Transformation of European society from the perspective of radical intellectuals in the period of fin-de-siecle (1890-1914)

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Transformation of European society from the perspective of radical intellectuals in the period of fin-de-siecle (1890-1914)

M.V. Chernyshev

Annotation

Fin-de-siecle is a French definition for “end of the age”, though also implying an era of changes in different spheres of social life within European society between 1890 and 1914. At the turn of the 20^th century we can observe the phenomenon of formation of the new type of modernist political ideology “beyond Left and Right” which tended to adopt some sort of cultural revolt against decadent bourgeois society and associate it with new forms of political actions. Famous writers of the Fin-de-siecle Gabriele D'Annunzio and Maurice Barres embodied in their writings this tendency. This essay argues that despite their claimed break with the tradition of the 19^th century and search for individual liberation, the representatives of the new intellectual tradition put into practice some of the ideas that later were associated with European totalitarian ideologies of fascism and national socialism. This study attempts to describe development of views of the two writers on the national societies taking into consideration a certain number of dynamic tensions within the period of European fin-de-siecle: first of all, between the tendencies of Decadence which were evident in the last quarter of the 19^th century and the desire for spiritual renewal, between the cult of personal perfection and the collective myth of political nationalism.

Keywords: modernity, national socialism, decadence, Fin-de-siecle, conservatism, fascism, Western civilization, political radicalism.

Аннотация

М.В. Чернышев. Трансформация европейского общества во взглядах радикальных интеллектуалов на рубеже веков (1890-1914 гг.)

Fin-de-siecle («финдесьекль») - французский термин, обозначающий конец века и используемый также для характеристики качественных изменений в разных областях общественной жизни европейского общества между 1890 и 1914 годами. На пороге 20-го века можно было наблюдать феномен формирования модернистской политической идеологии нового типа, которая отлична от «идеологии правых и левых», провозглашает необходимость культурной революции против декадентского буржуазного общества и ассоциирует данный протест с новыми формами политического воздействия. Известные писатели периода рубежа веков Габриэле Д'Аннунцио и Морис Баррес воплотили эту тенденцию в своих произведениях. В данной статье утверждается, что, несмотря на заявленную попытку разрыва с идеалами «старой традиции» 19 века и поиска путей внутреннего личностного освобождения, представители новой интеллектуальной традиции представили часть идей, которые в дальнейшем ассоциировались с европейскими тоталитарными идеологиями фашизма и нацизма. В данном исследовании предпринимается попытка описать эволюцию взглядов двух авторов на национальные общества, принимая во внимание определенное количество противоречий в рамках периода рубежа веков, прежде всего между тенденциями декаданса, ярко проявленными в европейской культуре последней четверти 19 века, и стремлением к индивидуальному духовному обновлению, между заявленным культом личностного совершенства и коллективным мифом политического национализма. Ключевые слова: модернизм, национал-социализм, декаданс, финдесьекль, консерватизм, фашизм, западная цивилизация, политический радикализм.

Introduction

«On the one hand, given the total collapse offaith of his age, an egotist can find no other expression for his creative energies than to cultivate his own inner universe, and this he proceeds to do, arrogantly and in defiance of all other men. The cult of the self is simply an extreme and systematic development of the spirit of the times. On the other hand, the egotist is trying to achieve for himself a therapy and pedagogy which will lead him back to the world, and for this he must find a basis of conviction and certainty on which he can ground his action». Shenton, G. The Fictions of the Self: The Early Works of Maurice Barres. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1979, p. 34.

Jurgen Habermas in his essay Modernity versus Postmodernity (1981) noted that the category of beauty and the domain of beautiful objects were first constituted in the period of European Renaissance but only around the middle of the 19^th century an aesthetic conception of art emerged, which encouraged the artist to produce his work according to the distinct consciousness of «art for art's sake» [1. P. 4]. The phenomenon of European decadence in the end of the 19^th century in its wide sense means corrosive decline of individual and social certainty due to a perceived erosion of obligatory moral traditions. Although the impact of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) on this process has remained debatable for more than a century, the peak period of the appearance of religious doubt as central theme in novels and plays can be observed during the 1880s and 1890s. Sometimes it had a fully materialistic explanation. In an article written in 1938, American psychologist Edvin Wilson referred to an adolescent memory of his friend-European who witnessed the last decades of the 19^th century. He expressed an idea that prosperity was not just around the corner and that a real depression could be recalled beginning in the 1890s and even in the 1870s: in those days, as they got worse and worse, people had to come looking for work, begging for work, just for their keep, and that by chance this depression might relieve the serious problem of domestic servants [2. P. 508]. Walter Laqueur (1996) points out that «the 1890s had not been a good decade» [3. P. 12] referring to the panic of 1893 and the ensuing economic depression in Western Europe and particularly in the USA. In France and Italy, the economic crisis was confronted with major corruption scandals. Jewish German writer Max Nordau (18491923) observed that only a small minority in Europe found pleasure in the new tendencies. In his opinion, this minority consisted chiefly of rich, educated people, or of fanatics: «The former give the ton to all the snobs, the fools and the blockheads; the latter make an impression upon the weak and dependent, and intimidate the nervous» [4. P. 21].

