Fascists and Honourable Men: Contingency and Choice in French Politics, 1918-45 (Studies in Modern History)

Studies in Modern History General Editor: J. C. D. Clark, Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor of British History, University of Kansas Titles include: Nimrod Amzalak FASCISTS AND HONOURABLE MEN Contingency and Choice in French Politics, 1918–45 James B. Bell A WAR ON RELIGION Dissenters, Anglicans and the American Revolution James B. Bell THE IMPERIAL ORIGINS OF THE KING’S CHURCH IN EARLY AMERICA 1607–1783 Joe Bord SCIENCE AND WHIG MANNERS Science and Political Style in Britain, c.1790–1850 Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill (editors) SAMUEL JOHNSON IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT Edward Corp THE JACOBITES AT URBINO An Exiled Court in Transition Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill THE ATTERBURY PLOT Diana Donald and Frank O’Gorman (editors) ORDERING THE WORLD IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Richard D. Floyd CHURCH, CHAPEL AND PARTY Religious Dissent and Political Modernization in Nineteenth-Century England Richard R. Follett EVANGELICALISM, PENAL THEORY AND THE POLITICS OF CRIMINAL LAW REFORM IN ENGLAND, 1808–30 Andrew Godley JEWISH IMMIGRANT ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN NEW YORK AND LONDON 1880–1914 William Anthony Hay THE WHIG REVIVAL 1808–1830 Mark Keay WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S GOLDEN AGE THEORIES DURING THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND, 1750–1850 Kim Lawes PATERNALISM AND POLITICS The Revival of Paternalism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain Marisa Linton THE POLITICS OF VIRTUE IN ENLIGHTENMENT FRANCE Karin J. MacHardy WAR, RELIGION AND COURT PATRONAGE IN HABSBURG AUSTRIA The Social and Cultural Dimensions of Political Interaction, 1521–1622

James Mackintosh VINDICIÆ GALLICÆ Defence of the French Revolution: A Critical Edition Robert J. Mayhew LANDSCAPE, LITERATURE AND ENGLISH RELIGIOUS CULTURE, 1660–1800 Samuel Johnson and Languages of Natural Description Jeremy C. Mitchell THE ORGANIZATION OF OPINION Open Voting in England, 1832–68 Paul Monod, Murray Pittock and Daniel Szechi (editors) LOYALTY AND IDENTITY Jacobites at Home and Abroad Marjorie Morgan NATIONAL IDENTITIES AND TRAVEL IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN James Muldoon EMPIRE AND ORDER The Concept of Empire, 800–1800 F. D. Parsons THOMAS HARE AND POLITICAL REPRESENTATION IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN Julia Rudolph WHIG POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION James Tyrrell and the Theory of Resistance Lisa Steffen TREASON AND NATIONAL IDENTITY Defining a British State, 1608–1820 Lynne Taylor BETWEEN RESISTANCE AND COLLABORATION Popular Protest in Northern France, 1940–45 Anthony Waterman POLITICAL ECONOMY AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY SINCE THE ENLIGHTENMENT Essays in Intellectual History Doron Zimmerman THE JACOBITE MOVEMENT IN SCOTLAND AND IN EXILE, 1746–1759

Studies in Modern History Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–79328–2 (Hardback) 978–0–333–80346–2 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Fascists and Honourable Men Contingency and Choice in French Politics, 1918–45 Nimrod Amzalak

© Nimrod Amzalak 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–29777–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Amzalak, Nimrod, 1969– Fascists and honourable men : contingency and choice in French politics, 1918–45 / Nimrod Amzalak. p. cm. — (Studies in modern history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–29777–7 (alk. paper) 1. France—Politics and government—20th century. 2. Fascism—France—History—20th century. I. Title. DC369.A494 2011 320.53 3094409041—dc22 2011011737 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To my beloved daughters Noa and Michal

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Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

1 A Contextual Approach to the Study of Fascism 1 The problem of essentialism 2 The controversy over French fascism 3 Fascism as a discursive trope 4 The enlistment of a concept: Max Weber’s elective affinities

1 1 9 18 30

2 Virtue, Virtuosity and the Ethos of Professionalism 1 The idealisation of the engineer 2 Elitism: héritiers vs. arrivistes 3 Excellence: patent vs. function 4 Leadership 4.1 The social role of command 4.2 A scientific model of decision-making 4.3 Social psychology 5 Conclusion

32 32 34 39 47 48 50 53 57

3 From the Trenches to the Laboratories: L’Appel aux Techniciens 1 Engineers and political power in the aftermath of the First World War 2 Lysis: la démocratie nouvelle 3 Maurice Barrès: La grande pitié des laboratoires 4 Georges Valois: la révolution National 5 Le Redressement Français 6 The ‘Young Turks’ of the Radical party 7 The Neo-socialists of the SFIO 8 Conclusion 4 Beyond Right and Left: Rallying to the Total Technical State 1 Crisis and discontent: the troubled years 1932–6 2 The technocracy of the ‘nonconformists’ 2.1 La Lutte des Jeunes against traditional politics vii

61 62 65 67 69 77 82 87 93

97 97 100 100

viii Contents

2.2 Planism: socialism for the entire nation 2.3 Personalism: L’Ordre Nouveau 3 The technocracy of the engineers 3.1 The Centre Polytechnicien d’études économiques (X-Crise) 3.2 Le Centre d’Etudes des Problèmes Humains 3.3 Le Fondation Française pour l’Etude des Problèmes Humains (FFEPH) 4 Conclusion

103 110 114 114 120 123 125

5 Big Illusions and Harsh Realities: The Vichy Years 1 Imagining the National Revolution 1.1 Charles Maurras and the Monarchist Charade 1.2 Emmanuel Mounier and imagined class collaboration 1.3 Marcel Déat and the makeshift dictatorship 1.4 Bertrand de Jouvenel and pseudo-science 2 The technocrats of Vichy 2.1 The conquest of government 2.2 The Worms group and the affair of the ‘synarchie’ 2.3 The legacy of Jean Coutrot 2.4 Pierre Pucheu: the state as an industrial enterprise 2.5 The collaboration of science: Georges Mauco, Georges Montandon and Alexis Carrel 3 Conclusion

130 130 131

6 Contingency, Choice and the Historian 1 Technocracy and nonconformism: a tale of elective affinities 2 The spectre of fascism 3 The role of the historian

178

Notes

189

Bibliography

204

Index Abbreviations

212

Index

213

136 139 145 149 149 150 152 153 160 170

178 181 187

Acknowledgements

This book is the product of several long years of research, throughout which I have benefited from the assistance and support of many to whom I remain indebted. First, I wish to express a special gratitude to Robert Tombs of Cambridge University, England, who has been a much valued mentor to me since the early beginnings of this research, and whose patience and perseverance in the face of my long path to completion, as well as his kindness, moral support and open-mindedness, are a proof that he indeed belongs to that unfortunately rare specimen of teachers who perceive of their role as that of encouraging the exploration of new ideas rather than the cautious conformity to established postulates. As I have never been blessed with abundant financial means, the sponsorship I received from the French Embassy in Israel on several occasions in which I had to travel to France in order to work in libraries and archives has been tremendously important. I am also thankful to the Vidal Sassoon Centre for the Study of Antisemitism for awarding me the Felix Posen Fellowship and to the Paul Desmarais Centre for French Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which honoured me with a prize early on during my research at a time when such encouragement was particularly important to me. I wish to thank friends, family and colleagues whose support never withered in the face of my never-ending grievances over the difficulties involved in sustaining this long and arduous research project. In particular I am grateful to Sascha Harris, Ornat Turin and Joan Tumblety and to my mother, Yael Amzalak. Last, but most definitely not least, I wish to extend my special gratitude to my life companion, Julia Lerner, who has been for me a constant source of encouragement and solace, and who has willingly helped to facilitate my work by surrounding me with love and support. An accomplished and talented academic researcher in her own right, Julia has also been an ever-fertile spring of inspiration for me, offering valuable insights which helped focus and enhance my thinking on various aspects of this work.

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1 A Contextual Approach to the Study of Fascism

1. The problem of essentialism The study of fascism has by now become an important branch of almost every discipline of the social sciences. However, since its early beginnings in the 1950s to the most recent contributions, it has never ceased to be a controversial topic not only in its substance but also, and perhaps primarily, in its form and procedure. In a book published in 1998, Roger Griffin argued that during the 1990s a new consensus had emerged among the major scholars of fascism, which, although still in an embryonic form, constituted a major step towards the consolidation of a new paradigm.1 Indeed, the fact that many of these scholars chose, in the second half of that decade, to republish their old works with only minor theoretical additions or, alternatively, to compile anthologies and readers that mapped out the current state of research, seems to support Griffin’s claim that scholars of fascism had indulged ‘in ritual lamentations over its lack of a consensus, or at least working, definition’.2 But before examining this alleged ‘new consensus’, it would be helpful to remind ourselves of the history of fascist scholarship in its various phases. The first attempt to tackle the fascist phenomenon on the theoretical level was made by Marxist theoreticians in the 1930s. In fact, Marxist theories of fascism have always been present in the research arena due to their dual function as both a contribution to the academic debate and as a part of the political combat, first against the fascist regimes and, later on, in the context of the cold war. There are several common features to all Marxist theories of fascism: (a) they all regard fascism as a side effect of the crisis of capitalism rather than as an independent political phenomenon; (b) fascism is 1

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conceived as a strategy in the service of some socio-political agent rather than as a comprehensive ideology; (c) the characteristics of the Italian and, more commonly, of the German varieties of fascism are regarded as paradigmatic of fascism in general. Thus the Executive of the Communist International (Comintern) asserted in 1933 that ‘Fascism is the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital’,3 and considered the rise of fascism a dialectic process of a brutal assault on socialism that would lead to the strengthening of class antagonism and to the acceleration of the collapse of capitalism: When the bourgeoisie recognizes its tottering dictatorship on a fascist basis in order to create a firm, solid government, this, in the present conditions, leads to the strengthening, not only of its class terrorism, but also of the elements which disrupt its power, to the destruction of the authority of bourgeois law in the eyes of the broad masses, to the growth of internal friction among the bourgeoisie and to the collapse of its main social support – social-democracy.4 A more sophisticated version of the Marxist argument is that of the French historian Nicos Poulantzas5 who regards the fascist state as an exceptional form of the capitalist state. Its uniqueness is due to the special function assigned to it by the ruling classes: that of overcoming a particularly acute economic and political crisis. It therefore has a very different nature from that of other capitalist states, which do not experience a similar crisis. The fascist party invades the state from without by a manipulation of public opinion, which, demoralised by the crisis, is especially susceptible to extremism, and with the collaboration of the state itself, which seeks to use fascism’s authoritarianism to protect itself from collapse. The state then delegates various responsibilities to the fascist party, which gradually consolidates its hegemony and, later on, its total exclusiveness in the political arena. The fascist regime is therefore not an ephemeral emergency measure designed to combat a particular threat, but a reorganisation of the political structure of the ruling class whereby power is shifted from the official apparatuses of the state to an external agency in the form of the fascist party. Marxist theoreticians have contributed considerably to the demystification and normalisation of fascism as an endogenous element of the political dynamics in liberal democracies. The common view that Marxist theory refuses to regard fascism as an ideology is only partially true. While it is certainly the case that Marxist scholars do not, for the

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reasons discussed above, consider fascism as an autonomous ideology, they do not argue that it is a mere power structure that may serve whichever ideology. Instead, they place it in the general framework of one particular ideology – bourgeois ideology – of which it is allegedly an agent. Marxist theory, therefore, doesn’t deny the ideological character of fascism but simply reduces it to a very narrow and transparent set of motifs through which one can clearly see the guiding hand of the ruling bourgeoisie. Most non-Marxist theorists, starting from the 1950s, while rejecting the view that fascism was the deliberate and conscious work of a particular social group, nevertheless accepted that it was a manifestation of the distress of certain social elements in view of the dysfunction of the liberal state and of capitalist economy as a result of the process of modernisation. Seymour Lipset, for instance, regarded fascism as a movement of the middle classes who felt threatened by the rapid industrialisation and the shift to mass production which also involved the standardisation of both economic and cultural activity. Since the liberal-democratic political order failed to protect them against this process (and in many cases even did much to advance it), the middle classes opted for authoritarianism: It is not surprising, therefore, that under certain conditions small businessmen turn to extremist political movements, either fascism or anti-parliamentary democracy. These movements answer some of the same needs as the more conventional liberal parties; they are an outlet for the stratification strains of the middle class in a mature industrial order. But while liberalism attempts to cope with the problems by legitimate social changes and ‘reforms’ (‘reforms’ which would, to be sure, reverse the modernization process), fascism and populism propose to solve the problem by taking over the state and running it in a way which will restore the old middle classes’ economic security and high standing in society, and at the same time reduce the power and status of big capital and big labour.6 Ernst Nolte, in his study of three manifestations of fascism,7 remains within the conceptual framework that sees fascism as a reaction of the middle classes to modernisation, but adds to the political and sociological consideration of his predecessors a philosophical dimension. For Nolte, fascism isn’t merely a reaction to the immediate materialist consequences of modernisation, but an overall rejection of the entire intellectual edifice of modernism and in particular the individualism and

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rationalism of the Enlightenment, which had undermined traditional socio-economic and political structures and transformed deeply rooted cultural patterns by introducing abstract philosophical concepts of society instead of the concrete and organic models of the old order. The rejection of this ‘transcendental’ worldview by the traditionalist and reactionary middle class was at the basis of its rallying to the cause of fascism. Thus, both Marxist and non-Marxist theories of fascism until the 1970s had certain common features: (a) they all regarded fascism as a reactionary force either consciously expressing or unconsciously representing the interests of a particular social group, normally the middle class; (b) they all attributed the emergence as well as the nature of fascism to exogenous sources. During the 1970s, several studies appeared which challenged this consensus. One such study was A. J. Gregor’s The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics,8 where the author uses for the first time the concept of ‘generic fascism’. Gregor rejects the view that fascism was a mere agent, a tool in the hands of more authentic and fundamental political forces, lacking an ideology of its own and therefore reactionary by definition. In an article written shortly after the publication of his book, he argues that not only was fascism in Italy not anti-modern, it had its own positive agenda of modernisation advocating ‘an industrialized Italy, with flourishing urban centres, secular political control of community life (sometimes with due regard for traditional religious values), and a rationalized bureaucratic (if anti-parliamentarian) infrastructure to govern the peninsula effectively’.9 This emphasis on the positive modernising crusade of fascism leads him to regard all mass mobilising movements aiming at the establishment of a dictatorship under the auspices of a single party in developing countries as either fascist or ‘fascistic’. Fascism is thus promoted from the position of an agent to that of an independent participant in the political debate, with its own positive and coherent programme. George Mosse, arguing along similar lines, accepts the active nature of fascism. He writes: Fascism was everywhere an ‘attitude to life’, based upon a national mystique which might vary from nation to nation. It was also a revolution attempting to find a ‘Third Way’ between Marxism and capitalism, but still seeking to escape concrete economic and social change by a retreat into ideology: the ‘revolution of the spirit’ of which Mussolini spoke; or Hitler’s ‘German revolution’. However, it encouraged activism, the fight against the existing order of things.10

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With Mosse’s definition, the general framework of what Griffin calls ‘the new consensus’ is beginning to clarify: fascism is a typical form of modern political radicalism in the sense that it shares certain structural elements with other revolutionary, mass-mobilising movements in developing and crisis-stricken countries; it is unique in its particular ideological content which aims at achieving irrational goals by rational means. The most complete formulation of this new consensus can be found in Stanley Payne’s A History of Fascism, where he restates with several modifications his arguments from the early 1980s.11 Payne’s theory is based on his tripartite definition of fascist ideology which distinguishes between its positive ideological aspects (what it stands for), its negative aspects (what it stands against), and the structural and organisational form it assumes (what it looks like). An examination of all three aspects leads Payne to define fascism as ‘a form of revolutionary ultra-nationalism striving towards national renaissance’. On the basis of this definition, he then offers what he calls ‘a retrodictive theory of fascism’, which distinguishes between the cultural, political, social, economic and international causes for the actual appearance of fascism. Payne’s theory redefines the poles of the spectrum of research in the field of fascism. For the old, Marxist-inspired school, this spectrum was drawn between, on the one hand, a view of fascism as a conscious expression of the class interests of the bourgeoisie and, on the other hand, a view which regards it as an unconscious representation of such interests. For the new school, however, the spectrum stretches between a predominantly objective view of fascism as a by-product of various cultural, political and socio-economic dynamics related to modernisation, and a subjective view that sees the development of fascism as an ideology relatively independent of various exogenous influences. In general, scholars closer to the subjective pole would be more inclined to regard fascism as authentically revolutionary, more left-wing than right-wing, and would put less stress on the sociological and structural features of fascism. Their main field of research would be that of intellectual history. Payne himself, together with Griffin, Eatwell and others can be placed about midway on this spectrum, while Mosse for instance is more inclined towards the subjective pole. One scholar who is most definitely on the subjective pole is Zeev Sternhell, whose trilogy on French fascism published between the early 1970s and the early 1980s, was followed by a broader work on fascist ideology in 1989.12 For Sternhell, fascism has its roots in certain intellectual developments which occurred during the late nineteenth century,

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predominantly the entry of the masses into politics, the maturation and popularisation of the new social sciences – in particular Darwinian anthropology and mass psychology, the rise of integral nationalism and the first moves towards an anti-materialist revision of Marxism. These various elements had nourished each other, finally leading to a new synthesis that was fascism. This process had already been well under way when the First World War broke out and cannot therefore be attributed to it or to other contemporary political or socio-economic factors such as the economic crisis of the 1930s or the stalemate in the political systems of the European liberal democracies, which served only as catalysts for the spread of fascism and not as direct causes for its initial inception. Sternhell’s approach allows him to sketch a very coherent and relatively neat history of fascist ideology, which presents its development as a linear progression from an embryonic form to a mature and independent protagonist in the political debate of the interwar period. The problem, however, is that it also frees him from the constrains of the specific historical context of fascism and thus lends itself to idiosyncrasy in arguably laying too much stress on small and politically insignificant instances of fascism which comply with its specific intellectual narrative while ignoring some of the more influential fascist elements. Many scholars, who refuse to accept his exclusion of Nazism and of other, more right-wing groups, from the fascist narrative, have criticised Sternhell precisely on this point. It was in order to avoid this problem that Roger Eatwell developed his theory, published in 1992, which offered what he called a ‘spectral-syncretic model’. This model, according to Eatwell, ‘is a spectral-syncretic distillation of different phases of fascism. As such it tries to limit the problem which afflicts some ideological models, namely a tendency to focus exclusively on the more interesting fascist intellectuals, like Drieu La Rochelle, who, according to one leading critic, had minimal influence over actual fascist leaders and parties.’13 Eatwell objects to the ‘check-list’ model favoured by many scholars of fascism who attempt to determine a fixed set of features, which could then be neatly integrated into a definition of fascism. Every such list, he claims, ends up giving only a partial picture of fascism since none can be exhaustive if it wishes to avoid internal contradictions. Instead Eatwell suggests a looser model, which underlines the major themes of fascist ideology rather than its specific tenets since ‘there was a series of core themes in European fascist ideology, notably synthesis, but these did not produce a unique set of conclusions’.14 Eatwell thus proposes to examine four main themes: natural history, geopolitics, political economy

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and leadership, activism and party propaganda, in order to determine fascism’s original contribution to them and to consider the various concrete forms these contributions can assume. It would seem that Griffin was correct in speaking of a new consensus in the study of fascism, which he outlined as follows: ‘Fascism is a genus of modern, revolutionary, “mass” politics which, while extremely heterogeneous in its social support and in the specific ideology promoted by its many permutations, draws its internal cohesion and driving force from a core myth that a period of perceived national decline and decadence is giving way to one of rebirth and renewal in a post-liberal new order.’15 This indeed stands in sharp contrast to the old consensus, which, as already mentioned, was dominated by various formulations of the agent theory. While ‘new consensus’ theories are certainly different from ‘old consensus’ ones, it is still not obvious that they are less problematic for the understanding of fascism. Let us summarise the antecedents of this consensus: (a) It assumes that fascism has a certain ‘essence’ which ‘stands behind’ its various manifestations. However, in order to define this essence, it must address itself to those very instances (normally starting with the allegedly paradigmatic ones such as German Nazism and more commonly Italian Fascism) in which it seeks the most frequent elements. Such elements are then compiled into a ‘check list’ which will be used as the criteria for determining whether a certain individual or group can legitimately be labelled fascist. (b) It is generally agreed that fascism becomes a significant political factor only if a strong correlation exists between its ideological postulates and its concrete manifestations in political behaviour and discourse. (c) Although most ‘new consensus’ theories generally consider the support base of fascism chronically heterogeneous, they at the same time tend to agree that it is normally groups undergoing a major crisis, be it political, socio-economic or psychological, which are most susceptible to this ideology. Thus Lipset, de Felice and others speak of ‘the crisis of modernization’; Poulanzas emphasises the role of an economic crisis; Mosse and some scholars of the Frankfurt school point to a major cultural crisis; and Sternhell insists on the ideological crisis of Marxism. Fascism is thus conceived as essentially abnormal, since its political significance depends on the occurrence of a major dysfunction within the public domain.

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All theories of fascism to date are therefore based on the assumption that fascism is a distinct political phenomenon manifested in the correlation between certain ideological elements and certain political practices which occur simultaneously only in exceptional and abnormal historical situations of acute political crisis. Within this consensus, the debate between the different scholars is thus centred on the determination of the essential ideological and political elements, the minimal strength of the required correlation, and the specific crisis, which makes it politically significant. However, this debate constantly runs against the same fundamental paradox: the more precise the definition becomes, the fewer instances of alleged fascism it is able to account for. The core of this paradox lies in the essentialist conviction, shared by most scholars in this field, that the coherence of the concept of fascism can only be obtained through all-embracing definitions based on elements shared by every instance of this concept. On the basis of this conviction they have tended to pursue a selection process of relevant case studies, which retained only those cases that could be neatly arranged into a compact generic definition that was reducible to a single element allegedly constituting the essence of fascism. This selection was informed for every scholar by his own particular, metaphysically predetermined, conceptual framework. All cases rejected in this process were either declared completely irrelevant or relegated to a secondary status as ‘proto-fascism’ or ‘pseudo-fascism’. However, the claim that the meaning of fascism can be rationally deduced from a larger and more abstract notion (capitalism, modernism, etc.) with little or no reference to the actual role played by fascism in various specific contexts seems very dubious. For on what basis could such a deduction be performed? What could possibly tell us whether a particular definition of fascism is indeed more ‘basic’ or ‘essential’ than any other? Surely, just the fact that a certain definition fits neatly into a general conceptual scheme implied by an overriding abstract notion is not a sufficient qualification of its validity. Is there then some privileged standpoint that allows us to evaluate our entire social world with all its practices? Undoubtedly if there is one, it is itself a rational construction which therefore needs to be justified by a reference to yet another, more abstract conceptual scheme, and so on. In this process we move away from the specific problem we initially set out to solve, and thus the concrete circumstances in which that problem arose become irrelevant and the problem itself is lost in an infinitely incremental philosophical procedure.

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It is no wonder that theorists of fascism who have followed this line of investigation ultimately found themselves with a definition of fascism which left many of its instances unaccounted for and thus attracted criticism from scholars who, very often following a similar procedure with different metaphysical assumptions, arrived at a slightly different pool of relevant case studies. This endless debate between theorists had, by the end of the 1970s, reached a point where it seemed that nothing useful could be said any more on the issue of fascism on the theoretical level, and that it would be better for scholars to restrict themselves to a descriptive account of the various political formations of the interwar period without a specific reference to the concept of fascism. This was indeed the overall argument in Gilbert Allardyce’s article of 1979.16 Theories of fascism formulated during the 1990s have generally been sensitive to this pessimistic view, adopting a more modest approach to the issue of a generic definition which acknowledged the variety of fascism. Nevertheless scholars continued to search for a single ‘core’ of elements, generally along the lines suggested by Griffin’s ‘new consensus’ definition, which runs through all instances of fascism. This effort to overcome the empirical heterogeneity of fascism by abstracting from it an ‘essence’ completely obscures the problem at hand: for it is not that the various idiosyncratic theories we have somehow get fascism wrong. In fact they are each based on a perfectly valid insight into fascism, one that relates to the role played by this concept in a particular context. The problem begins when these theories pretend to offer definitions that supposedly transcend all contexts. By doing so they get away from concrete historical circumstances and therefore also from social, economic, political, cultural and other coordinates which could have ‘pegged-down’ their theories on the hard rock of historical reality.

2. The controversy over French fascism In this work I shall concentrate on a particular instance of the theoretical controversy over fascism: that which concerns the application of this concept to certain political formations and tendencies in France during the interwar period. The French case presents a special difficulty to scholars since, unlike in other cases, most groups and individuals that have, at some point or another, been suspected of fascism never explicitly referred to themselves as such. Moreover, none of these groups and individuals has ever been in power in France and thus much of their agenda has allegedly remained a mere potentiality. This means that in France fascism has always been more of a theoretical concept than a

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concrete political formation. This fact has made the debate in French historiography over the application of this concept particularly sensitive and hazardous. The first attempt to confront the issue of fascism in France outside partisan polemics was made in the early 1950s by the French historian René Rémond as part of a comprehensive study of the French Right.17 Rémond’s work has remained to this day an essential reference for most French political historians and has in fact achieved a paradigmatic status for the study of French fascism, which, until the 1980s had virtually been unchallenged. Rémond’s thesis contains several basic arguments that may be summarised as follows: 1. Fascism did exist in France between the two world wars, but it was restricted to small and mostly non-influential groups, which failed to take root in French society and politics. The only exception was Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français, which did manage to mobilise a considerable body of supporters but was short-lived and only became explicitly fascist after 1939 and during the occupation when most of its leading ideologists had already abandoned the party, making it a mere vehicle of collaboration with the Nazis. 2. French nationalism between the wars was incarnated mainly by the Action Française, nominally monarchist and virulently anti-Semitic, and by the leagues, which generally relied on the tradition of plebiscitary Bonapartism. Although some of those organisations exhibited the kind of liturgy and mannerisms normally associated with fascism and Nazism, this was only a matter of political fashion since ‘fascism was at the time “in the air” ’. But if one examines their policies, there is little that deviates from the traditional stances of the French Right: nationalism, authoritarianism, plebiscitary populism and a varied dose of racism. 3. There was indeed some fascination among certain segments of the French political community with the Italian and the German experiences. But this fascination was not so much with any specific ideological elements but rather with the authoritative and resolute manner in which both Mussolini and Hitler managed to deal with internal problems (such as unemployment) as well as with external threats (the Bolshevik revolution). 4. All the above observations lead to the conclusion that there was never a real ‘fascist danger’ in France. Even the most notorious landmark in the history of French fascism, the manifestations of

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6 February 1934, is more a myth than a really significant political event. It was no attempted ‘putsch’ as some left-wing commentators claimed but rather a display of discontent on the part of a largely conservative crowd led by the Croix de Feu and several veterans’ organisations, which would have sunk into historical oblivion if it hadn’t deteriorated into a direct clash with the police that produced a number of ‘martyrs’ for the Right. 5. The fact that France managed to escape the fascist experience was due not only to the inconsistence and ineffectiveness of the various fascist groups but also to certain objective factors: (a) the fact that France belonged to the victorious camp in the First World War explains the lack of a public spirit of revenge, such as the one that had developed after the defeat in 1870; (b) the rather moderated effect of the economic crisis in France in comparison with other European countries prevented the development of an effective revolutionary opposition; (c) the relatively old age of the majority of the French population, due to the losses in the war made it difficult for fascist groups to recruit militants; (d) the long democratic and republican tradition in France has become a second nature for French society which has already well passed the infantile disorders of that regime; (e) the existence, on the Left, of democratic formations (notably the Radical party), which offered a channel of expression and representation to the middle classes that in other countries where no such formations existed, proved to be the audience the most susceptible to fascism; (f) the conservative nature of most right-wing groups in France who were more interested in constitutional reforms that would enforce the executive than in setting up a totalitarian dictatorship. Rémond’s thesis was reinforced by two articles published shortly afterwards, the first by Raoul Girardet entitled: Notes sur l’esprit d’un fascisme français 1934–1939 (1955)18 and the second by Jean Touchard (1960).19 Girardet, as the title of his article suggests, regards the fascist phase in France as being merely a symptom of the ‘spirit of the time’, which dictated to various nonconformist political groups a new vocabulary, and a new aesthetics borrowed from the Nazi and the fascist experiments abroad. He writes: We should not, on the other hand, attach too much significance to the comradely and friendly curiosity or to the enthusiastic sympathy manifested by some representatives of the French Right with regard

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to the regimes of dictatorial Europe and in particular with regard to the Mussolinian regime: those sentiments usually do not convey more than a simplistic and often erroneous mythology and seem to be based mainly on an old anti-parliamentary inclination and the taste for authoritarianism of a certain conservative milieu. We should not, finally, take too seriously certain spectacular manifestations, a paramilitary style too obligingly displayed, the taste for parades, for uniforms, salutes, flags. . . . 20 Touchard follows the lines suggested by Girardet in evoking the ‘spirit of the 1930s’ with special emphasis on the nonconformist intellectuals who, during that period, founded and edited a variety of reviews which had in common the rejection of the established order and a criticism of the political culture of the time. He writes: Common admirations and common disdains, the same vocabulary, the same code words (revolution, order, esprit, personne, renaissance, humanist, etc.), this is the essence of what binds together the journals of the young generation in France in the 1930s. In a country where the issue of vocabulary is of paramount importance, such an accord is rare. But the accord is much less complete when it is a question of proposing concrete solutions.21 Both Girardet and Touchard thus supplement the thesis advanced by Rémond, which regards the main currents of political dissent in interwar France as typically conservative, by focusing on that segment of the opposition that did offer a more radical and overall criticism of the established order. In accordance with Rémond, they find this segment highly inconsistent in its strategy and choice of concrete policies and largely confined to intellectual circles. If some of these groups and individuals exhibited sympathies with fascism, it was merely an influence of a certain political atmosphere and vocabulary prevalent at the time. Another contribution to this line of argument was made by Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle in Les non-conformistes des années 30.22 Loubet del Bayle surveys, as did Touchard but in considerably more depth, the various groups of dissident intellectuals of the interwar period and concludes, with regard to their affiliation to fascism: In sum, with regard to the ‘fascist’ experiences, the movements of the young generation of the 1930s were divided between, on the one hand, an uncompromising doctrinal rejection of the ideologies and

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practices of both Italy and Germany and, on the other hand, a certain fascination with the dynamism of those countries and of their youth.23 This analysis of the place of fascism in the political and intellectual scene of interwar France was only partly challenged by non-French scholars, such as Robert Paxton (whose major study concentrated on the Vichy period), Eugene Weber, Robert Soucy and others. But it was only in the early 1980s that the Rémond paradigm came under severe attack with the publication of two books, which set out to overturn its central tenets. The first was Bernard-Henri Lévy’s L’idéologie française,24 which argued, more in the prophetic tone of a publicist than in a methodical scholarly fashion, that between the wars, and even more so during the occupation, the majority of French citizens subscribed to an ideology, which being anti-liberal, anti-democratic, racist and authoritarian was no different than the one espoused by the fascist regimes. The decline and fall of the Third Republic was thus anticipated and even promoted by the French intelligentsia whose views helped to consolidate a political atmosphere which allowed a widespread collaboration with the enemy: ‘everything happened as if, in the minds of all those intellectuals, the cause was clear, the judgement already passed, the loss already mourned for’.25 But it was a book published a couple of years later by the Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell which caused the main stir in the French historiographic establishment and, indeed, among the general public in France. The book, Ni droite ni gauche,26 was the third part of a trilogy published by the same author during the 1970s, which traced the genealogy of French fascism from the Boulangist affair in the early years of the Third Republic to the Vichy period. Unlike Lévy’s book, Sternhell’s work was a meticulous academic study of intellectual history based on a thorough analysis of considerable documentary material, including unedited primary sources. The thesis presented in the book may be summarised as follows: 1. The First World War and the economic crisis of the 1930s, while supplying ‘the necessary sociological and psychological conditions for the setting up of fascist movements . . . did not give rise to the fascist ideology’ which ‘belonged not just to the interwar period but to the whole period of history that began with the modernization of the European continent at the end of the nineteenth century’. Therefore: ‘where the history of ideas is concerned, the First World War was not the major break it was in so many other spheres’.27

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2. Fascism was more than just a ‘spirit’. It was a ‘solid conceptual framework’, and ‘a complete ideological system, rooted in a comprehensive vision of the world and having its own philosophy of history and its own criteria for immediate political action’. This is why ‘in the hour of testing, fascist ideology did not fail and appeared to be the perfect type of political ideology’.28 3. Fascism is not, as generally believed, a simple variant of the Right. According to Sternhell: ‘ . . . it should be pointed out that in France the sources of the fascist movement, as well as its leaders, were to be found as much on the Left as on the Right of the political spectrum, and often more to the Left than to the Right’.29 The shift of many intellectuals from the Left to the Right was a gradual one, extending over several generations and involved a process of ideological revisionism of Marxism, which emptied it of its materialist content and fused it with integral nationalism and anti-liberalism. In fact, Sternhell claims that: ‘In many respects, the history of fascism can be described as a continuous attempt to revise Marxism and create a national form of socialism.’30 4. The moralist stance of fascism and its synthesis between elements borrowed from both the Left and the Right could not fail to attract ‘nonconformists’ from across the political spectrum: ‘Each one brought his own share, each one stressed a particular aspect of their common rejection of the existing systems, but all were united in rejecting what they felt to be the essence of those systems – “materialism”, whether liberal and bourgeois materialism or Marxist and proletarian materialism.’31 In this way, a kind of ‘intellectual solidarity’ was forged between, for instance, elements of the socialist camp (in particular the neo-socialists led by Marcel Déat), and socialCatholics such as Mounier of the review Esprit or various dissidents of the monarchist and reactionary Action Française, such as Valois, Maulnier and others. Sternhell thus rejects Rémond’s thesis regarding the marginality of fascism in France and argues on the contrary that not only had fascist ideas been well implanted in the minds of a large number of French intellectuals long before the Nazi occupation, but also that it was a product of French culture and history that had evolved gradually but consistently over several generations in that country until it finally assumed a concrete political form during the interwar period. This new thesis immediately attracted harsh criticism from various members of the French historiographic establishment.

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In an article published in May 1983 in the French periodical Le Débat Michel Winock wondered whether Sternhell: did not introduce too much coherence into a great deal of confusion, for accepting that the role of the historian is to find the logic in what seems like chaotic thinking, I nevertheless contest the coherence of the concept of French fascism which is nothing but an a-posteriori construction, made of dispersed and heterogeneous elements, which no political movement could ever assemble and hold together for long.32 The root of Sternhell’s mistake can be found, according to Winock, in his refusal to acknowledge the limitations of his particular methodological approach, which is based on pure intellectual history, ‘destined to follow its own trajectory, regardless of historical developments and with no relation to real events’.33 Winock concludes by pointing out that by following such an abstract procedure Sternhell has in fact: displaced the central problem of fascism: the conquest of power and the nature of the State which it created. Searching for the platonic idea of fascism, he refrained from examining the circumstances of its introduction into France; and not surprisingly so, since no such introduction ever took place. The entire paradox of the historian of ideas is in the fact that he is studying fascist ideology in a country where it never triumphed, and therefore did not need to make the compromises resulting from the exercise of political power: there, fascism can be found in its pure form since it does not govern. This is the originality of the excursive but also its predicament. Since in the beginning of fascism was not the Word but, as Mussolini pointed out, the action.34 In his book from 1987 Pierre Milza follows the main lines of Winock’s criticism, referring to Sternhell’s theoretical model as a ‘Platonic ideal’ whose ‘principal characteristic is that it remains such, while outside it forms, instead of this “model”, a real fascism of flesh and blood which is that of the movements and reactionary regimes of the interwar period’. This model: Isolates successively certain traits which can fit into the linear description of fascism, without showing why they are necessary and concomitant, and since it also resorts to a selective and superficial reading of texts, drawn from all the period in question and cut-out

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from their context, it ends up with an amalgam which associates with fascism even the slightest critique of liberal democracy and all efforts at effecting a political renovation which may include in their midst also those of fascism.35 This line of criticism is upheld by several other French historians such as Jacques Julliard and Serge Berstein; the former accuses Sternhell of having ‘artificially separated fascist ideology from fascism itself’,36 while the latter simply restated Rémond’s thesis that there was never a significant fascist tradition in France, primarily since that country was profoundly ‘allergic’ to such ideologies.37 Several non-French scholars have commented on the Rémond– Sternhell controversy, rejecting both positions on the level of the essential definition of fascism. William Irvine, in an article dedicated to the Croix de Feu (1991) writes: If the Croix de Feu can be shown to have been fascist then two principal tenets of the French historiography of fascism collapse. It would no longer be possible to argue, in the tradition established by Réne Rémond forty years ago, that French fascism was the work of an isolated minority. Nor would it be possible to maintain, as Rémond’s chief critic, Zeev Sternhell, has done, that fascism was omnipresent in France but only among dissident members of the Left seeking to revise Marxism. A serious scholarly examination of the Croix de Feu might reveal that fascism was both widespread and clearly on the political right.38 Another critic is Robert Soucy whose study of Maurice Barrès was contemporary with Sternhell’s study of the same subject, in the early 1970s. Soucy also published a two-volume work on French fascism, separating its narrative into two principal periods: ‘the first wave’ (1924–33) and ‘the second wave’ (1933–9). In the second volume of this work (1995) Soucy dedicated a section of the introduction to what he called ‘the Sternhell controversy’. Soucy writes: I agree with Sternhell that there has been an indigenous fascist tradition in France that predates the First World War and that the appeal of fascist ideas in France has been much stronger, especially in the 1930s, than heretofore acknowledged by many French scholars. I differ with him, however, in that I do not find French fascism, at least in its major manifestations, to be essentially leftist in either

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its intellectual origins or mass politics. In my view Sternhell takes too narrow an approach to the subject in focusing more on intellectuals (not always the most representative) than on mass movements and in taking too much of fascism’s rhetoric about national ‘socialism’ at face value, thereby ignoring many of the rationalizations and mystifications perpetrated by such propaganda.39 Sternhell’s critics can thus be divided into two major groups: those who agree with his contention that ‘fascist type of thought was at that time [the interwar period] very prevalent, that its roots went deep, and that its influence was considerable’, but disagree with his characterisation of fascism as predominantly revolutionary, left-wing and fundamentally based, on the ideological level, on a non-materialist revision of Marxism. To this group belong mainly non-French scholars of fascism. The other group, which included most of the French historians of fascism, while agreeing that fascism was essentially revolutionary and left-wing, argues that this only proves its marginality in French politics and society at that time. The most recent attempt to tackle this controversy can be found in a book, edited by Michel Dobry under the title Le mythe de l’allergie française au fascisme. Although clearly in agreement with Sternhell’s argument that fascism did have a significant effect on French political discourse in the interwar period, the book offers a new, non-essentialist approach to this issue. Dobry, for instance, argues that ‘one of the great weaknesses of the immunity thesis is its inability to take seriously, the existence in France before February 1934, of an autonomous special zone of the political space, where original “political initiatives” who share the common principle of extra parliamentary activity, compete, conflict, multiply and restructure’.40 This ‘special zone’ is where the various ligues and movements were competing with each other for the hegemony of the nonparliamentarian, anti-democratic and authoritarian camp. In that process they used variably and inconsistently the term ‘fascism’, imported from across the Alps, sometimes in praise, other times in derogation in order to mobilise support and rid themselves of competitors. By studying this arena of competition the scholar of French fascism is better focused in order to understand the concrete (rather than metaphysical) nature of fascism and its actual (rather than imagined) significance to the wider political discourse. The approach advanced by Michel Dobry certainly constitutes a great leap forward in the effort to escape the theoretical impasse over French

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fascism, in that it gets rid of the metaphysical essentialism that had dominated previous approaches to the issue. However, by restricting ourselves to the arena of the non-democratic movements and the interactions between them, we are neglecting what is perhaps the most important aspect of the controversy over the issue of fascism in France, namely the extent of its diffusion into the general society far beyond this relatively small and marginal arena. To put the issue more concretely, we should be asking: What was fascism, what did it represent, what use did it have (if any), for people and social groups in France, during the interwar period, which did not necessarily share the political agenda of the non-democratic and authoritarian Right?

3. Fascism as a discursive trope There is practically no dispute over the actual political and social facts relating to the interwar period and in most cases also to that of the Vichy regime. Factual controversies in this period have by now been relegated to the margins of the academic debate and concern mainly the efforts of politically biased revisionists to deny certain widely accepted accounts of events and behaviours pertaining to that period, particularly those that involve the collaboration of certain individuals and groups with the Nazi regime and, in the most extreme cases, the very nature of that regime. But if there is no dispute over the facts, there is certainly one over whether those facts should be labelled, in one combination or another, fascism. We have already discussed the problem of definition and the very unhelpful resort to essentialist formulations. However, the problem with essentialism is not only its abstraction and detachment from the historical context of its object of study but also its disrespect for its subject – the scholar who is studying it. Every historian who tries to decipher the riddle of fascism does so for a reason. After all, it is perfectly possible to study the historical events of interwar France without resorting to the concept of fascism (and, indeed, much of French historiography in the twentieth century had done just that). If the name of fascism is evoked by a historian it is because he or she chooses to take that particular path. And when such a controversial and far from coherent term is deliberately chosen, it is almost inconceivable not to ask: Why call a certain individual or group fascist? Why insist on it? And on the other hand, why be so offended by such an imprecise accusation? Why bother to deny it, to try and refute it, even to go as far as initiating legal proceedings over it? Is it fear of punishment? But surely,

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no one can be prosecuted for being ‘a fascist’! One must be proved to be implicated in factual actions in order to be found guilty in a court of law. However, fascism is never the whole story. It is a manipulative move in a much bigger game, and that game is not one of facts but one of associations and connotations. Other terms (e.g. ‘barbarism’, ‘levantism’) are used in other games of a similar nature. It is interesting to note that such terms are almost always pejorative. The explanation for that is in my opinion that they are all based to one degree or another on fear and trauma. They are not used in order to argue that a certain individual or group may be the perfect representation of certain historical facts but rather to declare that they ‘make us think’ of those facts, that they provoke their image in our minds usually by paraphrasing or imitating them to some degree. The trauma behind those declarations (the destruction of civilisation, the holocaust, etc.) is usually powerful enough to ensure that they will not go unnoticed and, indeed, unanswered. But the power of these declarations crucially depends on the context in which they are made. The associative baggage of the term ‘fascism’ in France is not the same as it is in Germany, Japan, Spain, the United States or Israel. The selection of images, words and feelings which it conveys can be different in all these instances, although it is normally the case that there is enough of an affinity between those associations to allow us to surmise that we are all performing the same kind of discursive manipulation. To assess the power of such a manipulative declaration in a given context we must therefore understand its coordinates and this involves an analysis of how and why we use the term ‘fascism’ rather more than of whether the specific historical facts it evokes are truly a complete and consistent set. In the words of Stanley Cavell: ‘What I am suggesting is that “Because it is true” is not a reason or basis for saying anything, it does not constitute the point of your saying something; and I am suggesting that there must, in grammar, be reasons for what you say, or be a point in your saying something, if what you say is to be comprehensible. We can understand what the words mean apart from understanding why you say them; but apart from understanding the point of your saying them we cannot understand what you mean.’41 The first step I should take in the context of the present work is the examination of the discursive coordinates governing both sides of the controversy over French fascism. A useful device to this end is the exposition of the metaphorical framework used by the principal protagonists to the controversy. For if indeed they employ a consistent and elaborate

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metaphor which runs through their work, this cannot be dismissed as a ‘mere’ illustration but should instead be treated seriously as a clue to the particular manner in which those authors employ the concept of fascism. Through such metaphors, we are guided to consider what fascism ‘is like’, what it is similar to in our everyday experience. In this way we are encouraged to apply the same conventions, both linguistic and moral, that pertain to the metaphorical instance to the concept in question. The metaphors tell us what conventions are considered by the authors as criteria for the correct use of the concept; that is, for using it as they do. Julian Jackson quotes former French president François Mitterrand as saying: ‘Everybody was at Vichy. But there were those who “started badly” [mal embarqués] “but ended well” [bien arrivés]; and then there were those who “started badly” and also “ended badly”. I was a bad starter who ended well.’42 Like many young men of his generation, who lived through the Second World War and the German occupation, René Rémond is understandably anxious to prove that he, and his friends and peers, many of whom ‘ended well’, had not in fact ‘started badly’. For that generation fascism is linked first and foremost to the trauma of the defeat, the occupation and above all, the collaboration. For Rémond, fascism had not been an issue in France before the war and could not be one after the Liberation. For it was mainly a question of what company one held, who one associated with and ultimately, which side one was on after May 1940. And the sides were very well defined: there were the French and then there were the Germans who occupied France. Such a division is obviously irrelevant to any period other than the one stretching between May 1940 and December 1944. Turning now to consider Rémond’s thesis about the French Right, one is immediately struck by the very clear set of metaphors he uses throughout his text. Already in the opening paragraph of the subchapter entitled: ‘Why did France manage to avoid fascism?’ Rémond makes it clear that ‘the problem is no longer to identify the ideological contours of this alleged fascist phantom, nor to identify the parties which belonged to it; it is to explain why our country was spared this contagious evil which so few other European people managed to escape’.43 Fascism is thus presented as a contagious disease which erupted outside France and for some reason failed to contaminate French society. To re-emphasise the point he refers to the work of French scholars who had also diagnosed the alleged ‘allergy’ of France to the particular virus in question: thus Roger Bourderon is quoted as saying that ‘Vichy

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had difficulty conducting a fascist transplant operation on the body of French society.’44 Rémond proceeds to consider the possible explanation for this apparent miracle and he first turns to Serge Berstein’s study of the Parti Radical between the wars. Berstein argues that the Radical party: ‘had immunized the middle classes, for whom it was the most natural political outlet, and who in other countries provided fascism with its battalions, against authoritarianism’.45 But it was not just the existence of a moderate and republican middle-class party that produced the miraculous antidote. Rémond also mentions the long republican tradition of France, which has made liberalism and democracy a second nature to most French citizens: ‘the French people . . . have, by the beginning of the 1930s, already been cured of the infantile diseases of democracy and of many illusions and this fact acted on them like a vaccine . . . ’.46 And Vichy? ‘The direct consequence of an exceptional situation without which it would never have taken place: the change in the regime which ensued from the defeat. Although exceptional, that situation was not without precedent: crushed by the disaster, the country which no longer believed in the utility of continuing the war had wished, in 1871, for nothing else but the cessation of hostilities.’ And in any case, Vichy ‘is not fascism but its contrary, if we are to accept that fascism expresses a reaction against traditional established order’.47 Thus, while emphasising the abnormality of the situation Rémond in fact pronounces the normality of Vichy as a natural reaction to an acute crisis. Essentially, though, France remains uncontaminated even if severely harassed. The metaphor of the healthy, immune body, which successfully rejects an attack by a particularly vicious virus, is very suggestive. First by referring to French society in such organic terms it assumes that the French have a common consciousness and ‘nature’, shaped by historical evolution and overriding the particular idiosyncrasies of individuals. One need not ask if this or that French person subscribes to an idea, but whether France as an integral whole does. In fact we find ourselves here confronted with a national myth that, ironically enough, Rémond seems to share with both his study objects and with one of his harshest critics (Bernard-Henri Lévy48 ) albeit in form and not in specific content. A second implication of Rémond’s metaphorical framework relates to the issue of political responsibility. Can anyone be held responsible for a disease he contracts? On the face of it one inclines to answer in the negative, for responsibility implies commitment, which in turn implies free choice. It would be absurd to suppose that anyone chooses to be affected by a disease as dangerous as fascism seems to be. But one could argue

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that responsibility here means taking reasonable precautions. However, Rémond does not say a single word about that, which is hardly surprising bearing in mind his deterministic portrayal of French collective consciousness. The French do not choose to be what they are; they are simply so. And being so, they cannot help being ‘allergic’ to certain things, which are alien to their national make-up. And what if certain elements in France can be shown to have nevertheless contracted the disease? In such a case, argues Rémond (albeit not in so many words), somehow those elements must have become alienated from the national collective and thus vulnerable to the disease. This is true, for instance, of certain intellectuals (always a suspicious category) who did not try to resist the contamination, presumably due to their oversusceptibility to aesthetic temptations, and of small groups such as Bucard’s Francistes whose clientele consisted of ‘a few hundred loudmouths’ and ‘layabouts’ whose main motivation was financial gain, especially under the circumstances of economic crisis and growing unemployment, and were willing to support whatever cause that offered them such gain.49 With regard to the Parti Populaire Français, Rémond first makes an implicit allusion to Doriot’s ‘personal motivations’ in turning against his old comrades on the Left, and then refers to ‘the role of circumstance and the impact of events’, especially during the occupation, which pushed some of Doriot’s supporters away from the national ethos and into collaboration with the enemy.50 The issue of Vichy receives a similar treatment: it was essentially dominated by marginal and reactionary elements whose real chance to make an impact on French society came only when the normal institutional structure of France collapsed in its defeat and occupation. And if the ‘first Vichy’ was set up by anachronistic romantics, its final stages were the work of ultra-collaborators ‘with nothing to lose’, who by that time were completely alienated from the mainstream of French society. The conclusion is clear: whatever is fascist cannot be truly French and whatever is truly French cannot possibly be fascist. If France suffered, during the interwar period, a ‘homeopathic dose’ of fascism albeit ‘too weak to confound its ideological formula’,51 the responsibility for that rests with the ‘others’ – nonconformist intellectuals, criminal lumpenproletariat, diehard relics of the ancien régime, and opportunistic traitors. These ‘risk groups’, which in abnormal circumstances enjoy disproportional attention, are in fact negligible from a wider historical perspective and cannot pose a serious threat to the health of the national organism. Sternhell’s starting point is very different. An Israeli historian, a holocaust survivor whose family was murdered by the Nazis, his perspective

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is anything but defensive. In an interview he gave to a leading Israeli newspaper he said: ‘suddenly, when I was five, that world collapsed. Instantaneously. It is difficult to describe the transition from secure tranquillity to the fall, the disintegration. When things you thought were stable abruptly fall apart. When what you believed was the natural order of things is annihilated. And rapidly, too – from one day to the next.’52 His quest was not for disassociation and exoneration but for a rational, logical explanation for what befell him: I am not sure of this, but it could very well be that at some level, that experience underpinned my academic and intellectual work. It was important for me to understand how a liberal democratic order collapsed so rapidly in sated, cultured Europe. How it came about that everything all at once broke down, fell apart. How it came about that catastrophe descended on the European world and descended on us, too. On our town, on our family, on my parents and on me.53 Sternhell’s choice of a metaphorical device is well understood in light of his wish to find a reason, a logical explanation and perhaps also a narrative that would turn the abrupt and brutal disruption of his childhood into something more comprehensible. In the introduction to his book he writes: ‘ . . . at the beginning of the twentieth century, France was a kind of laboratory in which the original political syntheses of our time were created’.54 French fascism was precisely such a synthesis and therefore is ‘in every respect an indigenous school of thought’ rather than ‘a foreign importation’ or ‘a vague imitation’ of the Italian or the German varieties.55 Sternhell insists on the self-sufficient narrative of French fascism and rejects the prevalent view that the First World War played a constitutive role in the creation of this narrative: ‘As a system of thought, fascism was not “invented” on the Piazza di San Sepolco, any more than communism came into being in the train that carried Lenin toward the Finnish frontier; it originated in the great ideological laboratory of the Belle Epoque.’56 Fascism is thus a controlled experiment not unlike the ones we know from the field of chemistry: several elements, carefully distilled over several generations are synthesised to create a new formula which will later be labelled ‘fascism’. To support this metaphorical framework, Sternhell directs his readers time and again to the episode of the Cercle Proudhon (1911) where two ideological tendencies – revolutionary syndicalism and integral nationalism – hitherto hostile to each other, were the components of

