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Maurice Bardèche (1 October 1907 – 30 July 1998) was a French art critic and journalist, and one of the leading exponents of neo-fascism in post–World War II Europe. Bardèche was also the brother-in-law of the collaborationist novelist and journalist Robert Brasillach, executed after the liberation of France.

His main work include History of the Film (1935), an art critic of cinema co-written with Brasillach, his literary study of novelist Honoré de Balzac; and various political works on fascism and "revisionism", in the footsteps of his brother-in-law's "poetic fascism", Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Antonio Primo de Rivera. Viewed as "the father-figure of Holocaust denial", Bardèche introduced in his works many aspects of neo-fascist and negationist propaganda techniques and ideological structures, and his work is deemed influential in redefining the wider post-war European far-right structure at a time of identity crisis in the 1950–1960s. He was however more of a political writer than a real doctrinarian, "dreaming of fascism" and his aesthetics rather than trying to establish a real political theory.

Early life and education (1907–1932)
Born on 1 October 1907 in Dun-sur-Auron, near Bourges, in a modest family, Maurice Bardèche attended the lycée of Bourges, before leaving his home region for the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he met Thierry Maulnier and Robert Brasillach in 1926. The latter introduced him in Maurassian circles. If those groups were mostly antisemitic, Bardèche's own antisemitism was at that time more of a conventional manner than a deep conviction. In 1928, he was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure, and received his agrégation degree in 1932. He wrote at that time for the royalist newspaper Étudiant français, parented by Action Française.

Interwar (1933–1939)
In 1933, Bardèche and Brasillach moved to Vaugirard, a working-class suburb of Paris, where they stayed for three years while Bardèche taught at the Collège Sainte-Geneviève of Versailles. He married Suzanne Brasillach, Robert’s sister, in 1934. With Brasillach, he compiled the History of the Film in 1935, the first encyclopaedia of cinema ever written. Writing for the Revue française, Bardèche also became a film critic for the art magazines 1933 and L’Assaut. Supporting Francisco Franco and the nationalist cause, he wrote another book with his brother-in-law titled Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne (1939). He wrote a fiercely antisemitic contribution to Je suis partout on 15 April 1938, on the occasion of an issue dedicated to Jews.

Literary career and WWII (1939–1946)
Bardèche presented his thesis on the world of novelist René Balzac in May 1940, graduated with a doctorate in literature, and was consequently granted a temporary professorship at the Sorbonne. He eventually became Professor of French Literature at the University of Lille (1942–44), holding three Chairs. While he endorsed the deeds and actions of the French collaboration with the Nazis, Bardèche neither invested himself physically or ideologically during the war. He instead focused on his career as a literary critic, and only wrote three articles on arts (Stendhal, Balzac and films) for the antisemitic and collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout, in which Brasillach was the editor-in-chief until 1943.

On 1 September 1944, Bardèche was detained for the three articles he had written in Je suis partout. Brasillach surrendered to the authorities to allow for the release of Bardèche's wife and children, and was transferred to the Fresnes prison. Bardèche joined him on December 30, and one month later Brasillach was convicted to the capital punishment for sharing intelligence with the enemy. Bardèche also sentenced to death, he was eventually pardoned and spent one year in prison.

Bardèche would later write in April 1959 in the magazine Jeune Nation: "I loved Brasillach very much, I admired him very much; and, I do not hide it from you, it is the death of Brasillach and the épuration that has turned me into a political animal. Politics did not interest me at all until that date; from then on, I went straight into politics." While in prison in 1945, Bardèche began to re-defined fascism by cutting away police repression, antisemitism and expansionist imperialism; in an attempt to present the ideology as "a youthful celebration and rejoicing, a new anti-bourgeois life-style, and the existence of feverish activism", in the words of scholar Ian R. Barnes. Brasillach became a fascist martyr, his cult and ideas transmitted by Bardèche and fellow travelers in the post-war era.

