Francesco Vitale
University of Salerno
Volume 16, 2024
Between 1933 and 1934 Georges Bataille planned to write a book, Le fascisme en France (Fascism in France).1 Bataille did not carry out his project but some traces of it are preserved, published in the second volume of the Oeuvres complètes, in which are collected unpublished writings dating from 1922-1940, writings preserved by Bataille himself or found in other ways. A short manuscript text with the same title, “Le fascisme en France,” dated 1934, was found within a file in which Bataille had collected several texts, under the general title “Essais de Sociologie.” It is assumed that these texts—another is entitled “Essai de définition du fascism” —were part of the preparatory materials for the book, as were the two much better-known texts that Bataille had dedicated to fascism, and published in La critique sociale between late 1933 and early 1934: “Le problème de l’État” and “La structure psychologique du fascisme.” In fact, in the introductory note to “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” Bataille refers to a larger work, of which this essay would be but a fragment, and in which it is legitimate to identify the project of Le fascisme en France: a rigorous description of the genesis and structure of the fascist phenomenon:
This essay attempts a rigorous (if not comprehensive) representation of the social superstructure and its relations to the economic infrastructure in the light of fascism. The fact that this is but a fragment of a relatively substantial whole explains a great number of lacunae, notably the absence of any methodological considerations; it was even necessary to forego justifying the novelty of my point of view and to limit myself to the presentation of my basic position.
(137)
In a footnote, Bataille indicates the precise scientific instrumentation he intends to use: Freudian psychoanalysis, French sociology, and German phenomenology. However, according to Bataille’s intentions, this would not be a purely scientific research, an objective phenomenological description, aimed at broadening the knowledge related to the object of investigation. The book that Bataille intends to create should be an instrument of struggle—a weapon—against fascism, more precisely, an instrument of knowledge capable of anticipating and preventing the affective forces attracted and activated by fascism in order to channel them towards a radically alternative objective, the emancipation of all humanity:
A system of knowledge that permits the anticipation of the affective social reactions that traverse the superstructure and perhaps even, to a certain extent, do away with it, must be developed from one of these possibilities. The fact of fascism, which has thrown the very existence of a workers’ movement into question, clearly demonstrates what can be expected from a timely recourse to reawakened affective forces. Unlike the situation during the period of utopian socialism, morality and idealism are no more questions today than they are in fascist form. Rather, an organized understanding of the movements in society, of attraction and repulsion, starkly presents itself as a weapon—at this moment when a vast convulsion opposes, not so much fascism to communism, but radical imperative forms to the deep subversion that continues to pursue the emancipation of human lives.
(“The Psychological Structure of Fascism” 159)
In fact, the short manuscript “Le fascisme en France,” eight pages in all, seems to fit this description: in the first part, Bataille offers a historical reconstruction of the advent of fascism in Italy. He goes back as far as 1872 to trace the origins of the political use of the term “fascio,” whose matrix is, first of all, anarchist, and then socialist. It is only with Mussolini, expelled from the Socialist Party in 1915, and then with the “Fasci rivoluzionari di combattimento” first, and then with the “Fasci italiani di combattimento,” that the term will take on, in 1934, the meaning that everyone knows, indicating the name of the party and regime of which Mussolini is the Duce, “le chef-dieu,” to use Bataille’s terms. The text goes on to highlight the common origin, not only historical, of fascism and communism, and to explain how Stalin’s Russia is also to be counted among the authoritarian and oppressive formations that are imposing themselves on the European scene: “In Moscow, as in Berlin or Rome, there is no more collective will or thought of everyone [pour tous]than the will and thought of the master” (“Le fascisme en France” 208).2 In the final part of the essay, Bataille moves from historical narrative to theoretical description, substantially following the perspective, arguments, and terminology adopted in the essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” concluding, however, with some rather obscure—from the point of view of his writing style, up to this point “rigorous” and “scientific”—and troubling reflections, in terms of what they suggest. We will return to them later. For now, we will limit ourselves to observing that Bataille, at least until the first months of 1934, seems to be convinced of the possibility of contrasting, if not actually averting, the advent of Fascism in France and its nefarious effects in Europe, through scientific research capable of producing the instruments necessary for this purpose, namely, a book that functions as a weapon: Le fascisme en France.
