it only succeeded to replacing one regime by another, if it did not effect a
transformation of the moral conscience of man.
Reworking a formula first devised by Jacques Maritain, primacy was to be given
to the spiritual over the material. This quite definitely did not entail an endorse-
ment of bourgeois idealism (Mounier spoke of an ‘anaemic idealism’) or indeed of a
bogus reactionary spiritualism, but was rather to be grounded upon what Mounier
referred to as ‘the concrete’ or ‘living individual’. It was for this reason that Mounier
defined the doctrine of Esprit as that of ‘personalism’. ‘A personalist civilization’,
Mounier explained,
is a civilization whose structures and intelligence are directed towards enabling all those
individuals who comprise it to become persons. Natural collectivities are there recog-
nized as realities, as possessing their own purpose, as being different from the sum of
individual interests and as being superior to the interests of the individual. Nevertheless
they have as their ultimate goal that of placing each person in a condition where they
257 Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-Conformistes des années trente (1969).
258 See Michel Winock, Histoire Politique de la Revue ‘Esprit’ 1930–1950 (1975) and Loubet del
Bayle, Les Non-Conformistes, 121–57.
482
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
can live as a person, where they can enjoy the maximum of initiative, of responsibility,
and of spiritual life.259
Aligned to this would be a ‘personalist democracy’ which, as Mounier was at pains
to point out, would be far removed from ‘a liberal and parliamentary democracy’
resting upon ‘the postulate of popular sovereignty’ and ‘the myth of the will of the
people’.260
Such views fed into a powerful sense of dissatisfaction with the democratic institu-
tions of what Albert Thibaudet termed the ‘République des professeurs’.261 Contempt
for politicians, for political parties, and for politics in general now became almost the
norm as government after government failed to meet the challenges posed by France’s
domestic and international problems. This malaise received graphic illustration with
the right-wing riots of 6 February 1934 in Paris, interpreted by many as an abortive
fascist coup. The intellectuals of the left responded with the creation of the Comité
de vigilance des intellectuelles antifascistes, whilst the electorate voted into power the
left-wing Popular Front government in 1936. The extreme right, now with Jewish
premier Léon Blum as one of their principal targets and scapegoats––‘Rather Hitler
than Blum’ read the famous slogan––only intensified their campaign against what
they saw as a corrupt and degenerate political regime. This ill-tempered frame of
mind was captured brilliantly in Robert Brasillach’s autobiographical account, Notre
avant-guerre, published in 1941 and dated ‘6 February Year VII. National Revolu-
tion’.262 For Brasillach, the Popular Front was nothing less than a ‘revolution of
intellectuals’ leading to ‘the ruin of the State’ and the ‘vulgarization of immorality’.
Never had stupidity, pedantry, and mediocrity been more in evidence. Out of this
‘extraordinary bedlam’ the workers had become convinced that they had no need to
work and that everything would be provided by the government. Hope for France,
he therefore believed, lay in abandoning ‘the promises of liberalism, the equality of
man, and the will of the people’ and in following the example of Nazi Germany.
There, he wrote, we have seen the ‘birth of fascist man’, young, virile, proud of ‘his
race and of his nation’. Here was the basis of an intellectual collaboration that followed
the fall of France in 1940263 and which, in Brasillach’s own case, led to his execution
for treason in 1945.
There is a question mark over how extensive such collaboration was.264 Jeannine
Verdès-Leroux, for example, has argued that there were ‘few true writers ready
to declare themselves as collaborators’.265 Those that did, she believes, were mostly
second-rate and there is no evidence to suggest that writers were queuing up to
be invited to the Institut allemand in Paris. Others would disagree, pointing to the
259 ‘Manifeste au service du personnalisme’, in Œuvres de Mounier (1961), i. 523.
260 Ibid. 619.
261 Albert Thibaudet, La République des professeurs (1927).
262 Robert Brasillach, Notre avant-guerre (1941).
263 See Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford, 2003). See also the
classic text by Marc Bloch, L’Étrange Défaite (1946).
264 See Albrecht Betz and Stefan Martens (eds.), Les Intellectuels et l’Occupation 1940–1944:
Collaborer, partir, résister (2004).
