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Bernanos, Drumont, and the Rise of French Fascism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

John Hellman
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Extract

While recent centenary celebrations held French novelist Georges Bernanos to be a leading Catholic antifascist Resistance thinker, his most original ideas really belong within that history of “French fascism” which has been elucidated in recent studies. His ardent, lifelong admiration for Edouard Drumont (+ 1917), the father of modern anti-Semitism, shaped his new kind of politics. On the very eve of the French defeat of 1940 Bernanos advocated a radical anti-Semitic, anticapitalist, spiritually oriented “national revolution,” not unlike that of the prominent writers who would support Marshall Pétain; his case illustrates why it was so difficult to find genuinely antifascist thinkers among the French Catholic intelligentsia of the period.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , Summer 1990 , pp. 441 - 459
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1990

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References

Notes

The author is grateful to Bush, William of the University of Western Ontario, North America's leading expert on Bernanos and editor of the special centenary issue of Renascence (Fall 1988)Google Scholar on Bernanos, for his comments and encouragement, to Joseph Schwartz of Marquette, senior editor of Renascence, who exorcised this article from the above as “inappropriate for a centenary celebration,” and to George L. Mosse of Wisconsin, for their comments and suggestions.

The author wishes to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its research support.

O'brien, Conor Cruise, Maria Cross (London, Chatto and Windus: 1952), p. 51.Google Scholar

1. [Bernanos] “would earn for himself the title of ‘bard of the Resistance’ with war articles, broadcasts, and volumes of essays on the crisis facing France and European civilization“ (Bush, William, “Introduction,” in Georges Bernanos in His Time and Ours, 1888–1988 (special issue), Renascence 41, nos.1–2 (Fall 1988/Winter 1989): 4.Google Scholar

2. Hans Araas, “Bernanos in 1988,” Ibid., p. 21.

3. Joseph Jurt, “The Resistance Writer” Ibid., p. 43. Professor Jurt is the leading Bernanos bibliographer.

4. Cf. Sternhell, Zeev, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Burrin, Philippe, La Dérivefasciste (Paris: Seuil, 1986)Google Scholar; Soucy, Robert, French Fascism: the First Wave, 1924–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).Google Scholar None of these studies, however, even mention Bernanos.

5. La Grande Peur des bien-pensants in Bernanos's Essais et Ecrits de Combats, I–II (Paris: Gallimard-Pléaide, 1971), p. 163Google Scholar (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as I or II).

6. Drumont also played a role in exposing graft and extortion during the Panama Canal Scandal in 1892, but his popular influence then declined as the young Charles Maurras and his Action Française began to attract militant younger nationalists of Bernanos's stripe.

7. Drumont, Edouard, La France Juive. Essai d'histoire contemporaine, 2 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, n.d. [originally 1886]), I: 102Google Scholar (hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as FJI or FJII).

8. Winock, Michel, Edouard Drumont (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 193.Google Scholar

9. Speaight, Robert, Georges Bernanos (New York: Liveright, 1974), pp. 39–40Google Scholar (hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as SP).

10. L'Avant Garde de Normandie, 12/10/1913. (This article was one of several not reprinted in the Pléiade edition [i.e., II]).

11. Valois later split from the Action Française and founded the Faisceau, France's first explicity Fascist movement. Bernanos seemed to have been the only devout practising Catholic in the Cercle.

12. Sternhell, , Neither Right nor Left, p. 11–12.Google Scholar See also Sternhell, Zeev, La Droite révolutionnaire, 1885–1914 (Paris: Seuil, 1978), chap. 9.Google Scholar

13. Il, 1523, note 2 for p. 593.

14. Correspondance, 2 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1971), I: 440)Google Scholar42 (hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as CI or CII).

15. Bernanos, Jean-loup, Georges Bemanos. A la Merci des passants (Paris: Plon, 1986), p. 105.Google Scholar

16. Bernanos had been brought into contact with the core of the Palma falangists through his intimate friend the Marqués of Zayas, an antirepublican retired military man who was head of the Majorcan Falange. So when the so-called National Movement was established in Majorca whereby, under the orders of Mola, Franco, and other generals, a part of the military and civilian elements of the extreme right rose up against the legitimate government of the Republic on 19 July, Bernanos was no doubt perfectly aware of the situation. According to Dom Massot, Jossep i Muntaner in his excellent article “Bernanos and Majorca (1934–1937),” in Georges Bernanos and His Times, pp. 29–42Google Scholar, Alfonso de Zayas y de Bobadilla is repeatedly and erroneously referred to as governor of the Baleric Islands in the notes of Bernanos correspondence, and the Marquesa de Zayas was a central influence in the genesis of the Diary of a Country Priest.

