Conspiracies and Secret Societies in Interwar French Literature Jason W. Earle Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Columbia University 2013 © 2013 Jason W. Earle All rights reserved ABSTRACT Conspiracies and Secret Societies in Interwar French Literature Jason W. Earle This dissertation analyzes the central place that representations of secret societies and conspiracies occupied in literature in France in between the two World Wars, reappearing in various guises in works by authors across aesthetic and ideological traditions. My examination situates these literary representations within their political and social context, demonstrating that the instability of the French Third Republic created an atmosphere that contributed to a proliferation of conspiracy theories targeting every faction imaginable, from right-wing and leftist groups to Freemasons, Jesuits, and Jews. Serving as both the subject of fictional works and the object of critical study, the figure of the secret society allowed authors to position themselves and their texts within this context of uncertainty and suspicion. The representation of conspiracies and secret societies permitted authors as varied as Jules Romains, André Malraux, Céline, and Paul Nizan to participate in and shape a widespread reevaluation of the political order by critiquing a dysfunctional system of parliamentary democracy and highlighting the cultural tensions of the day. My thesis does not just read these texts as reflections of larger political and cultural debates; it argues that secret societies and conspiracies served a specific literary function, particularly concerning the evolution of the avant-garde and the ideological novel in the interwar years. The invocation of these groups provided a charged metaphor for defining literary techniques and concerns of audience, genre, and language; and their representation helped shape the form and practice of interwar literature. I show, ultimately, how conspiracies and secret societies in literature participated in a larger discourse of fear and suspicion that heralded the decline of the avant-garde, the rise of the committed novel, and a growing literary interest in politics, ethnology, and sociology. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ………...………………………………….….………ii Introduction……………………………………………….………………1 1. Conspiracy Theories and Histories……………………………...……… 33 2. Franc-maçons ou faux-monnayeurs: Sexual Secret Societies in Proust and Gide…………………..….…….62 3. The Secret and the Manifesto: From Surrealism to Contre-Attaque…………..………………………. 97 4. Techniques of Fraternity: Romains, Malraux, and the Seduction of the Secret Society………...137 5. The Secret Society and Its Enemies: Aragon, Nizan, and Communist Writing in the 1930s…………….....183 6. Fascism’s Scapegoats: Drieu, Céline, and the Fear of the Jewish Plot……………………….225 7. The Conspiracy of Science: The Projects of the Collège de Sociologie………………...…………269 Conclusion……………………………………………………………..313 Bibliography…………………………………………………………...328 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Elisabeth Ladenson, who has provided years of advice, support and encouragement for this project, from its conception to its final draft. I thank Antoine Compagnon for his suggestions and helpful advice in the drafting of several chapters. I would also like to express my gratitude to the other members of my dissertation committee: Phil Watts, Denis Hollier, and Bruce Robbins. Several chapters of this thesis benefitted from suggestions from members of the Columbia French Department’s workshop for works-in-progress; I would like to thank my colleagues for their helpful suggestions. Special thanks are also due to Vincent Debaene, who provided encouragement and constructive comments in the early stages of the dissertation. I owe many thanks to the support of the staff of the Department of French and Romance Philology, especially Benita Dace, Meritza Moss, and Isabelle Chagnon; as well as to my former colleagues at Bard and Barnard Colleges. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to my family and to my friends both inside and outside of academia for all of their encouragement, patience, and diversion over the years. Above all, my parents, Mary and Doug Earle, have been a constant source of reassurance and support; this thesis would have been impossible without their encouragement, inspiration, and enthusiasm. I thank them with much love and admiration. ii 1 INTRODUCTION In 1922 the novelist and journalist Henri Béraud had the rare honor of being awarded the Prix Goncourt in recognition of not one but two novels published over the course of the previous year: Martyre de l’obèse and Vitriol de lune. Of the two, Martyre de l’obèse has proven to be the more enduring, its tale of the amorous difficulties of the titular overweight main character anticipating modern-day obsessions with weight. Vitriol de lune is a novel of an entirely different sort: a historical tale set in the reign of Louis XV, the book recounts in sensationalistic and suspenseful fashion the