Precision and Soul

Robert Michel - Propeller-Wind - 1918–1919

John Covert - Ex Act - 1919

Pierre Fix-Masseau - Exactitude - 1929

Symmetries

Peter Behrens - Der Kuß - 1898

Constantin Brâncuși - Le Baiser -1907

Franz Wilhelm Seiwert - Der Kuß - 1933

Surfaces

Francisco Goya - Il Cane interrato nella rena - 1823

Félix Vallotton - La loge de théâtre, le monsieur et la dame - 1909

Alvar Cawén - Flyygelin ääressä - 1925

Tendrils

William Blake - The Book of Thel - 1789

Hermann Obrist - Der Peitschenhieb - 1895

Henri Matisse - Venetian chair and fruits - 1942
Currently on show at the Royal Academy of Arts

Robert Wohl - The Generation of 1914 - 1979

“Let us imagine a rising generation with this fearless gaze, with this heroic attraction to what is monstrous, let us imagine the bold stride of these dragon-slayers, the proud recklessness with which they turn their backs on all the enfeebled doctrines of scientific optimism so that they may 'live resolutely', wholly and fully;” 

Friedrich Nietzsche, “An attempt at self-criticism” in The Birth of Tragedy, ed. R. Geuss & R. Speirs, Cambridge, 2007, 50

Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914, Harvard University Press, 1979, 307

The book opens with a warning: “Historical generations are not born; they are made” (Wohl, 5) and this conception, quite different from the essentially essentialist one of the men he sets out to study, will inform much of Wohl's analysis. Beyond the personal but widespread experience of the strife between “Fathers and Sons” there is indeed no ground to delimitate a generation from another, as births like ages constitute an uninterrupted continuum. This was not, however, the opinion of a significant number of intellectuals born between the second half of the XIXth century and the first quarter of the XXth, which Wohl sets out to enumerate and study with varying degrees of attention, organizing them in five countries (France, Germany, England, Spain and Italy) all of which will be examined in sufficient depth thanks to the author’s command of both their respective languages and of the relevant literature and cultural history.
Although the concept of generation existed in various forms from the dawn of times (from the goliarderies at the dawn of the XIIth century to the association of youth and revolution going back at least to the 1789, with Joseph Bara and Joseph Viala for example) Wohl largely skips such a historical overview to address directly its modernist –and political– appropriation: its forefathers would be Maurice Barres and Miguel de Unamuno, heralding from the 1880s the coming of the generations to know themselves. 

Antanas Sutkus - Blind Pioneer - 1962

Wohl begins with France and more specifically with Agathon’s 1912 survey of French students, biased as is well known¹, but also highly symptomatic of French nationalism at the time: following a dubious methodology, the authors painted the picture of a youth (18 to 25) embracing wholeheartedly a voluntarist and irrational nationalism, longing desperately for the soon to come baptism of fire. Generational politics was to be largely dominated (as Wohl shows throughout this volume) by conceptions either emphasizing the role of the intellectual (Gramsci) or straightforwardly elitist (Papini, Ortega), and the analytical use of the notion of “generation” was rooted, since the XIXth century, in literary history and criticism². Thus it comes as little surprise to find the concept was mobilized by a largely literary contingent of intellectuals to claim their right to re-shape society. 

But not all generational theories were literary, impressionistic or openly biased: many of the more fleshed out theories which Wohl examines arose from the sociological quarter, as eager for autonomous periodization as artists were to slice up the Zeitgeist. Indeed already one half of Agathon was a sociologist, and after following the trajectory of the generational idea through many important writers (Montherlant, Barbusse, etc. some of whom will find the war an endearing experience, but all of whom will be disappointed with its inability to bring about radical change), the author turns to the sociologist Mentré.
First conceived as coherent and united organism by the early generationalists, proponents of a kind of naturalized party politics, the generation turned out to be rather fissiparous: In France as elsewhere, already at the end of the war it appeared clearly to many of them that the experience of the trenches was not that of one generation, but of two. In fact as time passes, the latest generation seem always to subdivide, as the continuously adjourned revolution had to be blamed onto the scapegoat of the past: this elean turtle was not to be overtaken, and this discovery (as in Massis’ meeting with Montherlant) could prove painful, leading some of those who found their youth suddenly questioned to find that new generations, already, pointed towards nihilism (a place-holder, if there ever was one). Marinetti wrote “When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!”. In fact, as he and his age-group felt pushed out of the historical limelight, there was no shortage of bitterness.

