was on a tireless quest to find the French “sources” of fascist thought. He found them variously in the socialism of Proudhonian tradition, in Boulangism, and in revolutionary syndicalism. But above all, he found them in the great instigators of the French Revolution. In his first identifiably fascist work, dated 1934, he was already making analogies between the social classes involved in the 1789 Revolution and those of the contemporary revolutions in Rome and Berlin, as well as between France's process of revolutionary national unification and that which took place, according to him, in Germany in the 20th century. It is, on the other hand, only dating from the time of his joining the PPF that one can find, in his articles published in the movement's official journal, his most systematic reflections on the relationship between Fascism and the French Revolution.

In September 1937, Drieu undertook the publication of a series of theoretical articles, the first of which was entitled “Let us keep faith with our sources.” What precisely these sources were is revealed early in the article. Drieu believed that France “gave the world in 1792 the Jacobin formula, which since that distant époque, has always served as a model, and whose intellectual offspring have, in recent times still, appeared in the dictatorial methods of the Bolsheviks and Fascists.” In Drieu's way of thinking, though he personally abhorred French communism and sympathized with Italian Fascism, the distance separating Bolshevism from Fascism was not so great. That the French Revolution was able to serve as an implicit model to modern revolutionary movements owes principally to the fact that it was the Jacobins who “forged the notion of a totalitarian one-party State in a perpetual state of mobilization, acting in contempt of Parliament under the dictatorship of a single man and his close council, displaying an openly imperialist attitude towards other nations, among other traits.”

The great problem of contemporary times was that France had long since strayed from this primordial model, whose energy fertilized the whole political landscape, to instead cultivate a politics whose mediocrity matched only its narrow horizons. In other words, the republican form of government of the 20th century was, in fact nothing more than “A stale, sclerotic fascism,” and it was with this definition of the Third Republic that he entitled his second historical article. The PPF's “theoretician” attempted to show that the sources of this French republicanism were in no way liberal. The National Assemblies of the Revolutionary Epoque were of an entirely different kind to the English Parliaments, and the Jacobin Clubs had no kinship with parliamentary parties but recalled, rather, Russian Soviets or cells of fascist shock troopers. It is not by chance, therefore, that the dictatorial form of government born of such an institutional arrangement surprisingly resembled the formational processes of Fascism in both its red and black varieties.

Drieu did not however believe that the establishment of a dictatorial form of government should be a political objective for the PPF. If the party was liberal in its intentions and did not aspire to dictatorship, it could, all the same, learn lessons from the 1793 model:

“The advantage of the Jacobin regime is that it rested upon the energetic, disciplined life force of one party, one that recognized only the most virile of maxims and whose constant inclination was towards action, conquest, and war. The Jacobins were ferocious killers of men, both within and without, terrible imperialists who plunged Europe into a bloody inferno for 23 years. Before the Jacobin monolith, parliamentary anarchy dwindled to nothing.”

[…]

Drieu's primordial concern rested upon republican France's fundamental weakness against the other European nations: heroic Jacobinism was now to be found beyond its borders among the Italians, Germans, and Russians. According to him, all that remained in France were the hated descendants of the Directory, responsible for whittling away at the nation's heroic power. His greatest aversion is thus reserved for the regime installed between Robespierre's fall and Bonaparte's advent, a regime to which he prefers infinitely the liberal monarchy of 1789, the authoritarian democracy of 1793, and even Napoleon's imperial form of government.

The division of the French Revolution into four distinct revolutions constituted the subject of Drieu's last article, published in 1939, occasioned by the 150th anniversary of the Revolution. Therein, he expresses his profound disgust at the corrupt Thermidorians and their modern-day parliamentary imitators. However, rather than towards the men of 1793, his admiration this time inclines towards the “virile” and potent English liberals who, in the past, achieved the absolute separation of powers. As a corollary, Drieu does not hide his growing sympathy for the Bonapartist regime. That his admiration for Jacobinism had cooled is doubtlessly linked to his weakening faith in the emergence of authentic Fascism in France. France's powerlessness to rediscover its past glory, its Jacobin youth, seemed to him a historical foregone conclusion that would inevitably lead the country to its doom. Drieu, therefore, was not surprised in 1940 at his country's utter defeat. He had long since lost all hope of ever seeing actual French Fascism, and all that was left for him to do was to marvel at the “virile” power of the Nazi occupiers and to become a faithful though pessimistic “collaborator,” marching assuredly towards his predictable suicide at the war's end.