For Michel Surya, author of his intellectual biography, these texts would demonstrate that Bataille was among the few, if not the only one, in France, to recognize in fascism “the unthought” (Surya 181) of his own time, and therefore the need to “to think through exactly what fascism was (ce que exactement le fascisme est),and how best to fight it effectively” (176). This is why Surya regrets the failure to realize the book to which Bataille seemed to care more than anything else:
The book even had a title: “Le fascisme en France.” But the book never appeared, and judging from the outlines found later, there is every reason to doubt that Bataille ever progressed very far with it. This might seem a pity: who else could have presumed to write such a book? (…). It is rather harder to find adequate reasons for the book not being finished. One, of course, is how impossible Bataille found it to see any fully developed “literary” project through. (…). “Le fascisme en France” was the first book we see him wanting to write; but it was not the first project he abandoned and it was far from the last.
(176)
In fact, for Surya, it is the precipitation of events that distances Bataille from his project: “The urgency (l’urgence) by which Bataille, like others, was seized, an urgency which in all likelihood distracted him from continuing to write his book on fascism in France, became more immediate during the winter of 1933-4” (176). On January 8, 1934 the body of Alexandre Stawisky, a banker who had perpetrated a major financial fraud, was found. The press, both right and left, did not believe the suicide, but instead denounced the political coverage the banker enjoyed. The right takes advantage of this situation to organize a protest against the government and the parliament that will result in violent riots that will continue until the bloody demonstration of February 6, in which many will see an attempt at a fascist coup d’état:
When Chautemps was forced to resign the day after Alexandre Stawisky’s death, Daladier succeeded him for a short time … until the violent riots in front of the Palais Bourbon on 6 February forced him from power as well. Parliament was highly unstable at that time and this aggravated even more the prospect, widely considered imminent, of a fascist take-over of power.
(Surya 176)
According to Surya, the urgency of the events, the need to confront the fascist threat that had suddenly become real, led Bataille to take a stand and thus to take an active part in the organization of forms of collective political resistance, an organization that would take shape in the creation of the Contre-Attaque group. Bataille, therefore, would no longer have the necessary time to devote to the project of Le fascisme en France. However, the Contre-Attaque group would not take shape until much later, considering the urgency of the events, in the summer of 1935; and it would not even concretize until October, with the publication of the manifesto “Contre-Attaque. Union de lutte des intellectuels révolutionnaires.” In the meantime, Bataille found the time to write another book, a novel, Blue of Noon (Le bleu du ciel), which was finished in Tossa de Mar, Spain, in May 1935, and on which he was probably already working since October 1934. This is a completed novel that remained unpublished until 1957, and to which Surya himself attributes a certain relationship with Le fascisme en France, and above all, with its lack of realization, citing a different and much more intriguing motivation:
By 1935, at thirty-eight years of age, he was still no more in a position to put some order into his life. Blue of Noon saw off (a chassé) the project of “Le fascisme en France” or, more dreadfully, it was that project’s underside, its violent, dilapidated, warped version, “the leap of rage,” to be seen off (chassé) in its turn by considerations that partly elude us.
(216)
Thus, Le fascisme en France would not have been abandoned because of the urgency of events, or because of the materialization of the fascist threat that that book was supposed to combat if not actually avert, but to make room for Blue of Noon, which, in turn, would not simply be a new, different project, but the negative, violent, angry version of Le fascisme en France, destined not only to take its place in Bataille’s writing work, but to chase it away. This hypothesis, advanced, but not argued by Surya, is worthy of interest. It raises a number of questions prompting further speculation: why would Blue of Noon have chased away Le fascisme en France? If the abandonment of the project depended on the precipitation of events, why replace it with a novel? Was it the precipitation of events that forced the passage from a non-fiction type of writing—the one planned for Le fascisme en France—to the fictional writing of the novel? Certainly, if Bataille’s aim is to fight fascism with writing, then it is legitimate to think that a scientific essay with a historical-sociological approach risks not only arriving too late with respect to the threats that are taking shape—insofar as it presupposes that it is necessary to explain them in order to avert them—but also to be ineffective, addressing itself to a restricted audience of intellectuals interested in the subject and capable of understanding its refined arguments. From this point of view, a novel could be realized more quickly, as, in fact, it happened, and it would certainly have had greater possibilities of diffusion and penetration, of involving the public emotionally, thus proving more effective, because it was able to act on those irrational affective forces which fascism has used, and is using, to impose itself as an “imperative” authority. If this is so, why then would Bataille not even publish Blue of Noon, which he had also completed? Surya tries to explain the non-publication precisely in light of the strange negative substitutive relationship that he himself established: Blue of Noon as a “violent” and ultimately pessimistic version of Le fascisme en France would have revealed an image of Bataille in open contradiction to that of the militant anti-fascist that he himself was trying to accredit at that juncture:
Certainly if it had been published the book would have caused a scandal: there could have been no more violent exposure or more sarcastic denial of that for which Bataille was known in Paris, as an ultra-left militant convinced of the urgent need to bring together every intellectual force against the rising tide of fascism. If it had been published, the book would have said just the reverse: his indifference to all this, and worse still his desire: the horror of an awakening world that marvelously (to the point of disaster) corresponded to that of a warped life—so far that no landmark now remained to stand for what is desirable and what is not, what is just and what is to be condemned. Who would have been well enough informed to understand that what Bataille was writing—so odiously and vilely—announced the way that the rise of fascism might satisfy an evil humour?