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a new synthesis concocted by disciples of two major theorists of the time: Charles Maurras, leader of the monarchist Action Française and Georges Sorel, a disillusioned Dreyfusard. According to Sternhell the Cercle Proudhon was ‘the real laboratory of ideas which gave birth to the Faisceau’ (the French fascist group set up by Georges Valois in 1924). There, one could see a conscious and deliberate effort to ‘manufacture’ a new ideology. In accordance with normal scientific procedure, this mature and fully developed experiment was only the culmination of a series of previous experiments, which began with Boulangism in the 1880s, through anti-Dreyfusism, the Jaune movement and antidemocratic syndicalism. The reference to scientific-like procedure reflects the belief in the overall coherence, rationality and consistency of the political debate in France. Political action does not occur spontaneously as the result of a crisis, but is the product of a conscious effort, which evolves over time until it reaches maturation in the form of a complete system of directives for concrete political practice. This also implies a certain hierarchy among the various spheres of this process that clearly places intellectual contemplation on top as the intentional element. Scientific discourse involves the agreement of an elite of competent individuals over the standards and criteria for determining the validity of an argument. Not any layperson may, therefore, participate in such discourse nor can any claim be considered legitimate. For Sternhell to allude to such discourse implies that he regards the process of ideological and political deliberation as complying with those rules. If this is so, then we must ask ourselves which is the elite here and what are the standards governing its work? There is very little difficulty in answering the first question, for Sternhell very clearly points the finger at a particular social category: that of the intellectuals. More particularly, in the terms relevant to the discussion over fascism, he concentrates on those intellectuals who ‘specialise’ in the revision of Marxism. As for the standards they share, those can be deduced from his insistence that all formulations of fascist theory must follow a non-materialist line of argumentation. We thus have here the full structure of a scientific community, including specialised experts and an overriding conceptual consensus. If indeed political ideologies are developed in ‘intellectual laboratories’ by the concerted and long-term efforts of experts who follow common standards, then this has some important implications: first, there is the issue of responsibility. Unlike the scheme suggested by Rémond, where fascism is portrayed as a contagious disease, and where

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terms such as commitment, legitimating and consent are irrelevant (for no one either consents to a disease or is committed to it), Sternhell’s ‘ideological laboratories’ can only produce anything viable if they enjoy enough public support (they must ‘publish’). Thus, if Rémond simply asks the French to make sure, they take the correct dose of a readily available vaccination, Sternhell asks them to make a moral choice: During the war, one million Frenchmen freely chose to watch the well-known Nazi movie, Jud Süss. This famous piece of racial propaganda was distributed on a purely commercial basis: people had to pay to see it. Similarly, nobody was forced to buy the fascist papers every morning – and they sold by the hundreds of thousands. Nor was anyone forced to make a best-seller of Lucien Rebatet’s Les Décombres. No French publisher was obliged to sign the censorship agreement with the German authorities in Paris, yet all the major publishers decided to do so. Without a great deal of sympathy for the anti materialist revolution beyond the Rhine, collaborationism would never have started up with such success.57 The fascist experiment thus succeeded in breaking through to the general public not because the latter was somehow unprotected or unprepared but as a result of a deliberate choice. On the face of it, we are presented here with a clear dichotomy: two different language games are at play, suggesting two different pictures of fascism. One, expounded by Rémond portrays fascism as a virus, originating in foreign lands and infecting those who keep dubious company (ultimately the company of foreigners who come from the infested countries). The fascist is a marginal and dysfunctional individual whose political engagement derives from a flaw in either his cultural socialisation or personal biography. It is also limited to a particular period in time: the disease itself was rampant in the politically promiscuous interwar period and was introduced to France with the advent of the German troops, to be practically exterminated during the Liberation in what the French, very suggestively, refer to as the ‘épuration’ (the ‘purification’). To the contemporary reader, Rémond’s portrayal of fascism may sound not unlike certain mid-1980s depictions of AIDS . . . Sternhell, on the other hand, would have us see fascism as a product of a carefully controlled experiment with ingredients that belonged in the French cultural landscape. One might even think of it as some

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sort of a genetic experiment, carried out in a fertility lab, uniting revolutionary syndicalism and integral nationalism. If Boulangism, antiDreyfusism and other attempts failed to produce conception, along came the Cercle Proudhon episode to do the job – first came conception, then came the birth of fascism (and, significantly, Sternhell uses the term ‘birth’ in the title of his later, more comprehensive work on fascism, both in French and in English).58 So is fascism a virus, passed on synchronically from risk groups to those who associate with them, or is it a gene, carried down diachronically through the generations? As we have already seen, the answer to this question may have important consequences in terms of political responsibility: one is not obliged to keep bad company and expose oneself to danger and in any case can be cured of the disease if contracted. If however, one is carrying the malevolent gene in one’s body, it becomes a constant danger and ultimately a part of one’s personal make-up and legacy. If these are the coordinates of the perspectives of our two authors, it is easy to understand why Rémond insists on casting his gaze across the Rhine or the Alps for his definition of fascism and why Sternhell cannot do so and must find his definition in France itself. For Rémond, a respected intellectual, ‘bien arrivé’, later to be elected as one of the ‘immortals’ of the Academie Francaise, the issue was the assault on his homeland, the attempt to inject a foreign and deadly disease into it. It was essentially a matter of indignation. For Sternhell the issue was the betrayal by Europe of everything it was supposed to stand for: civilised conduct, humanism, reason and tolerance. France was the epitome of that idealist image of Europe and therefore its betrayal, or rather the realisation that there had always been an important streak in its blood that opposed that ideal, was perhaps the most painful. For him, it was essentially a matter of disillusion. There are two things we must not do with regard to these two perspectives. First, we must not try to transcend them by looking for some ‘Platonic idea’ of fascism that goes ‘beyond’ these two language games and defines fascism ‘in itself’. As already explained, this would be a futile exercise. Secondly, we must not arbitrarily decide between the two perspectives, since each of them is based on an insight into the issue at hand which is perfectly valid within a certain conceptual scheme. Moreover, these two perspectives are by no means mutually exclusive. As we already observed, there is hardly any dispute over the historical factuality of the actions and writings, during the interwar period and throughout the Second World War, of the individuals and groups who

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have come to be known, following Loubet del Bayle’s classic study, as ‘nonconformists’.59 The controversy is over the meaning of those actions and writings and ultimately over their consequences: were they the marginal and ephemeral victims of a passing disease or were they the noisy showpiece of a more deep-seated and largely latent predicament? To answer this question there is something we are missing – a ‘control group’ outside the ‘nonconformist’ circles and influential enough in French society of that period which, in the scheme advanced by Rémond and his followers, should prove either vulnerable or, as they claim, resistant to the influence of the ‘nonconformists’, and in Sternhell’s scheme would demonstrate the potential of developing a similar outlook to that of the ‘nonconformists’. Before introducing the ‘control group’ to be used in this study, I wish to make one methodical distinction among the ‘nonconformists’ along the lines suggested by Olivier Dard.60 Dard writes: ‘Beyond the individual biographies, aren’t there dividing lines opposing “spiritualists” and “realists”, the latter abandoning politics more willingly than the former and affirming the importance of technique in the management of public affairs as well as the primacy of competence over the eloquence of the politician or the sharpened pen of the publicist as a criterion of legitimacy?’61 For the purpose of this work I am interested in those personalities and groups which Dard calls ‘realists’. The reason for this is that while the members of the opposite group – the ‘spiritualists’ were mostly affiliated with the declining Action Française school and throughout the whole period in question remained confined to its marginal literary circles and spin-off publications, the ‘realists’ were able to form alliances reaching across the entire political spectrum and involving central figures from industry and the world of finance. Some prominent members of this group managed to obtain governmental positions both under the Third Republic and in the Vichy administration. Throughout this work I shall refer to these ‘realists’ collectively as the ‘nonconformists’. And since the core of the controversy seems to be the extent and the nature of the impact those ‘nonconformists’ had over French society, I have chosen to examine their intellectual and political relations with a particular group of the mainstream of that society – that of ‘professional experts’, mostly engineers and economists involved in and affected by the rationalisation of French industry during the interwar period through a process of technocratisation. These professionals were, in the 1920s, beginning to assert themselves as a distinct social group aspiring to become the nation’s governing elite and therefore fitting

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Rémond’s idea of normative, influential and middle-class individuals who were supposedly immune to the fascist temptation. Their struggle lasted throughout the interwar period and was finally successful when in the twilight of the Third Republic and during the Vichy period they practically took over the governmental apparatus. The ethos of this upstart group is extremely multifarious and often interfaces with the basic core of ideas promoted by the ‘nonconformists’. My study will explore this ethos, drawing on the writings of these professionals collectively (in the bulletins of their professional associations) and individually (in books and articles published by their most prominent spokesmen). I will also refer to the public portrayal of this ethos as articulated in popular works of literature.62 In conflating ‘professionals’ and ‘nonconformists’ I am not trying to discover a causal link between their ideological agendas and political development; nor am I claiming that the interaction between those groups was anything more than contingent. On the contrary, I argue that it is precisely the dependence of this interaction on the specific circumstances of the interwar period, and its evolution in accordance with the turmoil of that era, that gives it its explanatory value, as opposed to theories which start from an a priori stance and proceed to manipulate selectively the relevant historical context. In other words, I am not arguing that those ‘professionals’ were essentially or even generally ‘nonconformists’. Indeed, many engineers did not share that political agenda. What I am saying is that many of them did; that among those who did were some of the most prominent spokesmen for that group (in the sense that they occupied senior public positions or that their written works were widely circulated and discussed); and that this agenda was a constant and major motif in their syndical publications. Equally, I do not argue that all ‘nonconformists’ regarded these professionals as the embodiment or as the vehicles of their political ideas. I do argue, though, that some of the more prominent among them did, and that the nature and orientation of these professionals was a constant and major feature of works published by the ‘nonconformists’, who also participated often in activities and forums initiated and led by these ‘professionals’. It is certainly true that each of those two groups could have pursued its goals without having anything to do with the other. It is a historical contingency that they did in fact have a lot to do with each other. The First World War accentuated the image of the ‘professional’, in particular the engineer, who had already been glorified in works of fiction. He was now becoming a cultural icon (alongside the war veteran), representing the

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antithesis of everything that was wrong, outdated and malfunctioning in the old social, economic and political order and thus lending himself as an emblem for all those seeking a radical change. These professionals, however, had their own worries: the dissonance between their public image and their actual circumstances was striking and they engaged in a struggle to change that through the regulation of their profession and the removal of obstacles which barred their way to the nation’s political Olympus. That they had allies among the intellectual circles of the ‘nonconformists’, that they could advantageously position themselves as the saviours of France a second time round during the acute economic and political crisis of 1934 and later on in the wake of the wave of strikes in 1936, was unlikely to escape their attention, as indeed it did not. One must be careful, however, not to fall into the trap of oversimplification: the interest that each group had in the other did not always signify approval. The professionals’ recoil from politics and the distrust by the ‘nonconformists’ of American-inspired ideas and methods often produced criticism and confrontations. This, though, does not diminish the significance or the impact of the interaction between the groups. On the contrary, it underlines their mutual recognition. Throughout the two decades of the interwar period, these two groups regularly crossed each other’s path. Although there was some overlap in their membership, this was not the most significant factor in their interaction. It is their mutual empowering, unwitting in some cases, deliberate in others, that inflated their public significance and made them conspicuous. The ‘nonconformist’ agenda could have remained marginal had it not been carried into the hub of the political system by the triumphant professionals; the professionals could have been less successful had they not been able to distinguish themselves from the discredited old elites and assume the aura of providential saviours, which had been placed on their heads by many of the ‘non-conformists’. Just how contingent and fragile this interaction was can be seen in the tension that was always bordering on a rift between these two groups, once they were strong enough and came into their own during the Vichy years. And yet, it would be wrong to treat this interaction and its impact as pure coincidence, for the parties to it did make choices – ideological, political and strategic – with regard to each other, with consequences which, under the prevailing circumstances, were at least probable. I believe that this uneasy coexistence of necessity and choice, of interests and ideas, is precisely what Max Weber had in mind when he used the term ‘elective affinities’.

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4. The enlistment of a concept: Max Weber’s elective affinities The concept of elective affinities, advanced by Max Weber in his classic study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, has to this day remained largely enigmatic. Gerth and Mills, in their introduction to the 1948 selection of Weber’s texts, described this concept as ‘the decisive conception by which Weber relates ideas and interests’. This implies a dualism whereby two logically distinct elements, belonging to different spheres of human existence, are somehow drawn together. Gerth and Mills63 regard this ‘drawing together’ as motivated by the material element in the equation – the interests of the social actors – which determine their choice of ideas that ultimately provide a moral justification for the pursuit of these interests. Interpretations of this concept along slightly different but nevertheless materialist lines have also been advanced by scholars such Giddens,64 Hill65 and Parkin.66 Another line of interpretation, essentially non-material, is represented by Bendix67 who regards ideas and interests as ontologically distinct but dialectically connected. To become a social force, each element needs the other and both need to be articulated by the social actors. This dialectical knot is the elective affinity between them which ensures that they always occur simultaneously. All these definitions have one thing in common: they try to explain Weber’s concept of elective affinities as an attempt to overcome the duality between ideas and interests. It is, however, doubtful whether this was indeed Weber’s own intention. At least, he never wrote so himself. In fact, the total absence of any definition or attempt at a definition of this concept in Weber’s writings should suggest to us that he himself found it difficult to articulate such a definition or that he considered it unnecessary. It may be a better idea to try and extract the significance of this concept not from any abstraction of Weber’s work, but rather from its proper historical context. Here, one cannot fail to note the influence of Weber’s cultural environment on his work. In particular, for the purpose of understanding his concept of elective affinities, one should consider the influence of Goethe on Weber. As has been often pointed out, Weber was acquainted with Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) published in 1809.68 The novel itself had been based on a principle of chemistry advanced by Torborn Bergman in 1775 and defined as follows:

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Suppose A to be a substance for which other heterogeneous substances, a, b, c, etc. have an attraction; suppose further A, combined with c to saturation (this union I shall call Ac), should, upon the addition of b, tend to unite with it to the exclusion of c, A is then said to attract b more strongly than c, or to have a stronger elective attraction for it; lastly, let the union of Ab, upon the addition of a, be broken, let b be rejected, and a chosen in its place, it will follow that a exceeds b in attractive power, and we shall have a series a, b, c, in respect of efficacy. What I here call attraction, others denominate affinity. . . . 69 Goethe, who was familiar with Bergman’s work, used this principle in his novel to portray the relationships between its principal protagonists: a married couple and their two young guests, a man and a woman. The husband, Eduard, falls in love with Ottilie, the young woman; his wife, Charlotte, with the young Captain. When husband and wife later have intercourse they are thinking about their respective objects of love and, consequently, when the wife conceives a child, it resembles these lovers rather than its natural parents. Thereafter follows a sequence of tragedies culminating in the death of the husband and his young lover. Goethe’s novel is rich in metaphors and symbolism as it explores the limits and conditions of free choice in a set-up contrived to look like a scientific experiment. The improbable relationships woven between the characters in the novel are highly ambiguous and Goethe never actually resolves the tension between their choices and their constraints. Weber’s vagueness regarding his own use of the concept of elective affinities can be interpreted not as neglect but rather as an intentional device, a metonym alluding to Goethe’s novel, by which Weber invites his readers to consider the complexity of the mind-matter, or interestidea dualism in all its richness and potentialities. The two elements of this dualism do indeed occur simultaneously and maintain a close relationship. But this relationship is troublesome, tortuous and forever escapes abstraction. Its meaning can only be grasped by considering it within the specific context of every one of its instances. For this study, I shall use the concept of elective affinities in this complex sense, which, I believe, is close to what Weber had in mind and to its original formulation by Goethe.

2 Virtue, Virtuosity and the Ethos of Professionalism

1. The idealisation of the engineer Gustave Le Rouge (1867–1938), a popular science fiction novelist, wrote about the engineers that they belonged ‘to those true researchers who are a race apart, whose chosen ones are recognized by mysterious signs in the midst of the ignorant human crowds’.1 This depiction of the engineers as a religious cult with its own rituals and mystique echoes the saint-simonian jargon of the first half of the nineteenth century. In his first major work, Lettres d’un habitant de Genève a ses contemporains, SaintSimon argued that during the Revolution, scientists found themselves obliged to serve the triumphant propertied class rather than society as a whole. This, he claimed, was a far cry from the wishes and designs of the fathers of the Revolution. Instead of this unhealthy situation he proposed that: ‘politics be entrusted exclusively to a special class of scientists who will impose silence on all twaddle.’2 Saint-Simon was by no means alone in his celebration of science as a basis for social unity; the period of the Directory had seen the promotion of political science by the Ideologues who, with reference to Condorcet, attempted to formulate a scientific alternative to Christianity which would serve as a new epistemological basis for liberal politics. Saint-Simon was, however, much more ambitious: his scientists were to enjoy a truly sacerdotal status; hence he called for the establishment of a scientific priesthood which would preach the religion of Newton. Unlike Condorcet, who kept in his system a separation between the scientific elite and the democratic nature of politics, Saint-Simon expected political choice to give way to scientific administration: The men who brought about the Revolution, the men who directed it, and the men who, since 1789 and up to the present day, have 32

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guided the nation, have committed a great political mistake. They have sought to improve the governmental machine, whereas they should have subordinated it and put administration in the first place. They should have begun by asking . . . who . . . are the men most fitted to manage the affairs of the nation. . . . They would have reached the conclusion that the scientists, artists and leaders of industrial enterprises are the men who should be entrusted with administrative power, i.e. with the responsibility for managing the national interest.3 Saint-Simon died in 1825, but his ideas were kept alive by a group of devout disciples, most of whom were graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique, under the charismatic leadership of Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin who soon turned this group into a religious congregation with distinct rituals and internal hierarchy. Enfantin targeted the polytechniciens as a privileged audience for his teachings: ‘The Ecole Polytechnique’, he wrote, ‘must be the channel through which our ideas will spread through society. It is the milk which we have sucked at our beloved School which must nourish the generations to come. It is there that we have learnt the positive language and the methods of research and demonstration which today secure the advance of the political sciences.’4 Abel Transon, one of his colleagues and himself a polytechnicien, said in a lecture he gave the students of the school: The Ecole Polytechnique has shown itself to be profoundly religious: it was religious since all the students felt united by fraternity. It was religious since above this saintly fraternity it gladly accepted the fraternal hierarchy of men who dedicated to it their nights and days and because, above all, it has always applauded the promotion of people from within its ranks or from the outside, as long as that promotion was based on merit.5 Exactly a 100 years later, an article appearing in the organ of the Union Sociale des Ingénieurs Catholiques declared: ‘To have a vocation of an engineer is to be aware of the fact that we, engineers, are predestined for our career; and in order that we pursue it wholeheartedly, we must find therein an ideal, a raison de vivre, a mystique.’6 There is something odd about the idolisation of the engineering profession and its practitioners. On the one hand, it is a modern profession par excellence, which has developed in accordance with the progress of science and technology. On the other hand, its prestige and legitimacy

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seem to evoke sentiments which are traditional and even religious in nature. So what is it about the engineer that both their spokesmen and other commentators praise so much? Is it his virtue as a man or his virtuosity as a professional practitioner? In this chapter, I will address this question by discussing three concepts often associated with the idolisation of the engineers: elitism, excellence and leadership as they are expressed in the writings of the engineers themselves and in those of external commentators. I will then place my conclusions in a wider theoretical framework, which will link them to the core issues of this study.

2. Elitism: héritiers vs. arrivistes The first engineering school in France, The Ecole Polytechnique, was established by the revolutionary government in 1794, and was initially intended to train a scientific elite made of students drawn from all social classes and backgrounds on the basis of merit alone.7 This elite was to provide France with scientific and technological innovations that would help solidify and extend the achievements of the Revolution. However, during the Napoleonic years (1804–15) the school came under the scrutiny of the Emperor, who was afraid it might become a hotbed for political agitation. He therefore took steps to curtail the school’s alleged Jacobin fervour both by introducing fees, thus making it the domain of rich bourgeois families, and by militarising it through the introduction of strict discipline and hierarchy. In addition to that, the school was transferred away from its initial premises at the Palais Bourbon to an enclosure reminiscent of a military fortress with student dorms enclosed behind high walls in what looked like soldiers’ barracks. During those years, the majority of the engineers graduating from the school (about 75 per cent) were recruited by the army. Few ventured to seek employment outside governmental establishments. During the Restoration years (1815–30) the school was further modified. Now the emphasis shifted from militarism to traditionalism. In the spirit of the new regime, the school became more devoutly Catholic and the curriculum more oriented towards producing nobility rather than an enterprising bourgeoisie or a corps of engineer-officers. Accordingly, classes in various domains of culture générale were introduced along with a more theoretical approach to science. Throughout these changes a certain core profile of the ideal polytechnicien had nevertheless persevered: he was a member of the bourgeoisie, disciplined, respectful of social hierarchies and loyal to the state, scientifically inclined but no stranger to aristocratic refinement, and

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committed to public service. This profile is probably the reason why the polytechniciens took a leading role in the Trois Glorieuses revolution which brought down Charles X and later on also in the 1848 revolution and finally in the resistance to the coup d’état by Napoleon III. That they did so, solidified their status as the leading republican elite, socially conservative but politically committed to the Republic and to the spirit of the French Revolution. In spite of its prestige, the Ecole Polytechnique could not, on its own, address the dynamic needs of the French industry which, throughout the nineteenth century, consistently aspired to equal the professionalism of its British competitor. The school’s theoretical emphasis was at odds with the applied and practical nature of some of the leading branches of the engineering profession (such as mechanical engineering) and its archaic methodology failed to provide adequate training in the newly developed industries of chemistry and electricity. Adding to that the restrictive effect of its militaristic nature and the highly selective admission concours, which annually left hundreds of unsuccessful applicants, it was quite obvious that there was a place for another technical school, which would be oriented more towards industry than towards the army or the civil service. Such a school was the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, founded in Paris in 1829. The Ecole Centrale was the initiative of several liberal industrialists and economists.8 Its sponsor and owner was the wealthy landowner Alphonse Lavallée. One of the founders, the science professor JeanBaptiste Dumas, wrote in the unpublished history of the school: We adopted as a model the old Ecole Polytechnique [before it became a militarized boarding school], making the modifications required by the nature of the goal to be attained. Hence we eliminated the teaching of such overly advanced mathematical theories as have not yet lent themselves to practical applications.9 The basic social composition of the Ecole Centrale from its establishment and throughout the July Monarchy was similar to that of the Ecole Polytechnique: 72.3 per cent of the students of the former and 79.5 per cent of the students of the latter belonged to the upper bourgeoisie of rentiers and propriétaires. However, there are also some very significant differences: while only 4.2 per cent of polytechniciens came from the popular classes (artisans, shopkeepers, workers and peasants), 11.8 per cent of centraux belonged to those classes. Even more important is the fact that 34.6 per cent of centraux came from families of large merchants

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and industrialists as opposed to only 12.7 per cent of polytechniciens, while twice as many students from families of senior civil servants and military officers preferred the Ecole Polytechnique over the Ecole Centrale. This clearly illustrates the inclination of the former towards public service and of the latter towards the private industrial realm. It also shows that both schools were equally based on the wealthy bourgeoisie for the recruitment of their students. This last fact is easily understood if one bears in mind the relatively high cost of preparing for the entry exams in both schools and later also of the fees and maintenance charges. Interestingly, while the Ecole Centrale maintained its elitist social composition throughout the century, the Ecole Polytechnique opened its doors, in the last decades of the century and up to the First World War, to students of very humble social origins whose parents were workers, peasants or domestic servants. These groups constituted 11.2 per cent of polytechniciens during that period and only 0.2 per cent of centraux.10 In sum, it could be said that the Ecole Centrale was successful in reproducing the social elitism of the Ecole Polytechnique in the field of civil engineering. This elitism was, however, significantly different in that it was based on the productive sections of the bourgeoisie rather than on the ‘old money’ nobility. These post-revolutionary ‘new men’ owed their social status and, indeed, their wealth, to their commercial skills and were therefore willing to form a ‘meritocratic alliance’ with the technically educated middle classes in order to push away the old elites and take their place. The directors of the Ecole Centrale were aware of this process and encouraged it. Lavallée admitted as much: ‘The privileged class,’ he wrote, ‘which had the power and most of the wealth of the country, a class assured of transmitting to its descendants most of its advantages, could never have given to industry the stimulus it received from the middle class, which could maintain its position only by its education and its work.’11 One must not, however, overestimate this cross-class alliance and mistake it for egalitarianism. The encouragement of the middle classes to partake in the work of this new economic elite was accompanied by a rather sceptical and cautious estimate of the extent to which such encouragement should be given: the talented young men of the lower middle class should be carefully selected through a system of selective scholarships which would emphasise that they were the exception rather than the rule among the members of their class. Théodore Olivier, one of the founders of the Ecole Centrale wrote: A poor man endowed with a certain intellectual capacity will be restless if he is deprived of education. To ascend to a higher class, he must

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acquire instruction that permits him to earn his living by working with his intellect, whereas in a lower class, he can earn it only by working with his hands. . . . We must give scholarships to promising young men who may then pass into a higher class and become useful there. But at the same time, when we become convinced that a mistake has been made, that a young man is not fulfilling the hopes held for him earlier, we must, moved by a severe but equitable justice, bring him to a halt by withdrawing his scholarship.12 Thus the wealthy héritiers and the talented boursiers were to form together the well-trained managerial elite that would lead the economy forward by replacing the old non-professionals, whose archaic methods, outdated concepts and general incompetence had thus far prevented French businesses from becoming worthy competitors on the international market. Belanger, another founding father of Centrale, wrote: The manufacturer who formerly entrusted the direction of his enterprise to foremen whose intelligence raised them from the class of ordinary workers knows now that lest he fall behind his competitors, he must seek the advice of a different class of men, who can understand the thousand inventions made each year and can apply them with profit. This class is that of the industrial engineers to which the Ecole Centrale gives both the fundamental and the specialized knowledge necessary for those who really deserve the title.13 This union of skill and capital was recognised also by most authors of popular science, whose engineer-hero, if of an appropriate age, usually ended up marrying his boss’s daughter, thus bringing about an alliance of ‘those financial and intellectual forces whose union can overcome all obstacles’.14 ∗

∗

∗

Just as the French Revolution, in maturing into a regime, had had to make concessions with regard to its initial premises, so did the institutions it had created in its image. The Ecole Polytechnique, originally conceived as a hotbed for the scientific avant-garde, gradually mutated into a training school for the Republic’s top civil servants and military officers. Its clone, the Ecole Centrale, attempting to re-orient the engineering profession towards industry and business finally ended up being even more socially exclusive, maintaining an admission system which,

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although ostensibly favourable to gifted and well-motivated members of the lower classes, in fact guaranteed, through careful regulation, the dominance of the more affluent and well-established classes. As a result, the nature of the elite produced by these engineering schools became unavoidably ambiguous. On the one hand, it relied on the symbolic capital derived from the educational credentials of its members and from their social refinement; on the other hand, it depended to a large extent on technical aptitude and ultimately on the ability to produce and maintain financial wealth. While the former element encouraged prudence and conservatism, the latter was, at least potentially, far bolder and at times almost predatory. For the purpose of this study I shall call the more conservative tendency with its social prejudice and traditional bent ‘virtuous’; the other, entrepreneurial, tendency I shall call ‘virtuosic’. The only way these two conflicting tendencies could coexist was through what Bourdieu called ‘misrecognition’.15 If the acquisition and perpetuation of capital is essential to the social survival of the engineer, it must not, however, be pursued in a manner which might be considered ‘tasteless’ and therefore unbecoming for members of high society. At the same time, shying away from ‘adventurous’ business ventures and technological innovations might put one in a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis one’s competitors. Thus, each tendency must be co-opted by the other: entrepreneurship is recognised (or rather misrecognised) as providential and as an expression of the nation’s progressiveness or even of its ‘historical vocation’ or ‘divine mission’. Thus, for instance, Cyprien Méré, the engineer in Jules Vernes’ l’Etoile du Sud declares: The results obtained by a scholar do not belong to him alone! They are part of everybody’s patrimony! Keeping even one bit of them to himself, in his own egoistic personal interests, would amount to the vilest crime any man can commit!16 Georges Lamirand in Le Rôle Sociale de l’ingénieur writes with regard to the economic activities of the French engineers in the colonies: The true attraction of the life of an engineer in the ‘under-developed’ countries . . . must lie in the sense of the magnitude of his mission. He carries the message of a civilization which subordinates everything to human dignity and whose ambition is to liberate Man of all servitudes and of both physical and moral miseries. . . . Let this thought occupy the mind of our young engineer whilst learning his colonial

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vocation and if he feels strong enough to rise to this challenge, he will accomplish his mission with the strong conviction of one who knows that he is taking part in a great, an enormously great, project.17 Conservatism, on the other hand, is recognised (misrecognised) as responsibility expressed in the rejection of all forms of radicalism. ‘The Cadres’, writes Marcel Daniel of the Syndicat de la Maîtrise des Assurances, ‘will never consider imitating those who slowly and systematically pursued the effort of decomposing our social body. They will never unleash those pitiful words which take hold of feeble minds and encourage ideas of revolt.’18 A neutral ground of ‘professionalism’ is thus created, where the expediency of either adventurism or prudence is assessed solely on the basis of their contribution to the concrete business of promoting scientific and technological projects. All value judgements are thus filtered out: history is the chronicle of the linear struggle for ‘progress’ and society is the cadre whose mission is to carry on this struggle. Nothing must stand in the way of this mission, neither prejudice nor ambition. Virtue and virtuosity are thus melted together to form the new impartial and dispassionate ‘expert’.

3. Excellence: patent vs. function Another formulation of the same problem can be seen in the distinction between the perceptions of the title of engineer as a representation of a qualification on the one hand, and as a specific function in the production process on the other hand. Is the quality of the engineer measured primarily by his potential (as someone who possesses a certain knowledge) or by his actions (as someone who performs an important task)? Jules Verne’s Alcide Pierdeux (in Sans dessus-dessous) is described as ‘first and foremost a mathematician’; however, ‘he didn’t do mathematics but for the purpose of applying them later to the experimental sciences which, in turn, held little attraction for him unless they found their use in industry.’19 Application is the ultimate test for the engineer. He is judged on the basis of his success in applying scientific ideas to technical procedures and consequently boosting up production. Georges Lamirand conveys much the same idea in his guidebook for the socially conscientious engineer, where he makes a clear distinction between the ‘pure scientist’ and the engineer: It’s in general the scholar, the ‘pure scientist’ who makes the discoveries to which humanity owes its greatest improvements and its

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material wellbeing. . . . On the other hand, it is the engineer who uses these discoveries in practice . . . the engineer is therefore the permanent animator of economic evolution and of progress.20 The tendency to ascribe a predominantly practical orientation to the engineer and to totally associate him with industry can also be seen in the way his physique is described in the science fiction literature. Robur, the engineer in Jules Verne’s Robur le conquérant is portrayed almost as a robot: Of middle height and geometric breadth, his figure was a regular trapezium with the greatest of its parallel sides formed by the line of his shoulders. On this line attached by a robust neck there rose an enormous spheroidal head. [. . .] Eyes which at the least opposition would glow like coals of fire; and above them a permanent contraction of the superciliary muscle, an invariable sign of extreme energy. Short hair, slightly woolly, with metallic reflections; large chest rising and falling like a smith’s bellows.21 The natural environment of the engineer is also modeled on this practical and industrial image as can be seen in the following passage from Gustave Le Rouge’s La rue hantée: The tall metallic carcasses of the skyscrapers and the masts of the chimneys formed a real forest of steel which spread as far as the eyes could see in glorious disarray. Gilded steeples, domes made of ceramic or of iron, already half completed, threw a luminous shadow over the blue sky. A temple of workers bustling with feverish activity in the midst of chaos. . . . In this atmosphere of life and of creative work, Pierre Marceaux felt reborn.22 Finally, the robot-like creature that is the engineer is not a mere employee in this futuristic industrial complex but a permanent resident there, sustained by his everlasting devotion to his work: ‘only if his business urgently required him to do so, would he consent to step outside’, writes Jules Verne of the engineer James Starr in his Les Indes noires.23 Even his private space, his foyer, is mobilised to provide support for him in his everyday tasks. His home, writes Lamirand, is a standard type house similar to those of his colleagues and different only in size to those of his superiors: ‘The engineer can enter the home of any one of his colleagues with his eyes shut and still locate easily any room he is

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asked to go into.’ And even his wife ‘by listening to her husband talking about the factory and its workers . . . will find a new horizon opening to her, a new field offering itself for her charity: that of the township. She will take interest in the life of those households whose men work under her husband’s orders.’24 This pragmatism stood at the basis of the establishment of a new type of technical schools – the Grandes Ecoles des Arts et Métiers, where the training of engineers was explicitly industry oriented. The ‘gadzarts’ – graduates of these schools – were considered ‘self-made men’ whose career prospects depended on their up-to-date practical technological knowledge rather than on social standing or financial capital. Denis Poulot, president of the Société des anciens élèves des Ecoles d’arts et métiers, made this distinction clear in a speech he gave at the Society’s general assembly: Listen here, young comrades: the polytechnician, on behalf of some financial association or other, manages an industry, an establishment, a factory. The student of the Ecole Centrale buys a factory. The Gadzarts, he creates, he founds a workshop. Do you know why? Because he has seen real industrial action from up-close.25 These new schools, as well as the rise in the number of autodidact engineers, soon increased significantly the number of people on the market who claimed for themselves the title of ‘engineer’. This raised several major concerns. One revolved around the question of the appropriate education for engineers. While the old establishment of the Ecole Polytechnique was, in general, supportive of theoretical instruction, the attitude of the newer schools was different and more inclined towards applied science and practical courses. This was especially true of the research laboratories sponsored by various industrial companies, who were interested in a trained body of employable engineers who were up to date on all recent technological developments. The ‘science industriel’ promoted by Henri Le Chatelier in the two decades leading to the First World War, represented such an approach to technical education. Le Chatelier wrote: The bad orientation of our scientific teaching compromises the formation of our scientific elites, and thus becomes an obstacle to the development of the wealth and power of our country. . . . We ignore too easily the fact that new ideas are not necessarily profitable to those who had thought them up, but only to those who know what

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to make of them. . . . To create science and to put it into practice are two different things.26 Le Chatelier advocated a revision of the curriculum of the technical schools and in particular the Ecole Polytechnique where he was a professor, so that it would be based on a more holistic approach to engineering. Le Chatelier asks: Are the intellectual aptitudes necessary in order to do science, inborn or acquired through education? He rejects the answer provided by two leading industrialists who believe that the role of schools is not to shape the minds but rather to select them, by designating through the classification at the end of the study course, those who have the inborn qualities indispensablefor science. His view on this matter is very different: In turning towards the past, each one of us is perfectly conscious of his debt to the lessons learnt from his parents, his teachers, his friends and the scholars whose works he has studied. For their part, the teachers are conscious of the effect they have over their pupils. Some children may have exceptional inborn skills just as they may have better health than others but the development of their bodies and their minds depends first and foremost on the nurture they are provided with.27 Le Chatelier is clearly challenging the idea of the reproduction of the old elites. A good engineer is made, shaped, by the training he receives, and his ultimate test is in the way he applies it to actual industrial needs. Virtuosity rather than virtue is thus the appropriate standard for the profession. In the immediate future, however, a more pressing concern was that there may not be enough vacancies for all the newly qualified engineers, who consequently may then face unemployment. A second, and not altogether unrelated problem, was that the title of engineer in itself might suffer depreciation if too many establishments were allowed to confer it. As already specified, this title had been previously associated with the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique as well as with a certain social standing and outlook. If this exclusive club was to be opened to other persons from very different backgrounds and with very different social and political inclinations, it may no longer be possible to maintain the ethos of the engineer as a héritier – a modern and republican heir to the aristocracy of old. In short, the issue was the title of engineer and its value both intrinsically and on the job market.

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In 1921 a group of people associated with the technical school presented to the Superior Council of Technological Education (adjacent to the Ministry of Public Education) a document concerning the issue of the title of engineer. The authors of the document argued that the conferring of this title may be legitimate either after the completion of a formal course of studies in a recognised technical school, or after gaining a certain amount of practical experience in industry. This meant that the title could mark either a formal qualification or an actual function. In 1922 the under-secretary of Technical Education initiated a survey on this issue among the technical establishments and schools as well as the professional organisations of the engineers. The results showed that while most were willing to endorse the recommendations of the 1921 document regarding the criteria for the conferring of the title, they were also quite adamant in demanding disqualification and penalties for all those who failed to fulfil those criteria. It is important to note that there was no question of regulating the profession (deciding who would be allowed to do the work of an engineer), but only of regulating the title (deciding who would be allowed to be called an engineer). The significance of this is in the fact that it strengthened the overall impression that those who had not passed through the cursus honorum of the technical establishment were rejected not because of some doubt about their skills but rather because they took ‘shortcuts’ – practising the profession of engineer without having had the wide scientific and cultural training provided by the regulated schools, therefore making themselves difficult to rely on to perpetuate the social capital associated with this profession. Further evidence to this attitude can be found in the recommendations of a commission appointed in 1923 by the under-secretary to examine this issue. The commission recommended that every technical school, including those operating by correspondence, which was affiliated with a regular attendance school, should be responsible for conferring the title, so long as its examination procedure was supervised by the Permanent Council of Technical Education. It further recommended that the title ‘ingénieur diplômé’ be followed by an abbreviation of the name of the educational establishment which conferred it. A second commission, appointed in 1929, reached similar conclusions, setting more restrictive criteria for correspondence schools and entrusting the authority to confer titles to already practising autodidacts to the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.28 It is worthwhile noting the position of the Union des Syndicats d’ingénieurs français (USIF) on this issue.29 The USIF relied on a membership composed mainly of qualified engineers who nevertheless were

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graduates of the ‘lesser’ schools (as opposed, for instance, to the members of the USIC – the Catholic union of engineers, who were mostly polytechniciens and centraliens).30 This meant that they were especially wary of competition from the autodidacts and the correspondence schools (the status of the graduates of the Grands Ecoles being mostly uncontested). Indeed, the USIF was very active in the campaign to regulate the title of engineer and to deny it to anyone who did not follow a full-scale course of studies. Interestingly, the spokesmen for the USIF emphasised the importance of general education (culture générale) for aspiring engineers and proposed that the law included a clause stipulating that: ‘No one will be able to receive the qualification of an engineer if he hasn’t passed, before a jury, an examination in general knowledge (culture générale). The syllabus of that examination will be fixed by a decree based on the recommendation of the Commission for the Qualification of Engineers.’31 In this, the USIF was unwittingly echoing a fundamental controversy that had flared up in the first decade of the twentieth century around the proposed reforms of the official curriculum of the Sorbonne. Against the modernisers who sought a more up-to-date and applicable curriculum, stood then the old guard of Action Française affiliates who staunchly defended the cultural heritage embedded in the traditional teachings, especially in the teaching of Latin. This counter-attack was led by Alfred de Tarde and Henri Massis under the pseudonym Agathon.32 Although they mostly appealed to the teachers and students of the Humanities, Agathon did not neglect the scientific arena, and in an article entitled Classical Culture and Businessmen, published in 1911, they wrote: The principle which has united all the engineers and the scientifically trained people who are at the head of that Institute, is that the management of industrial enterprises requires a wide intellectual horizon, that in our day industry and commerce rise to the highest social level, where high culture is indispensable. [. . .] Therefore, contrary to the opinion of our reformators of the Sorbonne, it is not specialization which is the ideal of practical persons, it is not the instantly applicable knowledge which is the essence of education, it is rather a general cultural knowledge which is more and more extensive and less and less hasty.33 Georges Lamirand of the USIC expressed much the same sentiment. Although he emphasised the pre-eminence of technical education for engineers, he nevertheless added that ‘a leader is a man of wide

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horizons; the wider the scope of his responsibility the more profound his knowledge of general culture must be.’34 ∗

∗

∗

If the first section of this chapter dealt with the inherent tension between two social images of the engineer, the current section presents a reformulation of this tension, as it is reflected in the debate over the legitimacy of the title ‘ingénieur diplômé’. The central question here is: What makes an engineer? Is it what he knows or is it, rather, what he does? The former stance is based on a point of view which regards the engineering profession as a vocation and a mission. The engineers, according to this view, are the bearers of a specific heritage, of something essential about French or even European civilisation. This cultural essence is never fully articulated but its contours are quite clear: a good portion of culture générale, a commitment to public welfare, including charitable and philanthropic gestures, a strong moral fibre and an integralist worldview which places human inventions and achievements in a wide social and historical framework, thus turning them into further justifications and motivations for the perpetuation of long-standing social institutions and hierarchies. Thus the engineer Benevenuto Cellini in Gustave Le Rouge’s Le Voleur de Visage asserts: ‘It is our job to articulate clearly and logically the vague dreams of our medieval and renaissance predecessors. Our scientific tools allow us to realize what those ancestors could only dream of.’35 Georges Lamirand writes of the ideal engineer in the same vain: With the authority of his professionalism, it is his duty to instil this sense of humanity in the very structure of all countries, nations and continents in order to ensure, through humanity’s constant material progress and the equilibrium of its vital forces, the ascension of humankind towards its noble destination. His place is in the vanguard of Civilization. One cannot imagine a more wonderful mission!36 The opposite view of the engineer is the one that regards him as a product of specialised education and experience, whose mission is to address the immediate tasks set to him by the powers that be. He is not required to be a great inventor or to initiate sensational projects. His is a routine job, mundane and minute. It is no wonder that this type of engineer is often portrayed in fictional literature as a robot-like creature of the

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laboratory, having very little in his life besides it; so much so, indeed, that he imitates the industrial landscape in his domestic environment and even grows to resemble it in his behaviour and physique. This engineer is not a repository of old traditions, nor is he the representative of a particular social group. He may be recruited from any class, make his way through the higher educational system with the help of a scholarship or, indeed, plunge straight into the industrial workshop where practical experience will compensate for the lack of formal education. He needs not set up a business or own one. His job is to run the business, to manage it. Thus the engineer Marcel Camaret, in Jules Verne’s L’Etonnante Aventure de la mission Barsac, who works in Blackland – a city in the African desert run by the criminal Harry Killer, is oblivious to the dubious use to which his work is being put by the latter. He simply does as he is asked to do, with devotion and precision: ‘Harry Killer wanted rain and Camaret provided rain. . . . Harry Killer wanted flying machines and Camaret gave him planes capable of crossing a distance of five thousand kilometres at the speed of a racing car.’ And he asks no questions and raises no doubts: ‘About the use into which his friend intends to put his inventions, Marcel Camaret never considered asking. Being of a purely abstract mind, he could see only the problems themselves, without giving a thought to either their eventual application or to the source of the money which funded his work.’37 As in the case of social origins, discussed in the first section of this chapter, the issue of the appropriate training for the engineers is based not on strict dichotomies, but rather on a blurred distinction sustained by misrecognition. Those who hold the view that the engineer is essentially a representative of the established order and therefore a transmitter of a well-defined body of knowledge (social and cultural as well as scientific and technical), must nevertheless not lose sight of the practical aspects of the profession. After all, being an engineer is much more than merely graduating from a prestigious Grande Ecole; it entails a membership in an actual professional group where there are many practitioners who have had different or no formal training and whose membership is based solely on their function within an industrial firm. The regulation of the title of ‘ingénieur diplômé’ in the 1934 law creates an illusion of universality and equality between all practitioners of the profession, including the autodidacts by giving them an official sanction. However, the stipulation that the title must contain a reference to the institutional source of their qualification, allows, at the same time, the maintaining of the necessary distinction between elite and non-elite engineers.

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Misrecognition is also at the basis of the opposite view of the engineer. Even the most practical, matter-of-fact conception of the engineer as a mere practitioner cannot ignore the expediency of ascribing to him an elevated social status. This is done by distancing the engineer from anything capricious, temperamental and controversial. The engineer does not take part in the machinations of his employers, who are often of dubious moral character and inappropriately motivated. Similarly, he keeps his distance from all expressions of class struggle and militant industrial action. His only concern is the good of the project to which he has committed himself and which he must pursue to its end. Thus Marcel Camaret can say in his defence, when confronted with the criminality of his master: ‘Never leaving that factory which relies solely on myself, preoccupied with supervising everything, I never saw nor knew anything else at all.’38 His aloofness to petty calculations, personal gain and various human weaknesses of character, equates him with the virtuous aristocrat who is bound by duty against all odds. This, of course, is misrecognition of aristocracy which in fact operated on the basis of very strong value judgements. Here it is transformed into a stereotype, a form devoid of any specific content. Once again we find ourselves on the allegedly neutral ground of professionalism where patent and experience are fused together to form the qualified ‘expert’.

4. Leadership Throughout the Third Republic, the issue of authority – its nature, sources and role in social relations – has preoccupied theorists and practitioners of politics alike and featured extensively also in literary and artistic works. One major reason for this was the rapidly growing involvement of the masses in public affairs, a process which threatened to shatter traditional social and political hierarchies. The crisis was twofold: not only were the ranks of the governing elites threatened with a flood of new middle-class arrivistes (who could, after all, be co-opted by the old guard, as indeed some were), but the normative basis of these elites, their idea of government, of command, of leadership and – ultimately – of authority, was put in question. If France was to avoid a governmental chaos that would lead to a breakdown of the republican regime, the crisis must be managed and the process which had brought it about – controlled. To this end, the very tenets of authority must be rephrased and restated, taking into account the new social and economic realities.

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This was particularly urgent in certain clusters of French society where the effective exercise of authority was an essential part of daily activities. The army was of course at the top of the list but industry followed closely behind with its concern for efficient management, especially in those echelons which were populated by the new middle classes (hence the relevancy of this issue for the engineers). Yves Cohen has argued that the discourse of command and authority among engineers revolves around four major themes: the social role of command; the efficiency of collective action; social psychology; and education.39 4.1. The social role of command General Lyautey’s essay of 1891, Du rôle social de l’officier, published initially in Le Revue des Deux Mondes, sparked off a series of publications of a similar nature which applied his ideas not only to military issues but also to industrial ones. Lyautey argues that in an age of social unrest, it is the army officers who are best placed to restore confidence in the social order, for their authority has not been tainted in any way and is based on immediate and intimate relations with their subordinates. Lyautey writes: For the soldier, from a social point of view, the pacification of the spirit under such a regime renders it obstinate and susceptible to the idea of class hatred. Already today, on their return home, soldiers who have confidence and respect for their officer willingly remain in contact with him and, we have their testimony to that effect, protest against the accusations spread by those foolhardy demagogues who attack the corporate body, including the bourgeois and the patron, among whom it is supposed to recruit its staff. If such sentiments persevere and become the rule and the soldiers, that is the people as a whole, carry with them from their military service a memory of the benevolent, respectful and just authority of their superiors, such attacks will have no following and will come to nothing.40 Lyautey also wrote the introduction to a book published in the 1930s by the centralien Georges Lamirand under a similar title: Le rôle social de l’ingénieur. This book, which soon became a best-seller and was subsequently reprinted several times, applied Lyautey’s ideas on command to the arena of industrial relations. In particular it endeavoured to demonstrate how the modern engineer, if conscious of the nature of his leading role in the factory, can become a stabilising element, mediating between owners and employees and restoring confidence

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and cooperation between them: ‘One can cite numerous examples of factories which were transformed within a short period of time by the very presence of one or two engineers who were determined to replace the spirit of intrigue with a comradely team spirit’, writes Lamirand.41 A similar opinion was expressed by the left-wing USTICA (Union Syndicale des Techniciens de l’industrie, du Commerce et de l’Agriculture) in its manifesto: The technicians can and must play an important role in the reorganization of the country. They are partly proletarians: they are salaried employees. They are partly managers: they share in the responsibility for the running of the factories. They are at the heart of the production process. . . . They must understand the duties which this situation imposes on them. [. . .] Whatever his mentality, a boss who considers a plan of reform will always see his own interests before those of the collective. It is only human, he will ask himself what repercussions the reform might have on his business and he will respond accordingly. The technicians, less prejudiced by self interest, will provide an opinion based on the good of the whole.42 It is important to note, however, that this intermediary position of the engineers does not imply neutrality: ‘The engineer will be loyal,’ declares Lamirand, ‘loyalty is a territory favourable to sowing, it is important to fertilize it by endless devotion. The engineer will uphold the cause of his boss; he will play the same card as he, and will put himself at his disposal without reservation.’43 The official organ of the USIC – Union Sociale des ingénieurs Catholiques, consistently opposed any expression of class politics, stating that ‘We must cease every opportunity in order to explain to the workers the economic necessity of the function of boss, and to show them the solidarity which exists between all members of an economic organization – workers, technicians and bosses.’ And elsewhere: ‘Any pretention to a “class morality” or a “class justice” will disappear as a consequence of the educational effort by the elites.’44 We have already seen how this view was espoused by sciencefiction writers who tended to present the engineer as a professional expert who executed orders without asking too many questions and while remaining oblivious to political considerations.45 At any rate, it was clear that for the various spokesmen for the engineering profession their position carried an obligation that went far beyond their narrow professional concerns. ‘The engineer’, declares one contributor to the Echo de l’USIC, ‘is often a leader and in such cases, the

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importance of the social aspect of his function may surpass, even from a purely professional point of view, that of his technical action.’46 In order that this elite of engineers can fulfil its social role, it must ‘by taking on the heaviest responsibilities and by performing the most difficult assignments, obtain incontestable authority. We must therefore no longer consider the future engineers as pure technicians; we must prepare them for diverse duties and make sure that they find placements in the higher administration where they will introduce virility and competence.’47 This emphasis on the social role of the engineers and on their mediating and moderating functions should be viewed against the background of the rising power of organised labour. In 1895, only four years after the publication of Lyautey’s article, the CGT (Confédération générale du travail) was created. The publication of Lamirand’s book came in the troubled year of 1934, only two years before the great wave of strikes that heralded the political triumph of the Popular Front. The engineers were considered to be those who could lead the way out of the class struggle and into a kind of cosy class collaboration through their supposed indifference to the various political agendas that surrounded them. They were the peacemakers; the voices of reason. But there was a price to be paid for their services, as some of them made clear: We, who have always recommended methods of conciliation, we who have always had disdain for violent acts, say to the public authorities: beware, and pay no more heed to those people of the third-estate who want to rise above their station, for enough is enough. We have had quite enough of social troubles without stirring-up new ones, by exasperating those people whose cooperation is essential to production and who have thus far been agents of progress.48 If command was what they were asked to provide, authority is what the engineers wanted in return. This demand was never articulated very concretely but its power lay precisely in its vagueness: in a fragile political situation where workers and employers entrenched in preparation for a conflict, there was much to be gained by perpetuating the implicit menace embodied in the idea of the Rôle Sociale de l’ingénieur. 4.2. A scientific model of decision-making In an age when warfare is based primarily on technology, command is increasingly becoming a matter of making strategic decisions by ‘remote control’. A successful commander is thus not so much he who charges

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forth at the head of his soldiers in the battlefield but rather he who devises the most compact and efficient battle plan. This development in the nature of military command was acknowledged by many in the French military after the First World War. Thus General Rouquerol writes: Just as there are two kinds of courage, military courage and civil courage, so there exist two kinds of military courage: courage in the face of personal danger under fire that is bravery and courage of responsibility and decision making. The former is the courage of the tactical leaders and it involves getting as near the troops as possible, while the latter is that of the strategic leaders and it involves staying as far as possible from those troops.49 This new model of command was applied also to industry. French industrialists, faced with the ravages of war, which had left them with relatively small and unskilled personnel, were gradually realising, during the 1920s, that in order to compete on the international market they would have to come up with new strategies for both production and marketing. This meant an overall restructuring of their factories and the adoption of cost-reducing techniques. It was this realisation that made them attentive to the ideas of Taylorism, imported from the United States. Taylorism, or L’Organisation Scientifique du Travail (OST), as these ideas were collectively called in France, was mostly based on a system invented by the American engineer Frederick Taylor. According to Taylor, industrial workers, and in particular those involved in monotonous jobs, tend to work at a slow rate (‘soldiering’, to use his own term). This was due both to the inherent laziness of people and the observation that, when paid the same amount, workers will tend to do the amount of work the slowest among them does. Taylor then suggested that if the production process is analysed and broken down into its parts, it would be possible to determine the optimal procedure for the fast and efficient completion of each part, and thus to schedule the actions of every worker along the assembly line, to calculate break lengths and to set exact quotas for his output. To this Taylor suggested adding a system of bonuses and penalties aimed at increasing workers’ motivation to complete these quotas. One of the main exponents of OST in France during that period was Henry Le Chatelier. An engineer by profession, Le Chatelier taught until late 1897 at the Ecole Polytechnique. A year later he was elected to the

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Collège de France and by 1907 he had already become a member of the Institut Français and an established professor at the Sorbonne. At that stage Le Chatelier launched a campaign for the rationalisation of French economy through the adoption of Taylorist methods and the promotion of engineers to key economic positions. During the war Le Chatelier was called by the then Minister of Armament, Albert Thomas, to assist in the application of scientific methods and techniques to military needs. In 1925 Le Chatelier published his ‘manifesto’ on Taylorism, entitled: Science et Industrie – les débuts du taylorisme en France. In this book he expounded his idea that industry should be based on deterministic scientific rules, discovered experimentally and applied to the process of production. In this way, he argued, French economy would be able to recover and regain a prominent position in the international market. While Taylorism was concerned mainly with the shop-floor level, another theory of management, developed by the engineer Henri Fayol and consequently named after him, dealt with the higher echelons of industrial management, modeling itself on the new military concept of command. Fayolism was at its height between 1918 and 1925, when Fayol founded the Centre des Etudes Administratives, later to be merged with the Taylorist Conférence de l’Organisation Française to form Le Comité de l’Organisation Française. Fayol’s model was based on several key principles. First was the division of labour into specialised and standardised routine tasks where ‘the worker always on the same part, the manager concerned always with the same matters.’ Secondly was the principle of Authority and Responsibility, which was based on the manager’s right to exercise authority over his subordinates and on his accountability for their performance. Interestingly, Fayol admits here that correct procedures and a clear protocol are not enough to ensure such responsibility: ‘The best safeguard against abuse of authority and against weakness on the part of a higher manager is personal and particularly high moral character of such a manager and this integrity, it is well known, is conferred neither by election nor ownership.’50 Fayol then moves on to the next principle – the Unity of Command and Direction, which stipulates that ‘for any action whatsoever, an employee should receive orders from one superior only’ and that there should be only ‘one head and one plan for a group of activities having the same objective.’51 Next is the principle of the Subordination of Individual Interests to the General Interest according to which the collective takes precedence over the individual and the bigger collectives over the smaller ones. Thus ‘the interest of the State should have pride of place over that of one citizen or a group of citizens.’52 Fayol

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lists some other principles, all deriving in one way or another from the ones already mentioned. Elsewhere he also considers the appropriate selection procedure for employees. Under the title ‘elimination of the incompetent’ and he writes: ‘To keep his unit in good running order the manager must eliminate or suggest elimination of any employee, who for whatever reason has become incapable of carrying out his duties.’ He then adds that it is the duty of the manager to provide the remaining staff with a convincing explanation to justify this ‘elimination’ so as not to lose their confidence.53 Fayol stresses that his principles are indispensable to any type of modern organisation, be it the army, government, commerce or industry. However, he finishes his exposition with a paragraph in which he distinguishes between his managerial principles, which are to guide collective and materialist action, and the traditional postulates of Christianity, which are the foundation on which individual moral judgement is based: Surprise might be expressed at the outset that the eternal moral principles, the laws of the Decalogue and Commandments of the Church are not sufficient guide for the manager, and that a special code is needed. The explanation is this: the higher laws of religious or moral order envisage the individual only, or else interests which are not of this world, whereas management principles aim at the success of associations of individuals and at the satisfying of economic interests. Given that the aim is different, it is not surprising that the means are not the same. There is no identity, so there is no contradiction. Without principles one is in darkness and chaos; interest, experience and proportion are still very handicapped, even with the best principles. The principle is the lighthouse fixing the bearings but it can only serve those who already know the way into port.54 Once again, as in each and every aspect of the image of the engineer, we come across the tension between what is inherent and what is acquired, what is fundamental and what is supplementary, what belongs to the individual and what is in the public domain. 4.3. Social psychology The application of social psychology to the issue of command and management was an important feature of a series of books published by Flammarion after the First World War. The editor of the series was Gustave Le Bon, whose Psychologie des Foules, published in 1895, is a classic of political philosophy.

