Promotional Information

A study of the development of fascist aesthetics in France, highlighting the influence of the theories of Georges Sorel and his followers

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity 17
Chapter 2. The Jew as Anti-Artist: Georges Sorel and the Aesthetics of the Anti-Enlightenment 63
Chapter 3. La Cite Francaise: Georges Valois, Le Corbusier, and Fascist Theories of Urbanism 111
Chapter 4. Machine Primitives: Philippe Lamour and the Fascist Cult of Youth 155
Chapter 5. Classical Violence: Thierry Maulnier and the Legacy of the Cercle Proudhon 203
Conclusion 247
Notes 255
Bibliography 323
Index 345

About the Author

Mark Antliff is Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde; a coauthor of Cubism and Culture; and a coeditor of A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914 and Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy.

Reviews

"If there is an avant-garde within the historiography of modern European culture, then Mark Antliff is one of its luminaries. This remarkable book contributes in a scholarly and exciting way to the history of ideas, art, visual culture, and politics, while enriching comparative studies in both modernism and generic fascism. The complex and ideologically sophisticated fascist milieu of inter-war France has finally been released from the prison of intellectual history: French fascism's distinctive personality is revealed as a nexus of visionary artistic, social, and cultural schemes to regenerate the nation's productive dynamism in a way that would heal the degeneracy of the age and place the nation at the cutting edge of modernity."--Roger Griffin, author of Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler "This outstanding study adds an important dimension to our understanding of French fascism. Mark Antliff deftly identifies a variety of ways in which fascists in France and elsewhere activated myths of the past to propel challenging yet seductive visions of achievable futures. This approach is not only crucial to a better grasp of the real causes of fascism's success in the early twentieth century; it also implies a similar alertness to the threats--and the appeal--posed by the fundamentalisms that seek power in apparently democratic societies today."--Terry Smith, editor of In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity