Maurice Bardèche

Maurice Bardèche (1907 - 1998) is a writer, academic, biographer and Polémiste French of the 20th century. Regarded as the founder of the Négationnisme in France, it was, in the years which followed the Second world war immediately, intellectual French of reputation to only claim Fascisme explicitly.

Biography

It is born in a modest family from Dun-on-Auron (in the Cher) on October 1st 1907. Pure produced republican elitism, it obtains, after its Certificat of studies, a purse in order to continue its studies, then enters in hypokhâgne to the Louis-the-Large Lycée. It meets there a group of students, of which Jacques Talagrand (more known under its pseudonym of Thierry Maulnier) and his future brother-in-law Robert Brasillach, with which it binds of a final friendship. In 1928, it is allowed - 13th on 29 - with the National university, where it meets the philosopher Simone Weil, that it called “the red Virgin”, Claude Jamet, Jacques Soustelle (then “antifascist”), Roger Vailland or Georges Pompidou.

It is received with the aggregation letters in 1932 and teaches with the Sorbonne. In 1940, its thesis relates to Balzac: formation of the art of the novel at Balzac until the publication of the Father Goriot (1820-1835) . It will draw from it a biography which made authority at its time, Balzac novelist . It continues to teach in the Sorbonne, then at the University of Lille in 1942.

He collaborates in the Années 1930 in the reviews which animate Brasillach and Maulnier ( 1933 , 1934 , 1935 ) but primarily in the artistic field: he is pictorial and literary chronicler. Of 1936 with 1939, it goes several times in Spain and written with Brasillach Histoire of the war of Spain . Allured by the Spanish Phalange of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, it takes consequently party for the Fascisme.

During the war, except some articles on art in I am everywhere , it devotes myself to his literary work (it is a specialist in the writers of the 19th century). With the Release, it is stopped because near to quickly slackened Brasillach but, whereas his/her brother-in-law is shot. It is erased national teaching and will not be able to give any more course but in private schools, until the intervention of Georges Pompidou as of his election. From now on it will attempt to rehabilitate work and to diffuse the writings of Brasillach. In its Letter in François Mauriac (1947), lampoon sold with: 80000 specimens, it defends the idea of “collaboration” and the officials appointed by Vichy, calls into question the “legality” of the Résistance and critical excesses of “permanent purification” while expressing its reservations on the creation and the methods of the Milice.

In Nuremberg or the Promised land , published in October 1948 and drawn with: 25000 specimens, he pleads in favor of the Nazi Germany, disputing with Allied the right, legal and moral, to judge the leaders of the Third Reich for acts which they “perhaps” had made, and expresses theses negationnists whose argumentations will become traditional Négation of Shoah:

“If the French delegation finds harmful gas invoices, it is mistaken in the translation and it quotes a sentence where one can read that this gas was intended for " the extermination" , whereas the German text actually said that it was intended for " the assainissement" , i.e. with the destruction of the lice about of which all the internees complained indeed. It clearly results from the parts of the lawsuit that the solution of the Jewish problem, which had had the approval of the leaders national-Socialists, consisted only of one gathering of Jews in a territorial zone which one called the Jewish reserve: it was a kind of European ghetto, a Jewish fatherland reconstituted in the East, it was that which provided the known instructions of the ministers and the senior officials, and it was that only. And we do not have the right to conclude from it more than national-socialisme necessarily led to the extermination of the Jews: he only proposed more to let them mix with the political life and economic of the country, and this result could be obtained by reasonable and moderated methods. aren't we victims of a propaganda of which the effects can be one day terribly prejudicial with French people? ”

What is worth to him seized and lawsuit: after many tergiversations of justice, Bardèche is condemned to one year of prison firm and: 50000 francs of fine for “apology for war crimes” and the book is interdict with the sale. He repeats in 1952 with Nuremberg II or the Counterfeiters , where he is based on the theses of Paul Rassinier. He is imprisoned with Fresnes during three weeks in July 1954, before being amnestied by the president of the Republic Rene Coty. He will tell the difficulties of his family and his imprisonment (and that of its wife, Suzanne), under a humorous and dramatic tone, in Suzanne and the slum (1957).

More still than to defend Brasillach, he wants to also diffuse his fascistic ideas and anti-semites, which leads it to take part in the European Social movement. To Malmö in 1951, to the congress of this movement, it leads the French delegation and receives for task to federate the various French groups.

This company will exceed Bardèche, which is not a man of apparatus. He prefers to devote himself to propaganda in the writing. After having founded the Seven Colors, publisher publishing its books and those of fascistic intellectuals, it founds Défense of the Occident , re-examined which will be a meeting place of the extreme right-hand side of 1952 with 1982.

Its review and its work of ideologist and polemist are for the Extrême French right-hand side a “place of memory”; on the other hand and in spite of the presence of part of its usual topics, they are not a Discourse on Method, and Bardèche is not a reference mark for the action.

It was characterized by its frequent references to the Jacobinisme and the French revolution, and went each year to the Mur of Federate the to deposit a sheaf to remember it the Commune of Paris.

He dies the July 30th 1998. The September 12th 1998 is celebrated with its memory a mass according to the Rite tridentin in the church Saint-Nicolas-of-Hanging-post with Paris, which joins together several French line generations extreme, Pierre Sidos with Henry Coston and Pierre Guillaume. Jean-Marie Le Pen greets, in French initially , the “prophet of a European rebirth which he hoped for a long time”, “a great writer and a historian of avant-garde”.

Works

History of the cinema (with Robert Brasillach), Denoël, 1935, ED. supplemented in 1943.
History of the war of Spain (with Robert Brasillach), Plon, 1939.
Balzac novelist. Formation of the art of the novel at Balzac until the publication of the father Goriot (1820-1835) , Plon, 1940. ED. remelted in 1943.
Letter in François Mauriac , the free Thought, 1947.
Nuremberg or the Promised land , the Seven Colors, 1948.
Nuremberg II or the Counterfeiters , the Seven Colors, 1952.
What Fascism? , the Seven Colors, 1961.
History of the women , Stock, 1968.
Sparte and the Southerners , the Seven Colors, 1969.
Marcel Proust, novelist , the Seven Colors, 1971.
the work of Flaubert , the Seven Colors, 1974.
Stendhal novelist , the Seven Colors, 1977.
Balzac , Juillard, 1980.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine , the Roundtable, 1986.
Leon Bloy , the Roundtable, 1989.
Suzanne and it slum , editions of the Present, 1990.
Memories , Buchet-Chastel, 1993.

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