(217)
However, it is strange, to say the least, that Surya does not take into account the reasons that Bataille himself gave in 1957 to explain the non-publication of Blue of Noon in the years that followed its writing:
No later than 1936, I had decided to think no more about it.
In the meantime (entre-temps), moreover, the Spanish Civil War and the World War had rendered insignificant the historical events connected with the plot of the novel. Confronted with tragedy itself, why pay any attention to its portents (devant la tragédie elle-même, quelle attention prêter à ses signes annonciateurs)?
This reasoning suited the dissatisfaction and uneasiness that the book itself inspires in me. But those circumstances have now become so remote that my story, written as it were in the blaze of events (dans le feu de l’événement), has now fallen into the same category as others, those which their authors have by deliberate choice set in an insignificant period of the past. Today I am far removed from the state of mind out of which the book emerged; this concern, however, which was originally a predominant one, is no longer relevant; and I have thus deferred to the judgment of my friends.
(Blue of Noon 154)
Bataille decides not to publish Blue of Noon because he is too late for the events he wanted to avert by announcing their premonitory signs. Written “in the blaze of events,” its later publication would have rendered it insignificant as early as 1936. We can legitimately assume that it is for this same reason that Bataille abandons Le Fascisme en France, the book that Blue of Noon was supposed to replace/chase. However, there is something that does not add up: In 1936, the year in which Bataille decided to stop thinking about the publication of Blue of Noon, the Spanish Civil War, of which the insurrection of Barcelona in October 1934 would be the premonitory sign that we find in Blue of Noon, had just begun (July 17). But its outcome, in this first phase, was anything but predictable. World War II, announced in Blue of Noon by the night parade of fascist youth in Frankfürt, will begin only in 1939, with France directly involved only in May of the following year. Not only that, in 1936, France was governed by a left-wing coalition, the Front populaire, formed precisely to counter the fascist threat and which would govern until 1938. It would seem legitimate to affirm that if Blue of Noon was written “in the blaze of events,” in 1936 the tragedy it announces not only had not yet materialized but would even have been averted, at least in France. Or at least it would seem legitimate to sustain that, in 1936, it would still have been possible to avert it, noting the premonitory signs, soliciting that “awareness” that would inspire the Contre-Attaque initiative. So why, in 1957, does Bataille claim that, in 1936, the tragedy that Blue of Noon announced was already on the scene? An error in perspective due to both the temporal and psychological distance that Bataille attests to in 1957? It seems possible to formulate another hypothesis: for Bataille, the events he witnessed in 1934 were not premonitory signs of a tragedy that it would still be possible to avert at that juncture—the affirmation of Nazi-fascism in Europe, the carnage of World War II—but the tragedy itself, or rather, its incipit, in any case, moments of the unraveling of its plot, of its necessary and fatal articulation oriented towards an ineluctable destiny. It is worth trying to verify this hypothesis not only to try to understand the destiny that condemned Le Fascisme en France to abandonment and Blue of Noon to oblivion, but also because it could be the starting point for a more general reflection, simultaneously tied to what we are trying to articulate in these pages: if the premonitory signs of the nefarious event—in this case, fascism—are in fact already the event, they are part of it, they instruct and direct its development in a necessary and ineluctable way, what can be done to avert it? Above all, what can writing do, given its structural delay with respect to the event in general? What writing can live up to the nefarious event to be averted? For Bataille, as we have seen, neither scientific (historical, sociological, psychoanalytical, phenomenological, etc…) nor fictional writing, literature or the novel, seem to be up to the task, once one finds oneself “in the blaze of the events.”
