Reflections on the Adventurer - An Interview with Jean Mabire
Interview with Jean Mabire - Nouvelles de Synergies européennes nº41, 1999. Interview with Laurent Schang.
Jean Mabire (8 February 1927—29 March 2006) is an important figure in the Nouvelle Droite. He was a writer and journalist. He was a member of Europe-Action, then GRECE, and later went on to help found Terre et Peuple. He has written several works on history, paganism, and Normandy. He is also considered one of the chief architects of the pan-European nationalist idea of the European New Right. Below is an interview with Nouvelle de Synergies européennes in 1999 (issue 41). I have provided hyperlinks to give additional background information. TN denotes translator note.
Translated by Alexander Raynor
Laurent Schang: Jean Mabire, regardless of the domains you have covered in your 90-some volumes published to date (editor's note: 170, in fact, as J. Mabire himself told us in the letter accompanying his answers), from French SS to the 55 days of Peking, from Amundsen to the history of Normandy, there always emerges, if not obviously, a recurring idea, or rather, a certain definition of man, whose values could be summed up in one word: adventure. Jean Hohbarr was not mistaken when he wrote in an issue of Français: "Mabire admits it, he does not consider literature as a 'neutral' genre, but rather as the expression of a worldview". No doubt the Viking blood flowing in your Norman veins is not unrelated to this. Still, today, adventure seems to definitively belong to the past, in the age of all-media and satellite photography. Would space conquest, mercenary work, or sporting achievements (or the fight against AIDS, according to some) be the last forms of adventure open to the man of tomorrow?
Jean Mabire: When Ernst von Salomon, that typical adventurer of our century, was forced, after the defeat of his country, to answer a questionnaire (Der Fragebogen), it took no less than 650 pages to do so, which allowed him to write his best book, by the way. It was then realized that he had never ceased to put himself on stage and that throughout his life he had mixed his bibliography and his biography. This is certainly not my case. I am much more interested in my characters - imagined or reconstructed - than in myself. And perhaps even more in my readers than in my characters. Of course, my "heroes" live an adventure, starting with the very singular Roman Feodorovitch von Ungern-Sternberg, an extreme case if ever there was one. However, I think the term adventurer hardly suits them. I sometimes prefer the term militant. Or if you will, that of "political soldier", an expression invented, I believe, by Ernst Roehm, who is not the least singular of all my subjects and who has the advantage of being more truthful than romantic, hence the rather "instructive" side of the book I devoted to him.
Since you speak of adventurer, I think we should return to an essay (so important that I devoted an entire column to its author in Que lire?). This is Roger Stéphane's Portrait de l’aventurier (Portrait of the Adventurer). As we know, he evokes three extraordinary men: Lawrence of Arabia, André Malraux, and the indispensable von Salomon. This little book, published in 1950 and recently republished, is preceded by a very enlightening study by Jean-Paul Sartre. About twenty pages, but they seem to me essential to answer your question. Sartre distinguishes quite well: "Adventurer or militant: I don't believe in this dilemma. I know too well that an act has two faces: negativity, which is adventurous, and construction which is discipline. We must restore negativity, restlessness, and self-criticism to discipline". In a famous quarrel, half a century old, I feel closer to Sartre than to those "Hussars" who harassed the heavy convoy of committed literature. I believe, moreover, that there is some abusive simplification in opposing adventurers of action and adventurers of dreams. Drieu la Rochelle understood this very well, refusing to confine adventure to the derisory straitjacket of gratuitousness. If we talk about sailing, the pleasure boater can turn out to be as much of an "adventurer" as the competition sailor. And vice versa. Moitessier-Tabarly (TN: Bernard Moitessier and Éric Tabarly were both French sailors who inspired the French public to embrace sailing as a national pastime). The opposite of the adventurer? It's the bourgeois. See Flaubert who said everything about that. The field remains vast, infinite even, including Péguy's joke that claimed fathers were the adventurers of his century. On literature as a "worldview", I would like to quote Drieu again. I recently discovered an article from February 20, 1932: "No one is given to write a line that, in any respect, is neutral. A piece of writing will always present a political significance as well as a sexual or religious significance". No, adventure is not the past. Believe me, we will still live very dangerously in the 21st century.
LS: Pierre Mac Orlan, in his famous Petit manuel du parfait aventurier (Little Manual of the Perfect Adventurer) (now republished by Mercure de France) emphasized the paradox of the adventurer, namely that he does not exist, that he is only a posteriori recreation, pseudo-mythological mineralization by a bourgeois society hungry for dreams and exploits; and that, on the contrary, this same adventurer showed in his acts only cruelty, nihilism and cynicism, if not greed. This seems to us to be a thousand miles away from the message that your works spread, closer to Jack London than to Lawrence of Arabia.
