CHAPTER 10
If in the final analysis Blanchot’s participation in the world of journals was limited, it was because he had a daily responsibility: writing the foreign policy column for the Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires, a daily paper founded in 1789, whose glory days were those of Benjamin Constant and Chateaubriand, and which more recently had come to be presented as “the newspaper of the élite”—the employers and the intellectual élite of the far right.1 Having probably joined the paper in the summer of 1931, at the latest in March 1932, he was soon named its leader-writer and editor-in-chief, and for almost ten years he would spend most of his time in these roles.2 Thus he became one of the successors of André Chaumeix, who had been in charge of editing at the beginning of the century and who retained a strong but contested influence on editorial policy.3 The work, which he enjoyed, involved both writing editorials and acting as editor: formatting, modifications, corrections. Blanchot would have this role until 1940; then, after a hiatus of several months, he would write a literary column throughout the war years, which would only come to an end a few days before the final closure of a paper that had existed for 150 years.
The Journal des Débats, with its archaic format and makeup, its ever-smaller distribution (perhaps 25,000 copies in 1939, or 10,000 according to other estimates), and its readership mostly comprising subscribers, nonetheless remained a landmark in the journalistic landscape, thanks to the content of its political and cultural columns (it was seen more as a source of commentary than as a dispenser of information). The quality of its links with the political, diplomatic, and commercial world also contributed to its status. Owing to successive flotations on the stock market in the 1920s and the early 1930s, the majority of its shares were held by François de Wendel, a steel magnate, president of the Comité des Forges (a heavy-industry body), a director of the Banque de France, and a senator. He shaped editorial policy via the intermediary of Étienne de Nalèche, whom he had installed as editor. From this period on, links would form between the far right and the conservative editorial policy of a newspaper, which, in the early days of the Third Republic, had been linked to the center-left, and which had therefore been clearly radicalized, notably in terms of domestic policy.
The paper consisted of six pages, each of which had six columns, with no large headline on page one. On the first page began the main articles of each section. The second, in addition to serialized novels, was dedicated to international current affairs; the third, to domestic matters, to faits divers and to reviews of the press; the fourth page dealt with cultural events and sport; the fifth with the stock exchange; the last page was given over to advertisements and to breaking news. Occasionally a literary column would be provided by André Bellessort, a Maurrassian critic, a teacher in the hypokhâgne program (an elite university preparatory program) at the famous Parisian lycée Louis-le-Grand (a few years earlier he had taught Maulnier, Bardèche, Brasillach, Beaufret; following in Chaumeix’s footsteps, he would enter the Académie Française a few years later).
Blanchot the anticapitalist wrote on a daily basis for the “two hundred families,” without always diluting his position.4 These articles, and especially the editorials, were most often anonymous. Here we shall concentrate on signed texts, signed that is either with his name or with the initials Bl. or M. B. (even if the latter can lead to some confusion, given that a journalist by the name of Marcel Bastier also contributed to the newspaper at the time). The twelve signed articles, of 1931–33, all appeared on page one.
Blanchot’s anticommunism and Germanophobia in this period ingratiated him with a readership that fully shared these sentiments. They would provide the dominant tone for the Journal des Débats. This can be seen in his piece of September 17, 1933, reporting on a speech by Von Neurath, six months after Hitler had seized power in Germany and a month before Nazi Germany’s first major decision on foreign policy (the withdrawal from the League of Nations). Blanchot saw the full danger of the latter and made an appeal to national vigilance:
The puerile daydreams of Geneva are, in September 1933, in the era of Hitler’s Germany, incredibly absurd. . . . Europe today is unable to control Hitler and the Nazis. . . . Germany is completing the rebuilding of its army and is preparing to overwhelm Europe. . . . As soon as it has an instrument for its strength, it will use it to get its way through diplomacy, if that is enough, or if necessary through violence. . . . Mr. Von Neurath has declared that Germany wants peace. But he meant pan-Germanic peace, the peace that today Germany is trying to impose on Austria and the Saarland, before turning to other countries.5
Blanchot called for an end to all policies of disarmament, and events soon showed his judgment to have been correct, as on October 14, five days before leaving the League of Nations, Germany left the negotiations on disarmament. The article did not say whether re-armament was required for prevention, intimidation, or war. But its author called for, and for several years would continue to call for, a realist policy in a fragmenting Europe. Blanchot foresaw lucidly what would happen, but not without a fear that would continue to make itself felt for some time.6
Communist opportunism was just as unbearable for him, with its willingness to benefit from anti-Hitler feeling.7 He thought it wholly illegitimate to “appeal to the most violent and unjust regime to protest against the violence and injustice of the new Germany.” Materialists were said to have no knowledge of humankind’s spiritual needs, as well as to have atrociously persecuted intellectuals in Russia; “Communists and Marxists have lost any right to speak in the name of free thought and true culture.” This violent discrediting would influence Blanchot’s anticommunism at least until the period of L’Insurgé, when it would influence his position on the Spanish Civil War.
