Suchergebnisse

Safeguarding a <Civilization in Crisis>: La Revue Universelle's Conceptualization of Western Civilization and its Renewal, 1920-1935 This article contributes to a comparative study of the «Conservative Revolution» in Europe by exploring the French journal Revue Universelle in the 1920s and the early 1930s. Led by Henri Massis, Jacques Bainville and Jacques Maritain, the intellectuals contributing to the journal developed a unique cultural politics that evoked the decadence and decline of Western civilization under the forces of modernity, and called for the defence and renewal of this civilization through revitalised conservative values of Catholicism, authoritative leadership, elitism, and a return to the spiritual sources of Western culture. However, while the Revue Universelle team intentionally cultivated a pan-European scope for their journal and promoted its cultural politics as a common language for all European conservatives, their aim was compromised by their francocentric and germanophobic conceptualisation of the West and civilization.

Intellectual identity construction begins : the Dreyfus Affair, 1898-1902 -- Grooming the right-wing intellectual : the Nouvelle Sorbonne debate, 1910-1914 -- Constructing the French fascist intellectual : the interwar polarization, 1930-1939 -- The ostracized intellectual in power : occupation and collaboration, 1940-1945 -- An all-consuming resentment : the intellectual right in the postwar era, 1945-1967 -- Resentment and the new right : intellectual identity reimagined, 1968-2000

Throughout the twentieth century, French intellectuals of the Right have been locked in a cycle of resentment and reaction against the intellectual Left whom they blame for repeatedly ostracizing them from the role of 'intellectuel'. This resentment of a perceived exclusion has resulted in a recurring trope of left-wing cultural hegemony and right-wing marginalization that has come to define the individual and collective identities of the intellectual Right today. This process of perceived hegemony, resentment, and identity reconstruction is readily apparent in the work of right-wing intellectuals Ferdinand Brunetière, Ramon Fernandez, Drieu la Rochelle, Maurice Bardèche, and Alain de Benoist. When faced with perceived left-wing hegemony, these intellectuals reacted with resentment, revaluation of their designation as the excluded 'other', and retreat to self-segregated cultural communities. Over time, this process has both distinctly defined the intellectual Right and effectively radicalized and alienated it from mainstream intellectual life and the French public.