Investigating
the central role that theories of the visual arts and creativity played in the
development of fascism in France, Mark Antliff examines the aesthetic dimension
of fascist myth-making within the history of the avant-garde. Between 1909 and
1939, a surprising array of modernists were implicated in this project,
including such well-known figures as the symbolist painter Maurice Denis, the
architects Le Corbusier and Auguste Perret, the sculptors Charles Despiau and
Aristide Maillol, the “New Vision” photographer Germaine Krull, and the fauve
Maurice Vlaminck.
Antliff
considers three French fascists: Georges Valois, Philippe Lamour, and Thierry
Maulnier, demonstrating how they appropriated the avant-garde aesthetics of
cubism, futurism, surrealism, and the so-called Retour à l’Ordre (“Return to
Order”), and, in one instance, even defined the “dynamism” of fascist ideology
in terms of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage. For these
fascists, modern art was the mythic harbinger of a regenerative revolution that
would overthrow existing governmental institutions, inaugurate an
anticapitalist new order, and awaken the creative and artistic potential of the
fascist “new man.”
In
formulating the nexus of fascist ideology, aesthetics, and violence, Valois,
Lamour, and Maulnier drew primarily on the writings of the French political
theorist Georges Sorel, whose concept of revolutionary myth proved central to
fascist theories of cultural and national regeneration in France. Antliff
analyzes the impact of Sorel’s theory of myth on Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier.
Valois created the first fascist movement in France; Lamour, a follower of
Valois, established the short-lived Parti Fasciste Révolutionnaire in 1928
before founding two fascist-oriented journals; Maulnier forged a theory of
fascism under the auspices of the journals Combat and Insurgé.
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