It was originally my interest in Roger Caillois--sociological essayist, erstwhile surrealist, and cofounder of the College of Sociology--that led me to the forgotten avant-garde writer Armand Petitjean, an acquaintance of his youth in the 1930s. 1 This philosophical essayist published four major works, now almost entirely inaccessible outside the Bibliothèque Nationale: Imagination et réalisation (Imagination and realization [1936]), Le Moderne et son prochain (Modern man and his fellow man [1938]), Combats préliminaires (Preliminary combats [1941]), and La Mise à nu (The unveiling [1946]). 2
Petitjean seemed to represent an interesting case against which to gauge the political ambiguities of the left-leaning and antifascist College of Sociology, whose actual relation to fascism is a matter of some debate. 3 In the French context, the issue of fascist ideology per se is complicated by the question of individual political choice or action during World War II. As did the College of Sociology, Petitjean protested against the predominantly pacifist, munichois (i.e., pro-Munich Accords) mood of French intellectuals in 1938. 4 He then fought the Germans with particular patriotic zeal until the Armistice of June 1940, losing part of his right hand. Yet after 1941 he became an active collaborator--unlike any core member of the College of Sociology. Switching sides again in late 1943, he fought with the Allied forces, only to be condemned by the postwar literary épuration (purge): his name appeared on the first "blacklist" decreed by the CNE (Comité national des écrivains [National writers' committee]) in September 1944. 5
From late 1940 through 1941, Petitjean worked for the Vichy administration in the interrelated spheres of youth and propaganda. His career was largely sponsored by the former Communist Paul Marion, who became François Darlan's notorious minister of information (February 1941-April 1942) and who then, "having helped undermine the Darlan government in March-April 1942, remained as head of propaganda efforts under [Pierre] Laval," to quote Robert Paxton. 6 Petitjean thus played an active role in the chantiers de jeunesse (youth workcamps). 7 A young pawn of complex political maneuvers, he was unsuccessfully backed by Marion and others in May 1941 for the leadership of the Compagnons de France (Companions of France). 8 After this defeat, according to Pierre Hebey, he then sought to form the Jeunesses légionnaires (Legionary youth). 9 Unconfirmed allusions in Pierre Péan's biography of François Mitterrand even suggest that the future president was a youthful "follower" of Petitjean. 10
After the war, Petitjean was blacklisted as a writer because of Combats préliminaires, a collection of essays written at the military front (1939-40) and after the Armistice, which delivered, in 1941, a clearly collaborationist message. His publications under the aegis of Vichy also included articles for Compagnons (Companions), Jeunesse (Youth), at least one for La Gerbe (The sheaf), and nine contributions from January 1942 to August 1943 to the monthly, nonofficial publication, Idées: Journal de la Révolution Nationale (Ideas: journal of the national revolution). He wrote six articles between 1940 and 1943 for the Paris-based Nouvelle Revue française, which had become collaborationist with the new editorship of Drieu la Rochelle (July 1940-June 1943), since the German invaders hoped to preserve this journal as a "strategic bastion of Literature," in the words of Hebey. 11 Bernard Comte suggests that it was after Petitjean's defeat in Vichy in the summer of 1941 that he returned to Paris and to the Nouvelle Revue française, where he served as Drieu's editorial assistant. 12
Partly because Petitjean had fought so heroically (on the proper side), Jean Paulhan, the magisterial editor of the prewar Nouvelle Revue française, did spring to his defense in 1947, in De la paille et du grain (On the wheat and the chaff); we will return to Paulhan's famous, if cryptic, assault on the censorious strategies of his fellow literati. More recently, Hebey's survey of the collaborationist Nouvelle Revue française, from which Paulhan dissociated himself in 1940, cites two trenchant participants in twentieth-century intellectual life--Claude Roy and René Etiemble--both of whom deem Petitjean's case a uniquely thorny postmortem of the postwar. 13
Petitjean's career offers a unique perspective on the question of fascism and modernism in the French context, one that illuminates it more broadly. In ideological terms, Petitjean's career adds an interesting wrinkle to debates about the relation between intellectual nonconformism and fascism. "Nonconformism" generally indicates the ideological fluidity of the French 1930s, and specifically refers to those nonpartisan intellectuals who rejected not only political parties of the Right and of the Left but parliamentary democracy as well. 14 In a more cultural sense, emerging as it does within the "surrealizing" ("surréalisant") avant-garde, Petitjean's ambiguous path offers a new vantage on the complex interaction of political and literary, and political and aesthetic, discourse in this milieu. Why did this particular nonconformist member of the avant-garde, unlike so many others, become a true political fascist? Does he differ significantly in this respect from his patron at the collaborationist Nouvelle Revue française, Drieu la Rochelle?
The only real discussion to date of Petitjean is that offered by Hebey, who claimed in 1992, "[He] has done everything he could to be forgotten. After Mise à nu [1946] . . . he definitively opts for silence and retirement." 15 And yet, upon reading this, I recalled that I had seen Petitjean's byline in the September 1989 issue of Le Monde diplomatique on an article entitled "Toward Man's Contract with Nature," in the series Inventing a Future for the Planet. I soon discovered that his recycling as an ecological thinker had begun in 1973, when he assembled and introduced a collection of essays for the Club of Rome, a rather secretive group of industrialists propounding no-growth development. The Club of Rome is deeply revolutionary, Petitjean wrote at this time, "but leaves off at the threshold of politics, in the traditional sense of the term." 16
Some forty years earlier, Petitjean had given his own twist to the term "availability" ("disponsibilité") for politics in his 1937 essay "Disponsibilité de la jeunesse française actuelle" (Availability of youth), a polemic demanding that France acknowledge the untapped energy of his generation. He lent availability the new political sense of an energetic and affective openness to event--rather than to ideology or party--that would render his generation the agent of history. 17 Petitjean hailed "men of good will, of plasticity to history." 18 Of course, historical plasticity denotes passivity to event; properly to make history, these young men must be oriented and led by "'revolutionaries' who, more conscious than they, act in coordination with them." 19 Petitjean consistently presents his own authorial and intellectual role as that of an active revolutionary who stimulates "coming-to-consciousness" ("prise de conscience"). Yet his own career reveals a pronounced historical plasticity. My primary purpose here is to explore the "revolutionary" historical plasticity--or, perhaps better, "revolutionary plasticity"--of his conceptual framework as it encountered the march of history: we will find there, I am proposing, a rather distinctive conjunction, within the French context, of modernism and fascism.
Omitting, for now, the distinction between belief and opportunism, I intend to highlight three essential, and interrelated, factors in Petitjean's particular form of "fascist modernism." First, we find a cult of ideological and intellectual indeterminacy; second, a paradigm of revolutionary consciousness detached from any real ground in sociohistorical crisis; and third, a vitalist obsession with youth.
In order to situate Petitjean vis-à-vis current historical discussions of ideological nonconformism, let us glance quickly at his evolution during the 1930s. Born in 1913, he had become active by 1935 in a cultural milieu for which the surrealist movement was a primary point of reference, although Petitjean was himself more inclined to the modernism of James Joyce and of German Lebensphilosophie (life-philosophy). Having left the École Normale after one year, he participated, as did Caillois, in Les Cahiers du sud and became, again like Caillois, a protégé of Jean Paulhan, of the nonpartisan Nouvelle Revue française. 20 Paulhan's own complex ideological nonconformism, currently the object of some scrutiny, found in the youth a congenial political interlocutor. 21 This was especially true after 1936, when political questions dominated the cultural scene. Aligned then, unlike Paulhan, with the leftist and antifascist Popular Front, Petitjean in July 1936 both proclaimed an imminent New French Revolution and put forth an ambiguous plea for fresh doctrine. On the one hand, he declared, "French revolutionaries find a magnificent future in their past." 22 On the other hand, he contended, "since reactionary traditions are poorly established in France--or, rather, obsolete--French 'fascists' must innovate." 23 From late 1937 through the end of 1938, he wrote a weekly column, Battle of the Books, for Vendredi, a journal that, in the words of Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, sought to be the "conscience" of the Popular Front by maintaining strict editorial independence. 24 In 1938, still loyal to the flagging Popular Front, Petitjean urged his nation toward revolution "without fascism, Hitlerism, or Stalinism, and without the anticommunism of Mister Jacques Doriot [of the PPF, or French Popular Party]." 25 He also criticized the excessive abstraction and formal perfection of right-wing nationalist ideology, declaring that Hitler himself was little concerned about questions of "indeterminacy." 26 By this point, his private brand of revolutionary national-populism, quite militarist at the end of the year, had acquired a resoundingly protofascist ring.
Petitjean's nonconformism in the 1930s and his subsequent collaboration with Vichy render him quite relevant to current historical analyses of French fascism. His writings after 1936 fit well with Zeev Sternhell's influential description of left-leaning, nationalist antiparliamentarianism as ni droite ni gauche (neither Right nor Left) fascist ideology. 27 However, Michel Winock, one of Sternhell's most articulate opponents, questions the existence of any "coherent" French fascist ideology, since "no political movement was ever able consistently to assemble or to unite" under such a banner. 28 Daniel Lindenberg, on the other hand, is broadly sympathetic to Sternhell's approach and tries to establish a fascist political continuum from the nonconformist 1930s to Vichy collaborationism--a continuum in terms of Vichy's doctrine of National Revolution, already proposed in the 1930s by Petitjean and others. 29 Drawing upon the work of Robert Paxton, Lindenberg thus opposes ideological collaborationism to the realpolitik of Vichy state politicians who remained anti-German while collaborating with the invader. Collaborationism, in this formulation, involved a form of visionary fervor or "mental world, characterised by 'an ethic of conviction', committed pro-Nazism, a world far from the compromises and trickery that [collaborationists] all condemned at 'Vichy'" ("FI," 155). 30 Petitjean can serve here as a prime example. He enthusiastically endorsed the Vichy doctrine of National Revolution within a German Europe: "The national socialist revolution will proceed in the West and will make Europe, or Europe will succumb to foreign enslavement in its own anarchy." 31 Petitjean's article in the December 1942 issue of Idées, "Friends of the Revolution," which lists prewar opponents of both the Left and the Right, sustains Lindenberg's broad claim about the legacy of 1930s nonconformism:
A collaborationist, therefore, was to be distinguished from a fascist, a pacifist, a socialist or an old-style Jacobin republican precisely because he believed that, thanks to Franco-German collaboration, he had transcended the contradictions and weaknesses inherent to those ideologies whose impotence and harmfulness had been demonstrated by the defeat of [France in] 1940. ["FI," 140] 32
The larger historical debate about French nonconformist fascism can hardly stand or fall on such a re as Petitjean, but I would underscore that precisely what is distinctive about Petitjean among the ranks of nonconformists turned collabos can shed new light on the bigger picture of French fascistic (fascisant) modernism. Like Sternhell, Lindenberg highlights a "profound apocalyptic and eschatological mentality to be found amongst those disappointed by the Republic, by radicalism, by socialism and by syndicalism"; this shapes their "utopian" views of Europe, as well as their "rejection of all forms of hedonism and materialism" ("FI," 155). And yet Petitjean, despite his heightened and dogmatic rhetoric of 1942 and 1943, seems strikingly immune, on the whole, to the then-pervasive obsession with the failures of French society--an obsession that marked the French 1930s in general and then devolved to the revolutionaries of occupied France. For instance, his introduction to Combats préliminaires declared:
The word that, of the entire French language, took me the longest time to pronounce was "decadence." To avoid facing the facts, I sought refuge in every available system. In particular, I tried to say that the idea of decadence was romantic and anti-French, that it existed for us only as literature. 33
In 1938, Petitjean's explicit rejection of the discourse of decadence, of crisis, was received with raised eyebrows by the right-wing fascist sympathizer, Robert Brasillach, since what the latter considered to be at stake was the constitution of a fascist force among French youth. Reviewing Petitjean's Le Moderne et son prochain for the "Causerie littéraire" (Literary chat) of the Action Française, Brasillach declared:
[Petitjean] explains to us, and it is true, that fascism "is always born from a state of crisis following upon a state of war, when the generation of war has hypnotized, as it were, that of ruin." And he maintains that nothing of the sort has yet occurred in France because there has not yet been a "generation of crisis." I nonetheless suspect that it is on the rise. But let us not quibble about these delicate matters. 34
Petitjean's resolve to deny a "generation of crisis"--and, indeed, "crisis" itself--also distinguished him from the "hypnotized" outlook of Drieu la Rochelle, whose own generation had been deeply marked by World War I. Their contributions to the first issues of the collaborationist Idées clearly convey this divergence. Drieu's "Sense of the Tragic" (November 1941) attributes the defeatist French sense of humiliation to its lack of "tragic philosophy." 35 Rather than similarly dwelling upon Nietzschean tragedy, Petitjean optimistically praises (in the journal's next issue) what he terms the shift from "necessary" to "possible" revolution. 36 Moreover, he will assail in September 1942 those writers generally viewed as the most prominent exemplars of French fascist modernism:
At times, the consideration of our task may imbue us with vertigo, the spectacle of our ruins may paralyze us. How many "fascist temperaments" in France, from Drieu to Lucien Rebatet, including Céline, have known the temptation of nihilist despair or gleeful anarchy. 37
This attitude toward decadence in 1942, to which we will return, also clarifies Petitjean's specificity within the French cultural avant-garde before the war, where, as the voice of a new generation, he resolutely challenged the omnipresent ghosts of World War I.
For Brasillach in 1938, Petitjean was not a fascist but displayed a "'prefascist' temperament, broadly analogous to what may have been [the temperament] of many young Italians prior to 1922." 38 Without pursuing this Italian comparison, we could say nevertheless that Petitjean stands out during a decade mired in the crisis of liberal democracy, one that was expressed by varying junctures of aesthetic and political modernism and antimodernism in nonconformist and fascisant literary intellectuals alike. "Gnostic, Nietzschean, Drieu embodies throughout his career the very type of the antimodernist modern," writes Lindenberg. 39 In contrast, Petitjean remains surprisingly sanguine. Note the equilibrium he posits in 1938: "the forces of re-creation are in close equilibrium with those of creation. . . . The powers of man are no longer distant from those of the ancient gods (and of course from those of the demons). . . . He can finally look life and reality in the face." 40 Or, again, consider his calm praise in 1938 for the themes of the Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz: these descriptions of nature and the peasantry are an act of "sacred" preservation, without which the world of the future, "that which we are rebuilding, would lose its measure and raison d'être." 41 More concretely, he insisted that his generation was exempt from and untainted by World War I and, furthermore, that the Third Republic was not Weimar. On such grounds, and on the basis of a more recent discovery of "the people" ("le peuple"), Petitjean would hence refuse in July 1938 to heed the siren songs of "French abjection"; in fact, the French "people is so happy that it's still unconscious of being so." 42
This outright rejection of a sense of despair suggests how Petitjean's nonconformist discourse is unhinged from any socioeconomic or, indeed, historical basis to assume the form of a plastic, or infinitely mobile, projection. According greatest attention to Petitjean's surréalisant vanguard years, let us follow the early theoretical construction and some oddly illuminating intersections--with Bachelard, Lacan, Paulhan, among others--of Petitjean's revolutionary plasticity.
During a decade so fraught with the seeking of Personalist or spiritual regeneration, 43 few writers so performed--not to mention theorized--the state of youthful promise as did the lively Petitjean, who was appreciated as a bracing blend of avant-garde intellect and unrestrained passion. For Gaston Bachelard, in 1936, Petitjean's writing revealed "dynamism and experience, poetry and knowledge, that is to say, irreconcilable qualities." 44 "Encephalitis" balanced by "a vigorous animal appetite" declared Brasillach's review of 1938. 45 Drieu discovered Petitjean (and Swift) through Petitjean's Présentation de Swift and applauded this study of how Swift's "passion saves him at every step from intellectual rigidity." 46
Petitjean's earliest work affords a revealing illustration of the relation between ideological and intellectual indeterminacy, one that arose largely as a reaction against surrealism. Reading Petitjean's wartime text, Combats préliminaires, in 1943, Jean Piel (future editor of Critique, along with Georges Bataille) would record in his diary:
Here we have the final result of this frenzied naked will, lacking any real conviction that might assign it a goal: deformation of so many pseudointellectuals before the war, who were reacting against surrealist fatalism, and for whom the false reek of Nietzscheanism was awakened by the noisy echoes across the Rhine. 47
Many on the periphery of surrealism in the 1930s, inspired to achieve a synthesis of Marx and Freud and interested in questions of representation, superstructure, and affect, responded in various ways (political, poetic, aesthetic, scientific, philosophical) to "surrealist fatalism," as Piel suggests. This term echoes the opinion, increasingly voiced as political anxieties gripped the decade, that surrealism involved an idealist and aestheticized pseudoscience of the unconscious mind. 48
Petitjean's own variant of avant-garde revolution entailed the dialectic of what he termed Imagination and Realization, as outlined in his study Imagination et réalisation. This work recast his earlier essays on Joyce of 1934-35. A Germanophile and an Anglophile, fluent in both German and English, Petitjean was distinctly cosmopolitan in his avant-gardism. 49 "He inspired me to reread Ulysses, " wrote Brasillach, "that immense challenge to art and to nature." 50 And yet, Petitjean's undying passion was not for Ulysses but for the play of language in Joyce's Work in Progress, or Finnegans Wake. So enthralled was he that the contagion of Joycean prose complicates any access to his ideas, especially in his work of the mid-1930s.  51 Fondane was generally hostile, though, to what he elsewhere termed the "rational appropriation of the irrational" 52 prevalent in French surrealizing modernism; hence, he found Petitjean's "manner undoubtedly more satisfying than the excessive clarity of Bergson." 53 Paulhan, on the other hand, repeatedly enjoined Petitjean to reëmerge from under the weight of his readings and his foreign languages (this ironically echoed in De la paille et du grain ) to elucidate his own thoughts.
Yet it was largely in response to the surrealist "unconscious" that Petitjean had, paradoxically, derived from Finnegans Wake a model of intellectual lucidity. Joyce's literary aesthetic proposed a form of absolute self-consciousness unavailable, or so Petitjean claimed, in the French context: "a new meaning, a mythical measure, born out of the psychological depths, a veritable 'tempo' of the thought." 54 Joyce masters free associations "through what in others . . . would be called improper language"; he thus transcends Valéry's "supreme consciousness" as well as André Breton's "supreme unconsciousness"--toward "hyperconsciousness." 55 Petitjean's "Joyce and Myth" appeared in Eugene Jolas's English-language Parisian journal, transition, which had single-handedly sustained and published Joyce's Work in Progress. 56 In transition, the Jolases yoked together two distinct avant-gardes--"the Finnegans Wake current" and "the surrealist current," in the words of Maria Jolas--which even in this promising context had little or no interaction. 57 Petitjean's essay of 1935, "Joyce and Mythology," reflects such a rift--or, rather, pits the first current against the second. Although he uses Joyce to assail Bergson and Proust--here is no "mythology of the inner world" ("JM," 134) and Joyce has not "lost his time" ("JM," 136)--the real enemy is surrealism, with its use of the unconscious, automatic writing (which dissociates language and thought), objective chance ("le hasard objectif"), and "primitive mentality" (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's influential category).
Joyce's own leftist political views notwithstanding, Petitjean predicates on the writer's literary "authenticity" both a nonconformist, anti-ideological perspective and a theory of revolution. 58 In defining Joyce as the only "poet" who might "bring us back through mythology to ourselves and the world" ("JM," 135), Petitjean is concerned less with language than with ideology. Finnegans Wake is the demystifying salvation for modernity escaping the "non-sense of history," a world where
mythology becomes more and more a factor, a desperate counterfactor of history: some retreat into the past, others return to it (Giulio Evola, Gimenez Caballero, Rosenberg, every fascist), and more than one Marxist prophet tries to return to the future; under the pretext of the crisis, each one gets off on the wrong foot. All too human mythology where the hero himself, the Führer, presents himself gratuitously as Ecce Homo, the simple tensor of the more or less political energy of the men that [sic] are "his" men! ["JM," 134]
Petitjean is thus already rejecting "crisis," the "mythology of catastrophe, which wants to be, and is, the very motor of history, that of Dostoevsky, Georges Sorel, Spengler--earlier that of Choderlos de Laclos" ("JM," 134). Petitjean had previously mentioned Beckett's reading of Joyce that had proposed Vico's New Science as the structuring principle of Finnegans Wake --here, claims Petitjean, is "the fundamental order of things." 59 He emphatically contrasted this cycle with Nietzsche's "eternal return," which, in Petitjean's opinion, was conceived "in its distress rather than its glory, and as a vision rather than as a law of nature, only to . . . forestall [Nietzsche's] own catastrophe." 60 By July 1939, Petitjean would transpose Beckett's Joyce into nationalist optimism: "If there is one country where Vico is right, it is ours, which finds eternity in the very periodicity of its new agings and youths." 61
Before he developed such political applications in the late 1930s, however, Petitjean had translated his reading of Joyce into Imagination et réalisation. 62 This study of "realism recover[ing] reality by dint of mythology," explored the cycles, or "eternal return of the imagination," in a broader philosophical sense. 63 Entirely forgotten today (although worth republishing, I believe) this work offers a breathtaking romp through the various discourses of the European avant-garde and was received, at least by Bachelard and Fondane, with great enthusiasm. I suspect that Lacan also took an interest in what converged, in some ways, with his own thoughts on the "mirror stage."
To help us grasp Petitjean's argument, let us examine a summary he later presented in Combats Préliminaires, in which he claimed a continued adherence to the basic terms of Imagination et réalisation. This can aptly serve as the essence of what I have called his revolutionary plasticity:
The imagination projects the world for us as a state of nature, as absolute; but . . . the different techniques of the will, harnessing an ever growing sum of natural forces, animal instincts, human passions and motives, permit us to possess this world that we knew at birth only as an image and in a way that becomes ever more complete as we realize and reconstruct it. 64
It was through his work on Joyce that Petitjean had met Paulhan, whose Les Fleurs de Tarbes (The flowers of Tarbes), which first appeared in 1936, would challenge "surrealist fatalism" in the spheres of language and rhetoric, claiming that the Romantic avant-garde destroyed the "word" to obtain the "idea." Unlike Paulhan, however, and despite his own continued celebration of Joyce and persistent attack on surrealism, Petitjean did little in Imagination et réalisation to analyze the verbal artifact. Imagination et réalisation can be seen as a pataphysical Finnegans Wake, or theoretical stream of consciousness in the extreme. 65 Its sixteen-page index lists German, French, and English philosophers, natural and social scientists, all of Western literature (except for Wordsworth and Coleridge), and the surrealizing avant-garde. Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Ludwig Klages (the right-wing philosopher of Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele [The Intellect as opponent of the soul]) and Heidegger are important points of reference. 66
In his review of Imagination et réalisation, Fondane discerned a significant attack on the dominant French philosophical theory of the imagination--namely, Bergson's "fabulating function" ("fonction fabulatrice"), which arises only as a phenomenon secondary to "intelligence." "Petitjean restores the flow's proper direction," writes Fondane; "Imagination comes first." 67 Indeed, Petitjean posits an initial state of radical skepticism. Only through "the Imagination, that spiritual precipitation of vitality" do we perceive reality. 68 Such Imagination is then Realized through the "will to conversion," an imperative to reconstitute the self and the world in terms of the Imagination, as a form of projection called "imitation": "Realization is integration, insertion of the Imagination onto the plane of reality. It will thus proceed from imitation to imitation." 69 Drawing upon Klages, Petitjean argues that primary imitation--a form of biological imagination, or mimicry--is a feature of the natural world, but that imitation in the second degree--that is, dialectical Imagination, or self-representation--is an activity of which only man is capable. Accordingly, the "will to imitation" must be harnessed as a form of dialectical mimicry, as the "conversion process" between Imagination and Realization, between the imaginary and the real. It is a prise de conscience predicated on "the integration, in turn, of that Imagination that initially integrated us." 70
At this point, we locate a second major thrust of Petitjean's argument, which, like his earlier Joycean essays, still largely inveighs against the surrealist literary aesthetic. Of course, Imagination et réalisation does proffer a more generally anti-ideological attack on the "fictionalism" of modernity, the degraded Imagination of which is politically and socially exploited, society of the spectacle avant la lettre. Petitjean seems really more interested, though, in how the avant-garde Imagination has run wild--and in this, he pinpoints "surrealist fatalism." If we do not master our Imagination in a virile and willful dialectic with Realization, he argues, first-degree imitations will stand as " sur- or subreality . . . [,] a mockery of this reality and of its Imagination." 71 Only the "hysteric," an epithet Petitjean often applies to surrealism, will take his (or her) relatively unself-conscious--or, indeed, unconscious--projections and mimetic pantomimes for real.
Gaston Bachelard, who sought to revolutionize scientific epistemology in 1934 with his "new scientific spirit" ("le nouvel esprit scientifique"), was discovering surrealism in the very years in which he was becoming the "Master of Break Theory," to quote J. G. Merquior's study of Foucault. 72 This may explain Bachelard's ecstatic response to Petitjean's philosophical style, "unique in the annals of philosophy." "Until now the Imagination had not found its metaphysician," he writes. 73 These "programs of psychical realization[,] . . . which we will henceforth have to call 'Petitjeanian gyrations' [' les retournements petitjeaniens']," convey "the true dynamics of the psyche." 74 For this philosopher of science, such epistemic ruptures also revealed the imaginative dimension, or "breaks," within biology and natural evolution itself. "Life, just like thought, jumps from one image to another," Bachelard intones under the spell of Petitjean's lyrical prose. 75
I would also correlate Imagination et réalisation with that great monument to surrealizing phenomenological skepticism, Lacan's Imaginary, which, like Petitjean's conceptual framework, arose through and against surrealist "hysteria." Lacan's early work, as is well known, reflected a dialogue with Salvador Dali, whose own theory of "critical paranoia," of strategic obsession, purported to endow surrealism with a more powerful and active grasp of imagination than did its prior techniques, such as automatic writing. 76
To establish a specific biographical connection, I would note that in October 1941, Paulhan will write to Petitjean, "Lacan is very eager to see you. Could you please give him a call before you leave." 77 Three years earlier, reviewing the Mental Life volume of the 1938 Encyclopédie française, Petitjean had himself evoked Lacan's "remarkable" article on the family--which included a section on the mirror stage--to praise this new psychology that "integrates the world in man by relating him to his own knowledge of the world and to what he mistook, until now, for 'objectivity.'" 78 Their relation may even date back to 1935, when Petitjean published an essay in Minotaure linked to Imagination et réalisation --an essay he called "Analyse spectrale du singe" (Spectral analysis of the monkey). This appeared printed next to Caillois's "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," which Lacan enthusiastically mentions in his postwar, post- épuration essay, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I" of 1949. Petitjean's essay, like Lacan's, compares monkey and man and their relation to mirrors. 79 Above and beyond dizzying dialectical play, largely inspired by Klages--Who is 'aping' whom? (where the verb "to ape" ["singer"] unites mimicry and ape ["singe"] )--we learn that we are not the acme of evolution: "the skull of man is closer to that of a monkey fetus than to that of an adult monkey." 80 Indeed, such "infantilization" is at the source of our compensatory human Imagination:
[Since] the monkey does not recognize itself in the mirror, since if it did it would immediately be metamorphosed into man, which is exactly the gesture of Narcissus, and [since] man is an animal capable of representing to himself death, the infinite, and himself, the fact remains that man is a laughing monkey. 81Like Petitjean, Lacan cites "a real specific prematurity of birth in man" that conditions the desire for self-mastery through his specular image; this mirror stage will hence definitively situate "the agency of the ego . . . in a fictional direction." 82 For Lacan, this process is "jubilant" ("MS," 2). For Petitjean, in Imagination et réalisation, on the contrary, such relations to the gestalt may be "imaginary, forced, and desperate"--and Petitjean aspires, as we have seen, to a dialectical resolution of Imagination and Realization. 83 It is intriguing to consider Lacan's "function of méconnaissance" ("MS," 6), derived from man's unique "organic insufficiency in his natural reality" ("MS," 4) as a radical counterpoint to the voluntarist "eternal return of the imagination."
After 1936, claiming allegiance to the Popular Front, Petitjean will take Imagination and Realization to "the people," to National Revolution, and, ultimately, to war. I mean to emphasize two things about this period of extreme intellectual complexity, during which Petitjean himself addressed a vast array of topics for Vendredi. First, as I mentioned previously, Petitjean, while remaining a nonconformist of the Left, moved increasingly toward right-wing nationalism. Second, Petitjean's veritable target, that is, the sole clear enemy of his revolutionary consciousness (which collapsed all distinction between the political and the aesthetic), remained the French avant-garde; this will bring us back to our point of departure, the College of Sociology.
Let us, then, briefly trace, without engaging the ideological chaos of these years, Petitjean's trajectory from leftist revolutionary Jacobinism to a more nationalist revolutionary populism, which he associated, in 1938, with the great Dreyfusard, Charles Péguy. In the heyday of Léon Blum's government (1936-37), Petitjean's hopes ran high: revolution was compatible with negotiation. Against all odds, in early 1938, he still favored the indeterminate Popular Front, "a political formation that our 'nationalists' abhor," whereby "slowly but surely," nevertheless, "with the same 'disorder' as that of the bourgeoisie during the French Revolution, the people of France is becoming nationalized." 84 After Germany's Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, however, he adopted a posture of nationalistic belligerence. All the same, this did not diminish his Germanophilia and his chivalric esteem for the enemy. In April 1938, we find him praising the aristocratic German army, which "miraculously" survived the humiliating Treaty of Versailles and which "despite all the temptations of its strength, was able to await Hitler. " 85 In fact, Petitjean himself even sounds moved by the rise of Hitler:
This man from the south, whose primary experience was Viennese, and who could witness how racial diversity, excessive speculation, and intellectual sophistication may threaten a great empire such as that of the Hapsburgs, came to return all of its people to Prussian rule, has armed the Reichswehr itself with an ideology more fearsome than any that motivated the last war. . . . As for the end result, I expect we shall see it soon. 86To his own pacifist country, Petitjean did not recommend socioeconomic change but articulated instead an agressive doctrine in which political (that is, governmental), social (that is, demographic), and cultural (that is, aesthetic) senses of "representation" were indissociable: "No 'people' is as poorly represented by their politics, literature, or by their capital as the French." 87 This called for re-representation of the people on a grand, national scale. On the one hand, he endorsed a literary aesthetic, an ethics, and a politics of nationalist "reorientation" ("repaysement"). 88 In more militaristic terms, he called for "the dictatorship of France over all Frenchmen." 89 Petitjean would ground this protofascist ideology in the "mystique" of Péguy, whose ambiguous intellectual legacy bridges Catholicism, socialism, and nationalism: "Péguy is coming back," he wrote in December 1938. 90
Petitjean's ideological indeterminacy is matched, if not conditioned, by the conceptual indeterminacy of Imagination and Realization as these terms are applied to the political sphere. Le Moderne et son prochain describes how modern man is intellectually and emotionally "mobilized," or exploited, by liberalism, communism, and foreign forms of fascism. Russia, for instance, seems pragmatically nationalist, if paradoxically so. Unwittingly modernist in its very antimodernism, on the other hand, Germany's hypertrophied Imagination, or "integral Romanticism," is on the point of dangerous Realization. 91 But worse than all the rest is liberal modernity's "concerted lack of consciousness." 92
In these more local quarrels of the mind, Petitjean assumes a curious stance, since repaysement hardly dictates his nonconformist tastes; indeed, humor, for example, "allows the move from action to reflection." 93 Most importantly, he is still on the Left. He advises the professorial author of La Nausée (Nausea) "to open himself up to life, to immerse himself in the world, to harmonize Imagination with Realization." 94 (On 18 August 1938, Paulhan wrote to Caillois of plans to establish an advisory committee for the NRF comprised of Sartre, Caillois, and Petitjean.) 95 Chronicling Malraux's antifascist engagement in the Spanish Civil War, the novel L'Espoir (Hope) offers, in Petitjean's estimation, the perfect antidote to Sartre: Malraux is "the first in France, since the upheavals of the last war, who enters voluntarily--consciously--into the history of the twentieth century." 96 Indeed, Petitjean has not even fully withdrawn from the avant-garde. In 1938, for example, he is planning to write L'Oeil, the first interdisciplinary study of the eye. 97 And he still adores Joyce, while finding yet another new idol in Jean Giraudoux, "through whom France remains pure." 98 Petitjean's cosmopolitan sensibility has simply become nationalist as well.
In effect, Petitjean's ideological and cultural ambiguities resolve themselves into a t with the surrealizing avant-garde he knows best. The "hysteria" of liberal modernity may well seem embodied in surrealism. 99 By 1938, however, "the surrealist movement is no longer organic"--this precisely owing to its ahistorical, intellectual rigidity, claims Petitjean. 100 The real dangers for politicized consciousness now lie in Céline's lyrical right-wing anarchism and in the internationalist nonconformism of the experimental College of Sociology. If Petitjean's review of L'École des cadavres (School for corpses) assails Céline as "spokesman for all that is spineless, cowardly, abandoned, catastrophic, Cassandresque, and treacherous in the country," 101 Petitjean thereby underscores the revelatory but false consciousness such modernist prose may extend to its readers:
This language that is thought, that is not even purified by speech, these insults that are much more blasphemous, activist, and quasi-incantatory than Homeric invectives, due to the fact that they are no longer pronounced but written, do not reflect any reality (even verbal reality) or any jargon at all. Rather, they express the latent thoughts of thousands, of tens, of hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen. 102
In mimetic tension, Petitjean's violent diatribe against Céline recovers the Joycean prose of Imagination et réalisation.
This very same month, December 1938, Petitjean published a confusing piece in the Nouvelle Revue française almost as virulent as his attack on Céline. In "Fascisme anti-fasciste" (Antifascist fascism), he raged against unnamed French "intellectuals without calling," "left-wing conservatives," whose absurd slogan was " Antifascist fascism! " and who had "recourse to foreign stimulants." 103 Drawn to the "rhythms" of Hitler and Mussolini, these res dissociate themselves, nevertheless, from German and Italian nationalism out of self-interest. 104 Worst of all, however, they constantly attack France itself. "Antifascist fascists" do not realize that "the great French revolutions did not occur in a state of dearth but involved, on the contrary, an overabundance of heart. They are revelation much more than transformation." 105
And just who were these "antifascist fascists?" Here we return to the political ambiguities of the antiparliamentarian College of Sociology, to Bataille and Caillois, who generally shared Petitjean's belief that "contemporary history . . . involves psychology rather than economics." 106 Paulhan's correspondence with Petitjean, however, reveals the latter's deep conflict with the interdisciplinary College, which, along with Petitjean (and others), had criticized the Munich Accords in the November 1938 issue of Nouvelle Revue française. Nonetheless, as the "Declaration," drafted by Caillois, made perfectly clear, the antipacifist College of Sociology was also firmly antinationalist out of leftist, internationalist conviction; moreover, it envisioned a much more radical revolutionary strategy, one which could take shape after discussions and research. 107 Briefly put, and reflecting its own emergence against "surrealist fatalism," the College envisioned the resurrection of a loosely Durkheimian "sacred" that would recast "society" as "community" through sociological rather than patriotic or nationalist prise de conscience.
In January 1939, after the publication of "Fascisme anti-fasciste," Paulhan proposed that Petitjean and the College resolve their internecine warring. As Paulhan would have it, the College of Sociology would cease rejecting any specific attention to France, and Petitjean, in turn, would stop singing the praises of France. "Is there not some institution, some social form, that might replace it, that through its very presence might provide . . . the broad outline of such praise?" 108 By the very next month, Petitjean had launched a new journal for his generation, Les Nouveaux Cahiers de la quinzaine, the descriptive announcements of which suggest a Nationalist Revolutionary College of Sociology--"an Institution," declared Paulhan. 109
This project, which never saw the light of day, gives a fascinating sense of what the College of Sociology was not. Invoking Péguy and his famous journal, Les Cahiers de la quinzaine, Les Nouveaux Cahiers de la quinzaine recast this vision into the more current terms of a nationalistic applied sociology. 110 Compared to the conflictual and ambiguous College of Sociology, Petitjean's project seems a model of revolutionary plasticity, insofar as it explicitly aimed to reconcile dogma with ideological pluralism, theory with praxis, revolution with status quo, religion with materialism, mystical patriotism with social science, state with family (among other collectives), and the imaginary with the real. Discussion topics were to include "family, jobs, cult of the dead, army, youth groups, theater, spiritual authorities, intermediaries, representatives, managers, French regions, North Africa, French propaganda, foreigners in France." 111 Specialists with a " current outlook" would be solicited for "injunctions." 112 The projected first issue, on the family, would present
Statement of the topic. Objective study of the family according to region, social status, women's work, habitat, etc. . . . by A. Siegfried. Psychological study of current family emotions, by Dr. Lacan. Catholic accounts; "pagan," by Montherlant; Communist, by Nizan; working-class accounts. Conclusions. Pilory. 113
It would have been interesting to read Lacan's injunctions to the Nationalist Revolutionary family. . . . Presumably, this essay would have pursued his concurrent discussion of the family in the Encyclopédie française, where Lacan maintained, in the words of Elisabeth Roudinesco, that "only a modern family structure that was bourgeois and patriarchally dominant could ensure social freedom." 114 Alas, given the onset of the war, Petitjean's envisioned journal became instead the single-issue military journal Courrier (Paris-Province) (20 July 1939), urging a patriotic "generational consciousness" among the new recruits. 115
As I noted at the outset, the members of the College of Sociology did not collaborate with the Germans. Caillois himself was trapped in Argentina during war. 116 He wrote to Paulhan in May 1941 about his news of Petitjean: "I am hearing all sorts of horrors about the NRF (the review and the group)." 117 In his own wartime journal, Les Lettres françaises, edited under the auspices of Victoria Ocampo's Sur (South), Caillois defined, in August 1941, the "duties and privileges of French writers abroad": "to become the careful interpreters of their comrades reduced to whispers." 118 Aware that Petitjean was hardly whispering, Caillois's journal refused to grant any space, or voice, to Combats préliminaires. 119
Bearing in mind Petitjean's strong Germanophilia and sympathies for right-wing nationalism, can we predict the divergent paths these nonconformists were to take in any other way? I would tentatively suggest that the revolutionary intellectuals of the College of Sociology, generally older (except for Caillois), were both more radically visionary and more rigorous and principled than Petitjean, each in his own way. The "community" of the College thus floundered on the contradictions, both collective and private, that informed its members' responses to a deep sense of historical crisis. We might wish to consider, as well, the rather scientistic dimension of French modernism that inspired the College of Sociology--the "rational appropriation of the irrational," to recall Fondane's remark, however paradoxical or subverted--as opposed both to Petitjean's eccentric reading of Joyce and to his absorption of Lebensphilosophie. In any event, applauding the Courrier several months later, Paulhan queried Petitjean nonetheless, "Once again, what is it that you want?" 120
In February 1940, Drieu la Rochelle wrote quite poignantly about Petitjean in his diary:
He seems already quite struck and frightened by the disintegration that he must directly confront at last. He is clenched, but there is already a sense of despair. Poor boy. More terribly than I will he come to know the shame that crushed me at such a young age. 121
But Petitjean bounced back despite his wounded hand, the fall of France, and his disaffection from "the people." In September 1941, Paulhan, whose own intricate interactions with both collaboration and the Resistance have not yet been fully chronicled, wrote to Drieu about Petitjean. He was clearly surprised by Petitjean's easy move to the Vichy ministry of information: "Yes, the case of Petitjean is striking and (most likely) tragic. Can one bring about revolution as a minister? . . . I don't know. I don't think so. . . . It means having great faith in the power of lies, in one's own ability to lie." 122
I will not survey at this point the continuity of youth movements between the Popular Front and Vichy, Petitjean's maneuvering throughout a period of political flux, his numerous articles in Idées: Journal de la Révolution Nationale 123 and the Nouvelle Revue française, or his endorsement of French "imperial consciousness" toward North Africa ("Without the Empire, all hope is lost"). 124 Most important, I think, is the basic shift in Petitjean's dialectic of Imagination and Realization, which during the Occupation is now conducted in dialogue with Vichy and the Third Reich rather than with the French avant-garde. After the fall of France, Petitjean no longer argues that his country need merely acknowledge its own strength. His particular form of fascist modernism generally shuns both the "rose-colored glasses" of Pétain's National Revolution as well as the "dark glasses" of collaborationists and others who reiterate the discourse of national crisis, namely that France should engage in National Revolution under the German aegis since the defeat confirmed its failure as a society. 125 In Petitjean's opinion, the most objective analysis of French socioeconomic collapse has been provided by German strategists themselves ("IF," 11-14). Yet an equally objective remedy for such problems is to revitalize French motivation and will by focusing on France's "true status in the world . . . as the avant-garde of human civilization." 126
If the Jacobin tradition placed France at the revolutionary forefront of Europe, Petitjean's essay "Principles of a Western Order" also suggests, nonetheless, that German power should now inspire French revolutionary consciousness. Before the war, as we have seen, Petitjean viewed the problem of European modernity as that of an excessive, exploited, or unbridled Imagination. Thus, for example, Weimar was infused by dangerous, compensatory Romanticism. At present, in contrast, the problem (if it can be called that) is not modernity as weakened by myth but, instead, as gloriously bolstered by technology--that is, by excessive (or German) Realization. "The wealth, strength, and science of Western man evolve more quickly than does his consciousness," writes Petitjean. 127 This creates an imbalance between Imagination and Realization that triggers revolution. In the twentieth century, in other words, this disjunction has given rise to ideological Western revolutionaries, both Nazis and Bolsheviks, who "more secure in their traditions and more conscious of the future than the masses, have always strengthened and extended the masses' social structure and national horizon while restoring their sense of sacred honors." 128 Such prise de conscience defined as elite utopian doxa seems tailor-made for the former nonconformists turned National Revolutionary propagandists in occupied France!
After the war, and having been blacklisted by the CNE, Petitjean appraised his postwar ordeals in La Mise à nu , which Daniel Lindenberg considers today an unjustly neglected and rare "auto-critique" of the time. 129 This historian likes what he calls Petitjean's "desacralization" of writers and intellectuals whom, he claims, Paulhan tends on the contrary to "sacralize" and thus to exonerate in De la paille et du grain. Here, explains Lindenberg, lies "the true motive of [Paulhan's] practice, which consists of shielding [collaborationist writers] from any criticism." 130 Paulhan's defense of Petitjean and others from the CNE--of which he himself was a founding member--does indeed turn, in part, on the doctrine of the writer's "right to error." 131
A closer look at La Mise à nu should help to illuminate these issues. First, when read closely, Petitjean's "unveiling" is nothing if not a self-exoneration. 132 Second, it glorifies Petitjean's status as a writer. Again, he positions himself above and beyond the ideological fray: "[this ter] has made too many mistakes, he has witnessed too many fully to adopt any one dogma." 133 Assailing the orthodoxies of "gendlettres," (the intellectual avant-garde, that is, the CNE), Petitjean poses as a religious, universalizing moralist who may clarify the confused minds of his compatriots--"Divided between or within themselves?" 134 Unlike himself, they have not fully grasped the experience of the war. La Mise à nu thus questions countless postwar ideological and moral oppositions and seeks to remedy, in particular, the unhinged identity of the French "patrie" (fatherland). Petitjean decries, for example, "the case of the internationalist sharpshooter [member of the Communist Resistance], who will t for his country only insofar as he deems it in accord with his political ideal." 135
Both Paulhan and Petitjean thus defined themselves in these years as nonconformists, as opposed to the Communist-dominated CNE, which wore the mantle of the national Resistance--yet Paulhan's defense of Petitjean in De la paille et du grain can be read as a study in comparative nonconformisms. During the war, Paulhan remained loyal to Petitjean while consistently pointing out the logical and ethical contradictions of his behavior in a fascinating series of letters; his allusions to Petitjean in De la paille et du grain are also ambivalent in the extreme. Most seriously, Paulhan remarks of La Mise à nu that "[it] decides issues, instead of sorting them out." 136 This, of course, is precisely what De la paille et du grain attacks in the "fascist adjudications" 137 of the CNE and is precisely what Paulhan seeks to oppose through his complex analyses of the "mysteries" inherent in patriotism and language. On the first crucial topic, for example, he counters Petitjean's lament that France was defended by Communists who foreswore the "fatherland" ("la patrie") as an ideal. France was brilliantly betrayed, Paulhan replies, but it was betrayed by the very nationalists who worshipped it as such. In these confusions, Petitjean, the CNE, and others are equally enmeshed. 138
De la paille et du grain targets Petitjean in particular, however, by summoning his tendency to use untranslated foreign words. Despite Paulhan's ironic intimations of the relation of multilingualism and collaborationism, his line of thought is hardly so reductive; rather, it recalls Petitjean's reading of Joyce and the question of literary lucidity. For Paulhan, the question becomes, how well does a writer master the mysterious play of his own language, of a foreign language--or, more generally--of what he is writing?
At this point, De la paille et du grain cites Petitjean's use of the Kierkegaardian term einkelte (the individual) with seemingly gratuitous aim. If we return to La Mise à nu, however, we realize that Petitjean had vigorously condemned in this singular re, "[one] who takes himself tragically, who finds himself suddenly before God without any self-awareness." 139 In a sense, Kierkegaard's einkelte is made to serve as an antithesis to Petitjean's own moralizing stance. Yet, Paulhan writes of the einkelte, "once it has gone astray in a French text, [it] is no longer simply the solitary. It is the solitary with some kind of advantageous nuance (which remains Petitjean's secret)--as if it were very serious to be solitary!" 140 The secretive, "advantageous" opacity that Paulhan attributes to Petitjean's einkelte becomes deeply ironic, since it reverses the einkelte's stated status in La Mise à nu --and thus implicitly impugns the writer's own relation to self-consciousness and conscience. More than mere hypocrisy, linguistic, or intellectual error, or uncharted semantic excess, it is rather a form of unintentional inauthenticity that Paulhan seems to reveal. In other words, any writer may make mistakes, in either his own or in a foreign language, but some writers are completely blind to what they write.
Living conduit that he is between the ni droite ni gauche 1930s, the Phony War, Vichy, the épuration, and ecology trends of the 1970s and 1980s, Petitjean reveals a remarkable plasticity. On one level, he returns to the right-wing biological metaphysics of his youth, although now shorn of its Nietzschean voluntarism. On another level, he returns to the politically nonconformist Left; despite man's encounter with the limits of nature, Petitjean still believes in utopias. In the wake of May 1968, he thus asserts: "the global vision of a just world must arise in our hearts." 141 In 1989, he recommends that the experimental "biosphere" avoid "all ideological infiltration." 142 He assails egocentrism, anthropocentrism, Eurocentrism, and tempers the strain of the world's demise with all the fervor of a revolutionary Deep Ecologist: Man must acknowledge "alterity within himself, in all beings, within Nature itself." 143 If Petitjean's career thus tends to evoke the fascistic resonance of Deep Ecology as described, for example, by Luc Ferry in Le Nouvel ordre écologique (The new ecological order), 144 even more uncanny is how comfortably Imagination et réalisation may rest amid the latest revolution-in-consciousness.
Claudine Frank-Elster is an assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She is currently working on a book titled Roger Caillois and the Periphery of Surrealism; she is also editing an English-language anthology of texts by Caillois.
All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.
1. Armand Petitjean is still alive today. Caillois evokes his friendship with Petitjean in classes at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and at the École Normale in the early 1930s as a common interest in philosophy. See Roger Caillois, interview by Jean-José Marchand, videocassette, dir. Michel Latouche, in Archives du vingtième siècle (Paris: Société de Production, 1971). See also Odile Felgine, Roger Caillois (Paris: Stock, 1994).