265 Refus et violences: Politique et littérature à l’extrême droite des années trente aux retombées de la
Libération (1996), 216.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
483
examples of Drieu la Rochelle, Henry de Montherlant, and Lucien Rebatet as
evidence of widespread collaboration. What is undoubtedly true is that the world of
wartime intellectual collaboration was constituted by a curious hotchpotch of
convinced fascists (of one sort or another),266 pacifists, defeatists, anti-Semites,
anti-Communists, outright opportunists, and, later, anti-Gaullists. What is also
clear is that those who were prepared to cast themselves as the ideologues of the
National Revolution267 instituted by Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime268 were drawn
from both the right and the left and that they were prepared to call upon a very
diverse set of sources as guides to the intellectual character and inspiration of the
New Europe. In 1942, for example, the writer Alfred Fabre-Luce published an
Anthologie de la Nouvelle Europe.269 In addition to readings taken from Hitler,
Mussolini, Gobineau, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and others of a similar hue, he
also selected texts from Renan, Georges Sorel, Charles Péguy, Paul Nizan, specifi-
cally arguing in his preface that ‘Proudhon, Michelet, Quinet, sons of 89 and active
participants in 1848, had already treated national socialist themes: respect for force,
a counter-religion, the cult of the family and of the homeland.’270
It was arguably the monarchist doctrines of Action Française and of its principal
theoretician, Charles Maurras, rather than the temptations of fascism, which received
the greatest interest from those eager to save something from the wreckage of
humiliating defeat. For Maurras, the defeat of 1940 amounted to ‘a divine surprise’.
Despite his anti-Germanism, he had no hesitation in calling for unconditional
support of Marshal Pétain and the Vichy regime. Writing in La Seule France, he
sought to blame France’s defeat upon disunity and to protect the armed forces from
any blame, arguing that ‘the government of parties is the symbol of our divisions’. ‘In
France’, he proclaimed, ‘the Republic is the reign of the Foreigner.’271 Accordingly,
the restoration of both the State and the nation would require putting an end to ‘the
enormous power and monstrous influence exercised in France by people of a foreign
birth and
culture’. Maurras therefore supported the anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic
legislation associated with the National Revolution, defended measures to strengthen
the family, advocated educational reform designed to give greater influence to the
Church, called for an end to democratic liberties, and promoted a series of industrial
measures intended to forge a community of interests between workers and owners.
Yet, as the abject failure (not to mention corruption and political infighting) of
Vichy’s political programme revealed, Maurras’s own conception of France, of the
‘pays réel’, no longer had any significant purchase upon the real world. The clock
could not be turned back to pre-1789. Ironically, Maurras himself was a perfect
illustration of the problem, for his (as we might recall) was a Catholicism without
faith. He was an unbeliever.
266 See Philippe Burrin, La Dérive fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery, 1933–1945 (1986).
267 See Philippe Burrin, ‘The Ideology of the National Revolution’, in Edward J. Arnold (ed.), The
Development of the Radical Right in France (Houndmills, 2000), 135–52.
268 See Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years 1940–1944 (Oxford, 2001).
269 Alfred Fabre-Luce, Anthologie de la nouvelle Europe (1942).
270 Ibid., pp. ii–iii. See Daniel Lindenberg, Les Années souterraines 1937–1947 (1990).
271 La Seule France (1941), 136.
484
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
There are two further aspects of intellectual collaboration meriting our brief
attention. The first concerns attitudes towards the French Revolution. It should
come as no surprise that pro-Vichy and pro-Nazi sympathizers were, in the main,
hostile to the Revolution of 1789. In their view, the Revolution had been illegiti-
mate, bequeathing a political regime characterized by chronic instability and a
society in the grip of moral decadence. In a special edition of the review Je suis
partout marking the 150th anniversary of the Revolution, for example, Robert
Brasillach wrote that there was no reason to believe that the leaders of the Revolu-
tion had been any less corrupt than the politicians of the Third Republic, whilst
right-wing historian Pierre Gaxotte defined the Revolution as ‘an exercise in
expropriation and extermination’. The other contributions were similar in tone
and strident in their denunciation of a Revolution led by Jews and Freemasons.
Nevertheless, for the aspiring Fascist there was much to admire in the cold and
calculating leadership of Robespierre and the dictatorial power exercised by the
Jacobins. Viewed from this perspective, their hostility to the bourgeois, liberal state,
their preoccupation with the nation and national defence, and their emphasis on
their own discipline and purity (not to mention, their ruthless dispatch of their
enemies) offered an eighteenth-century prefiguration of national-socialism. For the
tormented souls dreaming of a new order, the Revolution of Year II, Robespierre’s
Revolution, was a form of totalitarianism avant la lettre.272
The second aspect worthy of comment was a virulent form of self-hatred. In large
part this focused upon France, and what was taken to be her decadence, her
bourgeois culture, her rationalism, her materialism, her supine surrender, her vanity
and arrogance, her abominable political leaders. ‘France’, Drieu la Rochelle con-
fided to his diary in 1942, ‘is finished, a second or perhaps even a third-rate
country.’273 She had become, novelist Roger Peyrefitte wrote, ‘a civilization of
shop girls’.274 To an extent these sentiments were fuelled by snobbery and by what
amounted to an aristocratic contempt for the masses, but they also were fired by a
form of self-loathing that went beyond a detestation of Jews and of pederasts. Again
Drieu la Rochelle pointed the way. His writings displayed hatred for others and
self-disgust in equal measure. However, particular opprobrium was heaped upon
the intellectual as a physically weak, effeminate, impotent, and sick individual, the
very embodiment of a lack of vitality and virility. Faced with his own imperfection
as a disembodied subhuman, therefore, Drieu la Rochelle idealized the man of
action and longed for a world of youth, vigour, life, honour, and heroism. With his
realization that collaboration had failed, he descended into self-pitying pessimism.