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‘The era which we are entering will be truly that of the masses,’ declares Le Bon, and therefore, ‘the knowledge of mass psychology is the resource most required to the present statesman; not in order to govern them – this has become exceedingly difficult, – but in order not to be completely governed by them.’55 This was true not only in politics but also in industry where technical progress on the one hand and the spread of democratic and socialist ideas on the other hand have created a gap between professional experts and simple workers: While scientific progress provided the elites with superior mentality which allows them to manage the mechanism of modern life, the progress of political ideas conferred on the masses that possess an inferior mentality, the right to govern and to entertain, through their representatives the most dangerous fantasies.56 If progress is to be maintained, the elite must be saved and to do so it must adapt itself to the new political realities. It must find ways to work through governments and parliaments dominated by the popular classes in order to ‘channel the fantasies of the many in the same way that the engineer channels the force of a torrent.’57 This can hardly be achieved through rational persuasion, for the masses are temperamental, unpredictable, intolerant and gullible. If the elite wishes to control them it must appeal to their imagination, it must entice them with a fantasy, a myth. Le Bon, like many of his contemporaries, believed that this mobilising myth must be patriotism. This, he argued, would ensure the allegiance of the masses to traditional social hierarchies and avert the flood which threatens to sweep away the elite, and consequently the achievements of scientific progress, and to plunge society into barbarism: We have arrived at this decisive moment when everyone must concede to becoming a disciple of social order against the destructive barbarism of the sectarians. The triumph of the sectarians will quickly lead to general ruin, to civil war and to invasions. Defending the fatherland and fighting anarchy has become the duty second to none.58 This portrayal of the lower classes as a barbaric mob, which stands in complete qualitative contrast to the elite, was taken up by many spokespersons for the engineering profession. A typical example can be

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found in an article published in the Echo de l’USIC – the organ of the Catholic union of engineers, in February 1939. The anonymous author of the article presented an analysis of the psychology of the working classes. ‘The workers are fairly new creatures,’ explains the article, ‘a bit primitive, and like all new creatures who are a bit primitive, they possess a phenomenal élan and a disposition to form prejudgements based on sentimental charity.’59 This, as can easily be seen, is based on the kind of psychological notions promoted by Le Bon and his school. The article then goes on to assert that ‘the worker is a creature devoid of tradition. He has never received nor can transfer any heritage. Deliberately, he creates the kind of life adapted to his profession and comfortable for himself. His milieu absorbs him and standardizes him.’60 Primitive and rootless, the working classes are also socially and politically irresponsible and egocentric: Their idealism manifests itself above all in their revolutionary creed. They hope for a better future. They have a nostalgia for a golden age but they know that they will not benefit from it (most of them know that the circumstances of their lives are not likely to change much and that social progress is very slow!). They regard an injustice committed against another as a personal offence against themselves. The strike may deprive them of many things and yet how easily do they declare one for the sake of even one of their comrades!61 Georges Lamirand devotes a large part of his Rôle Sociale de l’Ingénieur to the ways in which engineers should treat their working-class subordinates. Although he ostensibly rejects paternalism, his advice and tone reek with it. When, for instance, he describes the way an engineer handles a mutinous reaction by his staff, the description is reminiscent of a teacher telling off his mischievous pupils: In a few curt sentences, uttered in a dry tone of voice, he resolves the issue and puts it back in proportion: he expresses his astonishment at the offensive attitude exhibited by the personnel of whom he had expected better things than crude remarks. . . . The men walk out in silence, their heads bowed, like grown-up children who have just been told off.62 This infantilisation of the lower classes means that they should not be encouraged to aspire to a position above the one they were born in, for: ‘They will end up uprooted and disoriented, incapable of finding

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their place in the liberal professions and returning to manual labour after crushing failures, dissatisfied with life and disgusted with their profession.’63 The task of keeping them at bay involves the application of sanctions, at times severe, for: ‘When it is a question of choosing between their real good (which depends on the good of everybody) and what only appears to be their good in the short run, those men invariably behave like children, and must be brought to make the right choices by such means as the promise of prizes for good behaviour and the threat of punishments for a bad one. It’s humiliating but it’s unavoidable.’64 Following Le Bon, the engineers identify the root of social evil in the egalitarian political theories, which encourage the working classes to break the social hierarchies. Charles Aubert writes in the Echo de l’USIC: How then, could the doctrine of class war ever come into being? It is a purely intellectual idea, emanating from the nebulous mind of Karl Marx. Its success seems even more extraordinary when it encounters real and tangible realities. But since this false idea offers politicians a marvellous tool for the domination of the masses, by exploiting the most vivid passion of the human heart, envy, it has been propagated methodically and with relative ease in countries which have democratic constitutions and where election is the basis of political power.65 The responsibility to address this situation and to combat such ideas lies with the engineers: Our industrial bosses and engineers have duties towards their workers, duties which are analogous to those of the head of a family. If the harmful theories of Karl Marx could, for more than half a century, commit such ravages in the world of labour, it is because, as I pointed out in a previous article, the leaders of industry were weakened by liberal doctrines which did not allow them to seriously refute the socialist theories. Better armed in this regard, we must seize every opportunity to explain to the workers the economic necessity of a boss, and to show them the solidarity which exists between all members of the same economic group – bosses, technicians and workers.66 This pseudo-psychological discourse is yet another instance of the tension between who engineers believe themselves to be and what they

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believe is their duty to do. The ‘psychologisation’ of the interaction with the lower classes is a device designed to alleviate this tension by drawing a clear line between the classes. The existence of such a fundamental divide allows interaction to take place without the risk of getting confused as to the actual place of each party in the social hierarchy. If engineers are recognised as psychologically superior, professionally competent, morally sound and socially responsible, they do not need to fear being mistaken for ‘ordinary workers’ even though they are, too, in most cases, salaried employees. In this way they can exercise authority and command over their subordinates and ensure industrial peace. ∗

∗

∗

The three formulations of the concept of leadership confirmed, each in its own way, the conclusions of the two earlier sections of this chapter, namely that a conservative tendency, expressed in the permanent (albeit often implicit) allusions to traditional social categorisations maintains a tenuous coexistence with a more liberal and modernist tendency. Thus the concern and empathy for working-class subordinates is checked by overt paternalism; the acceptance of mass democracy is conditioned by the affirmation of social Darwinism; and the implementation of standardised managerial principles is preconditioned by a particular moral infrastructure. The balancing of virtue and virtuosity serves here to create the facade of professional neutrality – the engineer is neither the tribune of the people nor the servant of big capital. He is forever the cool and impartial observer whose choices follow a strict scientific logic.

5. Conclusion In this chapter I discussed three major concepts, which constantly and profoundly informed the discourse of and about the engineering profession in the interwar period. First, we saw how two different perceptions of the concept of ‘elitism’ existed concurrently. I labelled one ‘virtue’ and the other ‘virtuosity’ and argued that their coexistence was made possible through mutual misrecognition which allowed them to be presented as compatible within the larger project of ‘progress’ and ‘national unity’. Two competing perceptions were discovered also in my discussion of ‘excellence’ where pragmatism, based on the opinion that all elements of an engineer’s training and environment should be geared

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towards the successful fulfillment of practical tasks, was contrasted with an aristocratic insistence on the cultivation of character and on loyalty to heritage and tradition. Here, too, I found that a common ground was obtained through mutual misrecognition whereby the ideological content of each perception was ignored, allowing both to be represented by the term ‘professionalism’ which postulated complete neutrality on any matter not pertaining directly to technical efficiency. Finally, I analysed three major aspects of the concept of ‘leadership’ and found a recurring tension between empathy and reserve on the part of the managerial engineer in his interactions with his subordinates. This tension, resulting from his dual condition as both a manager and a salaried employee, was in most cases dealt with through a reformulation of the employer–employee relationship in scientific terms, which suggested that it was not voluntarily fostered (and therefore implies personal responsibility) but rather predetermined and fixed. Of course, this scientific facade can persist only so long as the more primal instincts of class envy, racial prejudice and religiosity, which it obscures, are kept in check. To sum up, the examination of these three concepts revealed within each one of them a tenuous coexistence of competing worldviews. Roughly speaking, we could say that one of these worldviews is traditional in the sense that it accords social status on the basis of virtue. This means that the accomplished engineer is he whose character has been cultivated in such a way that he regards his professional activity as a vocation, the purpose of which is to perpetuate traditional conventions and to glorify well-established institutions, customs and social hierarchies. The other worldview can be said to be modernist in that it treats the individual engineer as autonomous, dynamic and essentially utilitarian. The strength of the engineer comes not from his virtue but rather from his virtuosity – his ability to carry out his professional tasks in the most efficient manner. This modern engineer does not have a vocation; he has a career. His goal is not the perpetuation of tradition but the survival of his household through a slow and steady incremental process of promotion. Of course these two worldviews represent ideal types and most engineers fall somewhere in between them with an inclination to one side or the other. Science and, more precisely, scientific language has given them, and those who have written about them, the ability to incorporate both worldviews in a single discourse where scientific objectivity serves as an excuse for the exclusion of value judgements and therefore also of ideological and political commitments.

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I would now like to place these conclusions within the wider theoretical framework proposed by Max Weber in his discussion of the mechanisms of domination and legitimacy and, more specifically, of the dynamics by which bureaucratic authority replaces a traditional one. Weber defines traditional authority as based ‘not on the official’s commitment to an impersonal purpose and not on obedience to abstract norms, but on a strictly personal loyalty.’67 A community ruled by this type of authority is sustained by a shared sense of a ‘community of fate’ the members of which are connected to one another by personal relations and by their collective deference to a shared tradition. Bureaucratic authority is based on several key elements: impersonality (authority resides with the office rather than with the person holding it); rationality (norms and rules are formulated on the basis of expedience and rational values with clear and objective criteria for the assessment of their obtainment); and functional circumscription (the jurisdiction of an official is so defined that he is limited to his proper field of expertise). Although historically the traditional type of authority preceded the bureaucratic one, they were rarely found in their pure form and very often appeared in some combination or other. As Weber notes, this was especially true for the period of transition to modernity when increasing functional division and rationalisation constrained traditional organisations to change and to develop bureaucratic features.68 Later on, as mass democracy expanded, bureaucratic authority became the rule, but its victory was not complete and it had to be on its guard from the remnants of the old traditional order, which survived in the form of personal and local idiosyncrasies that resisted standardisation. Therefore, bureaucracy’s conquests could only be extended: ‘The more it is “dehumanised”, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.’69 It is for this reason that the bureaucratic model has complex and ambivalent relations with democracy which, on the one hand, facilitates its expansion by levelling social differences, while on the other hand impedes its total domination by introducing objective criteria of expertise which constantly rival its electoral nature. Such criteria are particularly threatening when they acquire official sanction in the form of a state-approved patent.70 Ironically, these ‘experts’, the product of modernist rationalism, become modern-day knights, with their professional titles as an insignia of their privilege, and thus translate virtuosity into virtue and arrivisme into elitism. Issuing from the womb of democracy, these ‘experts’ thus carry the latent menace of becoming its executioners.

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The materialisation of this menace could happen in any one of several ways. The most common way is that of a steady and gradual standardisation of the public domain and an increase in both the extent of the responsibilities assigned to the professional echelon and the depth of its impact on the politicians. This is how such a process normally proceeds in parliamentary democracies, where it is constantly checked and balanced by the various outlets of public opinion. As we shall see, the interwar period in France was indeed marked by the rise of the industryoriented technical schools, the adoption of ‘scientific management’ techniques by an increasing number of French industrialists, the legal regulation of the title of qualified engineers, and the constant appeal to these engineers to take on more and more public positions, which they increasingly did towards the end of the 1930s. However, in moments of acute crisis, the process of bureaucratisation could be disrupted by the intervention of charisma which ‘arises from collective excitement produced by extraordinary events and from surrender to heroism of any kind.’71 The defeat of 1940 was certainly such an ‘extraordinary event’, and the rise of Pétain to power is an illustration of charismatic intervention. Pétain had very little actual power under the circumstances of the German occupation and his charisma was essentially symbolic. It stemmed from who he was – the hero of Verdun, and from what he represented – the patriotic hope for the restoration of sovereignty and of military grandeur. The Vichy regime was publicly legitimised only inasmuch as it operated ‘on behalf’ or ‘in the name’ of Pétain. The engineers (or ‘cadres’ as they had come to be called by then) who were flocking into governmental positions in and around that time could only benefit by this turn of events since they were now being associated with something far greater than a materialistic revolution; they were now the vehicles of moral salvation and national redemption. Thus, the conferring of charisma on the immediate surroundings of Pétain practically turned his government into a hierocracy and the professional ethos of the cadres who populated it, into an ethical code of a secular priesthood.

3 From the Trenches to the Laboratories: L’Appel aux Techniciens

In Chapter 2 suggested that there may be some reciprocity between the ‘professionalism’ of the engineers, explained in the terms of the Weberian model of domination and legitimacy, and a similar process in the political arena. In order to examine this suggestion, this chapter will focus on the point of interface between the engineering profession and the political discourse in the specific historical context of the 1920s. The choice of this particular context is based on the fact that it was only after the First World War that the process in question, both in the professional and in the political contexts, matured to a degree that significant conclusions could be drawn from its analysis. This was due mainly to the material and cultural effect that the war had on French society and the consequent drive for reconstruction, which brought about reflexivity with regard to the potentialities of certain ideas and social groups. I will start by presenting the opinions of various spokesmen for the engineers on the role the latter ought to assume in politics. The commentary is drawn from all sides of the political spectrum as it is reflected in the publications of the various professional syndicates of engineers. I will then do the same with regard to certain political ‘nonconformists’, on both the Left and the Right. I chose these particular persons for the reason that all of them have been repeatedly ‘rounded-up’ by various scholars of fascism and accused of propagating that ideology. Other scholars have determinedly rejected the accusation with regard to some or all of them. As this work ultimately aims to address this debate, it is only natural that these activists should be the focus of my discussion here. 61

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1. Engineers and political power in the aftermath of the First World War In an article in the first issue of USTICA – the bulletin of the leftwing Union Syndicale des Techniciens de l’Industrie, du Commerce et de l’Agriculture – in March 1921, Roger Francq, founder and chairman of the syndicate wrote: ‘The USTICA was established by a group of technicians, mostly engineers, who came back from the war. . . . They had the idea that in order to put an end to the chaos in the midst of peace, a new world must replace the one which had given us 1 million 500,000 dead, 400,000 invalids and the devastation of our richest provinces.’1 However, they were quickly disillusioned, continued Francq, as they saw the incompetence and immorality of the political leaders whose only interest was in profiteering. It was no wonder he concluded, that in this atmosphere of cynicism, many of them traded their ideals for a career in business and chose not to get involved in politics. This, he noted in another article, left the business of government in the unreliable hands of incompetent politicians who relied on the counsel of dubious pseudoexperts who, ‘being “businessmen” first and foremost, that is, men of intrigue, were neither real technicians nor directors of industry.’ Instead of this sorry state of affairs ‘the reconstruction of Europe, a technical and social problem, must be handled by technicians and sociologists.’2 A year later, in an article entitled ‘Gouverner c’est prévoir’ (‘to govern is to foresee’), Francq made this point even more explicitly: In order to learn how to lead a state one needs to attend a different school than the political parliament with its craftiness and compromises. The meretriciousness of parliamentary life, which takes place in confined spaces, is not an appropriate school for the leaders of nations. On the other hand, what a prolific education does professional life provide. It teaches how to foresee, since in order to mould the material, in order to domesticate nature, in order to create, Man must discipline his spirit and leave nothing to mere chance. . . . A paradoxical situation, since it is precisely the men who are intellectually and technically prepared to govern who are not given the chance to do so.3 As for the way in which political power can be assumed, the writers of USTICA advocated an alliance with the working class: ‘The improvement of the lot of the technicians is not just a question of salaries, it is intimately related to the ascent of the workers into leading positions.’

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So wrote Francq, but hastened to add: ‘Let us defend the rights of the workers but we must not expect much from anyone but ourselves.’4 Revolutionary violence was, however, out of the question: ‘the technicians declare that they renounce violence as a means to obtain political power, and are confident that all social transformations require a long and continuous effort’, wrote one contributor to the bulletin and continued: ‘experience has taught us that the powers that be, collapse as a result of their own deficiencies and errors rather than as a result of a violent attack by their adversaries. The Technicians must prepare for the day when such deficiencies and errors will result in the falling of political power, like ripe fruit, into their open hands.’5 This rejection of parliamentary politics on the one hand, and a demand for a peaceful transference of political power to the technicians on the other hand, abounds also in the publications of the more right-wing syndicates. The centrist USIF (Union Syndicale des Ingénieurs Français) in an article typically entitled Le rôle sociale de l’ingénieur declared: It is to us that falls the duty to exercise a decisive influence on the direction of public affairs, even though we have not done so until now. We have an ambition to become a social group whose opinion prevails. And this ambition creates the duty to form our judgements on the basis of rigorous study, conscious of the past, and to seek with all the means at our disposal to bring about the triumph of the ideas of order, authority, subordination and natural hierarchy, which are the basis of the methodical and rational organization of all human societies.6 Charles Virmand of the Société des anciens élèves des Ecoles Nationales Françaises d’Arts et Métiers wrote in the Echo de l’USIC, the organ of the Catholic engineers’ syndicate: ‘The modern world lacks leaders in this world, where technique plays an ever bigger role, the future leaders cannot conceive of themselves as not having a technical culture.’ For him too, the ideals that the engineers should strive to promote and protect are ‘of a fraternal and hierarchic society where authority resides with those whose work marks them as the most deserving, where social distinctions will have no other basis than the common good, where the liberty of every person will be guaranteed by the spread of knowledge and the respect for duty.’7 If we cast our eyes even further to the Right, to the Ingénieur Français, a journal ideologically affiliated to the royalist Action Française, we

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find repeated and harsh attacks on the political heritage of the French Revolution (‘which was perpetrated against the workers and for the profit of financial powers and the republican regime’8 ) and against democracy (‘it is tyranny: all must bend to the will of the central power, exclusive and collective, anonymous and irresponsible, and since everything must lie in its shade, it destroys whatever it cannot subdue’9 ). As against the republican order, the journal proposes a corporatist regime: The corporatism is based on the natural order of things: it corresponds to the natural constitution of society, not to reforms conceived arbitrarily on the basis of a plan imagined by some visionary. Corporatism respects the virtue of competence and not that of the greatest number, the triumph of quality over quantity, the functional organization of all elements of society.10 The engineers are to be the vanguard of corporatism: ‘What we want’, writes one frequent contributor to the journal, ‘is to obtain, within our profession, an elite; and then, with it and through it, to improve the corporation and to mobilize it for the task of national reconstruction.’11 All this evidence leads to the conclusion that the organised power of French engineers in the 1920s envisioned an extension of their professional ethos into the realm of politics. Evidently, the various syndicates were far from unanimous on the normative substance of the regime they would like to see in place. The ideological spectrum they represented was extremely wide and in this respect simply reflected the partisan divide in parliament. These ideological differences, however, accentuate the solid and consistent common platform shared by all the groups – the pre-eminence of technical professionalism as a credential for the ideal statesman. This professionalism, as we elaborately demonstrated in the previous chapter, melts together conflicting worldviews to create a value-free zone where efficient management replaces both collective traditions and personal ambitions as the prime mover of professional activity. What the engineers are now proposing is to export this model into politics. This entails a complete rejection of the parliamentary system with its assemblies ‘of lawyers used to twisting texts, doctors who have no patients, professors who have got lost in their book, jurists attached to concessional formulas.’12 We shall now turn to the political system itself in order to see whether this project had any adherents there.

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2. Lysis: la démocratie nouvelle By the end of the First World War the ideas of scientific management had found enthusiastic advocates in various politicians and intellectuals in whose minds it was associated with a more profound national regeneration in both the material and the moral spheres.13 One of the early disciples of Taylorism in France was Lysis (pseudonym of Eugène Letailleur). Lysis, a bank employee and a publicist, founded in 1917 a movement called La Democratie nouvelle. In the movement’s founding manifesto Lysis wrote: ‘The notion of a political state becomes secondary to that of the economic state, since it is less interesting to engage in mean-minded disputes between the citizens, when everyone knows that he can better his situation simply by working.’14 Politics, thus, at least in its conventional sense, must give way to economics. Lysis was set on an economic reform which, he claimed, would create material abundance through a rationalised and efficient production process. However, his was also a political agenda opposed to distributive economic policies which, he argued, only fostered social friction and discontent: The democratic ideal is our goal, our flag, our aspiration, and no one disputes this in France, but we must admit that we have employed, in order to realize it, means which rested on great illusions. This fundamental error consisted in thinking that it was possible to profoundly transform the material condition of the poor classes through a political decision to redistribute revenues. . . . What did actually happen? The capitalists, treated like enemies and feeling insecure, do not dare to invest their capital anymore in enterprises in this country, and prefer to take it abroad and the national economy becomes stagnant or even recedes, while the condition of the workers remains miserable. Under such circumstances, the general mood deteriorates; the politicians exploit this discontent, and escalate their claims and the crisis deepens [. . .] we have known such a situation. . . . We have tried to obtain social progress through redistribution when it is before anything else, a question of production.15 And, he continues, if social progress is a matter of production rather than of distribution, then it is inappropriate that collective decisions be left in the hands of politicians rather than in those of producers, for it is the latter rather than the former who actually create wealth.16 Politicians generally lack any practical knowledge and experience in matters

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of production and should therefore not meddle in such issues: ‘If the producers have the right to defend themselves without having to resort to the intermediacy of those specialists in the representation of the people, it is in the interest of the country that they exercise this right since their judgement is undeniably sounder than that of those who have never had to deal with real difficulties and whose knowledge is based on theoretical instruction.’17 But who are these producers who must take the reins of power into their hands? Certainly not the workers, for Lysis is quite adamant in his claim that they are, in their present state, unqualified for any position of responsibility, for they lack the professional knowledge required for the task.18 It is therefore to the patrons that Lysis is looking, for they do have such knowledge and expertise. And among those patrons, he points out one group in particular, the technicians and the engineers: Production is a scientific affair, based on experience and organization. We are therefore bound to put in positions of power technicians and men of action who have already proved themselves; it is indispensable, no factory can operate with an able director. Moreover, no factory can operate if the director is replaced every three months, nor if he does not have the authority to make decisions, to organize services, to lead his staff and to make them obey him. We therefore realize that we must have, at the head of our State, stability, responsibility and let us not hesitate to add: authority.19 It is the technicians who will govern the reformed French state and in order to allow them to do so Lysis is willing to replace the whole electoral system, which, he claims, ensures the election of the most unsuitable candidates imaginable: Even if there are some exceptions, it is no less certain that our electoral system ends up selecting and putting in power, mechanically, the most dishonest and crafty individuals, sceptics, devoid of faith and ideas, or in short, those who are the least competent morally and intellectually. . . . And if we are conscious of this deficiency of our electoral system, who prevents us from replacing it with another which will yield better results? Is our failure to reform our institutions due to objections by the ruling oligarchy which regards such reforms as threatening its position? It must be said, at the risk of sounding optimistic, that such excuse doesn’t hold water.20

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And what form will this economic state ruled by technicians assume? Lysis regards this as a marginal issue. As long as the smooth running of the economy is secured, the form of government is immaterial: ‘What really matters on the other hand, as the facts show, is the intervention by the public authorities in order to create conditions favourable to initiative and later on for the intelligent stimulation and coordination of activities in order to integrate them in a comprehensive programme with a collective goal.’21 With the financial support of several industrialists, among whom was Michelin, Lysis published, in 1919, a daily newspaper propagating his ideas. At the same time his party enjoyed the support of some 26,000 adherents. However, the party failed to gain support in the elections that same year and consequently became riddled with internal scissions. In 1924 the party joined the Ligue nationale républicaine and in 1927, with Lysis’s death, it virtually disappeared.

3. Maurice Barrès: La grande pitié des laboratoires In April 1919, Maurice Barrès, the nationalist writer, journalist, Boulangist campaigner and conservative député of the Assemblée nationale, launched a press campaign designed to promote the upgrading of French science laboratories and, in the process, the elevation of the public status and prestige of scientists. Germany is defeated, wrote Barrès, but ‘it is not the moment to rest. The war has taught us a lesson of unity and organization; let us be faithful to this lesson since victory obliges us to remain united. It would be unfortunate if we did not have a common ideal. I am thinking of a guiding ideal which compels us and which leads the way like a pillar of fire.’ And this idea, continues Barrès, is the idea of ‘a France which understands the duties of each class towards the others, which does not respond to proletarian envy with bourgeois strictness, which wants to transform the life of the worker, place him in a different milieu, with completely different morality, with different conditions of life, so that the relationship between worker and boss are not locked up in a perpetual cycle of reprisals.’ Promoting this idea and turning it into reality is the task of the state and of the professional syndicates, but it is above all the mission of science.22 Therefore, scientists have every right to be considered members of the French elite, and to enjoy both the protection and the encouragement of the state. However, Barrès is very clear about the sort of scientists he believes should be encouraged. It was not the sterile theoreticians but

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rather the engineers, the men of practical applications, who bad won the war for France. Therefore, the true challenge for France is to produce more such persons: ‘The main issue is to see the goal to be obtained. It is not a question of educating the erudite. We need strong spirits capable of spontaneity and decision making, we need researchers – to put it more generally, we need leaders. . . . The wise man is not he who knows but he who acts.’23 And thus he appeals to the old aristocracy, the natural elite of the nation to consider an alternative cursus honorum – that of science: Many old families have maintained the belief that military spirit is superior to commercial considerations. For the last fifty years they could not see anything worthy outside the gates of Saint-Cyr. They have found it very difficult to adapt to a reality where the only motivation for action is self interest. Why not send their sons to muster the study of reason, to create science and to guide the spirit of humanity? They can become leaders of society and legitimately rise to the summit if they employ their intellectual resources in the service of the great human spirit.24 Barrès is doubtful about the capacity of the democratic state to encourage such a project: ‘A democratic state is a coalition of short-term interests. It has nothing other than immediate concerns. It can reward an inventor, but not one whose creation will only show its benefits in the long run. It is a bad judge because it cannot afford to make mistakes.’25 Instead he proposed the separation of scientific research from the state, and its entrustment in the hands of the universities which should enjoy an autonomous status. The goal of scientific research is ultimately the improvement of production and the manufacture of abundance in order to alleviate class tension. Barrès claimed that the real economic issue is not the distribution of wealth but rather its creation: ‘It is an accepted opinion that there is a certain amount of wealth in the world and that the main question is how to distribute it. But the scientific truth is that the quantity of wealth which can be produced is practically limitless. All we have to do is to produce.’26 Barrès explicitly refers to the Taylorist ideas imported from the United States as a source of inspiration for French industry: ‘This is where the American workers take an approach which is completely new to us. They say: the production of wealth can be limitless. Our effort should not be directed to struggling over the possession of the wealth that there is and which is insufficient for humanity as a whole,

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but must instead be invested in creating such immense quantities of wealth that will allow each person to take his share.’27 This task, of transforming French economy, and thus also social relations, ultimately ensuring French superiority, now belongs to scientists, engineers and industrialists, just as it had once been the task of the combatants whom Barrès had glorified two years earlier in his Les diverses familles spirituelles de la France, as the embodiment of ‘The eternal qualities of France’ which united them, in spite of their diverse intellectual, social and religious origins, in the will to fight for their country and to make the ultimate sacrifice for its sake. Now, Barrès states clearly that French science has proved an essential element in the defence of the national homeland and that therefore: ‘The man of the laboratory has proved worthy of his martyred brother, the man of the trenches.’28

4. Georges Valois: la révolution National Georges Valois (pseudonym of Alfred Georges Grassent) is perhaps the most enthusiastic and consistent advocate of the cause of the new technical elite in this period. Originally the unofficial spokesman on economics for the royalist Action Française and the director of its publishing house – the Nouvelle librarie nationale, he gradually developed, throughout the 1920s a political vision based on the one hand on technical progress and on the other on an overall political and moral regeneration of France, in the spirit of the great wartime Union Sacrée.29 What France needed above all, declared Valois in 1920, was an economic system which could assure the production and training of economic leaders: ‘Democratic Statism, which appoints leaders according to partisan pressure, is no less a detestable system than the libertarian or soviet socialism which makes such appointments on the basis of decisions taken by the assemblies of equals. One doesn’t appoint leaders: they are self-made and self-appointed; authority, like liberty, is not given; it is taken.’30 To accomplish this task, Valois argued, one needed to rid oneself of the old illusions of liberalism such as, for instance, the concept of human rights: ‘The man who was born of the war does not understand anymore the language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. To these vague figures of Man and Citizen he opposes the two authentic creations of human society: the warrior and the producer.’31 These archetypes represented at the same time the ‘New Age’ of humanity which, through rationalisation and mechanisation

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would create economic abundance, and a regenerated, confident and forward-looking France, recovered from its humiliating defeat of 1871 and reclaiming its prominent position on the international scene. Together with the old liberalism must go the old pretenders to political supremacy. In the early 1920s, Valois was still a member of the Action Française and his bête noire was the liberal, democratic and generally republican bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, he argued, had fulfilled an important historical role in bringing about modernisation and getting rid of feudal anachronisms. However, it had become too greedy in its quest for political influence and for this hubris it must now pay: ‘It is incontestable that the bourgeoisie was once great and that it provided great services to civilization. It is also incontestable that it can regain its grandeur and render new services. But on one condition: that it agrees to serve rather than to command. Its decay can be traced to the moment it presumed to take the leading role in the State.’32 The state could not be the servant of one class, argued Valois. This went against the very spirit of the Union Sacrée and of the solidarity of the trenches: ‘Let the State recruit among the bourgeoisie, as well as among the nobility, the workers and the peasants, in order to staff its personnel, we have no objection. But that the State should consider the bourgeoisie as a class of leaders, that the State, to speak frankly, should become a bourgeois state, we cannot accept because this is contrary to the philosophy of the warrior and to the most fundamental political wisdom. The State cannot be anything but a national state.’33 In 1924 Valois set up his own organisation, le faisceau des combattants et des producteurs, which was loosely modeled on the Italian fascist party. The new organisation had its own paper – le Nouveau Siècle – and enjoyed the financial sponsorship of the industrialist François Coty.34 The new National state, declares Valois, will release the French people from bourgeois mediocrity and will open the way for talent and for heroic self-sacrifice, long despised and subdued by self-indulgent plutocrats and corrupt politicians: ‘We are the country with the wealthiest bourgeoisie, which also has the best organized and the most fertile scientific spirit,’ he writes, ‘and yet we are also the country in which Maurice Barres spoke of the great distress of the laboratories!’35 But soon things will change, Valois declares: ‘The warriors will put the affairs of France in order; hierarchy will be restored: at the head of the State the Leader of the Warriors; below him the warriors themselves who will be placed at the head of all private enterprises.’36 When that happens, he promises, public prestige will no longer be based on money but rather on services rendered to the nation.

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The first task of the National state, under the leadership of the combattants and their leader, will therefore be ‘the destruction of those institutions founded in order to automatically ensure the triumph of the mediocre.’ Having destroyed these bastions of bourgeois plutocracy it will proceed to reassemble the true elite, which has heretofore been reduced to impotence and paralysis due to its lack of financial means.37 The National state will then turn these elite into true leaders who will carry the nation forward into a future of greatness and prosperity. Valois is, however, careful not to exclude from his future elite elements of the bourgeoisie he deems suitable for the task of national reconstruction. After condemning certain politicians and businessmen who represent a significant fraction of the bourgeoisie and who engage in profiteering from the financial and political crisis, he hastens to add: ‘I say: a fraction of the bourgeoisie made of bankers, producers, jurists and politicians. I do not say: the bourgeoisie as a whole. Since we know some bourgeois, big or small, who react violently against the dispositions of their peers and who wish to take a leading role in the resolute reform of their class.’38 Indeed, Valois is quite aware of the role played by certain industrialists in promoting economic renovation. In 1927 he writes: Today, groups of rationalist capitalists have come to understand that it would be necessary to come out of this mood of passive resistance. They have decided to take the lead of the movement and to carry out an economic revolution. We are not referring here to those groups of charitable people who think they can halt the progress of history by distributing benefits for the newly born. We are referring to the groups or individuals of the elite who resolutely undertake the rationalization of industry, with the clear idea of trying to do with capitalism what no one could or wanted to do with it for more than a century.39 In the article quoted above, Valois is referring in particular to the newly formed Redressement Français. This group, or think-tank, set up by the industrialist Ernest Mercier in 1926 to promote an economic reform, is regarded by Valois as a natural reaction to proletarian pressure which drives conscientious capitalists to reassess the mechanisms of the capitalist economy in view of their social consequences and to seek, within the confines of that system, a formula which would alleviate some of its excesses. The very fact that such a reaction becomes

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necessary vindicates the cause of the class struggle and demonstrates its utility: If, at this moment, there are active groups of rationalizing capitalists, like the Redressement Français it is because the great socialist upheavals and the Russian revolution have instilled great fears in the minds of some bourgeois. This proves the truth of Georges Sorel’s assertion that proletarian violence provides creative energy to the bourgeoisie. In this regard, the establishment of Mercier’s committee (which is very different from an organization of social defence and which is quite literally a revolutionary expression of capitalism) proves right the author of Reflexions on Violence.40 Thus it would appear that for Valois and his entourage, at least until the late 1920s, collaboration, albeit limited and conditional, with certain nonconformist elements of the bourgeoisie was favourably looked upon. Although true reform cannot be achieved, in his opinion, through a unilateral effort on the part of capitalists, without the active cooperation of the working class, he recognises the potential of this new initiative to push forward the necessary reforms. In 1928 Valois was back on the left-wing of French politics, having finally come to terms with the failure of his fascist experiment. The faisceau and its journal Le Nouveau Siècle, had by that time succumbed to the financial pressure which had resulted from the defection of Valois’ sponsors and to the attacks by his old rivals on the traditional Right. Steeped in debts and discredited by his association with fascism, Valois nevertheless relaunched himself on a new political career with yet another party, another journal and another publishing house. In the early 1920s Valois was adamant that the agents of the revolution were the veterans who ‘under the command of a national leader, supported by an elite of intellectuals, bourgeois and proletarian, we will overrun the liberal State, suppress its political, economic and social institutions and establish a national state with its own proper institutions.’41 By 1928, however, he had become disillusioned with these anciens combatants who, rather than rising to the challenge, preferred to engage in nostalgic paramilitary rituals. ‘The spirit of the victory for me’, wrote Valois, ‘wasn’t in those aggressive demonstrations directed at our neighbours, it was rather in the construction of a brand new world, by technology and in the cause of justice.’42 It was therefore to the representatives of this ‘brand new world’ that Valois now appealed, to the

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technicians, the engineers and the scientists, whom he describes as a new and distinct class rising between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Valois declared himself a member of this class: I belong to that new class, which has developed between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. A class born of historical necessity; a class of intellectuals; of technicians; of organizers of work, of inventors, of bosses, workshop stewards who, between the land and capital owners and the battalions of proletarians, is the great creator of the modern world. It is a class which is gradually gaining consciousness of itself and which will not hesitate long with regard to its mission. It is a class which refused to make its own the prejudices of the bourgeoisie. And which understands now that its mission is not to become a new bourgeoisie but rather to develop its own character within the State and liberate the proletariat of the misery and ignorance into which it has fallen during the era of individualism.43 The technicians, argued Valois, understood that the future of society depended on economic progress. They realised that the old class division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was no longer relevant. However, while on the one hand the bourgeoisie put its trust in police repression in order to curb social unrest, and on the other hand the proletariat kept pinning its hopes on a violent revolution that would sweep it into power, the technicians dragged their feet outside this dispute, not yet realising the political significance of their own economic and social position. And why was their position so unique and significant? Because, argued Valois, they constituted a new type of class, made up of both bourgeois and proletarians. It was a class of producers, of those who were directly and actively involved in the daily running of industry be it by providing it with new ideas and designs, or by supervising the work on the assembly line. They were not concerned with the ownership and distribution of wealth but rather with its production and management. In this they stood in opposition to that other social class – that of financial speculators, professional politicians and other non-productive elements of society. The true social front crossed between technicians and speculators, or in Valois’ figurative terms: between producers and parasites. In time, the technicians would take over the state and eliminate the parasites, for ‘the technical State serves a republic of producers where

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there is no place for either parasites or the useless.’44 The new technical state would know no other morality than that of productivity: ‘Its agents cannot judge human virtues in the name of metaphysical or religious principles. Those who are ejected from the realm of the producers are the men whose vices make them unworthy of their machines, inapt for production. It is at this point that there is sure to be discontent.’45 This struggle, between the forces of progress and prosperity and those of reaction and exploitation would, at some point, reach a showdown. In a way reminiscent of his old fascist past, Valois spoke of a ‘daring and audacious revolution, not lacking in brutality’ that would put producers and parasites in direct confrontation: ‘There must be a total conflict between the old world and the new one. No compromises. The latter must destroy the former.’46 This, claimed Valois, was the revolution he had always had in mind since his break with the Action Française in the mid-1920s. His mistake, he now admitted, had been to think that it could be achieved with the help of the Right. The politicians of the Right had a different revolution in mind, a conservative one that would save the privileges of the old ruling class, predominantly parasitic and non-productive, from the menace of socialism. This is why they had initially supported the Faisceau: ‘The press had expected a different kind of Faisceau than ours. We got there first. We took its place. And our Faisceau benefited from the atmosphere which had been prepared for that other one. The other fascism was the one propagated by Mr. Pierre Taittinger which was perfectly in tune with the wishes of those who wanted to incite popular rage against socialism.’47 In August 1928 Valois launched a new journal to promote his technocratic vision. Les Cahiers Bleus, in small format and carrying an average of 30 pages per issue, was published twice or three times a month over a period of four years until May 1932 – 119 issues altogether. This journal attracted writers from various sections of the new Left including ‘Young Turks’ from the Radical party such as Bertrand de Jouvenel and Jean Luchaire, and neo-socialists and other nonconformists from the ranks of the SFIO such as Marcel Déat, André Philippe and Paul Marion. In April 1929, Valois dedicated a whole issue of the journal to ‘an appeal to the technicians’: This day, we call upon a certain class whose mission it is to redress the current situation, for which it bears some responsibility simply because it has not yet become fully conscious of itself and of its mission. We call upon the class of the technicians.48

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And the mission Valois claimed for the techniciens was the organisation of the modern state. Like the bourgeoisie in 1789, which, conscious of its significance as the driving force behind the economy, had refused to succumb to the whims of the aristocracy and the monarchy, the presentday techniciens should not have to contend with the pettiness and the anachronism of parliamentary politics. They must overcome their distaste for politics and enter the public arena, not as partisan militants but as professional experts, disinterested, cool minded and concerned solely with pushing forward the overall reform of the state: ‘This doesn’t mean that the technicians will ignore the great historical traditions of our country. It simply signifies the fact that they will enter public life as technicians rather than as radicals, socialists or Catholics.’49 Valois went on to consider potential allies for the techniciens in their struggle for political power. Having become fully disillusioned with both the conservative Right and the various ligues, he now pinned his hopes on the nonconformist young guard of the Radical party and the SFIO. When in 1929 the Radical congress voted against participation in the Poincaré government, opting instead for a union of the Left against plutocracy, Valois considered it a ‘creative revolution’ with which he credited the ‘Young Turks’ of the party, grouped around such periodicals as La Voix and Notre Temps. In October of that year he wrote in the Cahiers: In the Radical camp, alongside the old formations, La Voix and Notre Temps give a whole new colour to the old vessels of radicalism. One of their most significant achievements is their alignment with that group of talented writers and enterprising technicians which includes Frédérique Lefèvre, Emmanuel Berl and many others. For a long time, the sympathy of the literary circles had been with nationalism alone. Nothing can be more important than the fact that it is now directed towards the new radical dynamism which has developed around La Voix and Notre Temps. . . . 50 In the following year Valois repeatedly wrote to Emile Roche, one of the central figures among the young Radicals, urging him to take the further step of creating an alliance with like-minded dissidents of the SFIO. Valois himself kept close contact with neo-socialists such as Marcel Déat and Barthélémy Montagnon, and in November 1933, writing in Chantiers Cooperatifs – the successor of the Cahiers, he publicly addressed Déat, criticising him for his reliance on the middle classes, which, Valois claimed, had become economically marginalised and politically

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ineffective. Instead he urged Déat and his fellow neo-socialists to turn their attention to the techniciens: Those who have found a place in small industry, small commerce, are lost for us. Those are the petit bourgeois. But the others, the technicians of big industry, remain ours. We have allowed them to disperse. It could seem as if they have abandoned us. But they are ours since, being conscious of their major economic function, they are, in the confidence of their own ranks, violently opposed to those proprietors who live off their work and who nevertheless despise them. It shouldn’t be too difficult to rally them to our cause, especially at a time like the present. It is to those men, Déat, that we must appeal and not to the petit bourgeois. To those who are of the same blood as ours, the cadres of the constructive revolution: those who would take the economy into their hands for the sake of the socialist revolution. Today they all still trample under the yoke of the grand masters of finance and of industry.51 As we shall see below, in the second half of the 1920s both ‘Young Turks’ of the Radical party and neo-socialists of the SFIO were drifting away from the orthodoxy of their respective parties towards a common ground which was generally labelled ‘realist’. The tenets of this ‘realist’ programme were the primacy of economics, the reliance on the middle classes and strong government guided, if not actually led by, professional experts, broadly referred to as ‘techniciens’. In the early years of the 1930s the ‘realists’ were still hoping to sway the leadership of their parties in their direction and therefore remained cautious in their mutual overtures. They also refrained from pushing their programme to its logical conclusion – the total renunciation of electoral party politics. This is where Valois stepped in. Enthusiastic about the technocratic policies of the ‘realists’, Valois was at the same time aware of the prospect of their eventual defeat if they remained divided by partisan affiliations. He therefore set out to make both his array of journals and his publishing house, La Librairie Valois – which had replaced the Nouvelle Librarie National – into a kind of ‘melting pot’ for the various technocratic and nonconformist tendencies. In 1928 he published Bertrand de Jouvenel’s Economie Dirigée and Pierre Dominique’s Révolution Créatrice; in 1929 appeared Jean Luchaire’s Generation Réaliste and Barthélémy Montagnon’s Grandeur et Servitude Socialistes. In 1930 Valois published Déat’s Perspectives Socialistes – the ‘bible’ of neosocialism. Valois was later to be bitterly disappointed by the outcome of this rassemblement, when many of his young protégés would abandon socialism in favour

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of various forms of fascism. It is indeed an irony that the first French fascist, at the moment of his repentance, should contribute so much to the nurturing of a hotbed for the next generation of French fascists.