Colonialism could seem like the designated pressure valve for the vitalist and imperialist impulses that constitute the subtext of much generationalism – however unlike in France (as with Psichari) or Italy (Papini), the reader is surprised when moving on to Germany to discover a very different picture, tinted, maybe, by a more romantic idealism and a centripetal Volkish tradition: the Jugendbewegung (Wandervogel and related) constitute a very early form of generationalism, and one directed more to teenagers than to the young adults courted by Agathon. Their secessionist utopianism was basked in that most peculiar mixture of Dionysian idealism and straight-laced biocentrism known as Lebensphilosophie, exemplified by Robert Musil under the traits of Meingast3. The resulting picture is of a somewhat less politicized movement, whether that should be read as epicurean and naturist, or as “third-positionist”, as when expressionist Pfemfert demanded “Be neither ‘radical’ in the sense of day-to-day politics nor ‘nationalist.’ Be young!” (45);

Alexander Rodchenko - Fizkul'turniks on parade in Red Square - 1937

via Charnel House

It is also in Germany however that Wohl finds one of his major case-studies: unlike the French Mentré, Mannheim was versed in Marxian thought and recognized that the generational flow was no long quiet river, but accelerated at the time of cultural or political upheavals. This was no doubt a first step towards understanding the construction of generations, but Mannheim stayed away from further questioning, leaving to classes their determination by material realities, and claiming, nebulously, for generations to have “values generated by the capacity of the human mind for new departures.”

England, often a late-comer to the field of cultural strife, might appear less puzzling than Germany and its Lebensphilosophie, but to a large extent we might ascribe this to the carefully preserved autonomy of its high culture where the generational debate was largely to take place: in other words, the undertones of social conflict were often muted by the limits imposed by literature –and poetry in particular– which favoured lyrical and introspective content to aesthetic-political theorizing.
And yet, it is there that arose the myth of the “lost generation,” to an extent synonymous with the titular “generation of 1914” in Anglophone scholarship. As somewhat of an apparté and using for once demographic data, Wohl takes the time to dispel this construction of a “generational tragedy” which seem to have largely been subsumed into the national “cult of the dead”.

Wohl’s account of Spain is centred on the figure of Ortega y Gasset, who showed more consistency in his dedication to the generational concept than he did to his progressive politics: we might regret that his thought take such a large proportion of the chapter, leaving little room for other exciting figures like Miguel de Unamuno, and none at all for South American nations which could have tied in with the French and Italian colonial experience, and probably constituted an important input for Iberic modernism (Vincente Huidobro for example) ; Ortega is nonetheless an interesting character, a moderate somewhat in the line of Prezzolini, and his vision of generation stand out as both highly articulated and “internal”, claiming none of that scientific neutrality common to Massis and Mannheim. His analysis outlines a particular use of the concept, where generationalism is used to retain the glitz of radicalism while in fact preaching parliamentary liberalism.

Konstantin Vasiliev - Parade - 1941

Last comes Italy, which Wohl surprisingly decides to open with the Papini of Un Uomo Finito: although the text does indulge in some powerful generational rhetoric, Papini seems to me too much of an individualist to constitute a convincing example: he was long dismissive of futurist modernolatry, and when he did reject the past he was careful not to pull any punches when it came to his contemporaries. His solipsistic “negation of the negation” left little room for his peers, and when he made some (as in his nationalistic writing) there certainly was no rejection of the past.
Similarly La Voce was careful not to run itself into a dead end, and its appeals for national renewal generally avoided the issue of generational conflict. Futurism certainly was listening more closely to its sirens, although with a pragmatism that its long life will make clear, and that is where the trace of Mussolini’s “cult of youth”4 might be followed. Whol did not have at his disposal when writing the rich culturalist historiography now available, thus we would be hard-pressed to blame him for overlooking many of its manifestations, although we might sometimes regret he is not more careful to dissociate “pure” generationalism from its mere influence on voluntarism, anti-academicism or vitalism. He offers us instead an examination of a very peculiar character, Omodeo, and a more predictable analysis of Gramsci’s generational thought. Both emphasize that, despite the relative discretion of pre-war generationalism, Italians across the political spectrum (liberals, Marxists, fascists…) identified together as a group, maybe more conceived of as “modernists” than as an age-group, and regrouped around common cultural icons like La Voce5.