The "revisionist" trilogy (1947–1950)
Bardèche explained that he felt like a "foreigner" in a France he saw as a "foreign country", or worse an "occupied country". In 1947, he wrote a letter to François Mauriac (Letre à François Mauriac), who had unsuccessfully tried to convince Charles de Gaulle to grant Brasillach amnesty. Bardèche dismissed the Resistance and the épuration, declaring the Vichy regime legitimate as was the Collaboration. One year later, he established the "revisionist school", denouncing the "falsifications" and "manipulations" of history allegedly committed by the Allies.

In 1948, Bardèche exposed his "revisionist" thesis in the book Nuremberg ou la Terre promise, a sequel to Lettre à François Mauriac. In the words of historian Valérie Igounet: "if, as Maurice Bardèche shows us, the history written on Occupation is false, then why the history of the Second World War could not be so too?" Bardèche wrote that the Nazi death camps were "inventions" of Allies set up to whitewash their own crimes. Jews are presented as ultimately responsible for the war, and are likewise accused of falsifying history. Dismissed as the inventors of the Holocaust, they had designed in his views an secret plan to "get revenge from Germany" and obtain international support of their nation state. Bardèche did not however refute the fact that Jews suffered or were persecuted during the war, but indeed denied the reality of their extermination. It was the first time since the end of the war that someone openly writes that he doubts the existence of the Holocaust. The book sold 25,000 copies. The work deemed an "apology of the crime of murder", Bardèche was convicted to one year in jail and fined 50,000 Fr in the spring of 1952. The book banned from the market, it circulated covertly from then on. Granted amnesty by president René Coty, Bardèche only spent a few days in jail in July 1954. As he realized the difficulty to diffuse his ideas in the post-fascist world, Bardèche eventually decided to establish his own publishing house Les Sept Couleurs, a name inspired by the title of one of Brasillach's novels.

In 1950, he released the last volume of his revisionist theory, Nuremberg II, our les Faux-Monnayeurs, reiterating what he had written two years earlier. The novelty of this book was its narrative construction around the tale of Paul Rassinier, a former deportee turned into an Holocaust denier. Bardèche concluded on his side that kapos were in reality worse than SS, and expressed his doubts about the existence of gas chambers. After his revisionist trilogy, Bardèche gained a new status in the international far-right movement. As neo-fascist activist François Duprat wrote, Bardèche "showed that the 'fascist' far-right had found his intellectual leader". Bardèche was in parallel recognized among academics as a lead expert of novelists Honoré de Balzac and Stendhal, and benefited from the fact he was the brother-in-law and spiritual inheritor of an "assassinated poet".

Political activism (1951–
To promote his neo-fascist ideas, Bardèche decided to enter politics. In December 1950, he went to Germany to give speeches, setting up an "apology of collaboration" and denouncing the "fraud of the French Resistance before a public essentially composed of former Nazis. Bardèche was also linked to the Ligue des intellectuels independents, was a patron of Réalisme, the journalist of the Union Réaliste. He co-founded the Comité National Français, an umbrella organization for various extremist groups. He stepped away when the movement embarked on a violently antisemitic course under the leadership of René Binet, founding instead the more tactical and moderate Comité de co-ordination des forces nationales françaises.

At the end of 1950, Bardèche initiated in Rome the European National Movements to co-ordinate various neo-fascist groups on the continent. At the congress is decided that another meeting would be held in Sweden the following year. Bardèche therefore attended in May 1951 the founding meeting of the European Social Movement in Malmö, Sweden, which drew 100 delegates from Europe including Oswald Mosley. Bardèche represented the French Comité National Français. On 6 Febrary 1954, he participated to a commemoration of Robert Brasillach held by Jeune Nation, along with Pierre Sidos and Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour. With the latter, he co-founded in the same year the Rassemblement National Français, and in 1952 the two of them commenced the journal Défense de l'Occident, designed as an arena for young fascists to air their views, and according to Barnes a "reborn and renamed Je suis partout". During the Algerian War, Bardèche wrote numerous articles defending French Algeria, third-world colonialism, and a concept of segregation based on ethic difference.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Bardèche made no secret of his fascism and famously wrote in the introduction to his work Qu'est-ce que le fascisme? (1961) "I am a fascist writer. Translated in Italian, it became a cult book for local fascists.

