The philosopher, literary theorist and novelist Maurice Blanchot’s politics have come under periodic scrutiny. Leslie Hill describes the source of the controversy:
As early as 1931 and 1932, while starting out with the Journal des débats, Blanchot was writing political articles and book reviews in various magazines and journals belonging to what soon became known at the time as the Jeune Droite. This was a loosely defined, highly volatile, disparate ideological movement that was largely the preserve of disaffected younger members of the French monarchist movement, Action française, who, tired of the circumspection and inertia of that party’s traditionalist leadership, had turned to more extreme measures in the desire to overcome what they saw as France’s decline into mediocrity; indeed, alongside its virulent nationalism, hatred of Marxism, and contempt for parliamentary democracy, what mainly distinguished the Jeune Droite was its diagnosis that France was in the grip of a profound spiritual and ideological crisis that might be remedied only by recourse to radical and violent means that demanded immediate mobilisation (Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, 27).
Blanchot’s journalism was never republished in his lifetime. It was brought to wider attention with a listing of pieces in two bibliographies in the journal Gramma in 1975-76, and the “Bibliographical Check-List” in SubStance in 1976. These indicated how Blanchot wrote in right-wing outlets including the anti-republican Combat, a journal which was arguably closer to fascism than the royalist tendencies of Action française, and in Le Rempert and the nationalist l’Insurgé.
In 1980 Jeffrey Mehlman wrote a piece about “Blanchot at Combat”. Mehlman claims that from 1936 to 1938, “Blanchot appears not as a littérateur with ‘rightist’ leanings, but essentially as a political thinker in an enterprise central to his generation” (p. 812). A further key discussion was Steven Ungar’s 1995 book Scandal and Aftereffect. Ungar’s point is that Blanchot’s post-war work is usually the focus, a period when he turned to novels and works of literary theory and philosophy. It is this later phase of his writing which was so important for Foucault, Derrida and others. Hard-to-find during Blanchot’s lifetime, his earlier political writings were collected in 2017 as Chroniques politiques des annees trente: 1931-1940, edited by David Uhrig. Unlike most of Blanchot’s other books, including other posthumous collections, there is no English translation.
Blanchot had published a book review in La Revue Universelle in 1931, and he appeared twice more in this journal, which associated with Action française. His biographer Christophe Bident notes that he also published in other journals related to this movement (Maurice Blanchot, French 60/English 44). Then he was the foreign policy column writer for the Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires, probably from 1931, then from 1932 its leader writer and editor-in-chief, until 1940 (Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 68-69/51; Hill, Blanchot, 21). Hill describes it as being in the 1930s “a traditionalist, staunchly conservative evening daily” (Blanchot, 21).
Bident provides a brief discussion of the possible anti-Semitism of some of these texts, and also notes their strident “antidemocratic, antiparliamentary, and anticapitalist rhetoric” (Maurice Blanchot, 96/75, 110/88). There is also a discussion by Michel Surya in L’Autre Blanchot. A more sceptical assessment comes from Hill:
But what is most startling of all about the accusation that Blanchot himself professed anti-semitic views in the 1930s is that, to date, no evidence of any real substance has ever been produced to support it. At most, the charge rests on a particular interpretation of no more than four articles published by Blanchot in 1936 and 1937 (Blanchot, 36, see 36-39).
In 1940 Blanchot tried to stop Journal des Débats publishing after the defeat and the collapse of the Third Republic, but was unsuccessful. He stopped writing political texts rather than support its interest “in the triumphs of Marshal Pétain” (Bident, Maurice Blanchot 153/123). As a consequence of the lack of explicitly political texts, as Ungar indicates: “Little is known about Blanchot’s politics during and immediately after Vichy” (Scandal and Aftereffect, 134).
For a while he was without income, and it seems his writing of a large number of literary essays for the continuing Journal des débats during the occupation was simply in order to support his family. Although these pieces of 1941-44 were not generally political in nature, they were in “a paper that was ever more in favor of the Vichy government and especially Pétain” (Bident, Maurice Blanchot 154-55/124). While literary and theoretical, this does not mean they are devoid of political interest. Mehlman, for example, has indicated Blanchot’s reference to Charles Maurras, the leader of Action française, in a 1942 review of Maxime Leroy’s La politique de Sainte-Beuve. Mehlman discussed this in a presentation to a conference in London in 1993: “Pour Saint-Beuve: Maurice Blanchot, 10 March 1942”. When confronted with this, Blanchot claimed to have “no memory” of the review, and confessed he initially “doubted whether it had even been written” (“A Letter”, 209). When presented with the text he was contrite:
Let me go immediately to the worst. That in March 1942 one pronounces the name of Maurras (particularly when nothing in the context demands a name such as this) is detestable and inexcusable… The fact remains that the name of Maurras is an indelible stain and an expression of dishonour. I was never close to the man, during whatever period, and always kept my distance from Action Française, even when Gide out of curiosity would call to see him (“A Letter”, 210).