As Wohl note in his conclusion (Wohl, 230) and develop throughout the text, generationalism is not politically exclusive: he finds among its exponents communists (Gramsci), socialists (Brooke), liberals (Ortega), conservatives (Massis), extreme nationalists (Junger) and fascists (Drieu) as well as a host of others like Montherlant or TS Lawrence, who seem apolitical, but whom one could find to gravitate around individualist-anarchism. He goes on to point out that, nonetheless, there is a widespread sense among those theorists of living in an interregnum (an epicentre of that “time out of joint” haunting the modernist consciousness) leading often to demands for radical change and discontinuity: illiberalism and revolutionary politics.

Furthermore we could add that as an “imaginary community”, the generation, much like the nation in its contemporary constructions, is conceived of as a new and unifying ideal, allowing for departure from the perceived democratic stalemate opposing right and left: in other words, the generational idea is a vector of syncretic politics “beyond left and right”. But whereas the nation largely emphasized historical continuity, the generational struggle, with its naturalization of the conflict between the past and the present/future, adds a revolutionary element, which in my opinion shed important light to the sometimes puzzling forms taken by nationalist ideologies between the wars.

Both nation and generation, despite those differences, were far from mutually exclusive. The very fact that the focus of attention was often the “generation of 1914” shows that the formation of the generation was hardly conceived as concurrent with that of the nation: although some lingering elements of internationalism can be spotted here and there (Wohl points out that the trench experience was often conceived as transcending national boundaries, and that some communists used generation to differentiate themselves from the socialist parties) the two communities live largely in symbiosis.

Emmanuel Evzerikhin - Memories of a Peaceful Time - Stalingrad - 1943

Wohl’s book is not only unique in his tackling eloquently a phenomenon that is central to much of XXth century history and has rarely been studied on its own or in such depth. It is also, on a more general level, a startling portrait of an epoch: I only wish he had explored a little more the relationship of Europe and Asia or Africa, while others will regret it does not seize upon the opportunity to contrast its cultural history with actual statistical and demographic analysis to which the subject might have lent itself well – however, the very constructionist framework announced by the author would have likely reduced any such insights to his own subjectivity. The book already bridges the divide between the “spontaneous sociology” of the artists and that of the actual professional sociologists, so it would no doubt have been perilous to add one more layer to the edifice.

In fact, if anything, Wohl’s book suffer from the symptoms of many of the books exploring radical ideologies of the interwar period (and many of the Belle Époque too) beyond the verified scope of institutional fascism: the very proliferation of small groups and ideologies, which have a lot in common but nonetheless turned out to oppose each others. Although fascism recycled, among other things, elements of generational politics, most of their proponents and theorists remained long aloof from the parties. Wohl does not provide us with a convincing delineation of “extreme nationalism” (Junger’s) from “fascism” (Drieu) which somewhat frustrates or blurs the otherwise great clarity of the book.
He seems aware of this issue, pointing out, first, that “the strange mixture of idealism and biological determinism on which the generational interpretation was based obscures our understanding of the major movements of the period” (Wohl, 237) and that his idea of a “neoconservative revolution” (Wohl, 232) is a contradiction in terms to be blamed not on him but on those writers of the “generation of 1914”. This is unsatisfactory inasmuch as the very same blame could easily be levelled against the fascists, and to this day the relationship between the “non-conformist right” nebula (Jungkonservativen, planism, etc., in which fascisms in their movement phases I find to belong) remain problematic. Some historians, Wohl among them, attempted to define those non-conformists as “fascism minus populism”, and those sympathetic to those movements have often added “and minus racism”, but even a cursory examination of those groups shows a reality much more complex. The continuity and overlaps between ideologies belonging to conflicting movements (say the Nazis and the Stahlhelm for example) is still perplexing historians, leading Roger Griffin to call upon analogies of “cultic milieu” and “rhizomatic” or “groupuscular right”6; To my knowledge however, those insights in the group dynamics of those movements are yet to be fleshed out.

