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By the end of 1888, having abandoned the hopes of ever having a Germanaudience, Nietzsche began to entertain the idea of having his work translated intoFrench. Encouraged in a few letters by the philosopher Hippolyte Taine, hecontacted Jean Bourdeau from the Journal des Débats about the project. In a fit ofenthusiasm he wrote to his friend Peter Gast about “the wonderfully nice letter” hehad received from Taine and that, finally, “the Panama Canal to France has beenopened.”1 He was, at the time, entirely unknown there. In 1877, Marie Baumgart-ner had translated and published “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” in Switzerland;the book, however, had only circulated among Swiss Wagnerians and gone largelyunnoticed in France. In the decade following his letter to Bourdeau, Nietzsche waswidely read and appropriated by French writers and thinkers to such an extent thatby 1900 they could claim him as not German but “French.” Many attributed thiszealous reception to a latent “pre-nietzscheism” that had prepared Nietzsche’s firstFrench readers for his work. They found echoes of their own ideas in the work ofthe German philosopher, like the writer Romain Rolland who claimed: “We wereall nietzscheans before ever having heard of Nietzsche.” Or André Gide, whocould write: “I was waiting for [Nietzsche] before knowing who he was.”2 Thiswas partly reinforced by Nietzsche’s own vindications of French culture and hisvirulent attacks on Germany, particularly in his later works. By contrast, his firstbook, The Birth of Tragedy, had contained a number of criticisms of France,particularly in section 23 where the young German philologist had observed “withhorror” the identity of civilization and culture in France. “On the contrary,” inGermany he had found concealed “beneath this restlessly palpitating cultural life

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (New York: Doubleday,1921) 259.

2 In “Nietzsche,” written in 1899 and reprinted in Prétextes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963) 85.

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and convulsion [. . .] a glorious, intrinsically healthy, primordial power that, to besure, stirs vigorously only at intervals in stupendous moments, and then continuesto dream of a future awakening.”3 “It is from this abyss that the German Refor-mation came forth,” and from which will stem the “rebirth of the German myth.”The section ends with the ambiguous: “Some may suppose that this [German]spirit must begin its fight with the elimination of everything Romanic. If so theymay recognize an external preparation and encouragement in the victorious for-titude and bloody glory of the last war.” In the Attempt at Self-Criticism written in1886 as a preface to the later editions of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche ascribedthe zealous rejection of the Latin element of “this questionable book” to the “timeit was written [. . .] the exciting time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71.”4 Wemay safely add to this Wagner’s influence on the young philosopher during theperiod: The composer of Tannhäuser never forgave the debacle following theperformance of his opera in Paris in 1861 and subsequently kept a permanentgrudge against France. But it is safe to assume that the Franco-Prussian War, inwhich he participated as a medical orderly, awakened an enthusiastic patriotism inNietzsche. His letters bear witness to his zeal for the German cause, a feeling thatwas of short duration and soon gave way to a serious apprehension about the riseof Prussian militarism in his country. In the first essay of Untimely Meditations,written in 1873, he showed that the German victory had not led to the triumph ofGerman culture; if anything, “in Germany there no longer exists any clear con-ception of what culture is,” whereas France “actually [possesses] a real andproductive culture” that the Germans have tried to copy with “little skill” and onwhich they continue to depend.

His decisive encounter with France did not occur until 1883. Nietzsche wasincreasingly preoccupied with the idea of decadence and found it mirrored amongFrench writers who, moreover, had already developed a complex theory of theconcept. The key figure at the time was Paul Bourget, who in his essay onBaudelaire in Essais de psychologie contemporaine formulated the “theory ofdecadence”:

By the word decadence, we designate the state of a society that produces too few individualscapable of performing the work necessary for life. A society can be viewed as an organism. Indeed,like an organism, it is divided into smaller organisms, which are themselves divided into afederation of cells. The individual is the social cell. For the total organism to function with energy,it is necessary that the smaller organisms function with energy, but a subordinated energy, and forthese smaller organisms to function with energy, it is necessary that their composite cells function

3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (NewYork, Vintage, 1967) 136.

4 I follow Kaufmann’s translation of the passage (p. 17), though the word “exciting” has a neutralvalue in German.

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with energy, but a subordinated energy. If the energy of the cells becomes independent, theorganisms that compose the total organism cease accordingly to subordinate their energy to the totalenergy, and the anarchy that would then ensue constitutes the decadence of the whole. The socialorganism is not exempt to this law. It enters into decadence when individual life becomes autono-mous under the influence of an acquired well-being and heredity. A similar law governs thedevelopment and decadence of this other organism, language. A style of decadence is where theunity of the book is disintegrated and yields to the independence of the page, and where the pageis disintegrated and yields to the independence of the sentence, and where the sentence is disinte-grated to yield to the independence of the word.5

Nietzsche discovered Bourget’s book shortly after its publication in 1883 and wasimmediately enthralled by his theory. He made a note of the passage quoted aboveand reproduced it, a few years later, almost exactly in The Case of Wagner:

For the present I merely dwell on the question of style.—What is the sign of every literarydecadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out ofthe sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life atthe expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style ofdecadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disgregation of the will, “freedom of the individual,”to use moral terms—expanded into a political theory, “equal rights for all” [. . .] The whole nolonger lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, and artifact.6

Mazzino Montinari and Jacques Le Rider have documented Nietzsche’s subse-quent study of French writers, in whose works he plunged searching for sourcesand documents on the theory of decadence: Théophile Gautier, Flaubert, theGoncourts brothers, the Comte de Gobineau, Gyp, Anatole France, Maupassant,Baudelaire, as well as Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Taine and even conservative criticssuch as Ferdinand Brunetière and Jules Lemaître.7 The encounter with Baudelairewas particularly decisive: His conception of time, history, and progress confirmedmany of Nietzsche’s own conceptions. In the words of Jacques Le Rider, “TheBaudelairean demystification of the modernist myth of progress of civilizations,his opposite vision of a humanity in the midst of a moral decadence and everfurther regressing towards animality—as Nietzsche interpreted them—prefigure‘postmodern’ consciousness in a striking manner, particularly if we interpret theBaudelairean contempt for the idea of progress as his premonition of the ‘end ofhistory’ which leaves nothing outside of the instant and eternity unified in thework of art, or heroism as Benjamin saw it.”8

5 Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Paris: Plon, 1883) 19–20.6 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 170.7 Mazzino Montinari, “Aufgabe der Nietzsche-Forschung heute: Nietzsches Auseinan-dersetzung mit

der französischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Nietzsche Studien (1988), 137–48; and Jacques LeRider, Nietzsche en France. De la fin du XIXe siècle au temps présent (Paris: PUF, 1999).

8 Le Rider, Nietzsche en France, 15.

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Ernst Bertram later wrote of the “Latin element” that invaded Nietzsche’s workin this period, and conversely, many commentators in France reclaimed the authorof The Case of Wagner as one of their own. Whichever the case, the arrival andreception of Nietzsche in France had a distinctive significance and flavor thatplaced the “French Nietzsche” on an entirely different register compared to theinterpretation of his work in other countries. The Franco-Prussian War had adecisive importance, not only in the development of Nietszche’s psychology andwork, but in the history of his reception in France. French politics and cultureduring the three decades that followed the war, and particularly the 1890s, werelargely determined by the humiliating defeat of France in that war.9 There was ageneral attempt at a national regeneration through the reform of institutions andparticularly the educational establishments. The philosophy departments in theuniversity were rearranged along secular lines and adopted neo-Kantianism and itsstress on duty and responsibility as their official creed.10 Meanwhile, an anti-German spirit invaded the cultural and political fields that were to culminate in theBoulangist period, with its campaign of revanche and the demand for the resto-ration of Alsace and Lorraine. A nationalist wave in literature demanded to purgeGermanic and “nordic” elements and return to purely Gallic, Latin, and Mediter-ranean literary traditions. While the university with its official neo-Kantianismremained mostly indifferent to the arrival of Nietzsche’s work west of the Rhine,the literary establishment largely appropriated Nietzsche as a “good German” whohad rejected his own country in favor of France. In his monograph, Nietzsche’stranslator Henri Albert wrote of him: “After 1883, Nietzsche wrote for France.His connections to Germany were almost entirely severed.”11 Alarmed at findingforeign influences gaining ground among French youth, the philosopher Jules deGaultier, author of Le Bovarysme, recommended reading the work of the author ofThus spoke Zarathustra instead, because “we have to recognize that Nietzsche’sthought is of a purely French inspiration and brings us back to ourselves.”12