2. See Armand Petitjean, Imagination et réalisation (Paris: Denoël and Steele, 1936), hereafter abbreviated IR; Le Moderne et son prochain (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), hereafter abbreviated MSP; Combats préliminaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), hereafter abbreviated CP; and La Mise à nu (Paris: Jean Vigneau, 1946), hereafter abbreviated MN.
3. See Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology, 1937-39, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Denis Hollier, Les Dépossédés (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1993); and Maurice Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983).
On Georges Bataille, cofounder of the College of Sociology, see Denis Hollier, "On Equivocation (Between Literature and Politics)," October 55 (winter 1990): 3-22; Jean-Michel Besnier, "Georges Bataille in the 1930s: A Politics of the Impossible," trans. Amy Reid, Yale French Studies 78 : 169-80; Alexander Nehamas, "The Attraction of Repulsion," New Republic, 23 October 1989, 31-36; Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: La Mort à l'oeuvre (Paris: Séguier, 1987); and Francis Marmande, Georges Bataille politique (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1985).
On Caillois, see Alexandre Pajon, "L'Intrépidité politique de Roger Caillois avant-guerre," Roger Caillois: "Cahiers de Chronos," ed. Jean-Clarence Lambert (Paris: La Différence, 1991), 373-87.
4. See Michel Winock, "Les Intellectuels français et 'l'esprit de Munich,'" in Les Années trente: Groupes et ruptures, ed. Anne Roche and Christian Tartig (Paris: CNRS, 1984), 147-58.
5. Published in the first issue of the Lettres françaises, on 9 September 1944, the first blacklist included Robert Brasillach, Céline, Alphonse de Chateaubriant, Jacques Chardonne, Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle, Jean Giono, Marcel Jouhandeau, Charles Maurras, Henry de Montherlant, Paul Morand, and André Thérive.
See also Herbert Lottman, The Purge (New York: Morrow, 1986).
6. Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 253. Daniel Lindenberg explains that Marion moved from Communism in the 1930s to the neosocialism "of Doriot's PPF [Parti Populaire français]. He left the latter in 1938 only later to become Vichy Minister of Information. Here he developed the idea of totalitarian propaganda originally sketched out by him in his book Leur combat [Their combat], published in 1939. After the war he was condemned to ten years in prison" (Daniel Lindenberg, "French Intellectuals and a German Europe: An Aspect of Collaboration," in Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France: Mandarins and Samourais, ed. Jeremy Jennings [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993], 156; hereafter abbreviated "FI."). See also Philippe Amaury, De l'information et de la propagande d'état: Les Deux premières expériences d'un "ministère de l'information" en France (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1969), 78-79, 128-271; hereafter abbreviated IP.
7. Robert Paxton writes of these "obligatory forest work camps for all young men of twenty," that they "preached austerity to blasé city youths around a thousand campfires" (Paxton, Vichy France, 147, 164). See also Bernard Comte, Une utopie combattante: L'École des cadres d'Uriage, 1940-1942 (Paris: Fayard, 1991); hereafter abbreviated UC.
8. See UC, 347-48, 387-88 and IP, 198-202.
9. See Pierre Hebey, La "Nouvelle Revue française" des années sombres, juin 1940-juin 1941 (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 417; hereafter abbreviated NR.
10. The original reads: "un adepte" (Pierre Péan, Une Jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, 1934-47 [Paris: Fayard, 1994], 403; see also 322).
11. The original reads: "une citadelle stratégique des Lettres" ( NR, 7); on Petitjean's articles for the collaborationist Nouvelle Revue française, see NR, 419-22. See also Gérard Loiseaux, La Littérature de la défaite et de la collaboration (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1984), 113-16.
12. See UC, 371.
13. See NR, 423-25.
14. In particular, see Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-conformistes des années trente: Une Tentative de renouvellement de la pensée française (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969).
15. The original reads: "Armand Petitjean aura fait tout ce qu'il pouvait pour qu'on l'oublie. Après Mise à nu [1946] . . . il choisira définitivement le silence et la retraite." ( NR, 403)
16. The original reads: "mais s'arrête au seuil de la politique, au sens traditionnel du terme" (Armand Petitjean, "La Pensée des limites," introduction to Quelles limites? by the Club of Rome [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973], 16).
17. Armand Petitjean, "Disponsibilité de la jeunesse française actuelle," Nouvelle Revue française, January 1937, 27 (the byline is dated July 1936); hereafter abbreviated "DJF." Petitjean opposed this "availability" to the febrile older generation, which merely "flies to the help of victory, adventure, or event, rather than actually making history" ("voler au secours de la victoire, de l'aventure ou de l'évènement, non pour faire de l'histoire" ["DJF," 32]).
18. The original reads: "les hommes de bonne volonté, de plasticité à l'histoire" ("DJF," 28).
19. The original reads: "'les révolutionnaires' qui, plus conscients qu'eux-mêmes, agissent dans leur sens" ("DJF," 28).
20. See Alain Paire, Chronique des "Cahiers du sud," 1914-1966 (Paris: IMEC, 1993). On the independent "spirit of the Nouvelle Revue française, " see Jean-José Marchand, "5 rue Sebastien-Bottin," in Entre deux guerres: La Création française entre 1919 et 1939, ed. Olivier Barrot and Pascal Ory (Paris: François Bourdin, 1990), 172-87. Marchand explains: "Even in the realm of the essay, Paulhan tries to open up the NRF by giving voice to marginal thinkers such as Armand Petitjean and Georges Pelorson" ("Même dans le domaine de l'essai, Paulhan tente d'aérer la NRF en donnant la parole à des penseurs marginaux comme Armand Petitjean et Georges Pelorson" [185]). Pelorson, who had published in transition, and who would later direct youth propaganda in occupied France, might be interestingly compared with Petitjean.
21. See NR, 407-15. See also Frédéric Grover, "Jean Paulhan et la politique," in Jean Paulhan le souterrain, ed. Jacques Bersani (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 187-225; Alain Clerval "Un Démocrate, Jean Paulhan," Nouvelle Revue française, May 1969, 931-37; and Michael Syrotinski, "Some Wheat and Some Chaff: Jean Paulhan and the Post-War Literary Purge in France," Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 16 (summer 1992): 247-63.
22. The original reads: "les revolutionnaires français trouvent dans leur passé un futur magnifique" ("DJF," 36).
23. The original reads: "les traditions réactionnaires étant mal établies en France, ou plutot hors d'usage, il convient aux 'fascistes' français d'innover" ("DJF," 36). Petitjean adds about these "fascists" in a footnote: "Furthermore, as long as their innovations are imported, they will not succeed in doing anything besides seeming like émigrés" ("D'ailleurs, aussi longtemps que leurs innovations seront des importations, ils ne parviendront à rien, sinon à faire re d'émigrés" [36n.]).
24. The original reads: "la conscience du Rassemblement" (Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France, de l'Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986), 105. Although Blum's government fell in June 1937, the policies of the Popular Front persisted through 1938.
25. The original reads: "sans fascisme, sans hitlérisme, sans stalinisme non plus, et sans l'anti-communisme de Monsieur Jacques Doriot" ( MSP, 192).
26. While explaining that French nationalists, such as Thierry Maulnier, have too much leisure to perfect their doctrine, Petitjean adds: "But perhaps Maulnier is not unaware of this concern when he writes: 'As the need for an organic social transformation becomes increasingly urgent, so too does it become increasingly indeterminate.' As far as I know, Hitler never thought that his Hitlerism was 'indeterminate'" ("Mais peut-être Maulnier n'est-il pas insensible à cette inquiétude, lorsqu'il écrit: 'Plus la nécessité d'une transformation organique de la société humaine apparait pressante, plus elle est indéterminée.' Hitler n'a jamais cru, que je sâche, à ' l'indétermination' de son hitlérisme" [Armand Petitjean, "Nationalisation de la France," review of Au delà du nationalisme, by Tierry [sic] Maulnier, and Le nationalisme contre les nations, by Henri Lefebvre, Vendredi, 4 March 1938, 4]).
27. See Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche: L'Idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Seuil, 1983); hereafter abbreviated NDNG. See also Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). Sternhell does not mention Petitjean.
28. The original reads: "qu'aucun mouvement politique n'a jamais pu rassembler ni unifier durablement" (Michel Winock, "Fascisme à la française ou fascisme introuvable?" in Nationalisme, antisémitisme, et fascisme en France [Paris: Seuil, 1990], 280). Winock points out, among other things, that while some nonconformists aligned themselves with Vichy, "a significant part of Resistance ideology is driven by antiliberal and antiparliamentarian thought" ("toute une part de l'idéologie de la Résistance s'abreuve aux sources de la critique antilibérale et antiparlementaire" [280]). On the debates with Sternhell, see also Pierre Milza, Fascisme français: Passé et Présent (Paris: Flammarion, 1987).
29. Sternhell explains how this idea of National Revolution permeates what he calls "the fascistic currents of the period" ("les éléments fascisants de l'époque" [ NDNG, 274]). The idea of "a revolution that is both antiliberal and anti-Marxist is thus widely available several years before it became the slogan and goal of all those movements seeking to reconquer France under the aegis of Nazi Germany" ("une révolution à la fois antilibérale et antimarxiste, est ainsi largement répandue plusieurs années avant de devenir le motto et l'objectif de tous les mouvements partis à la reconquête de la France sous la protection de l'Allemagne nazie" [ NDNG, 274]).
30. Lindenberg lists Déat, Doriot, Drieu la Rochelle, Céline, and Benoist-Méchin as collaborationists (see "FI," 155).
31. The original reads: "La révolution socialiste nationale se poursuivra en Occident et fera l'Europe, ou l'Europe succombera sous l'esclavage étranger dans sa propre anarchie." (Armand Petitjean, "Principes d'un ordre occidental," Idées: Journal de la Révolution Nationale, August 1943, 13; hereafter abbreviated "POO")
He praises "Hitlerism, fascism, and phalangism" as the first experiments of national European socialism, the first to confront the internal problems of modern Europe: "race, youth, and work. They gave the authoritarian state its indispensable instrument: the Party" ("la race, . . . la jeunesse et [le] travail. Ils ont donné à l'état autoritaire et populaire son instrument indispensable: le Parti" [12]).
32. Lindenberg concludes about Petitjean's essay "Friends of the Revolution": "Petitjean, like his friend Drieu la Rochelle, was pursuing a war of the new against the old and this with a fascination that he was never able to overcome for Marxism and its works. Whom did he cite by the side of the German prophets of conservative revolution, by the side of Von Salomon and Ernst Jünger, spiritual brothers-in-arms and 'fellow combattants in the corrupt war of 1939-40'? Carnot and the Jacobins, the 'mystique of volunteer in struggle' merging with that of the soldiers of Year II" ("FI," 144).
33. The original reads:
Le mot qui de tous ceux de la langue française a mis le plus de temps a forcer mes lèvres, c'est celui de décadence. Pour echapper à l'evidence, je me suis refugié dans tous les systèmes. Notamment, j'ai tenté de dire que l'idée de décadence était romantique et anti-française: n'avait de place chez nous qu'en littérature. [CP, 18]
On Petitjean's rejection of socioeconomic decadence see, in particular, his "Après l'après-guerre," Nouvelle Revue française, September 1938, 478-88. Anti-Semitism, for example, does not feature prominently in Petitjean's writing, although he does equate Jewish and German racism, viewing both critically, before and after the war. Under Vichy, he voices more commonplace anti-Semitic rhetoric about Jewish finance and the "degeneration" of France's "racial components" ("composantes raciales") in his "L'Appel de l'Histoire," Idées: Journal de la Révolution Nationale, October 1942, 17.
34. The original reads:
Il nous explique, et cela est juste, que le fascisme "est né partout de la succession d'un état de crise à un état de guerre, quand la génération du feu a pour ainsi dire hypnotisé celle de la misère". Et il affirme que rien de comun n'a pu encore se produire en France, parce qu'il n'y a pas encore eu de "génération de la crise". Il me semble pourtant qu'elle commence à monter. Mais ne discutons même pas sur ces points délicats. [Robert Brasillach, "Causerie littéraire," review of Le Moderne et son prochain, by A.-M. Petitjean, and Le Panier flottant, by Guy Mazeline, Action française, 26 May 1938, reprinted in Oeuvres complètes de Robert Brasillach, ed. Maurice Bardèche, vol. 12 (Paris: Club de l'honnête homme, 1964), 178; hereafter abbreviated OC.]