Wohl concludes that the general sense of frustration emerging from retrospective examinations of the XXth century by members of his “generation of 1914” is born not from their failure to live up to this renovative task handed out by History (as Ortega would have it) but from the concrete impossibility for them to realize the ideals they had largely inherited: the very XIXth century materialist ideal they had planned to replace emerged victorious after the American intervention in WW2, and, we might add, all the more so since the Perestroika.
The post-war “cult of youth” (Beat, X, Y, etc.) described by John Davis7 as instrumental to the rise of consumer-capitalism is likely to be in part an American appropriation of the generational idea. How much, however, does our own ongoing crisis of representative politics owes to the inter-war crisis of democracy, and how much does our own “post-political” condition stems from their spreading of syncretic and generational ideologies, remains to be seen. 

1 - Philippe Bénéton, "La génération de 1912-1914 : image, mythe et réalité ?", Revue française de science politique, vol. 21, num. 5, 1971, 981-1009

2 - Marius Hentea, "The Problem of Literary Generations: Origins and Limitations", Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 50, num. 4, 2013, p. 567-588

3 - Robert Musil, L'homme sans qualité, tome premier, Points, 2011, 864.

4 - George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: toward a general theory of fascism, Fertig, 1999, 230.
5 - Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Facism, Harvard University Press, 1993, 352. 

6 - Roger Griffin, "From slime mould to rhizome: an introduction to the groupuscular right", Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 37, num. 1, 27-50.
7 - See John Davis, Youth and the condition of Britain: images of adolescent conflict, Althone Press, 1990, 259.

The Thickets of Long Ago

"Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past,"
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940

Eugene Corbin - French camouflage - 1914
via Complex

Mela Koehler - Wiener Werkstaette fashion illustration - 1910-4
via The Blue Lantern

Unknown artist - French camouflage prototypes - 1914

Everything that is New

"Everything that is new is good, beyond the new there is no health. Humanity endures only by renewing itself constantly, by killing with years its old age."

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Interrogations, 1917
quoted by Robert Wohl

Louis Lozowick - New York - 1925

Anton Stankowski - Geometrical Mural - 1928

Giacomo Balla - Compenetrazione Iridescente 13 - 1912-13

Coloured Crystallization

"A nation does not pick its flag at random. There would be much to say about this kind of coloured crystallization of the deepest instincts of a people."

Jean Bazaine, Comoedia, 30 January 1943,

Quoted in Michèle C. Cone, French Modernism, 192.

Otto Freundlich - Composition - 1935

Jules Olitski - Cleopatra Flesh - 1962

Pablo Echaurren - Waltfuturismo - 1995

Henri Barbusse, Under Fire, 1916

"This evening, more than ever, in this setting both marvelously calm and exciting, where, in a shelter from the violent emotions and excessive tension of the trenches, I feel breaking out again, in their native form, the impressions deposited in me by three years of war, the Front casts its spell on me. And I seek ardently the sacred line of heavings of the earth and explosions, the line of balloons which are winched down every evening with regret, one after another, like bizarre and extinct stars, then, the line of Verey lights which starts rising."

Teilhard de Chardin, La Nostagie du Front, 1917

translated here

Osvaldo Bot - Trench - 1933

Barbusse, Henri. 2014. Le Feu (journal d'une escouade)
Sayat: De Borée (Poche Classique)

I am generally very wary of patois, créole and other celebration of idiolectic regionalism, as it can be found in French naturalist and late-romantic fiction; There is no doubt a part a question of generation, and a part of ignorance too, but in my experience vernacular dialogues generally tend to make up for uneventful conversation with exotic terminology. So when I engaged the six hundred pages of Barbusse’s “Le Feu” to find that the narrator (pretty much the only character who could be expected to use anything but the language one addresses cattle with) was of the silent type, I kind of wished for d’Annunzio’s (the other extreme...) rather than Barbusse’s Fire. After about a hundred pages, if I am glad I have read the book in my native French (most of the dialogues would be lost on me if it were in English) I have grown very much accustomed to Barbusse’s perverse fascination for the illiterate.  