Another reason for this enthusiastic appropriation may be the unusual circum-stances of the diffusion of Nietzsche’s work in France. As I mentioned above,Marie Baumgartner’s translation of Wagner in Bayreuth in 1877 had gone unno-ticed in France. The first article on his work was written by Jean Bourdeau in 1888in Le Journal des Débats. This was the same Bourdeau to whom he had beenreferred by Taine. In the same letter quoted above, Nietzsche, perhaps carried

9 See Claude Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pensée française (1870–1914) (Paris: PUF, 1959).10 Douglas Smith, Transvaluations: Nietzsche in France, 1872–1972 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) 38.11 Henri Albert, Les Célébrités d’aujourd’hui. Frédéric Nietzsche (Paris: Bibliothèque Internationale

d’Édition, 1903) 14.12 Jules de Gaultier, “Nietzsche et la pensée française,” Mercure de France 8 (1904): 585; and Ernst

Bertram, Nietzsche. Essai de mythologie (Paris: Félin, 1990).

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away by a premature exhilaration caused by Taine’s letter, wrote of “MonsieurBourdeau, one of the leading and most influential figures of France [. . .] [who]ought to undertake to make me known there.”13 Far from appreciating Nietzsche’swork, however, Bourdeau’s article presented him as the author of a “perversephilosophy” that advocates the rule of brutal force and cynical cruelty. Next camearticles by Eugène de Roberty in the Revue Internationale de Sociologie (1890),Teodor de Wyzrewa in La Revue Bleue (1891), and Jean de Néthy in La RevueBlanche (1892), after which a plethora of books, articles, and pamphlets began toappear on the work of the German philosopher. Nietzsche’s own work, however,other than a few excerpts in journals, had to wait until 1892 before making its firstappearance in France, with the publication of The Case of Wagner which wastranslated by Daniel Halévy and Robert Dreyfus. Besides the dubious A Traversl’oeuvre de Nietzsche, extraits de tous ses ouvrages translated by P. Lauterbach in1893, which presented a haphazard selection of quotations and aphorisms, it wasnot before 1898 that Henri Albert began the systematic translation of Nietzsche’scomplete works, a project that was completed 10 years later in 1908. As can beseen, before the publication and translation of his works in France, a large numberof critical studies had appeared that gave the public a foretaste of Nietzsche’sthought and paved the way for an enthusiastic reception. We can thus assume thatthe impression of acquaintance that the first readers of Nietzsche experienced inFrance was partly due to this work of preparation and familiarization carried outby critics and writers.

