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PARTISAN REVIEW
liberty." He accepted fascism as part of the European destiny because, in
one sense the last outpost of capitalism, in another it seemed to bear the
seeds of 'non·Marxist socialism'-socialism without class war, the cardinal
point of his creed. (Incidentally, he also predicted the fall of Thyssen.)
He was not alone in believing Hitlerism to be a genuine new order, but he
was so impressed by the socialist element in national socialism-and the
nationalist element in Stalinism-that he put Moscow, Berlin, Rome,
An·
kara, Warsaw and Washington (as of 1934) all on the same level for
French political parties to look up to. He admitted that the alleged
'dynamism' of Hitler Germany was really static and rigid, but in all these
reform movements he saw 'a moral force, a disposition to sacrifice, a will
to struggle' which seemed lacking in the 'senile corruption' of French
politics. As for the cause of international order, a political union of
Europe, he said: "After all, it seems to me no harder to teach the Euro·
pean necessity to fascist countries in which, willy-nilly, the socialist fer·
ment is at work, than to teach
it
to hypocritical democracies." And so:
"I shall perhaps work-1 have doubtless worked already-for the estab:
lishment of a fascist regime in France; but I shall remain as free toward
it tomorrow as yesterday."
Such is the extraordinary figure who has taken over what was the
best and most advanced literary journal in Europe, a consistent champion
of the greatest names, the freest spirits in French literature from Proust
and Gide to Giono and Malraux. Yet there are several good things to be
said of his editorship-at least up to last February. He went on printing
Gide, Petitjean and Montherlant, presenting their continued independence
and reserve of judgment to the harassed public of occupied France; and
he even planned to print something of Malraux (though this probably
never got beyond an advance notice) . In his own editorials he did not
commit himself to any uncritical enthusiasm even for Petain, let alone
Hitler; nor did he open the columns of literary liberalism to the savage
outbursts against the 'corrupting' literature of the Twenties and Thirties
which resounded through certain other French journals after the defeat.
But, for all that, what a fall from the genuine democratic vitality of the
N.R.F.'s politics under the editorship of Paulhan in 1939 and 1940! Just
before the war broke out it had even published the first French translation
from Bert Brecht's series of fierce dramatic sketches,
Terrors and Miseries
of
the
Third Reich-probably
a record in anti-fascism among established
French reviews; and up to the last, Julian Benda, Petitjean and many
others had contributed articles-often slashed by the pro-fascist war cen–
sorship-condemning appeasement and preaching all-out resistance to
Hitlerism. Now, of course, existing in Paris on sufferance of an even
worse censorship, forbidden to publish Benda (a Jew ) and deprived of
Petitjean (a patri(}t), the N.R.F. can hardly be expected to keep up that
record. But even Drieu seems to have been undergoing a political
crise de
conscience
in the early stages of his
~ditorship.
At any rate, his editorials
are a good deal less pro-fascist than what he was saying in 1934. In the