JM: I must have been about twelve years old when I borrowed this little manual you're talking about from my father's library, and I remember being very disappointed. Suddenly deprived of my adolescent imagination, nourished by Stevenson's L'île au trésor (Treasure Island) and t'Serstevens' Les corsairs du roi (Corsairs of the King). Hence my subsequent distrust of Mac Orlan, master-demystifier. He took away my desire to be an adventurer. I became, probably in reaction, a militant. This takes nothing away from the dark fascination of the gentlemen of fortune. But I identified more easily with Cyrano than with L'Olonnois or Borgnefesse... I was always left with the opinion from Edmond Rostand's epic drama that it's much more beautiful when it's useless... This sensation was reinforced by John Ford's film The Lost Patrol, before finding its fulfillment with Buzzati's Le désert des Tartares (The Tartar Steppe). I was struck by the fact that the founding battles - these exemplary adventures - are always lost battles: Sidi Brahim, Camerone, El Alamo, Bazeilles, Berlin, Dien Bien Phu. This was to reinforce my fundamental pessimism (always Flaubert, much more than Stendhal). But a pessimism that incites action more than dreams. See the sagas and Corneille on this. In my very personal case, what made the Algerian war quite exhilarating for me in 1958-59 is that I knew it was lost for the army in which I was fighting. You find this feeling multiplied by ten when I joined Philippe Héduy and the team of L'Esprit public at the end of 1962. At the age of re-readings, I took up La Bandera, La cavalière Elsa and even Picardie again, with a constant feeling of unease. The only book to survive: L'ancre de miséricorde. It is a fact that the "adventure novel" is only substitution. The reader lives what he is not, even relives what he has not lived. A phenomenon to which television gives a fascinating dreamlike dimension. One "makes" war or love by proxy in front of the small screen. Triumph of absolute illusion.
LS: The hero of your latest book, Padraig Pearse (Patrick Pearse une vie pour l’Irlande (Patrick Pearse: A Life for Ireland), ed. Terre et Peuple) also gives this impression of oscillating between revolutionary idealism and the blackest nihilism, love of men and cold criminal determination. A bit like Ungern before him, and this, in a perspective very close to Malraux's Conquérants (The Conquerors).
JM: This nihilistic and even suicidal side of Patrick Pearse has often been highlighted by his opponents. If you get this impression from my book, it means I would have failed in my demonstration. Because it is one. This short essay describes a sort of inevitable journey that leads a man - who is a writer, therefore an artist - from cultural struggle to political engagement and from this engagement to armed struggle. Another dimension of Pearse, and not the least, is his role as an educator at Saint Enda. We are very far from an adventurer, as will be after him, in many traits of his character, a man like Michael Collins. Pearse seems to me the highest incarnation of the "political soldier". He is going to accomplish a mad gesture, but one that seems to him the only one capable of awakening the Irish people. Evoking Les Conquérants in his regard seems very enlightening to me. Also, don't forget that this little book is in the same line as my big work on Les éveilleurs de peoples (The Awakeners of Peoples) (Jahn, Mazzini, Mickiewicz, Petöfi and Grundtvig). Pearse fights in their wake and combines in himself all aspects of their various personalities: poet, educator, militant, prophet, martyr... Ungern, on the other hand, escaped this sort of "rationalization of madness". He was both more demented and more lucid.
LS: In your book La Torche et le Glaive (The Torch and the Sword), you write these superb words: "Writing for me is not a pleasure or a privilege. It is a service like any other. Writing an article or distributing leaflets are acts of the same value (...) Writing must be a dangerous game. It is the only nobility of the writer, his only way of participating in the struggles of life". Now, rereading Dominique de Roux, what was our surprise to find similar words, written about the same time: "These last years, I understood this: literature and direct revolutionary action are both modalities of approaching death (...) It is through death that literature becomes revolutionary action, and it is through death that revolutionary action joins literature". It does not seem usurped today to see in him an adventurer of letters. Based on these confidences, and at the risk of repeating ourselves, wouldn't the adventure of the next century be more interior? By that we mean an attitude that we would qualify as "Become again what you are". Isn't this after all the higher objective assigned to literature, as your writings lead us to think?
