Nice. Having grown up in France at a time when the memory of Vichy was very much part of our elder's lived experience, I find your conclusions compelling. If anything, I would suggest you underestimate the ease with which a Republic slides into Fascism--as if Fascism were little more than an extension of liberal Republicanism. Not my thought alone, the historian Gérard Noirel, in "Les Origines républicaines de Vichy," makes a similar point in regards to the IIIrd Republic's attitude towards immigrants, for instance.
I've heard of Paxton's book, sounds like a sweet read! And not to worry, thinking about Vichy doesn't disrupt my routine at all; if you're ever in Poland you'd be amazed by the presence of historical magazines that focus on even darker chapters of the war. But if you really want to disrupt other people's routines, one topic that might ruffle a few feathers would be how Roosevelt and especially his secretary of state were staunchly pro-Vichy and anti-De Gaulle until it was no longer a question but a certainty that De Gaulle was the future of France. We have to admire wartime Roosevelt out of consideration for the war, but he was not the most celebratory "foreign policy" president we've had by a long shot.
Petain was a tragic figure. The Lion of Verdun, who virtually singlehandedly defeated the Germans at that gruesome battle. And then he becomes the leader of Vichy. For that reason I certainly don't regard that epoch as being in any way simple for the French. Maybe for the reds. On a random note, I look forward in the next year to reading Andre Gide's travels to the USSR, where he went as a true believer and what he saw changed his mind.
It’s insightful, if chilling, to examine Vichy as what happens when government collapses and no one is there to make anything work. Petain was a sad old puppet and Hitler wasn’t paying enough attention. But what were the French themselves up to during this time? The general consensus seems to have been that a lot of French people living ordinary lives would get to keep on doing just that so long as they put up with a few rations and billeted soldiers once in a while. Perhaps there is a suggested parallel to our current situation there, as well.
However, I find it hard to understand Vichy and the role of Fascism in wartime France without seriously considering its attraction to artists and intellectuals. Our contemporary view goes quickly to the evil and brutality of lockstep ideas, so we don’t necessarily see what attraction fascist ideas had for people like Pound, Yeats, Stein, Heidegger, possibly Matisse and more.
For one, the link between modernism and fascism has been successfully argued by scholars, including Mark Antliff (Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilisation of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909 – 1939. Duke UP, 2007). Antliff identifies “five areas where modernism and fascism can be shown to share concerns: ideas of cultural regeneration, avant-garde techniques of montage, notions of secular religion, primitivism, and anti-capitalist ideas of time and space. Following the work of historian Roger Griffin, Antliff argues that hyper-nationalist forms of cultural re-birth were an essential component of both fascism and certain concepts of modernism.”
For another, fascism cannot be understand apart from what those artists and intellectuals resisted in Communism — what they saw as the technocratic state that threatened to kill individualism and aesthetics with its focus on industrialism and scientific rationalism (Robert Soucy). Long before I encountered Soucy, it always seemed as though views of extreme Right and extreme Left encountered one another at the far side of the circle: an overly simplistic glorification of the common man, whether as industrial worker or spiritual native within a compelling sense of collective destiny.
Fascism is now a button word (press it and you go right to a single idea.) This is not my defense of fascism; it is my interest in the history of ideas, the only way to understand why smart, complex people embraced concepts we would not. Thank you for contributing to that interest.
Nice. Having grown up in France at a time when the memory of Vichy was very much part of our elder's lived experience, I find your conclusions compelling. If anything, I would suggest you underestimate the ease with which a Republic slides into Fascism--as if Fascism were little more than an extension of liberal Republicanism. Not my thought alone, the historian Gérard Noirel, in "Les Origines républicaines de Vichy," makes a similar point in regards to the IIIrd Republic's attitude towards immigrants, for instance.
Cordially,
I've heard of Paxton's book, sounds like a sweet read! And not to worry, thinking about Vichy doesn't disrupt my routine at all; if you're ever in Poland you'd be amazed by the presence of historical magazines that focus on even darker chapters of the war. But if you really want to disrupt other people's routines, one topic that might ruffle a few feathers would be how Roosevelt and especially his secretary of state were staunchly pro-Vichy and anti-De Gaulle until it was no longer a question but a certainty that De Gaulle was the future of France. We have to admire wartime Roosevelt out of consideration for the war, but he was not the most celebratory "foreign policy" president we've had by a long shot.
Petain was a tragic figure. The Lion of Verdun, who virtually singlehandedly defeated the Germans at that gruesome battle. And then he becomes the leader of Vichy. For that reason I certainly don't regard that epoch as being in any way simple for the French. Maybe for the reds. On a random note, I look forward in the next year to reading Andre Gide's travels to the USSR, where he went as a true believer and what he saw changed his mind.
It’s insightful, if chilling, to examine Vichy as what happens when government collapses and no one is there to make anything work. Petain was a sad old puppet and Hitler wasn’t paying enough attention. But what were the French themselves up to during this time? The general consensus seems to have been that a lot of French people living ordinary lives would get to keep on doing just that so long as they put up with a few rations and billeted soldiers once in a while. Perhaps there is a suggested parallel to our current situation there, as well.
However, I find it hard to understand Vichy and the role of Fascism in wartime France without seriously considering its attraction to artists and intellectuals. Our contemporary view goes quickly to the evil and brutality of lockstep ideas, so we don’t necessarily see what attraction fascist ideas had for people like Pound, Yeats, Stein, Heidegger, possibly Matisse and more.
For one, the link between modernism and fascism has been successfully argued by scholars, including Mark Antliff (Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilisation of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909 – 1939. Duke UP, 2007). Antliff identifies “five areas where modernism and fascism can be shown to share concerns: ideas of cultural regeneration, avant-garde techniques of montage, notions of secular religion, primitivism, and anti-capitalist ideas of time and space. Following the work of historian Roger Griffin, Antliff argues that hyper-nationalist forms of cultural re-birth were an essential component of both fascism and certain concepts of modernism.”
For another, fascism cannot be understand apart from what those artists and intellectuals resisted in Communism — what they saw as the technocratic state that threatened to kill individualism and aesthetics with its focus on industrialism and scientific rationalism (Robert Soucy). Long before I encountered Soucy, it always seemed as though views of extreme Right and extreme Left encountered one another at the far side of the circle: an overly simplistic glorification of the common man, whether as industrial worker or spiritual native within a compelling sense of collective destiny.
Fascism is now a button word (press it and you go right to a single idea.) This is not my defense of fascism; it is my interest in the history of ideas, the only way to understand why smart, complex people embraced concepts we would not. Thank you for contributing to that interest.