In his "Péguy et nous," Petitjean explained that "we are the only youth [in Europe], this country is the only one that has had time to recover from the war and that has not lived with the myth of youth ("nous sommes la seule jeunesse [en Europe], ce pays est le seul qui ait eu le loisir de réparer la guerre, et qui n'ait pas vécu du mythe de la jeunesse" [Armand Petitjean, "Peguy et nous," Nouvelle Revue française, July 1939, 11]).
35. The original reads: "la philosophie tragique" (Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle, "Le Sens du tragique," Idées: Journal de la Revolution Nationale, November 1941, 4).
36. Armand Petitjean, "De la révolution nécessaire à la révolution possible," Idées: Journal de la Révolution Nationale, January 1942, 1-5.
37. The original reads:
Il arrive que la considération de notre tâche nous saisisse de vertige, et que le spectacle de nos décombres nous tienne paralysés. Que de "tempéraments fascistes" en France, de Drieu à Lucien Rebatet, en passant par Céline, ont connu la tentation du désespoir nihiliste ou d'une allègre anarchie. [Armand Petitjean, "Notre problème révolutionnaire," Idées: Journal de la Révolution Nationale, September 1942, 18]
He counters this with nationalist mystique: "it is because we preserve a fanatical faith in the soul of France that we detest this present and recent past that suffice for most Frenchmen, and this feeble body with which they endow it today" ("c'est parce que nous conservons dans l'âme de la France une foi fanatique que nous haïssons ce présent et ce proche passé qui suffisent à la plupart des Français, et ce corps malingre qu'ils lui font aujourd'hui" [18]).
38. The original reads: "tempérament 'préfasciste', un peu analogue à celui qui pouvait être celui de beaucoup de jeunes Italiens avant 1922" ( OC, 178). In July 1943, Jean Paulhan wrote to a friend about the possibility of a fascist France, "with Petitjean or Bergery as dictator (that is not completely inconceivable)" ("avec Petitjean ou Bergery pour dictateur [à cela rien de strictement impossible]"); Paulhan explains that he is thinking of fascism "à la Mussolini" (Jean Paulhan to Jean Guéhenno, July 1943, no. 280, Jean Paulhan: Choix de lettres, ed. Dominique Aury and Jean-Claude Zylberstein, vol. 2 [Paris: Gallimard, 1986], 325).
39. The original reads: "Gnostique, nietzschéen, Drieu incarne tout au long de sa carrière le type du moderniste antimoderne." (Daniel Lindenberg, "Le national-socialisme aux couleurs de la France: Drieu la Rochelle," Esprit, November 1992, 173) On the ambiguities of aesthetic and political modernism in France, see Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 25-28.
40. The original reads: "les forces de récréation sont près d'équilibrer celles de création. . . . [L]es pouvoirs de l'homme ne sont plus si loin de ceux des anciens dieux (et bien entendu aussi des démons). . . . [I]l peut enfin regarder la vie et la réalité en face" ( MSP, 84).
41. The original reads: "celui que nous reconstruisons, perdrait ses mesures et sa raison d'etre" (Armand Petitjean, review of Besoin de grandeur, by C.-F. Ramuz, Vendredi, 15 July 1938, 4).
42. The originals read: "l'abjection française," and "peuple est à ce point heureux qu'il est encore inconscient de l'être" (Armand Petitjean, "Fascisme anti-fasciste," Nouvelle Revue française, December 1938, 1075; hereafter abbreviated "FAF"). In "Après l'après guerre," Petitjean wrote that a fully depleted civilization did not have the luxury of meditating upon its demise .
43. Sternhell writes: "On this important point fascists, semifascists and other 'nonconformists' fully agree, because they all share the same goal: to save the spirit and regenerate the body of modern society" ("Sur ce point capital les fascistes, les semi-fascistes et autres non-conformistes sont en parfait accord parce qu'ils visent tous le même objectif: sauver l'esprit et régénérer le corps de la société moderne" ( NDNG, 248]).
44. The original reads: "du dynamisme et de l'expérience, de la poésie et du savoir, autant dire des qualités inconciliables" (Gaston Bachelard, review of Imagination et réalisation, by Armand Petitjean, Nouvelle Revue française, March 1937, 455; hereafter abbreviated "IR").
45. The originals read: "encéphalite" and "un grand appétit animal" ( OC, 177).
46. The original reads: "passion le sauve à chaque pas de sa raideur intellectuelle" (Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, review of Présentation de Swift, by A. M. Petitjean and Le Journal à Stella de Swift, trans. Renée Villoteau, Nouvelle Revue française, November 1939, 802).
47. The original reads: "Voilà bien où mêne cette frénésie de volonté nue, sans conviction vraie qui lui assigne un but: déformation de tant de pseudo-intellectuels d'avant-guerre, en réaction contre le fatalisme surréaliste, et chez lesquels de faux relents de nietzschéisme étaient réveillés par les échos bruyants d'outre-Rhin." (Jean Piel, La Rencontre et la difference [Paris: Fayard, 1982], 237)
48. On the surrealists' own political career in the 1930s, see Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red: The Politics of Surrealism (New York: Paragon House, 1990); and Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism (London: Plantin, 1987).
49. In the 1930s, Petitjean published numerous French translations from the English: these include S. Zuckermann, La Vie sexuelle et sociale des singes (Paris: Gallimard, 1937); C.-C. Furnas, Le Siècle à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1938); Rogers D. Rusk, Les Atomes, les hommes, et les étoiles (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), and John Foster Dulles, Conditions de la paix (Paris: Denoël, 1939).
Petitjean's Anglophilia persisted throughout the war. In February 1943, he wrote that England should not be destroyed and that "unlike most of our compatriots, we feel closer to the English than to the Americans" ("contrairement à la plupart de nos compatriotes, nous nous sentons plus proches des Anglais que des Americains" [Armand Petitjean, "France-Europe," Idées: Journal de la Révolution Nationale, February 1943, 15]).
50. The original reads: "il m'a incité à reprendre Ulysse, cet immense défi à l'art et à la nature." ( OC, 177)
51. The original reads: "quelle abondante matière citée dans le texte original, anglais, allemand, espagnol, latin, grec, voire sanscrit! pour ne pas être amené à penser non que l'auteur est jeune, mais qu'il se sait jeune" (Benjamin Fondane, review of Imagination et réalisation, by Armand Petitjean, Cahiers du sud, August 1937, 443; hereafter abbreivated "RIR").
52. The original reads: " exploitation rationnelle de l'irrationnel" (Benjamin Fondane, Faux traité d'esthétique, ed. Catherine Thieck [1938; reprint, Paris: Plasma, 1980], 35). See Michel Carassou, "Benjamin Fondane, du surréalisme à l'existentialisme," in Les Années trente, ed. Roche and Tartig, 247-58.
53. The original reads: "cependant, nul doute que cette manière ne me satisfasse davantage que l' excessive clarté de Bergson" ("RIR," 443). Fondane's reference to Bergson's "excessive clarity" is ironic, perhaps almost a redemption of Bergsonian rationalism.
54. Armand Petitjean, "Joyce and Mythology, Mythology and Joyce," trans. Maria Jolas, transition, July 1935, 139; hereafter abbreviated "JM." This aesthetic recovers the moment of genesis, of self-consciousness, "the epoch of Narcissus, when the ape made himself man, or that of Jesus when God did the same" ("JM," 135).
55. The originals read: "il comble l'écart entre ces 'idées associées' par ce qui chez d'autres s'appelle ou s'appellerait écarts de langage" and "au-delà de la 'suprême conscience' (Paul Valery) et de 'l'inconscience suprême' (Andre Breton)--vers l'hyperconscience" (Armand Petitjean, "James Joyce et l'absorption du monde par le language," Cahiers du sud, October 1934, 614; hereafter abbreviated "JJ").
56. See Dougald McMilland, "transition": The History of a Literary Era, 1927-1938 (New York: George Braziller, 1975).
57. The original reads: "le courant Finnegans Wake . . . et le courant surréaliste" (Maria Jolas, quoted in Joyce et Paris 1902...1920-1940...1975: Actes du cinquième symposium international James Joyce, Paris, 16-20 juin 1975, ed. J. Aubert and Maria Jolas [Paris: Editions du CNRS; Villeneuve-d'Ascq, 1979], 47). See also Eugene Jolas's comparison of surrealism and Joyce quoted in McMilland, "transition," 194.
58. See Dominic Manganiello, Joyce's Politics (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). On transition's political nonpartisanship, see McMilland, "transition," 183.
59. The original reads: "l'ordre foncier des choses" ("JJ," 622).
60. The original reads: "dans sa détresse et non dans sa splendeur: et comme une vue de l'esprit non loi de la nature, que pour apaiser si possible ou du moins retarder chez lui la catastrophe" ("JJ," 622).
61. The original reads: "S'il est un pays au monde où Vico aît raison, c'est le notre, qui trouve l'éternité dans la périodicité même de ses vieillissements et de ses jeunesses neuves" (Petitjean, "Péguy et nous," 8).
62. Solely an aesthetic, writes Petitjean, of "conscious illusions based on the purest spiritual synesthesia can stubbornly return us to reality" ("illusions conscientes et fondées sur la plus pure cénesthésie spirituelle peuvent nous ramener obstinément à la réalité" [ IR, 299]).
63. The originals read: "le réalisme finit par retrouver la réalité, à force de mythologie" and "l'éternel retour de l'imagination" ( IR, 300).
64. The original reads: "l'imagination nous projette le monde à l'état de nature, d'absolu; mais . . . les différentes techniques de la volonté, mobilisant une somme toujours croissante de forces naturelles, d'instincts animaux, de passions et de raisons humaines, nous permettent de posséder de façon toujours plus complète en le réalisant, en le reconstruisant, ce monde dont nous n'avions de naissance que l'image." ( CP, 13)
65. A brief review in The Criterion scoffs at Petitjean's "entertaining" but "tenuous argument," remarking that this "contributor to transition, has written a long essay . . . in order to commend the linguistic experiments of Mr. Joyce. He pays tribute to the master more effectively in his manner than in his matter. . . . His dismissal of D. H. Lawrence and Sherwood Anderson has point; but his remark regarding Mr. Pound that 'American imagism has become no more than a kind of poetical atomism' is a fairer sample of how he has sought to make his too many verdicts more terse than arresting. He may be said to coruscate, not to burn with any devouring flame" (M. B., review of Imagination et réalisation, by Armand Petitjean, The Criterion [July 1937]: 757).
66. Petitjean does not mention Alexandre Kojève, whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s were very influential among the Parisian avant-garde. Imagination et réalisation frequently attacks Husserl's "abstraction" and comments favorably on Heidegger. See also Petitjean's review of De la souffrance à la plénitude, by Keyserling, L'Alternative, by Jankelévitch, and Qu'est-ce-que la Métaphysique? by Martin Heidegger ( Vendredi, 24 June 1938, 4), where he wrote: "Heidegger is the first who brought the supreme authority of mankind down to earth, without in any way disturbing its transcendent nature " ("Heidegger aura été le premier à ramener sur terre l'instance suprême de l'humanité, sans énerver en rien sa nature transcendante ").
On Ludwig Klages, see Richard Hinton Thomas, "Nietzsche in Weimar Germany--and the Case of Ludwig Klages," The Weimar Dilemma: Intellectuals in the Weimar Republic, ed. Anthony Phelan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 71-91.
67. The original reads: "Petitjean rétablit le sens du courant. C'est l'Imagination qui est première." ("RIR," 442) See also Bergson, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris: Alcan, 1932).
68. The original reads: "l'Imagination, cette précipitation spirituelle de la vitalité" (Armand Petitjean, quoted in Jean Paulhan, review of Imagination et réalisation by Armand Petitjean," Nouvelle Revue française, March 1936, 460).