Characterizing the period of 1880s Hardy (1840-1928) witnessed about the chronic melancholy that was taking hold of the «civilized races» with the decline of belief in a beneficent power [5. P. 40]. Another important tendency in the development of European literature at that time was quite evident. Vittorio Pica (18621930), a critic who published both in Italy and France, in an essay of 1886 spoke of the challenges that contemporary authors faced because of what he describes as the rapid democratization of their readership. He observed an «anguished period of transition» as a «democratic literature» clashed with an «aristocratic literature». According to his witnesses, the two prevailing trends were likely to fall into «opposite, but equally pernicious extremes, since the one tends to become more and more commercial, losing the noble characteristics of art, while the second, desiring to be overly distinctive and trying to avoid any contact with whatsoever with the crowd, refines and complicates its aesthetics to the point of rendering itself abstruse and even incomprehensible» [6. P. 9]. Secular suspicions in previous traditions and the tensions between believers and skeptics at that time gave demand on new ideas of individual dignity opposed to the advancement of materialist philosophy and literature associated with political socialism. Godwin Peak, the literature hero of George Gissing's novel Born in Exile (1892) noted «a strong desire for anti-dogmatic books written by men of mark» [7. P. 150]. In situation of the permanent crisis of religious work ethic applied to the sphere of human morality, cultural decadence implied a prevalence of self-indulgence and sometimes pretension over effort and talent.

In circumstances of its separation from traditional religious values, a majority of modernist artists were interested in different aspects of extraordinary life and, above all, in spheres of technology and politics, opposed to decadence and sloth of expressions. Since the middle of the 19^th century the western society seemed to be prosperous but with severe social and economic inequality, to such a degree that the upper class became either complacent or greedy, while the lower classes had become apathetic. Poor political leadership associated with scandals was appraised as a cause and a symptom of decadence, as the lifestyle of a decadent individual was usually considered to be incompatible with responsibility. Walter Laqueur refers to its emergence by 1905/6 when «the art mood had changed». He connected it with cultural demands of the new young generation which «got bored with the prevailing boredom» [8. P. 5].

The internal problems of Italy in the period of transformismo related to political and socio-economic development after the reunification in 1861 were not resolved, and they frustrated national intellectuals. Italian writer and social critic Alfredo Oriani (1852-1909) remarked that the country was made by «heroic imposition of the few» after which «the heroes became soldiers, the martyrs changed into clerks» [9. P. 478]. Positivism, equated with a crude and leveling democracy by Oriani and like-minded intellectuals, turned the «better minds», those conscious of their superiority, into a sort of exile. National heroes Garibaldi and Mazzini seemed forgotten. The national revolution had failed while the Italians were the conquered, not the conquerors. The «people» were absent from the struggle for the nation. For Oriani, the result was a separation of Parliament from the country, the decline of parties along with all other political ideals. He predicted an idealistic revolt, championed by a new elite. The new revolution of better minds was never defined, but remained a vague expression of intellectual frustration, a feeling of disquietude [10. P. 53]. Longing for a spiritual liberation, for the return to fashion of ideals that the Postrisorgimento seemed to have lost, soon emerged in the writings of the new generation of Italian writers, associated later with formation of prefascist ideology. Despite the statement by philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) that fascism was a parenthesis in Italian history, he was readily disposed to implicate fin-de-siecle decadence in the rise of fascism. Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) argued in 1924 that fascism's deepest origins lay in the anti-positivist intellectual climate of the fifteen years prior to the World War I.

Adamson (1990) points out that modernism may be understood as a central project of the intellectual generation entering the European cultural scene between 1900 and 1914, that of a «cultural regeneration» through the secular religious quest for «new values» [11. P. 360]. The Nationalists and idealists represented the more conservative and authoritarian side of fascism, the syndicalists and modernists its more «revolutionary» and aggressive side. Within the last group - the modernists - one can distinguish futurists, followers of Gabriele D'Annunzio, and former associates of La Voce journal. Their representatives include the generations born in the 1860s as well as the 1880s. One of the most engrossing controversies about the former has centered on Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938), a poet, novelist, playwright, World War I hero, and political activist. In surveying the Italian scene, contemporary scholars regularly place him in the context of the «revolutionary right» or the «conservative revolution» from which European fascism and nazism sprang. For in-stance, Stem (1961) draws the analogy between D'Annuncio and the German «conservative revolution” [12. P. 21-22].

The near kin to D'Anninzio in the late 19^th century European impulse to renew the nation in French setting is Maurice Barres (1862-1923). His distinguished personality and ideological stances have raised debates among his contemporaries and descendants. French intellectuals of the 20^th century such as Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Robert Brasillach, who openly positioned themselves as fascists, looked on Barres as their major precursor. Several scholars note that it was Barres who invented the term National Socialism. Chaitin (2008) argues that his brand of nationalism included the leader principle «along with a heavy dose of mob violence, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism» [13. P. 79]. Whereas Sternhell (1973) and Soucy (1972) note that Barres' forsaking rationalist humanism made him the bridge between 19^th century traditional conservatism and 20^th century fascism, Carroll (1995) presents the opposite view, stating that his persistence on following the philosophy of the autonomous subject accounts for his fall into totalitarianism [14]. Curtis (1959) states that «from the one perspective it is his betrayal of the tradition of the Enlightenment, from the other his fidelity to that heritage, that precipitates him into the abyss of protofascism» [15. P. 58]. Moreover, for Barres himself, action was not the fullest form of realization but was desirable in order to heighten his own sensibility. Politics and Parliament became favorable settings in which he made it possible to enrich himself.

