Tuesday 5 November 2019

Ezra Pound on France, Italy and Sacred Empire


More from the F.B.I. file on Pound. The Bureau’s translation of a wartime broadcast made in French, aimed at Vichy. I haven’t found the original document; but Feldman reproduces it.

Begins with an interesting statement of his Europeanism; collapses into the usual invective; then ends with “Rome was reborn. The Sacred Empire was reborn”; i.e., the empire of antiquity was reborn in the Holy Roman Empire; and the H.R.E. was reborn in Mussolini. More of Pound’s modernist Ghibellinism. So I think anyway.

Source: Matthew Feldman, “The ‘Pound Case’ in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview,” Journal of Modern Literature, 35.2 (winter, 2012), p. 93 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.35.2.83).

Related to Pound’s Ghibellinism:

Contributions by Guy Davenport and Boris de Rachewiltz to Eva Hesse (ed.), New Approaches to Ezra Pound (London, 1969);

Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Ezra Pound, the Last Ghibelline,” Journal of Modern Literature, 16.4 (Spring, 1990), pp. 511–533 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831417);

Robert Casillo, “Ezra Pound, L. A. Waddell, and the Aryan Tradition of ‘The Cantos,’” Modern Language Studies, 15.2 (Spring, 1985), pp. 65–81 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3194433).


On August 12, Marshal [Pétain] recognized that Germany was fighting for European civilization. He also recognized that Italy was an ally of Germany in this fight. He recognised the historic need for Europe, the need that Europe exist; one can say that he even went further one calls the European cause sacred. Eastern civilization is not ours: one can admire it, but it is not our affair, in the sense that European civilisation is our business, our duty.

You can go even further; now that your reforms are so fascist in form, you can penetrate fearlessly in the fascist spirit, in the constructive spirit. Sooner or later you will recognize your debts, cultural debts, ideological debts to Italy. In the middle ages, the Italians recognized fully their debts to France. Sweet maternal language, says Dante of the western language.

One must realize that your historians who have paid any attention to the history of Italy, are not very numerous. I accuse you in a friendly fashion of not having recognized fully your intellectual debt toward Italy since the XV Century. They flourished, that is to say, you profited from them a little late, and the source did not seem clear to anyone except Voltaire. For example: “Neither a good Christian, nor a good Ciceronian”, does not come from Voltaire.

Your clarity greatly resembled the clarity of Lorenzo Valla; there is no need to defame his name in recalling Lorenzo Valla. I believe that the idea of European collaboration is not very new. Balzac had some desire for it. but one must recognize the possibility of this collaboration, and the ways which lead us more directly to the new order.

One gets into working order according to historic procedure, and according to the divisions of race as much as one can and as close to the tracks of history as possible. Corsica is now facing a frontier already traced between the two divisions of the Roman empire. And you have not yet recognized your debt to Napoleon I. Corsica is not Gallic. Corsica is not part of [Provence]. Corsica did not speak a western language.

And it is useless for me to insist. I have no property in Corsica I have never traveled to Corsica. I am speaking as a friendly observer.

Garibaldi wanted to aid France, even after your soldiers had wounded him in a fight outside Rome, when he fought for the unity of his country.

I am not speaking of shortening the frontier. I am making this observation with an open mind. Your riviera of swindlers and adventurers is not the historic France, not your glorious France. It is artificial. The new France cannot be an artificial France.

Neither French good sense, nor French good humour can believe in pretexts. The France of pretexts was a Jewish France, a usurious France. You are late, in fact you are very late in your pursuing of usurers, Jews, Swiss and Normans and all gangsters. But you must distinguish between land and mortgage, between interest and interest taxes. The new Europe will be the Europe of the Axis. A Europe which does not refuse any honest collaboration, but at the same time a Europe which does not admit any false vanity, nor the refuse of the era of mercantile industrialists, of the Mandel, the Lazard, the twelve Regents, of the offspring of Necker and of traitors, who have betrayed all the governments of France, just as they did Napoleon.

The real France is a rural, pastoral France, this is the glorious France; the France of the laborers is also the real France, but your history is full of your imports of human material of the worst kind. You have exported good material, and work, well done feminine work. But you have imported some very sad people, usurers of all races and all kinds. You can find the traces of these in the fact that various names of foreign races are almost synonymous with the usurious people.

Normand, Lombard, Germain, all aside from the Jews and aside from the especially putrid bands of Swiss usurers. You need my small treatises on monetary economy, if you are to find Jean Barral, [Francis] Delaisi and if you are not to return to the reading of Le Tour du Pin as a preface to the new era.

You are hurt, sad and enraged and it is difficult to be magnanimous, but you must be just and even scrupulous.

Rome was reborn. The Sacred Empire was reborn.

Feldman, p. 93

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