LITMIR.BIZ

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does refer to the Dreyfusards as “heroes” in his essay Notre Jeunesse (“Our Youth”). But his supreme example of heroism in that essay is the intellectual and anarchist Bernard-Lazare, who was an advocate not of Dreyfusard masculinist violence but of a universal justice that encompassed Dreyfus and the oppressed around the world, and who, seeing the world clearly despite his spectacles,²⁰ ill health, and considerable avoirdupois, devoted himself to exposing the lies that brought about Dreyfus’s conviction in hopes of a future and quite expressly judicial vindication. Péguy praises him for his “gentleness” (douceur), as well as his “goodness” and “even-temperedness.”²¹

      Furthermore, the “martial” virtue in question for Péguy in Notre Jeunesse is courage—but courage for him was not, as it was for fascists, supremely expressed in a nihilistic and racist confrontation with death that finds its paradoxically debased Aufhebung in collectivist, industrial violence and domination. For Péguy, loving self-sacrifice, persistent devotion to carefully thought-out and established truths in the face of rejection by power, and voluntary poverty compose the true courage of the Dreyfusards (as Péguy argues throughout the essay). Moreover, Péguy’s preeminent example of heroism throughout his life’s work is not a man but a woman—Jeanne d’Arc.

      It is certainly true that the idealization of a chaste woman who ends her life as a sacrificial victim was part of the masculine-obsessive’s palette in early twentieth century culture, and it is equally evident that these tableaus could perceptibly constrict the lives of living women. Yet within Péguy’s rendering in both prose and poetry, Jeanne is in no way a passive, abnegating, willowy damsel in the manner of fin-de-siècle representations of “delicate” or “neurasthenic” women; nor is she an emasculating virago in the manner of some women in the work of male artistic contemporaries like Gustav Klimt or Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, nor an exalted romantic or erotic ideal (illusory or not) in the manner of Henry James’s Madame de Vionnet, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Sara de Maupers, or the variously idealized or “fallen” women that appear in the paintings of Paul Gauguin or Félicien Rops.

      In his extensive writings about Jeanne, Péguy describes her body’s actions but never describes her physical appearance, nor does he dwell on her physical suffering or her death—in his most famous poem about Jeanne, her death is entirely absent, as are any scenes of battle or violence. It is a challenge to find in his Jeanne a modern male fixation on the sacrificial death of a beautiful young woman, because her death is mostly set aside, and her appearance goes entirely unmentioned.

      Instead, Péguy’s Jeanne is a hero at once acutely intelligent and contemplative, and intensely ambivalent about war. She reluctantly leads men into battle as a way to create justice and peace even as she agonizes over the mistreatment of soldiers—including enemy soldiers. Her most characteristic gesture is not violence but her ongoing anguish at the thought that anyone should be in hell²²—a concern that was also Péguy’s. She is eager to help others and repeatedly argues with men to do so; she is willing to give her food to children in need (though she displays no desire to starve herself and is generally presented as healthy and readily, assertively disputatious with men and women alike). The actual poems do not offer themselves to now-standard interpretations exposing dehumanizing and instrumental accounts of women’s lives.

      In short, to sustain Péguy’s appearance in Forth’s masculinist, proto-fascist discourse, we are really left with the evidence that a teenaged Péguy persuaded his headmaster to allow for broader student participation in soccer games. While this claim offers a neatly symmetrical (if ghastly) parallel to the Victorian cliché about the Battle of Waterloo and the playing fields of Eton, this “evidence” does not give the author any grounds to draw historical connections between the soccer fields of Péguy’s lycée and fascist blitzkriegs, let alone the moral abysses of Sobibor and Auschwitz.

      It could be said that Forth’s purpose is to write not about Péguy, but about a masculinist discourse in which Péguy participates. Yet the argument for his inclusion in this discourse is not established by anything resembling careful, patient reading. Vladimir Nabokov’s sound if rakishly daunting injunction for interpretation that holds well beyond specifically literary reading—that it should passionately attend to details²³—is often brazenly flouted by historians seeking explanations for the cultural trajectory of late modern European history. It often binds together a wide range of sources in sheaves of very short and selective quotations in order to establish a series of “anxieties,” not in order to prepare the way for careful reading of particular sources (a perfectly legitimate task in the absence of infinite time), but as a substitute for a careful, patient reading of any sources.

      In this way, the tendency of a certain strain of modern history writing to argue or imply that historical selves fail to self—that is, they are set within a matrix of linguistic and cultural practices that determines their position, or at least the historical efficacy and relevance of that position—is all too often sustained by a prior commitment by the historian not to inquire about individual differences in the first place.

      This type of argument—of which Forth’s book is only one example—has become a kind of standard model for a great deal of writing about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. In it, it is claimed, or assumed, that the public, civic culture of the West in general, and Europe in particular, labored to prolong with only minor or at most gradual adjustments the presumed (as we understand, a selectively muted and amplified) culture of a premodern, traditional society with origins in the early modern or even the medieval period and its classical inheritance.

      In this account, this culture artificially prolonged and intensified often rigid distinctions of gender and caste, a sense of beauty and morals and metaphysics and honor, accompanied by other aspirations, prejudices, and hierarchies from its past. It dimly perceived but refused to accept that this public, civic culture had been stretched beyond the technological, social, economic, material, and cultural imperatives that gave it its suasive power. This disjunction produced “crises” and “anxieties” about decadence and decline that led the defenders of this composite “traditional” culture to something like a mannerist caricature of the already edited, selectively reduced, or amplified castes, hierarchies, and aesthetic and moral codes it sought to uphold, and sometimes to their pseudo-scientific rationalization in medicine, psychiatry, and social science.

      Working within this model, for some time many cultural and intellectual historians of Europe have shown how, at the beginning of late modernity (say, from the closing decades of the nineteenth century to 1914) a new, larval order began to fashion itself in aesthetics, politics, new notions of gender, sexuality, and social change. Not all of this is rendered in bright hues: still following Michel Foucault, the period’s more imperial forays into science and social science are often the object of criticism, explicit or implicit, on the grounds that they limited their universality by, for example, importing traditionally European, masculinist assumptions into their notion of universality, or imposing a coercive, homogenizing immanent eschaton (as in Marxism) upon the apparently spontaneous unfolding of becoming. But above all, historians trace the pathologies that sought to freely combine a steroidal enhancement of sundry limiting atavisms with the distinctive technological, ideological, and (often pseudo-) scientific possibilities of modern culture. It was this pathological response to an emerging late or postmodernity that brought Europe—or at the least, left Europe vulnerable—to the hecatombs of 1914–1945.

      Like all standard models, this model encompasses a variety of emphases and qualifications, and thus, if its advocates wish, it can deny its own existence. Something similar happened in economics at the turn of our own century, where “efficient market,” fresh-water economists for many years claimed they were “just doing serious work” in different corners of economics, with various intricate models that allowed for gratifyingly piquant scholarly exchanges, until the global financial crisis disclosed a remarkable unanimity of conviction—in the face of some decidedly jarring developments—about the putatively “serious” or “sober” principles of economics.

      The writing of history is rather less open to immediate contradiction by events. Yet while certainly not without the capacity to adapt and integrate disparate sensibilities and interests at various levels of abstraction,

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