Having come under the impression of similarities between Maurice Barres and Gabriele D'Annunzio in terms of their common outlook and style of writing in particular, it seems important to focus on common traits in evolution of their views on European fin-de-siecle and their personal activity in that period.

Esthetics is superior to tradition

Both writers started their professional career quite early. In 1891, at the age of 29, Barres was for Anatole France already «a youthful meitre» [16, P. 54]. The influence of this «prince of youth» on his younger contemporaries was remarkably strong. Despite the fact that his writing style soon included images of hunting, slaughter, and torture, it still left generally positive impression on such people as Frangois Mauriac, Louis Aragon, Leon Blum, and Thomas Mann.

Being a young journalist who quickly acquired a reputation of rebel and dandy, Barres started his career of writer in 1888 by publishing Under the Eye of the Barbarians while he was in Italy, the first volume of a trilogy Le Cult du moi (The Cult of the Self). Shenton (1979) states that following the Symbolist attacks on the naturalist vision of the world and anti-naturalist declarations of several writers in Jules Huret's Survey on literary evolution (1881), Barres took the novel in an inward direction, placing the problems of the individual consciousness at the center of attention [17. P. 22-23]. Thus, his Le Cult du moi was to a certain extent similar to the vision of Huysmans and France presented in his books. At the same time the young author was attuned to the literary public taste of the late 1880s. The novel begins as a thorough-going rejection of everything that the world has to offer a young man. At the beginning of Under the Eye of the Barbarians Barres employs the popular figure of Narcissus to represent the young man's self-consciousness. He gives the Narcissus myth a meaning quite different from the one it has traditionally. For him, Narcissism is a positive impulse rather than a moral tragedy when passion, the single-minded projection of desire onto one object becomes a possible means of achieving the unity of the Self.

Dividing the world into moi (myself) and the barbarians, Barres expressed in his early work the themes of exoticism searching for the life path conflicting with his teachers and surrounding. The experience, partly related to his private life, shows the disarray faced by a sensitive boy as he grows up in one of provincial towns and the ambition of the aspiring young writer and politician in the capital. On the one hand it is an expression of the pleasure of the senses, but besides that - frustration, intellectual yearning, and a studious desire for a higher form of spiritual fulfillment to be put among the spiritual elite. The hero is constantly measuring himself against others even when it goes against intellectual and moral tradition of the century. He is searching for the ideal master, the spiritual father who will provide a solution to the «problem of life». The desire to attach himself as a disciple to the authority of another leads to a violent rejection of those whose teaching disappoints his expectations. After the initial strong impression from meeting a «great man», the hero's accusation is leveled at the character that resembles popular French conservative philosopher Ernest Renan whose critical thought had undermined religious faith without proposing anything to replace it. Shenton (1979) explains this paradox stating that the hero found the messages of Renan too marked by the intellectual atmosphere of the Second Empire and politically he exposed a kind of liberal conservatism which must have seemed rather moderate to Barres without any basis for action in the world [18. P. 29-31]. The

Self becomes the only reality and the search for personal gratification, preferably of a «higher» nature, is the only reasonable rule of life in the face of universal relativism. Towards the end of the book there goes a clear message that the main hero is seeking not only liberation, but a faith to which he may apply his life in a spirit of submission trying to obtain salvation in a formula for action because he understood that his impotence comes from his spiritual isolation. Shenton argues that Barres's project is to harness the energy of an initial movement of revolt in an effort to discover authentic points of contact between the Self and the world.

Son of a wealthy landowner and mayor of the town Pescara (Abruzzo), Gabriele D'Annunzio entered the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1881 and shortly after that published several poems, collected under the general title of San Pantaleone (1886). They were full of pulsating youth and the promise of power, some descriptive of the sea and some of the Abruzzi landscape. His conception of style seemed to be new, and young D'Annunzio chose to express in his further novels the most subtle vibrations of his voluptuous life. According to one of the literary critics who lived at the end of the 19^th century, the author raised a lot of inspiration among his contemporaries:

He is the most brilliant figure that has arisen in the last years of the dying century, and if he is a promise of what the next is to bring forth the outlook is as ominous as it is fascinating; his chief characteristics are brilliancy and corruption. In all the range of Italian literature there is perhaps no such brilliant prose. It flashes like gems in the sunlight; it reminds one of the glories of summer sunsets, of strains of delicious music. Perhaps no writer of equal talent is so corrupt. A distinguished French critic has said of him that he is a pagan of the days of Nero, and he might have added, worthy of the imperial court, a fit leader of the revels in the Golden House. D'Annunzio is an aristocrat to the finger-tips, and his is the elegant and polished corruption of the declining days of Greece and Rome [19. P. 146-147].

