"Familistre rnov" or "Rvolution moyenneuse": A Utopian Cline? Author(s): Kirk Anderson Source: The French Review, Vol.

68, No. 5 (Apr., 1995), pp. 830-836 Published by: American Association of Teachers of French Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/397854 . Accessed: 17/11/2013 22:37
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THEFRENCH Vol. 68, No. 5, April 1995 REVIEW,

Printedin U.S.A.

"Familistre renove"or "Revolution A Utopian Cdline? moyenneuse":

byKirkAnderson
IS CONCERNED, WHERE REPUTATION the temptation of a certain Utopia was

Louis-Ferdinand Cdline's downfall. Had he held fast to his conviction that the social organism was beyond cure, had he not undertaken a deliriousand inevitably political-defense of what he considered his race, then there would be no cas Celine.For although biological racism was a permanent part of his credo, only briefly did it serve as the principal motor of his writing and the basis of a prescription for a new society. That this phase of his work corresponds to the blackest pages of modern French history is unfortunately no accident: contemporary events provoked Cdline's most polemic outbursts just as the prevailing ideological climate made them publishable. Nothing less than a shift from the narration of a largely fictional past to the description of an all-too-real present allowed Cdline to put race in the foreground. Thus it is both conventional and convenient to divide his work into novels and pamphlets, usually at the expense of the latter: all the more convenient as the pamphlets, long out of print, are unavailable to the general reading public. But by considering the novels alone, one can "conveniently" whitewash the most vehemently anti-Semitic of French writers. Beyond this strategy of exclusion pure and simple, no amount of critical prestidigitation (one can speak of a "simple play of signifiers" or emphasize the "de-centering of the writing subject") has done much to make Cdline's racist tirades palatable, especially considering that, chronologically and to a large extent thematically, they coincide with the modern dystopia par excellence-Hitler's. So although I will stress differences between the social projects elaborated in Mort adcredit, a novel, and in Les Beaux Draps, a "pamphlet," my intent is not to sanction that generic distinction. It is a legitimate one, perhaps, but it must not allow an ideological choice (the simple unwillingness to confront Cdline's racism) to masquerade as an esthetic one ("anovel is Literature, a pamphlet is not").

The"Familistere renove dela racenouvelle"

One of the paradoxes of that racism is just how little of it comes to the surface in his first two novels, which are still the best known. Bardamu, the narrator-protagonist of Voyageau bout de la nuit, ridicules the notion of a "French race" defended by his friend Arthur Ganate in the second para830

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the anti-Semitism of Ferdinand'swholly graph of the book. In Mort ai crkdit, unsympathetic father is only one article of his paranoid litany. So when Courtial des Pereires, much later in the same novel, decides to found a "Familistere renove de la race nouvelle," only a knowledge of Cdline's next few works would predispose the reader to attach any particularimportance to the word "race." Courtial becomes the narrator's employer and guardian about halfway through Mort a credit.He publishes Genitron,a periodical devoted to putting the fruits of current scientific research within reach of the masses. But this high priest of better living through science is also a charlatan whose schemes lead to ruin when a mob of swindled inventors sacks the Genitron office, and debts force him to sell his house. Undaunted and unrepentant, he comes up with another scheme: he will take his wife and apprentice to the country, where they will revolutionize agriculture by treating their vegetables with controlled exposure to electromagnetic fields. "L'avenir appartient au radis!," he proclaims in a characteristic fit of enthusiasm (978). Generators in tow, the three settle into a dilapidated farmhouse near Blame-le-Petit. The village's name suggests "sickly"and "small,"and so will be the vegetables produced according to this "radiotelluric"method. But first, des Pereires will have squandered what remains of his savings drinking and gambling while his wife thinks he is taking soil samples in the area so as to determine, scientifically, where and what to plant. Out of patience, she finally starts a potato crop on her own. But the future belongs no more to potatoes than it does to radishes. It is at this point that Courtial, at the end of his tether, has his last great idea: "Les individus c'est fini! . . . Ils ne donneront plus jamais rien! . C'est aux familles, Ferdinand! qu'il convient de nous adresser!" (1008). When Courtial declares that individuals have "nothing more to give," his language is so ambiguous that we cannot tell whether it is the social philosopher speaking, or the con man. Overnight the radiotelluric farm becomes the "Familistere Renov6 de la Race Nouvelle," with the arrival of fifteen tuition-paying adolescents recruited by sending brochures to their mothers and fathers in Paris. The advertisement guarantees the children "une saine et large existence absolument en plein air! . .. loin des pourritures citadines .. . dans des conditions champetres" (1009). Courtial even promises a "rationaliste" education followed by post-secondary instruction that will be "positiviste, zootechnique et potager" (1009). What began as a scientific experiment has now become a social one, and its leader is more out of his depth than ever. Though Courtial poses as an Edison or a Fourier, he is really more of a P.T. Barnum. This commune amounts to nothing but a last-ditch attempt to put off disaster by attracting young unpaid laborers. At most, des Pereires has in mind when he says "race"a new "breed"of youth, in a very general and non-biological sense. At the least, not even he takes any of it seriously: "race,"like "nouveau" or