5. Le Redressement Français In the middle of the 1920s France was undergoing a financial crisis. The government of the Cartel des Gauches, elected in 1924, was unable to prevent the collapse of the franc and the business community was afraid of an economic deterioration which might lead to an overall crisis such as the one experienced by Germany in 1923. Many leading figures in that community were beginning to realise that recovery necessitated a comprehensive process of industrial modernisation and rationalisation as well as deep political reforms. Adding to their concern was the wave of strikes reaching a peak in 1926 and engendering fears of a communist takeover. Ernest Mercier, an engineer by profession and the chairman of the Electricity Board, was one of those businessmen.52 His view was that the professional politicians, too concerned with personal ambition and partisan rivalries, were unable to solve France’s economic problems. Instead, what was needed was a political and technical elite of experienced and well-trained businessmen devoted to modernisation and progress and thus working for the general good. This view was enforced by a reference to the ideas of Marshal Lyautey, author of Le Rôle Social de l’Officier (1891) who, after his retirement in 1925, became a close associate of Mercier. Lyautey advocated the advance of a socially conscientious elite, based on war veterans, which, in the spirit of the ‘brotherhood of the trenches’ would foster public solidarity and class collaboration, thus averting the communist danger and inspiring a spirit of national renewal. Later on Lyautey would join Mercier’s Redressement Français. In December 1925 Mercier launched his project of gathering the professional and economic elite in order to ‘educate the masses’. He argued that this elite must be persuaded to reach beyond its narrow professional confines and concern itself with the task of reforming the state. The members of the elite, coming mainly from business and managerial circles owed their status not to birth or fortune but rather to their talent and intelligence. It was these latter qualities which had helped them rise to the top in the Darwinian struggle of economic natural selection. The group gathered by Mercier began its activities in 1926 by distributing brochures to businessmen, academics, leaders of veteran

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organisations, etc., in which they articulated their ideas. Later on, the group embarked on a project of putting together a comprehensive programme of reforms. They did so by asking leading experts in various fields to write their ideas and recommendations in the form of monographic reports. Some 127 such reports were published in 1927 in 35 volumes, under the title Cahiers du Redressement Français, printed in some 40,000 copies, half of which were sold within a year of their publication. In its 1927 manifesto the RF made, like Barrès and Valois, a clear connection between the desired economic and political reforms and the lessons of the First World War as carried and expressed by the young generation of veterans: The spirit of the Redressement Français is that of the generation which fought in the war: young enough still to understand the aspirations and needs of real youth, but informed and mature enough by twelve years of trials and sacrifices to be conscious of its own value and will. This generation wants the rejuvenation of the social elite. Certainly, in a vigorous country old age must be respected and its voice must be heard in the councils of the State. However, direct authority and commandment belong to those men who still possess all their moral and physical energy. This generation despises the old political quarrels and ancient hatreds, inherited from an old age which they can no longer understand and which no longer stirs the emotions because between it and us lies the irreparable and the inexplicable.53 The old order with its liberal ideology and institutions was inadequate for the task of reforming and regenerating post-war French society. ‘Individualism’, wrote Lucien Romier, ‘is very nice, very pleasant. But it is of another age.’54 Having tasted the trans-class solidarity of the trenches, the spirit of sacrifice and responsibility, the French no longer wished to be governed by corrupt and incompetent politicians engaged in archaic partisan rivalries. It wanted and deserved a new leadership which would turn the noble sentiments engendered by the war effort into a new political culture based on authority, responsibility, collaboration and productivity. The main task of this new elite was to restore authority and potency to government. The RF consistently criticised the exaggerated role played by the Chamber of Deputies in the governmental apparatus. It was

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claimed that this institution was both too powerful in its prerogatives and too dependent on the electorate. Its individualist attitude, exemplified in the preoccupation of its members with their personal careers, and the abstract nature of its debates and resolutions, based on outdated partisan platforms, hindered the work of the executive and stalled any project of reform. The RF proposed to reduce the number of deputies as well as to extend their term of office and thus minimise futile arguments in the Chamber and free it from its constant dependence on public opinion. It was also proposed that the deputies should benefit from the advice of economic specialists who would have a permanent seat on parliamentary committees. It was not, however, proposed to alter the structure of parliament along corporatist lines (a suggestion very popular with various technocratic groups in the late 1920s and throughout the following decade). This was probably due to the RF’s basic distrust of any professional association preoccupied with lobbying for the interests of its own members rather than with ‘the general good’. Reforming the state and the economy is not the task of syndicates or corporations but of professional experts, socially conscientious and politically unaffiliated. Thus the RF’s position paper on parliamentary reform (supervised by Raphael Alibert, later to become Pétain’s Minister of Justice) argued: It would be . . . extremely useful and utterly just to introduce into parliament, certain persons of note who have neither the leisure nor the inclination to plunge into the electoral fray. Their presence would enhance the prestige of parliamentary proceedings; especially since these men would not owe their position to an electoral victory too often purchased at the price of degrading concessions, thus preserving intact their personal prestige and independence.55 And who, among the young veterans, was the most able, the most equipped to take up the mission of carrying through this project of reconstruction? According to Raoul Dautry, the future Front Populaire minister and one of the leading figures in the RF, it was the engineers who could do so. In his study on the ‘Organization of Social Life’, published in the prestigious series of the Cahiers du Redressement Français, he wrote: Most young engineers have been in the war and have exercised leadership very early and in very difficult circumstances. The responsibility of command expired for them when they reached the end

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of their twenties. Their uniforms off, they remained leaders in the factory or in the bank. Of the discipline and camaraderie of the trenches they kept the habit of a positive and active order and of generous action.56 But prestige was just one argument in favour of the engineers. More important was their unique position within the labour relations in the factory where they occupied the middle ground between workers and management. On the one hand, they were the agents of management in that they were responsible for the execution of policy and for the supervision of the junior staff; on the other they were salaried employees who, like the workers, had no share in the ownership of the means of production. If they gained the confidence of both workers and management, they could become the facilitators of industrial collaboration which, according to the RF doctrine, was an essential prerequisite for economic prosperity. This was particularly important if the menace of revolutionary Marxism was to be averted, for the RF manifesto stated very clearly that: ‘Marxism is incompatible with social progress which requires big capital; this capital cannot be obtained but from the activity and prosperity of industry. But Marxism has no other goal than to destroy it; a Marxist government is a government devoid of resources: it creates misery, famine and death.’57 The engineers, commanders in wartime, were exposed to the same dangers as their subordinates who fought shoulder to shoulder with them in the trenches. Now, in peacetime, they were once more in a leadership position in the factory, and at the same time exposed to the same economic contingencies as the workers, being also salaried workers. Thus, wrote Dautry: There is no reason why they shouldn’t have now with the same people, the same kind of relations of sympathy and confidence and, since it was possible during the war to live together with people of different classes in perfect accord, helping each other and even loving each other, why should this be different during peacetime? Why should peacetime solidarity be more impossible to achieve than wartime solidarity? The inevitable difficulties which exist between capital and labour rarely deteriorate, even during a crisis, to feelings of envy or resentment between the worker and the young engineer who is also, after all, a salaried employee, sharing the same daily tasks.58

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The connection between the necessary economic and political reforms and the advance of the young generation of war veterans was, as we can see, a consistent feature of the Right. The veteran was considered an ideal type, a model, for the New Man of the post-war France, the only one capable of extracting it from archaism and leading the way towards its reconstitution as a modern, forward-looking, confident and united country, ready to face the challenges, local and international, of both capitalist competition and socialist agitation. Indeed, this sentiment was shared by the veterans themselves, as were most of the reforms advocated by the RF and the Faisceau. The veteran associations, regardless of their political affiliation, were all distrustful of politics in the narrow sense of the word, which they equated with opportunism, careerism and pettiness. Instead they advocated a kind of ‘non-partisan politics’, placed outside and above all parties and factions, and dedicated to the general good. Thus one of the journals affiliated with the Union Nationale des Combattants (UNC) wrote in 1923: The UNC must not engage in politics. It would have to do so if it became affiliated to a party or if it adopted the program of some party or if it itself became a party. It would not have to do so if it put itself outside and above all parties in order to elaborate and propose to all the French a programme which it deems best suited to advance the goals of the veterans, which are peace on the exterior and national independence on the interior and an accord between all the French united around patriotism and order for the prosperity of their country.59 The current politicians were inadequate. They were elected on the basis of popularity, wealth and personal contacts, all of which had nothing to do with the competence required of those who legislated for the whole nation: All those parties with only subtle differences between them were created [. . .] by parliamentarians of course, most of whom are poor bourgeois who need, like all of us, to earn a living and who have become politicians in the same way that one becomes a barman, a businessman or a banker, all general professions requiring no specialized knowledge.60 But the new modern state could not be efficiently governed by people who lacked technical skills. This was why the veteran associations

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put forward demands for reforms which were meant to ensure that the political system itself, and not only its personnel, would be supervised by experts and professionals. Like the Faisceau and the RF they demanded the strengthening of the executive, the extension of the authority of the Head of State and perhaps less typically, obligatory consultation by both government and parliament of the National economic Council on all matters of economic legislation. The Council, which was set up in 1925, was an important check on the political apparatus without actually becoming part of it. It did not replace parliament but rather supervised it to make sure it did not make rushed and uninformed decisions. The Redressement Français was aware of the fact that in order to attract professionals, and in particular engineers, the more pressing material concerns of the latter would have to be addressed. In the previous chapters we mentioned the wariness of the engineers with regard to the rising unemployment and the lack of official regulation of the qualifications which allowed entry into the profession. The RF’s position paper on industrial organisation testified to the organisation’s attentiveness on this issue: If today the material condition of the engineer is far from what it ought to be, and if tomorrow it might deteriorate even further, this is due to the fact that there are too many engineers who are being trained almost everywhere. This could cast a shadow on the future of some of them, but it is better to say the truth. It is better because appropriate measures could then be taken to ensure that the engineer will finally have in the reconstituted French economy the place he deserves not only from the moral point of view – much progress has already been achieved on this – but also from the material point of view since the moral dignity of a person is often a function of his material situation.61

6. The ‘Young Turks’ of the Radical party In 1926 the Radical party joined Poincaré’s government amidst the financial crisis and the risk that the franc might collapse, as had the German mark. The party was divided between two camps: the majority, led by Edouard Herriot, who supported a strategy of participation in a coalition government headed by independents, and a minority group, led by Daladier, who in 1927 succeeded Herriot as the party’s secretary general.62

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Daladier had most of his support among the rising generation of ‘Young Turks’ who, wishing to stop what they saw as the party’s ideological and organisational erosion, advanced a plan of reforms which were set to bring Radicalism back to its Jacobin roots. Their main move was to strengthen the status of the party’s central headquarters and the affiliation of the parliamentary faction to it. They also published their own journal, La Voix, as a platform for this reformist tendency. One of the expressions of this ideological renaissance was a strong opposition to collaboration with capitalism (as they accused Poincaré of doing), promoting instead the idea of a ‘directed economy’. In this, they argued, much more likely partners than the capitalists could be found in the CGT and among the young guard of the Socialist party. Bertrand de Jouvenel was perhaps the most ardent advocate of this approach.63 In a book published in 1929, de Jouvenel called for an intervention by the state in economic planning. First, the state must survey all existing industries and single out the ones which had a good potential to contribute to economic growth. Subsequently, it should support and encourage those industries and discard the rest. In order to ensure stability and avoid overproduction all industries must be concentrated in cartels, supervised by the state. All this entails, of course, a comprehensive reform of the state apparatus and its workings. Thus the 1929 Young Radicals’ manifesto stated: ‘We demand authority at the top, in the seat of command, as much democracy as possible in the seat of control, technology in the seat of creation.’ In order to ensure the authority of the executive echelons, de Jouvenel proposed to suppress the post of the president of the Republic and to invest all the authority in the prime minister, directly involved in governmental activities. However, among these young Radicals there was a strong tendency advocating a much more radical solution to both political and economic problems. The party programme of 1927 called for collaboration between parliament and professional organisations, possessing technical knowledge and experience needed to inform legislation: Our party has confidence in the professional associations, it believes that it would be impossible to realize without their cooperation neither the organization of labour nor the administrative reform; it believes that they have a role to play beside Parliament in informing it on matters pertinent to legislation and to assist it in the implementation of that legislation. It is in favour of creating commissions, assemblies of various kinds through which the associations would be able to express their will.64

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But advising politicians wasn’t enough, for the problem lay with the actual concept of politics which had become anachronistic and inadequate: ‘The politics of today’, wrote Bertrand de Jouvenel in La Voix, ‘is made with the ideas of the day before yesterday, to which the politics of the day before yesterday paid no heed. And having learned nothing, having thought of nothing, the politics of today too pays no heed to the ideas of today.’65 The business of politics is no longer a simple matter of rhetoric and popular slogans: ‘In sum, it is no longer a matter of opinion but of calculation. It is a science. All it needs is scientists.’66 Previous generations turned sociology into an exact science. The task of our generation, wrote de Jouvenel, was to do the same with politics. What was needed for this, he continued, was a more ‘scientific’ concept of politics, which would make it less capricious and more objective: specialisation, teamwork, rigorous methods of assessment, technologically advanced tools, meticulous and methodical documentation, etc. Some took this idea much further. Pineau, writing regularly in a special section of Notre temps entitled Science et Action: essai sur l’état scientifique, suggested the setting up of a second chamber of parliament composed of professionals: economists, engineers and experts of various kinds. This second chamber would not be elected by universal suffrage. Instead, its members would be elected by their peers, members of professional associations. This second chamber would be a real legislative chamber whose authority would be superior to that of the current Senate. It would have an absolute right of veto over all legislative measures and enjoy impunity against dissolution (the government would have the right merely to call for the election of one-third of the members, two years before the elections were due).67 In 1929, Jean Luchaire, in an article entitled ‘Fin de la lutte des classes’, writes: . . . technology, a preponderant social power, is an irresistible agent of destruction of old social classifications. It is so because it changes the nature of the wealth of the capitalists and gives to the technicians, even if they are the sons of the humblest manual worker, the possibility to go as high and as far as their personal abilities allow them. A capitalism which depends on technology is therefore no longer an impenetrable class. A proletarian who, thanks to technology, can see his sons rise to management positions is no longer an oppressed class which can be liberated only by a revolution. On the ruins of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat and capitalism, technology will rule and

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will abolish completely barriers which are irrelevant from the point of view of science.68 A day will come, continues Luchaire in another article, when the word ‘capitalist’ becomes synonymous with ‘technician’ and then ‘there will be no more question of class war, but simply a unified society made of categories into which people will fit in on the basis of their individual aptitudes.’69 In this future society, the political will and the interest of the collective will become one and the same thing. This will be ‘l’ère technique totale’ and it is therefore only logical and natural that at that point society and the state will be governed by technicians: ‘tomorrow, in a society where technology will be the major power . . . the direction of the state will be in the hands of delegates appointed by the technicians according to criteria of competence.’70 In this futuristic Etat Technique, social dissent will be dealt with through the use of special police units ‘trained to prevent labour related conflicts, to control all the industries, repress abuses with which the present personnel of labour inspectors are unable to deal. The majority of strikes can be avoided by an energetic and preventive action of the State which, free to impose collective labour contracts, will also be at liberty to repress any attempt to violate them.’ Criminality will become the object of scientific research designed to discover its roots and eliminate it absolutely.71 These young Radicals were in agreement that in order to achieve such a comprehensive social and political transformation, the old guard of pre-war politicians must be replaced. Sammy Beracha, a regular contributor to Notre Temps, whose technocratic book Rationalisation et Revolution was published by Valois, wrote: ‘All human progress is due to the succession of human generations. Each generation finds its place in history according to the contribution it has made to civilization.’ The old generation, with its ideals and concepts has a place of honour in the chronicles of French history. However, argues Beracha, this generation has now become obsolete and therefore inadequate for the task of transforming France into a truly modern and scientific society: Mr. Duhamel, a hero of my father’s generation, opposes culture to technology. But which culture? After all, there exists a new culture, inspired by the current technical advances. But this culture is inaccessible to those who, like old fashion stagecoaches, modern style, individualism and the old parliamentarianism, belong in that pre-history which insists on imposing itself on our time.

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Mr. Duhamel and my father are estimable men. They even joined the Human Rights League. They keep portraits of Rousseau or Voltaire or Napoleon in their homes, but they understand nothing of this new culture which is taking shape. It slips through their fingers like a twitching fish.72 And where will this new generation come from? Who should be its leaders? For the young Radicals the answer to this question lies primarily in what they consider to be the common ground for Radicals and socialists, which could become politically fertile and produce the new political elite. Bertrand de Jouvenel writes for example: ‘The classes who are represented by the socialists or the radicals have the same interest, and must follow the same course of action. It would be absurd if they do not take advantage of the benefits of a united front and a united command. Therefore, there is no need for more than one party.’73 Emile Roche writes only a week later: I imagine that Marcel Déat, Blanc, Tellier, Le Tessier and Glay have had to suffer the same threats, accusations and sarcasm in the socialist party, but why, we are asked; since you are all in agreement on this point, why not establish a new group? I have already answered that in my opinion there is no point in organizing outside the two parties at this stage. All effort must be directed towards getting them to draw a common programme which will assure agreement regardless of personal issues which have so far played too great a role.74 That these ideas were looked upon favourably by the young and nonconformist socialists themselves can be seen from the following interview conducted by de Jouvenel with Marcel Déat for la Voix: Jouvenel: the two parties go through a parallel development. In both there is a revision of doctrine; in both an enforcement of discipline. Déat: Alliance will be made simpler. Jouvenel: Only alliance? It is not enough! An alliance doesn’t provide us with a driving force. Don’t you think that a real union is more appropriate? Déat: I believe that it will finally come to it. It makes sense.75 But if indeed the objective is an Etat Technique, and if this objective is judged to be shared by an entire generation, marked by the war and

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informed by scientific and technological progress, it follows that the alliance can and should be extended beyond the boundaries of the Left and encompass other groups, such as the RF, discussed earlier in this chapter. In an article published in La Voix on 9 March 1930 under the title ‘Jeunes Equipes et Nouvelles Equipes’, the young Radicals do indeed take this further step: Let us not demolish, for reasons of age, the solidarity of the post-war generations who should all have the same objective: the transformation of the State, the creation of the technical State, the syndicalist State, and who must therefore place the agency of general interest above private economic and financial powers. Generations who know the value of economy as opposed to the pre-war generations of jurists and intellectuals. There is solidarity between the different groups, of all ages, even if some are socialists and others are capitalists. For example, Peyerimhof, Lambert-Ribot, Ernest Mercier, Lucien Romier, Aymé Bernard and others like them, representing the great committees, are just as much ‘nouvelles equips’ as democrats and syndicalists like Georges Bonnet, Emile Roche, Dominique, Jouvenel, Luchaire, Laurat, Louzon, to mention just a few examples from the radical Left through to communist socialism. Mr. de Peyerimhof may be one of the senior representatives of capitalism. He is however, no less a ‘nouvelles équipe’ for that. He wants to replace the military and juristic State with the technical State. It is therefore in our interest to see him and his cohorts arrive in the public domain, against the frightfully outdated Poincarists.76

7. The Neo-socialists of the SFIO When he won the by-election in 1926 in the Marne, Marcel Déat, a normalien, a sociologist and a decorated veteran of the First World War, had already been an active member of the socialist party for some years. However, in the eyes of his political comrades, his victory was marred by the fact that it was achieved through collaboration, in a joint list, with the Radical candidate, Paul Marchandeau. At the time, such collaboration was anathema for the socialist leadership, which regarded the Radicals as the servants of capital and thus hostile to the interests of the working class. Déat, however, would later make such cross-party and cross-class alliances one of the hallmarks of his political agenda.

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It is questionable whether he would have launched his neo-socialist campaign had he not lost his seat in the general election two years later, but lose it he did and at that moment, acting as the administrative secretary of the socialist parliamentary group, he became l’enfant terrible of the socialist party, putting himself in direct confrontation with its old guard leadership, and in particular with its chief, Leon Blum. The immediate pretext for this confrontation was Déat’s open and blatant criticism of what he saw as the party’s dogmatic approach to Marxism, which prevented it from forming political alliances that would bring it into a position of political influence. More profoundly, Déat claimed that the party failed to take account of social and economic developments which had disproved, or at least rendered obsolete, some fundamental presuppositions of orthodox Marxism. A few years earlier, in a little textbook entitled Notions de sociologie, he had expressed his doubts regarding the possibility of applying objective methodology in the social domain where pragmatism and a sense of moral purpose are the prime motivating forces. Déat was joined in his campaign of dissidence by several other socialists, some of them of the old guard (Pierre Renaudel) who judged Blum isolationism wrong, and some young ‘neo-socialists’ (such as Barthélemy Montagnon and Adrien Marquet). The group made the nonconformist journal La Vie Socialiste their platform until they were finally expelled from the party in 1933 and formed the Parti Socialiste de France. The new party did not succeed in gaining any significant following and finally submerged into the Union Socialiste Republicaine, along with some other small socialist groups, and in 1936 joined the Front Populaire, where Déat became minister of aviation. However, the significance of the neo-socialist group was not so much in its own political fortune but rather in the fact that it both encapsulated the sentiments expressed by other political groups in the post-war period with regard to political reform, and at the same time set the agenda for the following decade. A major figure in the neo-socialist group was Barthélemy Montagnon, an engineer and one of the secretaries of the Union des syndicates de technicians de l’industrie, du commerce et de l’agriculture (USTICA). In 1929 Montagnon published a book entitled Grandeur et Servitude Socialistes in which he criticises orthodox Marxism and proposes an alternative route to socialism. Marx’s economic determinism is wrong, claims Montagnon. Economic relations, and class relations for that matter, are not the primal movers of historical development. They are, rather, the result of ideas and in particular scientific ideas, which are the product of human genius

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and which in turn lead to technological developments that change social and economic relations. To prove his point, Montagnon attacks Marx’s thesis about the levelling of the interests and the conditions of the working class, due to the standardising effect of automation. This is wrong, he argues. Automation has in fact brought about precisely the opposite effect. Two social categories have evolved within the working class – experts and non-experts: The specialists, by their very function, by their initiative and responsibility, rapidly acquire a mentality which brings them close to the managing technical personnel. This is an important fact which has great moral consequences! But here is another new fact which is no less important: the technical staffs, team leaders, supervisors, workshop stewards, are growing in number. The number of ‘technical employees’ rises too. New vacancies are created. [. . .] The number of real workers diminishes. The gap between their number and the number of technical employees is closing. This development preoccupies all those who study social issues otherwise than from books.77 These technicians have become a distinct group within the working class, being on the one hand salaried employees and on the other management staff. They form an intermediate group between the unskilled labourers and the bourgeois patrons: The technicians belong at the same time to the proletariat, because they are salaried employees and to management because of their initiative and responsibility. They are at the core of production. Their moral and material role in times of transformation will be considerable. The working class would be helpless without them. The Russian revolution has taught us important lessons on this issue. . . . These technicians will soon hold in their hands most of the levers of command of production and exchange. Their function of management and control tear them apart from the working classes. Their improved economic situation turns them into small capitalists. These technicians will join the middle classes whose powers of equilibrium and social conservation will remain considerable.78 The socialists, if they ever wish to gain political power must take account of this new social and economic group, which is in a position to lay down the foundations for a modern economy. And after all, asks Montagnon, ‘Don’t we realize how much easier the consolidation of a

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socialist regime would be if upon coming to power it found an economy already organized methodically and rationally?’79 This is also why the whole notion of a proletarian revolution must be abandoned. If such a revolution takes place, who will run the economy? Who will ensure the functioning of the factories? Certainly not the working class, which does not have the benefit of technical training: If the working class had to manage factories organized according to the old principles, it would end up in a disaster. In those factories, work is based solely on the authority of the bosses, the shop floor stewards and the engineers. If this discipline disappears, what will remain? The conscience of the workers, their good will? Even those will soon be defeated by weaknesses, excesses and bad faith. The question of salary will provoke absurd proposals. The lazy workers will never allow any advantage to be given to their more active comrades! In no time, everything will become chaotic.80 The socialists must therefore refrain from speaking of a revolution for ‘if this word, revolution, has become irrelevant to our time, why use it so frequently? It’s upsetting and it alienates from socialism those who are its natural constituency but who are also clear headed and well balanced.’ If we cannot be revolutionaries, claims Montagnon, we should forever abandon this ‘imprecise and dangerous’ expression.81 And as a political conclusion of this anti-revolutionary stance, Montagnon argues that socialists must regard the communists as their worst enemy. The fight against communism is a ‘mortal combat’ to be fought ‘with drawn-out knives’. It is without the slightest hesitation that socialism must choose the most effective tactic in order to resist and defeat communism.82 And if the communists are regarded as an enemy, the Radicals are on the contrary worthy and likely allies, being the party of the middle classes and of the strong state. Albeit too stale, too outdated, too cautious, the Radical party is nonetheless a considerable political force which can be a valuable compagnon de route for the socialists for, after all, ‘if, as we have shown, the socialist party is not and cannot be a revolutionary party, where is the difference? Socialism is younger, more outgoing, and more audacious. It has wider perspectives and more precise goals. But the general direction is the same. Most of the road ahead can be travelled together.’83 Having established that the correct route to socialism passes through the middle classes, that this route is essentially one of economic

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rationalisation, and that the best agents of this rationalisation are the technical experts, it is hardly surprising that Montagnon’s vision of the future socialist state is profoundly technocratic. Government must be small: five or six ministers at the most with absolute executive powers. These ministers will no longer be accountable before parliament since the latter is ill-equipped for the task of supervising complex technical matters. They will be accountable to the governmental cabinet only and their performance will be assessed only on the basis of their concrete action for the general good. They will no longer be politicians. They will be technicians.84 In 1930, a year after the publication of Montagnon’s book, Marcel Déat published his Perspectives Socialistes. The main thesis of the book is that the socialists must endeavour to establish a new political majority which will sweep them into power and that such a majority can only be obtained by an appeal to the middle classes. Similarly to Montagnon, Déat maintains that the rationalisation of the economy has transferred the command of the production process from the manual workers – the classic proletariat – to the technical experts who, educated and skilled, are able to lay down the foundation for a modern economy which will create wealth and abundance and thus increase economic security and reduce social friction. Rationalisation, claims Déat, will abolish speculation and price fluctuation and bring about stability. Indeed, writes Déat, things have already improved a lot thanks to the concentration of capital in big cartels which, unlike the old anarchic and competitive capitalist firms, are more conservative and cautious and tend to favour permanent and stable settlements with the workers: The struggle has not waned for one moment; there has never been class solidarity and nevertheless we have always been able to arrange compromises which suited both parties. Capitalist property still exists, and it still yields an interest, there are still those who can live on dividends in their idleness and in luxury. But misery has disappeared and, according to the great law of evolution, the old system has given way to a new one, which guarantees social security. And so our savings are no longer just a defensive reflex in the face of an uncertain future but as a surplus allowing the individual to improve his standards of living. And this is good from every point of view.85 Moreover, the concentration of capital in big global cartels also reduces the threat of war and encourages pan-European collaboration for,

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once there is a common economic interest, though they may be arguments, disagreements and minor conflicts, there will be nothing to be gained by a violent and brutal confrontation and thus peace will be secured.86 If all this is true, if capitalism is indeed developing in the direction of peaceful regulation and collaboration, and if the effect of this process is an improvement in the living conditions of the working class (which in any case is decreasing in size due to the development of a significant section of it – that of the skilled technical experts – gradually submerging into the middle class), then the whole idea of a revolution is inadequate. A violent, catastrophic popular revolution can only lead to dictatorship and to economic ruin. Capitalism must not be challenged on the economic level but rather on the political one. It should be tamed, kept in check, but not destroyed. This is why socialists must concern themselves not with the expropriation of property but rather with the management of political power. It is therefore the state and the governmental apparatus which must be won over. ‘The State itself’, writes Déat, ‘is today empty of substance; it is nothing unless new forces revitalize it. This is the essence of the battle fought around it.’ And who are these ‘new forces’? Here Déat, like Montagnon before him, appeals to the technicians – the technical experts.87 Déat, however, emphasises that the mission of the technicians is not merely technical. In rationalising the economy, in restoring political authority and in fostering inter-class solidarity, and due to their education and cultural training as members of the middle class, they also act as the true guardians of the old republican values of civil rights, independence, liberty and equality. This is why they should be made aware of their responsibilities and encouraged to look beyond their specific technical functions. They should be made to understand that they are called to a position of command and leadership which is far more than the mere application of technical competence. The technicians have an important role to play in the government of the nation and in the elaboration of its laws. Again like Montagnon, Déat believes that in order to realise his vision of the technical state, socialists must first ascend to political power. And in order to do so they must form alliances. Borrowing from Sombart the term ‘anticapitalism’ Déat calls for a united front of all political forces which accept the need to regulate capitalism and to restore governmental authority.88

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8. Conclusion In his 1928 autobiographical work L’homme contre l’argent, Georges Valois wrote: In 1919, neither the veterans, coming back from the front, nor the civilians had any idea as to the political task which needed to be accomplished. The majority of the French awaited some great event which they had sensed coming during the war. . . . On 1st of May 1919, there was a great stir among the crowds who flocked into the streets and the boulevards of Paris. Later, posters raged with excitement on the walls of the town. Paris was to see a revolution. It didn’t know which one. It ended up with none.89 This sentiment, this hope, that something great and wonderful must come out of all the suffering and the misery and the sacrifice of the war, was shared by many among the younger generation of political ‘nonconformists’, who expressed a strong dissonance between the heroic allure of the soldiers marching back from the front, and the familiar and unappealing image projected by the old guard of politicians who continued to indulge in petty partisan maneuverings. France was victorious, they argued, and had once again become a heroic nation, sending the humiliation of the 1871 defeat to oblivion. And heroic nations deserved heroic leaders. France, however, had none. Most of these young ‘nonconformists’ agreed that it was not just the politicians who were at fault but the whole French concept of politics, which was too abstract, too prone to sophism and to theoretical dogmatism. The war, observed many of them, was not won by words. The Germans were not debated into defeat. They were crushed by the actions of an army, which was disciplined, hierarchical, unified, practical and determined. In a word: organised. The concept of organisation was not new for the French. However, while the Romantics had tended to explain it by reference to the living organism with its parts cooperating harmoniously out of necessity, for the interwar generation a much more favourite metaphor was the machine. There was nothing mystical about the machine, nothing primordial or divine. It was the product of human genius, an invention, a design. The machine had proved that organisation could not only be discovered but also manufactured. Moreover, the advent of automation and of assembly-line procedures proved that discipline could be

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fostered by regulation rather than by coercion. It is this organisation that most spokesmen for the post-war generation sought to implement and to extend into all spheres of public life. It is hardly surprising, then, that one of their main concerns was to identify the potential agents of such an ‘organisational revolution’. While the war veterans always remained the moral and historical inspiration for this revolution, it was generally recognised that they, in themselves, lacked the skills necessary to bring it about. As has been shown, the introduction of Taylorism into France brought to the fore another group, much more likely to carry this revolutionary project through – les techniciens (and later – les cadres). This generic term refers to all those in intermediate position between shop floor workers and patronat, what we would today call middle management. In professional terms most of these people had the training of engineers. In the eyes of the ‘nonconformists’ mentioned in this chapter, they personified the new French person: honest, professional, loyal, practical, disciplined. It is this shared view which allows us to identify those ‘nonconformists’ as an increasingly coherent group in French politics of the interwar period. ‘Nonconformists’ and engineers shared many platforms throughout the 1920s. In this chapter we discussed the Cahiers Bleus, the Redressement Français and the journals of the dissident Radicals and socialists. It is important to note that those were just a few of the journals dealing with the relation between scientific management and politics. Another important journal was L’Information Sociale, which was closely affiliated to the USTICA – Roger Francq’s left-wing engineers’ syndicate – and to which Albert Thomas, Minister of Armaments and chairman of the Bureau International du Travail (BIT) regularly contributed. There were also smaller but significant journals such as Henri de Jouvenel’s Revue des Vivants, to which contributed, among others, Léon Jouhaux of the CGT and Lucien Romier of the Redressement Français, and L’Europe Nouvelle, where wrote the economist Francis Delaisi and Ernest Mercier, chairman of the Redressement Français. The journal l’Etat Moderne, founded in the late 1920s brought together industrialists such as André Citroën, engineers such as Roger Francq and politicians such as Marcel Déat, Jules Moch and Vincent Auriol. Finally, the Conseil Nationale Economique, set up in 1925, included among its members prominent industrialists (Peyerimhoff of the oil industry and an affiliate of the Redressement Français) and engineers (such as Raoul Dautry, later to become Minister of Armaments). It is therefore not surprising that ideas developed in the engineering milieu were diffused

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among a wider audience, which included many of the technocrats discussed in this chapter. This was indeed the case of the whole body of ideas which comes under the title of ‘scientific management’. At the beginning of this chapter we saw how the engineers were adamant that these ideas should extend also to the political arena. Some went even as far as to suggest that their application should be entrusted only in the hands of engineers, making politicians superfluous. The discussion in this chapter makes obvious the affinity between that agenda and the technocratic tendencies of interwar political ‘nonconformists’ of all political shades. Let us recapitulate some of the major points of this affinity: 1. The French political system is bankrupted. It must be renovated by deep structural reforms, the essence of which is the replacement of professional politicians with non-political technical experts both in the legislative and in the executive wings of the state. 2. The governmental executive itself must be strengthened, its authority extended at the expense of the legislative. Government must no longer be dependent on the caprice of popular will. It must not be made accountable to those who lack the technical expertise necessary in order to understand and appreciate its projects. 3. National solidarity and patriotism must be fostered by encouraging inter-class collaboration. This can be achieved by assigning more responsibilities to technical experts who form an intermediate group between workers and patrons, sharing interests with both. 4. Economic rationalisation must be encouraged in order to create a solid base for the future ‘technical state’ and in order to train the elite that will eventually govern it. 5. All political forces hostile to the above ideas are to be regarded as enemies. This is true in particular of the communists. On the other hand, all political forces which accept these ideas, must lay aside old doctrinal differences and collaborate in the effort to realise them. It is important to stress that I am not suggesting any strict causality between the professionalism and ‘scientific management’ of the engineers and the policies of the ‘nonconformists’. What I am proposing is that there is an elective affinity between those two concurring agendas, which reinforces each one of them. For the young political ‘nonconformists’, both on the Left and on the Right, the sublimation of ‘scientific management’ and ‘professionalism’ into their policies means allying themselves with a strong economic milieu where not

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only engineers move but also some of France’s major industrialists. That the backing of such key economic figures can be crucial to nascent political organisations (particularly nonconformist ones) can be seen, for instance, in the case of Georges Valois’ Faisceau, which rose and fell by the grace of the industrialist François Coty. For the engineers, the alliance with rising young politicians who have already shown some promising prospects (such as, for example, the sponsorship of the ‘Young Turks’ group by the Radical leader André Tardieu) could mean access into the corridors of government. The engineering cohorts in both the Dautry and the Spinasse ministries, not to mention the Vichy Darlan administration, are a proof of the viability of these aspirations. Catalysed by the First World War, the processes of reform in both French industry and politics were to suffer a setback in the early years of the following decade when the economic crisis, already hitting hard in the United States and in Germany, reached France. Almost simultaneously, a major political crisis developed, which reached its peak in February 1934 when the republican regime itself came under attack. These events forced both ‘nonconformists’ and engineers to reconsider their strategies and to break with old alliances which had become liabilities. This was the case for the engineers vis-à-vis the laissez-faire industrialists and economists; this was also so for the ‘nonconformists’ in relation to their old parliamentary parties. This mutual distress once again brought to the fore the affinities between those two milieus. The new formulation of those affinities will be the subject of the next chapter.

4 Beyond Right and Left: Rallying to the Total Technical State

1. Crisis and discontent: the troubled years 1932–6 The economic crisis of the 1930s had been preceded by an earlier monetary crisis in the middle of the 1920s, which was the product of the state’s vast wartime expenditure financed mainly through heavy borrowing. Between 1918 and 1924 French national debt rose from 17 million francs to 428 million francs. In July 1926 the franc collapsed and the government resigned. A new government was formed by a coalition – L’Union Nationale – led by the much trusted and respected Raymond Poincaré who managed to stabilise the franc and return it to the level it had been a year earlier. On 7 November 1929 the Wall Street stock exchange crashed. The economic ricocheting soon spread across the Atlantic and hit all the industrial markets of the European continent. All, that is, but one. France remained ostensibly unaffected. This was due mainly to the relative stability of the franc and to a strong domestic market. The Tardieu government of the early years of the new decade could thus embark on a welfare reform, which also helped to keep unemployment in check. But the crisis could not be stalled forever and in 1932 it finally reached France. One major cause for this was the devaluation of the pound sterling, which made French prices uncompetitive. Foreign markets were soon lost; export dropped and so did production. Budgetary deficit was rising, and it was feared that the government might have to resort to borrowing, thus increasing the national debt. By 1934 France counted over 340,000 unemployed. The Radical government headed by Daladier, the leader of the party’s ‘Young Turks’, was unable to contain the popular uproar, which had already produced mass strikes across the country and which was further fuelled by the paralysis 97

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of the parliamentary apparatus and by a series of scandals, culminating in the Stavisky affair. As public discontent mounted, both the right-wing leagues, including some of the more militant elements of the anciens combatants associations such as the UNC, and the communists were seeking to take advantage of the situation in order to topple what they considered to be a fundamentally and hopelessly corrupt regime. Rather than try to tackle this situation by introducing the very reforms he had advocated only a few years earlier, Daladier opted for a violent repression of the protest, using his prefect of police, Chiappe, as his henchman. Chiappe, who had already declared his hostility to the communists and his sympathy for the ‘patriotic’ leagues, conducted a series of preventive arrests among left-wing militants while turning a blind eye to the activities of the Croix de Feu, the Jeunesse Patriotes, and other groups of the extreme Right who were gathering their troops for an assault on the discredited politicians of the Palais Bourbon. On 6 February, while the Assemblée Nationale was convening in order to vote on the new Daladier government, the leagues assembled in great numbers at the Place de la Concorde, preparing to march on the Assemblée. The demonstration soon deteriorated into violent clashes with the police, which claimed the lives of 15 demonstrators and left more than 2000 injured. In fact, the leagues would have easily obtained their goal of storming the Palais Bourbon had Colonel La Rocque, leader of the largest and best-disciplined league – the Croix de Feu – not ordered his militants to refrain from action. For the conservative and republican La Rocque the mere intimidation of the government and the display of his strength was a sufficient achievement, and he was unwilling to go that one step further and bring down the regime. Indeed, the intimidation was effective: on the following day, and in spite of winning the confidence of parliament, Daladier resigned. The atmosphere of a general crisis, economic, social and political, and the ominous developments across the Rhine, brought the main political forces of the French Left to consider collaboration. This was by no means an easy task and it was quite clear from the outset that if such collaboration was to be effected, its scope and ambitions would have to be modest. The Radicals, the biggest and most established of the three left-wing parties, was unwilling to endorse too far-going policies, as it was still recovering from the trauma of the unfortunate Daladier experience so passionately anticipated and so bitterly disappointing. Indeed, as we have seen, some central figures of its buoyant ‘Young Turks’ left it after their hopes for an overall ideological reform had been shattered. The socialists were trying to put together an economic policy that

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would please both the working-class and the middle-class electorate. As shown above, this led to bitter arguments within the party, which finally resulted in a split with Déat and his neo-socialists. The communists, ironically, were wary of any ambitious economic initiative such as Blum’s plans for nationalisations. Whether this was because of an ideological stance that objected to any reforms which might make capitalism seem more benign, thus giving the illusion that it could be tolerated, or because their wish to comply with Moscow’s policy of creating antifascist fronts, the result of their reserve was that they more often sided with the Radicals than with the socialists. It is important to keep in mind this political state of affairs when examining the wave of strikes that swept through France almost immediately after the electoral victory of the Front Populaire. In May 1936 a series of strikes broke out in various parts of France, which soon spread into the suburbs of Paris and engulfed major factories such as Nieuport, Lavalette, Hotchkiss, Renault, Fiat, Citroën and others. At first it seemed that this wave would not last, but in early June it rekindled and by the 2nd of that month no less than 150 factories were on sit-in strike. Five days later negotiations between the government and representatives of the strikers began at Matignon, to be concluded within a day in an agreement. The strikes, however, continued for another week, involving over 1 million workers and more than 9000 places of work. The main thrust of the strikes came to an end by the end of the month when the CGT and the parties of the Left called for a halt. Another, smaller, wave of strikes broke out in early July and lasted for several weeks. I tend to agree with Antoine Prost that the myth about a ‘conspiracy’ instigated by the PCF or by the CGT is unlikely. As mentioned earlier, the PCF’s subservient position towards the Comintern, which at the time advocated the setting up of ‘anti-fascist’ fronts, had been a major reason for its participation in the Front Populaire in the first place and for its subsequent hostility to the various ambitious economic policies advanced by Blum. It was therefore highly unlikely that it should all of a sudden engage in moves that might bring down the newly elected government and destabilise the regime. As for the CGT, it is enough to note that the thrust of the strike wave took place in sectors that were the least unionised, such as metallurgy, textiles and the food industry, while being virtually non-existent in ones where CGT membership was large, such as the postal service. Prost suggests a very interesting explanation for the strikes, arguing that they were neither a revolutionary challenge nor an act of

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vengeance against employers. The very nature of the strikes, the fact that they involved the physical occupation of the factories in the form of a sit-in strike, indicates that the explanation for them must be sought within those sites rather than outside them. Thus Prost’s theory proposes that the format of the strikes and the nature of the agreement which ended them redefine the boundaries between public and private spheres. Instead of the traditional, highly personalised and generally paternalistic mode of negotiations between the individual worker and his employer, comes now collective, impersonal bargaining. The factory is no longer an extension of the employer’s domesticity; it is not one big organic community (Gemeinschaft) but a synthetic formal coexistence (Gesellschaft) of several such communities, which interact though fixed rules.1 The rationalisation process was becoming not only a technical fact but a social one too.

2. The technocracy of the ‘nonconformists’ 2.1. La Lutte des Jeunes against traditional politics The events of 6 February, and Daladier’s resignation, marked the definite end of the ‘Young Turks’ project of reforming the Radical party. The disillusioned young guard of dissidents was beginning to abandon the party, some of them turning fully against parliamentary politics and, in the spirit of 6 February, seeking new alliances among grassroots young militants such as themselves, outside mainstream politics. One of these militants was the young journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel. On 25 February, very shortly after the stormy events of the Place de la Concorde, Jouvenel, along with a few others, set up their own journal, which they entitled La lutte des jeunes. In the first issue of the new publication de Jouvenel published his letter of resignation from the Radical party. He wrote: A great wave of disgust is rising in France. Paris is more agitated, the province is calmer. But everywhere the French, almost unanimously republican, demand a republic where honesty and energy reign and where the political realm has the same ideal as the professional one: the ideal of hard work for the benefit of all.2 In the previous chapter we already discussed de Jouvenel’s technocratic ideas as they were outlined in his 1929 book L’économie dirigée and in numerous articles in Notre Temps, La Voix and La République. Those ideas were shared by the general secretary of La Lutte, Sammy Beracha,

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who had also been a regular contributor to Valois’ Cahiers and Cahntiers as well as to the Radical République. In 1930 Valois published a book by Beracha entitled Rationalisation et Révolution. In this book Beracha announced the twofold dichotomy that was to become the official line of La Lutte four years later: producers versus parasites and young versus old. The second dichotomy was, according to Beracha, an expression of the first, the total rejection of everything static, stale and archaic: The generational rift is not subjective. It is merely the expression of the contradiction which exists between an economy which is undergoing rationalization and a social order which tries to hold back this development. It does not oppose one class to the other. It opposes technicity to routine, the producer to the politician, syndicalism to parliamentarism, organization to anarchy. In short, it opposes the new century to the old one.3 Sharing this view, Georges Roux wrote in the first issue of the journal: ‘The class struggle is replaced with a generational struggle. Today we see less of the worker–boss confrontation as the young–old one.’4 In that same issue an unsigned article called for the transference of economic deliberation and legislation from parliament – which after the events of earlier that month seemed particularly inadequate to tackle matters of national importance – into the hands of professional experts: ‘Wouldn’t it be preferable if, while the administration is preparing a law, it is submitted for examination to a group of people who have the competence to consider it from the perspective of the corporative interests of the entire nation? And if legislation, technical work of the utmost importance, is not left to the caprices of an Assembly wrought with intrigue and claptrap?’5 A similar demand, stated even more clearly and forcefully, had already been made by Beracha four years earlier: ‘It is evidently not the parliamentary state, as it is currently organized, which can take charge of the management of the economy. Such a delicate task cannot be performed but by a competent State: the technical State.’6 In this ‘technical state’ social solidarity would be fostered by the collaboration of workers and management in the process of production and the only legitimate moral standard would be that which was based on the assessment of each person’s contribution to productivity. In April 1934 La Lutte devoted an entire page to a document submitted by the engineer Maurice Dablincourt, secretary general of the Confederation of Intellectual Workers, to the General Council of the CGT. The paper introduced this document as the ‘program of the technicians’

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and claimed it to be ‘the most important document submitted to the General Council.’ Indeed, this ‘programme’ restated and summarised very clearly the technocratic ideas of the editorial team of La Lutte. ‘We have the feeling,’ declared the programme, ‘that an exclusively political regime does not correspond anymore to the economic needs of our era.’ And it continued along similar lines: Citizens, elected on the basis of philosophical doctrines, cannot be competent in economic matters. They necessarily become prisoners of powerfully organized interests, which know how to use the political parliament. A current has risen which cannot be pulled back. Tomorrow, there may still be street fights and they may have durable political consequences; but it will be a group of people well informed about the true problems of the day who, by taking up technical and judicial measures, will establish the economic regime most appropriate under the current global economic circumstances.7 This, then, is the lesson to be learned from the events of February 1934: the old parties are bankrupt, their politicians, prisoners of archaic dogma and electoral calculations, are incompetent and out of tune with the realities of the modern, technical age and therefore unable to perform the reforms which will pull France out of the economic and political crisis. The only remedy to this situation is the replacement of these politicians with professional experts who, even in the face of public turmoil, will not cringe from introducing the necessary economic and constitutional measures that will eventually create stability. These experts are the ‘technicians’, meaning all those actually involved in the production process rather than in its exploitation for personal gain. There will be no class barrier between them, no generational gap and no partisan rivalries. They will be the vanguard of the new generation, the ones who will at last make France worthy of its victory in the war and of the great sacrifice suffered by millions of its youth. To realise this programme, however, the technicians would need an organisation, a party. Such a party, writes another regular contributor to La Lutte, the young author Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, cannot be anything like the old traditional parties. Drieu, who had subscribed to the Redressement Française and who had some hopes in Valois’ political ventures now describes them as ‘imbecile experiments of fascism.’ His later hopes of the Radical party are similarly shattered, and like his colleagues on the editorial of La Lutte he concludes: ‘The Radical Party, heir to

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the Jacobin and Napoleonian tradition, can no longer play the role of the moderating intermediator. This petrified party, exhausted and out of breath which cannot resuscitate itself, is unable to reform its old institutions and should therefore be replaced with a new party.’8 This new party will adopt new methods for appealing to the public. It will enlist members of the professional elite into its ranks and through them will learn to exploit the new possibilities opened by the advance of technology: the radio, the press and the cinema. These innovations will allow it to speak directly to the people, to raise its enthusiasm and excite its imagination: ‘Parliament’, writes Drieu, ‘is an institution which has been assassinated by the press and the radio just as the trains, where those politicians never have to pay for their ride, have been assassinated by the car and the airplane. . . . This is demagogy in 20th century style: the softly speaking heroes come to seduce us in our beds.’9 Young, professional, audacious, authoritarian and demagogic, the new party which Drieu and his friends aspire to is strikingly similar to the ones in power across the Rhine and the Alps. Drieu openly admits this much: ‘It is quite clear that this means establishing party on the model of those great parties which have been triumphant in the world for the last twenty years. . . . We must say it blatantly; such a party would have to be national and socialist.’10 2.2. Planism: socialism for the entire nation The events of 6 February were a severe blow for the neo-socialists who had been striving for the creation of a mass, anticapitalist movement of the middle classes. The clashes at the Place de la Concorde and the political ricocheting thereafter only served to emphasise and deepen the political polarisation between the traditional political poles of the Left and the Right. Moreover, it reeked of anti-republicanism and violent Blanquist tactics, both decidedly unappealing for their potential audience. Marcel Déat spent the following two years desperately trying to minimise the damage of these events by repeatedly claiming that the rassemblement he was aiming at was neither of the Left nor of the Right. It was not to be an ideological union but rather a sociological one, confronting the young with the old, the productive with the parasitic.11 In 1932 Déat had contributed an article to a collective work entitled Rajeunissement de la politique. In that article, he claimed that ‘the main issue of political culture is the organization of political parties’.12 However, these parties were only of value if they were based on concrete social and economic realities rather than on abstract philosophical

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principles. It was with this idea in mind that, following his expulsion in 1934 from the SFIO, he set out to mobilise various social groups to the cause of a united front against capitalism. Like Valois and Mercier in the mid-1920s he first turned to the veterans’ organisations, who appeared to be the most likely candidates for such a venture, being the bearers of the spirit of the wartime Union Sacrée. Indeed, in March 1934, the Union Nationale des Combattantes (UNC) put forward a plan of ‘national reconstruction’, the essence of which was the strengthening of governmental authority at the expense of parliament, and a deeper involvement of the state in the regulation of the economy. Henri Pichot, president of the Union Fédérale (UF), another veterans’ organisation, wrote a year later about the dire political situation in France: This is not some banal ministerial crisis, nor a political crisis. It is a social crisis. There is no doubt; this is a generation which has played out its role. It is collapsing, disintegrating; it is suffering, melting away and decomposing. Incapable of preparing our country for the war it had not foreseen, it is equally unable to restore it in the aftermath of victory.13 All this was very much in tune with Déat’s political orientation and, bearing in mind that those two veterans’ organisations alone had between them a membership of over 1.8 million, he felt it expedient to try and enlist them to his cause. In the course of 1934, he conducted a series of meetings with the leadership of the UF, which, being of a radical-socialist leaning, seemed the most likely ally, in the hope of setting up an anti-capitalist front. However, Déat’s hopes were quickly shattered when the leaderships of these organisations showed no enthusiasm for any political venture beyond the protection of their members’ pensions, and voted, in the July 1934 congress of the Confederation of Veterans Association, for participation in the Doumergue government. Disillusioned by the veterans, Déat next turned to the syndicalists. On 15 January 1934 the CGT published a plan of reforms, composed by Rene Belin, a rising star in the CGT, and inspired by the Plan Belge of Henri de Man of the Belgian Labour Party. De Man, whose book Au delà du Marxisme had been published in French in 1927, criticised the Marxist notion that the class struggle was the inevitable and automatic consequence of capitalism. While accepting that the tension created by capitalist exploitation encouraged socialist militancy, De Man claimed that without a clear ethical goal, independent of the political struggle, this militancy was bound to degenerate into opportunism. This

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ethical goal he identified with the spirit of the liberal revolution of the eighteenth century, which, he claimed, had since been defeated by bourgeois decadence. Marx, continued De Man, was thinking of a situation where the ethical ideal was politically and socially hegemonic, thanks to the triumphant and militant bourgeoisie that carried it as its banner. He therefore believed that the role of the proletariat was merely to conquer political power from the hands of the bourgeoisie and ‘complete’ the revolution by transforming the relations of production. However, circumstances have now changed and the moral motivation for the revolution cannot any longer be relied upon. If socialists were to stick to orthodox Marxist strategy, they would find themselves leading a purely hedonistic revolution, which would most probably end up in bureaucratic conservatism. What is needed therefore is moral renewal, a rekindling of the old spiritual impulses that were once the motor of the bourgeoisie. It is no less than the reinvention of humanism. De Man is rather doubtful whether the proletariat is capable of this task as it is held back by a chronic inferiority complex, arising from its permanent state of insecurity. Furthermore, the proletariat is essentially not much different from the bourgeoisie in its moral outlook. There is no such thing as a ‘proletarian culture’ claims De Man; proletarians are no more than aspiring bourgeois. If it is neither the decadent bourgeoisie nor the psychologically challenged proletariat who can provoke and bring about this moral and social regeneration, then who can? Here De Man turns to the state. The state, being the embodiment of the wishes and the interests of the nation as a whole, is the only vehicle for the creation of the kind of social solidarity that can produce progress, equity and a common sense of moral purpose. The credibility of the state in this respect, De Man argues, has been proved by its already impressive record in promoting such wide-scale and influential projects as industrialisation (as in the USSR), the rationalisation of the economy (primarily in the United States), the creation of an advanced welfare system (as in France) and national unification and integration (as in Italy and Germany). But the state is not an abstract concept, continues De Man; rather, it is a distinct entity with a will of its own. This will is ‘the total direct outcome of the will of all the human beings who permanently participate in the destinies of the State; and these persons are civil servants, members of parliament, journalists; they are not employers or capitalists. Nor are they proletarians.’14 They are a class of their own – a class of specialists. Through their professional training and their constant concern with promoting the general good they have become a new elite and have

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produced a new morality – that of service. However, for these specialists to fulfil the task of moral and social regeneration they must rise above the class struggle and recognise their own distinct nature and mission. They must also free themselves from the constraint of electoral politics, which is deeply and inherently imbued with narrow and short-sighted sectarian interests. The trust that they should be seeking from the public is based neither on laws and regulations nor on popular vote, for the promotion of the general good in modern society is incompatible with the kind of transparency that was possible in the relatively small and primitive communities of the past: Today, the leader is no longer a simple agitator: he must know a great many things which the masses cannot know, since to know them implies a high degree of professional specialization; and he must do a great many things which the masses cannot do with him, seeing that they have to be done in the routine atmosphere of offices, committees, editorial boards, and the like. It is not enough that his followers should follow him, they must also believe in him.15 The ruling elite does not receive its authority from the people; it assumes it as a natural condition deriving from the service it provides to the national community. Therefore the question of election does not arise, for ‘true leaders are not elected by the masses; they impose themselves on the masses’16 and ‘the power of this leadership is measured by its fitness for dispensing with the sanction of a constitutional text or of monarchical dignity.’17 The ordinary citizen, who is not part of this elite ‘must be content to be one of the masses as far as concerns political decisions in matters whose details he cannot possibly have studied as fully as the specialist has.’18 The ruling class of specialists (De Man explicitly refers here to the engineers) is thus left to its own devices, free to make decisions, to organise and to command. ‘These managing intellectuals,’ concludes De Man, ‘are the inheritors of the motive of production which used to animate the craftsmen of former days, the motive which alike in the capitalist and in the proletarian has been degraded into the motive of gain. This stratum of intellectuals, therefore, contains the only persons among modern productive workers whose economic function is such as to make purposive organization the quality of production, the service of the community, their main motive for work.’19 De Man’s ideas received a warm welcome among certain tendencies issuing from the French socialist party – the SFIO. Such was the case of the neo-socialists and of the ‘Revolution Constructive’ group who both

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joined, in 1934, the ‘Comité de Plan’ initiated by Marcel Déat, now the leader of the ‘Parti Socialiste de France – Union Jean Jaurès’, which grouped the neo-socialists who were, in that year, expelled from the SFIO. The Committee promoted an effort to produce a French version of De Mans ‘Plan du Travail’ and to that end attempted to mobilise support from as diverse a political affiliation as the CGT on the one hand, and the Croix de Feu on the other. In a conference organised by the Committee on 28 June 1935, Déat called for a wall-to-wall coalition of all those, from all political persuasions, who had despaired of mainstream political parties and their stalemate policies, and who were willing to put aside their political prejudices in favour of a national effort to effect a comprehensive plan of reforms: We have seen how this was possible in a country similar to ours in many regards: in Belgium. At certain times, a compromise is preferable to inaction; those who are attracted by the ‘Belgian experience’ understand this and they are right to do what they are doing. . . . We are not inferior to all those countries which have dared to take a new road! There is in fact no other country in the world for which restructuring is easier! It is not important whether it is done on behalf of a nationalist or a Marxist ideology; if we choose to do it on the basis of just one ideology it will be impossible.20 The nationalists had to join this coalition if they realised that the fate of the nation could not be left to the financial interests of big capital; the syndicalists on the other hand would not be able to escape the conclusion that the interests of the working class could not be separated from that of the nation as a whole. ‘It is evident’, declared Déat, ‘that anticapitalist mobilization must include today not just workers but all producers.’21 Recalling De Man once more, Déat concluded his speech by reminding his audience that: ‘What we wish to build is not just an economic system, providing everyone with the means to lead a dignified and full life but also a civilizing climate where spiritual renovation may take place.’22 The Committee published its manifesto in 1935 with a preface written by Déat. The manifesto summarised the by now familiar array of technocratic proposals for economic reforms: price control, a mechanism of mediation between employers and employees, and a more central role for the professional economic institutions such as the National

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Economic Council, which would assume the role of an arbiter in matters of economic policy. It also called for the ‘cleansing’ of all such economic institutions by removing them from the hands of politicians and placing them under the charge of ‘qualified, impartial and responsible’ people who would represent the ‘general interest’ of the national economy. The Committee was quite clear from where such people were to be recruited: ‘The members of the Directorate will be chosen from among the technicians who have already gained experience in the various branches of human activity, on the understanding that they will have to forego, from that moment on, any benefits derived from private activities.’23 Once given executive authority, these technicians would be able to take rapid and effective decisions and to suppress, in the name of the general interest, all conflicts contrary to it. The tension arising from the material struggle between socialism and capitalism would thus disappear, because these two ideologies were only contradictory if seen from the perspective of a sectarian interest. Considered instead from the point of view of the nation as a whole, they were in fact complementary: capitalism was concerned with the efficient production of wealth and socialism with its just distribution. Assessing the work and the aspirations of the Committee, Charles Albert, an ex-Radical and collaborator in Georges Valois’ technocratic ventures, wrote: ‘Let us have no mistake. It is much more than mere reform; it is a real revolution which we must accomplish if we want our country to rediscover its strength and equilibrium. A non-violent revolution, conducted orderly and calmly, but a revolution all the same. It would be a profound change; a new arrangement of social relations; a re-examination of our institutions. A different way of living the liberty and equality which the French under no circumstances wish to give up.’24 To accusations levelled against the recommendations of the Committee, which blamed them for being authoritarian and not dissimilar to the corporatism of the fascist regimes, Déat answered: The technicians of the Plan Committee know what makes the French economy tick; they know what needs to be done in order to reconstruct it. They have a very clear and simple ideal, which is that of a renovated, rejuvenated France, audacious and daring, deriving strength from the European peace and willing to collaborate without condescension, righteous in every way and carefully guarding its traditions of liberty and tolerance. They know which place Jacobinism and syndicalism occupy in the traditions of this country; they know the correct dosage of centralism and individualism required for

