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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