French Literature Reviews - 2026
U. Eisenzweig, La Naissance littéraire du fascisme
History, Politics and Society
Bibliographic reference: U. Eisenzweig, La Naissance littéraire du fascisme, Editions du Seuil, collection "La librairie du XXIe siècle", 2013.
Uri Eisenzweig, La Naissance littéraire du fascisme
Paris: Editions du Seuil, coll. "La Librairie du XXIe siècle"
October 10, 2013
192 pages
19 euros
Publisher's presentation
In late 1897, Captain Dreyfus's innocence came to light, prompting a striking twist of fate. Bernard Lazare, the first to publicly refute the claim that Dreyfus was guilty, withdrew from the public eye. Meanwhile, Maurice Barrès, hitherto silent, engaged in denying the obvious: the injustice committed against the Jewish captain.
Uri Eisenzweig's book examines this paradoxical moment, offering an interpretation rooted in the fundamental positions of these two major thinkers of Dreyfusism and anti-Dreyfusism. Shaped by a shared fin-de-siècle literary sensibility, both rejected narrative as the privileged form of truth.
Is it this rejection that, after guiding his pioneering efforts at demystification, distanced the anarchist Lazare from a struggle centered on the effort to tell the truth—of which Zola's "J’accuse !" is the archetype? At the same time, the fascination with a truth escaping narrative engendered in Barrès a novelistic imagination which, when transposed to the political sphere, foreshadowed fascism: the conception of the Nation as an organic, rooted entity, fatally threatened by any otherness, any narrative. Corresponding to this worldview is a rejection of the universal in favor of common values, and a racial determinism regarding individual identity.
The book concludes with a reading of Octave Mirbeau’s superb Journal d’une femme de chambre (1900). Inversing the Barrèsian relationship between narrative and truth, this novel is the first to emphasize that the emerging fascist imaginary is inseparable from a new literary status for the Other—here, the Jew, as represented by antisemitism.
About the author
Born in Havana in 1946 to Jewish parents who had fled occupied Belgium, Uri Eisenzweig currently teaches literature at Rutgers University in the United States. His work focuses on various aspects of European modernity, notably the role of the literary imagination in the political choices, projects, and obsessions of Western society—whether exploring the Zionist logic in Territoires occupés de l'imaginaire juif (1980) or the fantasy known as "terrorism" in Fictions de l'anarchisme (2001).
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The intellectual climate of France at the end of the nineteenth century was profoundly shaped by debates surrounding national identity, individualism, and the role of intellectuals in public life. The Dreyfus Affair served as a major catalyst for these ideological divisions, drawing writers and journalists into intense political polarization. Authors and essayists frequently utilized literary platforms to articulate broader philosophical and social positions, merging aesthetic concerns with the pressing political controversies of the Third Republic. Readers interested in the historical intersections of European political thought and literary representation may find this work relevant to their studies.
Uri Eisenzweig examines this paradoxical moment by analyzing how both Bernard Lazare and Maurice Barrès rejected narrative as the privileged form of truth. The study traces how this shared fin-de-siècle literary sensibility led them in radically different directions, influencing anarchist demystification on one hand and the emergence of a proto-fascist political imagination on the other. The volume concludes with a reading of Octave Mirbeau's Journal d’une femme de chambre, considering how the novel engages with the emerging fascist imaginary and the literary status of the Other.
An article about this book can be read on the nonfiction.fr website.