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France, they know the smallest nuances of this country’s soil and territories. . . . If this is what is meant by the word ‘fascists’, then the definitions must be corrected and the dictionary – rewritten.25 Another ‘planist’ initiative of the mid-1930s was the Plan du 9 juillet.26 This was a document summarising the discussions held by a very heterogeneous group of young militants coming, like in the case of the Comité du Plan, from both the Right (Croix de Feu and Jeunesse Patriotes) and the Left (syndicalists of the CGT and socialists). The group, under the moral leadership of the celebrated author Jules Romains, set out to compose a programme of reforms along the lines of the technocratic agenda, which had become commonplace for French planism: the strengthening of the executive, curbing the powers of parliament, fiscal reforms and the creation of a common political platform for the Right and the Left based on the collective project of ‘national regeneration’. The plan presents four major principles or themes which should guide the project of national renovation. First comes ‘the idea of service’ whereby ‘personal interest, too often considered the ultimate goal of human activity, will be complemented and corrected by the sense of the social interest’; secondly, ‘liberty through order’ will replace ‘purely formal liberty’ with a concern for the concrete needs of the individual; next, ‘veritable equality’ based on solidarity – a sort of a ‘community of fate’ such as the one that had existed among soldiers in the trenches of the First World War. This kind of ‘profound equality’ should replace ‘judicial equality [which] signifies nothing at all’; finally, ‘the restoration of hierarchy’ aims to provide a mechanism for the realisation of true liberty and true equality by replacing the current social hierarchy, ‘suspect since it is all too often based on wealth, nepotism and the privilege of age’, with a meritocracy both in the public and in the private sectors. The first part concludes with an appeal to the ‘forces morales’ and primarily to the various sectors of production, to the war veterans and to the youth.27 Much of what follows bears a predictable resemblance to the agendas of the various other ‘nonconformist’ groups of the interwar period. This plan is, however, much more explicit in its authoritarianism than others. It argues that before all its reforms are fully implemented there would have to be a transitional period during which: A government of action, whose origin and manner of formation cannot be foreseen, but whose composition and programme must win the support of the great majority of the nation, will fix the

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basis for new institutions. This government will have the task of defining, authoritatively, the administrative, economic and social organization.28 Similarly, in times of crisis, the government would transform itself into a ‘Committee of Public Safety’ (Comité de Salut Public) outside the fluctuations of parliamentary politics, relying on ‘experienced and disinterested persons’.29 The plan also goes further than others towards adopting a corporatist regime with a total ban on strikes and a system of mandatory arbitration. This aspect of the plan did not go unnoticed and attracted some harsh criticism from various political circles both on the Right and on the Left. Thus, for instance, the Comte de Fels, in charge of the State Reform dossier for the Alliance démocratique, wrote in the Revue de Paris: ‘Let us spell it out. What is being offered to us is actually a classic coup d’Etat. Why beat around the bush? At this point we would be quite justified in asking: this coup d’Etat, how and with whom are you planning to carry it out?’30 2.3. Personalism: L’Ordre Nouveau The first issue of Ordre Nouveau appeared in May 1933. Its founders and co-editors were Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, and regular contributors were Alexandre Marc, Denis de Rougement and Daniel-Rops. Launched almost simultaneously with the rise of National-socialism to power in Germany, the journal was preoccupied from its start with the fortunes of that regime. The writers of the Ordre Nouveau did not condemn Hitlerism for its assault on democracy but rather on its perpetuation of it, albeit in a different form: ‘By a cruel paradox,’ writes Alexandre Marc, ‘it has fallen to National Socialism to realize for the first time on the other side of the Rhine a true democracy, of plebeian inspiration, which is manifested not in parliamentary forms but rather in an incarnation of ceasarism.’ In a special issue dedicated to an analysis of the merits and faults of national-socialism, and written in the form of a letter addressed to Hitler, the Ordre Nouveau editorial team writes: ‘Not having the courage to start from Man, you chose to start from the masses. Thanks to you, Mr. Chancellor, in these Germanic plains which had resisted until now all attempts to introduce demo-liberalism, numbers have become dominant.’31 This disdain of democracy is based on a ‘personalist’ ideology which rejects the abstract notion of the ‘individual’ and the philosophy of liberalism which is based on it. In an issue of the journal which opens with ‘an appeal to the technicians’, Robert Gibrat and Robert Loustau (both engineers, graduates of the

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Ecole Polytechnique) write: ‘The human person struggling against physical forces which threaten to destroy it and against the abstract cohorts of society which stifle it, can prevail only in the natural milieu of the family, the motherland and the profession.’32 This personalism has direct and immediate implications for industry in general and for the position of professionals within it. In a book published by Aron and Dandieu in 1934, entitled La Révolution Nécessaire, the authors write: From the creative aspect, the work of the laboratory, which must be the most personal and the most free, tends to become subjected to the entrepreneur or to the State; in as much as the enterprises merge, rationalize and are subjected to a collective plan, be it private or official, creative work cannot find anymore the space it needs in order to develop and turns, for better or for worse, on the people who are in charge of it by creating a proletarianization of the intelligence. This is the result of the waste of brilliant engineers and scholars who find themselves in stultifying jobs in the private or in the State sectors, which kill off their creative faculties: we can see the consequences in various symptoms which testify to the gradual paralysis of technical thinking.33 To mend this situation, a clear separation must be maintained between creative work and mass production. The former, the domain of engineers and artisans, is to be protected within the corporative structure as a ‘zone de communion professionnelle’. The latter should, though, be reduced until finally eliminated through the exploitation of technology. In an article entitled Le travail et l’esprit, Daniel-Rops writes about the proletarian condition in a tone reminiscent of the ‘psychological observations’ published in the Echo de l’USIC on this same issue (see discussion in Chapter 2): The proletarian is, for us, the archetype of productive society, he who has no longer a place for initiative in his work, who lives in the world of chain production where he is no more than a unit in the overall calculation of production and consumption. He is abstract, anonymous, replaceable, and prone to every risk and subjected to an inhuman nomadism. Independently of any class, from a general moral point of view, but also specifically for the benefit of the working class the struggle against productivism is for us a struggle for the abolition of the proletarian condition.34

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The proletarian condition is associated with the rationalisation of industry. The writers of Ordre Nouveau ceaselessly condemned this process, which they regarded as economic colonialism on the part of the United States. In a book published by Aron and Dandieu in 1931, entitled Le Cancer Américain, the authors lament the spiritual decay of a Europe which succumbs to the formalism and abstraction of American rationalism.35 In another book, Décadence de la nation française, published the same year, they argue that this rationalism is in fact a distortion of Cartesian ideas: ‘From Descartes to Ford, that is from the isolated individual who passionately creates the rational tools of comprehension and conquest, to the regimented individuals, constantly repeating, within the walls of rationalized factories, the same mechanical actions of a job they do not understand. The meaning of this is that Descartes is at the origin of the human epic the overwhelming but degrading climax of which we are seeing now.’36 Where Descartes methodologically isolated reason in order to achieve better knowledge of the world, the American distortion utilises it for practical ends. Rationalism is no longer a method of understanding the world but simply for organising it according to universal standards: ‘While preserving certain modes of thinking and certain rules, the rational method loses its aggressiveness: it is no longer a tool of conquest but a means of exploitation; all the heroism it once had has left it: it is reduced to no more than routine and technique.’37 This formal and alienated rationalism is also the basis of various modern concepts of nationalism, which the writers of Ordre Nouveau reject outright. Their idea of nationalism is different: ‘True French nationalism’, writes Alexandre Marc, ‘is unique in not making the nation a goal in itself, an idol to be admired, an absolute. No, the nation is subordinated to Man. It is in order that Man can be great that the nation must be strong. Independently of the concrete person the nation is nothing but a murderous abstraction.’38 True French nationalism consists not in complying with some abstract definition but rather in being conscious of one’s spiritual communion with one’s fellow countrymen. This is why the smaller the group the more authentic it is: the community of people who share the same ‘élan spirituel’ is the ultimate expression of this ‘communion’, followed by the ‘patrie’(normally regional) and then by the ‘nation’. Lastly comes the ‘Etat’, which is subordinate to all the above and which merely supplies them with the necessary logistics. The logical conclusion of this is, of course, that the institutions of the state must never take precedence over those of the other groupings and especially those of the highest instance – the domain of spiritual, moral

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and intellectual comradeship. Hence the expediency of eliminating the parliamentary system which encourages mediocrity and holds back the free, creative and innovative ‘personne’ who resembles the Nietzschian Übermensch: ‘Man is human only when he manifests his particular raison d’être. But once he manifested it, he has created something new which constitutes a risk. All his dignity consists in taking this risk. [. . .] The highest value of the person lies, ultimately, in his heroism.’ All forms of egalitarianism must consequently be suppressed: ‘The solidarity which we want will be established on this anti-egalitarian, personalist and solidarist affirmation: for each person his place.’39 Creative, adventurous, audacious and, yet, generous and responsible – the elite envisioned by the writers of Ordre Nouveau bears a strong similarity to the archetype of the engineer as described in popular sciencefiction literature.40 Here, for instance, is how Jules Verne describes the engineer Cyrus Smith in L’Ile mystérieuse: ‘Learned, clear-headed, and practical, he fulfilled in all emergencies those three conditions which united ought to insure human success – activity of mind and body, impetuous wishes, and powerful will.’41 This also echoes the sentiments expressed time and again in the engineering press itself throughout the interwar period. Thus Roger Francq, reflecting in 1922 about the secret of fascist attraction and success in Italy, writes in the bulletin of USTICA: Let us consider the great work which can be performed by a few energetic, honest constructors, imbued with the love of the workers, knowledgeable about their psychology, free of old formulas, conscious of the needs of the organization and of the ways to fulfil them, not confining themselves to flattering the masses with some well sounding phrases, not talking about revolutions, capable of constructing new buildings, habitable for all, instead of the old ones which are collapsing. Where are these men in France . . . and elsewhere? Modern Diogeneses, we are looking for them in vain. . . . 42 More than a decade and a half later, the editorial of the militant middleclass journal Front Economique declares: ‘The middle class man is a man who takes risks. It is enough to look around to see how true this is. [. . .] Defence of liberty and private property, respect for the authority of the boss: these principles, defended by the middle class, derive from its special condition, the risks which it constantly faces.’43 Moreover, in the final chapter of Révolution Nécessaire (as well as in the ‘Appel au techniciens’ in Ordre Nouveau), Aron and Dandieu make it

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clear that they consider these engineers not only as an ideal type but as the actual vanguard of the personalist revolution: ‘At this moment, we can confidently say that the theory of the necessary revolution is ready. . . . What is left is the technical preparation: may this book be the prelude of this effort and convince enough technicians and statisticians of the necessity of our endeavour so that they may apply their customary ingenuity and exactitude to a new purpose.’44

3. The technocracy of the engineers In what follows we shall examine one cluster of intellectual and political activities by engineers in the 1930s, where the expectations for a new technocratic agenda were being taken seriously. The X-Crise group, and its various offshoots often connected with the activities of the enigmatic engineer and polytechnicien Jean Coutrot, did not produce the revolution envisioned by the Ordre Nouveau group, or the restoration desired by the Jeune Droite. It did not follow the blueprints of the planistes or the battle cries of the rebels of La lutte des Jeunes. It did, however, bear the fingerprints of all these ideas and tendencies, which were moulded together to produce a new agenda for the engineering profession that bore an elective affinity to the nonconformist cause. The political significance of this was to become all too clear after the 1940 defeat. 3.1. The Centre Polytechnicien d’études économiques (X-Crise)45 On 25 August 1931, the young industrialist and polytechnicien Gerard Bardet published in the bulletin of the Ecole Polytechnique, X-Information, an article entitled Réflexions sur le monde present.46 In that article he contended that the graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique, being the technical elite of the nation, had the duty to engage in an effort to tackle the problem of the forthcoming economic crisis which had already devastated the United States and to which the French government seemed to be oblivious. Bardet, in fact, was aiming for something more than a mere theoretical reflection. What he had in mind was the working out of a comprehensive plan of action that would help to evade the consequences of the crisis. His call was answered, albeit rather scarcely at first, and gradually a group began to form, which met regularly to discuss the causes of the crisis and the measures necessary in order to combat it. The conclusions of the first six months of discussions were presented by Bardet in another article, where the general outlook of the kind of policies this group was to promote in subsequent years could already be discerned.47

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First, Bardet denounced the incompetence of the political echelon in matters of technical and economic planning and condemned its moral indifference towards these issues. Rather than studying the causes of the crisis and taking measures against it, he wrote, the politicians seemed to engage in a fruitless and absurd effort to save the old laissez-faire type of liberalism they had always favoured, and which was now clearly failing. Bardet then moved on to analyse the causes of the crisis, which he divided into two types: circumstantial and structural. The former referred to deficiencies which could be easily remedied (such as the lack of proper financial documentation); the latter type however necessitated much more rigorous measures which, according to Bardet, included deeper governmental involvement in economic matters (by way of regulation) and the setting up of a better welfare system. Capitalism, he claimed, was not to be destroyed but contained and controlled. The political part of Bardet’s exposition assigns to the state the double role of regulating the economy and ensuring impartiality and disinterestedness in the management of public affairs. These roles are to be supplemented by a moral concern for the creation and maintenance of social solidarity by demonstrating, through good example, that public spiritedness and devotion to the service of the general interest are as good, if not better, motives for economic activity as financial gain. One way of demonstrating this would be to set up a welfare system which would seriously and fundamentally address the problem of poverty and unemployment. The governmental apparatus would be divided between the legislative assemblies, and a body of professional experts, ‘technicians’, who would oversee all economic projects, as well as provide counselling, information and documentation. These technicians, Bardet suggests, would be drawn from the graduates of the technical universities (in particular the Ecole Polytechnique). Benefiting from the combined wisdom of these two bodies, the popular and the technical, government would be better equipped to make the right decisions. In 1933 the group, now known as X-Crise, set up its own bulletin, which within a few months obtained more than 500 subscribers, a considerable number bearing in mind the complex and technical nature of many of the articles that appeared in it. The composition of the group was politically and ideologically heterogeneous. Alongside neoliberals such as Jacques Rueff, Clement Colson and Henri Michel were Marxists like John Nicoletis, Louis Vallon, Jules Moch and Georges Soules (aka Raymond Abellio). However, the bulk of the participants belonged to a ‘centrist’ tendency, which included, among others, the

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founding members of the group: Gerard Bardet, Andre Loizillon and Jean Coutrot, as well as the prominent industrialist Auguste Dotoeuf. Speakers in the various sessions conducted by the group also included well-known personalities from the technocratic milieu such as Georges Valois, Marcel Déat, René Belin of the CGT and Ernest Mercier, founder of the Redressement Français. By 1936 X-Crise had become a familiar and prestigious institution among political and economic circles. Its membership kept rising, as did the circulation of its bulletin. In 1938 Bardet claimed a membership of over 2000, including dozens of societies and firms. He also estimated the circulation of the bulletin at over 2500 copies (others, like Loizillon, suggested even higher figures). According to Gerard Brun, ‘X-Crise can undoubtedly be considered as the most brilliant technocratic platform of the inter-war period and as a striking success.’48 A constant feature of the work of X-Crise was the preoccupation with the fate of liberalism. In May 1934 Jacques Rueff, the most consistent and prominent of the neo-liberals in the group, gave a presentation entitled ‘Pourquoi, malgré tout je reste libéral’ (‘Why, despite everything, I remain a liberal’). He began by rejecting the claim that liberal economy was to blame for the current crisis: ‘It is a monstrous lie that classic economy has failed since its troubles began precisely at the moment when the old regime of automatic regulation was replaced with this absurd regime of liberated economy (that is, liberated from the price mechanism), which is the exact opposite of liberal economy.’49 He then moved on to attack the notion of ‘l’économie dirigée’, claiming that economically it was absurd and politically it was dangerous, since it must inevitably lead to dictatorship. In the discussion that followed Rueff’s presentation, he was harshly criticised, first by the Marxist Jules Moch and later on also by Jean Coutrot, who argued that the realities of modern society had rendered the old individualism of classical liberalism obsolete and inadequate. In future, argued Coutrot, individual interests would only be addressed in the context of the collective and since, he continued, Rueff himself admitted that a certain degree of regulation and control was needed, why not dispense altogether with the notion of laissez-faire? However, the most powerful and devastating attack on liberalism came from the industrialist Auguste Detoeuf in a presentation he gave to the group in 1936 under the title ‘La Fin du Libéralisme’. Liberalism, such as existed in the nineteenth century was dead, declared Dotoeuf, ‘It is pointless to try to revive it. We must adapt to the new reality. Because it was beneficent, because it contains useful ferments, we must

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try to save from liberalism whatever we can. But since we cannot save everything we must decide what is to be sacrificed.’50 This entailed, according to Detoeuf, ‘that the State, whose role, whether we like it or not, will expand should cease to be at the same time the provider and the enemy of everyone, that the governors be the servants of the general interest and not of their own particular interests. In a word, it entails a change in morality.’51 Failing to do so would run the risk of giving rise to a totalitarian regime. A similar concern was expressed by Marcel Déat in a presentation he gave two years later: ‘I don’t believe that liberalism can save itself nor that we can save it. And it is a serious problem because while we can easily recover from the demise of a doctrine, we cannot accept the destruction of France.’52 What was needed was a plan of action that would address the crisis of liberalism on all levels: economic, political and moral. It was therefore not surprising that the members of X-Crise showed much interest in the various ‘planist’ initiatives of the period, which had much the ame concerns. In February 1935, Jacques Branger, a collaborator in the Plan du 9 juillet project, gave a presentation to the group on the issue of planism. In his presentation, Branger referred to the ideas of De Man and in particular to the latter’s distinction between ownership and management of capital. Planism, argued Branger, being the ideology of rationalisation, ‘tends to replace the classic agency of the capitalist with that of the engineer.’53 In doing so, it assumes a disinterested perspective of the concrete needs of society as a whole and thus appears to be ‘a new form of socialism’. However, as he hurries to add, this means ‘a combative attitude towards the crisis of capitalism rather than towards capitalism itself.’54 This could not but encourage Marcel Déat, an enthusiast of the Belgian model who, as we have seen, was at that time involved in the work of the Comité du Plan. This moral aspect of planism, and its universal application far beyond the limits of economics, was taken up by Jean Coutrot, one of the most prominent members of X-Crise.55 In that same year, 1935, Coutrot published a book entitled De Quoi Vivre?, which carried a preface by Jules Romains of the Plan du 9 juillet, a project in which Coutrot had taken an active part. Coutrot starts with a critique of individualism in its various forms, which he holds responsible for the crisis of civilisation and for its moral degeneration, as well as for the failure of liberalism. He then moves on to argue that all activity both in the natural and in the social spheres is based on an undulate movement or rhythm, where periodically external interferences displace the internal equilibrium in the life of the

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organism by blurring the relationship between cause and effect. In such periods of crisis, reason is the only reliable and constant factor which can be applied in order to restore the equilibrium. While De Quoi Vivre? was a rather cumbersome and clumsily argued work, which amalgamated various theories from the natural sciences and from sociology in order to support Coutrot’s preconceived ideas on rationalisation, his second book, published a year later on the background of the industrial unrest and the electoral victory of the Popular Front, was somewhat more relevant to the problems of the hour. The book, Les Leçons de juin 1936 – l’Humanisme économique, a summary of a lecture given by Coutrot and Bardet at the Sorbonne, refers to the June strikes and sit-ins not as an expression of a class struggle but rather as a symptom of a disequilibrium within the industrial sphere. It argues that, due to the external interference of sectarianism (in the form of Marxism or of individualist liberalism), both employers and employees can no longer see their respective roles in the factory as parts of a whole, for they are captured by the false idea that their relationship is inherently antagonistic and can only be managed as a ‘zero-sum game’. Coutrot suggests instead that both parties must be rid of their mutual psychological aversion and try to reach an agreement which will restore the balance between them. Such an agreement can only be achieved, he argues, under the facilitation of an impartial and disinterested referee, which must be the state, once it frees itself of the grab of politicians and transfers all economic responsibilities to professional specialists. This could be done, Coutrot suggests, in a manner similar to the model of ancient Rome: A provisory dictatorship which is the opposite of tyranny. We know very well that one has to stop a machine from time to time in order to synchronize its rhythm or in order to replace worn-out parts. How much more important this is to the political machine with its tendency towards flaccidity, degeneration and rotting! The true safeguard of democratic institutions, the only one acceptable in peacetime, is a periodic revision of the kind the Romans called dictatorship – a perfectly constitutional procedure. . . . Dictatorship, or if the word is too shocking, the granting of full powers (‘pleins pouvoirs’ – N.A) would have to be exercised, in this case, by one or more non-political, non-parliamentary persons who can present evidence to the effect that they have reasons to want this position other than the will to exercise power, that they are comfortable enough in their present lives to be able to resist the disillusion of grandeur, but that at the same time they have a taste for team work and an experience of it.56

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These industrial agreements will not abolish inequality. On the contrary, they will institutionalise it, making it a rational, normal and structural feature of all industrial relations. The organisation of human inequality means, writes Coutrot, ‘determining the levels of inequality, the possibility of penetrating each one of them and the required duration of stay on each level, while taking into account not only the requirements of logic, the interests of production and the future of the race, but also the persistence of our desires, the rhythm of our societies and our dislikes: in short, the landscape of our collective consciousness, the conditions of our human equilibrium, both interior and exterior.’57 Coutrot also suggests ways by which consensus over this totally rationalised new order can be achieved. Referring to the latest technological developments such as the radio and the cinema, alongside the more traditional means of propaganda and socialisation such as the press and the school curriculum, he writes: It is possible to peel off people from the inside, like one does with melons and to replace the bitter pips with savoury port wine, and to graft into them, without pain or wastage, any psychological content we choose. This is what at this time totalitarian governments do with such mastery by starting to work on their subjects when they are still in their cots – just in order to be on the safe side.58 And for the dissidents, those who manage to escape this brainwashing, Coutrot offers: the concentration camp, but conceived as a provisional sanatorium, with professors and nurses, where those we have been unable to convince, will be temporarily isolated until they are cured, in order to prevent them from doing harm.59 Another important means of mass psychology is myth. Coutrot, having read Sorel and Le Bon, is aware of the mobilising potential of this tool and suggests using it for the purpose of chasing away all those enemies of the rational state, whose actions have disrupted the equilibrium and whose opportunism currently prevents putting things right. He criticises the myths used by the fascist regimes, not so much because they are immoral (at least, he doesn’t say anywhere that they are) but simply because they are inefficient: Hitler used the Jew to strengthen collective hatred: a good choice; well tested over the centuries, but too simple. A Jew cannot cease

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to be a Jew: we can kill him or exile him. But this would be a bad solution since it would produce martyrs and unleash against us the universal law of the disruption of equilibrium. If we are to hate, let us hate those whose character can be changed. And who are those responsible for the deterioration of France today? Three major classes (here it pays to have a class consciousness!): the tepid, the insane and the old (or rather the senile). France has been wavering for decades between spoiled young brats and doddering old men.60 These flirtations with mass psychology soon became an important preoccupation for Coutrot and formed the basis of his next major initiative. 3.2. Le Centre d’Etudes des Problèmes Humains In 1937 Coutrot announced the establishment of his own foundation – Le Centre d’Etudes des Problèmes Humains (CEPH), which was to be the organisational infrastructure for the diffusion of his ideas. One of the declared aims of the CEPH was ‘making a contribution to the prevention of both a bloody revolution and war, by creating, on the neutral ground of scientific research, a crossroad permitting diverse ideologies to meet without passionate conflicts, and to perceive that while it may be easier to fight rather than to listen to each other, this kind of intellectual laziness ultimately produces nothing of value since all things human are not really contradictory but complementary.’61 The CEPH also appealed to various sectors of French society such as musicians, intellectuals, artists and syndicalists. Again, the response to these appeals was rather scarce. However, one initiative which managed to obtain some audience was the ‘déjeuners du CEPH’ launched in 1939. These ‘déjeuners’ were each dedicated to a predetermined theme with a presentation by a key speaker followed by a discussion. One such session, particularly interesting for our study, took place on 6 March 1939 and was entitled ‘L’ingénieur devant les mécanismes économiques et sociaux’ (‘The engineer in the face of the social and economic mechanisms’). In the conclusion of his presentation, having outlined his ideas and the work of the CEPH, Coutrot emphasised the role he expected engineers to play in the transformation of society and in the creation of the rational state: The constructor of future society, or rather he who will improve the present one, is perhaps the engineer. In any case, we should not entrust this task to those who are unable to perform it, even if

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they have the will to do so. Politicians, jurists, even men of liberal professions do not have the capacity to successfully deal with the issues I mentioned. The profession of engineer in its wide context, when applied not only to physical matter but also to the social sciences is perhaps the noblest occupation of our time. I would like us to take good notice of that.62 If engineers and industrialists remained his main milieu and constituted prime candidates for the implementation of his ideas, Coutrot tried nevertheless to mobilise support and sponsorship for the projects of his Centre by appealing also to well-known personalities from various backgrounds. In most cases these appeals came to nothing, as in the case of Leon Blum and even of Jules Romains and other ex-collaborators of his in the project of the Plan du 9 juillet. In other cases he was more successful, as with the various ‘nonconformist’ groups and with such eminent personalities as Dr Alexis Carrel, Nobel laureate and author of the much acclaimed L’homme Cette Inconu, who agreed to sit on the executive board of the Centre. Although these successes were modest in their effect and extent, it is worth examining them in some detail as they provide us with a link between the engineering milieu and the wider context of interwar political ‘nonconformism’. One potentially important contact for Coutrot was the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Their brief correspondence began shortly after the latter’s break with the Action Française in 1936. Maritain was at the time a regular contributor to the Catholic journal Sept and involved in various political campaigns alongside other dissidents of the royalist movement. Coutrot was familiar with the writings of Maritain and, in a meeting between the two, asked the philosopher to contribute an article to the bulletin of the CEPH. The article was never sent (or at least it was never published) and this contact, apparently, died out.63 In July 1938 Coutrot initiated an appeal to some 15 ‘nonconformist’ groups following an article by Alexandre Marc, who was at the time attempting to create a united personaliste front. A statement issued following the meeting called for ‘a subtle yet efficient coordination’ with the aim of obtaining a set of agreed principles. A month later, Alexandre Marc organised another such meeting under the forbidding title L’Union ou la mort! (Unity or Death!) This meeting was better attended than the previous one and included representatives of Ordre Nouveau, Esprit, and the CEPH. Jean Coutrot was enthusiastic for this effort to succeed and wrote to the industrialist Auguste Detoeuf, whose journal, Nouveaux Cahiers, had also been founded with the aim of providing a

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common platform for the various trends and tendencies: ‘This coordination between the various research and study groups will quite clearly not suffice in order resolve the difficulties of our present situation, but it can certainly increase the impact of our action and should therefore be considered mandatory.’64 However, these joint initiatives with Marc soon went sour due to a clash of priorities, and Coutrot embarked on a new project entitled Les déjeuners des groupes non-conformistes. This too failed to materialise when potential contributors politely declined the invitation to participate. A similar fate met Coutrot’s final attempt: the journal Buts, founded in 1940 as a platform for inter-group discussions.65 Prior to these efforts, Coutrot had already been in contact with one of the major figures of the Jeune Droite – Thierry Maulnier. Maulnier, who apparently read Coutrot’s De Quoi Vivre? published a critique of that book in the Revue Universelle in February 1936. In his critique, Maulnier compliments Coutrot on his ‘intelligence and ingenuity’ but loses no time in plunging his spear into the very heart of Coutrot’s argument and attacks his all-encompassing scientific approach: Here is the danger in regarding scientific knowledge as the summit of all human activity. [. . .] The supreme form of human activity is not reason as an instrument of acquisitive knowledge but reason as an edifying force and a creator of values: values which hardly change from one generation to the other and which, unlike scientific knowledge can find only in the individual their perfect and insurmountable expression. [. . .] Perhaps the main reproach against Mr. Coutrot [. . .] is that he has underestimated the part of the human problem which escapes science.66 Coutrot replies in a letter a week later. He rejects Maulnier’s accusations and declares that the only values which interest him are those that can ensure the future of humanity. He then reaffirms his faith in the ability of science to address this issue: ‘I have a very strong and ever present sense of this biological evolution, the destination of which we do not know but which will certainly not escape the laws of reason, what with the current consolidation of the sciences of man.’ Coutrot then expresses his wish to ‘nurture human types superior to the ones we have at present and later on [. . .] see what relations can be established between those superior types and, if humanity becomes conscious of itself, to begin to feel like a symphonic god and not like an organism or a polypier and to become at least to some extent a subject rather than a mere object.’67

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Coutrot, obviously, had little time for philosophical musings. His agenda, ambitious as it was, seemed to him to make sense only if it could be put into use. It is no wonder then that, as in the case of Maritain, his dialogue with Maulnier did not go beyond this solitary exchange of opinions. On the other hand, Coutrot was also wary of overtly political actions. In an open letter to Marcel Déat on the front page of La République (one of the platforms created by the dissident young Radicals), Coutrot criticises Déat’s enthusiastic reliance on the middle classes, which ignores their technical incompetence. Before anything useful can be done politically, argues Coutrot, technical education must be given to the country’s economic elite.68 Déat’s reply comes a few weeks later: You yourself spoke of a process of two or three years, on condition that everyone joins in and that devout action is no longer limited to a handful of men but is accompanied by the enthusiasm of the people, under the leadership of its political and industrial elite. Unfortunately, we do not have the time for such a process; we must try to find immediate remedies. Not in order to refute the ones you are offering but in order to create the condition for their application.69 But Coutrot was not interested in ad hoc political maneuverings. His wish was, in the words of Saint-Simon, an ideological precursor, that ‘politics [will] be entrusted exclusively to a special class of scientists who will impose silence on all twaddle.’ The efforts of Jean Coutrot throughout the second half of the 1930s were dedicated to putting together such an ‘élite des savants’ in the cadre of his CEPH in order to conduct experiments that would eventually produce the ‘superior human types’ of which he wrote to Maulnier. 3.3. Le Fondation Française pour l’Etude des Problèmes Humains (FFEPH)70 As we have already mentioned, one person who willingly collaborated with Coutrot was Dr Alexis Carrel, who was eventually appointed to the executive board of the CEPH, and five years later, stood at the head of an institution which can be regarded in many ways as a progeny of the CEPH. We shall take a closer look at Carrel’s ideas in Chapter 5. Here we shall briefly refer to his ‘second in command’ at the FFEPH – the renowned economist François Perroux, who was in fact in charge of the daily running of the institute.71 François Perroux was appointed

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Secretary-General of the FFEPH in September 1942. Perroux, already a member of Petain’s Conseil National and technical adviser to the Ministry of Finance, had been writing for the Nouveaux Cahiers journal where he had close contacts within the industrialist and engineering circles as well as with the personalists of Esprit and Ordre Nouveaux. His ideas, which he brought with him to the FFEPH reflect many of the themes which had been repeatedly debated among those circles throughout the previous decade. Of special interest are his ideas on leadership. In 1942 Perroux formed a small group called Renaître which set as its primary goal to help find the elite that would lead Vichy’s National Revolution. In one of the booklets issued by the group Perroux writes: ‘It is around the leader and by the leader that a group becomes self conscious, organized and integrated. [. . .] The unity of all human groups is never an abstract contract; it always carries the name of a concrete person. It always has the face of the man or men who successively incarnated and carried on the soul of the group. . . .’ Here we see the clear influence of the communitarian ideas expounded by the personalists. Further on Perroux gives this portrayal of the leader a certain Nietzschian twist: The holder of power, according to liberal doctrine, must not change the law but rather be subjected to it and implement it. The leader, for us, is not meant to repeat like an echo, or reflect like a mirror, the living values of a concrete community. He influences them. Between the community and him there is a reciprocal exchange in the course of which he injects his own ideas and values.72 But the charismatic nature of the leader must not mislead us: he is there mainly because ‘someone must make a decision at some point’, and his authority is accompanied by the burden of personal responsibility: ‘The national community has a right to life and the leaders who put this community at risk carry the responsibility for this.’73 Beside the leader there must be a council of experts to advise him, for ‘the leader cannot know everything, he needs experts to inform him on various issues.’ These experts are ‘competent technicians, specialists on various issues [. . .] natural leaders of subordinated groups, members of the elite which constitute the armour of every healthy social body, who assert themselves within a specific group, a-propos a specific activity, combining as much as possible the qualities of leadership with those of a technician.’74 The technical experts, those engineers with whom Perroux had been associated in the nonconformist circles of the Nouveaux Cahiers and later on

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of Idées, are undoubtedly the model for these elite ‘councilors’. Indeed, in a bulletin of the Institut d’études corporatives et sociales Perroux writes: Politics is not done solely within the confines of assemblies. In order to function, it needs public support. The politics of French renaissance cannot rely exclusively on either the working class or the middle class. In order to gain real popular support it must establish an alliance between the working class and the majority of the middle class, and thus create the political unity of the nation. This objective, which has been that of all political formations who have aspired to govern and to implement far reaching initiatives, is at the moment far and difficult to obtain. However, if it is not attained, the hope for a truly national kind of politics is a chimera. The French engineers must, in our opinion, understand this political task which they are called to serve and which consists in reforging national unity by pulling together the elites and drawing closer the French masses; they can become the real makers of national integration. [. . .] The engineers know how to build: it is very much up to them to build the France of tomorrow.75

4. Conclusion If the 1920s had been optimistic and produced the Utopia of a happy and rationalist reform of the French state, the 1930s were much more sombre. The economic crisis, which although delayed finally hit France, the failure of the parliamentary and governmental apparatuses to assert their authority, the rallying of France’s neighbouring countries to authoritarianism and the threat of another catastrophic war, brought about the fear of losing control, of disintegrating. The young Radicals and the neo-socialists who had previously endeavoured to reform their respective parties now resigned from them in bitter disillusion and called for an all-out assault on the entire parliamentary system and on what they considered to be its main liability – the conceptual framework of liberal democracy. In this they were not alone; the entire nonconformist camp – Jeune Droite, social-Catholics, personalists – were all feverishly publishing books and journals, articulating the very same rejection in numerous formulations. They rejected politics. They could not see anything useful coming out of the cynical manipulations of party functionaries who, they claimed, were often corrupt and always incompetent. Worse, they could see

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nothing moral in the very existence of the parliamentary system, which subjected the nation’s fate to the vagaries of public opinion. What was true and moral and appropriate was not a matter of opinion; it was a matter of fact. To know the facts one had to have education and training and to act upon them one had to be disinterested, responsible and imaginative. Government was therefore the business of the elite, not the mob. But this did not imply a rejection of collectivism. Quite the contrary, it sought to release society from ‘false’ collectives which were ‘synthetic’ and unnatural, and therefore fragile, contingent and inherently unreliable. Such were the political institutions of liberal democracy (which, at that time, were indeed unstable, with governments rarely lasting in office more than a year) and such were the financial markets of global and anonymous capitalism. As the antithesis of that stood the ‘organic’ community based not on contract but rather on patrimony. It was in that community that the ‘person’ (as opposed to the abstract ‘individual’) was born, raised, married, worked, fought and died. There was a stability in that community, a continuation through history, a sense of purpose and, perhaps most importantly, solidarity. In the socially polarised French society, which in 1936 exploded in a wave of mass strikes, solidarity was the order of the hour especially as the Matignon accords demolished the last remnants of feudal paternalism which had provided at least an illusion of inter-class idyll. They also rejected philosophy for being too speculative, alienated, abstract and ultimately useless. Some, those who Olivier Dard called ‘spiritualists’ replaced philosophy with theology; others, more activist in their approach, opted for science, which provided them with a clear and dispassionate procedure that also had the advantage of being innocent of political connotations (which philosophy, in France, could never be). Having crossed the Rubicon which separates dissent from an open rebellion, the ‘nonconformists’ were, in the aftermath of the February 1934 events, united in their opposition. It was very clear what they were against and it was generally understood (albeit more vaguely) what they were for. Battle plans were drawn on the pages of the vast and volatile array of journals; strategists were proclaiming themselves in conferences, luncheons, workshops and retreats; all was ready; all but the actual battalions who would storm the Palais Bourbon. The old ligues had already proved themselves powerless on 6 February 1934 when they failed to translate their insurrectionary rhetoric into anything more than noisy street brawling. Of particular disappointment was Colonel La Rocque, leader of the Croix de Feu, who had seemed, for a while, a

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likely candidate for the role of chef national but who, on that would-be apocalyptic evening in February, ordered his troops to retreat. But there was in fact a certain noyau in French society at that time which was, quietly but determinedly, conquering the Parisian corridors of power. These were not the intellectuals of whom Sternhell wrote; nor were they the ‘quelques milliers de braillards’ and ‘hommes de main’ referred to by René Rémond.76 They were professionals: engineers and technical experts issued from both the prestigious technical Grands Ecoles and the various Ecoles des Arts et des Métiers. Some had their own capital and even their own factories; others were managers, members of boards of directors and advisers. None of them were politicians. When the economic crisis hit France in 1935, Prime Minister Laval assumed ‘pleins pouvoirs’ and embarked on a reform campaign which involved the formulation of some 500 governmental decrees by a special think-tank composed of economists and engineers, the most prominent of whom, like Jean Coutrot, Raoul Dautry and Jacques Branger, were associated with the X-Crise group. But it was during the period of the Front Populaire that these ‘professionals’ gained significant access into the ranks of the governmental apparatus. This was primarily through the newly created Ministry of National Economy headed by Charles Spinasse, another X-Crise sympathiser who had given a presentation in one of the group’s sessions. The new Ministry absorbed, among others, Jacques Branger (X-Crise, P9J, CEPH), Alfred Sauvy (X-Crise, CEPH), Georges Soulés (X-Crise), Georges Guillaume (X-Crise, CEPH), Louis Rosenstock-Franck (Lutte des Jeunes, X-Crise), Gérard Bardet (X-Crise, P9J, CEPH) and Jean Coutrot (X-Crise, P9J, CEPH, Nouveaux Cahiers). The latter was also appointed as head of the Centre National d’Organisation Scientifique du Travail (CNOST), created in 1936 and populated by Coutrot with his X-Crise associates, most of whom were professional engineers. Daladier’s government in 1938 brought about another wave of ‘professional’ appointments, first in the Ministry of Finance headed by Paul Reynaud, and later in the Ministry of Armament headed by Raoul Dautry. The latter was the embodiment of the socially conscientious interwar engineer, having been affiliated with almost every significant grouping of engineers and technocrats from the Redressement Française of the 1920s, through X-Crise and up to the Nouveaux Cahiers of the late 1930s. It is hardly surprising therefore that we find among his staff at the Ministry representatives of almost all these groups: his head of bureau was Jean Bichelonne (X-Crise) and present were also François Lehideux (X-Crise, Nouveau Cahiers), Jacques Barnaud

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(X-Crise, Nouveau Cahiers), Henri de Peyerimhoff (Redressement Française, X-Crise) and Georges Lamirand (USIC, Nouveaux Cahiers). Dautry had also maintained close contacts with Jean Jardin (Ordre Nouveau) and with Alexis Carrel. Paul Reynaud’s government in 1940 saw a peak in the placement of professionals in the various ministries. It was no longer just the staff of the Ministries that was selected according to ‘professional’ criteria but the actual ministers: Jean Prouvost, a journalist, in the Ministry of Information; Yves Bouthillier, inspecteur de finances, in the Ministry of Finance; Admiral Darlan in the Ministry of Naval Affairs; Judge Frémicourt in the Ministry of Justice; General Colson in the Ministry of War, etc. This was also the case in the last government of the Third Republic, under Maréchal Pétain, who engaged among his staff René Gillouin (X-Crise, CEPH), General Brécard and Lucien Romier (Redressement Française), and Robert Loustau (Ordre Nouveau; X-Crise). What had been a mere aspiration in the 1920s has thus become a reality in the twilight of the following decade. Not only were the ‘professionals’ themselves gradually taking over almost every position in the governmental machine, but their ethos had become the guideline for the appointment of the most senior officials of the state. The professional engineers and experts won the trust of both modernisers and traditionalists. They had the assurance of being héritiers – educated in the finest establishments of the land, responsible and respectful to long-established social hierarchies and the allure of entrepreneurs – with a self-made career, a daring imagination and a scientific mind. They could be neo-socialists like Montagnon but also social-Catholics like Lamirand; boisterous men of action like Mercier but also enigmatic éminences grises like Jean Coutrot. And they had a plan, a design, a tangible solution to the concrete problems of the day, based on scientific facts rather than on philosophical reveries or political ambitions. This was no longer the crude pamphleteering and the menacing parading of the ligues. It was clean, rational, scientific and respectable. It was nonetheless for that nationalistic, authoritarian, corporatist, antidemocratic and anti-liberal. These ideological tenets, developed in the intellectual laboratories of the Plan du 9 Juillet, the Plan Française, the Ordre Nouveau, were ‘laundered’ in the ostensibly non-political clusters like X-Crise, Nouveau Cahiers and the CEPH where a large number of the participants did in fact simultaneously belong to one or more of those nonconformist groups. The result was astounding: while the old ligues were being outlawed by one arm of the Front Populaire government for their intransigent anti-democratic activities, the ‘professionals’

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were being welcomed by another arm of that same government. They wore no uniform, shouted no slogans and flinched from any explicit act of violence. It was not politics but science that Coutrot was engaging in when he proposed mass brainwashing through the cinema and the radio, or when he envisioned concentration camps for the re-education of dissidents run by men in white coats; it was equally non-political but scientific to promote ‘social hygiene’ by proposing to send all deviants and misfits to the gas chambers, as did Carrel; and it was common sense and good administration to suggest as did, in one way or another, almost everyone of these ‘professionals’, that the executive be strengthened by suppressing its dependence on the legislative through the setting up of a ‘provisional dictatorship’ and by the replacement of politicians with technical experts. Finally, it was purely on scientific grounds that individualism was rejected as ‘abstract’ and liberalism and Marxism denounced as dangerously metaphysical. This was a quiet revolution but a revolution nonetheless. By the time Pétain signed his country’s armistice in June 1940, the government of France had been highly saturated with the people whom the ‘nonconformists’ had repeatedly urged to take the reins of power. These people were not promoting the nonconformist agenda as such (and in any case there was no one single agenda to promote); they were promoting themselves, their profession and their scientific pursuits. However, in doing so they, often inadvertently, helped legitimise, empower and even radicalise the doctrines of those nonconformist groups.

5 Big Illusions and Harsh Realities: The Vichy Years

1. Imagining the National Revolution On 16 June 1940 Paul Reynaud, the last prime minister of the Third Republic, resigned and Marshal Pétain was asked to form a new government. On the following day, the Marshal delivered a radio broadcast to the French public announcing France’s defeat and urging the ending of hostilities. The armistice with the Germans was signed on 22 June. It stipulated the partition of France into an occupied zone and a ‘free’ zone, the dismantling of the French army, the financial responsibility of the French government for the maintenance of the German occupation troops in France and the continuous captivity of the 1.5 million French prisoners of war by Germany. Another armistice was signed with Italy on 24 June. Both agreements came into effect on the 25th of that month. The French government which, having escaped Paris was situated in Bordeaux, had to move once again as that town was now within the occupied zone. On 1 July it established itself in Vichy. Pétain, although an esteemed military figure who had already served in a ministerial capacity, was nonetheless no politician and he urgently needed a ‘meneur’ to help him consolidate his new government. For this task he chose Pierre Laval, who had objected to France’s entry into the war and enthusiastically supported the armistice. This and the fact that he had already been prime minister twice during the 1930s and had a rich political experience were great advantages in the chaotic atmosphere of the early Vichy days when much maneuvering was needed in order to display authority to the French and subservience to the Germans. However, Laval’s parliamentary past was also his predicament as he was to find out within less than a year. 130

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Laval set out to effect a radical constitutional reform geared towards turning Pétain into the Head of State, thus bypassing President Lebrun who was reluctant to sidestep in favour of the Marshal. On 9 July parliament convened at the Vichy casino. Absent were Laval’s bitterest opponents who had refused to accept the armistice and departed abroad. Absent also were the communists who had been banned in 1939. On that day and on the following one, Laval managed to obtain parliament’s approval for a constitutional revision to be effected on the authority of Pétain. A series of amendments, issued almost immediately, gave Pétain the authority to appoint and dismiss ministers at his will, and to appoint his future successor (for which he, predictably, chose Laval). One amendment adjourned parliament until further notice. Pétain was now France’s constitutional monarch and Laval was his dauphin. 1.1. Charles Maurras and the Monarchist Charade This pseudo-royal arrangement could not but appeal to the old guard of the Action Française. Indeed, at least in its initial phase, affiliates of the royalist movement took an active part in the development of the political doctrine of the National Revolution announced by the Marshal. This was, for instance, the case of Henri Massis and of Gustave Thibon in intellectual matters;1 of Raphaël Alibert who was Minister of Justice until January 1941; and of Xavier Vallat, Commissioner for Jewish Affairs from March 1941 to March 1942. Others in Pétain’s entourage with similar sympathies were the Generals Emile Laure and Charles Brécard; the general secretary of the presidency of the Council, Admiral Fernest; and the Marshal’s personal secretary Henri du Moulin de Labarthère. Charles Maurras himself established the new headquarters of his paper in Lyons from where he offered his support to the new regime. In 1941 he published a book entitled La Seule France, which testified to his adherence to the cause of the National Revolution. In reply to hypothetical critics who might wonder about what seems like a concession on the part of the old advocate of royalist restoration, Maurras wrote: They ask me: and it is you, a monarchist, who says that? You are willing to grant this to a power which isn’t monarchist? I answer: It is us. The monarchy was never a party; [. . .] my monarchism stems from my patriotism. The monarchists have never stopped serving the cause of national, corporatist and decentralist ideas. This prince has never ceased to encourage them to do so. All

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the declarations of the monarchy, all its charters stipulate: France before everything else. We did not wish this unfortunate war which brought down the regime, although it was an incompetent, dangerous and ruinous one. It was not us who mixed caprice, emotions and partisan interests in foreign policy affairs. But someone did. And we have had to suffer the consequences. And now we must find ways to repair the damage. National duty demands that we all gather now around Marshal Petain – this is the first, the last and the only duty we have; we will fulfil it. That is all.2 For Maurras the priorities were clear: ‘ordre d’abord, progrès ensuite’ (‘order first, progress later’). The National Revolution must first do away with the debris of the old democratic regime. It must restore governmental authority and social hierarchies. The trouble with the old republican regime was precisely its hastiness and reformatory zeal, which brought about centralisation and bureaucratisation, giving excessive powers to the fonctionnaires. This was too German and foreign to French political traditions. Let the functionaries return to the private sector and stay away from politics, urged Maurras. Power should return to the traditional elites in the provinces and those elites should not include foreigners (métèques) and Jews. Maurras’ argument here is in fact a continuation of the campaign launched in 1935 by the Action Française against the proliferation of foreigners in the liberal professions and in particular in the field of medicine. In the 1930s this campaign was shared not only by the extreme right but also by mainstream politicians from the Radical party as well as by some socialists. Indeed, it was the government itself which in 1935 passed a law prohibiting doctors of foreign origin from practising their profession in France in the four years following their naturalisation (five in the case of the public sector) and which stipulated a procedure by which the medical associations (which were strongly opposed to professional immigration and which often employed distinctly anti-Semitic argumentation to that end) were to be consulted on every case of a proposed naturalisation of a medical practitioner.3 The legislative efforts of various professional associations (merchants, lawyers, etc.) continued throughout the second half of the 1930s with bills being put to parliament which suggested a complete revision of naturalisations posterior to 1927 (when criteria were

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relaxed) and even for a prohibition on newly naturalised professionals to Gallicise their names for a ten-year period so that their foreign origin could not be concealed. . . . 4 In 1941 it was, once more, not a marginal journal that Maurras quoted in support of his arguments but the mainstream, mass-circulation Le Temps, which joined the campaign against the alleged flood of foreign doctors: The xenophilia of the politicians has prevented the implementation of effective measures against the intolerable abuses. The law passed by the Vichy government will be accepted with joy by the young French who have seen their professional horizons shrink further every year as a result of the flood of refugees from other countries . . . It was crucial not to continue to neglect the problem created by the masses of foreigners who, for various reason, could not practice their profession in their own countries, and have come to do so in France by taking the place which belongs by right to our educated young men.5 Maurras adopted a similar line of argumentation when he turned to discuss the Jews. The main problem with the Jews in France, he argued, was that they were essentially foreign. They formed ‘a state within the State’ and under the disguise of their French citizenship gradually took over not only the economic sectors where the damage to the indigenous population was mainly material but also those social agencies which were in charge of forming the nation’s normative patterns such as the educational system, the governmental administration and the cultural arena. It was in the latter case that the French had to be particularly alert and wary, warned Maurras, for the Jews were anarchic and revolutionary by nature and were therefore bound to cause havoc and disorder by spreading the spirit of individualism. Moreover, since they were bound by loyalty to no one but their own kind, they would not cringe from bringing about the destruction of their host nation once they had finished ‘sucking its marrow’. Therefore the judicial measures taken up by Vichy against the Jews were not an infringement of their human rights: ‘It isn’t written anywhere, neither in the stars nor on our conscience, that it should be considered offensive for a human being not to be able to be the manager of a theatre, a cinema, a publication or a university.’6 These measures were merely a protection on the part of a vigilant host towards an ungrateful guest: The laws concerning the Jews [Le Statut des juifs – NA] do not require them to say that two plus two makes five, nor to deny the Hebrew

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faith, nor to speak or write anything dishonourable. These issues are safeguarded. But we are the masters of the house that our fathers have built and for which they have given their sweat and their blood. We have an absolute right to set conditions for the presence of the nomads to whom we have offered shelter under our roof. And we also have the right to decide to what extent we can offer such hospitality.7 It is important to remember that this discussion of immigration, foreigners, naturalisation and professional protectionism was not merely academic. In addition to the aforementioned legislation, the LavalFlandin government had conducted an extensive crackdown, in 1934–5, on foreign refugees and expelled thousands who did not have work permits. Many of those were Jews and political dissidents escaping from Nazi Germany. The Daladier government of 1938, responding to the wave of incoming political refugees from Spain, went even further in legislating against what Albert Sarraut, the Interior Minister, called ‘undesirable elements’ among naturalised foreigners, who could now be stripped of their citizenship if their conduct was considered ‘unworthy’. On 12 November 1938 the government issued a decree authorising the internment of such ‘undesirables’ in specially built concentration camps, which were later to be used by the Vichy regime.8 This escalation in the official measures taken against foreigners was perfectly in tune with the wishes of Maurras and his cronies. Their aristocratic pretensions did not allow them to adopt the crude xenophobic and anti-Semitic style of the likes of Drumont. They advocated a cool, calculated and official treatment of foreigners and Jews based on the famous distinction made by Maurras between ‘the antisemitism of skin’ (‘l’antisémitisme de peau’) and ‘State anti-Semitism’ (‘l’antisémitisme d’Etat’): Antisemitism is bad. If we understand by it the antisemitism of the skin which leads to pogroms and which refuses to recognize the Jew as a human being who has both good and bad qualities and in whom the good qualities may even be dominant. We will not give up our natural friendship with those Jews who are patriots. But there is also political antisemitism, ‘State antisemitism’, which is excellent, because it is aware of the dangers of the other kind of antisemitism and can help avoid its worst excesses.9 The Statut des Juifs (and the confiscation of Jewish property) as well as the further restrictions on the naturalisation of foreigners were precisely

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what Maurras had in mind and he welcomed them enthusiastically. At last France had a king-like ruler who was not afraid to act determinedly against the ‘anti-France’ in a regal and stately manner, through official laws and decrees. This was the nationalisation of xenophobia and anti-Semitism; it was also their bureaucratisation, for the implementation of those measures required an enormous apparatus to take care of its legal, logistic and financial aspects as well as the propaganda effort that endeavoured to legitimise it. This was quite ironic, of course, for Maurras, who was an ardent opponent of the centralised powers of the fonctionnaires. . . . Here we see an accidental, though very significant, affinity between the conservative Action Française and the technocratic tendencies of the professional milieu: the fear of chaos, of revolutionary or insurrectional action, shared by both, was a strong incentive to ‘rationalise’ the National Revolution. Furthermore, Maurras accepted the meritocratic principle with regard to the members of the new government: ‘They were chosen for their competence. Their achievements will testify for them. They have not come from the ranks of incompetent assemblies, but from a power that is real. Why? Because it is a personal power.’10 Of course, Maurras supported such meritocracy only as long as its authority emanated from the Chef National and only as long as its actions complied with the traditionalist values he regarded as the expression of true ‘Frenchness’. However, under the unfortunate circumstances of the defeat and the occupation, Maurras was willing to defer judgement (or rather to turn a blind eye) on the actual protagonists of the government: The issue is not certain particular persons or others; it is not about approving of them, which will be too much like some indirect form of carnival parliamentarism. It is about supporting them. French unity is saved. It is what it is. Let us serve it!11 In other words, Maurras was aware that the new government of Vichy had turned out to be somewhat removed from his ideals of grandeur, if looked at through the lens of a magnifying glass. However, he was quite happy to let that pass as long as the show went on and the actors played their part in the charade. To put it in the terms we used in our discussion of the ethos of professionalism, Maurras was willing to accept the new government through misrecognition: Pétain was the restored French king and his ministers were his chevaliers. But of course this is more than just a simple and rather pathetic exercise of wishful thinking