The dream to resurrect France's revolutionary Jacobin politics did not, however, disappear from French Fascism's political landscape. In the summer of 1940, in the early days of the German occupation, the onetime “neo-socialist” Marcel Déat took his first steps on the path that would lead him to convert from Fascism, indeed, to National Socialism. Initially, he was among Petain's “National Revolution’s” many supporters. It was, however, precisely among these “losers of the Thirties,” these politicians forced to abandon their original parties even before France's defeat at German hands, that a new tendency formed. A tendency not content to “simply” collaborate with the victors and dissatisfied with the conservative nature of the Pétain government. Déat, among these marginal politicians convinced that their hour had come, was without a doubt the one who did the most to distinguish himself, creating the Rassemblement National Populaire (the People's National Rally) and outlining France's first detailed totalitarian project in favor of an independent National Socialist regime.

Contrary to both Valois and Drieu La Rochelle, Déat came from a left-republican background, and his opportunism and unbridled aspiration to wield power did not prevent him from understanding that, despite the relatively broad support that the Vichy regime enjoyed early on, this could not last. He remained aware that even if the Third Republic had lost some of its prestige in the inter-war years, no form of government could succeed in erasing republican principles and casting the Revolution's heritage aside. In a 1943 series of conferences and articles (later collated into a book, German Thought, French Thought), this conclusion would lead him to formulate his position on the Age of the Enlightenment and the essence of the Revolution.

In preparation for his conferences and book this brilliant alumnus of the École normale supérieure and student of the sociologist Célestin Bouglé, took time to re-read Rousseau and study the works of Albert Sorel, Aulard, Mathiez and Jaurès. The difficulty and scale of the task, Déat was going headlong into battle with those who would attempt to cut France from its past: “conservatives” who had taken control of France and wanted to erase 150 years of Revolution, demanded the effort. In 1943, it was clear that ideological identification with Italian Fascism, verging on collapse, could not be made, and therefore German National Socialism would be the essential object of comparison. Yet all his writings, and this despite sympathizing with the concept of biological racism, reveal that justifying and adopting this ideology demanded considerable effort on his part. Thus, Déat could be defined as an authentic fascist moving heaven and earth to come across as a national socialist. […]

Déat's work features the same phenomenon witnessed in Valois' and Drieu's: in its preface, he declares that the initial outlines of National Socialism were laid out in France during Year II of the Revolution. Despite 150 years of deviation and corruption, there still existed, for him, a “totalitarianism of Year II, a precocious national socialism, Jacobin in essence, and not anarchic in the slightest, quite the contrary.” Furthermore, he adds, totalitarianism was not born during the Revolution exactly, but was already firmly rooted in French thought in the Age of the Enlightenment, and this, in particular, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's fiery vision. In a chapter titled “J. J. Rousseau, the Totalitarian,” Déat attempts to demonstrate how the Genevan thinker was the father of authoritarian democracy, the political model most proximate to those of the 20th century totalitarian regimes.

One must read Rousseau, Déat asserts, to discover the principle that citizens must submit to society's judgement and that each must renounce their personal interests to allow the general will to become concrete. In order for this supreme will to come into existence, Rousseau banished all division from within the nation, and it is certain, according to Déat, that had he lived in the 20th century, Rousseau would have been among the pioneers of a system of single-party government. Rousseau is not, however, a communist nor one of those advocating for the collectivization or nationalization of all private property: the 18th-century philosopher advocated for a middle-class society, one as devoid of plutocrats as of the destitute. According to Déat, therefore, taking into account that Rousseau was one of the precursors of modern nationalism, he could without hesitation be called the first national socialist.

Rousseau is thus held to be the ancestor of the authoritarian-democratic movement. His, however, is not the 18th century's only current of thought. Parallel to it exists one founded upon individualist principles that led politically to Federalism, the concept of the separation of powers, and later on, anarchism. During the French Revolution, this latter movement was represented principally by the Girondins, whereas Rousseau's inheritors were the Jacobins, embodying an authoritarian, hierarchical, statist, and organic political tendency. In his analysis, Déat's objective was to show that this tendency prefigured that of the 1933 revolution in Germany. Whereas Valois had accepted the Revolution as a whole, and Drieu had often hesitated between 1789 and 1793, Déat as can be seen is categorical in his preference: the decisive year, the most important one, that one that could serve as a model, is Year II. The government of the Committee of Public Safety represented the most modern form of government and the one closest to the spirit embodied in the European National Socialist revolution: “The Jacobin State was, like the Reich, totalitarian after its manner.” The reasons he gives are multiple and complex.