69. The original reads: "Réalisation c'est intégration, insertion de l'Imagination sur le plan de la réalité. Elle procédera donc d'imitation en imitation." ( IR, 124)
70. The original reads: "l'intégration à son tour de cette Imagination qui nous intégrait d'abord" ( IR, 126).
71. The original reads: " sur- ou subréalité [qui] constitue en effet une dérision de cette réalité et de son Imagination" ( IR, 125; emphasis added).
72. J. G. Merquior, Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 70. On Bachelard and surrealism, see Gaston Bachelard, "Le Surrationalisme," in Inquisitions, ed. Henri Béhar (Paris: Editions Du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1990), 1-6; first published in Inquisitions 1 (June 1936): 1-6.
73. The originals read: "unique dans les annales de la philosophie" and "Jusqu'ici l'Imagination n'avait pas trouvé son métaphysicien" ("IR," 456, 455).
74. The originals read: "programmes de réalisation psychique . . . ce qu'il faudra appeler désormais 'les retournements petitjeaniens'" and "la juste dynamique du psychisme" ("IR," 455). Bachelard is especially struck by this cyclical model: "Hardly has the project been sketched out but the imagination must turn back upon itself; it must return to its seed, forming nothing but seeds" ("À peine l'oeuvre est-elle ébauchée, que déjà l'imagination veut et doit se retourner; elle doit revenir à son germe, ne former que des germes" ["IR," 455]).
75. The original reads: "La vie, comme la pensée, saute d'une image à l'autre" ("IR," 456). Bachelard mentions Petitjean at greater length; see Gaston Bachelard, Lautréamont (Paris: José Corti, 1939), 21, 144, 148-51.
76. Elizabeth Roudinesco evokes the surrealist shift to paranoia from a prior privileging of hysteria (and automatic writing) as she describes Dali's project, in 1930, to systematize "a coherent method of knowledge and creative interpretation of reality. Lacan will give his strategy the scientific legitimacy that it lacked, and Dali himself will enthusiastically applaud the publication of Lacan's thesis" ("une méthode cohérente de connaissance et d'interprétation créative de la réalité. Il reçoit de Lacan la caution scientifique qui manquait à sa démarche et saluera avec enthousiasme la publication de la thèse de celui-ci" [Elizabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, 1925-1985, vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 126]). See also, in particular, Jacques Lacan, "Le Problème du style et la conception psychiatrique des formes paranoïaques de l'existence," Minotaure 1 (June 1933): 68-69.
77. The original reads: "Lacan désire extrêmement vous voir. Voudriez-vouz, avant de repartir, lui donner un coup de téléphone." (Jean Paulhan to Armand Petitjean, October 1941, no. 206, Choix de lettres, 247)
78. The original reads: "intégrer le monde dans l'homme en rapportant à l'homme sa connaissance du monde et ce qu'il prenait, jusqu'ici, pour 'objectivité'" (Armand Petitjean, "Le Savant devant l'homme Encyclopédie française," review of La Vie Mentale, Vendredi, 21 October 1938, 4). Petitjean is referring to Lacan, "Le Complexe, facteur concret de la psychologie familiale," in La Vie mentale, ed. Henri Wallon, vol. 8 of the Encyclopédie française, dir. Lucien Febvre (Paris: Larousse, 1938).
The first version of "The Mirror Stage," now lost, was written in 1936; see David Macey, Lacan in Context (London: Verso, 1988), 214.
79. See Armand Petitjean, "Analyse spectrale du singe," Minotaure 7 : 59; hereafter abbreviated "AS." See also Henri Wallon's Les Origines du caractère chez l'enfant , which drew upon Köhler's L'Intelligence des singes supérieurs , cited by both Lacan and Petitjean.
80. The original reads: "le crâne de l'homme ressemble davantage à celui du foetus du singe qu'à celui du singe adulte" ("AS," 59).
81. The original reads: "[Puisque] le singe au miroir ne se reconnaît pas, que le faisant il se métamorphoserait aussitôt en homme, ce qui est proprement le geste de Narcisse, et que l'homme est un animal capable de se représenter la mort l'infini et soi-même, il nous reste que l'homme est un singe-qui-rit." ("AS," 59)
82. Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I," in Écrits, ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 4, 2; hereafter abbreviated "MS."
83. The original reads: "fictive, forcée et désepérée" ( IR, 136).
84. The originals read: "une formation politique qui fait horreur à nos 'nationalistes'" and "aussi lentement, aussi sûrement, avec le même 'désordre' que la bourgeoisie lors de la Révolution française, le peuple de France est en train de se nationaliser" (Petitjean, "Nationalisation de la France," 5).
85. The original reads: "malgré toutes les tentations de sa force, sut attendre Hitler " (Armand Petitjean, "La 'Victoire des vaincus,'" review of Histoire de l'armée allemande depuis la guerre, " by J. Benoist-Mechin, Vendredi, 8 April 1938, 5).
86. The original reads: "Cet homme du sud, dont la principale expérience fut viennoise, et qui put éprouver à quel point la diversité des races, les excès de la spéculation, la sophistication des esprits peuvent menacer un grand empire comme l'était celui des Habsbourg, vint remettre tout son peuple entre des cadres prussiens, vient armer la Reichswehr elle-même d'une idéologie plus terrible que toutes celles aux noms desquelles fut menée la dernière guerre. . . . Quant à la fin, j'imagine que nous la verrons bientôt." (Petitjean, "La 'Victoire des vaincus,'" 5)
87. The original reads: "aucun peuple n'est aussi mal représenté par sa politique, par sa littérature, comme par sa capitale, que le peuple de France" ( MSP, 238).
88. Armand Petitjean, "Dissolution du roman," review of Terre natale, by Marcel Arland, and La Femme à tout faire, by Marius Richard, Vendredi, 17 July 1938, 4. "Modern man has lost his own sense of identity as well as that of his fellow man" ("Le moderne ne sait plus qui il est, ni quel est son prochain" [ MSP, 6]).
89. The original reads: "la dictature de la France sur tous les Français" (Armand Petitjean, "Dictature de la France," Nouvelle Revue française, April 1938, 665).
90. The original reads: "Péguy revient parmi nous" (Armand Petitjean, review of Souvenir, by Charles Péguy, Vendredi, 8 December 1938, 4). Petitjean noted Péguy's return "in the writing of André Billy, or of Robert Brasillach. . . . Some are going so far as to say: 'The English have Kipling, the Italians d'Annunzio; why should we not have Péguy?" ("Sous la plume d'André Billy, ou de Robert Brasillach. . . . Certains vont jusqu'à dire: Les anglais ont Kipling, les Italiens d'Annunzio; pourquoi n'aurions-nous pas Péguy?'" [4]). See Robert Burac, "Péguy," in L'Affaire Dreyfus de A à Z, ed. Michel Drouin (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 255-60. During the war, Péguy was extensively invoked by collaborationists, but he was also invoked by the Resistance.
91. The original reads: "romanticisme intégral" ( MSP, 84). See also Armand Petitjean, "Communisme de défense nationale," review of De la Sainte Russie à l'URSS, by Georges Friedmann, Vendredi, 1 April 1938, 4.
92. The original reads: "inconscience concertée" ( MSP, 83).
93. The original reads: "permet de passer de l'ordre de l'action à celui de la réflexion" (Armand Petitjean, "L'humour international," review of Le Voyage imaginaire, by Leo Cassi; Les Hommes gris, by Ettore Settani; and La Route au tabac, by Erskine Caldwell, Vendredi, 22 October 1937, 4).
94. The original reads: "de s'ouvrir à la vie, de se baigner au monde, et d'accorder 'l'imagination' avec la 'réalisation'" (Armand Petitjean, "Morbus romanticus," review of La Nausée, by Jean-Paul Sartre, Vendredi, 6 May 1938, 5).
95. See "Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Roger Caillois, 1934-1967," ed. Odile Felgine and Claude Perez, Cahiers Jean Paulhan, vol. 6 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 89.
96. The original reads: "le premier en France depuis les bouleversements de la dernière guerre à entrer volontiers--consciemment--dans l'histoire du XXe siècle" (Armand Petitjean, review of L'Espoir, by André Malraux, Vendredi, 12 December 1937, 5). See also Petitjean's earlier, more grudging appreciation of Malraux: Armand Petitjean, "Les Écrivains combattants d'espagne à la Mutualité," Nouvelle Revue française, March 1937, 273-75.
97. Petitjean inquires: "Don't we need to take a general look at this singular, exemplary point of view on reality as presented by vision?" ("Ne faut-il pas un coup d'oeil d'ensemble à ce point de vue singulier, éxemplaire, sur la réalité qu'occupe la vision?" [ MSP, 228]).
98. The original reads: "c'est par [lui] que la France reste pure" ( MSP, 238).
99. "Prior to the order of general mobilization," for example, Petitjean thus demands "a league for the protection of free dreams" ("pour la défense de la liberté des rêves [L.D.L.R.]") since these are threatened by "surrealists" and "führers" alike, along with "businessmen" and "psychiatrists" ("Les psychiatres, les surréalistes, les romantiques, les hommes d'affaires, les führers sont en train de nous interdire de rêver à notre gré. . . . "). (Armand Petitjean, "La liberté des rêves," review of L'Ombre à la Barraquer, by C.-J. Odic and Gustalin, by Marcel Aymé, Vendredi, 18 March 1938, 4)
100. The original reads: "Le mouvement surréaliste n'a plus rien d'organique." (Armand Petitjean, "À Propos de l'exposition surréaliste," Nouvelle Revue française, March 1938, 515)
101. The original reads: "le porte-parole de tout ce qu'il y a de veule, de lâche, d'abandonné de catastrophique, de cassandresque, de traître dans le pays" (Armand Petitjean, review of L'École des Cadavres, by L.-F. Céline, Reflets de la semaine, 12 December 1938, 4).
102. The original reads: "Ce langage pensé, qui n'est pas même purifié par l'élocution, ces injures qui sont bien plus blasphématoires, activistes et presque incantatoires que les invectives homériques, du fait même qu'elles ne sont plus prononcées, mais écrites, n'imitent aucune réalité (fût-ce une réalité verbale) aucun argot du monde. Elles sont bien plutôt l'expression de l'arrière-pensée de milliers, de dizaines, de centaines de milliers de Français." (Petitjean, review of Céline's L'École des Cadavres, 4)
103. The originals read: "intellectuels sans vocation," "conservateurs de gauche," "Fascisme anti-fasciste!" and "recours à des excitants étrangers" ("FAF," 1074).
104. Petitjean writes: "You allow that Hitler and Mussolini impose their rhythm upon all of modern life, but you are willing to acknowledge that the interests of Germany and Italy are not necessarily your own, and you can, thanks to the antifascism of your 'fascism,' flaunt your patriotism. To protect your interests, you adopt their mores" ("Vous admettez que Hitler et Mussolini imposent leur rythme à toute la vie moderne; mais vous voulez bien reconnaître que les intérêts de l'Allemagne et de l'Italie ne sont pas nécessairement les votres, et vous pouvez en somme, grâce à l'antifascisme de votre 'fascisme', faire parade de votre patriotisme. Pour défendre vos intérêts, vous adoptez leurs moeurs" ["FAF," 1074]).
105. The original reads: "les grandes révolutions françaises ne se sont faites dans la pénurie, mais dans la surabondance de coeur. Elles sont révélation, bien plus que mutation" ("FAF," 1075). Petitjean contrasts this with the "void, despair, and humiliation" ("ce vide, ce desespoir et cette humiliation") that is the basis of National Socialism in Germany ("FAF," 1075).
106. The original reads: "l'histoire contemporaine . . . est moins une affaire d'économie que de psychologie" (Armand Petitjean, "L'Esprit devant le siècle," review of Avertissement à l'Europe, " by Thomas Mann, Vendredi, 11 November 1937, 5). Petitjean cites both Caillois and Bataille very favorably in Imagination et réalisation ( IR, 65, 154, 267, 298).