Blanchot’s books appeared with Gallimard in the early 1940s, and include Thomas the Obscure, Aminadab and Faux Pas. For Bident, they were “published in occupied France with a regularity mirroring that of his columns, and without ever having any trouble with the German censors. The question of the political morality of these publications cannot be avoided. But neither can one omit to add that in the same era and in the same place, publications appeared by Bataille, Sartre, Leiris and Camus” (Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 155/124). We could add Georges Dumézil to that list.
Bident counts 171 articles and two front-page texts in this period in Journal des Débats (Maurice Blanchot, 181/145). 54 of these texts were collected in the book Faux Pas in 1943. Bident reports that the invitation to collect them in a book came from Gaston Gallimard himself (Maurice Blanchot, 225/179). The texts in this collection were often rewritten, and the ordering was non-chronological. In 2007, the remaining pieces from Journal des Débats were collected in a single volume in French, bringing together texts from 1941-1944, and each year’s essays were translated as separate English volumes: Into Disaster 1941; Desperate Clarity 1942; A World in Ruins 1943; Death Now 1944. The Journal des débats was closed with the Liberation, in part because its publication under the occupation led to charges of collaboration. These texts and political issues around them are also explored in Bident’s biography. In particular he discusses some of the first discussions of this earlier Blanchot, and how long it took for the full story to emerge (Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 528-29/421-22; see Hill, Blanchot, 21-52).
Bident’s translator John McKeane suggests that some of these texts in response:
are haunted by the idea of Blanchot’s unpalatable past, but precisely they are haunted by it because there is not sufficient evidence to move to any full-scale condemnation (there is a clear difference of scale to the scandals surrounding Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger, for instance). There are indeed statements in Blanchot’s work that he himself recognized as ‘detestable and inexcusable’. But because they are so few, Surya for instance is often reduced to criticizing Blanchot’s associates… Forty years after the publication of selected 1930s texts in Gramma, and twenty years after the comprehensive accounts of Hill and Bident, we need to realize that this incomplete line of thinking has run into the sand. Perhaps in due course archival information will arise allowing for a full-scale condemnation of Blanchot. But in the meantime, sufficient evidence is lacking, meaning we exist in a half-light where strange shapes are seen in the shadows, and the debate is one of insinuation and guilt by association. Therefore it is surely time to banish these particular specters by switching on the lights of reading and analysis (“Amor: Blanchot since 2003”, 476).
Nonetheless Ungar suggests that the analysis “Serge Klarsfeld, Robert Paxton, Pascal Ory, and Henry Rousso have done for Vichy remains to be done for France in the 1930s” (Scandal and Aftereffect, 153, see 172). One contribution this would be his collaborative book with Dudley Andrew, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture, published a decade later. Richard Wolin has recently written about Blanchot’s 1930s journalism. There is a more extensive treatment in Leslie Hill, Blanchot politique: Sur une réflexion jamais interrompue.
Reviews of Dumézil
In the pages of Journal des débats during the occupation Blanchot wrote four pieces on Dumézil, treating his books Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, Horace et les Curiaces, Servius et la fortune and Naissance de Rome. None of these reviews are included in Faux Pas which has no references to Dumézil. But that book has a number of pieces on myth and religion, so the interest is not surprising. Blanchot’s first review of Dumézil came in July 1942 and was of the first volume of the Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus series. It began with a general statement of the book’s potential importance:
If Georges Dumézil’s book Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus were of interest only to the specialist, it would be deprived of part of the readership it deserves and to which it appeals thanks to the brilliance of its form, the scope of its attention to certain specific issues and the skill with which it draws the reader toward questions whose legitimacy can be glimpsed only at the highest levels of learning. The latest in a series of numerous studies in comparative mythology, his essay not only examines problems relating to the prehistoric past of our civilizations, it also presupposes a method that requires us to reflect usefully on what the requirements of knowledge are, and it helps to define a notion as important and as obscure as that of myth (Chroniques littéraires, 187-88; Desperate Clarity, 92).
In the wake of nineteenth century work on the common language to which many modern languages were related, it notes that earlier attempts to “reconstitute the religion and the mythology of these remote societies” were “premature, and it failed” (Chroniques littéraires, 188; Desperate Clarity, 93).
