{"id":99802,"date":"2022-11-22T17:00:16","date_gmt":"2022-11-22T15:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=99802"},"modified":"2022-11-18T14:45:28","modified_gmt":"2022-11-18T12:45:28","slug":"21-00-78","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=99802","title":{"rendered":"La Revue Blanche"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>La Revue Blanche<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

MITCHELL ABIDOR<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Tablet\u2019s French literary ancestor was founded by three Warsaw-born brothers who were high school friends and classmates of Marcel Proust, and who published everyone from Andr\u00e9 Gide to Paul Claudel. Then came the Dreyfus affair.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
\n

Revue blanche magazine poster, 1890sCALIMAX\/ALAMY<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

To burrow through the issues of La Revue blanche<\/em>, the French political and cultural journal that was published from 1891 to 1903, is to experience awe at the breadth, reach, and openness of an important section of the French intellectual world of the time. In many ways,\u00a0La Revue blanche<\/em>\u00a0can be said to define that world. Any random volume of the review can represent its entire run, demonstrating its impressive variety and cosmopolitanism. Volume 9, from 1895, includes an excerpt from Andr\u00e9 Gide\u2019s early novel\u00a0Paludes<\/em>, translations from Edgar Allan Poe, August Strandberg, Alexander Herzen, and Knut Hamsun, along with essays by the great novelist and diarist Jules Renard. Among the poets we find Paul Claudel, St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9, Paul Verlaine, and Francis Jammes. Art was a strong point of\u00a0La Revue<\/em>\u00a0blanche<\/em>, and the three issues of this volume were illustrated by Toulouse-Lautrec and F\u00e9lix Valloton.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

The magazine was owned and edited by the Warsaw-born Natanson brothers, Alexandre, Thad\u00e9e, and Alfred. The sons of a banker father who settled in France when the brothers were young, they attended one of France\u2019s most prestigious high schools, the Lyc\u00e9e Condorcet, where Marcel Proust was among their friends. Their university studies destined them for lives among the solid bourgeoise, but it was the arts that drew them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

La Revue blanche<\/em>, founded in Li\u00e8ge in 1889 but transferred to Paris in 1891, was in a sense a tribute to the success of Jewish emancipation, which had occurred a century earlier, thanks to the French Revolution. The Jewish presence in the pages and leadership of the review is unmistakable, cutting across political ideologies.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Sitting alongside the Natanson brothers at the head of the review was Lucien Muhlfeld, secretary of the editorial committee and former librarian at the Universit\u00e9 de Paris. For 10 years, the future Jewish socialist prime minister of France L\u00e9on Blum wrote articles and theater and book reviews, both under his own name and pseudonymously. Among the magazine\u2019s other Jewish contributors were the novelist Tristan Bernard, the first Dreyfusard; the anarchist Bernard Lazare; and the pacifist and Esperantist Gaston Moch.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

This Jewish role did not pass unnoticed. In a February 1898 article in the antisemitic newspaper\u00a0La Libre<\/em>\u00a0parole<\/em>, its publisher and editor, Edouard Drumont, author of the bestseller\u00a0La France juive (Jewish France)<\/em>, described\u00a0La Revue<\/em>\u00a0blanche<\/em>\u00a0as: \u201cThis little world led by the two [sic] Polish Jewish Nathanson [sic] brothers, is made up of the young Jewish litterateurs Gustave Kahn, Romain Coolus, Lucien Muhlfeld, Fernand Gregh, Marcel Proust, Tristan Bernard, [and] L\u00e9on Blum.\u201d Drumont called them \u201ca handful of Jews, newly disembarked in this country whom he strangely accused of having \u201cintroduced anti-Semitism into all souls and corporations.\u201d It was this Jewish presence, and the review\u2019s support for causes like the defense of Alfred Dreyfus that led Drumont, the most vocal antisemite of the time, to call the magazine \u201can intellectual Dreyfus,\u201d i.e., a traitor to France.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Despite Drumont\u2019s view of the review, it at times demonstrated a certain ambiguity, if not indifference, to Jewish matters, particularly prior to the Dreyfus affair. In 1895, early in the days of the Dreyfus affair, which began the year before with the arrest for espionage of Alfred Dreyfus,\u00a0La<\/em>\u00a0Revue blanche<\/em>\u00a0spoke out against attacks on the Armenians by the Turks and the repression of Spanish anarchists, but said not a word about the antisemitic riots in Algiers or of Captain Dreyfus. It is both a sign of the review\u2019s openness but also of lack of sensitivity to Jewish issues that in 1896 it published an article in praise and in memory of the Marquis de Mor\u00e8s, a vocal and militant member of the Ligue anti-semitique who was killed that same year while leading a failed crusade against the Jews of North Africa. The historian of the review Paul-Henri Borrelier was right in describing the pre-Dreyfus\u00a0Revue<\/em>\u2019s \u201cuncertain combat against antisemitism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

The very first article in\u00a0La Revue blanche<\/em>\u2019s first Parisian issue in 1891 proclaimed its editors\u2019 and publishers\u2019 intentions for the magazine: \u201cThis is hardly a fighting review. We propose neither to undermine established literature nor to supplant the already organized young literary groups. Put simply, we want to develop our personalities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Whatever was said in this unsigned statement, assumed to have been written by Lucien Muhlfeld, the magazine\u2019s editorial secretary, if ever an intellectual review was a \u201cfighting review\u201d in all senses of the term, it was\u00a0La Revue blanche.\u00a0<\/em>Over the years, it less and less disguised its anarchist-tinged political colors. But it was also and most importantly, a \u201cfighting review\u201d on the cultural front. The editors gave room in its pages to the most groundbreaking new writers, as it had promised \u201cundermin[ing ] established literature\u201d and supplanting \u201calready organized young literary groups.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

An all-but-unknown writer appeared in an 1893 issue, publishing a strange rewriting of Flaubert\u2019s\u00a0Bouvard et<\/em>\u00a0Pecuchet<\/em>, in which Flaubert\u2019s heroes express antisemitic sentiments. The two men speak of the Jews\u2019 \u201codd practices, unintelligible vocabulary\u201d; of how \u201cthey all have hooked noses \u2026 vile souls turned strictly to self-interest \u2026 And what is more, they formed a kind of vast secret society.\u201d The author of the piece, Marcel Proust, explained the clear Jew-hatred by saying, \u201cOf course, the opinions attributed to Flaubert\u2019s two famous characters are in no way those of the author.\u201d Though this article would appear in his book\u00a0Les Plaisirs et les jours<\/em>, Proust, the Natanson\u2019s high school classmate, was not as yet living up to the potential his supporters at\u00a0La Revue blanche<\/em>\u00a0saw in him. It was only 20 years later, in 1913 that the first volume of\u00a0A la recherche du temps perdu<\/em>\u00a0would appear.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The Dreyfus affair radically changed\u00a0La Revue blanche<\/em>. As the historians Pascal Ory and Olivier Barrot wrote, \u201cFrom 1898, the editorial committee of gifted minds would become the headquarters of a general staff, the site of one of the greatest human rights enterprises of world history, virtually the seat of a party, but one unlike any other since it was that of the Dreyfusards.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

La Revue blanche<\/em>\u2019s hesitation before joining the fight for the captain was common on the French left: Defending an officer was not the top priority of anti-militarists like the editors and writers at\u00a0La Revue<\/em>\u00a0blanche<\/em>. The Jewish presence on the magazine could not but have played a role in this engagement. How could it not, given the antisemitic wave the controversy unleashed across France? Even so, it was in all probability more the review\u2019s general nonconformity that led it to this commitment to defend Dreyfus.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The magazine\u2019s first blow in defense of Dreyfus was published in February 1898 in an article titled, \u201cA Protest.\u201d The review admitted its previous silence, its \u201cabstention\u201d from comment on \u201cthe ongoing appalling trial,\u201d The review\u2019s editors\u2019 confidence in the justice system had been destroyed by the trial and verdict, and they expressed their shock that the clear evidence in support of Dreyfus\u2019 innocence and the quality of his defenders \u201care no longer enough for a judicial proceeding to be judged in keeping with the elementary guarantees of fairness.\u201d Their anger was boundless: \u201cFor the first time, not only is light not cast, but it is now forever impossible that it be cast.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The antisemitism the case had given rise to, which included anti-Jewish riots and demonstrations, was cause for great alarm: \u201cWe protest against public opinion, duped and fantasized, which refuses to see the danger to which the booted bureaucracy exposes us.\u201d Yet the review\u2019s mixed attitude to Jewishness is also made clear in this defining article on their greatest political cause. Standing matters on their head, they wrote: \u201cIn this racial persecution there is a superstition like the Judaism of its origins which takes us back to the time when Jews believed in the Talmud.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But the principal point was that \u201cwe invite to join us all those who think freely, who seek a justice rendered in keeping with the law and who, hating all forms of autocracy, accept military autocracy less than any other.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The review published an homage to Emile Zola after the publication of his \u201cJ\u2019Accuse,\u201d and, in a scathing article by Lucien Herr, librarian at the Ecole normale sup\u00e9rieure, it broke with Maurice Barr\u00e8s, the nationalist and literary figure who had until then been the spiritual guide of many of the magazine\u2019s writers, when he came out against Dreyfus. Herr wrote angrily, directly addressing this voice of France, that \u201cThe French soul was only ever great and strong at those moments when it was welcoming and generous. You want to bury it under a paralytic stiffness in which are placed rancor and hatred.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The great poet and essayist Charles P\u00e9guy, who would be killed in battle during World War I, decried the \u201cuniversal demoralization of an entire people, ratified by the court martial in Rennes [which condemned Dreyfus] was assuredly the consummation of the crime.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The Dreyfus affair was not the only social battle in which the\u00a0Revue\u00a0<\/em>engaged. In 1897, across two issues, it published a remarkable \u201cEnquete sur la Commune,\u201d a series of brief, firsthand accounts of the great uprising of 1871 whose specter still haunted France. A century and a half later it remains one of the best accounts of that event.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The repressive legislation passed in response to the anarchist bombing wave of the early 1890s, laws which effectively banned anarchist propaganda and activity of any kind, was harshly criticized in the pages of\u00a0La Revue blanche<\/em>. The strongest criticism was an article signed \u201cUn Juriste.\u201d The author described the legislation as, \u201cEveryone admits that these laws never should have been our laws, the laws of a republican nation, of a civilized nation, of an honest nation. They stink of tyranny, barbarism, and falsehood.\u201d The pseudonymous author was the future three-time prime minister of France, L\u00e9on Blum.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

An 1898 volume of anti-militarist articles released by the review\u2019s book publishing arm, provocatively titled\u00a0L\u2019Arm\u00e9e contre la<\/em>\u00a0Nation<\/em>\u00a0(the army against the nation) would lead the minister of war to press a charge of defamation against the publishers, a charge the Natansons were able to successfully defend themselves against by claiming the book contained nothing but articles that had already been published elsewhere and not been found criminal.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

By the turn of the century French intellectuals began withdrawing from the political field. Charles P\u00e9guy later described the letdown felt during and after the Dreyfus affair by lamenting that \u201ceverything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.\u201d At the same time, the editorial staff and stable of writers at the review had turned over several times. One of its later editors, Urbain Gohier, was a barely disguised antisemite who would become an important figure on the anti-Jewish fringe. Yet the quality of the contributors was still high. If Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s poetry no longer appeared in its pages, the young Guillaume Apollinaire did. Alfred Jarry became a regular contributor, the\u00a0Revue<\/em>\u00a0publishing his masterpiece,\u00a0Ubu Roi<\/em>, as well as Octave Mirbeau\u2019s classic\u00a0Diary of a<\/em>\u00a0Chambermaid,<\/em>\u00a0serially and in book form by its Editions de la Revue blanche. That enterprise also published what is considered to be France\u2019s first bestseller, a translation of\u2014of all things\u2014the Pole Henryk Sinkiewicz biblical epic\u00a0Quo Vadis<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

By the first years of the 20th century only one Natanson brother, Thad\u00e9e, remained on the magazine. Embroiled in a lengthy divorce, he seemed to have grown tired of the magazine. It was losing money, but then, according to Thad\u00e9e\u2019s wife, later famous as Misia Sert, that had always been the case. In 1903\u00a0La Revue blanche<\/em>\u00a0published the last of its 237 issues. Its closing was in no way an indication of failure. It had set out to be the voice of a new France, of a more open country, both politically and culturally, and was, in the end, both its begetter and its voice.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n

Mitchell Abidor<\/strong> is a writer and translator who has published over a dozen books on French radical history.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em>
\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.
\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:
\n<\/em>webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

La Revue Blanche MITCHELL ABIDOR Tablet\u2019s French literary ancestor was founded by three Warsaw-born brothers who were high school friends and classmates of Marcel Proust, and who published everyone from Andr\u00e9 Gide to Paul Claudel. Then came the Dreyfus affair. Revue blanche magazine poster, 1890sCALIMAX\/ALAMY To burrow through the issues of La Revue blanche, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99802"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=99802"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99860,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99802\/revisions\/99860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}