Borgese (1937) gave a critical evaluation of D'Annunzio's works based on the main issues which concerned the poet:

Acknowledged or despised, he was behind all the spiritual movements and modes from the close of the 19^th century to the years around 1920. His Italian, which he ever spoke with a heavy, lush provincial cadence, was written with an overgrowth of similes, often baroque, on a constant musical strain, not seldom cheap [...] Occasionally, but seldom, he had tried, since his early youth, to endow his imaginary violence with a collective or patriotic meaning. Imaginary violence mixed with patriotic meaning were overshadowed by «matchless human joy» with which no Mazzini, no prophet of the Risorgimento could like [20. P. 92, 96].

Even though D'Annunzio began his literary career as a poet importing French decadent fashion into the Rome of the 1880s, he gained an international reputation as a novelist. From 1889, when his highly acclaimed The Pleasure appeared, to The Fire, in 1900, he wrote six novels. Each of them is centered on a life of a young man who is in search of spiritual meaning, mostly by means of sensual pleasure. Initially, in The Pleasure the hero is isolated, self-absorbed, and weak-willed, more romantically involved but otherwise similar to his counterpart in Joris-Karl Huysmans's A Rebours (1884). The main idea which was mentioned in all of the author's novels at this time was the need for dreams shared equally by the so-called intellectual class. The democratic culture, confessed by the rest of people was diagnosed by the author as hopeless: «The world is the representation of the sensibilities and the thoughts of a few superior people, who over the course of time have created it and then enlarged and beautified it. It is a magnificent gift lavished upon the many by the few, by free men upon slaves: by those who think and feel upon those who must work» [21. P. 19].

D'Annunzio's primal experience of the clash between aristocratic and democratic writing came in the disruptive world of post-Unification journalism. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s there are signs that a less frigid attitude toward the wider public was also developing in D'Annunzio. In a newspaper article of 1892, The Need of the Dream while speaking with disdain about the popular audience, which seemed to have an appetite for the cheap editions of mediocre literature, he stresses out that the need for dreams is shared by both intellectuals and by the «lower classes». In the mid-1890s D'Annunzio begins to imagine the creator of art as the shaper of the whole community's consciousness. In Maia (1903) D'Annunzio uses this aesthetics to expound his will to dominate his community with splendid words and powerful imagination. While in the period of fin-de-siecle symbolism could be associated with a refined art in the (Mallarme, Apolliner), D'Annunzio here transforms its hermetic aesthetics into an instrument for making the poet a great communicator. In his novel The Fire (1900), the protagonist Effrena expresses distaste for an elegant public which prefers applause on the poet's meetings to a revitalised Italy.

In 1892, D'Annunzio discovered German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche through extracts in the Parisian journal Revue blanche. In his article Jean de Nkthy presented excerpts from The Genealogy of Morals. It was followed by extracts from Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Problem of Socrates, The Twilight of the Idols, and Nietzsche contra Wagner (in 1897). His aesthetic began to shift toward the celebration of action, violence, and the myth of the superior man who thinks and acts «beyond good and evil». Both the novels and the occasional articles written by D'Annunzio in this period show that Nietzsche's ideas of the superman and will-to-power were absorbed by the Italian intellectual both emotionally and as «doc- trines» [22. P. 369-370]. To the four qualities (will, lust, instinct, pride) which D'Annunzio himself declares as the key elements of his personality, he added Nietzsche's will to power which gradually drove him on to the political stage of Italy and brought him fame in Europe. His first «Nietzschean» novel, The Virgins of the Rocks, is written in a more disciplined and virile style, although his conception of a superman, as portrayed in Claudio Cantelmo, is cerebral and childishly pretentious [23. P. 60-61]. On the other hand, the will to power adopted by D'Annunzio, was bound to come to in conflict with his incurable will to pleasure, for the sake of which he had already removed (long before his acquaintance with Nietzsche) all distinction between good and evil. In his well-known play, La Gioconda (1899), the main character is an aesthetic superman, in whom the creative ecstasy and sensuality merge in one disposition to which he sacrifices his wife. In the Ship (1908), D'Annunzio combines extreme lust with extreme political will to power, both equally loud and cruel. The note of cruelty, so pronounced already in his Stories of Pescara (1902), leads at times to undisguised sadism - a feature which has been variously commented upon by most of D'Annunzio's critics.

The association of Nietzsche with Barres was quite common during the 1890s due to the main issue of extreme individualism presented by French writer. However, the influence of German philosopher on his views and ideas should not be exaggerated. While Barres had indeed written his Culte du moi trilogy during the early 1890s at the height of the popularity of Nietzsche in Europe, by 1898 he was writing about collective rather than individual regeneration in his novel of national energy. Another important point worth commenting is his attitude to German «musical philosopher» Richard Wagner. In the late 1880s, when Barres had become an influential writer his thinking of owed much to Baudelaire and Mallarme, who found Wagner inspiring, but also to the pessimistic strain in Schopenhauer's philosophy, which he attempted to counter through a cult of energy [24. P. 321]. He valued the composer for his exaltation of those human beings who take their laws from no one but themselves. However, later he linked Wagner's music with German politics. Thus, appearing in Barres's early publications as the model for a renewed French energy Wagner evolved into a scapegoat with the development of Barres's nationalist program. Although initially D'Annunzio also flirted with the Wagnerian notion of the artist as the creator of a new secular-religious faith, his future stance to him remained rather indifferent and aloof [25. P. 317].