But for the last twenty years or so new research, developments in ethnography and anthropology and an increasing mistrust of sociological theories have made it possible to reconsider that failure, and Dumézil’s studies are themselves an example of the combination of rigor and daring that has been necessary in order to formulate some initial hypotheses concerning the religious and social frameworks of the Indo-Europeans (Chroniques littéraires, 18; Desperate Clarity, 93).
However, he does indicate some potential problems, suggesting that the tripartite division and the way
Hindu myths and thinkers, like the Druids, should seek to discern within souls the same architectural and hierarchical order that exists in kingdoms, in accordance with a notion of which Plato provides a celebrated account in Book IV of the Republic. Is this homology between the soul and society an Indo-European legacy? Is it not present too in the traditions that the vestiges of non-Aryan civilizations allow us to imagine? It is in this respect that the comparative method appears threatened by the range of its hypotheses and the scale of its success, claiming more than it is able to and more than can possibly be proved (Chroniques littéraires, 191; Desperate Clarity, 96).
He also indicates some of the challenges Dumézil’s comparative approach had for specialists, and particularly his claims about early Rome as myth turned into history (Chroniques littéraires, 192; Desperate Clarity, 97).
He followed this up with discussion of Horace et les Curiaces later that year, in an essay which partnered the book with Jacques Benoist-Méchin analysis of “letters sent by soldiers killed in the 1914–18 war”, and Henri Daniel-Rops’s study of the soldier and theologian Ernest Psichari (Chroniques littéraires, 214; Desperate Clarity, 122).
Georges Dumézil focuses on the principle of heroic force that is generally represented, among the Indo-European peoples, through myths of a war-like character [caractère guerrier]. The aim of this learned comparativist is to find in the story of Horatius’s combat not so much the trace of a historical event, but an adaptation of a myth designed to represent an ancient military initiation rite (Chroniques littéraires, 218; Desperate Clarity, 126).
Turning to the comparison with the Irish Cú Chulainn legend, he continues:
Georges Dumézil provides a minute examination of the differences separating the two legends, and he explains them by showing how Roman mythology, through eliminating the element of the marvellous from the ancient rite, transformed it into a romance [roman] and retained only its outlines, which is to say the same framework of fact, but justified by reasons that were both psychological and judicial (Chroniques littéraires, 219; Desperate Clarity, 127).
Blanchot returned to these themes in an article on the next book in Dumézil’s Les Mythes Romains series, Servius et la fortune, reviewed in June 1943. Blanchot describes this as a book in which he “applies the same explanatory principles [principes d’explication]” as his earlier work “to a study of the king who no longer incarnates simply sovereignty, but rather a certain type of access to sovereign power, and who is considered to be the inventor of a social practice whose origins no doubt go back to the Indo-European era” (Chroniques littéraires, 385; A World in Ruins, 118). His last review of Dumézil was of the book Naissance de Rome, the second book in the Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus series. Here he again returns to the theme of the relation of what purports to be Roman history as disguised myth, and Dumézil’s challenge to established accounts of the early stages of the city, particularly André Piganiol (Chroniques littéraires, 625; Death Now, 124-25). Dumézil builds on Theodor Mommsen’s claim that some aspects of Roman pseudo-history come from later history, with a past constructed to serve the interests of the present (Chroniques littéraires, 625-26; Death Now, 125). But Dumézil also contends that if at least aspects of what is taken to be history is actually myth, it can reveal traces of the earlier Indo-European societies, for which other traditions also give evidence (Chroniques littéraires, 623; Death Now, 122).
The End of the War
Blanchot was almost executed by a German firing squad in June 1944, but escaped when the squad came under attack. Fifty years later he fictionalised the event in The Instant of My Death. The Journal des débats was closed after the liberation, in part because its publication under the occupation led to charges of collaboration.
After the war Blanchot joined the first Paris issue of the journal L’Arche, originally launched during the war in Algiers. He wrote sixteen texts for L’Arche, mostly longer critical essays, thirteen of which were collected in The Work of Fire (see Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 237-38/190). Blanchot was unusual in that he worked with both L’Arche and Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes. “He was even one of the rare writers able to straddle both journals” (Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 241/194). He was also closely involved in the launch of Critique, and Georges Bataille declared that “Without Blanchot, no more than without Éric Weil [sans B, pas plus que sans EW], I could not have founded the journal” (Dominique Arban, “Cinq minutes avec Georges Bataille”, 5).
But Blanchot did not stay with Critique long and left it and Les Temps Modernes in the early 1950s, joining the relaunched nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française. He published 128 articles with this journal, which as Bident notes are “mostly collected in Blanchot’s four main volumes of criticism. The Space of Literature, The Book to Come, and later The Infinite Conversation and Friendship in 1969 and 1971” (Maurice Blanchot, 335/272).