In the aftermath of the insurrection and the failed coup d’état of February 6, 1934, the left-wing parties and unions decided to call for a large united demonstration on February 12, from which the Front populaire would take shape, come to power in May 1936, and govern France until 1938. In 1936, in “Popular Front in the Street” (Front populaire dans la rue), a document published by Contre-Attaque, Bataille recognized in this demonstration the rise of those emotional forces capable of mobilizing the popular masses, and especially the workers against fascism. However, in 1934, “in the blaze of events,” that is, in the days when this great event was being prepared and then held, Bataille’s description and assessment is of a very different sign. During these days, Bataille keeps a sort of personal diary in which he bears witness to the events taking place and makes a very first evaluation. The manuscript, published posthumously, is entitled “En attendant la grève générale,” and the chronicle begins on February 11, the day before the demonstration. The description seems to constitute the palimpsest, if not the direct source, of the description of the Catalan insurrection found in Blue of Noon. The terms used to describe the collective emotional state in the hours leading up to it are the same, “despair,” “agitation,” “anguish,” and even one detail is taken literally: Troppmann’s decision to shelter his car in a garage with a half-open shutter had in fact been taken, for the same reason, by Roland Tual, the friend with whom Bataille, on February 12, is driving, together with Michel Leiris, to the site of the event (“En attendant la grève générale” 257).3 On February 11, Bataille dwells, above all, and even with a certain irony, on the signs of “effervescence” and “anguish” that he gathers in the streets of Paris, where even the offer of a brothel is reduced, because “there is revolution,” in the words of the tenant, which Bataille reports. Not only that, Bataille also dwells on the possible outcomes of the next day’s demonstration, reflecting on what constitutes the concern hovering in leftist circles: organized to counter Fascist violence, the demonstration should remain peaceful so as not to give the government and the military the opportunity to repress it in blood, and the Fascist “patriots” the opportunity to turn it in their favor. Bataille seems pessimistic, not only because it seems difficult to avoid violence, but especially because, even if a peaceful and widely attended demonstration were to succeed, this would not in itself be sufficient to counter the fascist threat:
Unfortunately, there is not much hope that the rightly called strike will be extremely extended. On the contrary, it seems difficult to stop it from becoming violent. What is more, we must not forget that, in any event, the developing process of fascism has started, and that its general conditions seem favorable. Its quickest subsiding will not mean its end at all.
(“En attendant…” 254)
For Bataille, even a full and peaceful success of the demonstration would not in itself be sufficient to ensure the objective for which it was called: the averting of the fascist threat. The process of development of fascism is by now triggered and the favorable conditions seem to make it inevitable, like a fuse that once lit will necessarily cause the deflagration. But then, in the eyes of Bataille, what is the nature of this process and what are the conditions that would make it difficult to oppose, if not inevitable? On February 12, Bataille, with Tual, Leiris and Queneau, participates in the demonstrations: at first the strike seems to have failed, Bataille, still with irony, notes that telephone communications have not been interrupted and that tramways circulate freely (in Blue of Noon a demonstrator shoots at a tramway). However, once he reaches the cours de Vincennes, Bataille is impressed by the solemn grandeur of the processional crowd. The central part of the description will be taken up almost verbatim in “Popular Front in the Street.”4 Bataille will change the tense of the verbs, turning the narrative into the form of a memory, but also the evaluation that he will draw from it: if, in 1936, the events of February 12, 1934, taken verbatim from the diary written “in the blaze of events,” will be recalled as the sign of the strength that the masses can still oppose to the fascist threat, in 1934, the interpretation of these signs is completely opposite:
As far as the eye can see the popular mass agglomerates, yells, coming from everywhere unto the immense cours de Vincennes; and it seems that the fascist elements will be powerless for a while in front of this massive workforce, with lifted fists, aroused by its anger and clamors. The working and suffering people appear, in front of the pale youth of Action Française, like an unmovable barricade. Unfortunately, the competition that the rising fascism opposes to the so-called proletarian parties has nothing to do with a war in which it is enough to do a headcount.