It is difficult to identify with certainty any common lines of approach among hisfirst French readers. In his recent study, Christopher Forth maintains that thepublications by the group of young writers in the journal Le Banquet were themost responsible for launching the Nietzsche vogue among “avant-garde” circlesin the 1890s. The short-lived journal was the work of young graduates from thelycée Condorcet who were trying to free themselves from the symbolist influenceof their school years (Mallarmé was their English professor). Forth’s claim aboutits influence, however, is quite doubtful, for the journal had an extremely limitedimpact at the time of its publication, which is generally exaggerated in retrospectdue to the participation of the young Marcel Proust and Daniel Halévy, who wereunknown at the time.14 There is virtually no echo to the articles written by Halévy,Ferdinand Gregh, or Robert Dreyfus on Nietzsche in the other journals of theperiod. In her seminal study on the French Nietzsche, Geneviève Bianquis wasmore correct to see his first admirers as the conservatives who had grouped

13 Bertram, Nietzsche.14 Christopher E. Forth, Zarathustra in Paris. The Nietzsche Vogue in France, 1891–1918 (DeKalb:

Northern Illinois University Press, 2001) 23. Forth examines the work of the journal from theretrospective point of view of the Dreyfus Affair.

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together against the symbolist movement, the then dominant school in literature andart.15 They were of a generally conservative persuasion, though they came fromdifferent factions and were only united by their preoccupation with the problem ofdecadence. It should be recalled that the terms “symbolist” and “decadent” wereused interchangeably at the time, particularly by the opponents of the movement,and connoted the same writers and tendencies in literature and art.16 Moreover, theFrench Wagnerians, who were allied to the symbolists, received Nietzsche’s workwith much consternation: They had barely begun propagating the work of themaster in the pages of the Revue Wagnérienne to a largely unreceptive public inwhom memories of the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War were still current, whenNietzsche’s critique ofWagner made its appearance in France. They responded withgreat hostility and one can even discern a united front attacking Nietzsche in thepages of la Revue des Deux Mondes. Edouard Schuré, Teodor de Wyzewa, AlfredFouillé and others chided Nietzsche, denounced him as an anarchist destroyer ofvalues, a nihilist who was driven to a deserved madness, and a resentful disciple ofWagner who had broken with him due to his inability to accept the superiority andsuccess of the prophet of Bayreuth. On the other hand and paradoxically, a greatnumber of symbolist writers found inspiration in Nietzsche’s work, and thesymbolist journal La Revue Blanche and the more moderate Mercure de France(whose founder Alfred Vallette was one of the first supporters of the symbolistmovement) were the chief organs that helped translate and disseminate the work ofthe author of Beyond Good and Evil.

The critics of symbolism found a useful weapon in Nietzsche’s critique ofdecadence, his approbation of French Classicism, and his opposition of Latin andGerman principles at the expense of the latter. They formed many different groupsand only shared different kinds of nationalism and an intense preoccupation withthe problem of decadence. For the Action Française, Nietzsche offered the pos-sibility of a modern critique of modernity and democracy, a revolutionary critiqueof revolution which could free the party from its dusty image associated with thetraditional traditionalism of the Right. For Pierre Lasserre, one of the movement’sphilosophers, Nietzsche represented a “conservative who speaks like a revolution-ary.”17 He was particularly struck by the contrast between the conservative, tradi-tional and classical content of Nietzsche’s work and the violent, passionate

15 Geneviève Bianquis, Nietzsche en France. L’Influence de Nietzsche sur la pensée française (Paris:Félix Alcan, 1929) 12.

16 Most historians of the movement accept Guy Michaud’s claim in his authoritative study (Messagepoétique du symbolisme [Paris: Nizet, 1966] 314) that the first period of activity, from 1884 to thelater 80s was called “décadence;” “symbolism” would then refer to the second period, especiallyafter 1886, during which the movement developed a theoretical doctrine for the “instinctive” poetryof the earlier stage.