failed assassination attempt on the king by the servant Damiens, whose execution made him the last victim by drawing and quartering in France, a death that would go on to garner much historical notoriety, eventually serving as the centerpiece of Michel Foucault’s introduction to Surveiller et punir. While the novel certainly dwells in lurid and anatomical detail on the execution, the main drama concerns the preparation and aftermath of the assassination attempt, portrayed in the text as a plot orchestrated by the Jesuits. Operating out of a secret residence, a group of Jesuits hopes that the attack on the king will be just the first step of what one of their members refers to as the “grand dessein que l’Eglise poursuit… un dessein secret.”1 Their goal is to turn France away from the moral decline into which Louis’s reign has led it, but the head cleric makes it clear that their goal does not stop with the French court: “Le P. Etapier assignait à la Société de Jésus de plus amples destinées; il la voyait, dans l’avenir, maîtresse du monde, dominant les trônes, tenant tête, s’il le fallait, au Vatican!” (65). In his fantasy of overturning royal houses and catholicizing England, Etapier hopes to finally fulfill “le vieux rêve jésuite, transporté, par un tour adroit, au plan d’une politique guerrière” (66). Thus the attack on the king becomes the opening salvo in a vast, far-reaching conspiracy: an all-out war against the social order in the hopes of establishing the Jesuits as the rulers of the world. 1 Henri Béraud, Vitriol de lune (Paris: Albin Michel, 1921), 53. Subsequent citations given parenthetically. 2 Despite the stamp of approval of the Prix Goncourt, literary history has not been particularly kind to Vitriol de lune, perhaps in part due to its conventionality. While attentive to historical detail, particularly with regard to its depiction of 18th-century Lyon, the novel uses, without much innovation, many of the standard devices of the adventure novel: mysterious figures, shadowy spaces, and surprising, often violent, turns of fortune.2 Even its conspiratorial tone bears the heavy-handed weight of its predecessors, with Béraud reproducing the portrait of the rapacious and calculating Jesuit that Eugène Sue had perfected in his 1844 bestseller Le Juif errant. But Vitriol de lune and Béraud himself have also suffered a poor fate due to its author’s activities in the years following its publication. In addition to his career as a novelist, Béraud gained a certain amount of fame in France as a journalist, often offering cultural and travel reports for a variety of newspapers. Around the time of the Goncourt honor, he made his mark by polemicizing against the Nouvelle revue française and its founder, André Gide: in a series of interviews in Les Nouvelles littéraires in 1923, he accused protestant, homosexual, and bourgeois writers at the NRF of being an elitist, snobbish closed circle. Through a populist and anti-intellectual rhetoric, Béraud attacked his literary peers on moral and aesthetic grounds, arguing that their continued success was a denigration of “le génie français.”3 By early 1934 this polemical side to Béraud’s writing became expressly political, when he assumed a new position at the newspaper Gringoire, abandoning his role as reporter-at-large for that of editorialist. There he presided until 1943, regularly publishing editorials that took on an increasingly hostile attitude toward the perceived enemies of France, namely England, 2 Frédéric Monier remarks that “il n’y a rien, dans cette fiction, que de très conventionnel (dans tous les sens du terme).” See his Complot dans la République: Stratégies du secret de Boulanger à la Cagoule (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), 147. 3 See Gisèle Sapiro’s La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 127-132. 3 communists, and Jews.4 Béraud’s broadsides against Jews would recall the conspiratorial narrative at work in Vitriol de lune, with his attacks against a vast Jewish-communist plot trafficking in the same conspiratorial conventions as his anti-Jesuit critique several years prior. In editorials against Léon Blum’s Popular Front government, Béraud published lists of names of Jewish politicians, implying that the socialist prime minister was the face of a revolutionary Jewish plot against France. The French defeat at the hands of Nazi invaders only strengthened Béraud’s conspiratorial worldview: in a 1941 editorial, the military collapse of France is laid at the feet of “le rôle anglo-maçonnique de la haute juiverie internationale.”5 By the time of the Liberation, Béraud’s polemics in favor of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers had sealed his fate: he was arrested and convicted for intelligence with the enemy, resulting in a death sentence that was ultimately commuted to life imprisonment. Despite his relative lack of aesthetic originality and literary stature, Henri Béraud’s case represents in many ways the strange history of the conspiracy theory in literature over the interwar period in France.