It was precisely because the Communists had no right to set themselves up as the “guardians of culture” that Blanchot called for intellectuals to commit themselves to “public affairs” (la chose publique).8 He also took an interest in teaching, which he thought should not become too liberal, judging it unfortunate to “give up on a cultural ideal whose benefits we have felt for centuries”; he criticized the internationalist vision of history, brushed clean of jingoistic sentiment, that was contained in French school textbooks, quoting the view of a Belgian historian: “reading your history books, one would think they had been written by the enemies of France.”9 The articles often concentrated on cultural issues, attempting to look at the national, traditional, and spiritual dimensions whose absence explained the contemporary crisis, even including its economic aspects; for “all men have their part in the same spiritual nature.”10
In 1932, Blanchot began drafting Thomas the Obscure. Due to the pressure of events and of his journalistic duties, he had to interrupt it the following year, when he joined the newspaper Le Rempart (The Rampart), publishing an article—sometimes two—almost every day, on domestic or most often on international policy.11 He seems to have written almost every night: while the Journal des Débats was an evening paper, Le Rempart appeared in the morning, and Blanchot’s pieces were often found on the page named “Tonight’s Latest News.” We must picture him during the day reporting on a protest by striking workers, and then in the evening, working with the excitement of a looming deadline.12 At this early stage, journalistic writing was thus also that of the night, of a night whipped up by the day’s passions, unrelated to the dispossession of “the other night,” whose density came later for Blanchot, leading toward “the space of literature.”13
Launched on April 22, 1933, Le Rempart appeared seven times weekly. It was a journal providing general information, most often eight pages long, containing columns on politics, economics, finance, sport, fashion, and the arts. It also included a review of the national press, written by Jean-Pierre Maxence, and the rarer feature of a rich review of the international press, which often occupied a whole page. A caricature on page 1 was followed by others throughout the paper. The underlying idea (esprit) of the paper was clear from its title, but also from the formulation that appeared below it: “Independent from power and from all powers: this is the motto of this free newspaper.” It could also be seen from the banners that on both sides blared such often-changing statements as “Our only aim . . . to tell the truth. Our only method . . . our readers’ confidence and support,” or, “If you are aware of a wrongdoing, and if elsewhere you are turned away, come to us: you will see that we do not use the word ‘independence’ in vain.” Responding to a reader’s question regarding the meaning of its title, the newspaper defined itself as “a citadel in which the rights of France will be defended without mercy and without respite. A fortress in which we will fight the enemies of the Fatherland, whatever garb they adopt.”14 Le Rempart started out by seeking a large cohort of writers, featuring on the first page texts by figures such as Bernus, Bourget, Giono, Halévy, Massis, Maurois, and Montherlant. The aim was to have 50,000 subscribers and 150,000 readers.
Le Rempart was founded and managed by Paul Lévy, a rich and intriguing man, an important figure in the press who was often embroiled in libel cases. This associate of the nationalist deputy Georges Mandel, who had been close to Clemenceau, drew together a group of about fifteen permanent staff, “of different ages and opinions,” to whom he gave “total, complete freedom.”15 With Blanchot, Maxence, and Maulnier in key posts, the “young right” nonetheless had an important role. The newspaper’s sympathies were clearly patriotic, antidemocratic, antiparliamentarian, anticapitalist, anti-internationalist, anti-Hitler and, as the latter’s seizure of power unfolded, more and more anticommunist and national-revolutionary.
