A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, 1983. / Since his suicide in March 1945, Drieu la Rochelle has been accused of fascist, nazi, or ... communist tendencies. Furthermore, he has been considered until now in a purely political light. Most of the studies which have been devoted to him have dealt with the "political case" - his literacy work has been left in the dark. [Abbreviated Abstract. Open document to view full version]

Everything about fascism is aesthetic: this is what our thesis aims to demonstrate, based on the example of interwar French Fascism (1919--1939). It studies both discourses, symbolic practices, and literary texts, in order to show the multiple aspects of fascism's aesthetic dimension. Two theories, discourse analysis and sociocriticism, have guided us and permitted us to explain the interaction between aesthetics and ideology. / Our thesis is divided in three parts, each one devoted to one of fascism's central themes: the leader, the youth, and the group. In our first chapter, we examine the charismatic leader's many faces, among which are the poet and the warrior. We then show that fascism's discourse on heroism makes of the epic hero an ideological model and that, in its turn, this ideological hero greatly influenced Pierre Drieu la Rochelle's representation of the hero. But, as we indicate, Drieu's novels reveal that the cult of the hero is both a glorification of the self and a self-hatred. In our second chapter we examine fascism's cult of youth such as it was in Italy and Germany, after which we have demonstrated that, in a way, French fascism was an extreme radicalization of the contemporary French discourse on youth. Then, we analyse one of Robert Brasillach's novels which brings to the fore the dark side of fascism's cult of youth: its death drive. / In our last chapter, we unearth the aesthetic principles underlying fascism's political spectacle, principles that we also find at the heart of Drieu's texts. We consequently state that Drieu has adopted fascism's aesthetic years before he realized he had fascist ideas. Going a little further yet, we stipulate that Drieu thus reveals that the aesthetic was one of the main roads towards fascism. We then establish, in our final conclusion, a synthetic description of fascist aesthetics: an aesthetics of pathos, exhibition, sublime, violence, and death.

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This thesis examines the campaign waged against Vichy's National Revolution by Robert Brasillach, Marcel Deat, Jacques Doriot, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. It explores the particular issues of contention separating Vichy and the Paris ultras as well as shedding light on the final evolution of a representative segment of the fascist phenomenon in France.

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