Maurice Bardèche

Early life and education (1907–1932)

Maurice Bardèche was born on 1 October 1907 in Dun-sur-Auron, near Bourges, in a modest republican and anticlerical family. He attended the lycée of Bourges, before leaving his home region for the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he met Thierry Maulnier and Robert Brasillach in 1926. The latter introduced him to Maurassian nationalist circles. If those groups were mostly anti-Jewish, Bardèche's own antisemitism was then more of a conventional manner than a deep conviction. In 1928, he was admitted to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, where he received his agrégation degree in 1932. Bardèche wrote at that time for the royalist newspaper L'Étudiant français, parented by Action Française.

Literary career and WWII (1939–1946)

After presenting his thesis on the works of novelist Honoré de Balzac in May 1940, Bardèche graduated with a doctorate in literature and was subsequently granted a temporary professorship at the Sorbonne University. He eventually became a professor of French literature at the University of Lille between 1942 and 1944, holding three Chairs at the same time. While he endorsed the deeds and actions of the French collaboration with the Nazis, Bardèche did not invest himself "physically" or ideologically during the war. He instead focused on his career as a literary critic, and wrote only three articles on arts (Stendhal, Balzac and films) for the antisemitic and collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout, in which Brasillach was the editor-in-chief until 1943.

On 1 September 1944, after the Liberation of Paris, Bardèche was detained for the articles he had written for Je suis partout. Brasillach surrendered to the authorities in order to allow for the release of Suzanne and their children, and he was eventually transferred to the Fresnes prison. Bardèche joined him on 30 December; one month later, Brasillach was sentenced to be executed for sharing intelligence with the enemy during the war. Bardèche was sentenced to one year in prison. He lost his university chair in literature and was, for a time, evicted from his apartment.

After the war, Bardèche's world view seemed entirely designed through the filters of Brasillach's death, the épuration, and a hatred of Marxism. He led for 30 years a "personal crusade to purify fascism" and present it as a respectable ideology. In April 1959, Bardèche told the nationalist magazine Jeune Nation: "I loved Brasillach very much, I admired him very much; and, I do not hide it from you, it is the death of Brasillach and the épuration that has turned me into a political animal. Politics did not interest me at all until that date; from then on, I went straight into politics." While in prison in 1945, Bardèche began to develop his own definition of fascism, by cutting away police repression, antisemitism and expansionist imperialism, in an attempt to present the ideology as "a youthful celebration and rejoicing, a new anti-bourgeois life-style, and the existence of feverish activism", in the words of scholar Ian R. Barnes. Meanwhile, Brasillach turned into a fascist martyr in French far-right circles; his cult and ideas were transmitted by Bardèche and fellow travellers through the post-war era.

Neo-fascist activism (1951–1969)

To promote his neo-fascist ideas, Bardèche entered politics. In December 1950, he visited Germany to deliver speeches, creating an "apology of collaboration" and denouncing the "fraud of the French Resistance" before an audience essentially composed of former Nazis. Bardèche was also linked to the Ligue des Intellectuels Independents, and was a patron of Réalisme, the journal of the Union Réaliste. He co-founded the Comité National Français, an umbrella organization for extremist groups to operate, but stepped away when the movement embarked on a violently antisemitic course under the leadership of René Binet. Bardèche founded instead the more tactical and moderate Comité de Coordination des Forces Nationales Françaises.

At the end of 1950, Bardèche initiated in Rome the European National Movements, in order to co-ordinate various neo-fascist groups across the continent. At the congress, it was decided that another meeting would be held in Sweden the following year. Bardèche thereafter attended in May 1951 the founding meeting of the European Social Movement in Malmö, which drew 100 delegates from Europe, including Oswald Mosley. Bardèche represented France under the Comité National Français. On 6 February 1954, he participated in a commemoration of Robert Brasillach held by the neo-fascist group Jeune Nation, along with Pierre Sidos and Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour. With the latter, he co-established in the May 1954 the Rassemblement National Français. In 1952, the two of them commenced the journal Défense de l'Occident, designed as an arena for young fascists to air their views and, according to Barnes, a "reborn and renamed Je suis partout". During the Algerian War (1954–1962), Bardèche wrote numerous articles defending French Algeria, third-world colonialism, and segregation based on ethnic difference.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Bardèche made no secret of his fascist stance, and wrote as the first sentence of his work Qu'est-ce que le fascisme? (1961): "I am a fascist writer". The book became a well-known theoretical work of post-war fascism both in France and abroad. Translated in Italian, it turned into a favorite book among local fascists. The context of the Algerian War, along with the political crisis it triggered in metropolitan France, made fascist ideas more acceptable for a short lapse of time in the wider society, which allowed Bardèche to publicly present himself as an advocate of fascism, a conviction which he had never openly admitted until then.

In 1969, Bardèche published Sparte et les Sudistes (Sparta and the Southerners), in which he wrote that far-right thinkers should not begin with men from the lens of ideology, a mistake he sees in the "rational and abstract definition of man" of left-wing writings, but rather "as they find them, in the place where they have grown, in the unequal bunches that nature has formed."