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and self-deception, for the new ‘king’ and his government were de facto putting their efforts in the service of a particularly abominable occupier: their regal officialdom encouraged the project of rationalising and legalising the National Revolution, thus providing the Nazis with up-to-date databases of ‘undesirables’ and with a legal basis for discriminatory measures. 1.2. Emmanuel Mounier and imagined class collaboration Another wing of conservatism present and active in Vichy was the personalist milieu affiliated with social-Catholicism. Its main spokesman in Vichy was the philosopher and editor of Esprit, Emmanuel Mounier,12 but it also benefited from active sponsorship by Paul Bauduin, Foreign Minister in Laval’s first government, and by Georges Lamirand, head of the general-secretariat of Youth and the author of Le Rôle social de l’ingénieur. One important initiative in which the personalists engaged was the Ecole des Cadres at Uriage. The school, directed by Captain Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac, was established in 1940 in order to train the sons of the French elite according to the principles laid out by Marshal Lyautey in his Rôle Social de l’Officier and in accordance with Catholic morals and the principles of the National Revolution of Vichy. Eager to demonstrate the validity of these doctrines, and in particular their communitarian ideology which advocated class collaboration and national unity, the school tried to foster relations between its predominantly middle-class body of students and the working-class and peasant ‘cultures’. Thus, for instance, it introduced lectures by the Minister of Labour, the ex-CGT René Belin, and by Marcel Montcel, national president of the Jeunesse Ouvrier Catholique. Belin spoke of class collaboration and Montcel of ‘working class psychology’ – two themes central to the ‘professionals’ discourse. Indeed, the directors of the school regarded its mission as a training academy for the elite of the new French state that would combine the professional ethos with the traditional and religious values of personalism and social-Catholicism. By the end of 1940 they expressed their wish that ‘all men occupying whatever post of command in society, whether civil servants or engineers, professors or lawyers, take a course at Uriage.’13 This did not happen eventually due to a growing impatience on the part of the government with the school’s insistence on its independence and its aversion towards the policy of collaboration. However, in the school’s ideals we find, once again, the ethos of professionalism in its dualist form of misrecognition between contradictory tendencies. This is apparent in the attempt to bring down class

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divides and create a ‘national community’. While the school reached out to the working classes, the latter were far from enthusiastic with regard to it and deeply suspicious of its missionary Catholicism. This, however, did not prevent the school from regarding itself as the representation of ‘social harmony’, combining intellectual effort with sport and manual labour in the same way in which the intelligentsia and the proletariat were expected to collaborate within the national community. Of course the working class in question was not present in the school itself – only 6–8 per cent of the students came from a background which could be described as working class. Nor was it apparently the one encountered in the practical stage the students took in various factories; Dunoyer de Segonzac, when summing up the experiences of the school’s students in the factories remarked: ‘They confirmed what we have already learned from the representatives of the industrial world who have passed through Uriage; not only are workers in their totality not integrated into the national community but they are taking their distance from it, and that distancing, already larger than before the war, is continuing to grow.’14 The harmony the school was pursuing was, notwithstanding official declarations to the contrary, an intellectual concept, an idea, based on the romantic notions of socialCatholicism of writers like Péguy whose works were a dominant element in the school’s curriculum. To these symbolic workers, it was possible to attribute a typical ‘working-class mentality’ which, as we saw in Chapter 2, was defined and propagated by various publications of the professional milieu. It was this same mentality that was taught to the students at Uriage by Montcel, and it was also the one which informed the official messages of Pétain on la condition prolétarienne, ‘l’angoisse de la misère’; ‘le travail sans joie’; ‘le taudis dans la cité laide’; ‘la vie de nomade sans terre’.15 Bénigno Cacérès, a carpenter by trade and an instructor at the school, recalling an interview he had with one of the school’s masters remarked: ‘I was a kind of guinea pig. I was the authentic “prolo” on whom he wanted to perfect his method of mental training, of understanding proletarian structures of thought.’16 If the working class constituted one pole of the symbolic social hierarchy, the patrons were the other. Once again, their portrayal was predominantly pejorative. Mounier, for instance, condemned ‘the avarice of the money grabber, the strictness of the rich, the arrogance of the powerful . . . the sickening timidity which they impose on the poor.’17 Pétain, for his part, accused the patrons of ‘egoism and . . . incomprehension of the proletarian condition’18 and elsewhere, in an attack against ‘a capitalism blind and egoistic’ he equated the ‘servants of the trusts’ with

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‘the troops of the ancien régime . . . those who put their personal interests before those of the State, political parties with no following but suffused with sentiments of revenge, functionaries attached to a political order of which they were both the beneficiaries and the masters – or those who subordinated the interests of the motherland to those of foreign powers.’19 Between those two unattractive groups – the uprooted and uncivilised proletarian and the avaricious and egoistic patron, we find the middle class, represented in the economic domain by the professionals – engineers and other middle-management echelons – who were the balancing and rationalising mediators. When Mounier enumerated the qualities to be encouraged in the younger generation he in fact restated the ethical code associated with the professional milieu: a taste for bold and far-reaching projects which are nonetheless realistic; a willingness to learn from accumulated experience; a sense community based on functional hierarchy; a practical orientation which avoids overintellectualism; responsibility and initiative; commitment to serving the common good rather than pursuit of private gain; and austerity and functionality rather than decadent hedonism. It is this spirit, this ethos, which the students of Uriage were meant to adopt and make their own, as befits those who pretend to be worthy of the designation ‘Cadres’. In a text composed by members of the school staff we find the following declaration: ‘The selection method which we prefer is selection through life and we replace most written and oral exams, practical internships of various kinds, short and long, individual and collective, which allow to judge that which the exams could never judge: the professional value of a man and the qualities of a leader.’20 In Marshal Pétain’s aforementioned message he made it very clear that he too shared this view of the worth and the role of the professionals, and in particular the engineers, in the context of the National Revolution. After reproaching the proletarians and the patrons for their vices and inadequacies he told the engineers: ‘You have much more to do since you are not only technicians but also leaders.’21 It is through the misrecognition of the classes at the two poles of the social spectrum that the professionals, the ‘cadres’, gain their place in the tripartite equation that makes the basic unit of the new corporate order. As long as the patron is portrayed as an egoist and the proletarian as an anarchic nomad, the mediation of the engineer is essential. Thus, engineer Jacques Saint-Germain writes in Jean Luchaire’s Nouveaux Temps:

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How can we talk about social collaboration without evoking the image of him who, throughout economic crises, labour conflicts, political antagonisms, has always been the silent prototype of the collaborator, of the protector of the interests of economic enterprises both against the egoism of the bosses and against the spirit of class war? Both subordinate and commander, the engineer, always in the crossfire, has often played in recent years an extraordinarily productive role for which he will one day be commended.22 Indeed, Vichy’s most important piece of economic legislation, the Charte du Travail, reflected this opinion by creating the comites sociaux for every workplace and for every profession. These committees gave equal representation to the three groups: employers, cadres and workers and were authorised to reach agreements on various industrial matters. Of course, this is not to say that the men of Uriage were consciously pursuing a technocratic agenda. On the contrary, they were profoundly traditionalist and devoutly Catholic and their view of social matters was, as already mentioned, very romantic. However, that their ideas of leadership and of excellence corresponded so neatly with the ethos of professionalism, demonstrates both the strength of this ethos, which could become a model for the training of the ruling elite, and its adaptability to the discourse and the practice of even a very traditionalist milieu. 1.3. Marcel Déat and the makeshift dictatorship On 5 July 1940 Marcel Déat began to publish a series of articles in L’Oeuvre, now based in Clermont-Ferrand. In those articles he outlined his ideas for the new political order: The parties are dead . . . France will not be rebuilt on the basis of a national union. . . . What we need is what other peoples who have made their revolution already have, be it Italy, Germany or Russia – a party, a single party, which alongside the State and the government, assembles, animates and supports action. Once parliament has disappeared, the party will remain the sole link between the government and the public.23 Indeed, Laval led Déat to believe that he supported his ideas on this matter and encouraged him to explore it further. Déat, somewhat credulously, wrote in his journal: ‘The battle is won . . . the Party will have its budget.’24 This, in spite of his low opinion of the composition of Laval’s government which was too reactionary for his taste: ‘A country

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squire from Brittany will take charge of the Agriculture. We are told that such and such fossil will enter the Institute for National Education. . . . We shall see a lot of the inertia of senior civil servants, of retired businessmen, and of old men.’25 At the end of July Déat and his neo-socialist cronies submitted to Pétain a report which concluded their findings on the issue of the Parti Unique (PU). The report opened with the argument that the Parti Unique was needed in order to consolidate the authority of the new government: ‘Since there is no longer a parliament, and since neither the personal and direct action of the Head of State nor of his administration is enough, we need a large organization which can be divided into small units, each powerful in its own right.’26 The PU was also required for the rebuilding of the country’s elites so that ‘France will get its chance to make her revolution from above and in an orderly fashion.’ Finally, the PU would also guarantee that the German National-socialists ‘take us more seriously.’ In the doctrinal part of the report we find, among the major tasks of the PU: ‘Organize the “proportional representation” of the Jews in the various branches of the State, exclude them completely from some of these branches’ (this, before the first Statut des Juifs has been published by Vichy!) and ‘expel the undesirables’ (a euphemism for refugees from Nazi Germany and from Franco’s Spain). The third part of the report describes the structure and functioning of the PU and what is striking here is the close affinity to the model of industrial administration developed by Henri Fayol for the middle-management echelons – the ‘cadres’ (see Chapter 2): a unity of command and a clear hierarchy – ‘On each level the leader is accountable to his own leaders and has authority over his subordinates’; social and class impartiality: ‘the Party will accept all French of good will without distinction of origins’ (with several exceptions nevertheless: ‘the Jews will not be admitted. Nor will recently naturalized French’); devotion to service and not to personal careerism: ‘no one will make a career out of his membership in the Party’; mediation between upper and lower echelons: ‘It [the PU – N.A.] will act as mediator between the government and the people, an arbiter between the people and the public authorities’; a practical rather than theoretical orientation: ‘Ideology must become secondary to practical action’; specialisation: ‘The newly constituted ruling personnel will study the problems related to each specific social category and to each specific issue.’ Indeed, we may also view the PU claim for exclusivity as a kind of guild-like protectionism that regards the business of government as a

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distinctive professional competence which may suffer devaluation if allowed to be proclaimed by unauthorised agents. Finally, the authoritarian structure of the PU is explained also as a countermeasure to the ‘Bolshevik subversion’, an argument often found among spokesmen for the associations of the ‘cadres’. Déat and the neo-socialists were not alone in their efforts to promote the idea of a Parti Unique. On 10 July 1940 Déat’s signature appeared on a declaration drafted by the ex-Radical, Gaston Bergery, together with those of another 96 ex-parliamentarians, mostly of the dissident Left. The declaration begins with an equal condemnation of both the Right and the Left for their part in weakening France through their sectarianism, which ignored the fact that the true patriotic struggle should have been against both the plutocracy and the ‘Stalinist politics.’27 A further reason for the defeat in the war is given as the ‘incompetence of the leadership’; the text expounds: ‘To be a party leader, one needed precisely the kind of qualities which were the opposite of those needed in order to govern a great nation.’ It is hardly surprising that after such a condemnation comes an admission that the defeat is more an excuse than a reason for getting rid of the old regime: It would be an error with grave consequences if one were to consider changing the regime simply due to external pressure. [. . .] The change is unavoidable now that France is defeated but it was required already twenty years ago. And it was up to us to make that change then, in time to avoid the defeat.28 The new order envisioned by the declaration would be ‘autoritaire’, ‘national’ and ‘social’: ‘The new order must be a labour hierarchy, based on the principle of efficiency.’ The affinity and continuity of this critique with the pre-war agenda of the dissident Left in particular and the nonconformist milieu in general, is here explicit. Another person who was at the time pursuing efforts in favour of a Parti Unique was the self-styled fascist writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. On 10 August 1940 Drieu met Otto Abetz, the German ambassador, and told him: If Germany wishes to be generous with France, it can prove it by teaching us how to build an effective single party. The single party is, in our century, the only political means for a government to consolidate its power. If Germany wishes to see such a party in France

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it will prove it not just by letting us build it but by actually helping us, even forcing us, to do it. Not only do the French need teaching, they need coercing since they are still stunned by the defeat.29 Drieu, who like many ‘nonconformists’ in the second half of the 1930s, had joined the PPF in 1936 and left it not long afterwards, was campaigning for a German sponsorship of Doriot as the leader of the would-be Parti Unique. Abetz, however, disliked and distrusted Doriot and was more inclined towards Déat as the prospective leader. Both Déat’s and Drieu’s efforts finally came to nothing. Déat left Vichy for Paris, Bergery remained and was later appointed ambassador to Russia and then to Turkey. Drieu, enraged by his failure, published an angry pamphlet in which he denounced the Vichy government as ‘a gang of old charlatans’ led by ‘That old crook Laval’ and manipulated by parliament which ‘not having been dissolved but only sent on vacation, still holds its show-off sessions, its old backstage maneuverings, its old chronic sickness in the corridors of Vichy.’ The French, raged Drieu, are stupid and have only themselves to blame for their political incompetence and sterility. When, on 13 December 1940, Laval was removed from office by Pétain, who was being manipulated by his ultra-conservative entourage, Déat decided that there was no more point in expecting anything from Vichy and set out to launch the Parti Unique unilaterally. He began an extensive round of meetings with various political elements favourable to the policy of collaboration and at the same time free from the grip of Vichy. His most significant recruit was the Colonel Eugène Deloncle who had been leader of the Cagoule as well as of its successor – the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR). The fusion between Déat and Deloncle was not an easy one. Déat, a normalien, was a calculated intellectual; Deloncle, a polytechnicien, was an engineer, a man of action and an enthusiast of military-style organisation. The partnership collapsed in October 1941 and Déat was once again chef unique of his Parti Unique – Le Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP). He lost no time in renewing his campaign for the endorsement by both the Germans and the Vichy authorities of the ideas of Parti Unique with the RNP as its model. A series of articles published in l’Oeuvre between July and September 1941 (collected and published in book form in 1943) formed the basis of the revised doctrine for the prospective party. Déat expressed his full support for the policy of collaboration, which he thought should be pursued with more vigour, and for the eventual

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integration of France in Hitler’s new European order. To that end the RNP was willing to support Laval (now reinstated as prime minister) and to crush every political opposition. The new Europe would be based not on the old liberal individualism but rather on the communitarian principles of personalism: ‘Whatever happened to that individual praised with such agonizing tenderness by our outdated thinkers? He has become a person. The word speaks for itself, and all those reflexions by the young promoters of “personalism” were neither in vain nor untimely.’30 The party would be an intermediate between the masses and the state. It would seek to mobilise the political elites and to unite them into a single coherent order. Interestingly, Déat repeatedly put emphasis on the need for competent and educated people in the party who specialised in some field or other: ‘the militants must specialize in order to be more efficient’, and who, like scientists in a laboratory, can produce a synthesis which will put an end to social rifts. In his memoirs, Déat tried to clean himself of the charge of racial anti-Semitism. He wrote: The great reproach we can make at the Jews, with some honorable exceptions such as Emmanuel Berl, is for having, by race solidarity, become more and more supportive of the war against Germany and for having done everything they could, especially in London, in order to push us towards that adventure. There is no doubt that the situation of the Jews in Germany was indeed dire but this was not worth the sacrifice of French peasants who suffered under the scorching sun of the battle fields. This was and remains my strong conviction.31 However, in his Parti Unique articles Déat clearly spoke of a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ when he wrote about the Jewish issue: It is then that the French, who are a mixture of various peoples, but no less Aryan for that, formed the clear notion of a European community, defined not just on the basis of a common political goal and an institutional similarity, but also on the basis of a common identity based on blood. It is important to consider the fact that our people, more than any other, must rebuild itself biologically, since at the moment it is lacking both in quantity and in quality. The precautions taken by the cattle breeders should be applied with the same care to the nurturing of children, of French men, and that the purity of the race is the precondition of any demographic renovation.32

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Déat’s public speeches were also quite clear on this issue. On 12 July 1942 he told the National Council of the RNP: The Jewish problem is the problem of foreigners and we must therefore look at it from the other direction: we started by taking in all the Jews and then we said: we are going to sort from among them those of whom we must get rid. And now we say: let us begin by not taking any of them in, and later on we may choose from among them some who are worthy of joining the French community.33 The treatment of the Jewish issue by Déat is a good illustration of the transformation which might occur in an ideological system once it attempts to adapt to different historical circumstances. Déat was not a hard-core anti-Semite of the Action Française school, nor did he show much consistent interest in biological racism. In fact we find very little trace of anti-Semitism in his pre-war writing, and bearing in mind his rigorous academic training, his meticulousness and his repeated insistence that his activities in the 1940s were only an extension of ideas he had formulated already in the previous decade, this can hardly be put down to neglect. In fact, the most likely reason for suddenly introducing this element into his doctrine was a purely Machiavellian calculation on his part that this would ingratiate him with the powers that be. Déat was certainly cold-blooded enough to do this, as we can see from the following passage: Being revolutionary nowadays is like being a doctor. But this time we make nature obey us by obeying to it. Without excluding a few necessary chirurgic interventions we must also not resort to butchery. The concentration camp can be much more efficient than the guillotine.34 If this is reminiscent of a similar statement by Jean Coutrot (see Chapter 4), it is certainly not surprising. Déat was in agreement with Coutrot on the possibilities suggested by the project of rationalising political action and utilising manipulative propaganda methods. In fact it was precisely against the disciples of Coutrot that Déat used such manipulation when he took an active part in the instigation of the famous ‘complot synarchique’, which was designed to destabilise Darlan’s technocratic government. Déat wrote on that episode:

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What struck me immediately was the force of the ‘myth’ and the use I could make of it both against the maneuverings of French capitalism and against the more dangerous elements of German conservatism. [. . .] The names were less important: the myth was more efficient when it was impersonal, vague and omnipresent. In fighting against this scheme, I knew very well that I needed not hide from what was clearly a phantom, but at the same time I planted in the imaginations, in an appealing and disconcerting way, these dark threats which a cool and rational analysis would have exposed as completely inoffensive.35 Would it really be far-fetched to assume that a similar calculation stood in front of his eyes when he took up the anti-Semitic cause? There is, of course, one difference between the two cases: the consequences of the manufactured ‘complot’ would have been the sacking of a few ministers. The consequences of anti-Semitism and an active encouragement of ‘aryanisation’ were, in fact, the confinement of tens of thousands in concentration camps and their eventual deportation to Auschwitz. 1.4. Bertrand de Jouvenel and pseudo-science In Chapter 4 we discussed the activities of Bertrand de Jouvenel at the critical moment of 1934 when he launched his Lutte des Jeunes after an angry break with the Radical party. In 1938 de Jouvenel published Le Réveil de l’Europe. The book begins with a retrospective discussion of the nonconformist efforts of the 1920s (see Chapter 3). Those efforts, claims de Jouvenel, came to nothing because they were too intellectual and divorced from reality: ‘The “young bands” of 1923–1929 shared the faults of the erudite circles of the 18th century. They constructed an abstract “just” world without considering whether their designs coincided with the will of the majority.’36 What was actually needed was a political strategy based on a concept which sees humanity ‘as a big machine which spends its energy in endless frictions, with an output that is forever increasing.’37 It was also necessary to be rid of the illusion that the proletarian masses could share this vision and effect the necessary reforms. Instead it would have been more productive to look to the ‘international aristocracy’ of similarly minded young men all across Europe with whose projects ‘our efforts . . . would coincide’, and with whom the French ‘nonconformists’ have, in fact, a common political agenda.

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But instead, the ‘nonconformists’ remained entrenched in the prevailing political culture of the Third Republic, which was a mixture of materialistic socialism and individualistic liberalism that was being offered to the working class in order to appease it. As a result of this misguided effort, the interwar period witnessed the rise of social deformities such as ‘a certain type of denationalized, migratory workforce. Devoid of any technical capacity it is a pure labour force, a product of the big factory and usable in such a factory alone.’38 To restore society to its healthy condition: ‘It takes . . . a “personnel” [des “cadres”], a group of individuals who possess certain physical and moral qualities and inspired by the same rules.’ However, ‘At the moment of truth we discovered that our society does not possess such personnel.’ This, argues Jouvenel, is because ‘Western society, in the period between 1830 and 1930 has lost its notion of aristocracy, and forgot that in every human society, at any time, there must be a personnel dedicated to its defence, and motivated by its sense of mission which is on a much higher plane than the egoistic goals pursued by everyone else.’39 In this context, Jouvenel laments the ‘pantouflage’ (crossover from the public to the private sector) of many graduates of the technical schools and remarks: ‘Future historians will find curious our choice of members of the Legion of Honour and will conclude that the Republic had more respect for the self enriching financier than for the officer, wounded in the defence of his homeland.’40 The ‘cadres’ must be reinforced with new blood, coming from those quarters in French society which have not yet been spoiled by individualism, materialism and the false ideas of equality and class-war: ‘There will be found the new aristocracy . . . in the service of principles which are neither old nor new but permanent.’ This lesson, adds de Jouvenel, has already been learned by ‘the anti-Marxist movements known as “fascist” ’.41 The last part of the book, entitled ‘Le Rappel à l’ordre’ begins with an eulogy to force. Force, claims de Jouvenel, is at the bottom of every meaningful collective action. In a democratic and liberal society this fact is often concealed behind a ‘more respectable’ façade of parliamentary deliberations. However: ‘if we were to examine this more carefully, we would conclude that almost always the decision taken by the “wise”, which manages to avoid the use of force, leads to exactly the same result as a violent conflict would have done.’ Therefore, the only thing that can be meant by those who advocate a peaceful solution of conflicts is: ‘an intervention by those wise men who calculate the probable result of a violent conflict and then recommend to the various parties ways

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to reach that result without using violence.’ De Jouvenel thus concludes with regard to role of force in politics: ‘we cannot avoid admiring it, recognizing its rights, salute its creative and organizing virtues.’42 The cult of force, continues de Jouvenel, has swept in its wake the youth of Europe. With team spirit, discipline and boldness they have created a new creed for the continent, ordained by ‘le jugement de Dieu’. Out of this creed the old European Man, ‘le Franc’, is reborn and restored to its proper place among the elite. It is ultimately a spiritual revolution: ‘The physical force which fascist movements are reproached for using was acquired through their spiritual force.’43 This is why these rulers cannot be accused of despotism. In fact, ‘they resemble those founders of dynasties, of whom our Capetians provide a good example, who could construct anything solid only so long as they were themselves bound by the principles which they advocated.’44 De Jouvenel’s next book, Après la Défaite, published in 1941, contained even more accentuated praise for Nazi Germany and for its ‘communitarian’ values which, de Jouvenel insists, rightfully triumphed over French bourgeois individualism. It is no wonder, as notes Zeev Sternhell, that this book became a favourite with the Nazi propaganda service, which actively promoted it.45 In this book, de Jouvenel continues his exploration of the new political sciences. Having already established in his mind the validity of the sociological concepts of ‘force’ and ‘community’ in politics, he now turns to discuss the application of the natural sciences in this field. De Jouvenel identifies three main branches of new sciences, which bridge the gap between nature and society: biopolitics, geopolitics and psychopolitics. These sciences, he claims, are gradually replacing the old disciplines which were based on the false principles of liberal democracy: The architects of the defeat had taught that France was composed of a President of the Republic, a Senate, a Chambre of Parliament and an electoral corpus. To these mythical creatures of the Faculty of Law, the press added other monsters such as the Radical Party and the Socialist Party which gave the impression that France was inhabited only by such apocalyptic fauna. The biopolitician sweeps away all these entities. He sees on the national soil nothing but men. He sees them as they truly are, not very many and not very pretty.46 And thus, the biopolitician takes upon himself the task of ‘correcting the defective tendencies of the French race’; the geopolitician ‘will bring to our attention our destiny as it is embedded in the form and structure

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of our French soil, on the mainland and overseas’, an important task if ones accepts de Jouvenel’s claim that: ‘the overwhelming superiority of the leaders of the Third Reich stems from the fact they have always kept their eyes fixed on the maps and on the key strategies of international politics.’ Finally, the psychopolitician should study the biographies of key figures in the past: ‘The psychopolitician will be able to determine what qualities made the national leadership in various periods in the past. The same types of individuals still exist today. What we must do is assemble all those fortunate people who exhibit those qualities and to make them into our future elite.’47 The new political science advanced by de Jouvenel has in fact very little originality – there is hardly anything in it that had not been stated and restated throughout the interwar period. However, while the appeals to the ‘cadres’ as a ruling elite and to ‘professionalism’ as a new national ethos seemed somewhat Utopian and far-fetched in the 1920s when de Jouvenel and other ‘Young Turks’ propagated them in their nonconformist journals, its reaffirmation in the late 1930s on the background of a tottering parliamentary regime which is, in fact, being invaded by the cadres to an unprecedented extent, carries a much heavier weight. It is at this point that the anguished critique of a young man in the face of the regime’s ills becomes the active engagement of the adult politician (de Jouvenel, let us not forget, is at the time a centralcommittee member of Doriot’s PPF) who is hammering the last nails into the Republic’s coffin and, after the defeat, dancing on its grave. To his vision of a new aristocracy of ‘cadres’ de Jouvenel could find partners both in Vichy (as we shall see shortly) and among the collaborationists, as noted in the following passage from Nouveaux Temps: The profession of engineer which in the past was almost legendary, the aristocracy of the production process, has deteriorated little by little until it has become just another occupation, taken-up without a sense of vocation, and the attainment of a basic diploma has replaced the thoughtful selection process appropriate for those who are to fulfil a difficult social function. [. . .] The present events, the need to redress our national economy and our professional morality through our own devices, provide our corps of engineers with an opportunity to reverse this historical process. [. . .] Remaking France requires, first and foremost, the employment of engineers.48 But it is not just the call for the replacement of democracy with an authoritarian technocracy that is interesting for us in de Jouvenel’s

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writings. His insistence on the applicability of the natural sciences to not only the study but also the government of society will reveal, as we shall later see, a particularly sinister affinity with some of the more unsavoury activities of the Vichy regime.

2. The technocrats of Vichy 2.1. The conquest of government We already noted in Chapter 4 the rapid and extensive infiltration of the political establishment in the second half of the 1930s by professional experts, engineers and other ‘cadres’, who had integrated into the more technical ministries mainly under Reynaud and Daladier. This tendency accelerated even further under Vichy so that Laval’s first government included just five parliamentarians, his second government had only himself and, when he was deposed on 13 December 1941, the new government, led by Admiral Darlan, had none at all. This was not merely a result of an aversion to the politicians of the Third Republic but an expression of a new political culture whereby government was the business of technicians – experts in the field for which their ministry was responsible. Thus Pierre Caziot, an agronomic engineer was given the Ministry of Agriculture; Raphaël Alibert, a jurist, was appointed to the Ministry of Justice; René Belin, ex-CGT official, received the Ministry of Labour, etc. In other cases, ex-directors of ministries were simply ‘promoted’ to a ministerial position: Marcel Peyrouton in Interior Affairs; Jean Bertholet in Communications; Jacques Chevalier in Education. This demonstrated the disappearance of the divide between civil servants and politicians – both were now expected to act according to professional standards, as different echelons of a single executive body. Every ‘technical’ minister brought with him his own entourage of experts: Belin, for instance, brought in Henri Lafond, Jacques Barnaud (X-Crise, Nouveaux Cahiers), Pierre Laroque (Homme Nouveau, Nouveaux Cahiers, Plan du 9 juillet) and Jean Bichelonne (X-Crise and future Minister of Industry). These men were to create the Comités d’Organisation (CO) through which more ‘cadres’ were admitted: Francois Lehideux (X-Crise, Nouveaux Cahiers, and future Minister of Industry), Pierre Pucheu (PPF, X-Crise, and future Minister of Industry and later of Interior) and Jean Luchaire (RNP, Lutte des Jeunes, Cahiers Bleus, Nouveaux Temps). On 12 August 1941 Pétain broadcast a sombre message to the nation referring to ‘an atmosphere of bogus turmoil and intrigue’ created by the enemies of the regime and in particular by ‘the servants of the trusts’.

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To understand the significance of that message we must go back to December of the previous year, when Pierre Laval was ousted from office in an internal coup orchestrated by the conservative elements in Pétain’s entourage, some of whom despised him and begrudged him his parliamentary past; others were wary of his all too obvious Germanophilia. Another victim of the coup, away in Paris, was Déat whose disillusion with the Vichy regime brought him to criticise it in extremely harsh terms in his paper. Both Laval and Déat were arrested and later released through the intervention of the German ambassador Otto Abetz. In February, after a short interim, Admiral Darlan was announced the new prime minister. His government was ‘purified’ of parliamentarians and reinforced with more experts coming from private industry and affiliated with both the non-conformist circles and with various economic and financial interests. 2.2. The Worms group and the affair of the ‘synarchie’49 Among these new recruits was a certain group, which later received the collective designation ‘Le group Worms’ due to the affiliation of most of its members in one capacity or another to the Worms bank. At the centre of the group was Gabriel Le Roy-Ladurie who remained throughout the Vichy period a kind of ‘éminence grise’ without ever assuming any official position. Other members in the group were Pierre Pucheu, Jacques Barnaud, François Lehideux, Victor Arrighi and later also Paul Marion. Drieu La Rochelle hovered around the group in the hope of enlisting their support for his project of creating a parti unique. All these individuals also had in common a brief membership in Doriot’s PPF in the late 1930s. Their goal, which they discussed in their regular meetings in an office belonging to the Worms bank, was to make use, as extensively and as effectively as possible, of the governmental apparatus in order to advance the rationalisation of French industry through a ‘revolution from the top’ and through an integration into the new Nazi Europe. They had no time for either the old conservatives of the Action Française or the ‘ultra-collaborators’ like Déat. They had once been let down by a would-be dictator in the person of Doriot and were not looking for another. Darlan and Pétain, who knew and cared little about economic matters, suited them nicely since they were easy to manipulate once lip-service to the tropes of National Revolution had been paid. However, the group’s sectarian habits (their ‘secret’ meetings and the fact that they tutoied each other), their ‘Parisian’ mentality, which took them away to the capital on weekends, annoyed many in Vichy such as, for instance, Pétain’s chef de cabinet Henri Du Moulin de Labarthète,

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who nurtured real animosity towards the group and in particular against Pucheu whose ambition he regarded as a threat. Pétain himself couldn’t have had much sympathy for the group’s apparent lenient approach to big capital and to their disinterest in the traditional themes of the National Revolution. The opportunity to be rid of the group presented itself in June 1941 when Jean Coutrot plunged to his death from the balcony of his Parisian apartment. Although it has never been established for certain whether this was an accident or suicide (most commentators are inclined to accept the latter), his affiliation before the war with many of the Vichy technocrats immediately sparked off rumours about him being their ‘secret leader’, the ‘brain’ behind the group, etc. The rumours insisted on another curious point: that Coutrot and his group were in fact members of a secret society called ‘la synarchie’, an ancient Masonic splinter group devoted to the task of subverting the existing order to make way for the big plutocratic trusts which would eventually assume political power. A document called ‘la pacte synarchiste’, probably the work of someone belonging to the Martinist order and containing a ludicrous blueprint for an international conspiracy not unlike the one associated with the forgery known as the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, was found in Coutrot’s home library after his death and was handed over (perhaps by Coutrot’s estranged brother-in-law) to the special security police of Vichy in Paris. There it fell into the hands of Dr Henri Martin, head of the police force and a particularly paranoiac zealot, an ex-Maurrassien and Cagoulard and a self-styled ‘specialist’ of political subversion. It was a report written by Martin which set off the affair of the ‘synarchie’. One recipient of Martin’s report was Raoul Husson, who was working on a report concerning the causes of the defeat in 1940. Martin’s ‘revelations’ provided him with an excellent scapegoat. His own report found its way to Henri Chavin, Chief of the Sûreté, who complied yet another version of the story. Finally, Marcel Déat, who was waiting in the wings for ammunition against the Vichy government, seized upon the story and published a series of articles in his paper denouncing the ‘conspirators’. We have already seen that in his memoirs Déat admitted that even at the time he realised that the story could not have been true and only served in order to incite public opinion against those he believed were keeping him away from a governmental position and the political influence that it entailed. An actual conspiracy there probably was not, but the young and ambitious technocrats of the Vichy government were the disciples of

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an economic and political agenda which, as we have already seen, had been nurtured by the nonconformist milieu since the 1920s. The novelty of the Vichy period, and in particular of the Darlan administration, in this regard was that this agenda had now become government policy implemented by the very agents designated for this task by the ‘nonconformists’ throughout the interwar period – professional experts, mostly engineers and fiscal inspectors. Technocracy had finally come into its own. 2.3. The legacy of Jean Coutrot Jean Coutrot himself failed to find his place among them. Like the biblical Moses, he had led them through the political desert of the 1930s and died before entering the Promised Land of executive governmental power. He did try to join them, though. In August 1940 he published in Déat’s l’Oeuvre an article which proposed to regard the result of the war not as defeat but rather as a ‘common victory’ by France and Germany over ‘the absurd rigidity of the national personnel who, since the 19th century, fragment Europe into unstable and antagonistic enclaves.’ He expressed his belief in a common future in which ‘we will find stronger life forces than the ones we have so far known.’50 In another article he outlined the raison d’être of a future technocratic government: Just when Germany offers us a great lesson in the scientific organization of industrial, administrative and military work, at the very moment we are constrained to reform French production and administration, it is impossible to implement the measures which would ensure the sustainability of such reform.51 He then argues that such organisation requires: ‘Few men but dynamic ones, who finally have real power and responsibility.’ Throughout that summer Coutrot continued to produce various documents, sometimes drafted in the form of actual decrees and bills of law, which he intended to be used for the purpose of an overall economic reform. Among these documents is, for instance, one where he envisions the creation of a new professional organisation composed ‘of economic experts uncorrupted by personal business interests: real technicians of professional organization, animators of the economy.’52 Undoubtedly, Coutrot saw himself as one of those experts and there is evidence to suggest that he tried to obtain a governmental appointment. These efforts coming to nothing and his deteriorating health are reflected in his morbid correspondence of the time and in the testimonies provided

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by his acquaintances. By May 1940 Coutrot was already suffering from what seems like deep depression, a fact which gives credence to the assumption that his death in that month was indeed a suicide. If Coutrot never entered the Promised Land, others who carried his ideas did. Let us now take a closer look at one of them, perhaps the most prominent figure among the Vichy technocrats: Pierre Pucheu. 2.4. Pierre Pucheu: the state as an industrial enterprise Pucheu was born in 1899. Although a student of humanities at the Ecole Normale Supérieur, Pucheu felt disinclined towards life in an ivory tower. In his memoirs, written while awaiting trial in Algiers, he wrote: I did not have a sense of vocation as a teacher. Later, I actually enjoyed teaching. I trained many young men. But I did so through experience, at the office, in study tours, in the workshops. And I still have the same distaste for the ‘ex-cathedra’ type of pedagogy.53 Indeed, after graduating, Pucheu turned to the world of business: I passionately wanted to experience the real life of the factory. To that end, I had to give up the secure existence that I had had. I had to find a big factory with a large number of workers where I could have, in one way or another, all the powers and all the responsibilities.54 He found such place in the Japy Company, where he worked first as an administrator and later as the president. Pucheu was, however, a politically motivated industrialist who set his mind on technocratic designs which went much further than the management of a single company. He was thoroughly infused with the ideas of the nonconformist milieu and believed in a strong, authoritarian state, a controlled economy and a hierarchical society. This led him to join the Volontiers Nationaux of Colonel La Rocque’s Croix de Feu in 1934 and, disappointed with their conservatism and inaction, to switch to Doriot’s more vibrant PPF where he remained in the capacity of treasurer until 1939. Simultaneously, he participated in various think-tanks (Plan du 9 Juillet, X-Crise) and wrote for several reviews (e.g. Travail et Nation) of the technocratic circles. In 1941 he was appointed Minister of Industrial Production in Darlan’s government and after a few months transferred to the Ministry of Interior. In 1943, realising that the Germans were losing the war, he escaped to Algiers to join the forces of Free France. However, he was arrested, tried and executed for treason.

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Pucheu described himself in terms typical of the professional milieu and appropriate to the ethos of ‘l’ingénieur social’: devotion, modesty, pragmatism and an indifference to ‘petty’ political machinations. As a patron, Pucheu testified about himself: I am no playboy and have never entertained neither dancers nor horses, nor yachts. My only pleasure was to welcome my friends at my humble family dinner table. I was always rewarded for my work with a fixed salary which was topped at the end of the year with a bonus given at the discretion of my employers. My status was, in essence, equal to that of the humblest worker. I never partook in the profits of the companies I served.55 If he was anti-Marxist it was, therefore, not because he wished to protect his own privileges or those of other capitalists but simply ‘through an instinctive sympathy for natural hierarchies’ and his entry into politics was ‘motivated by a sense of disgust with the regime’, which increased apropos the events of February 1934. Similarly, when joining the government in 1941, ‘I knew very well that I was taking upon myself a mission involving sacrifice. But something inside me told me that it would be cowardice to refuse to partake in the national crossbearing.’56 This in spite of the fact that ‘political action requires the kind of opportunism which I lack and a drive which I never felt.’57 Ramon Fernandez, an ex-comrade in the PPF, who interviewed Pucheu for the collaborationist La Gerbe in 1941 wrote about him: Here is this man, with his harmonious and stable complexity, with his good-natured and earnest personality: a personal personality, if I may say so. Here is this normalien, student of the Arts, who has become one of our young and enterprising industrialists and at the same time one of those who are concerned by the troubles of our country.58 Pucheu thus projected an image which was almost archetypical of the professional, the technicien to whom numerous appeals had been issued throughout the interwar period to save France from its financial crisis, from its enemies, from its crumbling political system and, in short, from itself. And Pucheu set about this task with the determination and the rigor he brought with him from his industrial activities. Robert Aron (Ordre Nouveau) wrote about him: ‘He wants to see France governed like an industrial enterprise, he hates poor performance, despises democracy

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which he derides as “démocrasouillie” and believes that the police should be the basis of the new regime.’59 Drieu La Rochelle who met him when he frequented the meetings of the Worms Group remarked: ‘Pucheu’s character was better disposed towards realizing that which, for Marion, Arrighi, myself and Benoist-Méchin, remained wrapped-up in intellectual inhibitions.’60 And what were the tasks which Pucheu was so keen to carry out and which required such determination and lack of inhibition? In the already mentioned interview with Fernandez, while Minister of Interior, Pucheu explained: There are the senior members of freemasonry whose details are included in the lists you read. There are the Jews: an economic Aryanization of the unoccupied zone is also necessary, so that the two zones are synchronized. Here measures against individuals are insufficient and often misleading: it is important to examine economic influence. Finally, there is communism.61 Indeed, on 19 October 1941 Pucheu signed a decree creating the Police Aux Questions Juives (PQJ), which was to join the Anti-Communist Police created two weeks earlier. A Secret Societies Police was formed two months later. In the free zone the PQJ was confined to André Dupont of the Limoges office of the Commissariat Général aux Question Juives (CGQJ). The section in the occupied zone was put under the charge of Jacques Schweblin – an associate of Pucheu, an engineer and a veteran of both the Croix de Feu and the PPF. Schweblin recruited his own men, mostly from the ranks of Déat’s RNP, Doriot’s PPF and Deloncle’s MSR. This force assisted the Germans in rounding up Jews in the occupied zone. Pucheu’s signature appears also on the various decrees and laws passed during his tenure by the Vichy authorities against foreigners, Jews and political dissidents. A couple of incidents recounted by Robert Aron are particularly indicative of Pucheu’s attitude. In October 1941 the Germans were planning a retaliatory execution of prisoners. They asked Pucheu to authorise the list of their intended victims. Originally the list contained 150 prisoners. Pucheu pleaded for a reduction in that number and, indeed, a new list containing only 50 names was submitted for his signature. However, that list included many First World War veterans. Pucheu told the Germans that he could not authorise the execution of such patriots. A third list was then given to him by the Germans, which contained only the names of known communist militants. Pucheu pleaded

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no more and authorised the executions. Almost everyone on that list was executed within days. Another incident had taken place a couple of months earlier when the Germans insisted that the French provide them with six prisoners to be executed as punishment for the assassination of a German officer. The secretary-general of the Ministry of Justice called Pucheu and asked him to try and obtain an amnesty for the three people arrested, who apparently had nothing to do with the assassination. Pucheu refused. He refused again when the caller asked him to reconsider his decision on at least one of the three, who was married and had children. Pucheu explained: ‘The Germans demanded six heads. The special section had only condemned three people to death. In this situation I cannot give pardon; execution must take place tomorrow.’62 Pucheu was accused by the clandestine press of the resistance, particularly that of the communists, of having initiated and orchestrated the execution of prisoners. Very little evidence has been offered in support of these claims, and it would not be unreasonable to assume that they were based on the same propaganda-related calculations as the affair of the ‘synarchie’. Pucheu was of course implicated in those executions, as he was in the round-ups and incarcerations of Jews and foreigners who were fleeing from persecution and certain death in neighbouring countries. He was implicated by his involvement in the creation and maintenance of the mechanisms and the logistics that were the infrastructure of Vichy’s collaboration with the German occupation. It was a moral responsibility and as such, of course, unquantifiable. To the technocratic Pucheu such argumentation was incomprehensible. For him, ‘being a man, is first and foremost being in control of oneself. It is to know how to resist temptations and impulses. It is being able, in any circumstances, to control them through objective contemplation.’63 Therefore it is perhaps the verdict given by Robert Aron on his subject that is the most precise and is worth quoting at length: He is at fault not for having spilled French blood since, actually, it is thanks to him that there were fewer fatalities and more survivors. He is at fault for trying to apply statistical calculations to what should never be quantified – the life and death of men who are united with him through membership of the same national community. His mistake was to have chosen, or at least agreed without protest when the German chose, to make distinctions between various categories of Frenchmen in order that the Germans can have their victims; his great mistake was to consider the life of a communist, as much a soldier of the resistance as anyone else, less worthy of defending.

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The fault of Pucheu is therefore less political than moral or metaphysical. He does not provoke the kind of rage of a Robespierre at the Convention or of the Duke of Aumale at the trial of Bazaine, but rather a kind of sacred horror which Pascal would have felt at the thought of serious human problems, such which involve questions of life and death, being analysed through the application of geometry.64 One doesn’t have to accept Aron’s distinction between the political and the metaphysical to realise that Pucheu’s culpability is of a different nature than that of, for instance, Darquier de Pellepoix, Commissaire Général des Questions Juives, who is motivated by hatred and obsessed with his bêtes noires, which he has been pursuing religiously since the 1930s. On this point, it would perhaps be helpful to take note of the interesting typology proposed by Laurent Joly apropos the employees of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives. Joly distinguishes between five generic types but we shall concentrate here on two which are pertinent to our discussion of Pucheu. First is l’antisémite légaliste – respectable, often of a high social status, a lawyer perhaps, an industrialist or a senior civil servant who is conceived by everyone as honest. His strategy is to hide behind the letter of the law, assuring others as well as himself that his actions are justified by the application of proper procedure. Jean Armilhon, legal advisor to the CGQJ was, for instance, such a person. His view on the anti-Semitic laws and decrees which he drafted was very clear: Antisemitism should be conceived not as an issue of racial or religious hatred, but essentially as a reflex of national defence. Anything which exceeds the measures necessary in order to ensure this defence against the Jewish invader must be considered not only as futile but as undermining the whole exercise.65 This is reminiscent of the way Déat, another ‘respectable’ academician, excused his own anti-Semitism and of Maurras’ ‘antisemitism d’état’. It is strikingly similar to Pucheu’s view on the matter: In the case of Jewish immigration, for the reasons explained earlier, we will have to be very prudent. The only way to guarantee for the Jews who are of old French descent their rights as citizens, is to ensure that we receive only the minimum of Jewish immigrants.66 A second type identified by Joly is le fonctionnaire zélé – often unmarried, workaholic, professionally over-conscientious and dull. Socially,

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he or she would normally be considered arrivistes. Joly brings as an example the case of Mlle Marie-Eleonore Mathieu who managed the liaison service of the CGQJ between December 1940 and July 1944. Her duties included assuring the smooth transfer of communications between the CGQJ and the German authorities, thus facilitating coordination between the occupiers and their Vichy collaborators. Mathieu also took initiatives of her own such as the systematisation of the data on the progress of ‘aryanisation’ in various sectors of the economy, thus making it easier for the Germans to survey and supervise these activities. In a note addressed to her boss Darquier de Pellepoix in November 1942, Mathieu confesses her passion for her work: Allow me to take this opportunity to assure you that nothing would make me happier than knowing that my work accords with both your wishes and with the needs of the moment. In the same note she adds: I have made this Liaison Service in which I have invested all my efforts and sacrificed all my spare time, my holidays and my personal life, the centre of my present existence.67 This kind of narrow-minded monographic attitude is well known among civil servants who in the course of their careers serve various masters with different and sometimes contradictory political agendas and normative priorities. The mechanism which makes this possible detaches pragmatic and utilitarian considerations from moral ones or, in more complex set-ups, sublimates the moral in the pragmatic and finds normative justification in the maintenance of a continuous and uninterrupted process. Strategy and tactics are elevated to the status of permanent truths while ideology is derogated as ephemeral and capricious and therefore unreliable. In a democratic regime, this instrumental attitude in the executive is, at least in theory, checked by both the political system, where legislation may constrain it, and by the judicial system, which contrasts it with normative and constitutional postulates. However, once the boundaries between the three powers are effaced, and all are subjected to the same ethos – the professional one, the attitude of the fonctionnaire can easily become that of a judge or of a minister. We saw how Pucheu described himself in terms akin to those used by Mlle Mathieu: the sacrifice of personal comfort, denial of privileges and pleasures, dedication, etc. We also saw how his explanation of his actions was similar to the one offered by the legal expert Armilhon. But

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Pucheu, unlike those two, was a senior minister, and it is on his authorisation that many of these lesser officials relied when fulfilling their duties. Pucheu, we must remember, was not the only one of his kind in the government. Another minister was, for instance, Francois Lehideux, an industrialist like Pucheu and another member of the Worms group. When writing in his memoirs about his period in government he notes: ‘Personally, I have never been an antisemite. [. . .] I must confess that the anti-Jewish laws passed by Vichy in October 1940 somehow escaped my notice; or at least they did not leave the impression they should have done.’ He then admits taking notice of these measures when joining the government in 1941, but ‘I justified it to my conscience by the efforts I had to make in order to protect the French labour-force which was held captive by the Germans.’68 It is of course highly unlikely that Lehideux could have been unaware of the antiJewish measures, which were publicly and proudly announced. More probably he knew about them but adopted the same attitude he did when he joined the government: it was unpleasant but there were more important things to deal with. . . . More important and more exciting too, apparently. Jean Bichelonne, another one of the Vichy technocrats and like Pucheu and Lehideux Minister of Industrial Production, who was a great enthusiast of economic collaboration with the Germans, is reported to have cried out one day: ‘It is painfully hard to satisfy the German demands. It’s exciting!’69 Bichelonne’s dedication to the collaborative effort brought Darlan to remark: ‘You’d have made an excellent Minister of the Economy of the Reich.’70 Pucheu wrote about him: He worked fifteen hours a day, too much for his own good, in constant precipitation because he didn’t know how to delegate tasks. [. . .] His will to serve political ends, at such troubled times, seemed to me commendable since in order to do so he abandoned a lucrative private career. [. . .] To tell the truth, this man, so gifted in many ways, was more of a marvellous production machine than an original and constructive spirit.71 Bichelonne was so dedicated to his job that he refused to abandon ship even when all his colleagues had already realised that it was quickly sinking. He remained in office during the last throes of the government when, after the final reshuffle, it fell into the hands of the most extreme wing of the collaboration, and he escaped with them to Germany, where he died.