(“En attendant…” 258)
The confrontation with fascism has nothing to do with a traditional conflict whose outcome would depend on the number of forces in the field. In the light of what has happened, and is happening, the demonstration in Paris looks like a ghostly procession: the vitality of the forces that rise up unitedly against fascism is only apparent, the signs of life, and therefore of hope, are actually signs of a death already given because necessarily imminent:
In Germany, the oldest and most powerful workers movement has been defeated at once, like a bull at the slaughterhouse. And here, through the delirium of this day, the most threatening clamors are nothing more than the ghosts of clamors, just as those condemned to death are nothing more than specters.
(“En attendant…” 259)
Therefore, in 1934, for Bataille, it was already too late, the fuse had already been lit, the nefarious event had already happened, and it was impossible to prevent its outcome. This is because Bataille interprets French events in the light of what is happening elsewhere, in Europe, where the process of development of fascism was triggered. But, above all, it is because he interprets this development as necessary and inescapable, destined to be repeated wherever similar favorable conditions are reproduced: the economic crisis with the exacerbation of class conflict, the distrust of parliamentary democracy, unable to cope with the crisis and ensure the balance of what Bataille in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” had called the “homogeneous society” (138). However, it is still unclear why, in 1934, Bataille considered the process of development of fascism unstoppable, and its outcome ineluctable. But, at least, we know where it began and, above all, that for Bataille, once begun, it cannot be isolated, that is, considered as a phenomenon linked to contingent local conditions. In support of this thesis, Bataille recalls what is happening in Austria, where the left-wing forces are well organized, even militarily:
Already in Austria, even though the working class is united under the flags of social-democracy, and that it occupies, through the amount and location of strategic points that it holds, an exceptional position, and that the fascist movement that it battles against is, in a certain way, divided, this working class can be seen already as defeated. But, in the vast movement of the masses, in the undeniable emotion that stirs me, and that pushes socialist and communist processions to an encounter, the red multitude, far from realizing a catastrophic reality, instead realizes its force, precisely at the moment that this latter one escapes it.
(“En attendant…” 259-260)
The last page of the diary, relating to February 13, the day after the Vincennes demonstration, bears an emblematic title: “Contagion révolutionnaire en Europe.” Bataille learns from the newspapers about Austria, confirming his interpretation of the inevitability of the fascist phenomenon, which finally becomes explicit:
The newspaper I throw myself into in order to read the articles on the strike announces, in three columns, the socialist insurrection in Vienna. This catastrophic news lets itself be read without hesitation: Nazi Austria. From every corner, in a world that stops being breathable, the fascist grip closes in.
(“En attendant…” 262)
On the same day as the general strike in France, in Austria, in Linz, the paramilitary organizations of the Social-Democratic Party react to a police repression, resulting in an insurrection that spreads throughout the country. The head of the government, Engelbert Dollfuss orders a hard repression, with which the forces of the left are definitively annihilated. Dollfuss was Chancellor of the government from 1932, the coalition of right that supported him was close to the fascism of Mussolini but contrary to the annexation (Anschluss) to Germany proposed by the Austrian National Socialist Party, close to Hitler. Dollfuss was killed on 26 July 1934 during the coup d’état that brought the Nazis to power. In Blue of Noon, Bataille will evoke Dollfuss’s death as one of the most sinister premonitory signs of what is now about to happen, because ultimately it has already happened on 12 February and perhaps even earlier:
At one point I went to the window and opened it; the wind was making a violent noise—there was a thunderstorm on the way. In the street right in front of me, there was a very long black streamer. It must have been a good eight or ten yards long. The wind had partly unhinged the flagpole; it seemed to be flapping its wings. It didn’t fall. It made a big loud noise as it snapped in the wind at roof level, unfurling in twisted shapes, like a stream of ink flowing across the clouds. The incident may seem irrelevant to my story, but for me it was like having a sac of ink burst inside my head. That day I was sure of dying without further delay.
(…)
“The streamer had been raised in honor of Dolfuss’s death.”
“You were in Vienna when the assassination took place?”
“No, in Prum. But I arrived in Vienna the next day.”
“Being there must have upset you.”
“No.”
This foolish, ugly girl horrified me by the consistency of her preoccupations.
“In any case, even if there’d been a war, it would have mirrored what was going on in my head.”
“But how could war mirror anything inside your head? A war would have made you happy?”
“Why not?”
“So you think war could lead to revolution?”
“I’m talking about war, not about what it could lead to.”