Condemning the ravages of Hitler’s policies, and notably anti-Semitic persecution, would be one of the major concerns of Le Rempart, which would often dedicate its front page to this end, in order to “inform the few Frenchmen who still retain any illusions regarding Hitler, who take this madman for a defender of social order.” As early as that spring, some headlines condemned “Hitler’s anti-Semitism,” which led to “the boycotting of men of science and of letters,” or the “show of strength” by which “Hitler is having the leaders of socialist trades unions arrested and is laying his hands on workers’ banks.” The “Freudian side of Hitler” was evoked sarcastically, given the desire to “free Germany from its inferiority complex,” but sarcasm is not able to hide the article’s unease: “10,000 youngsters marched bearing torches in Odin’s valley and, gathered around the bonfires of Walpurgis night, celebrated spring and the reawakening of the fatherland.” Another day saw the publication of a photograph of the Jewish cemetery of Tubnitz, which had been desecrated by the Nazis (swastikas painted on tombs); a caricature condemned the burning of books. An article on the swastika provided information about its origins and showed how it reversed the symbolism of the Hindu swastika, becoming a “fetish of destruction and death.” In June and July, Paul Lévy signed a series of editorials entitled “the Hitler plague.” When Goering set up martial law in July, “Terror in Hitlerland” was the headline for the front page.
Blanchot himself condemned the first persecutions of the Jews, the first work camps, the setting up of the Terror. A false mysticism and a false materialism came together to serve pan-Germanism, according to his analysis.
All Hitler’s actions have been inspired by obvious demagogy. The barbarous persecutions of the Jews only express the desire to provide pan-Germanism with some sort of testimony, with a sign of its essential status, of its incomparable origin. They never had any particular political goal. They helped satisfy the powers of instinct, the frenzy of passions unleashed by revolution. (134)
By the acts of violence, by the overspilling of the powers of instinct, he moved a whole people and caused it to rise up for a grandiose undertaking. By persecuting the Jews and struggling stubbornly against Marxist internationalism, he tried to give back to that people a feeling of its unique origins and, in truth, the religion of Germany. (148–149)
This government, “which is trying to base itself on mysticism” (134), gave a theatrical setting to the May Day celebrations that, while appearing to celebrate the strength of the proletariat, “gives expression to the revenge of collective forces, to unreserved devotion to an ideal of grandeur and domination” (135). What was truly barbaric about Hitler was not so much the recourse to violence as the betrayal of the social and national revolution through cultural mystification. Hitler’s pan-Germanism was perverting nationalism with the idea of racial imperialism. German youth “has been brought up to worship the military civilization at the heart of the Prussian spirit” (143). The work camps became a method for mobilization, “which used new constraints to link each individual to the State” (142). The Third Reich was thus said to be preparing “the onset of a civilization in which, in a socialized society, the individual person and the spirit will be stripped of their essential freedoms” (143). A few months later, this was in no further doubt: The government of the Reich “has claimed the power to decide on life and death” for Germans (290).
“Germany has already armed itself. It has reformed its military forces. It has reformed the warrior spirit of a people that now awaits its destiny in battle” (148). Blanchot therefore called for a firm and aggressive foreign policy: “As Le Rempart demanded yesterday, as it will not tire of demanding, because at stake is the destiny of an entire youth and an entire civilization, and the only way of ensuring peace is to stay one step ahead of the threat, and to disarm it: Mayence must be reoccupied” (150).
Blanchot would repeat this call on two or three occasions, but not to the point of becoming an out-and-out hawk. He demanded that Daladier not meet Hitler, since “if we find it natural to work with Germany and with Hitler . . . then we will only have . . . to wait for the moment when we will be forced to choose between slavery and war” (201–202).
However, we know that the policy of neither Paris nor Geneva (where the League of Nations was based) would respond to these demands or principles, and this would only reinforce Blanchot’s antidemocratic and anti-internationalist feeling. France was no longer France: it was entirely given over to Geneva.