17 Pierre Lasserre, La Morale de Nietzsche (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902) 11.

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form it took. The original title of his book had been Nietzsche against Anarchism,which was one of Lasserre’s obsessions in the 1890s during the heyday of theanarchist movement.18 He believed anarchism and decadence to be one and the samething and saw the remedy in the cult of authority and patriotism, for which he foundinspiration in Nietzsche’s work. Jules de Gaultier—another philosopher associatedwith the Royalist party—though more loosely—held a position not far fromLasserre’s; his analysis of Nietzsche was, however, a good deal more subtle. Heidentified two poles in Nietzsche’s work, “nihilism and authority,” both possibleinterpretations that depend on the reader.19 From Nietzsche, de Gaultier retained adisdain for Christianity, humanitarianism, revolution, and socialism; he advocateda hierarchic society that demanded a heroic asceticism from the individual whowould have no other reward for his formidable efforts (besides his membership inthe elite) than struggle-for-struggle’s sake. His was a pessimistic vision of a societyin a state of perpetual civil war, where the victors can never come to rest and haveto live in continuous struggle for supremacy against each other.20

Hugues Rebell has often been mistakenly seen in the company of the twoprevious philosophers. His interest in Nietzsche was from the outset literary ratherthan political.21 Throughout the early 90s, he was a fellow traveler of Maurras andother writers who later founded the Action Française, at which point he quietlydistanced himself from them. Though his interpretation of Nietzsche was not farfrom de Gaultier’s, its application to politics dismayed him and pushed him todisavow his earlier admiration of the German philosopher. In his interview with LeCardonnel and Vellay in 1905 he retracted his earlier enthusiasm: “Nietzsche wasonly an incidental support for me [. . .] I never took him for a teacher.”22 In anarticle he wrote on Nietzsche in 1899, at the moment of the creation of ActionFrançaise and in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair, he protested against the uses of

18 The essays comprising the book were written in the late 90s and we can assume that after the declineof the anarchist movement Lasserre decided to change the title.

19 In his interview with Georges Le Cardonnel and Charles Vellay’s La Littérature Contemporaine:Opinions des Écrivains de ce Temps (Paris: Mercure de France, 1905) 250.

20 Besides several articles on Nietzsche, de Gaultier wrote the following books on the subject: De Kantà Nietzsche (Paris: Mercure de France, 1900), Nietzsche et la réforme philosophique (Paris:Mercure de France, 1904), and, in the collection “Les Maîtres de la pensée anti-chrétienne,”Nietzsche (Paris: Éditions du Siècle, 1926).

21 I have shown the differences that separated Rebell from the writers of the Action Française in anupcoming article in Romanic Review, “Hugues Rebell and Charles Maurras before l’ActionFrançaise.”

22 Le Cardonnel and Vellay, La Littérature Contemporaine, 109. In his “Nietzsche and the ActionFrançaise” (Journal of the History of Ideas 11:2 [1950]: 196), Reino Virtanen takes this quote as aproof of the later disavowal of Nietzsche by the adherents of the Action Française, who were eagerto dissociate themselves and their party from any kind of German influence. This is inaccurate. By1905, Rebell had broken all ties with Maurras and his party.

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“Nietzscheism” by the party of Maurras: “In themselves, egoism and conceit areneither good nor bad. They depend on those who use them. Imagine the egoismand conceit of certain imbeciles; and you can see how Nietzscheism, appropriatedby a political party, becomes ridiculous.”23