In the 1950s Blanchot also returned to writing political texts, and his position seems to have shifted quite dramatically, including support for Algerian independence and opposition to de Gaulle (Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 391-93/315-16). These political texts have been collected posthumously as Écrits Politiques 1953-1993, translated as Political Writings, 1953-1993. His many more literary articles in Bataille’s Critique journal are collected in La Condition Critique: Articles 1945-1998, for which there does not seem to be an English translation. As far as I can tell, after the war he never again engaged with Dumézil’s work.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Alin Constantine for first alerting me to Blanchot’s reviews of Dumézil.
Bibliographies of Blanchot
“Bibliographie I”, Gramma 3/4 [Lire Blanchot I], 1975, 223-45.
“Bibliographie II”, Gramma 5 [Lire Blanchot II], 1976, 123-32.
“Maurice Blanchot: A Bibliographical Check-List”, SubStance 5 (14), 1976, 142-59.
Blanchot’s Reviews of Dumézil
“Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus” (1942), reprinted in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats, 187-193; “Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus”, Desperate Clarity, 92-98.
“Considérations sur le héros” (1942), on Horace et les curiaces, reprinted in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats, 214-20; “Considerations on the Hero”, Desperate Clarity, 122-29.
“De la louange à la souveraineté” (1943), on Servius et la fortune, reprinted in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats, 385-91; “From Praise to Sovereignty”, A World in Ruins, 118-25.
“Naissance de Rome” (1944), reprinted in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats, 623-27; “The Birth of Rome”, Death Now, 122-26.
Other References
Dominique Arban, “Cinq minutes avec Georges Bataille”, Le Figaro Littéraire, 17 July 1948, 5.
Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005.
Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Ce qui demeure: Lettres de soldats tombés au champ d’honneur 1914-1918, Albin Michel, 1942.
Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot Partenaire Invisible: Essai biographique, Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998; Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, trans. John McKeane, New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
Maurice Blanchot, “La politique de Sainte-Beuve” (1942), Chroniques littéraires, 141-47; “The Politics of Sainte-Beuve”, Desperate Clarity, 38-44.
Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas, Paris: Gallimard, 1971 [1943]; Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandall, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Maurice Blanchot, “L’Instant de ma mort”, French-English version in Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, 2-11.
Maurice Blanchot, “A Letter”, French-English version, trans. Leslie Hill, in Carolyn Bailey Gill ed. Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, London: Routledge, 1996, 209-11.
Maurice Blanchot, Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats: avril 1941-août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident, Paris: Gallimard, 2007; Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland, New York: Fordham University Press, 2014; Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942, trans. Michael Holland, New York: Fordham University Press, 2014; A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland, New York: Fordham University Press, 2016; Death Now: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1944, trans. Michael Holland, New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.
Maurice Blanchot, Écrits Politiques 1953-1993, ed. Éric Hoppenot, Paris: Gallimard, 2008; Political Writings, 1953-1993, trans. Zakir Paul, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010
Maurice Blanchot, La Condition Critique: Articles 1945-1998, ed. Christophe Bident, Paris: Gallimard, 2010.
Maurice Blanchot, Chroniques politiques des annees trente: 1931-1940, ed. David Uhrig, Paris: Gallimard, 2017.
Henri Daniel-Rops, Psichari, Paris: Librarie Plon, 1942.
Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, London: Routledge, 1997.
Leslie Hill, Blanchot politique: Sur une réflexion jamais interrompue, Genève: Furor, 2020.
Éric Hoppenot, “Maurice Blanchot: Compagnon de route de Critique?” in Sylvie Patron (ed.), Autour de Critique 1946-1992, Le Coudray: Otrante, 2021, 101-26.
Maxime Leroy, La politique de Sainte-Beuve, Paris: Gallimard, 1941.
John McKeane, “Amor: Blanchot since 2003”, in Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, trans. John McKeane, New York: Fordham University Press, 2018, 465-78.
Jeffrey Mehlman, “Blanchot at Combat: Of Literature and Terror”, MLN 95 (4), 1980, 808-29.
Jeffrey Mehlman, “Pour Saint-Beuve: Maurice Blanchot, 10 March 1942”, in Carolyn Bailey Gill ed. Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, London: Routledge, 1996, 212-31.
Michel Surya, L’Autre Blanchot: L’écriture de jour, l’écriture de nuit, Paris: Gallimard, 2015.
Steven Ungar, Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France since 1930, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Richard Wolin, “Blanchot Collabo: From the Jeune Droite to Jeune France”, French Politics, Culture & Society 43 (1), 2025, 93–124.
This is the 66th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic organisation here.