17. Muntaner, Massot I, “Bernanos and Majorca,” p. 17.Google Scholar

18. From the first moment, Bernanos had followed all aspects of the political situation in Majorca and on the peninsula, through his own son and his comrades, and through the Marqués and Marquesa de Zayas and other friends and acquaintances. Yves Bernanos fought under the Marqués de Zayas in a selected militia of the falangists called the “Dragoons of Death” and helped intensify a repression against prorepublican elements (which his father approved at the time.)

19. Along with certain falangist friends he began to feel remorse about the extent and arbitrary nature of the repression which had just ended. Then, by December, volatile Yves Bernanos had had a fight with the Italians, who hated him, and he passed into France a few months later. Suddenly, at the beginning of 1937, Georges Bernanos was speaking in cafés against the Italians and against the political council of the island, and, in the meantime, was writing a book which would recount his Majorcan experiences: Diary of My Times (which would appear in France in 1938, after he had lost almost the whole of the original manuscript).

20. The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Morris, Pamela (Glasgow: Collins, 1977), p. 10Google Scholar (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as “D”).

21. Mounier, Emmanuel, review of Gilles in Esprit 91 (04 1940).Google Scholar

22. “Réflexions sur le catholicisme,” L'Emancipation nationale, 24 06 1938.Google Scholar

23. Notes pour comprendre le siecle (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), p. 147.Google Scholar (The titles li in this quotation are, respectively, a novel by Léon Bloy, a play by Claudel, and a long series of poems by Péguy and, finally, Bernanos's novel.)

24. Griffiths, Richard, The Reactionary Revolution. The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870–1914 (London: Constable, 1966), p. 362.Google Scholar

25. Text cited by Le Figaro Litteraire, 27 12 1952.Google Scholar

26. See several examples in the excerpts from collaborationist propaganda in Cotta, Michèle, La Collaboration, 1940–1944 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1964), esp. pp. 138, 232–33Google Scholar for the Péguy cult. The Avenue George V in occupied Paris became the Avenue Edouard-Drumont. See Ory, Pascal, La France Allemande. Panics du collabomtionisme francais (1933–1945) (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1977), p. 69.Google Scholar Ory's Les Collaborateurs, 1940–1945 provides many examples of the enthusiasm for Peguy and Drumont among the collaborators. Robert Brassilach described a bonfire rally in occupied Paris during which a text of Bernanos was read alongside those of Nietzsche and Celine, and just after a eulogy to a national-socialist I'honnête. “Lettre a un soldat de la classe 60,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Club de I'honnete homme, 1963-1966), V: 601.Google Scholar

27. Le chemin de la Croix des Ames (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 201Google Scholar (hereafter parenthetically cited in the text as Che).

28. Lettre aux Anglais (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), p. 54.Google Scholar

29. The Ecole Nationale des Cadres, created in the Château Bayard, near Uriage, in the mountains above Grenoble in the early months of the Vichy regime as an authoritarian alternative to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, might be seen as an effort to embody Bernanos's dream. And this antiliberal and antirepublican elite school, led by dashing young Catholic royalist cavalry officer, Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac, with the help of several young Catholic intellectuals became, like Bernanos himself, always more contemptuous of the baseness at Vichy and supportive of the noncommunist resistance against the occupant. See Hellman, John, “Maritain, Simon, and Vichy's elites schools” in Freedom in the Modem World. Mortimer Adler, Jacques Maritain, and Yves Simon (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), pp. 165–80.Google Scholar

30. The substance and extent of Maritain's private reservations during the war about de Gaulle's abrogation of personal power to himself without having obtained a democratic mandate for Free French political authority from the French people will be revealed with the forthcoming publication of the Jacques Maritain-Yves Simon correspondence.

31. José Antonia Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, son of Miguel Primo de Rivera, dictator under Alfonso XIII (1923–1930).