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2.5. The collaboration of science: Georges Mauco, Georges Montandon and Alexis Carrel Another site in Vichy where the ethos of professionalism had important consequences was that of the applied sciences. In what follows we shall look into manifestations of this science in relation to three key themes of the National Revolution: anti-immigration, anti-Semitism and eugenics. In 1932, Georges Mauco submitted his doctoral thesis, which dealt with the immigration wave experienced by France since the First World War. His thesis was published in book format in that same year under the title: Foreigners in France: their Economic Role and Activity. The book soon won the appreciation of commentators on both the Left and the Right. The Left saw in this work, which was very detailed and informative of the condition of the immigrants, an instrument to combat the exploitation and abuse of those immigrants. Indeed, Mauco warned against the lack of sanitation, appropriate lodgings and proper medical treatment for the immigrants and provided valuable statistical evidence in support of his claims. On the other hand, Mauco’s book also raised other issues with regard to immigration which had little to do with the welfare of the immigrants themselves. In a section entitled Immigration and the ethnic and moral unity of the nation he wrote: But even if the purity of the French ‘race’ is not threatened by European immigration, is it not endangered by threats issuing from within the French nation? [. . .] Up to which point would the immigrants, even those who have been assimilated, partake in this state of mind, this moral discipline, and subscribe to the ‘permanent plebiscite’ which is the nation? Up to which point will French intelligence and culture be able to sustain the weight of these massive imports without collapsing or getting distorted?72 Mauco soon offered his own answers to these questions: These crowds of immigrants, many of whom are uprooted misfits, increase by a third the rate of crime in France and are incontestably the agents of demoralization and disorder. No less pernicious is the moral deliquesce of certain Armenians, Greeks, Jews and other foreigners, mostly peddlers and dealers. The intellectual influence of foreigners is more difficult to detect but it is apparent especially in

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the form of an opposition to reason, to the spirit of finesse, to prudence and to a good sense of proportion which is characteristic of the French.73 However, Mauco did not advocate a halt to immigration as he realised the value of the immigrants to France as a workforce much needed after the colossal losses of the First World War. Instead he wrote: ‘The only remedy to racial anaemia and to this silent invasion is a policy which reduces the shocking inequality and which accords economic advantage to the family over individual egoism.’74 In this, Mauco reflected a general pro-natalist sentiment in France which found expression, for instance, in the Code de la Famille, passed by the Daladier government in 1938, setting out an obligatory course in ‘demographic studies’ for all high schools. The Vichy government adopted this Code in 1942 and extended its application to primary schools as well. All children were to be taught that the family was ‘the source of the conservation and the improvement of the race.’75 The issue of immigration was at the centre of public debate in the mid1930s. In the same year that Mauco published his book, a law was passed which set limits to the employment of foreign workers. Between 1932 and 1939 no less than 221 governmental decrees were issued on the basis of that law, which determined, for every profession, the proportion between French and foreign workers. In 1935 Henry de Jouvenel offered Mauco the position of secretarygeneral of his Comite d’études du problème des étrangers. However, de Jouvenel passed away soon afterwards and the Committee became defunct. Another similar Committee was set up by Adolphe Landry not long afterwards and Mauco was appointed its secretary-general, a position he occupied also at the Union Scientifique Internationale de la Population. He was now an established authority on immigration in France. It was only after his association with Doriot’s PPF in 1938 that his professional expertise was explicitly mobilised for an ideological cause. In 1940, in an article entitled ‘révolution 1940’, Mauco launched an attack against liberal democracy, which he accused of being ‘the development of calculation and foresight, put in the service of the individual as opposed to the family. A liberal economy which penalized the family, a democracy which cultivates individualism, social agitation stimulated by an insatiable appetite for gratification, will lead to the slow but sure death of France.’76 As a remedy, Mauco proposed the usual communitarian measures advocated by numerous writers of the Right and of the social-Catholic and personalist tendencies. At the basis of

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these measures was a reform in education and the inclusion in the curriculum of the values of work, family and public service. However, ‘while waiting for education to diffuse the new morality, only imposed discipline and fear would be able to combat individual habits and appetites, embezzlements and sabotage. The authoritarian government would have to exhibit some merciless examples as warnings.’77 A revolution was required but not the kind advocated by the communists. Mauco was more inclined towards the fascist variety: ‘The fascist revolution, on the contrary, relies on national sentiments and on traditional values. Fascism therefore involves a less brutal revolution. It takes into account existing human realities and values.’78 Although, as we said, Mauco was not opposed to immigration as such, he did advocate selectiveness: the only immigrants to be encouraged were manual labourers, especially those who could work in agriculture. This was not only because of the objective need for such workers but also because they were the easiest to ‘re-educate’ and in any case, the least likely to meddle in intellectual affairs and thus ‘contaminate’ French culture. A major element among the immigrants identified as problematic by Mauco were the refugees who sought political asylum in France. Of course, Mauco was not the only person to warn against the influx of refugees, which had been increasing gradually since the war, becoming a real flood after the rise of Nazism in Germany and again after Franco’s victory in Spain. Mauco called this immigration ‘the imposed immigration’ through which ‘three great groups in particular entered France: the Russians, the Armenians and the Jews [. . .] human beings diminished by suffering, by demoralizations and often by diseases. [. . .] inapt for any productive activities [. . .] they express a certain contempt for their host country which they partly blame, it seems, for their disappointments and sufferings.’79 Jews were particularly problematic for they ‘furnished almost twice as many cases of mental illness as other foreigners in France. [. . .] Stealing, swindling, corruption, and indecent behaviour are particularly rampant among them.’80 Mauco was a respected scientist. He studied immigration as a sociological and anthropological issue. He measured and counted and sorted and made informed generalisations. His writings, at least until the late 1930s, contained none of the vulgar language used by known political anti-Semites and extreme right-wing agitators, but rather the usual dosage of prejudice and self-righteousness associated at the time with a traditionalist and conservative worldview. He seemed to be interested not in persecution but rather in regulation. However, this apparent

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innocence blurs the fact that in the specific historical context in which he wrote and lectured his ethnic categorisations had very severe implications. The hierarchies he pretended to establish between various immigrant groups according to their alleged ‘inherent characteristics’ could not but re-enforce and encourage popular prejudice and provide it with scientific dignity. Relying on these pseudo-scientific postulates, Mauco’s political prescription implicitly legitimised the use of harsh measures against certain groups of immigrants (refugees in general, Jews and Asians in particular) who were deemed essentially incompatible with French society and therefore necessarily inadmissible. For our study it is important to note that Mauco’s scientific approach to immigration created a basis for an affinity between three elements: the Maurrasian version of xenophobia and ‘antisémitisme d’état’ which sought a respectable image; the technocratic wish to rationalise the actions of the state in all areas (and to that end to apply the natural sciences to politics as a source of objective criteria); and the specific interest of professionals in keeping foreigners out of their territory in order to prevent professional devaluation and unemployment. We have already seen that this affinity strengthened and excused the two-tier citizenship system that was gradually emerging in the second half of the 1930s whereby naturalised professionals had to comply with restrictions on the practice of their profession. Under Vichy this tendency became even more accentuated, leading to mass deportation of foreigners. Worse, the ‘scientific’ approach to immigration blurred the boundaries between members of an ethnic group who were French citizens and those who were foreign. In the case of Jews this trickling was particularly apparent, as the French authorities were gradually less and less concerned with observing this distinction when it became clear that politically it was more expedient to abandon it. Mauco’s articles were published also in the journal L’Ethnie Française, which was edited by the ethnologist Georges Montandon, a naturalised citizen of Swiss origin who, after serving as a doctor in the French army during the First World War, took up residence in Paris in 1925 where he worked at the National Museum of Natural History. In 1931 Montandon delivered a course at the Paris School of Anthropology, which was dedicated to the definition of the term ‘ethnie’. For Montandon this term meant ‘a natural grouping, which is defined by taking into account all human characteristics, biological, linguistic or cultural’81 as opposed to ‘race’, which was ‘a human group defined solely on the basis of its somatic characteristics’82 and ‘nation’, which was ‘a political grouping, created by history and embedded in the armoury

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of the State.’83 These distinctions were discussed at length in his major work, L’Ethnie Française, published in 1935. Having made these distinctions and articulated the definitions, Montandon proceeded to present an analysis of every population group in France according to its ethnic and racial affiliation. In this he prepared the ground for his future activities as a professional expert on ethno-racism and declared: ‘The most important thing, when talking about a “technicien” is that he should have a disposition for precise ideas.’84 Montandon, an acquaintance of the anti-Semitic author Ferdinand Céline, already hinted in his 1935 book that the Jews, being a nonassimilative community, should be encouraged to immigrate to Palestine and to establish there their own separate state. However, after the defeat in 1940 his anti-Semitism became open and violent. On 2 July 1940 he published an article in La France au Travail in which he wrote: The French nation has been poisoned by an ethnic whore. What characterizes psychologically the Jewish ethnic community and justifies the scientific label under which we treat it, is not only its luxury but primarily the fact that this community, instead of serving a homeland, a country, puts itself, like a prostitute, at the service of all countries, while at the same time refusing, for two thousand years, to mix in their populations. This is the spirit of that whore nation which imposes itself on the French: a) destroying the peace, b) sabotaging armament, c) turning the women against their maternal role through the press which it controls, of which the old Paris-Soir . . . with its quasi pornographic articles, edited by Jewish whores whose names we all know, was exemplary.85 In that same year Montandon launched a new collection to be published by Denoël under the title: Les juifs en France. As a prelude to this collection he published a brochure called How to recognize the Jew? with a selection of quotes from Céline, Drumont, Michelet, Renan and others. He also joined Doriot’s PPF as president of the party’s ‘Ethnic Commission’. More significantly, he became the editor of the journal L’Ethnie Française, which was financed by the German Institute in Paris and later also by the Commissariat aux Questions Juives. The journal set out to provide scientific grounds, based on Montandon’s book of the same name, for the National Revolution, while at the same time to ingratiate the Vichy regime with the Nazis by mimicking their efforts on the racial issue. Montandon was quite successful on that last score and the Nazi intellectual Roderich Von Ungern-Steinberg noted: ‘Montandon’s book,

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L’Ethnie Française is the only one which can legitimately be used and recognised as a racial manual for the population of France.’86 In 1943 Montandon was appointed head of the Institut d’Etude des Questions Juives et Ethno-Raciales. At the same time he was also employed as an ‘expert’ by the CGQJ. In this last capacity he was put in charge of examining the case of persons whose Jewishness was doubtful. Regarding himself as a scientist Montandon was extremely rigorous in his examinations, applying a whole set of ‘anthropometric’ criteria: he examined behaviour, mimicry and various physiological motifs, finally delivering his ‘conclusion’, ornamented with pseudo-scientific verbiage. Here is a typical example: Since the patient has no papers testifying to her religion (she is in fact of no religion like those half-Jews who remained on the Jewish side of the barricade) and since her morphology, gracious as it may be, is quite obviously Jewish, the undersigned concludes that she is to be considered a Jewess.87 These ‘examinations’ actually determined the fate of the persons concerned. Laurent Joly estimates that about 3800 persons were examined by Montandon for the CGQJ. Many of those were later deported to Auschwitz.88 Montandon was very careful not to drop the scientific facade, and whenever making a provocative statement, always hurried to invoke the authority of his professional knowledge. Thus when he called the Jews ‘a band of rascals’, he was quick to add: ‘It is not as a political orator that I speak! My choice of words is based on careful consideration.’89 Having established the scientific nature of his discourse, and disassociated it from the ‘merely’ political one, Montandon felt free to proceed towards practical proposals. Historically, he wrote, there had been three possible solutions for the Jewish problem: assimilation, segregation and emancipation. All those three measures failed, however. A fourth solution in the form of a separate Jewish state, albeit desirable, was under the circumstances impractical. If so, asked Montandon, ‘What is the normal solution for a situation whereby one is faced with a band of gangsters?’ And he replied: ‘Only one: uprooting. You will agree that the social concept that we have developed of the Jewish community justifies in advance whatever measures we take, even death before a firing squad, which would ensure the total elimination of these rascals from the countries of the West.’90

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In another article, entitled ‘Elements of genetics and eugenics’, published a few months later, Montandon enlists genetics and demography to legitimate the application of eugenic measures to those groups in the population to which he refers as ‘tares’: Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. Science must be allowed to offer its assistance in this matter before it is too late. Montandon writes: The truth is that it is scandalous that while the laws of heredity allow us to improve the race of cows, horses and pigs, humanity alone continues to procreate randomly like they did in the Stone Age. This problem becomes even more acute since medical progress, chirurgy and social conditions tend to conserve human waste and encourage it to procreate when natural selection would have already disposed of it.91 Eugenics was not a recent import from Nazi Germany, where it was an integral part of the ruling ideology. In fact, the French Eugenics Society was established already in 1912 with the declared goal of promoting ‘research and application of knowledge useful to the reproduction, preservation and improvement of the species’ through the ‘encouragement and development of sciences which are applicable to the studies of the Society.’ According to William Schneider, ‘despite its inability to organize a mass movement, or even a nationwide group, the French Eugenics Society was well constituted in organization and personnel, not to mention theoretical appeal, to exercise a great deal of influence in France during the interwar years.’92 Montandon was not the only scientist to be drawn by eugenics. Much better known and respected was the 1912 Nobel Prize laureate, Dr Alexis Carrel, whom we mentioned in the previous chapter in connection with the FFEPH. Alexis Carrel was the author of a book entitled L’homme cet inconnu (Man, that Unknown), which had been published in 1935, very quickly became a best-seller and was consequently translated into many languages. The last two chapters of the book, which deal with the relations between the individual and society, contain some extremely provocative observations and recommendations which could not have escaped the attention of the book’s vast audience. ‘Humanity’, declares Carrel, ‘does not appear to be composed of separate particles, as a gas is of molecules. It resembles an intricate network of long threads extending in space-time and consisting of series of individuals. Individuality is doubtless real. But it is much less definite than we believe. And the independence of each individual from the others

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and from the cosmos is an illusion.’93 Therefore, when the individual is isolated, as he is in the mass-production factories, he loses his unique personality and becomes ‘a nameless speck of dust.’94 This uniqueness of every individual makes the liberal principle of universal legal equality quite absurd, concludes Carrel: ‘Indeed, human beings are equal but individuals are not. The equality of their rights is an illusion. The feebleminded and the man of genius should not be equal before the law. The stupid, the unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have no right to higher education. It is absurd to give them the same electoral power as the fully developed individuals.’95 The persistence of this false egalitarianism, which stands at the basis of the democratic regime, he claims, ‘has contributed to the collapse of civilization in opposing the development of an elite’ since ‘it was impossible to raise the inferior types, the only means of producing democratic equality among men was to bring all to the lower level. Thus vanished the personality.’96 The unfortunate result of this, continues Carrel, is that ‘many inferior individuals have been conserved through the efforts of hygiene and medicine.’97 Measures must be taken to combat these tendencies, measures which may not be very pleasant. However, ‘eugenics asks for the sacrifice of many individuals. [. . .] Nations have always paid the highest honours to those who gave up their lives to save their country. The concept of sacrifice, of its absolute social necessity, must be introduced into the mind of modern man.’98 This ‘sacrifice’ is especially expedient in the case of criminals, the mentally ill and other social ‘undesirables’. Carrel is chillingly precise in his prescription for them: Those who murder, assault with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnap children, steal from the poor [and] mislead the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts. Neither philosophical systems nor sentimental prejudices should stand in the way of a modern society organized with reference to the normal individual.99 Carrel proposes that the ‘healthy elements’ of society, ‘those with the best organs and the best spirit’ should be encouraged and nurtured by ‘engineers knowledgeable about the mechanisms of the human being and of his relations with the world outside him.’100 Carrel has in mind for those engineers a harsh and strict course of training which

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will last for no less than 25 years, during which they will lead a secluded and ascetic life. Those who will successfully complete their training will be able to carry out the mission for which they had been selected: ‘the establishment through eugenics of a hereditary biological aristocracy.’101 Interestingly, the introduction to the German edition of the book, published in 1936 in the Third Reich, included the following sentence, absent from editions in other languages: ‘The German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal. The ideal solution would be the suppression of each of these individuals as soon as he has proven himself to be dangerous.’102 It is hard to imagine a more blatant encouragement for the Nazi euthanasia project known as Aktion T4 in which an estimated 75,000–100,000 physically and mentally handicapped people were exterminated. Not only in Germany but also in France there were those who, upon the publication of the book, already appreciated the significance of Carrel’s ideas, and were quick to appropriate them for their political cause. Thus Leon Daudet, one of the most prominent intellectuals of the Action Française, commented at the time: ‘It is interesting to see how the observations of such an erudite and reputed person coincide with the Maurrasian critique.’103 Alexis Carrel was determined to put his ideas into practice: ‘In order to create a true science of Man and a technology in the service of civilization,’ he wrote, ‘it is indispensable to set-up centres of synthesis where collective thinking will produce new knowledge.’104 After briefly rubbing shoulders with Colonel La Rocque and his Croix de Feu he joined Doriot’s Parti Populaire Française. However, this proved to be equally disappointing for him and Carrel had to wait until 1941 when Maréchal Pétain appointed him ‘regent’ of a new establishment, which was an original creation of the Vichy government – the Fondation Française pour l’Étude des Problèmes Humains (FFEPH). This was to be the culmination of Carrel’s work and constituted an official recognition of its social and national importance: ‘This great undertaking’, he declared, ‘is a striking testimony to the survival and the vitality of French thinking. For the first time ever, an institution is established on a non-philosophical, non-political and exclusively scientific basis for the systematic construction of civilized Man in the totality of his corporal, spiritual, social and racial aspects.’105 The FFEPH was a major Vichy establishment. It was given financial autonomy and a budget of 40 million francs (by way of comparison,

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the total budget of the CNRS was 50 million francs). It employed, throughout its three years of operation, a staff, permanent and temporary, of about 400 scientists, administrators and technical experts. This impressive effort was to serve Carrel’s vision of engineering a new type of person. More specifically, the Foundation worked through several study groups, each dedicated to a particular branch of scientific enquiry. One such group, under the direction of Robert Gessain, Paul Vincent and Jean Bourgeois worked on demographical issues and, in a similar way to Mauco and Montandon, attempted to create an ethnic hierarchy of groups according to their ‘assimilatory potential’ in order to determine ‘which are the immigrants whose presence is desirable from the point of view of the biological future of the nation.’106 We have already pointed out the immense popularity of Carrel and his 1935 book. In May 1941, the year of his repatriation and shortly before the launching of his Foundation, Déat’s l’Oeuvre published an interview with Professor Reiter, president of the German Health Department under the title: Une vue biologique de l’Etat. In the interview, Professor Reiter explains his policy: The concept of national economy is incomprehensible without the concept of biology. All men and women represent an economic value. All incurable diseases produce losses. We can think of three factors: the material value of the individual which corresponds, if you will, to his physical aptitude for work, the biological value which is manifested by the number of children he has – when a man has no children his biological value is nought. Finally, there is the cultural value which can be very great. Of course the cultural value is not independent of the material value since, fortunately, intelligence and teaching depend on the quality of the work and on its outputs. [. . .] The main goal to achieve is to have healthy men and women, living comfortably and raising many children; the State needs a lot of money in order to raise a healthy child; it cannot spend its resources on the incurable sick.107 The interviewer sums up in this way: And thus, the collaboration has allowed the French to learn new scientific methods. . . . This is how biology and sociology come together. We shall listen to Prof. Reiter with much attention since the future of our country will be determined, for those who will be able to

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understand it, along the lines of his ideas. And we must learn to draw lessons from those ideas.108 The conclusions of the l’Oeuvre journalist, seen in the background of Carrel’s ideas, their popularity and the importance accorded to the FFEPH by the Vichy authorities, seem particularly grim if one also notes the findings published by Max Lafont in his doctoral dissertation in 1981, later to be published under the title L’Extermination Douce. Lafont argues that during the occupation years, some 40,000 mentally ill patients confined in psychiatric hospitals under the responsibility of the Vichy government were practically starved to death by the prevention of the extra food rations required for their survival. Such extra rations were, on the other hand, given to non-mentally ill patients in ordinary hospitals. Lafont refers to Carrel and his eugenics as a major ‘inspiration’ for this practice.109

3. Conclusion What ties together the various Vichyites discussed in this chapter? Not much, if one takes the essentialist approach, which seeks a consistent underlying common denominator. One cannot bundle up together Maurras, Mounier, Déat, de Jouvenel and Pucheu without resorting to an inexcusable amalgam. Maurras was pursuing a thoroughly reactionary agenda which had been formed almost half a century earlier and has changed little since; Mounier was trying to reconcile his Catholicism with a sympathy for the ‘common man’; Déat and his Left dissidents were still trying, as they had done since the mid-1930s, to save their socialist faith, which had lost its Marxist god; Bertrand de Jouvenel, like Drieu La Rochelle, a perpetual onlooker (a voyageur dans le siècle, as he later called his book of memoirs) was forever condemning in others the intellectualism for which he actually blamed himself; Pucheu was promoting his managerial career which, in the intoxicating atmosphere of the death of the Republic and the rise of authoritarianism, could finally release itself from the constraints of democracy and satisfy its crave for total control. Certainly, similarities can be found between these various tendencies. In some cases they would even be shared by all of them (the very significant fact, for instance, that none of them, at any point, offered even the slightest advocacy for the Republic and its democratic regime). However, such parallels are too general and too feeble to be considered a true common platform. Anything more profound (such

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as a common claim to a certain intellectual lineage which goes back along the counter-revolutionary tradition) will necessarily encompass only some of these tendencies and will also make redundant the specific historical context in which they all took part. The approach advocated in this work is, however, quite different. It willingly accepts that every tendency does indeed represent a distinct case rather than a mere instance of some meta-principle. It also takes seriously the impact of the spatial and temporal circumstances in which these tendencies coexisted. It does not seek a common denominator, a common source or a common interest; it does not require that these tendencies be shown to have collaborated. Its claim is threefold: first, that not one of these tendencies could have become anything more than a noisy marginal voice without somehow accommodating itself with the other tendencies, thus manufacturing the illusion of a unified voice; second, that even such a unified voice could not have had much real political power unless it was adopted and carried by a significant social agent; third, that such agency was in fact offered by the ‘cadres’. It was precisely this marginality that drove so many of the promising young intellectuals of the Action Française to engage in political experimentation outside the movement, in the ranks of the Jeune Droite and in some cases also in the right-wing ligues such as the Jeunesses Patriotes and the Croix de Feu. For Maurras, a legitimate political action could only be one which is directed towards the restoration of an ‘organic’ and non-elective regime completely disassociated from democracy and parliamentarism. In other words, a political action which constitutes a total denial of the republican order. The defeat of 1940, the dissolution of parliament, the arrest of politicians who symbolised the liberal regime of the Third Republic and the authoritative figure of Marshal Pétain were certainly favourable conditions for such a political action. However, it was quite clear that the followers of Maurras in the corridors of power at Vichy were distinctly unhappy with the Republican residue that still existed in the government, particularly in the person of Pierre Laval. The latter’s removal in December 1940 was very much down to them. In the circumstances of the German occupation, however, it was impossible to offer a purely ‘Maurrasian’ alternative, since such an alternative would necessarily be ultra-patriotic and anti-German. What was needed was a pseudo-Maurrasian facade – an authoritarian executive, willing to implement nationalist policies through a seemingly legal procedure, without at the same time resorting to the partisan politics of the defunct Republic.

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For the left-wing dissidents, gathered around Déat, the problem of marginality was intensified by a symbolic struggle over the inheritance of socialism. Although Leon Blum was ‘horrified’ by Déat’s ideas about the desired nature and the practical tasks of contemporary socialism, Déat never regarded himself as anything but a true and loyal follower of Jean Jaurès (as is clear from the name he gave his neo-socialist breakaway group). If Déat was pretending to represent socialism, he could hardly allow himself to remain on the fringes of the political system. Socialism was not an intellectual construction; it was not merely social critique. It had to be practical and political and embodied in a revolutionary party. It was hardly surprising therefore that Déat was obsessively pursuing efforts to establish such a party. However, it was also quite clear that it could not be a party of the old Republican style where, allegedly, personal and sectarian interests ruled and where every effective action had to rely on the consent of the majority. Nor could it be based on electoral considerations, which threatened to divert it from its declared goals towards populism and opportunism, as had happened in the case of the old Republican parties. And yet, it could not fully imitate the National-socialist party of Germany for it had to be, at least ostensibly, subservient vis-à-vis the occupier and therefore its militant patriotism would necessarily be deficient. It would have to proceed in a manner that would be in tune with the wishes of Berlin and in compliance with the latter’s designs for the new European order (not unlike the situation of the communists vis-à-vis the Comintern). If so, the main task of the party would be to manage the revolution for the Germans, as a ‘subcontractor’ in charge of the ‘French branch’ of the Reich. Thus the struggle between the various contenders for the leadership of such a party could be seen as a competition for a political franchise, with Abetz as the arbiter. The contender that would present the best bid would win the contract. And what would constitute a winning bid? Certainly, a favourable disposition towards the Nazi policies in France and abroad, but also an ability to mobilise the French public and to present at least a semblance of voluntary collaboration. Doriot was too extreme, too unreliable; the other right-wing leaders of the interwar ligues were too anti-German. Déat was much better suited for the job, but his enthusiasm was somewhat intimidating for the Germans and his lack of public support would make him too much of an obvious Nazi puppet. But the idea of a unified, rationalised managerial équipe that would walk the path of Franco-German collaboration did catch on. Unfortunately for Déat, it was to be implemented by others, a fact which left him

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frustrated and begrudging, awaiting an opportunity to take his revenge on the usurpers. Although Bertrand de Jouvenel was no stranger to the maneuverings around the ‘political tender’ for the Parti Unique, his main interest lay in the more intellectual issue of cultural regeneration. It was not so much a political regime that he was seeking to establish (or restore) but a certain concept of civilisation, based on the Nietzschian idea of an edifying aristocracy. De Jouvenel was quite clear as to the origins of this aristocracy. As we saw above, he identified it with the ‘cadres’ – a meritocratic, cross-class, young and well-educated elite of professionals, favourably disposed towards an authoritarian and hierarchic political regime and bent on European integration and collaboration. That such an aristocracy was too ideal to be true was of little consequence. It was the pretence and the principle which stood behind it that mattered. That principle was simple: it stipulated that Man could become whatever he aspired to be if he put his mind to it and disciplined himself to do what was necessary in order to achieve it. It was on that basis that de Jouvenel explored the possibilities offered by the application of the recent discoveries of the natural sciences to the problems of society. If science could find a way to make total control over society possible, the rising aristocracy of the ‘cadres’ would only have to apply it to specific circumstances, thus changing the nature of politics in the spirit of Condorcet who once wrote: ‘I thought that all laws should be obvious consequences of natural law, so that all that would be left to opinion or the will of the legislator would be purely practical or formal matters of application, in which even anything of an arbitrary nature that they involved would gradually disappear.’110 Opinion and debate would lose their meaning since they would be in an obvious disadvantage in comparison with the objectively tested postulates of science. This, of course, is perfectly in tune with de Jouvenel’s view on the primacy of force as a motivation for political action. As he himself notes, force can in many cases be sublimated into various procedures which are seemingly more subtle but which nonetheless rest on totalitarian precepts that pretend to offer an all-encompassing explanation that makes further debate redundant. The resort to biopolitics and such like is precisely this sort of procedure. The personalist experiment of the Ecole de Cadres at Uriage is another attempt to manufacture a new governing elite that is situated somewhere in between the vitalist supermen of de Jouvenel and the traditionalist nobility of Maurras. Mounier’s emphasis is religious and his

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cadres are to be the disciples of social-Catholicism. In this capacity they are required to help foster class collaboration through the application of the principles laid out by Lyautey (and later also by Lamirand) and reformulated time and again with regard to the ‘rôle social’ of the various social elites. However, as we saw, bridging over the social gap was not an easy task and the men of Uriage were far from successful with regard to it. If their vision was to be perpetuated, some other social agent, better placed socially and economically, had to carry it forward. Finally, the group of young industrialists who joined the Vichy government were perhaps the most likely to be favourably disposed towards the cadres. They were not politicians in the ordinary sense, as their principal career was made in the private economic sector rather than in the political system. For them, the business of politics was the rationalisation and, subsequently, the regulation of economic activities and of the social practices which sustained them. Many of them had been members of both the technocratic groupings of the 1930s, predominantly X-Crise, and the nonconformist circles of that period (here, as we saw earlier, dominated the PPF but there was also a significant representation for Ordre Nouveau and, in the case of the older ones, the Redressement Française and the various initiatives of Georges Valois). Unlike other tendencies in Vichy, the technocracy of people like Pucheu, Lehideux, Bichelonne Belin and Bouthillier was not constrained in its choice of the cadres as its agency but was, on the contrary, set on that choice by default. Issuing themselves from the socio-economic and professional milieu of the cadres, and imbued with their ethos, they chose to make their entry into politics precisely at the moment when the democratic structure and personnel became defunct. As they, and their colleagues, had repeatedly argued throughout the interwar period, this demise of the liberal order and its replacement with a rational, disciplined and functionally hierarchical meritocracy was a precondition for the recovery of France from its political and economic ailments. We showed above how these technocrats populated their ministries with members of the cadres and extended the meritocratic principle so that it blurred the boundaries between the civil service and the political echelon and facilitated mobility between them. What of the motivation of the cadres themselves? Why did they respond to the call to serve as an agency for the political tendencies of Vichy? It was not an ideological commitment that drove them, nor a hope for personal gain. These two motivations were not, of course, completely irrelevant to them – they all confessed a sympathy with one or more elements of the National Revolution and an admiration for

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some of the themes and practices of National-socialism (in particular its alleged achievements in industrial rationalisation and in curbing unemployment). Similarly, notwithstanding some declarations to the contrary, it is safe to assume that their professional careers did not suffer much by their assumption of executive power in their area of interest and expertise. . . . But it was mainly their strong adherence to the professional ethos they had helped to manufacture and perpetuate, and the constant urging by both the professional and the political press to turn that ethos into a new political culture and its bearers into a new political elite, that propelled them towards governmental positions. Indeed, only six months after the defeat, the chairman of the USIC wrote: The technician is too modest and so far he hasn’t found the place to which he is entitled neither in society nor in the great councils of the State. [. . .] Our country which is now truly at the vanguard of progress among the nations must give the technicians their place. Intermediates between capital and labour, they constitute the middle class of the production process, and their role is essentially to be a stabilizing force. Their modest voice must be heard in the councils of State and we hope that the elevated place they merit will be kept for them in the new organization of production.111 And around the same time Jacques Saint-Germain wrote in Nouveaux Temps: The engineer must be called to play a central role in the renaissance of France. His intellectual quality, his sense of responsibility, his modesty should have secured his promotion. But a certain type of unhealthy capitalism has always put obstacles in his way. It is up to the revolution which is taking place in front of our eyes to redress this situation.112 In a doctoral thesis published by the jurist François de Bois in 1941 under the title La Formation Sociale de l’Ingénieur he wrote: Is the engineer part of the elite? Obviously! The engineer can be part of the elite because the elite has three main features: it possesses a certain sense of superiority over the masses; this superiority is oriented towards the common good; the grouping which constitutes it is open. Therefore, anyone who has promoted himself without abandoning

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the class to which he belongs, the milieu in which he lives, and has put his abilities in the service of the public, merits a place in the elite.113 It was only the ‘cadre’, the professional expert, who could, in the circumstances of Vichy, serve all masters while not being the disciple of any of them. He was not the nobleman of Maurras, not the devout Catholic of Mounier, not the socialist of Déat, not the superman of de Jouvenel and, in most cases, not even the entrepreneur that was Pucheu. He did not have to be any of those. In fact, it was crucial that he wasn’t, for his greatest value for the Vichyites was in perpetuating the illusion that their agenda did in fact achieve a hegemonic status, as opposed to its marginality in the old order. The agendas of these various tendencies were interpreted by these cadres not as normative prescriptions but rather as tasks, projects to be managed and seen through to completion. Rounding up the Jews had, for many of the people involved in it, nothing to do with religious prejudice or with an anti-Dreyfusard legacy. It was a matter of getting the job done, of delivering the goods, of making sensible use of one’s time and of the state’s resources. Both Maurras and Déat expressed appreciation for the progress made in the ‘aryanisation’ of Jewish property and provided justifications for it that vindicated their ideology. It is doubtful, however, whether these justifications meant anything, or indeed were at all known, to people like Mlle Matheu, who took care of the daily implementation of this policy and for whom the microcosms of their specific profession and place of work provided sui generis justifications of their own. Similarly, the praise offered by these political persons to the corporative structure of the Vichy economy ignored the fact that the rationalisation of the economy was not always serving the social and cultural purposes it purported to serve. It is precisely for this reason that the violent transgression of this illusion, in the affair of the ‘synarchie’, was so traumatic and penetrated the highest echelons of government, upsetting Pétain himself and provoking him into making an exceptionally harsh public statement. An interesting effect of the exploitation of the agency of the cadres was a tendency on their part to promote their own self-perpetuation both on the discursive and on the institutional levels. This they did coincidentally with the implementation of the various political policies. The examples from the scientific milieu, discussed above, are a clear demonstration of this. It is not just that the theories of people like Montandon, Mauco and Carrel served to camouflage, by their pseudoscientific nature, the racist, xenophobic and eugenic policies of the

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Vichyite political agitators; they also helped to make the value-neutral approach to these issues legitimate and publicly recognised. The official sponsorship of the FFEPH and of the IEQJ was a clear statement on the part of the Vichy authorities that any social ‘dysfunction’ would from now on be dealt with in the sterile, dispassionate and matter-of-fact manner of the professional expert. Scientific determinism, rationalist categorisation and professional impersonalism were the ultimate mottos of the social reformers of the National Revolution, just as liberty, equality and fraternity had been for those of the French Revolution.

6 Contingency, Choice and the Historian

1. Technocracy and nonconformism: a tale of elective affinities The interwar period in France was particularly volatile in terms of intellectual engagement in politics and produced an enormous array of manifestos, programmes and plans which sought a complete transformation of the political regime, of society and even of Man himself. These ideological tendencies stretched from the Young Right, which was strongly influenced by the intellectual baggage of the Action Française, through social-Catholicism and ‘personalism’, to the ‘neo-socialists’ and the ‘Young Turks’ of the SFIO and the Radical party respectively. In this study I employed the term ‘nonconformists’, coined by Loubet del Bayle, to refer to those who belonged to the more technocratically minded tendencies, whom Olivier Dard called ‘realists’ and who had the potential and the drive to exert influence beyond their immediate circles. ‘Nonconformism’ of whatever shade would have remained marginal in terms of access to political power, without the help of a significant social agent. After an early disillusion with the agency of the First World War veterans who, both in their proper associations and under the auspices of the Croix de Feu, showed little inclination to seize political power, the main focus of the ‘nonconformists’ turned to the engineers and to other professional experts, collectively referred to as ‘techniciens’ and later ‘cadres’. The engineers were more than just a professional group. Their portrayal in both professional and fictional literature reflected a profound self- and public appreciation for them as the bearers of a new and exciting ethos. This ethos was dual: it comprised the often contradictory motifs of virtue and virtuosity. The 178

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perpetuation of this ethos was initially instrumental for the engineers in their struggle for the regulation and the representation of their profession. However, it gradually became a purpose in its own right, setting hierarchical meritocracy as an alternative to electoral democracy, and the engineers as an alternative elite to both the intellectuals and the parliamentary politicians of the Third Republic. The encounter between the ‘nonconformists’ and the techniciens proved beneficial to both parties. It provided the former with a prestigious and upwardly mobile agency; it allowed the latter to upgrade their struggle for power from mere professional protectionism to a presentation of an overall political alternative. This collaboration was nurtured in numerous sites – journals, think-tanks, political groupings, etc. Its intensity grew steadily throughout the interwar period, reaching its zenith in the X-Crise and Nouveaux Cahiers initiatives of the 1930s. It is quite likely that this collaboration would have ended up in another disappointment for the ‘nonconformists’, had the result of the 1940 military campaign been different. By that time engineers and other ‘cadres’ were already reaping the fruits of their elevated social position and enhanced political bargaining power by making headways into governmental positions under Blum, Reynaud and Daladier. Their nonconformist allies were becoming redundant. However, the defeat, the occupation and the establishment of Pétain’s regime, created a new situation whereby the nonconformist agenda was the order of the day but could only be realised by proxy. This was due to the overtly nationalistic, anti-German, revolutionary and Catholic nature of most nonconformist tendencies. Thus the old alliance with the technocrats was re-established. The latter were not necessarily more enthusiastic now than they had been before about the policies of the various ‘nonconformists’. But they were as aware as always of the instrumental value of ingratiating themselves with the new political masters. Under the watchful eye of the Germans, the various nonconformist agendas had to be played down. Nationalist revanchisme, militant socialCatholicism and a strong parti unique could not but engender enmity on the part of the Germans, who preferred to simmer their French bouillon without ever allowing it to boil. And so, an elaborate sham was put in place with a king-like ruler, a corporatist-like economy, a communitarian-like society and a sovereign-like state. Empty shells which presented a facade of nonconformism that was less and less convincing even to the ‘nonconformists’ themselves. These shells, however, had to be maintained and managed for the duration of the occupation,

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until their rightful masters could take over. This is precisely where the technocrats had their use as well as their opportunity. It could be argued that the technocratic governments of Vichy were in fact a sort of a ‘holding company’ managing the National Revolution by franchise for its nonconformist creators. In this capacity the technocrats were in their element and soon took over the entire governmental apparatus, effacing the borderline between politics and civil service and doing what they were best at: rationalising, standardising and maximising the operation and the output of the executive. In the circumstances of the occupation this implied close collaboration with the Germans and compliance with their policies. Such a technocratic machine needs a constant supply of tasks and projects, since processing, regulating and coordinating are its raison d’être. Moreover, it requires that the process be made standard and free of idiosyncrasies which might create disturbances in the operation of the machine. The issue of anti-Semitism is a good example of this. It was quite clear that some kind of anti-Semitic measures would be expedient in order to appease both the domestic ‘nonconformists’ and the German occupiers. Such measures, however, could not be modelled on the old anti-Dreyfusard precepts, which had implicit anti-German connotations; nor could they be simply copied from the Germans since this would have seemed too much like a renouncement of sovereignty. And in any case, both options were too dependent on subjective interpretations, too idiosyncratic. A better model was the scientific study of the alleged relation between ethnology and immigration, and more specifically, the correlation between certain ethnic features and the probability of successful assimilation. This was neither the crude racism of the Nazis nor mere vindictiveness. It was, ostensibly, a simple procedure of regulating immigration and standardising the population. The theories developed by Mauco and Montandon, both respected members of the scientific establishment, provided an excellent framework for such a procedure, and the appropriate institutions for its implementation were soon set up. We saw how the apologetics offered by those who were in charge of these measures tended to regard them as justifiable in that they redressed certain ‘disproportions’ in the population, by reducing the numbers of ‘troublesome’ elements. Once such justification had been given and internalised, the use of coercion became legitimate as a surgical necessity: things had to be put in order and those who were ‘misplaced’ had to be extracted and put back in their appropriate place or at least be cast away as excess. A similar logic was applied also in the case of the mentally ill, who were considered superfluous

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and burdensome. The combination of the Maurrasian principle of ‘state anti-Semitism’, which was now deposited in their hands to be managed, and their own scientific approach and professional ethos, made these technocrats averse to anything that was too capricious and ferocious. Thus, to the usual arsenal of anti-Semitic and xenophobic measures, such as property confiscation, exclusion from certain professions and deportation, they added some original contributions, such as the sanitary concentration camp where ‘dysfunctional’ social elements would be ‘re-educated’ through brainwashing (Coutrot), or the ‘medical establishments’ where the same individuals would be quietly gassed to death (Carrel). These new measures were not implemented by Vichy itself but then again, it is quite reasonable to assume that the regular dispatches of ‘demographical excess’ towards the East were not done without the knowledge of their eventual destination. Of course there was always the fear, on the part of the ‘nonconformists’, that the technocrats might go their own way and prefer to pursue policies which deviated from or even contradicted the original designs of the National Revolution. Indeed, the whole affair of the ‘synarchie’ was the product of precisely such fear, which was flared up and manipulated by those who begrudged the technocrats their front-of-the-stage position. It is not my contention that all technocrats were attentive to the political wishes of the ‘nonconformists’, or that all ‘nonconformists’ looked up to the technocrats for political agency. I do argue though that the most consistent elements in either group were aware of the expediency of associating with the other and that this association steadily built up during the interwar period and the occupation, empowering and promoting both parties. At times the association was merely discursive; at other times it amounted to political action. During the Vichy period its effect was particularly strong, due to the simple fact that it involved the exercise of executive power in extremely hazardous political circumstances.

2. The spectre of fascism But should we call this affinity between technocrats and ‘nonconformists’ fascism? Well, that really depends on what we are trying to achieve by using this term. Fascism never happened in the same sense that the demonstrations of 6 February 1934 happened in Paris, or that the vote of full powers to Marshal Philippe Pétain happened on 10 July 1940 or that a raid by the French police was conducted throughout the 11th

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District of Paris on 20 August 1941, when more than 4000 Jews were arrested. It never was in the sense that the Drancy internment camp was, in a north-eastern suburb of Paris. And yet, it imposes itself as a general descriptive category whenever these historical facts and others, related to it, are discussed. But it’s a slippery category, one which slides through our fingers whenever we try to define it or set criteria for its application. And this is because it is not the kind of category we try to force it to be; it is not historical but political, and it derives its power precisely from the blurred and erratic set of mental associations it sets off in its audience. That fascism was the proper name of the political regime established in Italy by Mussolini in 1922 is no more relevant to the use of the term than, for instance, the cinematic depiction of Hitler by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. The application of the noun ‘fascism’ and even more so, of the adjective ‘fascist’, extends far beyond the limits of any specific political reality and reaches into almost every sphere of our lives. It is used in order to describe works of art, music, architecture and literature. Even more remarkably, it is used in order to label certain modes of behaviour in inter-personal relationships. In fact, no other political term has been as widely deflected as this one. This suggests that the emotional charge of this term is no less powerful than its descriptive value. Indeed, while scholars have come very close to abandoning this term for lack of precise definition, its employment in popular discourse does not seem to have suffered from such inhibitions and is freely applied to as diverse phenomena as American capitalist globalisation and Islamic fundamentalism. Fascism has no homeland, no particular age, colour or language. It haunts people in almost every corner of the world as an eerie nightmare. And like nightmares, which are idiosyncratic and stem from personal fears and phobias, so does fascism derive its power of intimidation from deep-seated personal and collective traumas such as slavery, genocide, persecution, poverty, etc. It would be true to say that fascism has become a mythical entity, a bogeyman. This is not to say that fascism is any less real for that. Its menacing presence in our consciousness, embellished with the horrific visions stemming from our specific connotations of it, directly and indirectly influences our political, social and aesthetic choices. On a deeper level, it also affects our self- and public image in accordance with our position vis-à-vis this threat: we may resist it, succumb to it, exploit it, ignore it, be attracted to it, etc.; and we may be held accountable to ourselves and to others on the basis of our position. Moreover, I do not wish to

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deny that this term has a specific historical and geographical fixation: even when used in a contemporary context it almost always involves an, albeit implicit, allusion to the events in and around the Second World War in Europe. However, the choice of relevant events is variable. Fascism is never simply ‘out there’, pre-packed and ready to go; it is always custom made to fit a specific purpose, and that purpose can only be understood (or at least assumed) if we look beyond the historical objects of this term, to its subjects – to their motivations and outlooks. My argument has been that no a priori definition of the term ‘fascism’ can help dispel the controversy over its application to France in the period between 1918 and 1945, since the truth conditions for the employment of that term are to be found not in objective historical facts, over which there is hardly any disagreement, but rather in the subjective agendas of the scholars who study them. In a way, one could say that Sternhell and Rémond spoke for two major groups who came out of the war period in France – the victims and the bystanders. For Rémond and many others of his school it was a matter of indignation over the implication of France in the ‘dirty business’ that had gone on beyond its borders. Sternhell’s perspective, informed by his early childhood trauma of a terrible betrayal by the Europe in which his family had built their lives and which turned out to have had a much darker side, is based on this disillusion and on a meticulous search for the roots of the evil he witnessed. It is understandable that their starting point should be the most obvious suspects – the ‘nonconformists’ and the political and intellectual milieu which they frequented. But, as this study has shown, the ‘nonconformists’ were just one part of the story. But why did both scholars and those who followed them insist on the actual term ‘fascism’? And why persist in using it even when it had become clear that it obscured more than it revealed? I suggest that one possible reason for this can be found in the wider context of the debate on French fascism, and to see it we must go back to the momentous events of February 1934. It was in the aftermath of those events that the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (CVIA) was born as an initiative of sympathisers of the left-wing parties: the Radical party, the SFIO and the Communist party. It was preceded by a declaration published on 11 February under the title ‘A Call for Struggle’, which in its opening lines clearly stated the agenda that French intellectuals were called to address: ‘With incredible violence and speed, the events of the last few days have brutally brought us in the presence of immediate fascist danger.’1 The declaration was signed by some 90

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intellectuals, among whom were the pacifist philosopher Alain and the celebrated authors André Malraux and Jean Guéhenno. On 5 March a second declaration appeared, initiated by the Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires (AEAR), which was closely affiliated to the communists. The opening paragraph of this declaration, which has become known as ‘Aux Travailleurs’ (‘To the Workers’) read: ‘United beyond all differences, in the face of the fascist demonstrations in Paris and the popular resistance which alone confronted them, we assure the workers, our comrades, of our resolute determination to struggle alongside them to protect from a fascist dictatorship the rights and liberties won by the people.’2 The declaration was co-signed by some 2300 people, among whom were some of the leading figures of the French left-wing intelligentsia, and became the founding document of the CVIA. Unlike the earlier Call to Struggle which was more general, less partisan (thus allowing Julien Benda, author of The Treason of the Intellectuals, who had objected to any form of political engagement, to sign it), the ‘To the Workers’ declaration was explicitly aiming to achieve what the political parties, and especially the communists, still hesitated to openly endorse: an alliance of the Left. In May 1934 such an alliance was already openly discussed by the SFIO congress in Toulouse; a year later, after the USSR had joined the League of Nations, the Franco-Soviet pact had been signed and the Communist International had officially adopted the popular fronts strategy, the French communists finally endorsed too the idea of unity. Thus anti-fascism had become a rallying slogan aimed at bringing together the mutually distrustful activists of the two proletarian parties and paved the way to what later became the Popular Front. However, the CVIA was anything but homogenous. The signing of the Franco-Soviet pact may have accelerated the drive towards unity but it had also given it a very clear orientation: its one and only purpose, at least as far as the communists were concerned, was to prepare for an eventual war against Germany should it threaten the Soviet Union and its allies. This was viewed with alarm by other factions in the CVIA: the pacifists and the Trotskyites, the former because they objected to any form of bellicosity no matter what the pretext for it may be; the latter because they could not see how fighting for the interests of the Stalinist state and its capitalist allies advanced the cause of revolutionary socialism. After the electoral victory of the Popular Front in June 1936 these two factions finally took control of the CVIA, causing a wave of communist resignations from its ranks. The pacifist stance, dictated by the philosopher Alain and his disciples, had from the start equated

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anti-fascism with anti-war and therefore regarded the French nationalist hardliners as the real fascists who had already been responsible for the excesses of the Versailles Treaty and were now pushing France towards another bloody confrontation. An article published in 1934 by Alain’s faction read: ‘The struggle against fascism is never a struggle against some alleged external enemy. Fascism is for every nation the enemy within. [. . .] Antifascism can never be used as a justification for another war. War is the ultimate catastrophe and we refuse to accept that it can ever be inevitable.’3 Alain himself wrote a year later: ‘We must play down [in our discourse] the external problem and overstate the internal danger.’4 The Trotskyites, for their own reasons, held a similar position: an article published in Pierre Monatte’s journal La Révolution prolétarienne declared: ‘Regardless of the circumstances, the political enemy number one is always in our own backyard.’5 Some prominent members of the CVIA later joined the collaborationist Ligue de la pensée française, which pursued the radical pacifism of Alain’s tendency in the CVIA through the encouragement of pragmatic collaboration with the Nazis. Ironically, the pacifists received reinforcement, after the 1935 pact with Stalin and the 1936 landslide victory of the Popular Front, from both the extreme Right, which became increasingly concerned by the prospect of a communist takeover in the aftermath of a victory over Germany, and from certain quarters in the Radical party, such as the group centred around Gaston Bergery and his Front Commun, who advocated fighting the devil on its own ground by espousing authoritarian measures. Thus, by the second half of the 1930s, anti-fascism, and therefore fascism, had definitely become an issue of internal politics in France. It was less about Berlin or Rome and more about Paris. The fascism that was to be avoided was embodied in the internal weakness of the French political system. In 1936 the victorious Popular Front outlawed the leagues of the extreme right who were considered a ‘fifth column’ in the midst of the Republic. In 1940 it was those same ultra-rightists who outlawed and tried the leaders of the Popular Front under a similar pretext. But whichever way, fascism was regarded as the predicament of the French, brought about through no fault other than their own. There is little wonder therefore that this legacy, espoused by both Left and Right, remained so strongly embedded in the political and historical discourse in France, provoking recurrent attempts to prove or disprove it. The intense controversy flared up by the publication of Sternhell’s book should, I suggest, be viewed in this context.

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But if the controversy over French fascism belongs in a specific historical context and the trauma it implanted in various individuals, doesn’t it lose its relevance now that many of these individuals are either deceased or retired? Does the menace implicit in the affinity between technocracy and ‘nonconformist’ politics still have the power to disturb us? Well, for one, it is quite clear that this affinity lingered on long after the Liberation. It would perhaps be not so far-fetched to regard the existentialism of the 1950s and the student movement of the summer of 1968 at least partly as expressions of frustration and wariness with regard to the persistence of this menace. The young students who occupied the Sorbonne and who put up barricades in the streets of Paris never intended to go as far as committing true revolutionary action. Their revolt was primarily an act of transgression against the dirigisme and the regimentation of the public domain, and its beginnings can be found in the critique of the ‘technocratic university’, developed in 1964–6 apropos the Fouchet reform, which threatened to marginalise the humanities. Student militants such as Marc Kravetz, Antoine Griset and others criticised what they regarded as the ‘technocratisation’ of the university through specialisation and selection criteria designed to turn the student body into a reserve army of future ‘cadres’. Interestingly, this criticism was fused with a rejection of certain ideological themes which were the legacy of the nonconformism of the 1930s: nationalism, colonialism, antiSemitism, etc. and which the critics believed were being reproduced by the ruling technocracy. But the persistence of the elective affinities between technocrats and ‘nonconformists’ is even more obvious in relation to the idea of a united Europe and, indeed, in actual EU politics. The unification of Europe has, unlike other themes shared by those two groups, survived the war and gained impetus both as an idea and as a concrete political reality. The enthusiasm of the technocrats for this idea and their increasing involvement in its implementation has been much commented on in both in academia and in lay circles. So has the fact that the political heirs to the interwar ‘nonconformists’ have found the European issue to be a fertile ground for their doctrines.6 Is this fascism? Once again, the bare historical facts will not provide us with an answer. To quote the French historian Pierre-André Taguieff: Neither ‘fascism’ or ‘racism’ will do us the favour of returning in such a way that we can recognize them easily. If vigilance was only a game of recognizing something already well known, then it would only be a question of remembering. Vigilance would be reduced to a

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social game using reminiscence and identification by recognition, a consoling illusion of an immobile history peopled with events which accord to our expectations or our fears.7

3. The role of the historian I tend to agree with Quentin Skinner that historians who are guided by ‘pure ideas’ (such as, in our case, the idea of fascism) are ‘very readily led to speak as if the fully developed form of the doctrine was always in some sense immanent in history, even if various thinkers failed to “hit upon” it, even if it “dropped from sight” at various times, even if an entire era failed (note the implication that they tried) to “rise to a consciousness” of it.’8 Such efforts, argues Skinner, lead not to histories but rather to mythologies: ‘A history of thoughts which no one ever actually succeeded in thinking, at a level of coherence which no one ever actually attained.’9 Once we are free of these mythologies, continues Skinner, and understand that there are no such determinate ideas, we realise that ‘there is no history of the idea to be written, but only a history necessarily focused on the various agents who used the idea, and on their varying situations and intentions in using it’.10 Many historians conceded this point but tried to ‘save’ the objects of intellectual history from contingency by adopting a contextual approach which subjects the meaning of texts to the historical context in which they were written. This, however, hardly solves the problem, since knowing the ‘context’ does not necessarily entail knowing the attitude of the author of the text towards it: did he try to conform to ‘the spirit of his time’? Did he try to subvert it through irony? Was he at all aware, at the time, of all the minute nuances of this context, which the meticulous historian from his posterior perspective neatly mapped out? Here again, I agree with Skinner that the context should not be accepted as determinate but rather as ‘an ultimate framework for helping to decide what conventionally recognizable meanings, in a society of that kind, it might in principle have been possible for someone to have intended to communicate’.11 Neither the text ‘in itself’ nor the context ‘in itself’ can provide us with definite answers: ‘There are simply no perennial problems in philosophy,’ concludes Skinner, ‘only individual answers to individual questions, with as many different questions as there are questioners.’12 The historian studying fascism, whether in the French case or in the German or Italian ones, who wishes to break free from essentialism and reductionism, would do best to start by questioning his own motivation for conducting the study. For it is always a certain kind of fascism that

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is being pursued, one which relates to a broader context that can be as dramatic as a deep-seated trauma or as prosaic as a broader academic agenda. But whatever it may be, that context sets the grammar of the quest and its syntactic boundaries. Once that context is at least somewhat coherent, it would be useful to conflate it with another, seemingly contradictory one, in order to see what elements of concrete historical reality could have sparked off such diverse uses of the concept. My argument is that such diversity is the result not of a ‘mistake’ on the part of this or that scholar but of the contingent concurrence of those historical elements. In our case we saw how the political trajectory of a much esteemed professional group coincided with that of a very heterogeneous group of ‘nonconformists’, and how the elective affinities between them, enhanced by the defeat in the war and the ensuing occupation, encouraged them to pursue a common agenda, which seemed increasingly menacing to many in France. This ‘enemy within’ menace received already then the designation of ‘fascism’, due to the efforts of groups such as the CVIA. Looking at it in this way renders the question of whether this was ‘really’ fascism quite redundant. However, the term ‘fascism’, being ultimately a mobilising myth, is still very important and relevant, for it carries connotations which have the power to influence political discourse even today. Very few people would care to be labelled ‘fascists’ and those who proudly carry this tag are very unlikely to gain any political influence. The real danger would appear when the power of this designation wears off; when it no longer evokes images and associations that are disturbing enough to haunt our minds. And this is where the facts gathered by the historian and arranged in coherent patterns (such as the elective affinities between technocracy and ‘nonconformism’) come into the picture. Not as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle known to be the parts of a predefined whole, but rather as anchors in concrete reality; as dusted, polished, fine-tuned and articulated testimonies to the immanence of evil.

Notes

1 A Contextual Approach to the Study of Fascism 1. Roger Griffin (ed.), International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, Arnold, London: 1998. 2. Ibid., p. 15. 3. Executive of the Communist International (ECCI) Plenum on ‘Fascism, the War, and the Tasks of the Communist Parties’, in J. Degras (ed.), The Communist International 1919–1943, Vol. 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1965, p. 296. 4. Ibid., p. 298. 5. Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism, Verso, London: 1979. 6. Seymour M. Lipset, Political Man, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1981, p. 134. 7. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York: 1966. 8. A. J. Gregor, The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ: 1974. 9. Ibid., p. 129. 10. George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution, Howard Fertig, New York: 1999, p. 42. 11. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945, UCL Press, London: 1995. 12. Zeev Sternhell, M. Sznajder and M. Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, Princeton University Press, Princeton: 1994. 13. Roger Eatwell, ‘Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1992, p. 174. 14. Ibid., p. 189. 15. Griffin, International Fascism, p. 14. 16. Gilbert Allardyce, ‘What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, 1979, pp. 367–88. 17. René Rémond, Les Droites en France, Aubier Montaigne, Paris: 1982. 18. R. Giradet, ‘Notes sur l’esprit d’un fascisme français 1934–1939’, Revue française de science politique, Vol. 5, No. 3, juillet–septembre 1955, pp. 529–46. 19. J. Touchard, ‘L’Esprit des années trente’, reproduced in Pierre Andreu, Révoltes de l’esprit, Editions Kimé, Paris: 1991, pp. 195–229. 20. Giradet, ‘Notes sur l’esprit d’un fascisme’, p. 580. 21. Touchard, ‘L’Esprit des années trente’, p. 213. 22. Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 30, Seuil, Paris: 1969. 23. Ibid., p. 315. 24. Bernard-Henri Lévy, L’Idéologie française, Grasset, Paris: 1981. 25. Ibid., p. 19. 189

190

Notes

26. Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche, Le Seuil, Paris: 1983. Quotes from this source used herewith are taken from the English translation: Z. Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left, Princeton University Press, Princeton: 1996. 27. Ibid., p. 29. 28. Ibid., p. 272. 29. Ibid., p. 14. 30. Ibid., p. 20. 31. Ibid., p. 28. 32. M. Winock, ‘Fascisme à la française ou fascisme introuvable?’, Le Débat, No. 25, mai 1983; reprinted in M. Winock, Nationalisme, antisemitisme et fascisme en France, Seuil, Paris: 1990, p. 280. 33. Ibid., p. 281. 34. Ibid., pp. 285–6. 35. Ibid., p. 38. 36. Jacques Julliard, ‘Sur un fascisme imaginaire: à propos d’un livre de Zeev Sternhell’, Annales. E.S.V. 39, No. 4, July–August 1984, p. 859. 37. Serge Berstein, ‘La France des années trente allergique au fascisme: à propos d’un livre de Zeev Sternhell’, Vingtième Siècle, No. 2, April 1984, pp. 83–94. 38. William D. Irvine, ‘Fascism in France and the Strange Case of the Croix de Feu’, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 63, No. 2, June 1991, p. 294. 39. Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave 1933–1939, Yale University Press, New Haven and London: 1995, p. 10. 40. Michel Dobry, ‘La thèse immunitaire face aux fascismes’, in Michel Dobry (ed.), Le mythe de l’allergie française au fascisme, Bibliothèque Albin Michel, Paris: 2003, p. 53. 41. Stanley Cavell, The Claim to Rationality: Knowledge and the Basis of Morality, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1961–2, pp. 258–9; quoted in Hannah F. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, University of California Press, Berkeley: 1972, p. 96. 42. Julian Jackson, ‘Mal embarqé bien arrivé: the Strange Story of François Perroux’, in Hanna Diamond and Simon Kitson (eds), Vichy, Resistance, Liberation, Berg, Oxford: 2005, p. 155. 43. Rémond, Les Droites en France, p. 198. 44. Ibid., p. 218. 45. Ibid., p. 221. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., p. 234. 48. Lévy, L’Idéologie française. 49. Ibid., p. 207. 50. Ibid., pp. 216–17. 51. Ibid., p. 208. 52. ‘Amazing Grace’, an interview conducted by Ari Shavit, Haaretz, 6 March 2008. 53. Ibid. 54. Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche, p. 14. 55. Ibid., p. 27. 56. Ibid., p. 29. 57. Ibid., p. 296.