In 1944 he refused all offers of escape from France and committed suicide in March
of the following year.275
272 See George L. Mosse, ‘Fascism and the French Revolution’, Journal of Contemporary History, 24
(1989), 5–26, and Shlomo Sand, ‘Les Représentations de la Révolution dans l’imaginaire historique du
fascisme français’, Mil Neuf Cent, 9 (1991), 29–48.
273 Journal 1939–1945 (1992), 318.
274 Quoted in Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 211.
275 See Pascal Balmand, ‘Anti-Intellectualism in French Political Culture’, in Jeremy Jennings (ed.),
Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France (Houndmills, 1993), 165–9. See also Pascal Ory,
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
485
One writer who was immune from such spiritual impoverishment was Simone
Weil.276 Born in 1909 of Jewish ancestry, Weil was educated at the prestigious
Lycée Henri IV in Paris and at the École Nationale Supérieure, where she studied
philosophy. Upon graduation, the naturally rebellious Weil took up a teaching
post in the provincial town of Le Puy and (somewhat uneasily) managed to
combine her professional duties with militant trade unionism as well as writing
for both La Révolution prolétarienne, edited by Pierre Monatte, and Boris Souvar-
ine’s La Critique sociale.277 Never an admirer of the French Communist Party or of
orthodox Marxism, she set about the writing of Oppression et liberté and did so in
the firm conviction that we were living in an age ‘without a future’.278
Since 1789, Weil argued, each new generation had placed its hopes in revolution
but such hopes could no longer be sustained. Weil based this claim upon a critique
of the Soviet Union––Lenin and the Bolsheviks, in her view, had succeeded only
in creating a new form of oppression imposed upon the proletariat by a state
bureaucracy and a privileged intellectual caste––but, more fundamentally, and
contrary to the views of Marx, she believed that the capitalist system had not
‘developed within itself the material conditions required for a regime of liberty
and equality’.279 Rather, Weil was convinced that the division, specialization, and
mechanization of labour typical of modern production methods fashioned the
possibility of a permanent enslavement of the workers and not their free association.
Never, Weil wrote, has the individual been so completely delivered up to a ‘blind
collectivity’. Never had the ‘social machine’ worked more efficiently at ‘breaking
hearts and crushing spirits’280 Such a bleak vision provided few grounds for
optimism, but Weil was adamant that the ‘most fully human civilization’ would
place the dignity of ‘manual labour’ at its centre and as its highest value. The best
that we could do in these circumstances, Weil wrote, was to ‘strive to introduce a
little play into the cogs of the machi
ne that crushes us’.281
It was after the completion of Oppression et liberté in the autumn of 1934 that
Weil resigned as a teacher and began working as a machine operative in a factory.
This painful experience only confirmed her fatalism. The same was true of the
Popular Front. Despite her initial enthusiasm and sense of joy, the strikes and
factory occupations of the summer of 1936 served to convince her further that a
radical social transformation was not possible. Nevertheless, with the outbreak of
the civil war in Spain, Weil made her way to Barcelona to join the anarchists where,
like many a volunteer, she proved to be more of a hindrance than a help. What
followed was a period of profound reflection and her conversion to a deeply
spiritual Christianity.
L’Anarchisme de droite ou du mépris considéré comme une morale (1985) and François Richard,
L’Anarchisme de droite dans la littérature contemporaine (1988).
276 See Mary G. Dietz, Between the Human and the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil
(Totowa, NJ, 1988).
277 See Weil, Œuvres complètes, II/1. L’Engagement syndical (1927–juillet 1934) (1988).
278 Oppression et liberté (1955), 58.
279 Ibid. 63.
280 Ibid. 142.
281 Ibid. 158.
486
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
In the few years that were to remain to her––Weil died in Ashford, Kent, on
23 August 1943 at the age of 34––a preoccupation with the divine became ever
more present in her thoughts and her writings but the realities of politics––most
notably, the rise of Nazism and the fall of France in 1940––could not be avoided.
Living in Marseilles, Weil left for New York in May 1942 and arrived in London in
December of the same year. She there joined the Free French and, with her health
in rapid decline, wrote a long and unfinished manuscript entitled ‘L’Enracine-
ment’.282 Subtitled ‘Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind’, it was
explicitly intended as a contribution to the debates about what form of government
and society was required in post-liberation France. To say the least, Weil’s views did
not chime with those of many of her exiled compatriots.
The manuscript itself was divided into three sections. The first explored our
Revolution and the Republic Page 102