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"moderne," is a buzzword of the age, and he knows it. The "Familistere r6nov6 de la race nouvelle" has as little to do with family as it does with race, for des Pereires is completely incapable of playing the role of father; the thought never even crosses his mind. This commune only breaks families apart. In reality, anarchy reigns. The children's education consists of learning how to steal from nearby farms, because the entire colony is soon cold and starving. The neighbors begin to throw stones, half of the children are arrested, and the potatoes come up wormy and foul-smelling. Finally, one morning, Courtial sneaks away and shoots himself in the head. Ferdinand and the widow are taken into custody, and the examining judge gives the order, "Qu'on renvoye seance tenante toute la 'Race Nouvelle' chez elle!" (1053). At least that is how Ferdinand (who narrates) puts it, with obvious derision toward Courtial's use of the term "race,"a derision reminiscent of Bardamu's response to his racist friend Arthur. Later, during the Occupation, Cdline would single out for his most sarcastic attacks those who, like Courtial, had "race"on their tongues but not in their guts. Although race and family seem part of Courtial's plan in name only, the the word episode has an unmistakable ideological resonance. Radiotellurique: itself suggests the intersection of two almost contradictory clich6s of Utopian literature. Radioevokes the faith in progress through science inherited from Comte and the positivists; tellurique "of the earth" calls to mind the familiar "back to nature" principle and its implied condemnation of urban civilization, variously espoused by Rousseau and the Romantics, by the counterculture movements of the 1960s, and by Pol Pot. According to Courtial, his great reform comes "du fond, de la seve meme des camis a twist on Fourier's phalansteres, pagnes!" (1010). Even the word familistere the Utopian colonies whose example was supposed to transform all of society, one community at a time. In fact, Cdline did not invent the term; a disciple of Fourier had called his collective a "familistere" in the preceding century (Zeldin 81). In case we miss the connection, Ferdinand refers to the fictional commune at least once as a "phalanstere" (Mort a credit1024). So what may seem like "a parody of a fascist youth corps" also pushes its roots deep into the nineteenth century (Kaplan 117). Given that the "familistere"'s founder makes no real effort to guarantee its success, its failure alone does not prove that it was conceptually flawed. But the tone of the narration leaves little doubt. Ferdinand does not share his mentor's enthusiasm for rural life: "J'ai pas estime moi, ?a d'un tres bon Cette maniere de hameau ... Ces hiboux partout ... Au vide pr6sage!... contraire, lui des Pereires, il trouvait tout ?a parfait! ... Il se sentait tout ragaillardipar le bon air de la campagne" (996). Of course events will justify Ferdinand's doubts. The soil, the climate, and the neighboring peasants will prove equally inhospitable, just as they were to Bardamu in the first part of Voyage au bout de la nuit, and would be to Louis-Ferdinand Cdline, the protagonist of Nord, published thirty years later. He occasionally condemns

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urban life, but never goes so far as to glorify its alternative-not even in the pamphlets.1 As for Courtial des Pereires's faith in technology, young Ferdinand has little to say. But the abject failure of the radiotelluric project prefigures a skepticism on Cdline's part which will turn to hostility in Bagatelles pour un massacre and Les Beaux Draps, where anti-Semitism and antimaterialism go hand in hand. Courtial lacks that skepticism entirely; he furnishes various scientific explanations for each setback, and eventually blames his potato disaster on an excess of ferric aluminum hydrate in the soil. But with any amount of self-awareness, he would be neither comic nor tragic, and he is in fact a little of both. Scientific insights only blind him to the real cause of his failures, to wit, the weakness for drink, gambling, and idleness which his wife refers to as his "penchants"or "vices"(1046-47). "C'4taitsa nature! ... ," she laments after her husband's suicide, "I1 se vautrait plus bas qu'une truie si on le laissait une seule minute!" (1046). Her observation very precisely describes the children's behavior too. Can a happy society be built from such stuff? I have raised the question of whether we should blame the failure of the familistereon Courtial's theoretical blunders or his simple lack of will. But one can easily locate the explanation at the extradiegetic level: the project fails because, in a C61inian novel, it must. This thorough pessimism with regard to social progress, more than any formal or stylistic feature, sets the novels apart from the so-called pamphlets.