Return to literary studies (1971–1989)
Bardèche produced works of valuable literary scholarship on French novelists Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Léon Bloy, that are cited in bibliographies. In parallel, he continued to publish neo-fascist and negationist pamphlets, such as Robert Faurisson's The Problem of the "gas chambers" in 1978.

Later life and death (1990–1998)
Maurice Bardèche died on 30 July 1998. Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front party, described him as "a prophet of a European renaissance for which he had long hoped". His wife Suzanne, sister of Robert Brasillach, died in 2005.

Views
After the war, Bardèche's world view seemed entirely designed through the filters of Brasillach’s death, the épuration, and a hatred of Marxism. He led for 30 years a "personal crusade to purify fascism" and present it as a respectable ideology.

In the late 1980s, he has declared to "agree on everything" the Front National endorsed, except for their imprecise agenda on the Jewish question, a subject Bardèche considered decisive.

Neo-fascist meta-politics
In 1961, Maurice Bardèche redefined the nature of fascism in a book deemed influential in the European far-right at large, Qu'est-ce que le fascisme ? ("What is fascism?"). Bardèche argued that previous fascists had essentially made two mistakes: they focused their efforts on the methods rather than the original "idea", and they wrongly believed that fascist society could be achieved via the nation-state as opposed to the construction of Europe. According to him, fascism could survive the 20th century in a new metapolitical guise, only if its theorists succeed in building inventive methods, adapted to the changes of their times, in order to promote the core politico-cultural fascist project, rather than trying to revive doomed regimes: "The single party, the secret police, the public displays of Caesarism, even the presence of a Führer are not necessarily attributes of fascism. […] The famous fascist methods are constantly revised and will continue to be revised. More important than the mechanism is the idea which fascism has created for itself of man and freedom. […] With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn: and paradoxically it will, without doubt, be the last bastion of Freedom and the sweetness of living." Bardèche then started to develop his own interpretation of fascism, defined as a youth and heroic rebellion against the established intellectual structures, and a defense of Europe against the influence of both the capitalist American power, and the communist Soviet Union. Instead of building a doctrine by adding its constitutive elements one after the other, Bardèche removed those generally attributed to the pre-war fascist experiences, dismissing them as "attempts" at achieving the original fascist idea, rather than models to follow for the future. He recognized José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, as his main influence.

Unlike most of his far-right contemporaries though, Bardèche did not conceive the Falange as a perfect example to imitate in the late 20th century. If he drew inspiration from the dirigist socialism of the Spanish fascists, Bardèche essentially tried to develop his own theory of fascism, adapted to the post-war environment, and built on the original socialist, national and hierarchical idea of fascism. The fascist society lies to Bardèche on the idea that only a minority, "the physically saner, the morally purer ones, the most conscious of national interest", can represent best the community, adding to dissipate critics that this theoretical elite should be at the full service of the less gifted ones, in what he called a "feudal contract". Apart from this classical definitions of fascism, the particularity of Bardèche was his euro-nationalist stance, as he believed the time of the nation state had passed, and developed instead the idea of a "military and politically strong European bloc", as a third way between capitalist America and communist Russia. This united Europe would initially take the form of a confederation of nation-states, later turned into a fascist federal state. His second innovation was the rejection of the constricted single party state, the absoluteness of the Fürherprinzip, and the "providential leader" principle. On the question of minority, he stated that "they will always be a small minority of opponents in a Fascist regime", but that they should be left alone as long as they do not hinder the global project, thus dismissing the systematic persecutions of Jews by the Nazis. Bardèche's mode of fascist governance appears as plebiscitary, allowing discussions and debates as long as they do not deviate from the global fascist principles.