The origins of the history of the Action Française’s engagement with Nietzschecan be traced to the formative period of the young Maurras around 1890, theperiod where he was still a literary critic and primarily concerned with aestheticand literary questions. The young critic was then formulating the doctrine ofl’école romane, an ephemeral literary movement that was launched in 1891 by thepoet Jean Moréas. The success of symbolism had, by then, provoked a reaction inthe provinces and particularly in the south that had as its primary points ofreference the concepts of “Latin genius,” the Mediterranean sun and culture andrejection of all things “Nordic.” Against the cosmopolitanism of Paris and sym-bolism, they dreamt of a littérature du terroir and a return to the joyful culture ofthe south, as opposed to the “sad” and “foggy” literature that had invaded thecountry from the north. They accused symbolism of being of foreign origin (mostits adherents were indeed Belgians) and its major sources—Wagner, Tolstoy,Ibsen, Schopenhauer—from “Nordic” and Germanic traditions that were artifi-cially transplanted on French soil. Maurras, who was from Provence, was at thistime trying to ally himself with Mistral and his school of félibrige, but the authorof Mireille gently rebuffed his attempts at giving his literary movement overtpolitical and patriotic tones. He then turned to Jean Moréas and the formulation ofthe doctrine of the new school, l’école romane. Its manifesto claimed a return toa purely Gallic and Greco-Latin canon of Letters and the rejection of foreigninfluences. The opposition of the concepts of “Latin” and “Germanic” had by1890 become a staple idea among the conservative groups on the Right. It wasNietzsche, ironically, who was the first in the nineteenth century to forcefullyarticulate the opposition of “Latin” and “Nordic” civilizations in Europe.24 Formany years Maurras found over and over again that he had to account for the“contributions for his traditionalism from a source outside tradition,” as ReinoVirtanen put it, and explain the role that the “Barbarian” Nietzsche had played inthe development of his thought and the doctrine of the Action Française.25 And thiswas not limited to the idea of the opposition of northern and southern cultures. Thereaders of one of his earliest works, Les Serviteurs, were struck by the Nietzscheanaspects of the story. “The most Maurrassian” of his early works according to Ivan

23 Hugues Rebell, “Le Nietzschisme,” Le Culte des idoles (Paris: Jacques Bernard, 1929) 90.24 Madame de Staël had suggested the distinction in her De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports

avec les institutions sociales (1800) and De l’Allemagne (1810), but her idea found no echoes untilNietzsche.

25 Virtanen, “Nietzsche,” 206.

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Barko, Les Serviteurs was written in 1891 and published in the Revue Bleue thefollowing April.26 It tells the story of the Athenian Criteon, who, once descendedto the kingdom of the dead, finds that his wisdom and power are of no conse-quence without his servants. In turn, his slaves, still in Athens, find life impossiblewithout their master. Some years later they in turn join him and inform him thatAthens has fallen to the Barbarians, its temples demolished, its poets dead. A“Hebrew Christ” has arrived and has ennobled the slaves and promised to set themon the throne of the strong. He has awakened a desire which, “instead of exaltingBeauty, praises ugly, deformed and humiliated things [. . .] Fools, weaklings andinvalids are joining its ranks.”27 The new doctrine has spread rapidly and is gainingnew adherents every day. The master and his slaves, however, can take comfort inthe fact that they have once again found one another and applaud the union thatgives their existence meaning and coherence.

When, in 1895, he inserted Les Serviteurs in his book Le Chemin de paradis,Maurras felt it necessary to defend himself against any taint of “Germanic” or“Barbarian” thought. In a note added to the end of the volume he recounted beingquestioned about the obvious Nietzschean elements in his story. “Could it bepossible that you don’t know Nietzsche?” he reported being asked.28 “But that wasthe first time I ever heard that name [. . .] And now, they tell me, that the samethesis found in my work is professed by a strange writer of Slavic race in Germanywho is called Nietzsche. I have barely skimmed what I’ve seen of his work. Iremember, however, to notice in The Case of Wagner published in 1888 but onlytranslated here in 1893, curious affinities between his philosophy of art and theaesthetic theories that I myself had put forth in 1891 at the time of the foundationof the école romane.”29

In 1903, reviewing Pierre Lasserre’s La Morale de Nietzsche, who had under-lined Nietzsche’s importance for the Royalist cause and the Action Française,Maurras once again recalled the circumstances of the publication of Les Serviteursand concluded: “Without sympathizing with Nietzsche, we could see that thisBarbarian was all right [. . .] This half-Slavic German would be welcome in thesacred fort of the ancient French School, but if they want to bring him here as adoctor, it’s best for his advocates to remember exactly what is ours and what ishis.”30 The controversy was not to end there but was to haunt Maurras for a longtime yet. On the occasion of the appearance of her seminal study of Nietzsche in

26 Ivan Barko, L’Ésthétique littéraire de Charles Maurras (Paris/Geneva: Droz, 1961) 66.27 Charles Maurras, Le Chemin de Paradis (Paris: Flammarion, n.d. [1895]) 193.28 Ibid.29 Charles Maurras, Quand les Français ne s’aimaient pas (Versailles: Bibliothèque des Oeuvres

Politiques, 1928) 213.30 Ibid: 114.

