Neo-Traditionalist Fantasies: Colonialism, Modernism and Fascism in Greater France 1870-1962
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
NEO-TRADITIONALIST FANTASIES: COLONIALISM, MODERNISM AND FASCISM IN GREATER FRANCE 1870-1962 by Christopher Alexander MacKenzie Churchill A thesis submitted to the Department of History In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen‘s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (April 2010) Copyright ©Christopher Alexander MacKenzie Churchill, 2010 ABSTRACT Neo-traditionalism was a classicist and colonialist project for regenerating the nation, inaugurated by French avant-garde intellectuals in the fin-de-siècle. Most were formerly Symbolists. They wanted to regenerate a dissolute French population employing new fantasies of identity which would overcome the fragmentation of French culture in the era of modern imperialism. The neo- traditionalist world-view was an alchemy of conflicting cultural concerns which defined the era. These intellectuals hoped that, according to their specific re- arrangement of these concerns, they would redefine and regenerate France itself. Neo-traditionalism was an aesthetic-political project which was conservative and revolutionary, colonial and metropolitan, traditional and avant-garde. This dissertation is a history of this specific set of ideas and strategies which occupies an uneasy position at the intersection of several conventional historical topics: modernism, fascism, and colonialism. Neo-traditionalism was none of these per se, and yet touched upon all of these topics. This is not a history of France quarantined from its overseas territories, but a history of France that includes colonial Algeria as it was seen by most French contemporaries: an integral and legal part of territorial France. This study also focuses on the lives of two neo-traditionalist intellectuals, Louis Bertrand and Albert Camus, whose works helped define and redefine these shared ideas over time, as they moved across the colonial threshold between France and Algeria, and as they sought to ii redefine each society in the image of the other. Bertrand was the founder, almost sui generis, of the conventions of settler literature in the colony. He was also one of the most pro-Nazi French intellectual s of the twentieth century. Camus still remains the most celebrated writer of that settler literature, as well as being almost equally as certain the most famous anti-fascist French intellectual of the twentieth century. There is much that distinguishes their lives and work from one another, but there is also a great deal that they share. One was fascist, the other was anti-fascist. But they shared particular visions of society that are only understood in exploring the intellectual subcultures which shaped their world- view on either side of the Mediterranean: a neo-traditionalist world-view. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis was written with the assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to express my gratitude to at least a few of the too many people who have helped me with advice, suggestions or enlightening conversation as this project evolved: Nedjma Abdelfettah-Lalmi, Amar Acheraïou, Rosa Barker, Marc-Olivier Baruch, Chris Bongie, Mireille Calle- Gruber, Jessica Dionne, Gordon Dueck, David Fancy, Nick Hardy, Nolan Heie, Melissa Houghtaling, Adnan Husain, William Irvine, Andrew Jainchill, Milen Jissov, Tiffany Jones, Jonathan Judaken, Samuel Kalman, Anthony La Vopa, Dana Olwan, Frank Pearce, Ariel Salzmann, Todd Shepard, Robert Shenton, Tim Smith, Andrew Stevens, Sylvie Thénault, Travis Tomchuck, Ahmed Yusuf, and Molly. Of course, I would not have written this at all without the inspiration of my grandmother Hazel and the MacKenzies of Scotsburn, my mother Elaine and step-father John, the memory of my father Jonathan, my siblings Erika, Kirsten, Amalie, David, and George, and my nephew Tyler and my niece Breanna. I would finally like to offer particular gratitude to a few people: Athena Elafros is my partner and dearest friend and this dissertation has been thought out and written in constant discussion with her. Students in the classes I taught while writing this thesis have provoked my thoughts, frustrated my prejudices, and forced me to think more clearly than I might have otherwise. iv In many of the most important ways, the administrative staff in the History Department at Queen‘s University really made this thesis possible. I have been particularly encouraged by Yvonne Place, Cindy Fehr and Cathy Dickinson who I know is also a good songwriter. Finally, Harold Mah has been a real inspiration. My interest in Algerian and French history was first provoked in his graduate seminar. This dissertation, as should be obvious, derives many of its approaches and techniques from his inimitable style of cultural history. I cannot write as clearly or elegantly, but I regard his essays and books, with a very few others, as beacons out of the obscurity of my own half-finished thoughts. v This dissertation is dedicated to Hazel MacKenzie and Robert Tittler. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract p. ii Acknowledgements p. iv Chapter 1 Introduction p. 1 Chapter 2 Neo-Traditionalism in Greater France: Tourist Routes and Classical Roots p. 36 Chapter 3 From Classicism to Colonialism: Louis Bertrand‘s Algeria p. 147 Chapter 4 From Colonialism to Fascism: Louis Bertrand‘s France p. 220 Chapter 5 Neo-Traditionalism in Colonial Algeria: Political Reaction and Cultural Regeneration p. 292 Chapter 6 The Dramaturgy of Terror: Albert Camus‘s Artaudian Debt p. 322 Chapter 7 The Lyricism of Destitution: Albert Camus‘s Barrèssian Debt p. 367 Chapter 8 Neo-Traditionalist Legacies: From the Fin-de-Siècle to the New Millennium p. 418 Bibliography p. 434 vii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Introduction to Neo-Traditionalism: Classicism, Colonialism and the Occulted Origins of French Modernity. ―The intensity and perseverance of the neo-classical movement is one of the two or three most remarkable phenomena of the Belle Époque. Yet it is also one of the most forgotten, and one of the least comprehensible, for the reading public today.‖ -Bonner Mitchell, Les Manifestes Littéraires de la Belle Époque ―Bertrand‘s image of the classical renaissance was a tree with its roots digging as deep as its branches could spread. Like Maurras (or Barrès), he imagined the artist as bearer of the collective memories and ideals of his race.‖ -Margaret Werth, The Joy of Life: The Idyllic in French Art, Circa 1900 In fin-de-siècle France a cultural project for regenerating the nation was inaugurated by avant-garde intellectuals. They, like many of their generation, were concerned with the nation‘s decadence and seeming decline. This is the history of an influential group of neo-classicist modernists who sought, by virtue of their art, to re-root French people into authentic traditions they thought had been obliterated by the disorientation, dislocation, and decadence of modernity. This project went by different names according to several movements, yet an affinity and shared world-view was nonetheless acknowledged between them. Maurice Denis called this world-view ‗neo-traditionalism‘. Gabriel Hanotaux and others called it a renaissance latine. Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, Alfred de Tarde and Henri Massis called it a renaissance française. Still others like Charles Maurras 1 called it a renaissance classique or the doctrine of traditionalisme.1 Members of a number of avant-garde movements, including the Symbolists, the École Romane and the Naturistes, began defining themselves as neo-classicist in aesthetic sensibility, nationalist in politics, and with an emphasis on the Mediterranean as the privileged site for both France‘s classical and colonial self-definition. 1 A note on terminology: neo-traditionalism is used to describe not a single movement, but a palpable shift in avant-garde movements in the 1890s, in which many expressed an increasingly ‗revanchiste‘ preoccupation with tradition, classicism and conquest. According to Alphonse Roche in 1937: ―The use of the term traditionalism […] did not become current in literary criticism until the last thirty years. We find it used by Henry Bérenger in an article in 1897, by Maurras in 1900, and by Bourget in 1901. But it is not until 1904 and 1914 that ‗traditionalism‘ and ‗traditionalist‘, in the political, social and literary sense, became more broadly used. Critics like Albert Thibaudet, Victor Giraud and many others have often dicussed this issue and used this term. We find it in many manuals of literary history published since the war.‖ Alphonse Roche, ―Les Idées Traditionalistes en France de Rivarol à Charles Maurras,‖ in Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. 21 (The University of Illinois at Urbana, 1937), p. 13. The works of Agathon (nom de plume of a young Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde) examined the fin-de-siècle ‗generation‘ of French students who championed tradition, action, and classicism against the decadent society around them, in the universities and cities. See Agathon, Les Jeunes gens d‟aujourd‟hui (1913); and Agathon, L‟Esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne (1911); See also Pierre Lasserre, Le Romantisme français (Mercure de France, 1907). Massis, Tarde and Lasserre were intellectuals writing nearer the First World War than 1890, by which time many of the neo-classicists of the 1890s had been drawn into the orbit of Charles Maurras, but there were many permutations of these themes in the 1890s, and expressed in many movements. But because of Maurras‘s extraordinary success in redefining French neo-classicism, by the early twentieth