For ten years, the Quai d’Orsay [the French foreign ministry] has been one of the places in France where France itself has been most poorly served and where the least French thought has taken place. . . . France, silenced by a government that is not worthy of it and that is betraying it, continues not to show what it is capable of, namely of rising up and facing up to events. It only seems able to submit and to capitulate. (116–118)
The demand for national strength overrode even the idea of democratic equity. Versailles was a bad treaty, only viable if one brought it to life (Blanchot quoted Clemenceau’s statement that the treaty could be whatever governments made of it), because it was based on the mistakes of “Rousseauist and Wilsonian ideology.” “Without reason, it mixed morality and politics. It founded an entire balance of power on the debatable values of law and justice” (237). After all, “one of democracy’s main mistakes is to have slandered strength.” Thus Blanchot was able to paradoxically condemn “the criminal conceptions of disarmament, the absurd pacifist philosophy” (162). When three or four years later he would come to accept these ideas that he had originally judged to be absurd, it would not be due to any change of deep-seated convictions, but due to a sense of resignation and the necessity of adapting to the new situation, which saw Hitler in a position of power and demanded that the army be given time to revise its strategies. The pacifism of 1936–1937 would be a coherent development from the antipacifism of 1933, because the strategic reasons for pacifism were quite different (even if the room for maneuver would seem very small), as were the military implications (even if fatalists would still be arguing for capitulation).
Therefore, the contingent nature of these judgments was not hiding any element of Blanchot’s profound political beliefs. His critique of democracy was not linked to more than what he saw as an epoch of decadence and corruption. His attack focused on the very conception of the Republican regime (this would never be clearer than in the era of Le Rempart). “Disorder lies not only in the immorality of the men who lead us and who are betraying us, but in the madness of institutions” (172–173). Blanchot preferred order to “Republican freedoms, which we disdain” (224). He condemned “the inhuman Declaration of the Rights of man,” which defined the freedom of the citizen as being “freed of historical antecedents, liberated from his natural bonds.” With Maurras, he sniped at “the veritable anarchy of all liberal thought” (151). He was passionate about the taxpayers’ strike, supported business owners, disdained bureaucrats. He fostered hatred for almost all varieties of right-wing politics and saw the left everywhere, in the army, in education, in power. He condemned “the slavery of the government of cartels”: “a minister supported by the socialists only has the freedom to act against himself and against the public interest that he represents” (136). He tended to make communism into the essence of democracy, its predictable outcome.
The “necessary revolution” (218) against the dominance of capital and the socialist state takeover of both France’s material and spiritual heritage would thus be a national revolution. “The spiritual revolution, the national revolution is no longer an image or a symbol. The events of each day bring it closer, make it more necessary. And little by little, they are showing us what it will be like: tough, bloody, unjust, and our last chance at safety” (salut, 220).16
Blanchot stated that he could feel a revolutionary ferment among the people. On several occasions he called for insurrection against the state. He called—already here, as he would do later in a very different way—for insubordination.
When the State has become incapable of working in favor of the State and in favor of the nation, the public good can only be defended by resisting the public authorities. The general interest can be saved by private initiative. Every man has the power to condemn unjust laws and to remove himself from their jurisdiction. Thus do revolutions begin.
We are in a revolution (211).
This was a revolution in favor of order, one that was to take place via revolutionary disorder. Blanchot would confirm this a few years later: “The return to virtue . . . is simply the product of the impurities of violence.”17 The revolution’s lack of method, of strategy, of practical thinking nonetheless revealed the weakness of such appeals, and thereby allowed the most dangerous of fatalisms to gain ground. “In this regard, the adventures of Italy and Germany are full of promise. While they do not show us the kind of revolution that we should hope and prepare for, they do show us that we can hope for a revolution that will save us” (267).
The distinction here is clear, all the more so given that other articles, and the general spirit of the newspaper, avoided any confusion; however, the absence of any manifesto demonstrated a lack of responsibility that already condemned this discourse to a dangerous drifting, condemned its language to aporia, and condemned the face it put on to a kind of dismay.
The adventure of Le Rempart ended in late 1933. Blanchot did not abandon Paul Lévy, being reunited with him at Aux Écoutes, a weekly paper whose “backbone” he would come to represent, according to its director.18 Probably as early as 1934, and at the latest in 1937, he became its editor-in-chief.19 This role was in addition to the editing of the Journal des Débats: Blanchot was still projecting the image of a journalist with competing priorities, using up time and energy that he could have devoted to writing. After the war, he would never hold an alienating day job, with its rhythms and pressures, for so long.
