On Literature and the Occupation of France: Blanchot vs. Drieu

THESE REMARKS ARE OFFERED IN SUMMARY of readings of the crisscrossed fates of two French writers who traversed the ordeal of World War II and the Occupation in virtually opposite ways. They have been pursued in the conviction that the most intriguing aspect of the period is the extent to which it and its writers furnish a matrix for developments that reached fruition much later—as though this were the moment in which the deck was reshuffled and a game begun that the French (and we) may still be caught up in. Sociologists of French elites, for example, have long traced certain features of French technocracy to the school initiated by Vichy at Uriage (see Bitoun). An eminent historian of French literature, Marc Fumaroli, has recently suggested that the somewhat stifling cultural aspirations of the French Republic at the end of the twentieth century have their roots in the Jeune France bureaucracy of Vichy (91).