There are two themes that intersect in Barbusse’s project: the war and the commoners. His project is to write an account of the war as it was lived by the lower class. To a significant extent, and despite outstanding litterary qualities, they come into conflict:

The unending rigmarole of of provincial peasants and proles, despite Barbusse’s laudable efforts at giving them some specificity, start feeling like a litany about half-way through the book: food, booze, an inarticulate indignation and a naive idealization of life before the war comes back in their dialogues again and again, so much so that in fact the diversity of the characters dissolves into the portrayal of a unanimous mass of boorish victims. A couple of Deus ex Machina do discreetly stand out, the caporal Bertrand and the accountant, the first being the fair but distant voice of bourgeois leftism, the other the vessel for Barbusse to provide some hard facts and numbers about the war. 

Completely deprived of subjectivity by first the alienation of the working class, and second by that of life in the trenches, this reader found it difficult to empathize with those characters. 

Barbusse, instead, is found at his best in small epiphanic nuggets where the absurdity of trench-life is in its purest form, unmixed with social tropes: “Around the dead fluttered letters which, while they were deposited on the ground, had escaped from their pockets or their cartridge belts. On one of those little bits of all white paper, that flitted in the wind but which the mud englued, I read, leaning over slightly, the sentence: “My dear Henri, how beautiful was the weather on your name day !” The man lies on his belly; his back was cleaved from one hip to the other by a profound furrow; His head was half-turned; we see the empty eye, and on the temple, the cheek and the neck, a sort of green moss has grown. (…). And if we were to say something in front of this heap of annihilated creatures, we would say: “Poor guy!” (205-6)

This memorable outing of the narrator with his mate Poterloo, among the inhumane landscape where flesh and mud have melted into one choking mass, is a telling highlight of the author’s gruesome but poetic (in fact so gruesome it is poetic) attention to details : “We approached them slowly. They were layed tight against each others: each gesturing with arms and legs, a petrified movement, distinct in agony. Some show half-molded faces, the skin rusting, yellow dotted with black. Some have their face fully blackened, tarred, lips swollen and enormous: negro heads blown like balloons. 

Between two bodies, reaching out confusingly from one or the other, a cut-off wrist finished in a ball of filaments.

Others are shapeless larvae, sullied, were stick out some vague objects of equipment or shards of bone. Further away, a corpse has been moved in such a state that one has had, not to loose it on the way, to pile him up in some wire fencing then attached to both ends of a stake. Like this, rolled up in this iron hammock, he was carried and dropped here. One can distinguish neither the top nor the bottom in this body; in the pile that he makes, we can only recognize the gaping pocket of trousers. We can see an insect that exits and enters.“ (205)

Arthur Dove - Moon and Sea II - 1923

There is something hieratic and abstract, like a painting of Barnett Newman, in the apocalyptic experience Barbusse, like many of the war novelists, takes such pain to depict: visionary revelations of the absurdity of life and of the death of God, they fail to move the cast of characters the author assembled, shielded from abstraction, from all causes or aspirations by their earthly common-sense and their simplicity. 

This isolation seems often contrived by the author to emphasize the tragedy of common men sacrificed for ideals they have no grasp of. History has shown that nationalism was not then the vice of the middle class, as many on the left wished to see it, but a widespread -if suicidal- aspiration, down to the foot-soldier. Of course no one can claim that Barbusse does not depict his brigade as he saw it, closer and better than we might ever do, but we can wish for less angelism (“How happy was life before!”, 204, or “It’s when there is nothing left that we understand we were happy. Ah! How happy we were!”, 212) and more psychology: “Those are simple men that have been simplified further, and whose primordial drives only, out of necessity, can grow: survival instinct, egoism, hope to hold on for ever, joys of eating, drinking and sleeping.” (68)

Surely it has become a commonplace to compare Junger and Barbusse, but it feels even staler to claim they cannot be: the first world war, and the experience of the trenches, had something international, maybe even universal in the words of most of its chroniclers. 