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France in 1928, Geneviève Bianquis once again brought attention to the history ofthe Action Française in its infancy and the debt they owed to Nietzsche. Theeditors of the journal of the party retorted once again with charges of barbarianismand the debate on the “Germanic” roots of the Action Française was launchedagain.

The thinkers of the Right were not the only readers of Nietzsche in France. Inhis Les Maîtres de la pensée contemporaine, Jean Bourdeau described two lec-tures by Jean Jaurès in Geneva on Nietzsche, where the father of socialism inFrance had purportedly declared that the overman of Nietzsche is none other thanthe proletariat. The lectures have not survived, but were recounted by manypresent at the event. In France as in Germany, a number of socialist writersattempted to integrate Nietzsche’s philosophy into their program.31 One of the firsttranslators of Nietzsche, M. A. Desrousseaux, who translated Human, All tooHuman in 1899, was one of the leaders of the Socialist Party. Eugène de Roberty,another socialist, interpreted Nietzsche’s seemingly antidemocratic and antirevo-lutionary statements in the manner of Ibsen’s enemy of the people: His harshnessis rather an excess of pity, his vicious attacks nothing other than the revolutionarylonging to erase actual society in favor of the one to come. They are the necessaryvituperations against the old society that needs to be swept aside by the revolu-tionary force of the future overmen.

Charles Andler was the most brilliant exegete of Nietzsche among socialists; hislifelong work on Nietzsche culminated in the publication of his magisterial sixvolume work, later reprinted as Nietzsche, sa vie et sa pensée by Gallimard in1958.32 Andler began his studies at the École Normale Supérieure in philosophy,but switched to German when he realized that he could not follow his interests inthe neo-Kantian atmosphere of the philosophy departments of the Third Republic.His first interest in Nietzsche dates from 1889, and he was teaching a course onNietzsche at the Sorbonne as early as 1903. He was a Dreyfusard, a socialist anda member of Jean Allemane’s Socialist Workers’ Revolutionary Party. One of hisstudents, Albert Lévy, published a book on Max Stirner and Nietzsche in 1904,and Geneviève Bianquis, the author of Nietzsche en France, was another of hisstudents and disciples. In his early articles he maintained that Nietzsche’s work is

31 Although the German efforts seem to have been more extensive; see R. Hinton Thomas, Nietzschein German Politics and Society, 1890–1918 (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1983), especially 7–47.

32 The original volumes, published by Bossard, were as follows: Les Précurseurs de Nietzsche (1920),La Jeunesse de Nietzsche (jusqu’à la rupture avec Bayreuth) (1921), Le Pessimisme esthétique deNietzsche, sa philosophie à l’époque wagnérienne (1921), Nietzsche et le transformisme intellec-tualiste. La Philosophie de sa période française (1922), La Maturié de Nietzsche (jusqu’à sa mort)(1928), and La Dernière philosophie de Nietzsche (le renouvellement de toutes les valeurs) (1931).Andler published several essays on Nietzsche before the War, one of which is translated in thisvolume.

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perfectly congruent with democratic and revolutionary politics. From his earliestwritings on the subject, Andler insisted on the systematic coherence ofNietzsche’s work—a perspective that Nietzscheans have subsequently found adrawback that weakens his analysis—and sought to harmonize this system withsocialism. His early essays, prior to the publication of his book, already lay thefoundations of his later argument. But as Douglas Smith has shown, he was forcedin his later work to acknowledge that Nietzsche’s use of metaphor disturbs theideas expressed through metonymic means, and hence Nietzsche’s writing is“effectively written in two languages at once.”33 Far from being disturbed by theadmission of the contradiction in Nietzsche’s work, it “actually allows [him] acrucial move [. . .] in favour of a politically progressive retrieval of Nietzsche fromNationalist propaganda. If Nietzsche’s thought is essentially contradictory, it maybe possible to suggest that Nietzsche’s attitude to democracy is not in fact one ofunequivocal hostility but one of qualified approval.”34 In the last analysis, Andler’sstress of Nietzsche’s critique of actual society and his vision of the society to comeare firmer grounds on which he could reconcile Nietzsche’s thought with social-ism. And the third volume of his study still remains the major reference onNietzsche’s study of French authors and the influence they exerted on histhought.35

