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Mnemosyne and Mars: Artistic and Cultural Representations of Twentieth-Century Europe at War

thinkers to blame Jews, women, socialists, immigrants and others for so-called national decline, ultimately leading them to privilege the aesthetic realm as a space of purity, regeneration and political action (which is not the same thing as the aestheticisation of politics). The ‘aesthetics of hate’ describes this shared nationalist aesthetic—one founded on the exclusion of those deemed foreign, inferior or impossible to assimilate within French society. Sanos draws much of her evidence from far-right newspapers such as the monthly Combat, the short-lived L’Insurgé and the virulent weekly Je Suis Partout, none of which has ever been subjected to the kind of systematic discourse analysis we see here. The first three chapters offer a comprehensive genealogy of interwar far-right thought and a clear sense of how far-right ideas were embedded in broader, interconnected discourses on masculinity, modernity and crisis. These chapters lay the foundation for nuanced readings of texts by Blanchot and by Céline later in the book, which are notable for their rigorous attention to context and their focus on non-literary writings. A final chapter on Je Suis Partout examines the newspaper’s call for legal measures permitting the exclusion of Jews from France. Sanos excavates the culturally specific rhetoric driving that call, which among other things allowed the French far right to cast its anti-Semitism as more ‘rational’ than the purportedly myth-driven Nazi variety. The book is at its most original and compelling when discussing the mutually constitutive relationship between antiSemitism and colonial racism in far-right thought—a relationship most vividly captured in Céline’s image of the negroid Jew. It is somewhat surprising that Sanos did not pay more attention to the context of the emerging mass media, especially given her focus on the issue of collapsing boundaries and the high level of interest that Brasillach and Rebatet maintained in film and radio. The sustained attention to the imperial context, however, does much to compensate for this gap. In short, this fine book deserves a wide readership. One hopes in particular for its swift translation into French.