In the late 1880s and early 1890s both Barres and D'Annunzio do not limit themselves to complaining how beauty suffers at the hands of the mob and official institutions. Instead, they set out to appeal to a new mass constituency, seeking to harmonize individual energy with public request for new ideas and slogans. By the end of the century the attitude of both writers toward Modernity had undergone an abrupt reversal, although in a different way. If Barres started formulating the possibility of renewal from an individual to the entire nation and his esthetics went through the period of change, D'Annunzio found a new excitement in modernist technology. Even a brief analysis of his notebooks from 1899 indicates the shift: «All those people who lament and sigh that the centers of Beauty and Dreams have been invaded by the tramcar and the railroad are important» [26. P. 184]. The street car and the train, standard emblems of the Industrial Age's conquest of city and countryside, have suddenly lost their distastefulness for D'Annunzio and significantly enlarged the number of options for his esthetic choice. At that time this intellectual position led him and other modernist intellectuals to perception of growing distance between the artistic avant-garde and the public at large but also stimulated their artistic search in favor of making publicity for a new sort of activity.

Beyond the Left and the Right

Several important political events happened in Italy and France from the late 1880s which stimulated Barres and D'Annunzio to search for new forms of personal engagement in national affairs. Boulangist movement in the late 1880s sparked the popular imagination in France. Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger (1837-1891), nicknamed General Revanche, was a politician who seemed to promise energetic leadership, a dynamic vision of national destiny, and a clean sweep of the political board in politically unstable France [27. P. 35]. According to Curtis (1959), Boulangism was an incoherent movement linking those dissident elements discontented for various reasons with the existing regime: anti-republican, antidemocrats and anti-Semites, who wished for constitutional revision, opposed to the anticlerical bias of the political regime controlled by liberals and moderate socialists, and those whose primary emotion was the memory of the defeat by Germany. Initially the protege of the Radicals and of the anticlericals, Boulanger drifted to the Right and entered into negotiations with monarchists, the Church, and with foreign autocrats, one of whom was Russian tsar Alexander the Third. The Boulangist movement was «a faith for the troops, a means for the lieutenants, an end for the leader, but for no one a doctrine» [28. P. 27]. France, to be strong, had to have an authoritarian government, not a parliamentary one, and one National party, instead of a nation broken into conflicting factions. For the first time, French Republicans were allied with monarchists against other Republicans. However, after obtaining a sweeping success in the elections of January 27^th 1889, General Boulanger failed in the attempt of state overturn.

For Barres Boulange was particularly attractive because he allied the prestige of the army to an ability to arise the feelings of the masses with a regeneration of national life. Curtis stated that «constantly looking for the strong man, he found him in the man on the black horse» [29. P. 25]. Soon Barres managed to adapt his theory of du moi into politics. He first entered the Chamber in 1889 under a platform of "Nationalism, Protectionism, and Socialism” on the Boulangist ticket. He got a deputy seat on the extreme left of the Chamber. A year later he wrote, «Boulangism is a Socialist program, a general movement against the omnipotence of capital, in favor of national reconciliation and love of the disinherited». Without giving a chance to follow the way similar to «German collectivism» or «Russian terrorism» French socialism would produce both the vigorous development of national strength and the necessary effort to decentralize and federalize the government [30. P. 49-50]. In The Garden of Berenice (1891), only two years later, he expressed his gratitude to the workers of Nancy for providing him with his first election victory [31. P. 255].

In 1893 and 1896, Barres ran parliamentary campaigns as a socialist on a worker's platform being defeated both times. From this experience he emerged with the conclusion that nothing was any importance, especially in political affairs, but success [32. P. 166]. Moreover, he had a strong disgust to the doctrinaire wing of French socialism since he saw it to be irreconcilable with national interests. In his 1898 electoral program Barres had elaborated his political program proposing homes for the old retired workers, the recognition of workers' syndicates and their independence, and contending that socialism was a word in which France had put its hope [33. P. 49]. In 1902, he spoke in highly enthusiastic terms of the necessity for economic transformation and a change of leadership for the French society [34. P. 253]. Four years later Barres was reelected to the Chamber of Deputies on a conservative ballot.

Summarizing his parliamentary experience, Barres never had strong affiliation with any party or real electoral group, and continually changed his electoral nomenclature. In the Chamber he was deliberately ineffective: he spoke only 42 times often amid a volley of interruptions. Later in 1913 he wrote, «I am not a party man in the Chamber. Rather, I collaborate with all those who serve the national interest, all who unify and who eliminate those who conspire against the genius of the nation» [35. P. 235].

As scholar interest in Gabriele D'Annunzio revived in the post World War II period, his relationship to the left became a source of hot controversy. The historian Renzo De Felice (1978) called for a major revision of opinion on the poet's political legacy. He argued that D'Annunzio should not be regarded as a main precursor of fascism but rather as an element of «subversive leftism, the irregular left» [36. P. 2]. Becker (1994) notes that critics have been unable to take seriously the avowed “socialist” interests of Canto novo (1882), a collection of verse written when D'Annunzio was nineteen. Soon before that he promised in a letter to a friend that his collection of verse would contain «bursts of ferocious socialism». In other correspondence, the young writer expressed his hatred against «all those fat bourgeois» and demonstrated his compassion for the “poor exhausted workers» and the «despised beggars». Becker points out that unlike contemporaries who merely lament the allegedly anti-esthetic nature of socialism, D'Annunzio in the late 1890s does not limit himself to bemoaning the ugliness he detects in the burgeoning socialist movement. Instead, he tries to attract the recently organized socialist constituency toward certain beauties of his devising [37. P. 75-76].

In 1897, searching to adapt his artistic expression to seek political influence, D'Annunzio states: «As the need for popular consent leads me to the simplification and amplification of my art, so that same need drives me to enter a field of civil activity». In the same speech he proposed to remake working class con-

sciousness by attuning it to ideals of beauty [38. P.80]. He was elected to Parliament as a deputy of the conservative right. However, in his speeches D'Annunzio soon started giving inappropriate political speeches. First, he stresses out that politics based on the subordination of worker to «padrone» (the boss) will be replaced by a quasi-religious and esthetic relationship of mutual understanding between poet and masses. At the same time, he attacks «orthodox” socialist doctrine for «dehumanization of the multitude» and lack of nobility in its behavior. Therefore, it opened a way to a new semi-Nietzschean synthesis in a statement he made in 1897: «I am beyond the right and the left, as I am beyond good and evil... I am a man of life and not of formulas» [39. P. 193].

Three years later, in 1900, there was an episode taken place in the Chamber of Deputies when D'Annunzio spontaneously moved from the conservatives to the extreme left. He won a cordial welcome from his new socialist colleagues. The socialist party newspaper Avanti! also offered an approving review of this speaking campaign, expressing its satisfaction that D'Annunzio had dropped his identity as the esthete despicable of action and practical life and become «the singer of Garibaldi» [40. P. 48]. In 1901, the poet chose to deliver an inaugural reading at the pro-socialist People's University in Milan. Italian nationalists who initially were inspired by the fact that an aristocratic poet could succeed in politics changed their positive attitude to D'Annunzio. Their leader Enrico Corradini concluded from these episodes that esthetic politics of D'Annunzio provided neither an adequate line of defense against the danger of socialism nor a good alternative to seemingly outdated liberal ideology. A historian and a biographer of D'Annunzio, Paolo Alatri (1992), has described this change as «one of those extemporized and confused initiatives that mark the political life of a man devoid of any real and proper political dimension» [41. P. 49]. Though such a union of leftist ideas and concern with aristocratic ideals is hardly normative for the period of highly ideological debates in the two countries, the significance of this jointure should not seem elusive. D'Annunzio did not make any real contribution to the Italian society as a parliamentarian, nor did he become a distinguished antiestablishment politician. However, his rhetoric and ambitions to appeal directly to masses opened the way to adapt his talent to the new political reality of modernity.

In a letter of October 18, 1901, Barres wrote that he was retiring from the sterile struggle and did not want to be either a candidate or deputy, for political nationalism was finished. What alone interested him was a certain national point of view to introduce into public affairs. He returned to his «true territory, which is to help maintain the standard of French thought» [42. P. 254]. Although Barres did not give up doing parliamentary work completely and later he entered the parliament again as a deputy, he succeeded in projecting his influence on the French society beyond preparing legislation bills.

Notorious national-socialists

According to Curtis (1959), Barres was the first to give the word nationalism its present political significance, in an article on July 4, 1892, and became identified with the idea during the Boulanger and Dreyfus Affairs [43. P. 253]. In 1894, he defends French Socialism (as opposed to other brands) because of its moral superiority [44. P. 94]. Becker (1994) remarks that although the term «socialist nationalism» was used by Barres in 1898, but D'Annunzio actually had elaborated the same set of ideas in his 1897 election speech [45. P. 49].

The speech given by D'Annunzio for pragmatic reasons to boost his popularity among political elites and masses in 1897 was based on the idea to establish a new order for Italians by transforming their consciousness. He announces a third politics, neither capitalist nor socialist. Firstly, he emphasizes the idea of a «racial community» which can unite the people, and attach them to their native place. Secondly, analyzing a current political crisis, D'Annunzio promises that Italy will return to East Africa (renunciation of the Italian protectorate over Abyssinia led to the fall of Crispi cabinet a year earlier). Both these ideas call for a new identity for the working class which should be recruited to campaigns of national solidarity and new foreign policy. Simultaneously, the speech justifies a rightist elitism in the form of hierarchy. It is the superior human, the poet, who provides guidance to his nationals. Thus, the new type of politics ought to be created to transform explosive energies of socialist-inspired masses into nationalist and imperialist programs.

Appealing to the socialists in a newspaper article of 1900, D'Annunzio argues that the energies of class struggle should be refocused on a national struggle for existence and, therefore, to a national revival: «I repeat that I am only drawing my notions from the essential traits of my race, to wit, a vigorous instinct for self-preservation and a vigorous instinct for domination» [46. P. 121].

Similar to D'Annunzio, nationalism of Barres is less a political theory than a private cult held up for the emulation and admiration of his disciples. It can be explained in the notion of an unconscious principle of growth:

The death of the Ideal in the 19^th century entailed the end of the upward striving of the Romantics. Consciousness was turned downwards, towards the Unconscious, towards Instinct. Emotion, cut off from its roots in a higher moral sphere turns to this new substratum to ensure its unity in time. The Unconscious, of which renewed desire is the permanent expression, assures the unity in succession which is his essential doctrine. From it emerges the whole complex of notions such as evolutionary becoming, growth, the garden, and ultimately nationalism and the myth of Lorrain [47. P. 135].

Over the late 1880s-early 1890s opposition to the young Third Republic was most blatant on the right and syndicalist left side of political spectrum, but also among the young generation. At that time Barres was idolized by them because of the spirit of arrogant disrespect and independence which spread through his writings. Le Cult du moi condemns the moral and philosophical bankruptcy of the regime and the emptiness of all the formulas for success which are available to the young generation. Under the Eye of the Barbarians was closely connected to the agitation around the figure of General Boulanger whose because he contrasted to «two thousand mediocre men» who had usurped the levers of power under the cover of parliamentary democracy [48. P. 27]. Seen from this perspective, Under the Eye of the Barbarians can be interpreted as a hope that Boulanger would be able to renovate the national spirit and provide inspiration for the spiritually disgusted young generation. Charles Maurras acknowledged the role of Barres in the attempt to save French culture. «If impressionism, naturalism, and all other forms of degenerate romanticism have been defeated in French intellectual life between 1885 and 1895, it is to Barres and to Barres alone that the chief honor of the triumph is due», he wrote» [49. P. 45].

In 1897, Barres began his new trilogy The Novel of National Energy which included the following novels The Uprooted (1897), The Appeal to the Soldier (1900), and Their Faces (1902). According to the author's new viewpoint, a rejection of the formative forces, and thus of identity, can only lead to disaster for both the individual and the collectivity. Chaitin argues that in his novels, much more than in his political pamphlets, Barres allows the full range and complexity of the tendencies that make up nationalist identity, and, above all, the contradictions within them. In the Uprooted he uses the expression «members of humanity» in the sense of Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), which echoes that of De Maistre and Tocqueville, to criticize the revolution Jacobin tradition with its «paper constructs», first of all «abstract men, empty simulacra, philosophical marionettes» since they are people who have lost their selves, their ties to their ancestors, to the land where they were born and raised, and to their cultures. The latter are victims of synthetic theory and artificial law, imposed upon them by physical or mental violence. Here Barres imposes criticism on Kantian universalism, with its categorical imperative and rationalist abstraction.

From his new perspective Barres argues that tradition allowed the extension and development of individuality and also admitted the individual into something larger than himself: «There is at the bottom of ourselves a constant neurotic point ... it does not simply provoke the sensations of an ephemeral individual but also stirs the whole race» [50. P. 107]. Individuals are not mastering of the thoughts born in them. Thoughts are reactions movements of the organism in a given milieu. They were not born of intelligence, but were ways of reacting that were common to all those in the same milieu. Though Barres speaks of the Social Contract as «imbecilic because it is a dialectical construction about an abstract man», at times he approached Rousseauistic ideas, in talking of «being a slave of my earthly and family formation», and of “the slavery I have slowly learned to love» [51. P. 108-109]. modernist ideology decadence annunzio barres

In Scenes and doctrines of nationalism (1902) Barres states that tradition became a means of protection against the brutal pressures of life, a means of individual exaltation, and also a basis for organizing French energy in order to accomplish French destiny. It was necessary for France to recapture, protect, increase the energy inherited from its ancestors. He made one of his characters, Saint-Phlin, explain that in cemeteries he saw the tree of life and its roots stir up the soul. Each act which «denies our earth and our dead means a lie which sterilizes us» [52. P. 113]. An individual is a moment in the development of his race, an instant in a long culture, «one movement in a thousand of a force which preceded me and will survive me. France would save itself only by a fever; our whole national history says it [...] here is my country and my race, and saw my true post, the end of my efforts, my predestination». Barres adds that Lorraine was not essentially «our countryside, works of art, customs, resources, dishes, not even our history, but it was a special way of feeling». But it was also true that Lorraine adhered to France solely to obtain order and peace: «Our patriotism has nothing idealistic, philosophic about it; our fathers were very realistic» [53. P. 112].

