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.^[7][8] 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.^[7][8][9] 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.^[9] 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.^[10]

In the interwar (1933–1939)

In 1933, Bardèche and Brasillach moved to Vaugirard, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, where they stayed for three years while Bardèche taught at the Collège Sainte-Geneviève of Versailles.^[7] He married Suzanne, Brasillach's sister, in July 1934.^[9] During their honeymoon in Spain,^[11] Bardèche had a car accident that left him with a permanent depressed skull fracture on the forehead.^[12] With his now brother-in-law Brasillach, Bardèche compiled The History of Motion Pictures in 1935, a study of the nascent art of cinema. According to scholar Alice Kaplan, it was "probably the first general history of cinema written in France, if not the world."^[13]

Writing for the Revue française, Bardèche also became a film critic for the art magazines 1933 and L'Assaut. During the Spanish Civil War, Bardèche was a supporter of Francisco Franco and the nationalist cause. In 1939, he edited with Brasillach a pro-Franquist book entitled Histoire de la guerre d'Espagne (History of the Spanish War).^[14] Bardèche published a fiercely antisemitic contribution in Je suis partout on 15 April 1938, on the occasion of an issue dedicated to the Jewish question.^[9]

Literary career and WWII (1939–1946)

Robert Brasillach, fascist poet and brother-in-law of Bardèche. His execution by the Resistance in 1945 turned Bardèche into a "political animal".^[9]

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.^[9][14] 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.^[9][14]

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.^[9] Bardèche was sentenced to one year in prison.^[15] He lost his university chair in literature and was, for a time, evicted from his apartment.^[16]

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.^[17] 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."^[9] 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.^[18]

The "revisionist" trilogy (1947–1950)

Bardèche explained that he felt like a "foreigner" in a France he perceived as a "foreign country", or worse an "occupied country", in the immediate post-war period. In 1947, he wrote a letter to François Mauriac (Lettre à François Mauriac), who had unsuccessfully tried to convince Charles de Gaulle to grant Brasillach amnesty in 1945. In the letter, Bardèche dismissed the Resistance and the épuration, declaring the Vichy regime and collaboration legitimate. One year later, he established the "revisionist school", railing against what he called the "falsifications" and "manipulations" of history committed by the Allies.^[9]

In 1948, Bardèche espoused his "revisionist" thesis in the book Nuremberg ou la Terre promise, a sequel to Lettre à François Mauriac. In the words of historian Valérie Igounet: "if, as Maurice Bardèche shows us, the history written on Occupation is false, then why the history of the Second World War could not be so too?" Indeed, Bardèche wrote that the Nazi death camps were "inventions" of the Allies established to whitewash their own crimes. Jews were presented as ultimately responsible for the war, and likewise accused of falsifying history.^[2] Dismissed as the inventors of the Holocaust, Jews had allegedly designed a secret plan to "get revenge from Germany" and obtain international support for the creation of their nation state. If Bardèche did not refute the fact that Jews had suffered or had been persecuted during the war, he did deny the reality of their extermination.^[19][9] It was the first time since the end of the war that someone openly writes that he doubts the existence of the Holocaust.^[9] The book, which sold 25,000 copies, was considered an "apology of the crime of murder" by a court, and Bardèche was convicted to one year in jail and fined 50,000 Francs in the spring of 1952. Nuremberg ou la Terre promise was consequently banned, but circulated covertly. Bardèche spent only two or three weeks in jail in July 1954, then was granted amnesty by president René Coty.^[1][9] As he realized the difficulty of diffusing his ideas in a post-fascist context, Bardèche decided to establish his own publishing house Les Sept Couleurs, a name inspired by the title of one of Brasillach's novels.^[9]

In 1950, Bardèche released the last volume of his revisionist theory, Nuremberg II, ou les Faux-Monnayeurs, reiterating what he had written two years earlier. The novelty of this volume was the narrative construction Bardèche had designed around the tale of Paul Rassinier, a former deportee turned into a Holocaust denier. Bardèche concluded on his side that kapos were in reality worse than SS, and expressed his "doubts" about the existence of gas chambers. After the release of his revisionist trilogy, Bardèche gained a new status in the international far-right movement. As neo-fascist activist François Duprat later wrote, Bardèche "showed that the 'fascist' far-right had found its intellectual leader". At the same time, Bardèche was recognized among academics as a leading expert of novelists Honoré de Balzac and Stendhal, and benefited in the public opinion from being the brother-in-law and spiritual inheritor of an "assassinated poet".^[9]

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.^[20]

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.^[9] 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.^[9] 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".^[17] During the Algerian War (1954–1962), Bardèche wrote numerous articles defending French Algeria, third-world colonialism, and segregation based on ethnic difference.^[21]

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".^[22][10] The book became a well-known theoretical work of post-war fascism both in France and abroad.^[22] Translated in Italian, it turned into a favorite book among local fascists.^[23] 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.^[24]

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."^[25]

Return to literary studies (1971–1998)

Bardèche produced works on French novelists Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Léon Bloy, which are often cited in bibliographies. In parallel, he continued to publish neo-fascist and pamphlets denying the Holocaust, including Robert Faurisson's The Problem of the "gas chambers" (1978).^[8]

According to literary scholar Ralph Schoolcraft, "it would be misleading to infer a divorce between Bardèche's right-wing propaganda and his literary criticism. [...] He favored a totalizing vision that organized the entirety of a writer's production into a sort of organic system working in the service of a specific overriding design. Critics have seen this aesthetic view of literary art as analogous to visions of a fascist utopia, with the author posited as an absolute authority arranging elements hierarchically and moving towards a complete unity at the expense of diversity and ambiguity."^[8]

Death

Gravestone of Maurice and Suzanne Bardèche.

Maurice Bardèche died on 30 July 1998 in Canet-Plage.^[9][26] Jean-Marie Le Pen, then the leader of the National Front party, described him as "a prophet of a European renaissance for which he had long hoped".^[27] His wife Suzanne, the sister of Robert Brasillach, died in 2005.^[28]