Both Le Feu and Storm of Steel are emphatically direct and realist in their depiction, and are based on journals kept at the front. In a sense, despite a seemingly polar opposition between Junger’s enthusiastic Storm and Steel and Barbusse’s elegiac tone, both share a common stock of poetic image, as did a strikingly large number of trench writers: if the moral judgement on the events vary from one to the other, there is a remarkable consensus on moods and metaphors in depicting “la guerre suprême” (12). 

Indeed, the same mindset, which Barbusse sees both as alienation and innocence, is extremely close to that “liberated” mentality celebrated by Junger, as well as some future fascists (Ardengo Soffici for example) : 

“The soldiers of this war have, for all things, the philosophy of a child: they never look afar, nor around them, nor ahead. They think more or less day to day.” (74)

But Barbusse of course is a pacifist and a humanist – to him, no atavistic return to simple, primitive concern, can salvage those men: what the rightists are celebrating is to him the last stage of degeneration, that which outstrips the man from all its hope and dignity prior to its eventual physical elimination. At times Le Feu even reminded me of Arendt, in its emphasis on the de-humanizing character of war: physically so: "One stumbles upon reefs of crouching beings, curled up, bleeding and screaming, at the bottom." (346) - and mentally too: “I raise myself half-way as on a battle-field. I contemplate once more those creatures that rolled here one above the other among the regions and the events. I watch them all, wedged in the chasm of oblivion and inertia, at the brink of which some seem to cling, with their pitiable preoccupations, with their child-like instinct and their ignorance of slaves.” (257)

How come, sometimes the reader might wonder, are those men so broken, so crushed by the experience, while Barbusse himself retain enough distance, enough aloofness to write about it with such brio?

I suspect this tension is grounded in Barbusse’s frustrated attempt to align himself effectively with a the plebes he outlined too starkly - as if the writer Barbusse found himself unable to resist the poetic appeal of of the spectacle of technological warfare, that which his creations, unsullied by artistic aspiration, can remained aloof from. The sublimity of inhumane, monstruous experience of the Great War shows again and again in the book. 

“But that clutter of sodden corses 

On the sodden Belgian grass— 

That is a strange new beauty.”

Ford Maddox Ford, Antwerp, 1915

Down to the mystique experience, another locus communis of the modernist depiction of war, we find painted by both Junger and Barbusse. Compare: 

“I had felt Death’s hand once before, on the road at Mory – but this time his grip was firmer and more determined. As I came down heavily on the bottom of the trench, I was convinced it was all over. Strangely, that moment is one of the very few in my life of which I am able to say they were utterly happy. I understood, as in a flash of lightening, the true inner purpose and form of my life. I felt surprise and disbelief that it was to end there and then, but this surprise had something untroubled and almost merry about it. Then I heard the firing grow less, as if I were a stone sinking under the surface of some turbulent water. Where I was going, there was neither war nor enmity.” (Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel, Penguin books, p.281) 

“All of a sudden, a formidable explosion fell unto us. I was shaken down to my skull, a metallic resonance filled my head, a burning smell of sulfur penetrate my nostrils and suffocate me. The earth oppened in front of me. I felt raised above the ground and thrown to the side, folded, smoldered and half-blinded in this flash of thunder... Yet I remember very well: during this second where, instinctively, I sought, desperately, haggard, my brother in arms, I saw his body rose, standing, black, arms fully outstretched, and a flame instead of the head.” (230)

Otto Gustav Carlsund - Apocalyptic Landscape - 1933

In fact if the reader was to survey both works in search of a radical difference, he might be disappointed: despite Barbusse’s effort to ground his narrative in “the social experience” of war, with a selection of salt-of-the-earth dialogues rendered in colourful and inflected dialects, both authors remain invariably at a remove from the mass: if in Junger this is rooted in an (reconstructed) aristocratic ideology of cold virtus and sacrifice, in Barbusse it comes from both ethnographic remove and the fascination the author cannot hide in the face of a surreal and visionary experience, unfathomed by his squadmates, yet which he cannot help but share with his reader. 

