BarcelonaAny friend of literature who, when reading, focuses primarily on the aesthetic quality of a book, its style, or its prose, has a problem of conscience when he takes up the work of a first-class writer who openly praised, or had dealings with, a despotic regime like Italian Fascism. From Annunzio, a close friend of Mussolini, in Germany he goes on to Martin Heidegger and several others;
The French case is the most painful, perhaps because it is the closest to us geographically and linguistically, and France is a very consolidated republic. Among them, with the added threat of open anti-Semitism, we can mention the cases of Robert Brasillach—who was shot after the war—and that of Louis-Ferdinand Céline —author of some brutal pamphlets against the Jews that have finally been made available in French after Gallimard refused to include them in the Complete works of the author— or of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, who committed suicide in 1945 before being tried and sentenced.
To focus on this case, since his work has been published in Spanish and Catalan, we will remind readers of some of his statements contained in his books, from before and during the occupation of France by Hitler's troops. In the book The young European —with writings from between 1917 and 1927—, Drieu, who had fought in the World War, wrote: "I have never hated you [the Germans]. My joy has germinated in your blood [...] You are strong [...] And I have not been able to hate in you the Force, mother of all things [...] German." This can be digested in a relative way, but not so much what he wrote in the middle of the war, in 1944: "We [the collaborationists] lost, we were declared traitors; it is fair. You [the French Resistance] would be the traitors if yours had been the losing cause. But France would not have ceased to be France [... the enemy. I provided the enemy with French intelligence."
These are statements eloquent enough to make a democratic reader think they'll never read Drieu la Rochelle. There are also people who lack sympathy for Jorge Luis Borges because he accepted being decorated by Pinochet. The great JV Foix was called "the fascist dynamo" before our war. But we have to make an effort: we never excuse their fascism, but we accept that, nevertheless, all those we have cited were important and great writers. Moral judgment is one thing; aesthetic judgment is another.