According to political scientist Ghislaine Desbuissions, Maurice Bardèche was more interesting in restoring a metaphysical point of view on the nature of man than to design a real doctrine or a form of state. To Bardèche, fascism was indeed an "idea", a "spirit" and a "way of living", before being a political project, whose prominent values were those of the "soldier"—braveness, loyalty, discipline and fidelity—and those of the "citizen", in fact the soldier's values applied to the civil life. Furthermore, "an egalitarian concept of humankind eroded distinct racial identities, vital differences and reduced humans in society to the status of ants". The Europe of politicians was deemed "incapable of defending itself against infiltration and subversion, and powerless against a foreign invasion because it had made a dogma of anti-racism. The growth of anti-fascism had reduced Europe to the condition of eighteenth-century Poland, where elites constantly indulged their own self-interests at the expense of the state, and exposed Europe to similar dangers, that is, attacks from both East and West."

"Revisionist School"
Bardèche aimed at creating "two schools" of equivalence between fascists and the Resistance. These methods were later expanded and developed by Rassinier and Faurisson. According to Barnes, "they used textual notes and academic referencing, concentrated their denial effort on limited targets believing that to cause doubt over a minor historical point calls the larger picture into question. The two have additionally denounced orthodox historians and created a milieu of doubt."

"We have been living for three years on a falsification of history. This falsification is clever: it leads to imaginations, then relies on the conspiracy of imaginations. [...] It had been a good fortune to discover in 1945 those concentration camps that no one had heard of until then, and which became precisely the proof we needed, the flagrante delicto in its purest form, the crime against humanity that justified everything. [...] The moral war was won. The German monstrosity was proved by these precious documents. [...] And the silence was such, the curtain was so skillfully, so abruptly revealed, that not a single voice dared to say that all this was too good to be perfectly true." To prove Germany innocent, Bardèche annihilate the specificity of the Hitlerian crime by drawing moral equivalence between the Soviet and the Nazi concentration systems. Forgetting the Nazi attempt at the systematic execution of peoples, Bardèche believed Russians were just more skillful in propaganda to dissimulate their crime. Concentrations camps are presented as a meticulous post-facto construction by Jewish "technicians", architects of the "invention of the Holocaust" to dominate the world via a plan of historical disguise. Bardèche qualified the Nazi policies about Jews as "moderate" and "reasonable", explaining his own reality of the events as a "grouping" in a "Jewish reserve" via a population transfer to the East. His other arguments are the following: "testimonies are not reliable, essentially coming from the mouth of Jews and communists", "atrocities committed in camps came from deportees", "a disorganization appeared in camps following the first German defeats", "the high mortality is due to the 'weakening' of prisoners and epidemics", "only louses were gassed in Auschwitz.

In parallel with the questioning of Nazi crimes, Bardèche drew up a real indictment against the Allies and their war propaganda, accused of the Dresden bombings and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He claimed that democratic idealism created a closed world similar to that achieved by Marxism, and that by proscribing the fascist consciousness, the Nuremberg trials had eroding individual's autonomy. According to Barnes, as the democratic world was in his views "oppressive when it condemned fascist sensibilities through persecution", Bardèche "laid down an ideological basis which was defensive in character: he visualized a struggle for survival in a new world as a process of ideological Darwinism".

Anti-Americanism
In his 1951 book L'Œuf de Christophe Colomb, he explained that the USA had "killed the wrong" pig during WWII, and that anti-fascism only turned out to be an artifice of Bolshevik domination over Europe. As only nationalists had always fought communism, they were in his views be the only ones able to build an anti-communist Europe, naturally allied with the nationalist countries of the Arab world:

"If some people think of establishing an antifascist and stateless Europe, which would be virtually remote-controlled from New York or Tel Aviv, this colonized Europe does not appeal to us at all, and we also believe that such a conception would only prepare the way for communist infiltration and war."

Literary work
According to literary scholar Ralph Schoolcraft, "it would be misleading to infer a divorce between Bardèche's right-wing propaganda and his literary criticism. [...] He favored a totalizing vision that organized the entirety of a writer's production into a sort of organic system working in the service of a specific overriding design. Critics have seen this aesthetic view of literary art as analogous to visions of a fascist utopia, with the author posited as an absolute authority arranging elements hierarchically and moving towards a complete unity at the expense of diversity and ambiguity."

Works

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