To those soldiers around him he seems to love or want to love, the war is “merely” extra-ordinary, but to Barbusse and Junger, to the writer and his readers, the war is the brutal incursion of the unreal, of the fictional maybe, inside the most gritty real. The war seems to collapse the constitutive diegesis between the experience and its retelling, bringing the fact ever closer to the metaphor. This surreal collision of fact and fiction prompts in Junger lyrical outbursts and heroic (or absurd) deeds, whereas there seems to be a lingering sense of guilt in Barbusse’s chronicles.

To put it differently, by his very condition of writer or narrator, despite his best efforts, Barbusse has some of the same fascination many more enthusiastic authors have had in the morbid face of trench-war. 

To me there is no doubting that the high-water mark of Barbusse’s prose is to be found not in his sometimes contrived naturalistic depiction of military life, but in the poetic effusions of his description of modern warfare: the fabric of the real pushed in bulks through the shredder of war, falls in an abstract dump of mud and flesh, where gleams from to time, explosions, shrapnel and other machines. The result is surreal, or maybe subreal, the incursion of hell on earth. Apocalyptic visions are regular trope of WW1 depiction, and despite his best efforts to “secularize” his discourse, Barbusse cannot help but giving us some rather successful examples. On him, too, the front has cast 

its spell... 

“We leave. We are the two sole living spoiling this illusory and vaporous scene, this village strewed over the land, on which we step.” (213)

Avant-Garde Fascism - The mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France, 1909-1939

Mark Antliff starts his book with a rather in depth discussion of the current state of scholarly study of the generic fascism phenomenon. In a welcome recupitulation of the main actors and orientations in this subject he posit as his goal the incorporation of the Sternhell/Griffin “philosophical” take and a more pragmatic and economical take exemplified exemplified by Jacques Julliard of whom I have little to no experience.

Wheras this introduction in itself constitutes a valuable summary, it seems the focus will remain throughout most of the book on the idealistic aspects of the doctrines, which obviously for a volume treating of the links between art, modernism and the different avatars of fascism, seems unavoidable.

...

The meat of the book is essentially structured in four chapters, each covering a decade of the french fascist thought and it’s interconnection with the arts and design movements of that time, but also with the previous manifestations of the antiparlementarian politics, and in doing so tracing a complex set of genealogies, some connected and some independant.

George Sorel (1847-1922)

The first of those four periods concern Sorel himself and describe his evolution, seemingly crucial in it’s constant radicality and his opportunistic shifts in allegiance, prefiguring what seems to me the quintessentially composite nature of later fascisms. Assessing the real importance of Sorel’s thought in european fascisms must be a tricky exercise as must be the Strasserite legacy in germany or the corporatist in Italy but in the particular case of France Mark Antliff makes it clear that the movement between anarcho-syndicalism and royalist/neo-christian milieu, with their shared reaction against the bourgeois dreyfusards, constitute the turning point where the pre-existent reactionary ideology become infused with the revolutionnary leftist credentials.

Georges Seurat, The Eiffel Tower, 1889

The artists then associated with the movement range between late symbolists and neo-catholics. Wheras it is easy to see how symbolists shared Sorel’s fascination for the myth, the movement was also, as typically fin de sciecle, rather diverse in it’s political –and racial- expressions. When Sorel shifted towards the Action Francaise, he was introduced to the more refined mystique of the likes of Charles Peguy or Georges Seurat or Maurice Barres. Other than the stark nationalism and the christian mythology this is were, under the influence of Arts and Crafts maybe, we can trace the roots of corporatism.

...

We move on to examine George Valois and his french fascism, whose approach, of particular interest, makes a move towards a defining feature of the era, modernist “makroprojekt” and the tendancy towards fully planned, all encompassing, urbanism. In the tradition of utopias and phalansteres, we learn that the Citée Francaise has become a corner stone of the fully re-imagined society, reflects the classless and corporatist ideals of a french fascism borrowing as much from the Cercle Proudhon (the missing link between Sorel and later fascists) and the blossoming movement in Italy.

