The Response to Le Pen's Response

The following is a response, written I would guess by Jean-Pierre Fabre-Bernadac, to Marine Le Pen’s response (in English here) to the “Generals’ letter” (in English here). As blatant as Le Pen’s electoral preoccupation was in her letter, this response may seem harsh. But the redactors and signatories of the initial letter are clearly eager that their project not become too closely associated in the public mind with any particular political force.

We were surprised to read Marine Le Pen’s open letter in Valeurs actuelles, a letter written following the article “‘Pour un retour de l’honneur de nos gouvernants’: 20 généraux appellent Macron à défendre le patriotisme.” It seemed important to us to make a clarification and two remarks in reference to the words of the President of the Rassemblement National.

Marine Le Pen's Response to the "Generals' Letter"

Marine Le Pen’s response to “the Generals’ letter,” Valeurs actuelles (23 April). English translation of the initial letter available here. The republication of the letter in V.A. on 21 April seems to have been largely responsible for the scandal: it had been up on Place d’armes for a week by then, but to less effect. “The Generals” were to respond to Le Pen on 24 April.

Representatives of every army and every specialism, you have signed an open letter, “For a Return to Honour for Our Leaders.”

Your initiative, rare in the military machine, testifies to the degree of disquiet that you feel faced with the worrying deterioration of our country’s situation. The observations that you present, uncompromising but fair, and the strength of the terms you use amount to a public intervention that, given your status as signatories, nobody can ignore.

The "Generals' Letter"

The “Tribune des Militaires” has got a little attention in the English-language press. The papers began to cover it a little on Monday and Tuesday; but Philippe-Emmanuel Gobry did as much as anyone else to get the word out. The following open letter was drafted by Captain Jean-Pierre Fabre-Bernadac, officer (retired) of both the Territorial Army and the Gendarmerie, and has been signed by over twenty generals and over a thousand soldiers of every rank. It was first published on a site called Place d’armes (14 April), and seemed to receive relatively little attention. Then Valeurs actuelles republished it (21 April); Marine Le Pen responded to it (23 April; I will translate and post her response presently); and then people, including the Minister for the Armed Forces, took note.

Durrell, Geopolitics, Idealizing the Beloved

1. A paragraph on Durrell from Robert Steuckers, “Pour donner des fondements philosophiques à la ‘N.D.,’” c.5, Vouloir, 146–8 (Autumn 1999), translated by me:

Lawrence Durrell, born in India, living in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, his great homeland of choice, sings the Greek and Cypriot landscapes, sketches ironical and comical rustics who are true men of flesh and blood, develops an almost Joycean vision of the real formed of superimposed strata communicating vaguely amongst one another and implying the extreme relativity of all facts of the matter: for there is simultaneously imbrication and juxtaposition, general mixture and hermetic contingency, so that each phenomenon is unique in itself, the product of a fusion or of an unparalleled originality; no schematic thought can succeed in grasping the essence of all these phenomena; no dry and prescriptive morality can succeed in taming them, submitting them, choking their influence. They escape the classifications of the schematisers. Ultimately, for Durrell, as for [D. H.] Lawrence and his friend [Henry] Miller, sexual experiences are veritable initiations into earthly pleasures.

Charles Maurras, “On the Classical Spirit” (1922)

“De l’esprit classique,” note 1 to “Trois idées politiques,” Romantisme et Révolution (Paris: Nouvelle Libraire Nationale, 1922), pp. 269–70. My translation. A short, lapidary exposition of Maurras’ conception of the classicism–romanticism dichotomy. His analysis owes much to Pierre Lasserre. Here Maurras represents the more straightforwardly political side of the classicist current within conservative-revolutionary thought, Lasserre and T. E. Hulme representing the middle term, and T. S. Eliot giving probably the most influential and most straightforwardly aesthetic formulation.

PDF: https://www.academia.edu/45025240/Charles_Maurras_On_the_Classical_Spirit_1922_

A deplorable error, due perhaps to the prejudices of the professor or the former student, led our master Taine to designate as classical the spirit that prepared the way for Revolution. On reflection, classical Antiquity played but a minute part in it. As far as classical books are concerned, the Revolutionary bibliography includes hardly more than Plato’s Republic and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives; nor would these be present had not the Father and Doctor of revolutionary ideas, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, borrowed from them more language than substance.

André Breton, Surrealism and René Guénon

A little on André Breton, Surrealism and René Guénon from Patrick Lepetit, “Surréalisme et ésotérisme,” Mélusine (23 February 2020). Breton cites Guénon favourably in “Du surréalisme en ses oeuvres vives,” Manifestes du surréalisme (Gallimard, 1979), pp. 187–8, n. 1. For an English version, see Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, transl. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (U. Michigan Press), p. 304.

After the Second World War, a whole group of discreet surrealists, among them Bernard Roger, René Alleau, Roger Van Hecke, Guy-René Doumayrou, Elie-Charles Flamand and Jean Palou belonged, under the leadership of another medical man, Dr. Hunwald, to the Thebah Lodge of the Grande Loge de France, which had briefly been the lodge of René Guénon. All of them except Jean Palou—who, passing from the Grand Loge to the Grand Orient via the Grande Loge Nationale Française, saw a glittering career, and would go on to found lodges and chapters in the Shah’s Iran, before dying prematurely—remained members until the end. Regarding René Guénon, a French esotericist who needs no introduction, it should be known that, in 1925, Breton, who admired him as did Artaud and Queneau, sent Pierre Naville to suggest that he join the surrealist movement; which the author of The Crisis of the Modern World refused, considering it the perfect expression of that counter-initiation that he condemned in all European esoteric societies. Still, in 1953, in an article entitled “René Guénon jugé par le surréalisme,” and though there is no longer any doubt as to the reactionary nature of Guénonian thought, Breton said:

Some Maxims and Missiles of Rivarol

A few “maxims and missiles,” or “pensées et paradoxes,” by the Comte de Rivarol, translated from Rivarol: avec une notice et une portrait (Paris: Mercure de France, 1906), pp. 351–9. For something similar, see “Selections from Vauvenargues” (this blog, 17 September 2020) and “Steps upon the Sand,” Azure Bell (20 October 2020).

Men are not as wicked as you say. Twenty years it took you to write a bad book; and but a moment it took them to forget it.

“You spoke a lot with some rather annoying men.” “I spoke for fear of listening.”