PART III
I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
CHAPTER 19
In April 1940, Thierry Maulnier, still a contributor to L’Action Française and La Revue Universelle, together with Kléber Haedens and Marie-Thérèse Barrelet (the friend of the publisher Edmond Buchet), launched the Revue Française des Idées et des Oeuvres.1 The first issue, which would be the only issue, contained texts by Drieu, Fraigneau, Giraudoux, and a column by Maurice Blanchot.2
The collective positions of the journal were aligned with nationalist and Germanophobic traditionalism compatible with Blanchot’s ideas of the time.3 An anonymous editorial denounced the German cult of “brute force”: “the return to brutal origins, the appeal to blood and soil,” as well as the disdain for cultural refinement that was so opposed to French culture: “the very existence of France is a centuries-long form of protest against the senseless theories which necessarily make force brutal and civilization a naturally dissolute phenomenon.” The editorial concluded that “France is the daughter less of blood and soil than of order and style.”
Nonetheless, the ideas invariably espoused by the editorial collective must be understood in relation to external events: the radicalization of the extremes, the expectation of real conflict with Germany. Drieu fulminated against “Thierry’s journal,” predicting that it would fail “because it will not take a clear position.” The relatively nuanced line adopted by Maulnier, which was the helpless reflection of the dead ends into which he had run, indeed tolerated literary viewpoints that were slightly more open in their modernity, and would cause Drieu to state that “Kléber Haedens and Blanchot are infected with surrealism.”4 Although Blanchot’s article began with a devastating denunciation of the Surrealist critique of the Chants de Maldoror, it still addressed Lautréamont, and indeed did so in very laudatory terms (“this hidden attempt at a sort of pure book”), in a way that could only irritate Drieu, and be seen by him as a provocation. Choosing a writer born in Uruguay and venerated by the surrealists, the author of an apparently immoral and disordered book, albeit one with perfect syntactical poise (like Sade’s), an aesthetic that he compared to those of Giraudoux and Jean-Paul, Blanchot speaks to the national value defined by the editorial’s conclusion, and finds an outlet for it in this breezy, cunning, knowingly left-field viewpoint.
On May 10, 1940, the German invasion began. The editorial of the Journal des Débats vigorously demanded that the government reject the offer of an armistice. Several of these texts were censored. On May 19, Reynaud called Pétain into the government. On June 3, Paris was bombed (Blanchot would allude to this in Death Sentence). On June 8, the front page of issue 1150 of Aux écoutes carried a caricature of a bull with Hitler’s head and a body covered in tattoos of swastikas about to leap on to an impassive bull-fighter dressed as a French soldier; the caption compared “the onrushing Beast” to “French calm.” But on June 10, the government was moved to Tours, and on June 13, at the Château de Cangé, Pétain addressed its ministers: “In my eyes, armistice is the condition on which the continuity of eternal France rests.” For him, only an armistice could allow the government to remain in the country to protect the French from the occupier and from the communist putsch that was still feared. Blanchot was despairing: on June 15 the Germans, who were making progress across the country, were at Chalon-sur-Saône, and on June 16, as Reynaud was resigning and Pétain was forming a government in Bordeaux and immediately requesting an armistice, Levinas was taken prisoner in Rennes. On June 18, Blanchot was in Bordeaux, where he heard General de Gaulle make his appeal. On June 22, the armistice with Germany was signed at Rethondes. A dividing line separated France into two zones. On July 10, the Senate and the National Assembly, which had come together in Vichy, voted with an overwhelming majority to confer full powers on Pétain, who was to draw up a new constitution. The two chambers were dissolved. It was the suicide of the Third Republic. Blanchot was watching from the gallery: he felt that he had reached the end. This event shocked him, more than February 6 and more than Munich. It left him stupefied, not knowing what to do.5 Such a betrayal of the nation, and of the idea of culture that it represented, would definitively—if there were still any doubt—set him against any moderation in political matters. It became clear to him that all moderation was compromise, and that all right-wing extremism walked the path toward collaboration. It was also by a process of elimination that Blanchot would move closer to the far left as the only tenable solution, even for the idea of the nation.
He tried, unsuccessfully, to convince those in charge of the Journal des Débats to suspend all publication. But since June 15 the newspaper had withdrawn to Clermont-Ferrand and had been receiving financial support from the government, on condition of its unwavering support and the submission of copy to the censor. On July 7, after an interruption of eighteen days due to the Germans’ entry into Clermont, the newspaper reappeared bearing a column named “After the Disaster,” probably thought up and written by Blanchot. Its author was against constitutional reform, but the death of the Third Republic on July 10 put an end to the column. The tone of the editorials, which in the spring had constantly been calling for a “war government,” in summer became more and more reactionary and, from November 1940 on, concerned with the triumphs of Marshal Pétain. At this point Blanchot gave up on any political responsibility at the Journal des Débats.6 Without his editorialist’s job, he was soon without financial resources. For while he had taken on the editorship of Aux écoutes, which in mid-June had also withdrawn to Clermont (indeed to the same street) and reappeared on July 13, Paul Lévy’s weekly was banned by Laval on August 17.
If in Blanchot’s “transformation of convictions” there was one political rupture that was more decisive than any other, it is perhaps that of summer 1940. It was perhaps experienced as an additional death, less passionate but just as depressing as the previous one(s), at a stroke erasing the apprenticeships, certainties, and sometimes violent engagements of many years, even a lifetime. Blanchot was thirty-three years old. This death carried off what once passed as friendship but that would often seem to have been nothing but acquaintance. It created a commitment to future, headless communities without father figures, a commitment to an infinite gift (which would be that of life, of the texts, of the récits, the very possibility of the récits as the possibility of staying alive). A true kernel of effacement, this death created a commitment not to return to the same place, but to return only in ghostly form. Friendship would be born from this spectral reserve. Dedicating a copy of Thomas the Obscure to Xavier de Lignac in September 1941, Blanchot would quote Gérard de Nerval: “Voices said: the Universe is to be found in night.”7
Nonetheless, Blanchot would retain some links with Maulnier, who continued to contribute to L’Action Française, proposed a programmatic doctrine for the national revolution in the Revue Universelle, prowled the lobbies in Vichy, and wrote anonymous articles for Candide. From April 1941 until the last days of the war, Blanchot would provide a regular literary column to the Journal des Débats, a paper that was ever more in favor of the Vichy government and especially Pétain. On June 5, 1941, he even put his name to an article attacking the state’s abandonment of the new, middle-class poor and therefore calling for the reinstatement of private assistance, invoking the difficulties of the war, the aftereffects of the winter, the undernourishment of children and adolescents, the exhausted devotion of the volunteers, the difficulties of maintaining their dignity for those who had fallen into poverty.8 At no point during the war would he publish in any of the clandestine journals. In 1941 Thomas the Obscure would appear with Gallimard. With Aminadab in 1942 and Faux pas in 1943, he published three books in occupied France with a regularity mirroring that of his columns, and without ever having any trouble with the German censors. The question of the political morality of these publications cannot be avoided. But neither can one omit to add that in the same era and in the same place, publications appeared by Bataille, Sartre, Leiris, and Camus.
There was no radicalism on Blanchot’s part at this stage. Was there any for anyone? We have to try to imagine the fear of the occupier, the collapse in ideals, the strategies of deception; we have to imagine some who increasingly failed to understand and others who saw a duty to speak out, all of whom fell into their own traps. Mauriac, Valéry, Gide, Giraudoux, and Montherlant adopted positions that were no closer to being “commendable.” The Maurrassians, their “dissidents,” those close to them from Esprit and Ordre Nouveau, mostly rallied to Pétain. But there were numerous divisions. Je Suis Partout expressed contempt for Thierry Maulnier. Blanchot became a target for the extreme right-wing press.
Blanchot’s silence henceforth bore the clear weight of responsibility, a concern for decency, an awareness of the impropriety of public statements and of the despair of the epoch. Lacking any external mark of heroism, this silence could not conceal the collapse of the aristocratic ideal. Dedicating Aminadab in September 1942, once again to Xavier de Lignac, Blanchot now quoted Nietzsche: “It is difficult to live among men, because it is difficult to keep silent.”
This silence also bore the trace of effective discretion, of solitary courage, of a dignity rediscovered through devotion. In November 1940, Blanchot and his sister saved Paul Lévy, warning him that he was about to be arrested.9 When the decrees of October 18, 1940, and of April 26, 1941, appeared, which barred Jews from all public professions, Blanchot—at the Journal des Débats and then at Jeune France—must have been aware of them. Perhaps he saw them as history’s way of spurring him into action. The climate had become so unsavory that Jewish families were beginning to fear for their children. After Levinas’s arrest, his daughter Simone was sent to the Normandy countryside to stay with friends of Blanchot and his father.10 However, these friends, perturbed by the strange looks that the young girl was attracting, brought her back to Paris. One day in 1941, Blanchot offered to lend his apartment for a few weeks to Levinas’s wife Raïssa and her daughter. He then found them a hiding place near to Orléans, in the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul convent, which also assisted in the Resistance, to which would go first the daughter (probably in 1941, at the latest in early 1942) and then the mother (in August 1943). A professional journalist who was always in the loop, Blanchot had discreet links to the Resistance. Denise Rollin and Claude Roy confirm this engagement.11 He met René Char as early as 1940. Any real opposition to the occupying forces would only begin two or three years later. In the region of Quain, Blanchot would drive cars in order to help clandestine figures cross the border.12
Speaking much later of the Resistance, in a distinctly personal tone, Blanchot would see it as an apprenticeship for intellectuals in the “dark struggles that make war and revolution resemble each other”; they also learned how hard it was to “sustain a just moral correlation between means and ends.”13 This was an all the more personal reading given that these were questions that he had been asking himself for years, without finding any resolution except first through rhetoric, then through silence. The “national-revolutionary” utopia found the Resistance to be a way of balancing, in the struggle for refusal, between the nationalism he was shortly to abandon and the communism he was moving toward.
If “there can be absolute hostility only for a brother,” perhaps Blanchot experienced some difficulty in entering a fratricidal rivalry, in confirming that the clan had split apart.14 We can understand his subsequent refusal of all legacies and his reluctance to overly politicize refusal. Clear abstention from the political led to a paradoxical neutrality, an active effacement, standing above a breach created by an engaged withdrawal. Henceforth friendship had no site.