Founded in 1918, Aux Écoutes was a satirical, even scandalous journal (its cover each week being entirely covered by a caricature), but also included a finance section aimed at those who dabbled on the stock market. It contained numerous advertising banners. Its circulation, of perhaps more than 100,000 copies, and its distribution were without comparison to those of the Journal des Débats. Blanchot probably earned a lot more money there.
Its articles, which were short critical or satirical paragraphs interspersed with advertisements or illustrations, were rarely signed. Here and there a few book reviews bore the initials “Bl,” and these can be attributed without any doubt to Blanchot due to their tone, style, and choice of subjects, which were similar to those in the other journals he was writing for at the time. An entire page of criticism on Sartre’s Nausea, published in 1938, is a precious exception to this rule of anonymity.
It is difficult to know precisely how Blanchot reacted to the events that must have moved him at this time, and whose intensity, pressure, and dangerous quality caused numerous dissidents to abandon their doctrinal beliefs. The “demonstrations” of February 6, 1934, certainly marked him, so much so that for him they represented the only significant domestic event of the 1930s, at least before the election of the popular front. Two years later he would call them “magnificent in their ardor, their devotion and their sublime actions,” stating that “their strength and generosity are incalculable.”20 We can imagine his disgust on learning that Action Française had decided not to act, fearful of carnage, of deaths and injuries. This could only have pushed him closer to Maulnier, Maxence, and Francis who, caught up in the enthusiasm, had drafted in a few weeks Demain la France, in which they took February 6 as “the first manifestation of the nation’s energy” and called for insurrection. It must also have brought him closer to Paul Lévy, who on February 8 declared, “The national Revolution is under way: nothing can stop it now, France wishes to become French again, France wishes to be governed by men who are deserving of the task, it wishes to retain its status as a power of the very first rank.”21
Nonetheless, Blanchot continued to be most exercised by Hitler’s rise to power. In November 1933, he learnt from the press that the Führer had been to visit Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.22 A year later, Levinas published in Esprit his text “Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.”23 He gave a philosophical approach to the analyses published the previous year by Blanchot in Le Rempart. This is to say that he radicalized what had been purely journalistic positions, without recourse to any strategic or diplomatic reading. He raised the level of debate on the topic of an organic conception of society, “on the basis of shared blood,” or on that of a biological conception of mankind in which “the essence of the spirit consists entirely in its situatedness within the body.” Refusing any social ideology that plunged into “the mysterious voices of the blood, the appeals made by inheritance and the past,” Levinas brought to bear the order of an ethical thinking. In short, he was dissatisfied with any reflection that was limited to political contingency: “It is not this or that dogma, whether democracy, parliamentarianism, dictatorial regime or politics of religion, that is at stake. It is the very humanity of mankind.”
In this same month of November 1934, the Revue du Vingtième Siècle officially took up where the Revue du Siècle had left off eight months earlier. Still edited by Jean de Fabrègues, with Maxence and Maulnier as his right-hand men, the journal in fact presented itself as the successor to Réaction: it took the latter’s contributors and its program, albeit abridged and articulated in a few words in the first issue with three guiding principles: against democratism, against capitalist materialism, for returning his spiritual (which was to say Christian) destiny to humankind. It remained close to the Count of Paris.
It was to be a short-lived affair. The sixth issue, of May–June 1935, warned of the journal’s financial difficulties; it would also be the last issue.
In February and May 1935, Blanchot contributed to the journal with two pieces on foreign policy. His aggressive positioning on the approach to be taken toward Germany had not changed. Indeed, it could only harden, after Hitler’s decision of March 16 to abandon the treaty of Versailles and to reestablish compulsory military service, taking the number of divisions in the German army to thirty-six. Blanchot attacked the “malfunctioning of French diplomacy,” condemning the latter’s constant contradictions, its apparent firmness and its underlying negligence of responsibility, the desire, based in fear, not to confront pan-German imperialism, and the refuge taken in an international system whose lack of means condemned it to ineffectiveness and ridicule.24