The"Revolution moyenneuse"
In hindsight, the two ideologies which polarized French politics and culture sixty years ago both look Utopian. Fascism and Communism posit the source of social evils somewhere outside human nature and promise a future without them, and in this they are equidistant from the Cdline of Voyageau boutde la nuit and Mort credit.Never mind his claims, years after the fact, that Voyagewas the first and only "communist" novel; as Trotsky, Paul Nizan, and even Sartre and Beauvoir suspected early on, this misanthrope was no comrade.2 What really distinguishes the pamphlets from the novels is the glimpse they offer of the writer in a constructive mood. "Voici le roc ouiconstruire!"he proclaims in LesBeauxDraps with no trace of irony, and this is a C61ine quite foreign to readers of his novels, where only a mountebank like Courtial would make such a pronouncement (177). Is there some logic to the fact that C61ine'smost affirmative pages appear in the same works as the racist rants? First, the prolonged tirades of Bagatellespour un massacre are punctuated by fairy-tale ballet scenarios celebrating an esthetics of lightness and grace. Then, Les Beaux Draps includes a plan, perhaps no more realistic, to rebuild French society from the ground up, a plan the author-cum-political philosopher calls his "revolution moyenneuse" or "communisme Labiche."(This is "petty bourgeois Communism,"

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with the accent on "petty.") So his most odious books are also those in which he stands for, and not only against, something. With Cdline, the racist and Utopian urges are inseparable. Indeed, his case illustrates like no other the argument that crimes against humanity begin in the Utopian imagination. The genius of Cdline's revolution, if we believe him, is that it takes people as they are-petty, jealous, and materialistic. At this point the plan is basically a rhetorical device, conceived to tell his compatriots not what can be done, but only how they are. "Voyons mesquin, voyons mediocre, nous serons suirsde pas nous tromper," he promises (137). So, a logical outcome of arguments already developed in Bagatellespour un massacre,the "Communisme Labiche"begins by imposing equality of income in one fell swoop: "Je d6crete salaire national 100 francs par jour maximum" (135). Married couples are allowed up to 150 francs a day, and families with three children no more than 200. The minimum salary is in each case one-half of the maximum. In this way, C&line(in real life Dr. Louis Destouches) excises like a tumor (his own metaphor) the pecuniary jealousies that infect French society. True equality begins with money, and the rest will follow: "Solidarite impossible sans l'6galite devant les ronds, d'abord. On s'occupera de l'esprit ensuite" (199). Nationalizing the banks, mines, railroads, insurance, industry, and large retail stores will eliminate unemployment. The same measure applies to all agriculture beyond a certain acreage. The sick will be cared for by the state, those who refuse to work will go to prison, and the poets will create cartoon films to elevate the national soul. Everyone will hold property: the modest family dwelling with a garden of 500 square meters becomes an inviolable institution. (One can only suppose this garden will be cultivated without the aid of wires and transformers). Having vilified his compatriots in the first part of the book for their materialism, Cdline then recommends giving them exactly what they want. Whether his prescriptions for new family legislation and a radical reform of primary school actually belong to the "Revolution moyenneuse" is unclear. Less quantitative, less rational, and a good deal less cynical, these last two measures appeal to uncorrupted instinct rather than material desire. Predictably, children are the subjects here. First, the entire country, after an obligatory racial clean-up, is to become like one great family (a true familistere?),held together no longer by economics but by racial pride. Adults will consider all children as their own. The author does not specify the provisions of the new "code de la famille"which will effect this important transformation in attitude. He is only a bit more explicit with regard to his education reform, which he calls "le Salut par les Beaux-Arts" (172). Technical and practical knowledge should be considered a necessary evil and not accorded more than one-half of class time. Music, dance, and painting come before grammar, geometry, and physics. Instead of suffocating every child's inner artist, schools must cultivate it. Although a thorough purge must precede the whole "Revolution moyen-