Plan Voisin by Le Corbusier, 1925

This chapter also examines the interesting relationship between Le Corbusier and the different fascist groups – with whom we can suppose he shared a certain sense of ambitious aesthetic, without agreeing of their some time populist synthesis. Reinforced concrete, as the defining feature of modernist architecture, was promoted alongside a rationalisation of space and construction, which in the industrial arena, under the guise of tailorism, was to pose the first contradiction with the corporatist and craft-oriented ideals of the previous generation.

...

The study of the third “generation”  is built around the character of Philippe Lamour whom crystallizes the cult of youth, not in the common form of the volkish fascination for the body and for sports, but in the glorification of the machinism. This one period is of particular interest on the level antisemitism: Also present from the root in Sorel and co. it seemed less central in the modernist strain like the one of Lamour, who welcomed Robert Aron and other right wing jewish thinkers. This same generation of fascist who seemed somewhat more focused on a politic of novelty, somewhat cosmopolite, would also be the ones contemporary to a fully blown third reich with whom french fascism always had ambiguous and often hostile relationships at the time.

Germaine Krull, Eiffel Tower, 1928

The defining feature Antliff identifies is an interesting manifestation of the cult of youth: generational warfare. In their concern with overcoming the class conflict that plays in favour of their communist rivals, the focus of the mythic opposition is transfered onto the opposition between the middle-aged “bourgeois” who never experienced the first world war, and a coalition between a dynamic youth and the veterans, spiritually rejuvanated by the experience of the war. The art popular in that third wave, in continuation with the modernist fascination of Valois, extended on other, more daring forms, in the persons of Germain Krull, Eisenstein, Man Ray or even Bunuel – Partly in reflection of it’s fascination for innovation and youth, under the aegis of Lamour fascism will seemingly find in this period it’s more cultural expression.

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The fourth and final wave of fascists Mark Antliff examines is at the dawn of the second world war: the particular case of the war time fascism and of the collaborationist agenda are left for an other book. Thierry Maulnier look back at the roots of french fascism, before it’s more modernist manifestation, in the form of the Cercle Proudhon: feeling cornered by the socialist Front Populaire, those late fascists draw a parallel with the situation of Sorel and the early Sorelian when confronted with the rising power of parliamentary socialism.

Aristide Maillol, Les Trois Nymphes, 1930-8

Revolving largely around their opposition to the art forms profusely promoted by the Left in power, 

their cultural policy was one of classicism, centered around Racine, whose martial epics fitted their ideology as much as his formalism pleased their conservative taste, and incorporating sculptors like Despiau, Maillol and architect Perret. The continuous reference to Ancients in terms of litterature, art or architecture echoed their doctrine of Classical Violence, drawing on a an existing association between fascism and the Roman and Greek civilizations, idealised into self-less citizen soldiers.

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The dissection of fascism into different movements, different tendencies that are studied independantly, has been a constant in the study of fascism of Ernst Nolte, Paxton or Sternhell. Mark Antliff emphasizes the chronological evolution between those diverse manifestations. Placing the “classical violence” of Maulnier in the late 30’ after the resolutely modernist urbanism central to Valois in the 20’ helps making sense of the contradictory elements in the general idea of fascism. It is tempting to project onto the fascist phenomenon the usage of post-modernism, as this would resolve the paradoxes and pose it as an accessible reaction against modernity, but fascism, on it’s own scale, has an history of it’s own and ignoring this reality comes down to falling for it’s own mythical presentation, as outside of human time.

The relationship of fascism to time and it’s fictionalised, mythological quality is obvious, as exemplified in Antliff’s or Griffin’s suscription to the the idea of palingenesis, but here we see the loop being looped within fascism itself: the fourth part of Maulnier and his classical violence, goes back to the root, avoiding in part the maybe more liberal heritage of Lamour and Valois, to rejuvenate fascism itself.

Fascism like most mythical ideologies is essentially a negation of time, replaced for the sake of a narrative by the controlled and sublimed dimension of myth. As evidenced in this book, what is most striking is that even towards it’s own contemporaneous history fascism seems to be adopting the same policy.