In the first instance, the ex-neo-socialist cites the Revolution's national dimension. The concrete existence of a patriotic nationalism hindered the influence of universalism in the Revolution, and it is not by chance that the term patriot became synonymous with revolutionary. The formation of a revolutionary national consciousness did not destroy social classes, but its awakening, just as it did in Germany, contributed to the abolition of privileged castes and reinforced the integration of different social classes within the national community.

[…]

Nationalism was thus the fundamental principle of yesterday's Revolution and the contemporary German/Pan-European Revolution. But are their nationalisms truly alike in character? According to Déat, without the least hesitation, yes. However, there is one fundamental difference between the two phenomena that resides in the stages of their development. The French Revolution drew its initial momentum from an absolute universalism; then, it became progressively more nationalistic. The German Revolution began with extreme nationalism and was advancing, Déat says, towards a Europe-wide humanism. French revolutionary nationalism, it is true, was not racialist like the new German nationalism, but this dissimilarity owes to the differences in the historical processes by which the two peoples became so. The German race formed long before the existence of a national state, whereas the French became so only after the formation of the political State. It follows then that the French equivalent to German Race Theory is the Revolution's Theory of France's Natural Borders.

Déat regretted that the biological understanding of race was the one least suited to French political culture; nevertheless, with a little effort, the French people would be able to “cultivate” their sense of ethnic belonging. Déat was ready to make the first effort by defining revolutionary fraternity in the following terms, “the powerful feeling of your belonging to a community in blood, that is, of your kinship with men of the same race and the same fatherland.” Fraternity, however, is an insufficient nation-builder: in precisely the same manner as Hitler's Revolution had been doing since 1933, thanks to a potent and centralizing political apparatus, Revolutionary Jacobinism completed the national and linguistic union of the nation.

The Jacobin state was in no way bourgeois, liberal, or secular, and it was precisely the 18th-century individualism that, in aiding in the disaggregation of a society based on castes and orders, prepared people's minds to receive the totalitarian ideal. A “culture-state” could be built on these historical foundations, a partisan state with a doctrine that desired to shape its citizens and create militants. The Jacobin State took public education in hand, organised public festivals and under its direction, “the Revolution became a religion. It developed like a new Islam. It had rituals, insignia, mystical fervor, proselytizing, martyrs, and an inquisition.” Was all this so far from Germany's revolutionary romanticism, and is it by chance that Fichte, the most significant of the German descendants of the Jacobins, was the father of Romantic Nationalism in Germany?

Indeed, according to Déat, Fichte was the theoretical bridge connecting one side of the Rhine to the other, and the Rousseau of the National Socialist Revolution. Through him can be understood not only the mental affinity between the two revolutionary events but also their resemblance in the economic domain: Fichte's vision of a closed state dominating the national economy can be inferred directly from the Jacobins' economic undertakings. The Jacobins were not socialists, but like Rousseau, they did not hold the grand bourgeois in great esteem and did not advocate capitalism. Under war conditions, they implemented a directed economy, a state that controlled the supply of necessities, intervened in setting pay scales and did not hesitate to confiscate suspects' property. Such a state, which, without nationalizing private property, subjugated the economy to its needs and whose strength was essentially the middle classes, recalled to Déat, despite all the differences, the contemporary National Socialist economy.

In addition to the cultural and economic analogy was the political affinity. The Revolution's Jacobin phase was in no way parliamentary. France's parliamentary tradition was only created after the Restoration in 1815. From the very beginning, the revolutionary assemblies differed from modern parliaments; they were not made up of organized groups or electoral parties, and the fact that power passed into the hands of committees and later into those of a dictator should not surprise. Jacobinism did not respect the liberal principle of the separation of powers and based its regime on one, and one only, political movement:

“Must I underline the fact that the Jacobin Club, with its thousand branches, though it was in no way a party in the electoral sense, was very close indeed to the future revolutionary uni-party? In both cases, it is a question of uniting in one common, passionate, selfless, and unshakable discipline, a fanatical elite cadre.”

He held that the idea of a government based upon one party was born at the end of the 18th century, and became reality and was perfected by the National Socialist Revolution. And so, he felt justified in concluding his historical reflections by proposing:

“The French Revolution, in originating in the national sentiment born out of the people's accession to sovereignty, was set on a path leading it to political totalitarianism and a totalitarian conception of the state and life.”

A position he never disavowed, even after the Liberation.

[…]