(Blue of Noon 41-42)
The advent of fascism is inescapable, as are its catastrophic outcomes, because it is not a “historical” phenomenon exclusively determined by political, economic, social, local, and contingent conditions that could possibly be averted by appropriate political action. These are only the conditions favorable to its development, but in reality, for Bataille, fascism is a virus or perhaps the means of transmission that an even more ancient virus has found to spread. A highly contagious virus that affects not the body but the human psyche, spreading that state of “effervescence,” “anguish,” of ecstatic exaltation in which the individual, “outside of himself,” is ready for the extreme sacrifice in the name of that “god-chief” who was capable of attracting and guiding these irrational affective motions, clearly indicated by Bataille, already in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” as conditions for the affirmation of authoritarian “imperative forces.” The event to be averted has already taken place—Hitler’s peaceful seizure of power in Germany by democratic means (30 January 1933)—because the contagion has already reached the dimensions of an unstoppable pandemic. This is an unstoppable virus precisely because reason, knowledge, and science can do nothing against it. For Bataille, at least as of this date, there is no remedy, no antidote, against the fascist virus and its spread:
It seems like today, as in 48, a revolutionary contagion is taking place across Europe. (…) Without a drop of blood, January 30th 1933 is one of the most sinister dates of our epoch. And today, in France, after February 6th apparently opened, through bloody riots, the embryonic period of a fascist revolution, an infinitely bloodier riot—if not, also, infinitely more serious—gives Austria a shaking against which, its reign, will only be able to resist in appearance. It seems that the arrival into power of the National-Socialists in Germany has provoked a moral shock in France, not unrelated to February 6th. On the other hand, the fact of seeing the riot triumph in Paris, with fire and blood, must have rendered powerless the opposition against the insurrectional solution in the social-democrat milieus of Austria. And even if the Spanish Revolution was nothing but a peripheral phenomenon, without any possible repercussions abroad, on the other hand, the general shaking of Europe risks giving to new elements the only tragic turn possible to this dead-end situation.
(“En attendant…” 262-263)
It is clear that in these conditions, already in the first months of 1934, writing a book like Le fascisme en France no longer made sense; and it is equally clear in what sense Blue of Noon would take its place. By conjugating the state of emotional exaltation, of uncontrollable anguish, in which his protagonist, Troppmann, finds himself, with the “historical” events that announce the disaster to come, Bataille wanted to show the symptoms, individual and collective, of the fascist contagion and the nefarious outcomes to which it will necessarily lead in the absence of any antidote, for which it is now useless to appeal to reason. The conclusion of Blue of Noon leaves no doubt or hope: Troppmann, in uncontrollable anguish, unable to stop his tears, wanders the streets of Frankfürt at night, heedless of the rain. He is drawn to the sound of drum rolls in the distance in a huge empty square. On the steps of a theater, a marching band made up of children wearing the uniforms of the Hitler Youth performs music that evokes war, that makes the war already there, present, in that empty square:
I was standing in front of children who were lined up on the tiers of the stage in military formation. They were in short black velvet pants and short jackets adorned with shoulder knots; they were bare-headed; fifes to the right, side drums to the left. They were playing with such ferocity, with so strident a beat, that I stood breathless in front of them. Nothing could have been more abrupt than the beating of the side drums, or more caustic than the fifes. As they faced the vast, empty, rain-drenched square and played for occasional passersby, all these Nazi boys (some of them were blonde, with doll-like faces) seemed, in their sticklike stiffness, to be possessed by some cataclysmic exultation. (…). The sight was obscene. It was terrifying—if I hadn’t been blessed with exceptional composure, how could I have stood and looked at these hateful automatons as calmly as if I were facing a stone wall? Each peal of music in the night was an incantatory summons to war and murder. The drum rolls were raised to their paroxysm in the expectation of an ultimate release in bloody salvos of artillery. I looked into the distance . . . a children’s army in battle order. They were motionless, nonetheless, but in a trance. I saw them, so near me, entranced by a longing to meet their death, hallucinated by the endless fields where they would one day advance, laughing in the sunlight, leaving the dead and the dying behind them.