JM: First of all, let's not deceive ourselves too much, we writers, about the importance of these "adventures" that are our books. We don't really know what use our readers will make of them. Thus the influence of a Barrès appeared surprising to us yesterday and incredible today. I am from a generation marked by the red-hot iron of Montherlant and Malraux. That's to say if Sartre and Camus then seemed to me of a rare blandness. We were returning to "fin de siècle" literature with Mediterranean aestheticism and Dreyfusard intellectualism. The counter-attack of the "Hussars" seemed to me less pertinent than that of the boys of the next batch, and notably Dominique de Roux and Jean-Edern Hallier. We must add Jean-René Huguenin and Jean de Brem, but they died too early. We should talk about death. Dominique like Jean-Edern had the fascination, the prescience of it. It's a reflection that doesn't come only with age. Here again, we find Malraux. The tragic idea of life. You then pose a sort of opposition between "interior action" and "exterior action". There is a temptation here: the royal path Guénon/Evola. It interests me, but it's a path that hardly attracts me. I'm rather fascinated, in the same spirit, by the peace/war dialectic. Let's say Giono/Malraux (always him). Nietzsche had quite well anticipated all this. The temptation of the ivory tower clashes with the brutal assertion that the street belongs to the one who goes down to it. It is obvious that for a writer, the act of writing is interior and the act of publishing exterior. Two strictly complementary adventures. It seems to me that you are alluding to "politics". As much as its politicking and even political version is totally foreign to me, the fate of the city, from my carnal homeland to Europe, has never ceased to haunt me. Hence a reflection on the State, whose goal must be to "strengthen" the people and not to serve an ideology.
LS: Still in the same register, but another adventure as intensely lived for almost 50 years, the federalist commitment, which combines in the same absoluteness passionate Europeanism and defense of carnal identities. You say in the le Manifeste pour la renaissance de la culture normande (Manifesto for the Renaissance of Norman Culture) that French culture will only be saved by its re-sourcing in its regional traditions and its opening to the Europe of letters. Can you elaborate?
JM: The identity of a people is its spirit as much as its flesh. This is why "culture first" seems to me more decisive than Maurras' famous "politics first". Certainly, I do not deny the political vision. But I situate it outside the multiple and harmful current contingencies. For me, everything comes down to the dialectic, let's rather say the confrontation, between these two entities, not contradictory but complementary, which are the Empire, that is to say Europe, and the peoples who certainly do not confuse themselves with the existing nation-states. Europe, if it wants to preserve its identity and assert itself in relation to the rest of the world, that is to say by resisting first and foremost American imperialism, must be above all one and diverse. One politically, militarily, diplomatically, economically. But culturally diverse. This is why France has significance only by first ensuring what the Pléiade called "the defense and illustration of the French language". In this field, the role of Wallonia as well as French-speaking Switzerland is capital, even if these two entities excite the contempt of the most sterile Parisianism. This French culture, embodied in a language, will only be able to regain some vitality by integrating all its regional specificities. I am not talking here about the so-called "minority" languages, Breton, Flemish, German, Corsican, Catalan, Basque, Occitan, but also the various dialects of oïl, as well as what is called "regional French", which varies according to countries and usages. The current promotion of "suburban language" results in a terrible impoverishment, among other factors by the use of "verlan", which is the opposite of a creation to become a mechanism. Maintaining written language against spoken language is one aspect of the cultural war. This certainly clashes with modernity which will soon know only a sort of basic French quite similar to what American is in relation to the language of Shakespeare. This attitude implies concern for the "humanities" as we used to say, that is to say knowledge of Greek and Latin. We must add to this, for the concerned carnal homelands, a certain connivance with their deepest roots. That is to say, in Normandy, for example, elementary notions about the primitive Norse mode which would allow us to maintain the link with our oldest culture.
LS: And because for you the adventure continues, can you, for the readers of Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes, indicate some future reading paths...
JM: I don't currently have plans to write any great document on the Second World War, even if I am far from finished with the vast fresco of "elite corps", begun nearly thirty years ago with the publisher Balland. I still have to write two volumes of the history of French volunteers on the Eastern Front: 1943 and 1944. I'm waiting for my young friend Eric Lefèvre to provide me, as has been the case in the past, with the necessary documents to evoke this adventure. I leave to others the task of evoking the motivations and battles of Baltic, Ukrainian or Hungarian volunteers. That would require too much time in research and translations. After Bering and Amundsen, I would have liked to bring to life other polar explorers like the Swede Nordenskjöld and the Dane Rasmussen. But the book market and the public's lack of curiosity are such that I don't plan to embark on these adventures. So, I'm concentrating on my chronicles for Que lire? Volume 6 is finished and should be published at the end of this year. I'm at more than 450 writers and there are about two hundred authors that I consider essential to cover. I also intend to devote a book to this mystery that is the permanence of Normandy for eleven centuries. My project of a gigantic history of Norman writers, in several volumes, remains for the moment in the state of notes and files, for lack of having found an enterprising enough publisher. As for the novel about the last war that I've had in mind for more than half a century, it will perhaps be reduced to a simple short story.