Both Barres and D'Annunzio follow the trend of the new epoch justifying a new principle of leadership. In Appeal to the Soldier (1900) the French writer stated that the fundamental idea of Boulangism had been «to put the authority of the Fatherland above all parties; the General, in keeping with the art of leadership, instead of casting a deciding vote, approved them all» [54. P. 272]. Barres argued that by transcending ideological rivalries Boulangism would have served the nation's broader interests The authority of the new leadership would spring directly from the masses, not from elected intermediaries. The Chamber of Deputies could be disbanded by force to install a new order. In 1902, Barres wrote that it was precisely because members of the Chamber of Deputies feared such a possibility, they found national heroes disturbing [55. P. 226].

The new leader in D'Annunzio's terms is an assertive character, a «true noble» who «bears no resemblance to the worn-out heirs of the ancient patrician families». “He is a free man, stronger than his environment, convinced that personality is more important than contingent qualities» [56. P. 162]. In the modern world, as seen by D'Annunzio, the new movers are the daring young technocrats like the pilot Tarsis in Maybe yes, maybe no (1910), or the adventurers of the age of imperialism like those portrayed in Maia. They mobilize the «revolutionary crowds» and connect them to the industrialized society by means of new political discourse. Lavrin (1968) points out that in his four volumes of Laudi (1903-04) D'Annunzio accepts the role of a self-appointed leader calling to new adventures and to a joy of life, embracing all the diversity of existence. In his temperamental adoption of the aspirations of Young Italy, he became a poet of patriotism, of energy and action. Yet instead of expanding through his nation, he reduced that cause to a very narrow sacro egoismo. As a proponent of national imperialism, he found his ideal of leadership in a blend of Bismarck, Cesare Borgia, and an operatic condottiere [57. P. 60-66]. Identifying himself as an aristocratic artist in the mid-1880s and early 1890s, D'Annunzio nonetheless comes to wish for the influence over the mass audience, the newly «democratized» reading public. Trying to expand his audience to the «true crowd» at the turn of the century he becomes preoccupied with remodeling the language to reach these subjects. He started addressing the crowd in terms bespeaking courtship, telling people that he sees in their numbers a hidden beauty that he can draw out. The result is a myth of "two races-nobles and plebes-scripted as the story of the noble artist-creator, who mesmerizes, violates, and then discards the plebian masses much as he does women. In March of 1901, in Milan, according to the astonished observer F.T. Marinetti, D'Annunzio drew a crowd of 4000 to hear his poetical evocation of Garibaldi's life [58. P. 177].

The general tendency toward decline of the role of religion in modern Western society did not mean its total annihilation in the sphere of individual and group consciousness. Hugh McLeod (2000) draws our attention to an important point when he argues that in the educated middle class of France the impact of new intellectual developments within decadence in the later 19^th century was less, because religious skepticism had for long been widespread. As a reaction to that, in the 1880s and the 1890s the rediscovery of Catholicism was commonplace among French intellectuals [59. P. 149]. Barres went through the long process of adaptation to perception of religion as a necessary vital element in social life. In one of the first rallies of the French League of Patriots in 1899 a noteworthy dialogue between Barres and one of its key founders Jules Lamaitre took place. When they started discussing seemingly common view on national traditions Barres asked: «What traditions? If it meant reaction he would have none of it. No clericalism. Anti-clerical and militarist is what our government ought to be» [60. P. 180]. In a letter of April, 1902, Barres stated that although he did not want Catholicism to be degraded, at the same time he did not intend to go to confession, or to associate himself with the campaigns of the vestries against free thinkers. He named himself among its defenders, “not as a faithful believer, but because I am patriotic, in the name of the national interest». He believed that French nationality was tied strictly to Catholicism, that it was formed and developed in a Catholic atmosphere, and that, in trying to destroy and tear Catholicism away from the nation, no one could foresee what would be demolished. His comment about religion after the death of his mother in 1907 was made in different, more personal terms: «Political defeat. After such shocks, one accepts the Catholic thesis. We have seen that we are not absolute masters of ourselves. We accept our fatalisms» [61. P. 226]. Later in 1911, he remarked: «The Church planted in the village square makes the soil healthy. Around it the human plant develops in an atmosphere of civilization [...] The Catholic religion became the poem that most satisfies me; it was in the churches that my intelligence and my heart find the formulas of the highest poetry» [62. P. 223].

D'Annunzio's was not focused on the problem of religion in the form of Catholicism so much, but his contribution to the debate about «Latin decadence» requires a special consideration. It is remarkable to note that both writers see Venice as an exemplified ideal of decayed glory. For D'Annunzio and Barres, the decadence of the nation is an obsession, especially considering the fact that they were familiar with the literary current of decadence. In 1895, the Italian writer promises to promote a “Latin renaissance” in the magazine II Convito. He issued a manifesto for an Italian cultural revival, stating that such a rebirth needed to be accompanied by the national self-assertion which he felt had never really materialized after the country reunification. Unlike Barres's focus on regional values, D'Annunzio chose the city of Rome as a symbol that inspired the 19^th century national intellectuals such as Mazzini or Carducci. To his mind, the liberation of it from the papacy («the sublime conquest») had never been followed by any glorious achievements for the new nation. Nationalists, such as Corradini, were eager to promote the myth of Rome's greatness as an example for the present, but to D'Annunzio romanticized it and sufficiently dramatized its appeal. In 1904, he had addressed the symbolic city in the national context: