The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914-1940

The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914-1940

From acclaimed biographer and cultural historian, author of For the Soul of France (â€œMasterful historyâ€ â€”Henry Kissinger), Zola (â€œMagnificentâ€ â€”The New Yorker), and Flaubert (â€œImpeccableâ€ â€”James Wood, cover, The New York Times Book Review)â€”a brilliant reconsideration of the events and the political, social, and religious movements that led to Franceâ€™s embrace of Fascism and anti-Semitism. Frederick Brown explores the tumultuous forces unleashed in the country by the Dreyfus Affair and its aftermath and examines how the clashing ideologiesâ€”the swarm of â€™ismsâ€”and their blood-soaked political scandals and artistic movements following the horrors of World War I resulted in the countryâ€™s era of militant authoritarianism, rioting, violent racism, and nationalistic fervor. We see how these forces overtook the countryâ€™s sense of reason, sealing the fate of an entire nation, and led to the fall of France and the rise of the Vichy government.

The Embrace of Unreason picks up where Brownâ€™s previous book, For the Soul of France, left off to tell the story of France in the decades leading up to World War II.

We see through the lives of three writers (Maurice BarrÃ¨s, Charles Maurras, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle) how the French intelligentsia turned away from the humanistic traditions and rationalistic ideals born out of the Enlightenment in favor of submission to authority that stressed patriotism, militarism, and xenophobia; how French extremists, traumatized by the horrors of the battlefront and exalted by the glories of wartime martyrdom, tried to redeem Franceâ€™s collective identity, as Hitlerâ€™s shadow lengthened over Europe.

The author writes of the Stavisky Affair, named for the notorious swindler whose grandiose Ponzi scheme tarred numerous political figures and fueled the bloody riots of February 1934, with right-wing paramilitary leagues, already suffering from the worldwide effects of the 1929 stock market crash, decrying Stavisky the Jew as the direct descendant of Alfred Dreyfus and an exemplar of the decaying social order . . . We see the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture that, in June 1935, assembled Europeâ€™s most illustrious literati under the sponsorship of the Soviet Union, whose internal feuds anticipated those recounted by George Orwell in his Spanish Civil War memoir Homage to Catalonia . . .

Here too, pictured as the perfect representation of Europeâ€™s cultural doomsday, is the Paris Worldâ€™s Fair of 1937, featuring two enormous pavilions, the first built by Nazi Germany, the second by Soviet Russia, each facing the other like duelists on the avenue leading to the Eiffel Tower, symbol of the French Republic. And near them both, a pavilion devoted to â€œthe art of the festival,â€ in which speakers and displays insisted that Nazi torchlight parades at Nuremberg should serve as a model for France.

Written with historical insight and grasp and made immediate through the use of newspaper articles, journals, and literary works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Embrace of Unreason brings to life Europeâ€™s darkest modern years.
Country USA
Manufacturer Alfred A. Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2014-04-01
UnitCount 1
Format Deckle Edge
EANs 9780307595157

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Alfred A. Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2014-04-01
UnitCount	1
Format	Deckle Edge
EANs	9780307595157

The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914-1940

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