Notes

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58. Sternhell, Sznajder and Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology. Originally published as Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste, Fayard, Paris: 1989. 59. Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 30. Loubet del Bayle dealt mostly with the Young Right and with the groups affiliated with socialCatholicism. His book should be read in combination with Pierre Andreu’s Révoltes de l’Esprit, Editions Kimé, Paris: 1991, which discussed from the inevitably biased perspective of the author, some of the other major politically dissident currents of the period, including those issued from the major political parties, and which also includes a reprint of Jean Touchard’s important essay ‘L’ésprit des années 1930: une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française’. 60. Olivier Dard, Le Rendez-Vous Manqué des Relèves des Années 30, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris: 2002. 61. Ibid., p. 11. 62. The members of this ‘control group’ are referred to in various publications from the period in question usually as ‘techniciens’, and much later on as ‘cadres’. However, if one reads carefully the sources in question, is it clear that while most authors had in mind some broad concept of middle management possessing technical skills, their concrete point of reference were engineers, especially those who had graduated from the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Centrale. 63. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London: 1948. 64. A. Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1971. 65. M. J. Hill, A Sociology of Religion, London, Heinemann: 1973. 66. F. Parkin, Max Weber, Ellis Horwood and Tavistock Publications, Chichester and London: 1982. 67. R. Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, Methuen, London: 1966. 68. For the purpose of this study I used the following English translation: J. W. Goethe, Elective Affinities, Henry Regnery Company, Chicago: 1963. 69. Quoted in R. H. Howe, ‘Max Weber’s Elective Affinities: Sociology Within the Bounds of Pure Reason’, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 84, No. 2, September 1978, pp. 366–85.

2 Virtue, Virtuosity and the Ethos of Professionalism 1. Gustave Le Rouge, La Guerre des Vampires, U.G.E 10/18, Paris: 1978, p. 66. The references to literary works in this chapter are informed by the excellent article ‘Les ingénieurs: géniaux ou ingénieux’ by Françoise Curutchet-Jullian in a special issue of Culture Technique dedicated to the engineering profession (Culture Technique, No. 12, mars 1984, pp. 37–47). 2. Keith Taylor (ed.), Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825): Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organization, Holmes & Meier, London: 1975, p. 102. 3. Ibid., pp. 83–5. 4. Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de, Œuvres de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin, Vol. 24, Dentu & Leroux, Paris: 1865–78, p. 86. Also quoted by G. Pinet, ‘L’Ecole

192

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

Notes Polytechnique et les Saint-Simoniens’, Revue de Paris, 15 May 1894, p. 85. For an extensive discussion of the political outlook and impact of the Saint-Simonians, see G. Iggers, The Cult of Authority, the Political Philosophy of the Saint-Simonians, M. Nijhoff, The Hague: 1958. On the contribution of the Saint-Simonians to the development of technocratic ideas see R. Carlisle, ‘The Birth of Technocracy: Science, Society, and Saint-Simonians’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 35, No. 3, July–September 1974, pp. 445–64. Abel Transon, ‘Premier discours sur la religion’, quoted in Pinet, ‘L’Ecole Polytechnique et les Saint-Simoniens’, p. 81. L. Boucraut, ‘La vocation de l’ingénieur’, Echo de l’USIC, Février 1937, p. 113. There are some very useful studies of the Ecole Polytechnique covering both pedagogical and wider issues. For this chapter I referred mainly to Terry Shinn’s, L’Ecole Polytechnique 1794–1914, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris: 1980, and to two anthologies published on the occasion of the school’s bicentenary and edited by Bruno Belhoste, Amy Dahan Dalmedico and Antoine Picon, La France des X: deux siècles d’histoire, Economica, Paris: 1995 and La Formation Polytechnicienne 1794–1994, Dunod, Paris: 1994. The best study to date of the Ecole Centrale is John Hubbel Weiss, The Making of Technological Man, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, UK: 1982. Quoted in Weiss, Making of Technological Man, p. 24. All quantitative data from table 3.8 in ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 220. Ibid., p. 221. Ibid., pp. 222–3. Jules Verne, L’Invasion de la mer, Hetzel, Paris: 1905, p. 64. Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK: 1996, p. 318. Jules Verne, L’Etoile du Sud, Hetzel, Paris: 1884, p. 98. Georges Lamirand, Le Rôle Sociale de l’ingénieur, Plon, Paris: 1934, p. 230. Quoted in Marcel Teillard, ‘Pour Une Doctrine des Cadres’, Front Economique, 4 mai 1937. Jules Verne, Sans dessus-dessous, Hetzel, Paris: 1889, p. 116. Lamirand, Le Rôle Sociale de l’ingénieur, p. 11. Jules Verne, Robur le conquérant, Hetzel, Paris: 1886, pp. 28–9. Gustave Le Rouge, La rue hantée, Hetzel, Paris: 1914, pp. 235–6. Jules Verne, Les Indes noires, Hetzel, Paris: 1877, p. 95. Ibid., p. 205. Quoted in Charles Rodney Day, ‘Des ouvriers aux ingénieurs: le développement des Ecoles d’Arts et Métiers et le rôle des anciens élèves’, Culture Technique, Numéro spécial: Les ingénieurs, No. 12, mars 1984, p. 285. Henri Le Chatelier, Science et industrie: les débuts du taylorisme en France, Editions du CTHS, Paris: 2001, p. 271. Ibid., p. 215. For an extensive discussion of the various public initiatives and parliamentary discussions of the 1934 law regarding the title of engineer, see Pascal Goutman, ‘La genèse parlementaire de la loi sur le titre d’ingénieur’, in André Grelon (ed.), Les ingénieurs de la crise: titre et profession entre les deux guerres, Editions EHESS, Paris: 1986, pp. 171–95.

Notes

193

29. For a discussion of the positions of the major engineering professional unions with regard to the title of engineer, see Jean-Louis Robert, ‘Les syndicats d’ingénieurs et de techniciens et la protection du titre d’ingénieur (1919–1934)’, in Grelon (ed.), Les ingénieurs de la crise, pp. 151–7. 30. A good study of the origins and policies of the USIC – the most prominent engineering association, is A. Thépot, ‘L’Union sociale des ingénieurs catholiques durant la première moitié du XXe siècle’, in A. Thépot (ed.), L’ingénieur dans la société française, Ouvrières, Paris: 1985, pp. 217–27. 31. Ibid., p. 146. 32. For an extensive discussion of this controversy and the views of each of its protagonists, see Claire-Françoise Bompaire-Evesque, Un débat sur l’université au temps de la Troisième République: la lutte contre la nouvelle Sorbonne, Aux Amateurs de Livres, Paris: 1988. 33. Agathon, ‘La culture classique et les hommes d’affaires’, Revue des Français, tome IX, janvier–février–mars 1911, pp. 35–6. 34. Lamirand, Le Rôle Sociale de l’ingénieur, p. 240. 35. Gustave Le Rouge, Le Voleur de Visage, Méricant, Paris: 1904, p. 55. 36. Lamirand, Le Rôle Sociale de l’ingénieur, p. 23. 37. Ibid., p. 250. 38. Ibid., p. 320. 39. Yves Cohen, ‘Les Polytechniciens dans le discours sur le commandement (1891–1940)’, in B. Belhoste, A. Dahan Dalmedico and A. Picon (eds), La France des X, Economica, Paris: 1995, pp. 157–68. 40. Maréchal Lyautey, Du Rôle Social de l’officier, René Julliard, Paris: 1946, pp. 48–9. 41. Lamirand, Le Rôle Sociale de l’ingénieur, p. 143. 42. USTICA, No. 1, 5 mars 1921, p. 1. 43. Lamirand, Le Rôle Sociale de l’ingénieur, p. 43. 44. Charles Aubert, ‘Le problème des classes’, Echo de l’USIC, Octobre–Novembre 1939, p. 574. 45. On the relations between engineers and employers, see I. Kolboom, ‘Le patronat et la question des ingénieurs dans les années trente’, in Grelon (ed.), Les ingénieurs de la crise, pp. 61–72. 46. Charles Virmand, ’Le rôle social de l’ingénieur’, Echo de l’USIC, Décembre 1932, p. 644. 47. Ibid., p. 648. 48. Quoted in L. Boltanski, Les Cadres, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris: 1982, pp. 79–80. The first chapter of Boltanski’s book (pp. 63–153) provides a particularly valuable survey and analysis of the rise of the cadres in the 1930s. 49. Quoted in Cohen, ‘Les Polytechniciens dans le discours sur le commandement (1891–1940)’, p. 161. 50. Henri Fayol, General and Industrial Management, Pitman Paperbacks, Surrey, UK: 1967, p. 22. 51. Ibid., pp. 24–5. 52. Ibid., p. 26. 53. Ibid., pp. 98–9. 54. Ibid., p. 42. 55. Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules, PUF, Paris: 1939, p. 7.

194 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Notes Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie politique, A.G.L, Paris: 1984, p. 109. Ibid., p. 110. Ibid., p. 304. ‘La classe ouvrier: sa psychologie’, Echo de l’USIC, février 1939, p. 123. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 125. Lamirand, Le Rôle Sociale de l’ingénieur, p. 130. Louis Beugniez, ‘La Culture Ouvrier’, Echo de l’USIC, janvier 1939, p. 28. R. P. Torris, ‘L’organisation professionnel dans le respect des libertés essentielles’, Echo de l’USIC, février 1939, pp. 134–5. Charles Aubert, ‘La lutte des classes et la doctrine de Marx’, Echo de l’USIC, décembre 1921, p. 276. Charles Aubert, ‘Classes économiques ou classes sociales?’, Echo de l’USIC, mai 1922, p. 476. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 3, Bedminster Press, New York: 1968, p. 1006. Ibid., p. 1028. Ibid., p. 975. Ibid., p. 1000. Ibid., p. 1121.

3 From the Trenches to the Laboratories: L’ Appel aux Techniciens 1. Roger Francq, ‘Appel’, USTICA, 5 mars 1921. 2. Roger Francq, ‘Seules la technique et la main-d’oeuvre réunies pourront reconstituer l’Europe’, USTICA, 20 avril 1922. 3. Roger Francq, ‘Gouverner c’est prévoir’, USTICA, 5–20 juillet 1923. 4. Francq, ‘Appel’. Roger Francq continued to promote these ideas throughout the interwar period. A summery of his doctrine and a reiteration of his appeal to the engineers can be found in his book L’Economie rationnelle, Gallimard, Paris: 1929. 5. J. Archer, ‘L’orientation syndicale des techniciens’, USTICA, 20 mars 1921. 6. Jean Rey, ‘Le rôle social de l’ingénieur’, Bulletin de l’USIF, juillet 1926. 7. Charles Virmand, ‘Rapports présentés au Congrès International de l’enseignement technique de Bruxelles’, Echo de l’USIC, décembre 1932. 8. Firmin Baconnier, ‘A.B.C. du syndicalisme’, L’ingénieur Français, avril 1927. 9. Firmin Baconnier, ‘Vers une renaissance corporative’, L’ingénieur Français, décembre 1927. 10. Jacques Valdour, ‘La corporation par rapport à l’Etat’, L’ingénieur Français, mars 1927. 11. V. Valentin-Smith, ‘L’ingénieur’, L’ingénieur Français, février 1927. 12. Francq, L’Economie Rationnelle, p. 96. 13. On this subject, see C. Maier, ‘Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1970, pp. 27–61. 14. Lysis, Vers la Démocratie nouvelle, Librairie Payot, Paris: 1917, p. 40. 15. Ibid., p. 11.

Notes 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

195

Ibid. Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., pp. 196–7. Ibid., pp. 184–5. Ibid., p. 31. Maurice Barrès, Pour la haute intelligence française, Librairie Plon, Paris: 1925, p. 29. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 248. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., pp. 161–2. Ibid., p. 28. On Georges Valois’ rift with the Action Française see: P. Serant, Les Dissidents de l’Action Française, Copernic, Paris: 1978, pp. 13–36; F. Huguenin, A l’école de l’Action Française, JC Lattès, Paris: 1998, pp. 369–73; J.-M. Duval, Le Faisceau de Georges Valois, La Librairie Française, Paris: 1979, pp. 65–9. Georges Valois et Georges Coquelle, Intelligence et Production, Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, Paris: 1920, p. 169. Ibid., p. 116. Georges Valois, La Révolution Nationale, Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, Paris: 1924, p. 98. Ibid., pp. 40–1. A rather concise presentation of the Faisceau is given in Duval, Le Faisceau de Georges Valois; a more extensive discussion can be found in Allen Douglas, From Fascism to Libertarian Communism: Georges Valois against the Third Republic, University of California Press, Berkeley: 1992. Valois, La Révolution Nationale, p. 133. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., pp. 165–7. Georges Valois, Le Fascisme, Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, Paris: 1926, pp. 42–3. Georges Valois, ‘Notre politique ouvrière pour la nouvelle organisation économique’, Nouveau Siècle, 1 May 1927. Ibid. Valois, La Révolution Nationale, p. 162. Georges Valois, L’Homme contre l’argent, Librairie Valois, Paris: 1928, p. 15. Ibid., p. 6. Georges Valois, Un Nouvel Age de l’Humanité, Librairie Valois, Paris: 1928, p. 152. Ibid., pp. 183–4. Georges Valois, Guerre ou Révolution, Librairie Valois, Paris: 1931, p. 184. Valois, L’Homme contre l’argent, p. 180. Georges Valois, ‘Appel aux technicians’, Cahiers Bleus, April 1929. Ibid. Georges Valois, ‘Echos du monde moderne et des jeunes équipes’, Cahiers Bleus, October 1929. Georges Valois, ‘Lettre à Marcel Déat’, Chantiers Coopératifs, November 1933.

196

Notes

52. On Mercier see: R. Kuisel, Ernest Mercier: French Technocrat, University of California Press, Berkeley: 1967. 53. ‘Ce qu’est le Redressement Français’, Redressement Français, January 1927. 54. Lucien Romier, Idées très simples pour les français, Les Documentaires, Paris: 1928, p. 32. 55. Raphaël Alibert, ‘Organisation Politique et Administrative. La Réforme Parlementaire’, Cahiers du Redressement Français, No. 24, 1927, p. 41. 56. Raoul Dautry, ‘L’Organisation de la vie Sociale’, Cahiers du Redressement Français, No. 24, 1927, pp. 30–31. 57. ‘Ce qu’est le Redressement Français’. 58. Dautry, ‘L’Organisation de la vie Sociale’, p. 32. 59. Quoted in Antoine Prost, Les Anciens Combattants et la Société Française, Vol. 3, Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, Paris: 1977, p. 129. 60. Ibid., p. 134. 61. Raoul Bigot, ‘Organisons La production. Les Ententes Industrielles’, Cahiers du Redressement Français, No. 8, 1927, pp. 217–18. 62. On the dissident tendencies in the Radical party throughout the interwar period see: S. Berstein, Histoire du Parti Radical (Vol. 2 – Crises du Radicalisme 1926–1939), Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, Paris: 1980. 63. The political legacy of Bertrand de Jouvenel has not yet been thoroughly studied. A rather salutary assessment is given in C. Slevin, ‘Social Change and Human Values: A Study of the Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel’, Political Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, March 1971, pp. 49–62. A more damning commentary is offered by Zeev Sternhell in Ni droite ni gauche, Le Seuil, Paris: 1983. 64. ‘Le Programme du Parti Radical’, La Voix, 2 April 1928. 65. Bertrand de Jouvenel, ‘De l’incompatibilité des idées avec les portefeuilles’, La Voix, 1 June 1930. 66. Bertrand de Jouvenel, L’economie dirigée, Librarie Valois, Paris: 1928, p. 172. 67. Christian Pineau, ‘Science et Action: essai sur l’état scientifique’, Notre Temps, March 1929. 68. Jean Luchaire, ‘Fin de la lutte des classes’, Notre Temps, December 1929. Many of Luchaire’s ideas, which reflect the political tendency of the ‘Young Turks’ are summarised in his Une génération réaliste, Librairie Valois, Paris: 1929. 69. Jean Luchaire, ‘Le Politique face au technique’, Notre Temps, December 1929. 70. Jean Luchaire, ‘Vers l’Etat technique’, Notre Temps, December 1929. 71. Pineau, ‘Science et Action’. 72. Sammy Beracha, ‘Lutte de classe? Non. Querelle de générations? Oui’, Notre Temps, July 1932. 73. Bertrand de Jouvenel, ‘Au confluent du Socialisme et du Jacobinisme’, La Voix, 6 April 1930. 74. Emile Roche, ‘Notre Route’, La Voix, 15 April 1930. 75. Bertrand de Jouvenel, ‘Pour la Gauche Unitaire’, La Voix, 9 June 1930. 76. Emile Roche, ‘ “Jeunes Equipes” et “Nouvelles Equipes” ’, La Voix, 9 March 1930. 77. Barthélemy Montagnon, Grandeur et Servitude Socialistes, Librairie Valois, Paris: 1929, p. 55.

Notes 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

197

Ibid., p. 162. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., pp. 109–10. Marcel Déat, Perspectives Socialistes, Librarie Valois, Paris: 1930, p. 215. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 234. Ibid., p. 163. Valois, L’Homme contre l’argent, p. 16.

4 Beyond Right and Left: Rallying to the Total Technical State 1. Antoine Prost, ‘Les grèves de mai-juin 1936 revisitées’, Le Mouvement Social, No. 200, juillet–septembre 2002, p. 53. 2. Bertrand de Jouvenel, ‘Lettre de démission’, La Lutte des Jeunes, 25 February 1934, p. 2. 3. Sammy Béracha, Rationalisation et Révolution, Librairie Valois, Paris: 1930, p. 38. 4. Georges Roux, ‘La jeunesse révolutionnaire’, La Lutte des Jeunes, 25 February 1934, p. 4. 5. ‘La reforme de la constitution’, La Lutte des Jeunes, 25 February 1934, p. 7. 6. Béracha, Rationalisation et Révolution, p. 169. 7. ‘Le programme des Techniciens’, La Lutte des Jeunes, 15 April 1934, p. 6. 8. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, ‘Verra-t’on un parti national et socialiste?’, La Lutte des Jeunes, 25 February 1934, pp. 4–5. 9. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Socialisme Fasciste, Gallimard, Paris: 1934, p. 59. 10. La Rochelle, ‘Verra-t’on un parti national et socialiste?’. 11. On Marcel Déat’s neo-socialism see: A. Bergounioux, ‘Le néo-socialisme. Marcel Déat: réformisme traditionnel ou esprit des années trente’, Revue Historique, October–December 1978, pp. 389–414. Other useful studies of Déat’s political career J.-P. Cointet, Marcel Déat, Perrin, Paris: 1998; and S. Grossman, ‘L’évolution de Marcel Déat’, Revue d’histoire de la 2e Guerre mondiale, No. 97, January 1975, pp. 3–25. 12. Marcel Déat, ‘Les Partis-Ecoles’, in Daniel-Rops et al. (eds), Le Rajeunissement de la Politique, Corréa, Paris: 1932, p. 285. 13. Antoine Prost, Les Anciens Combattants et la Société Française, Vol. 3, Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, Paris: 1977, p. 136. 14. Henri de Man, The Psychology of Socialism, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London: 1928, p. 199. 15. Ibid., p. 205. 16. Ibid., p. 206. 17. Ibid., p. 207. 18. Ibid., p. 206. 19. Ibid., p. 217.

198

Notes

20. Marcel Déat, quoted in S. Sailly, ‘Le Rassemblement Pour le Plan’, L’Information Sociale, 11 July 1935. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Le Comité du Plan, Le Plan Français, Fasquelle Editeurs, Paris: 1935, pp. 150–1. 24. Charles Albert, ‘Classes moyennes à l’action! C’est vous qui êtes désignées . . .’, Front Economique, 5 May 1938. 25. Marcel Déat, ‘Une technique et un idéal’, Front Economique, 27 October 1938. 26. H. Le Chatelier, Le Plan du 9 juillet, Gallimard, Paris: 1934. 27. Ibid., pp. 15–20. 28. Ibid., p. 21. 29. Ibid., p. 22 30. Quoted in Olivier Dard, Jean Coutrot: de l’Ingénieur au Prophète, Presses Universitaires franc-comtoises, Paris: 1999, p. 160. 31. Ordre Nouveau (Coll.), ‘Lettre à Hitler’, Ordre Nouveau, No. 5, 15 novembre 1933, p. 17. 32. Robert Gibrat et Robert Loustau, ‘Comment se posent les problèmes techniques’, Ordre Nouveau, No. 7, 15 janvier 1934, p. 3. 33. Robert Aron et Arnaud Dandieu, La Révolution Nécessaire, Jean Michel Place, Paris: 1993, p. 246. 34. Daniel-Rops, ‘Le travail et l’esprit’, Ordre Nouveau, No. 7, 15 janvier 1934, p. 10. 35. Robert Aron et Arnaud Dandieu, Le Cancer Américaine, Les éditions Rieder, Paris: 1931. 36. Robert Aron et Arnaud Dandieu, Décadence de la Nation Française, Les éditions Rieder, Paris: 1931, p. 207. 37. Ibid., p. 214. 38. Alexandre Marc, ‘Tradition Renouée’, Ordre Nouveau, No. 8, 15 février 1934, p. 6. 39. Ibid., p. 18. 40. See the discussion in Chapter 2 of this work. 41. Jules Verne, L’Ile mystérieuse, Livre de Poche, Paris: 1971, p. 13. 42. Roger Francq, ‘Fascisme’, USTICA, 5 novembre 1922. 43. ‘L’homme des classes moyennes c’est l’homme des risques’, Front Economique, 6 juillet 1938. 44. Aron et Dandieu, La Révolution Nécessaire, p. 271. 45. Helpful studies of X-Crise are O. Dard, ‘Voyage à l’interieur d’X-Crise’, Vingtième Siècle, No. 47, July–September 1995; G. Brun, X-Crise – de la récurrence des crises économiques, Economica, Paris: 1981; The group is also discussed extensively in P. Bauchard, Les Technocrates et le Pouvoir, Arthand, Paris: 1966, pp. 15–50. 46. Excerpts from this article are quoted in Olivier Dard, Jean Coutrot, p. 57. 47. This article is extensively quoted and discussed in Dard, Jean Coutrot, pp. 66–72. 48. Gérard Brun, Technocrates et Technocratie en France, Albatros, Paris: 1985, p. 48. 49. Quoted in Dard, Jean Coutrot, p. 80.

Notes

199

50. Auguste Detoeuf, ‘La Fin du Libéralisme’, X-Crise, numéro 31–2, mai–juin– juillet–aout 1936. 51. Ibid. 52. Marcel Déat, ‘Conditions d’un Equilibre Français’, X-Crise, numéro 52, December 1938. 53. Quoted in Dard, Jean Coutrot, p. 83. 54. Ibid. 55. On Jean Coutrot see Dard, Jean Coutrot; another insightful study is J. Clarke, ‘Engineering a New Order in the 1930s: The Case of Jean Coutrot’, French Historical Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2001, pp. 63–86. 56. Jean Coutrot, ‘Nécessités 39’, Humanisme économique, September–October 1938, pp. 5–7 57. Jean Coutrot, Les Leçons de juin 1936 – l’Humanisme économique, CPEE, Paris: 1936, p. 61. 58. Ibid., pp. 31–2. 59. Ibid. 60. Coutrot, ‘Nécessités 39’. 61. Quoted in Dard, Jean Coutrot, pp. 332–3. 62. Jean Coutrot, L’ingénieur Devant les Mécanismes Economiques et Sociaux, Société des Ingénieurs Civils de France, Paris: 1939, p. 23. 63. See Dard, Jean Coutrot, pp. 335–6. 64. Ibid., p. 341. 65. Ibid., pp. 342–3. 66. J. Coutrot, ‘De nouvelles raisons de vivre’, La Revue Universelle, 15 février 1936, pp. 496, 498 (also quoted in Dard, Jean Coutrot, p. 232). 67. Quoted in Dard, Jean Coutrot, pp. 233–4. 68. Jean Coutrot, ‘Lettre ouvert a Marcel Déat’, La République, 13 Novembre 1937. 69. Marcel Déat, ‘Réponse à Jean Coutrot’, La République, 16 Novembre 1937. 70. A good study of the FFEPH is A. Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales: la fondation Alexis Carrel 1941–1945, Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris: 1992. 71. About Perroux see also: Julian Jackson, ‘Mal embarqé bien arrivé: The Strange Story of François Perroux’, in Hanna Diamond and Simon Kitson (eds), Vichy, Resistance, Liberation, Berg, Oxford: 2005, pp. 155–70. 72. François Perroux, Renaître, essais. 1re série. La Révolution en marche, Librairie de Médicis, Paris: 1943, p. 128. 73. Ibid., p. 129. 74. Ibid., p. 132. 75. François Perroux, ‘Le rôle professionnel et politique de l’ingénieur’, Institut d’études corporatives et sociales, Cahier de travaux, Numéro 9–10, Avril 1944. 76. René Rémond, Les Droites en France, Aubier Montaigne, Paris: 1982, p. 207.

5 Big Illusions and Harsh Realities: The Vichy Years 1. On the important role played by Henri Massis as mentor of the young generation of right-wing intellectuals see, for instance: M. Toda, Henri Massis: un Témoin de la Droite Intellectuelle, La Table Ronde, Paris: 1987.

200

Notes

2. Charles Maurras, La Seule France, H. Lardanchet, Lyon: 1941, pp. 163–4. 3. See on this issue, Vicki Caron, ‘The Antisemitic Revival in France in the 1930s: The Socioeconomic Dimension Reconsidered’, The Journal of Modern History, No. 70, March 1998, pp. 24–73. 4. Ibid., p. 50. 5. Maurras, La Seule France, pp. 191–2. 6. Ibid., p. 196. 7. Ibid. 8. See Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years 1940–1944, Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2001, pp. 104–5. 9. Charles Maurras, L’antisémitisme d’État, L’Action Française, 18 February 1937, p. 5. 10. Maurras, La Seule France, p. 161. 11. Ibid., p. 160. 12. For a study of the activities of Mounier at Vichy, see John Hellman, ‘Emmanuel Mounier: A Catholic Revolutionary at Vichy’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 8, No. 4, October 1973, pp. 3–23. 13. John Hellman, The Knights-Monks of Vichy France, Uriage 1940–1945, McGill University Press, Montreal: 1993, p. 35. 14. Quoted in ibid., p. 69. 15. Maréchal Pétain, Message Aux Ouvriers, Techniciens, Patrons, Saint-Etienne, Secrétariat Général de l’Information, 1 March 1941. 16. Quoted in Hellman, Knights-Monks of Vichy France, p. 69. 17. Emmanuel Mounier, ‘Programme Pour le Mouvement de Jeunesse Français’, Esprit, January 1941, p. 165. 18. Pétain, Message Aux Ouvriers, Techniciens, Patrons. 19. Maréchal Pétain, Discours du Maréchal Philippe Pétain, 12 August 1941. 20. Quoted in Guy Thuillier, L’ENA avant l’ENA, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris: 1983, p. 224. 21. Pétain, Message Aux Ouvriers, Techniciens, Patrons. 22. Jacques Saint-Germain, ‘L’heure des cadres’, Nouveaux Temps, 20 novembre 1940. 23. Marcel Déat, ‘La mort utile du Parlement’, L’Oeuvre, 8 July 1940. 24. Quoted in Jean-Paul Cointet, Marcel Déat, Perrin, Paris: 1998, p. 171. 25. Ibid. 26. The full text of the Report is reproduced in Antoine Prost, ‘Le rapport de Déat en faveur d’un parti national unique (juillet 1940): essai d’analyse lexicale’, Revue française de science politique, Vol. 23, No. 5, 1973, pp. 933–65. 27. The declaration is reproduced in full in Emmanuel Berl, La Fin de la 3e République, Gallimard, Paris: 1968, pp. 283–94. 28. Ibid. 29. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Fragment de Mémoires, Gallimard, Paris: 1982, p. 40. 30. Marcel Déat, ‘Le Parti Unique’, reproduced in Documents pour l’Histoire, Vol. 1, Editions Déterna, Paris: 1998, p. 33. 31. Marcel Déat, Mémoires Politiques, Denoël, Paris: 1989, p. 618. 32. Déat, ‘Le Parti Unique’, p. 84. 33. Marcel Déat, ‘Le Parti Unique’, Le National Populaire, 25 July 1942. 34. Ibid., p. 22. 35. Déat, Mémoires Politiques, pp. 622–3.

Notes 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

201

Bertrand de Jouvenel, Le Réveil de l’Europe, Gallimard, Paris: 1938, p. 21. Ibid. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., pp. 142–3. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 145–7. Ibid., pp. 232–3. Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., p. 236. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left, Princeton University Press, Princeton: 1986, p. 292. Bertrand de Jouvenel, Après la Défaite, Plon, Paris: 1941, p. 229. Ibid., pp. 232–4. Jacques Saint-Germain, ‘L’ingénieur, cerveau de la corporation de demain’, Nouveaux Temps, 25 November 1940. About the affair of the ‘synarchie’ see R. Kuisel, ‘The Legend of the Vichy Synarchy’, French Historical Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3, Spring 1970, pp. 365–98; O. Dard, La Synarchie, Perrin, Paris: 1998; a rather curious interpretation which seems to take the allegations surrounding that affair at their face value is L. Yagil, ‘La synarchie ou le mouvement “synarchie d’empire” et Vichy 1940–1944’, Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains, No. 165, January 1992, pp. 71–89. Quoted in Olivier Dard, Jean Coutrot de l’ingénieur au prophète, Presses Universitaires franc-comtoises, Paris: 1999, p. 393. Ibid. Ibid. Pierre Pucheu, Ma Vie, Amiot-Dumont, Paris: 1948, p. 176. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid. Ibid., p. 272. Ramon Fernandez, ‘Entretien avec M. Pucheu’, La Gerbe, 4 Septembre 1941. Robert Aron, Histoire de Vichy, Fayard, Paris: 1954, p. 386. La Rochelle, Fragment de Mémoires, p. 94. Fernandez, ‘Entretien avec M. Pucheu’. Aron, Histoire de Vichy, pp. 388–9. Pucheu, Ma Vie, p. 194. Aron, Histoire de Vichy, pp. 387–8. Laurent Joly, Vichy dans la ‘Solution Finale’, Grasset, Paris: 2006, p. 409. Pucheu, Ma Vie, p. 270. Joly, Vichy dans la ‘Solution Finale’, pp. 416–17. François Lehideux, De Renault à Pétain, Pygmalion-Gérard Watelet, Paris: 2001, p. 383. Aron, Histoire de Vichy, Vol. 2, p. 171. Quoted in Gérard Brun, Technocrates et Technocratie en France, Albatros, Paris: 1985, p. 177. Pucheu, Ma Vie, p. 255. Georges Mauco, Les Etrangers en France, leur rôle dans l’activité économique, Armand Colin, Paris: 1932, p. 556.

202

Notes

73. Ibid., p. 538. 74. Ibid., p. 560. 75. See Limore Yagil, L’homme Nouveau et la Révolution Nationale de Vichy, Presses Universitaires de Septentrion, Paris: 1997, p. 124. 76. Quoted in Patrick Weil, ‘Georges Mauco, expert en immigration: ethnoracisme pratique et antisémitisme fielleux’, in Pierre-André Taguieff (ed.), L’antisémitisme de plume 1940–1944, Berg International Editeurs, Paris: 1999, pp. 267–76. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Sébastien Jarnot, ‘Une relation récurrente: science et racisme, l’exemple de l’Ethnie Française’, Les Cahiers du Cériem, No. 5, May 2000, pp. 17–34. 80. Ibid. 81. Georges Montandon, L’Ethnie Française, Payot, Paris: 1935, p. 26. 82. Ibid., p. 13. 83. Ibid., p. 29. 84. Georges Montandon, ‘Politique ethnique’, L’Ethnie française, No. 5, September 1941, p. 28. 85. Georges Montandon, La France au Travail, 2 July 1940. 86. Quoted in Jarnot, ‘Une relation récurrente’, p. 20. 87. Joly, Vichy dans la ‘Solution Finale’, p. 551. 88. Ibid., p. 555. 89. Georges Montandon, ‘Politique ethnique’. 90. Ibid. 91. Georges Montandon, ‘Eléments de génétique et eugénique’, L’Ethnie Française, No. 9, July 1943, pp. 32–9. 92. William Schneider, ‘Towards the Improvement of the Human Race: The History of Eugenics in France’, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 54, No. 2, June 1982, p. 278. 93. Alexis Carrel, Man, The Unknown, Harper & Brothers Publishers, London: 1935, p. 266. 94. Ibid., p. 271. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., p. 272. 97. Ibid., p. 296. 98. Ibid., p. 301. 99. Ibid., pp. 318–19. 100. Ibid., p. 284. 101. Ibid., p. 304. 102. Quoted in Andrés Horacio Reggiani, ‘Alexis Carrel, the Unknown: Eugenics and Population Research under Vichy’, French Historical Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring 2002, p. 339. 103. Léon Daudet, ‘Alexis Carrel’, Candide, 21 Novembre 1935. 104. Quoted in Brun, Technocrates et Technocratie en France (1914–1945), p. 136. 105. Alexis Carrel, ‘La science de l’Homme’, La France de l’Esprit, Sequana, Paris: 1943, p. 112. 106. Reggiani, ‘Alexis Carrel, the Unknown’, p. 350. 107. ‘Une vue biologique de l’Etat’, L’œuvre, 9 May 1941. 108. Ibid.

Notes

203

109. Max Lafont, L’Extermination Douce, Editions de l’AREFPPI, Le Cellier: 1987. 110. Quoted in Jack Hayward, After the French Revolution, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London: 1991, p. 16. 111. P. Liouville, ‘Rôle de la technique’, Echo de l’USIC, December 1940. 112. Saint-Germain, ‘L’heure des cadres’. 113. François de Bois, La Formation Sociale de l’Ingénieur, PUF, Paris: 1941, p. 11.

6 Contingency, Choice and the Historian 1. Quoted in Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions française, Fayard, Paris: 1990, p. 136. 2. Ibid., pp. 140–1. 3. Michel Winock, Le Siècle des Intellectuels, Editions du Seuil, Paris: 1997, p. 305. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., p. 310. 6. On the attitude of French technocrats towards the idea of Europe, see Brun, Gérard, Technocrates et Technocratie en France 1914–1945, Albatros, Paris: 1985, pp. 231–47; on the affinities between the idea of a united Europe and the politics of ‘nonconformists’, see John Laughland, The Tainted Source, the Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea, Little Brown, London: 1997; see also Roger Griffin, ‘Europe for the Europeans: The Fascist Vision of the New Europe’, Humanities Research Centre Occasional Paper, No. 1, 1994. 7. Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Discussion or Inquisition: The Case of Alain de Benoist’, Telos, No. 98–9, Winter 1993–Spring 1994, p. 54. 8. Q. Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1969, p. 10. 9. Ibid., p. 18. 10. Ibid., p. 38. 11. Ibid., p. 49. 12. Ibid., p. 50.

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Index Abbreviations

Since a major theme of this book is the affinities between groups and individuals whose affiliations to groups, journals and institutions often crisscrossed, I thought the reader may find it useful if these affiliations were listed beside the names of the various protagonists. The following is a brief legend to the abbreviations used to denote these affiliations in the index. AD – Alliance démocratique AF – Action Française CB – Cahiers Bleus CC – Chantiers coopératifs CEPH – Centre d’Etudes des Problèmes Humains CGAJ – Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives CGT – Confédération générale du travail CP – Comité de Plan CVIA – Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes EC – Ecole Centrale EM – Etat Moderne EP – Ecole Polytechnique Esprit – Esprit EU – Ecole des Cadres d’Uriage Faisceau – Faisceau des combattants et des producteurs FC – Front Commun FFEPH – Fondation Française pour l’étude des problèmes humains GW – Group Worms LJ – Lutte de Jeunes LV – La Voix

MSR – Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (and/or its predecessor the Cagoule) NA – Novelle Age NEO – The Neo-Socialists NS – Nouveau Siècle NT – Notre Temps ON – Ordre Nouveau P9J – Plan du 9 juillet PCF – Parti Communist Français PPF – Parti Populaire Français RF – Redressement Français RNP – Rassemblement National Populaire RP – The Radical Party SFIO – Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière USIC – Union Sociale des ingénieurs Catholiques USIF – Union des Syndicats d’ingénieurs français USTICA – Union Syndicale des Techniciens de l’industrie, du Commerce et de l’Agriculture V – Held an official function in the Vichy regime XC – X-Crise (Centre Polytechnicien d’études économiques)

212

Index

Boulangism, 24, 26 Bourderon, Roger, 20 Bourdieu, Pierre, 38 Bourgeois, Jean (FFEPH), 169 Bouthillier, Yves (EC, V), 128, 174 Branger, Jacques (EP, XC, P9J, CEPH), 117, 127 Brun, Gerard, 116 Bucard, Marcel, 22

Abetz, Otto, 141–2, 150, 172 Action Française, 10, 14, 24, 27, 44, 63, 69, 70, 74, 121, 131–6, 144, 150, 168, 171, 178 Albert, Charles (ON, RP, PF), 108 Alibert, Raphaël (RF), 79, 131, 149 Allardyce, Gilbert, 9 Antisemitism, 134–5, 143–5, 157, 160, 163–4, 180–1, 186 Aron, Robert (ON, NC, CEPH), 110–113, 154–7 Arrighi, Victor (GW), 150, 155 Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires (AEAR), 184 Aubert, Charles (USIC), 56 Auriol, Vincent (SFIO, EM), 94 Bardet, Gerard (EP, V, XC, P9J, CEPH), 114–16, 118, 127 Barnaud, Jacques (EP, V, XC, NC, GW), 127, 149, 150 Barrès, Maurice, 16, 67–9, 70, 78 Bauduin, Paul (EP, V, XC, GW), 136 Belin, René (CGT, XC, NC, CEPH, V), 104, 116, 136, 149, 174 Benda, Julien, 184 Bendix, Reinhard, 30 Benoist-Méchin, Jacques (V, PPF, GW), 155 Beracha, Sammy (EM, CB, CC, NT, LJ), 85, 100, 101 Bergery, Gaston (NT, V, FC), 141, 142, 185 Bergman, Torborn, 30–1 Berl, Emmanuel (V), 75, 143 Bernard, Aymé, 87 Berstein, Serge, 16, 21 Bertholet, Jean (EP, V), 149 Bichelonne, Jean (EP, XC, V), 127, 149, 159, 174 Blum, Leon (SFIO), 88, 99, 121, 172, 179

Cahiers Bleus, 74, 75 Carrel, Alexis (PPF, CEPH, FFEPH, V), 121, 123, 128, 129, 160, 166–70, 176, 181 Cavell, Stanley, 19 Caziot, Pierre (V), 149 Céline, Ferdinand, 164 Centre d’Etudes des Problèmes Humains (CEPH), 120–3, 127, 128 Centre Polytechnicien d’études économiques (X-Crise), 114–17, 127, 128, 149, 153, 174, 179 Cercle Proudhon, 23–4, 26 Charte du Travail, 139 Chavin, Henri, 151 Chevalier, Jacques (V), 149 Comintern, 2, 99, 172 Comité de Plan, 107 Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (CVIA), 183–5, 188 Commissariat Général aux Question Juives (CGQJ), 155, 157, 158, 165 Communism, 2, 23, 77, 87, 90, 95, 98, 99, 131, 155, 156, 162, 172, 183, 184, 185 Confédération générale du travail (CGT), 50, 83, 94, 99, 101, 104, 107, 109, 116, 136, 149 Coty, François, 70, 96 Coutrot, Jean (EP, P9J, XC, CEPH, NC, CC, EM), 114, 116–23, 127, 128, 129, 144, 151, 152–3, 181

213

214

Index

Croix de Feu, 11, 16, 98, 107, 109, 126, 153, 155, 168, 171, 178 Daladier, Édouard (PR), 82, 83, 97, 98, 100, 127, 134, 149, 161, 179 Dandieu, Arnaud (ON), 11, 110, 112, 113 Daniel-Rops (NT, ON), 11, 110 Dard, Olivier, 27, 126, 178 Darlan, Francois (Admiral) (V), 96, 128, 144, 149, 150, 152, 153, 159 Dautry, Raoul (EP, XC, RF, NC), 79, 80, 94, 96, 127, 128 Déat, Marcel (SFIO, V, NEO, RNP, XC, P9J, NT, EM, CB, CC, CP), 14, 74, 75, 76, 86, 87–8, 91–2, 94, 99, 103–4, 107–8, 116, 117, 123, 139–50, 151, 152, 155, 157, 169, 170, 172, 176 De Felice, Renzo, 7 Deloncle, Eugène (EP, MSR, RNP), 142, 155 De Man, Henri, 104–7, 117 Detoeuf, Auguste (EP, RF, NC, XC, GW), 116 Dobry, Michel, 17 Dominique, Pierre (V, NS, PPF, RF, LJ, CB, EM), 76, 87 Doriot, Jacques (PCF, PPF), 10, 22, 142, 148, 150, 153, 155, 161, 164, 168, 172 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre (PPF, LJ, GW), 6, 102, 141, 150, 155, 170 Dumas, Jean-Baptiste, 35 Dunoyer de Segonzac, Pierre (EU), 136, 137 Dupont, André (CGQJ), 155 Eatwell, Roger, 5, 6 Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, 35 Ecole des Cadres d’Uriage, 136–9 Ecole Polytechnique, 33, 34–7, 41, 42, 51, 111, 114, 115 Ecoles des Arts et Métiers, 41, 127 Enfantin, Barthélemy-Prosper, 33

Faisceau des combattants et des producteurs, 24, 70, 72, 74, 81, 82, 96 Fayol, Henri, 52, 53, 140 Fondation Française pour l’étude des problèmes humains (FFEPH), 123–5, 166, 168, 170 Francq, Roger (USTICA, CB, EM), 62, 63, 94, 113 Frisch, Edmond Gustave (comte de Fels) (RF, AD, XC), 110 Front Commun, 185 Front Populaire, 79, 88, 99, 127, 128 Gerth, Hans, 30 Gessain, Robert (FFEPH), 169 Gibrat, Robert (EP, V, XC, ON), 110 Giddens, Anthony, 30 Gillouin, René (V, XC, CEPH), 128 Girardet, Raoul, 11, 12 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 30–1 Gregor, Anthony James, 4 Griffin, Roger, 1, 5, 7, 9 Griset, Antoine, 186 Guéhenno, Jean (CVIA), 184 Guillaume, Georges (CEPH, XC), 127 Herriot, Edouard (RP), 82 Hitler, Adolph, 4, 10, 110, 119, 143, 182 Husson, Raoul (V), 151 Jackson, Julian, 20 Jardin, Jean (V, ON, NC, XC), 128 Jeune Droite, 114, 122, 125, 171 Jeunesse Patriotes, 98, 109 Joly, Laurent, 157, 158, 165 Jouhaux, Léon (CGT, EM), 94 Jouvenel, Bertrand de (NEO, PPF, EM, CB, NT, P9J, V, LJ, LV), 74, 76, 83, 84, 86, 87, 100, 145–9, 170, 173, 176 Jouvenel, Henry de (EM), 94, 161 Julliard, Jacques, 16 Kravetz, Marc, 186 La Democratie nouvelle, 65–7 Lafont, Max, 170

Index La lutte des jeunes, 100–3, 114 Lambert-Ribot, Alfred, 87 Lamirand, Georges (V, NC, USIC), 38, 39, 40, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 55, 128, 136, 174 La Rocque, Francois (Colonel), 98, 126, 153, 168 Laroque, Pierre (V, NC, P9J), 149 Laurat, Lucien (SFIO, CGT, CB, NC, V), 87 Lavallée, Alphonse, 35, 36 Laval, Pierre, 127, 130, 131, 134, 136, 139, 142, 143, 149, 150, 171 La Voix, 75, 83, 84, 86, 87, 100 Le Bon, Gustave, 53, 54, 55, 56, 119 Le Chatelier, Henri (EP, XC), 41, 42, 51, 52 Lefèvre, Frédérique (RP, NT), 75 Lehideux, François (V, XC, NC, GW), 127, 149, 150, 159, 174 Le Rouge, Gustave, 32, 40, 45 Le Roy-Ladurie, Gabriel (XC, GW), 150 Letailleur, Eugène (Lysis), 65–7 Lévy, Bernard- Henri, 13, 21 Lipset, Seymour, 3, 7 L’œuvre, 139, 142, 152, 169, 170 Loubet del Bayle, Jean-Louis, 12, 27, 178 Loustau, Robert (EP, V, PPF, XC, ON), 110, 128 Luchaire, Jean (RNP, NT, CB, EM, LJ), 74, 76, 84, 85, 87, 138, 149 Lyautey, Hubert (Maréchal), 48, 50, 77, 136, 174 Malraux, André, 184 Marc, Alexandre (ON), 110, 112, 121 Marion, Paul (SFIO, V, NEO, PPF, CB, NT, P9J, XC, V), 74, 150, 155 Maritain, Jacques (NC), 121, 123 Marquet, Adrien (SFIO, NEO, V), 88 Martin, Henri (AF, MSR, V), 151 Marxism as an enemy, 80, 129, 146, 154 revision of, 6, 7, 14, 16, 17, 24, 88, 104, 105, 107 and the study of fascism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Massis, Henri, 44, 131

215

Mauco, Georges (V), 160–3, 169, 176, 180 Maulnier, Thierry, 14, 122, 123 Maurras, Charles (AF), 24, 131–6, 157, 170, 171, 173, 176 Mercier, Ernest (EP, RF, XC), 71, 72, 77, 87, 94, 104, 116, 128 Mills, Charles Wright, 30 Milza, Pierre, 15 Mitterrand, Francois, 20 Moch, Jules (EP, XC, SFIO, EM), 94, 115, 116 Montagnon, Barthélémy (SFIO, USTICA, NEO, RNP, NT, XC, P9J, CC), 75, 76, 88–91, 92, 128 Montandon, Georges (V, CGQJ), 163–6, 169, 176, 180 Montcel, Marcel, 136, 137 Mosse, George, 4, 5, 7 Moulin de Labarthète, Henri du (V, XC), 150 Mounier, Emmanuel (Esprit, CEPH, LJ), 14, 136–9, 170, 173, 176 Mussolini, Benito, 4, 10, 12, 15, 182 Neo-Socialism, 74, 75, 76, 87–92, 99, 103, 104, 106, 107, 125, 128, 140, 141, 172, 178 Nicoletis, John (EP, RP, SFIO, CVIA, XC, P9J), 115 Nolte, Ernst, 3 Notre Temps, 75, 84, 85, 100 Nouveau Siècle, 70, 72 Nouveaux Cahiers, 121, 124, 127, 128, 149, 179 Nouvelle librarie nationale, 69, 76 Olivier, Théodore, 36 Ordre Nouveau, 110–114, 121, 124, 128, 154, 174 Organisation Scientifique du Travail (OST), 51, 127 Fayolism, 52, 53, 140 Taylorism, 51, 52, 65, 68, 94 Parkin, Frank, 30 Parti Populaire Français (PPF), 10, 22, 142, 148, 149, 150, 154, 155, 161, 164, 174

216

Index

Parti Radical, 11, 21, 74, 75, 76, 82–7, 90, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 125, 132, 145, 147, 178, 183, 185 Paxton, Robert, 13 Payne, Stanley, 5 Perroux, François (FFEPH, NC, Esprit), 123–5 Personalism, 110–114, 136, 143, 177, 178 Pétain, Philippe (Maréchal), 60, 79, 124, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 135, 137, 138, 140, 142, 149, 150, 151, 168, 171, 176, 179, 181 Peyerimhof, Henri de (XC, RF), 87, 94, 128 Peyrouton, Marcel (V), 149 Philippe, André (SFIO, XC, CB, CC, Esprit), 74 Pichot, Henri, 104 Pineau, Christian (CGT, NC, NT), 84 Plan du 9 juillet, 109, 117, 121, 128, 149, 153 Poincaré, Raymond, 75, 82, 83, 97 Police Aux Questions Juives (PQJ), 155 Poulantzas, Nicos, 2 Poulot, Denis, 41 Prost, Antoine, 99, 100 Prouvost, Jean (V), 128 Pucheu, Pierre (V, PPF, XC, GW), 149, 150, 151, 153–9, 170, 174, 176 Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP), 142, 143, 144, 149, 155 Rebatet, Lucien, 25 Redressement Français, 71, 72, 77–82, 94, 102, 116, 127, 128, 174 Rémond, René, 10–13, 14, 16, 20–2, 24, 25, 26, 28, 127, 183 Roche, Emile (EM, NT, LV), 75, 86, 87 Romains, Jules (P9J, XC), 109, 117, 121 Romier, Lucien (V, RF, XC), 78, 87, 94, 128 Rosenstock-Franck, Louis (EP, CVIA, XC, LJ), 127 Rougement, Denis de (ON, NC, Esprit), 110 Rouquerol, Jean Joseph, (General), 51

Roux, Georges (RP, LJ), 101 Rueff, Jacques (EP, XC), 115, 116 Saint-Simon, Henri, 32, 33, 123 Sarraut, Albert, 134 Sauvy, Alfred (EP, XC, CEPH, FFEPH, V), 127 Schweblin, Jacques (PPF, CGQJ), 155 Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO), the socialist party, 74, 75, 76, 83, 86, 87, 88, 90, 104, 106, 107, 147, 178, 183, 184 Skinner, Quentin, 187 Sorel, Georges, 24, 72, 119 Soucy, Robert, 13, 16 Soules, Georges (aka Raymond Abellio) (EP, SFIO, XC, MSR), 115, 127 Spinasse, Charles (SFIO, XC), 96, 127 Sternhell, Zeev, 5, 6, 7, 13–25, 26, 27, 147, 183, 185 Synarchie, 150–2, 156, 176, 181 Taguieff, Pierre-André, 186 Taittinger, Pierre, 74 Tarde, Alfred de, 44 Taylor, Frederick, 51 Technocracy, 27, 74, 76, 79, 85, 91, 95, 100, 102, 107, 108, 109, 114, 116, 127, 135, 139, 144, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 156, 159, 163, 174, 178, 179, 180, 181, 186, 188 Thibon, Gustave, 131 Thomas, Albert, 52, 94 Touchard, Jean, 11, 12 Transon, Abel, 33 Union des Syndicats d’ingénieurs français (USIF), 43, 44, 63 Union Nationale des Combattantes (UNC), 81, 98, 104 Union Sociale des ingénieurs Catholiques (USIC), 44, 49, 55, 56, 63, 111, 128, 175 Union Syndicale des Techniciens de l’industrie, du Commerce et de l’Agriculture (USTICA), 49, 62, 88, 94, 113

Index Vallat, Xavier (AF, V, CGQJ), 131 Vallon, Louis (EP, SFIO, NEO, XC, P9J, NT, NC), 115 Valois, Georges (AF, Faisceau, CB, EM, XC, NS, LV, CC), 14, 24, 69–77, 78, 85, 93, 96, 101, 102, 104, 108, 116, 174 Verne, Jules, 38, 39, 40, 46, 113

217

Vincent, Paul (FFEPH), 169 Virmand, Charles, 63 Weber, Eugene, 13 Weber, Max, 29, 30–1, 59 Winock, Michel, 15 Worms, group, 150–2, 155, 159 WW1 veterans, 11, 72, 77, 78, 79, 81, 93, 94, 104, 109, 155, 178