(151)
There is no escape from the death to which the young Germans are vowing, indeed the massacre has already been accomplished in the appearance of these ghosts. Any opposition to the fascist contagion at this point seems insignificant (“vétilles” is the word used by Bataille), let alone a scientific essay such as Le fascisme en France. It is in this sense, therefore, that Blue of Noon would have chased away the book-weapon:
Against this rising tide of murder, far more incisive than life (because blood is more resplendent in death than in life), it will be impossible to set anything but trivialities (vétilles) the comic entreaties of old ladies. All things were surely doomed to conflagration, a mingling of flame and thunder, as pale as burning sulfur when it chokes you. Inordinate laughter was making my head spin. As I found myself confronting this catastrophe, I was filled with the black irony that accompanies the moments of seizure when no one can help screaming. The music ended; the rain had stopped. I slowly returned to the station. The train was assembled. For a while I walked up and down the platform before entering a compartment. The train lost no time in departing.
(151-152)
However, it is also possible to advance another hypothesis: Bataille had come to these grave conclusions much earlier. That is, already at the beginning of 1934, on February 13, writing “in the blaze of events,” he had proof of the contagion in progress, of the transmission that had become unstoppable because it was able to move on the emotional wave aroused by the events in progress, particularly between Austria and France. The conclusion of Le fascisme en France, which appears to be detached by a white space from the analytical, historical-sociological one we have summarized above, not only seems to announce the conclusion of Blue of Noon, but even to go beyond it, in a sort of acceptance of a destiny by now ineluctable. The desperate tone is the same, the same terms are needed to configure an analogous scene: the unstoppable sobs resound from one to the other text, the anguish and the exaltation in front of the imminent death, and therefore already present, are transmitted from one to the other as through an unstoppable contagion:
Beyond the big imperative heads of the gods, the agitation of spirit, freed from the pitiful worry of living–and not to be personally missed–existence, enters finally into death, in a desperate movement of tears and cries. It is not anymore about the preservation of the comical right to belong to one self (to what childish succession of vanities, some swollen, some flat?). It has become possible, beyond those who reduce, from everywhere, men to their empire, to belong in extasy to death.
(“Le fascisme…” 212)
Having reached this conclusion, it finally seems possible to sustain that the fragment Le fascisme en France, eight pages in all, already bears the stigmata of the events that are about to take place, because those that have already happened are not heralding signs, but symptoms of a virulent contagion already in progress that nothing can stop. Not even the book that Bataille would have liked to write as a weapon to oppose fascism, but abandoned because it was already late in the events he wanted to avert: everything had already been written between 11 and 13 February, “in the blaze of the events,” in that blinding white space that separates the lucid and rigorous analysis from the conclusion that had become inescapable.
Notes
- I wrote this essay in the days leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I sent it to Tyler Williams the morning the invasion began (February 24, 2022). Convinced that it had all been written long ago. ↩︎
- [Note from one of the editors, James Martell: All translations from the Œuvres complètes are mine]. ↩︎
- See G. Bataille, Blue of Noon 123. ↩︎
- See G. Bataille, “Popular Front in the Street,” “Comrades, we must say of the Popular Front that it was born on the Cours de Vincennes on the day of February 12, 1934, when for the first time the masses of workers gathered to demonstrate the strength of their opposition to fascism. Most of us, comrades, were in the street that day and can recall the emotion that overcame us when the Communists marchers, coming out of the rue des Pyrénées, turned into the Cours de Vincennes and took up the entire width of the street: this massive group was preceded by a line of a hundred workers, shoulder to shoulder, and arm in arm, marching with unprecedented slowness and singing the Internationale. Many among you, no doubt, can remember the huge old bald worker, with a reddish face and heavy white mustache, who walked slowly, one step at a time, in front of that moving human wall, holding high a red flag. It was no longer a procession, nor anything poorly political; it was the curse of the working people, and not only in its rage, IN ITS IMPOVERISHED MAJESTY, which advanced, made greater by a kind of rending solemnity—by the menace of slaughter still suspended at that moment over all of the crowd.” (“Popular Front in the Street,” in Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 163) ↩︎
Works Cited
- G. Bataille, Blue of Noon, trans. by H. Mathews, London: Paladin Books, 1988.
- —. “Popular Front in the Street” and “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” in Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, ed. by A. Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 1985.
- —. “En attendant la grève générale” and “Le fascisme en France,” in Œuvres complètes, II. Écrits posthumes 1922-1940. Paris : Gallimard, 1970.
- M. Surya, Georges Bataille. An Intellectual Biography, trans. by K. Fijalkowski and M. Richardson. New York: Verso, 2010.