Mention must also be made of Élie Faure’s lyrical appropriation of Nietzschefor the socialist cause. For Faure, civilization is not a moral but a “lyrical phe-nomenon.” Class war and revolution are the heroic material of the human dramathat allow the liberation of energies and are so many occasions for the affirmationof the individual. Class war and revolutions are desirable, for they shatter reifiedforms and liberate new forces; they awaken a sense of heroism and a taste forself-sacrifice in the individual. The spilled blood that is their price is of noconsequence compared to the liberation of human energies that they can bringabout. The masters of Nietzsche are thus transformed into revolutionary heroesdrawn from the ranks of the workers and the people; their heroism and sacrificebecome ends in themselves, and revolution and class war their means. Faure is notso much concerned with the shape of the societies that they may produce, for it isthe acts of heroism that are the goals of this new humanity of overmen.36

Finally, George Palante attempted to integrate Nietzsche’s conception of theindividual with a revolutionary individualism that brings him close to the anar-

33 Smith, Transvaluations, 66.34 Ibid.35 On this subject, see also W. D. Williams, Nietzsche and the French: A Study of the Influence of

Nietzsche’s French Reading on His Thought and Writing (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952).36 Besides his treatment on Nietzsche in Les Constructeurs (Paris: Crès, 1904), Faure pursued the

ideas in his subsequent books: La Conquête (1917), La Roue (1919), and Napoléon (1921).

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chists.37 In his book Précis de sociologie published in 1901, Palante attempted toconstruct a sociology based on the Nietzschean critique of morals. In his articles“Two types of Immoralism” and “Social Dilettantism and the Philosophy of theOverman” he demonstrated the role played by morality in subordinating theindividual to social dogmas and saw in the philosophy of the overman a justifi-cation and theory of a revolutionary individualism.

It would be impossible to include all the French writers of the period who founda source of inspiration in Nietzsche’s work and attempted to appropriate andintegrate it in their own thought, or those who sought to refute and challenge hiswork. With the approach of World War I and the intensification of hostilitiesbetween France and Germany, Nietzsche’s commentators in France tended toforget their earlier assimilation of the author of Untimely Meditations into theGallic tradition and began instead to stress his imperialistic aspects and his savagecalls to war and conquest. The period between the two Wars witnessed a renewalof the interest in Nietzsche, what Vincent Descombes has called the “secondFrench moment of Nietzsche,” in the works of Georges Bataille, Roger Cailloisand the writers of the Collège de Sociologie.38 A third moment was the period of1960s and the work of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. TheEnglish speaking public has long been familiar with the first two through the manytranslations, commentaries, and histories that are available in English. Morerecently, studies have begun to appear on the first “moment.”39 This volumepresents a selection of the works of the writers of that period with the hope ofcompleting this picture.

Baruch College, City University of New York

37 Michel Onfray’s Georges Palante. Essai sur un nietzschéen de gauche (Paris: La Folle Avoine,1989) presents him as an anarchist, but his relation to the anarchists was unclear.

38 Vincent Descombes, “Le Moment français de Nietzsche,” Pourquoi nous ne sommes pasnietzschéens, ed. Alain Boyer et al. (Paris: Grasset, 1991) 101.

39 Namely, in the works of Christopher Forth and Douglas Smith mentioned above.

ALI NEMATOLLAHY

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