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neuse" (obviously Vichy's anti-Jewish statutes of October 1940 do not begin to suffice), the renovation of primary school is the component actually conceived to foster racial pride. Unlike Courtial des Pereires, Cdline never speaks of race lightly. Whereas laws of science transcend national and ethnic boundaries, the fine arts allow a celebration of all that is distinctive to the race: "L'Artn'est que Race et Patrie!"(177). So, although paradoxical, it is not surprising that even if Dr. Destouches's racism nominally rests upon a biological, that is, a scientific foundation, his attempt to define the essence of the French "race"can only resort to poetic language: ". c'est un mime ton, un petit sourire de gaite, tintante Ala source, toute furtive espiegle aux mousses, filante au gu."3 Readers of the pamphlets in particular recognize instantly this sort of lyric flight, organized around key words like espiegle, gai, mutin,furtif, and guilleret;Cdline describes children, in much the same mode, charmed by his own lanand ballerinas fairies, like Courtial guage by his scientific neologisms. So he implies, quite in spite of himself, that his "French race," like the fairies of his ballet scenarios, belongs to a purely subjective world, if not an imaginary one. (Was it Bardamu or Cdline who said it ten years earlier in Voyageau boutde la nuit?: "la race franlaise . . . n'existe pas!" [8]) Yet this poetic definition/demonstration appears in the midst of what is to all appearances a call to action. Like Walter Benjamin, Robert Brasillach considered Fascism a marriage of esthetics and politics. The former held that Fascism leads to an esthetization of political life; the latter defined it as the alliance of poetry and action, the union of d'Annunzio and Mussolini (Rasson 127-28). Celine's reform implies such a union but, a d'Annunzio with no Mussolini, he cannot hope in earnest for it. The Paris collaborationists indulge him only on occasion, the occupying Germans keep him at arm's length, and Vichy will ban his book. When an anonymous listener/reader interjects, "Nous sommes en pleine utopie! A la quatrieme dimension!" the writer cheerfully acknowledges his own lack of realism (LesBeaux Draps 181). But after this fleeting moment of lucidity, he immediately resumes describing the results of his revolution as if it were imminent. One might consider the "Revolution moyenneuse" a repudiation of Courtial's "Familistere renove de la race nouvelle," which valued intelligence over instinct, glorified work instead of creativity, and institutionalized delusions about agricultural life. However, I would like to suggest a different sort of contrast. The familistirebeing a purely fictional creation, its passage from theory to practice, as well as its ultimate success or failure, depend on the author who puts all this into a narrative. The "Revolution moyenneuse" belongs to a different universe, Cdline's own, where he is as powerless to enact his recommendations as he would be to control the results if his so-called revolution occurred. After the war, the closest he ever came to an apology for his race-baiting was to tell an interviewer "[J]e me suis pris pour Louis XV ou Louis XIV, c'est Avidemment une erreur profonde..... LAj'ai p~ch6 par orgueil, je l'avoue, par vanitY, par batise"

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(Romans II 939). That is the relatively charitable view that the postwar Cdline would have us adopt, and although few readers of Bagatelles pour un massacre or LesBeaux Draps would be disposed to consider simple arrogance as the author's principal defect, it remains that by crossing over from narrative fiction into the prescriptive discourse of the pamphlet, Celine lost sight of his own limitations; in short, his "pride," "vanity,"and "foolishness" had made him into a malicious version of Courtial des Pereires.
WHEATON COLLEGE

Notes
'It is the seaside, and not the country, that will represent a haven from the city's brutality: "Tout le monde, toute la ville Ala mer! ... sur les arteres de la campagne, pour se refaire du sang eparpiller dans la nature, au vent, aux embruns, toutes les hontes, les gnenreux, fientes de la ville" (Bagatellespour un massacre238). 2"[C]'est moi l'auteur du premier roman communiste qu'a jamais ete &crit ... qu'ils en &criront jamais d'autres! jamais!" D'un Chateau l'autre, in Romans II (277). Remarks by Trotsky, Nizan, and Beauvoir are cited in the annotation to Romans I (1266, 1277, 1409). 3Les Beaux Draps 127. Cf. Rasson: "[Qluand il s'agit de designer la valeur de la race et sa disposition que le registre du lyrique pourquoi il vaut la peine de la defendre, Cdline n'a A et l'irrationel" (125).

Works Cited
Cdline, Louis-Ferdinand. Bagatellespour un massacre.Paris: DenoMl,1937. . Les Beaux Draps. Paris: Nouvelles Editions Franqaises, 1941. . Mort d cridit and Voyage au bout de la nuit, in Romans I. Ed. Henri Godard. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. . Romans II. Ed. Henri Godard. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. neapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Rasson, Luc. "Le Salut par les Beaux-Arts: Celine, Nizan." Paul Nizan &crivain:actes du colloquePaul Nizan des 11 et 12 dicembre 1987. Lille: P U de Lille, 1988. Zeldin, Theodore. France 1848-1945: Politics and Anger. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1979.

andFrench Intellectual Fascism, Literature, Kaplan,Alice. Reproductions of Banality: Life.Min-

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