107. The Declaration of the College on the International Crisis reads as follows: "It does not think it is obliged to consider the particular interests of France in this venture. . . . The College of Sociology regards the general absence of intense reaction in the face of war as a sign of man's devirilization. It does not hesitate to see the cause of this in the relaxation of society's current ties, which are practically nonexistent as a result of the development of bourgeois individualism." (Roger Caillois, "Declaration of the College on the International Crisis," in The College of Sociology, ed. Hollier, 45)
108. The original reads: "N'est-il pas une institution, une forme sociale, qui devrait y suppléer, fournir tout au moins par sa seule présence . . . les grandes lignes de la louange" (Jean Paulhan to Armand Petitjean, January 1939, no. 60, Choix de lettres, 83; see also 460nn). As Derrida has underscored, the word "suppléer" is ambiguous, meaning either "to replace" or "to supplement."
109. The original reads: "une Institution" (Jean Paulhan, "Sur les 'Cahiers' d'Armand Petitjean," Nouvelle Revue française, March 1939, 535). See also Petitjean's review of the intellectual inquiry conducted by Volontés, Armand Petitjean, in " Volontés et la direction de conscience," Nouvelle Revue française, July 1937, 155-56.
110. Petitjean wrote of "the need for a national and popular Revolution, national because it is popular. These conclusions of Péguy will be its point of departure " ("la nécessité d'une Révolution nationale et populaire, nationale parce que populaire. Ces conclusions de Péguy seront sa base de départ " [Armand Petitjean and Andre Ullmann, quoted in "Nouveaux Cahiers de la Quinzaine," Cahiers du sud, April 1939, 357; hereafter abbreviated "NC"]).
111. The original topics are: "Famille; Métiers; Culte des Morts; Armée; Groupement de Jeunes; Théatre; Puissances spirituelles; Intermédiaires; Représentants; Cadres; Régions de France; Afrique du Nord; Propagande française; Étrangers en France" (Armand Petitjean, quoted in "Pour de nouveaux Cahiers, " Nouvelle Revue française, February 1939, 352). The list of topics published in the April 1939 Cahiers du sud, where André Ullmann is cited as well, seems more left-wing; in particular, "foreigners in France" is replaced by "racism and France" ("le Racisme et la France" ["NC," 358]).
112. The originals read: "sensibilité actuelle " and "des directives" (Armand Petitjean, quoted in "Pour de nouveux Cahiers, " 352).
113. The original reads: ¼Position de la Question. Étude objective sur la famille suivant les régions, la condition sociale, le travail des femmes, l'habitat, etc. . . . par A. Siegried. Étude psychologique des sentiments familaux actuels, par Dr. Lacan. Temoignages catholique, "paien" de Montherlant, communiste, de Nizan; témoignages populaires. Conclusions. Correspondance. Pilori. ["NC," 359]
The pillory would used be to attack enemies of the nation.
114. The original reads: "seule la structure familiale moderne de type bourgeoise et à dominance patriarcale était capable d'assurer la liberté sociale" (Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: Esquisse d'une vie, histoire d'un système de pensée [Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1993], 201). See her illuminating study, which does not mention Petitjean, of this question (193-204).
115. Petitjean's article, "Eléments d'une génération: Bilan des échecs et des espoirs avant l'action," was reprinted in Combats preliminaires. Other contributors to the Courrier included Drieu la Rochelle, Hubert Beuve-Méry, Robert Lacoste, Brice Parain, Leo Lagrange, Thierry Maulnier, and Emmanuel Mounier. See Claude Roy, "Le Courrier de Paris et de la Province," Nouvelle Revue française, October 1939, 657-58.
116. See Felgine, Roger Caillois, 197-265, on his lecture series in Buenos Aires, where he was both the guest and the lover of Victoria Ocampo; the available evidence suggests that Caillois did plan to return to France.
117. The original reads: "Il circule toutes sortes d'horreurs sur la NRF (la revue et le groupe)" (Roger Caillois to Jean Paulhan, 13 May 1941, "Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Roger Caillois," 6:146).
118. The original reads: "se vouloir les interprètes attentifs de leurs camarades réduits à s'exprimer en chuchotant" (Roger Caillois, in "Devoirs et privilèges de l'écrivain français à l'étranger," Circonstancielles, 1940-45 [Paris: Gallimard, 1946], 43).
119. Caillois wrote to Léon Pierre-Quint of his editorial decision not to include "Petitjean's book, the ideology of which I am somewhat fearful" ("le recueil de Petitjean, dont je crains un peu l'idéologie" [Roger Caillois to Léon Pierre-Quint, 20 July 1941, unpublished letter, Bibliothèque Nationale, NAF 18359]).
120. The original reads: "Encore une fois que voulez-vous?" (Jean Paulhan to Armand Petitjean, 26 October 1939, no. 99, Choix de lettres, 129).
121. The original reads:
On le sent atteint déjà et épouvanté par la désagrégation qu'il constate enfin à vif. Il se crispe, mais cela sent déjà le désespoir. Pauvre petit. Il connaîtra plus terriblement que moi la honte qui m'a brisé si jeune. [Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle, Journal, 1939-1945, ed. Julien Hervier (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 150]
See also NR, 416-17.
122. The original reads: "Oui le cas de Petitjean est frappant, et (sans doute) tragique. Peut-on faire une révolution en étant ministre? . . . Je n'en sais rien. Je ne le crois pas. . . . C'est avoir grande confiance dans le pouvoir du mensonge, dans sa propre faculté de mensonge." (Jean Paulhan to Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle, September 1941, no. 195, Choix de lettres, 235)
123. Bernard Comte's spectrum of ideological currents in Vichy explains that Idées united authoritarian proponents of "hard-line National Revolution" ("Révolution nationale dure")--such as supporters of Paul Marion--with dissident right-wing Maurrassians in an attack upon loyal followers of the Maréchal Pétain ( UC, 371-72). Comte notes elsewhere that the founders of Idées, targeting an audience of educated youth, had little resonance in this milieu where they lacked "strong institutions" ("organisations puissantes") and where the Catholic church prevailed ("Encadrer la jeunesse?" in La Propaganda sous Vichy, 1940-1944, ed. Laurent Gervereau and Denis Peschanski [Paris: BDIC, 1990], 45).
On Vichy propaganda see also IP, "FI," and Claude Lévy, "La Propagande," in La France des années noires, ed. Jean-Pierre Azéma and François Bédarida, vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 47-65.
124. The original reads: "Hors de l'Empire, pas de salut" (Armand Petitjean, "Défense et illustration de notre Empire," Idées: Journal de la Révolution Nationale, July-August 1942, 36). See also Armand Petitjean, "Pour défendre Dakar . . . des camions, des avions, et des chars," La Gerbe, October 1942, 3.
125. Petitjean decried the contemporary tendency to view France's situation "as black or rosy, not because these are the true colors of France in 1942, but because we are wearing glasses of either color" ("en noir ou en rose, non parce que ce sont les couleurs réelles de la France en 1942, mais parce que nous portons des lunettes de telle ou telle couleur" [Armand Petitjean, "Inventaire de la France," speech to the Algerian School for Managers (l'École des Cadres d'Algérie), proceedings of the Regional Delegation of Algerian Youth, 21 April 1942 (Algiers: Typo-litho and J. Carbonel United, 1942), 5; hereafter abbreviated "IF"]). Petitjean is particularly critical of the so-called Riom trials of Third Republic leaders.
126. The original reads: "notre vraie place dans le monde . . . à l'avant-garde de la civilisation humaine" ("IF," 20). His discussion of "the genius of France" ("le génie de la France" ["IF," 18]) invokes the sacred sources of nationhood.
127. The original reads: "Les richesses, la puissance et la science de l'Occidental progressent plus vite que sa conscience" ("POO," 10).
128. The original reads: "plus sûres de leurs traditions et plus conscientes de l'avenir que les masses, ont toujours raffermi et élargi la structure sociale et l'horizon national de celles-ci en même temps qu'elles leur rendaient le sens des honneurs sacrés" ("POO," 10). This equation of Nazism and Communism was linked to an emphasis upon the contemporary "temptation" of Communism.
129. Daniel Lindenberg, Les Années souterraines (1937-1947) (Paris: La Découverte, 1990), 266. Alluding to La Mise à nu, he even evokes the "endearing" ("l'attachant") Petitjean (Lindenberg, "Le national-socialisme aux couleurs de la France, 173).
130. The original reads: "le vrai motif d'une pratique qui consiste à soustraire à toute critique les Jouhandeau, les Chardonne, les Morand et autres Giono" (Lindenberg, Les Années souterraines, 260; see also 266).
131. See Jean Paulhan, "D'un certain droit à l'erreur," in De la paille et du grain, vol. 5 of Jean Paulhan: Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1970); hereafter abbreviated PG. De la paille et du grain was first published as a series of articles (1947-48); it was then published as a revised and expanded monograph in 1948.
132. Like most who were accused at the time, Petitjean remained devoid of remorse. He privately declared, in 1946, "I published under the Occupation, it was wrong for me to do it, and I published certain things that make me feel not ashamed but confused (as for other things, which today might seem like mistakes, I await the verdict of the future)" ("J'ai publié sous l'occupation, j'ai eu tort de le faire, et j'ai publié des choses dont certaines me remplissent non de honte, mais de confusion [pour d'autres, qui paraissent aujourd'hui des erreurs, j'attends le verdict de l'avenir]" [Armand Petitjean to René Lalou, July 1946, unpublished letter, Bibliothèque Nationale, NAF 14692]).
133. The original reads: "[ce combattant] . . . a trop fait d'erreurs, il en a trop vu faire pour adhérer entièrement à aucun dogme" ( MN, 7).
134. The original reads: "Divisés entre ou en eux-mêmes?" ( MN, 27).
135. The original reads: "le cas du franc-tireur internationaliste qui n'accepte de faire la guerre pour son pays qu'autant qu'il le juge politiquement conforme à son idéal" ( MN, 26).
136. The original reads: "il lui arrive de trancher les problèmes, au lieu de les débrouiller" ( PG, 319).
137. The original reads: "sentence fasciste" ( PG, 329).
138. Syrotinski provides a useful overview: "The mystery of language (how can language continue to function in its essentially imperfect state?) is identical to the mystery of patriotism (how can a patrie be reinforced by the existence and tolerance of anti-patriots?). It requires keeping this mystery in play, since its expulsion endangers the very existence both of language and of the patrie. " (Syrotinski, "Some Wheat and Some Chaff," 261)
139. The original reads: "un moi indiscret qui s'est pris au tragique, [un] moi qui se trouve brusquement face à face avec Dieu sans conscience de soi" ( MN, 85).
140. The original reads: "Cet Einkelte, dès qu'il s'égare dans un texte français, ce n'est plus simplement le solitaire. C'est le solitaire avec je ne sais quelle nuance avantageuse (qui demeure le secret de Petitjean)--comme si c'était très grave d'être solitaire!" ( PG, 320)
141. The original reads: "la vision globale d'un monde équitable doit s'incarner dans nos coeurs" (Petitjean, "La Pensée des limites," 29). Besides participating in the publication of Club of Rome documents, Petitjean began in 1972 to edit an Écologie series at Fayard, which published such works as Edward Goldsmith, Changer ou disparaître ; René Dubos, Les Dieux de l'écologie ; and Aurelio Peccei, L'Heure de la vérité .
142. The original reads: "de toute infiltration idéologique" (Armand Petitjean, "Pour un contrat de l'homme avec la nature," Le Monde diplomatique, September 1989, 19).
143. The original reads: "l'altérité en lui-même, dans les êtres, en toute chose, dans la Nature elle-même" (Petitjean, "Pour un contrat de l'homme et de la nature," 19).
144. On the philosophical aspects of Deep Ecology, see Luc Ferry, Le Nouvel ordre écologique (Paris: Grasset, 1992). Petitjean's title, "Toward Man's Contract with Nature," explicitly echoes the basic premise of Deep Ecology, which, according to Ferry, displaces the Social Contract with a Natural Contract, whereby "the entire universe becomes the subject of rights: it is no longer man, viewed as the center of the world, who must be first and foremost protected against himself, but it is now rather the cosmos as such which must be protected against man" ("l'univers tout entier deviendrait sujet de droit: ce n'est plus l'homme, considéré comme centre du monde, qu'il faut au premier chef protéger de lui-même, mais bien le cosmos comme tel, qu'on doit défendre contre les hommes" [28]).