L'Affaire (w/ John Ganz)
Added 2021-02-06 00:16:12 +0000 UTCBeloved KYE guest John Ganz (Ep. 15: The Year the Clock Broke) returns to discuss the Third Republic, the Dreyfus Affair, and what the hell fin de siècle France has to do with 21st century America. Among other things, we discuss: anti-Semitism and nationalism, Sorel and Gramsci, liberalism, socialism, and (surprise!) fascism. You told us you didn't mind the nerdy episodes; be careful what you wish for...
If you enjoy this conversation, please consider signing up for John's new and truly excellent newsletter, Unpopular Front!
Further Reading:
John Ganz, "Gramscians vs Sorelians," Unpopular Front, January 23
"The Third Republic and Today," Unpopular Front, January 27
"The Century of Rubbish," Unpopular Front, February 2
"From Republic to Reaction," Unpopular Front, February 4
Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton University Press, 1995); The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1995)
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (George Braziller, 1986)
Helen Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2018)
Comments
I subscribed to John’s substack (my first substack subscription!). My Jewish primary education mentioned the Dreyfus affair in passing (yet another bad thing that happened to the Jews but not much else); returning to it in 2021 and placing it in the context of all I’ve been learning on KYE feels like returning to a childhood playground and discovering an entire city has been excavated around it.
Gabriel Edwards
2021-02-16 21:15:36 +0000 UTCGreat episode. Your shows are always so rich in detail and discussion that I often listen to them twice. For this one I'm already up to three.
Keith Thobe
2021-02-11 13:18:02 +0000 UTCPiquant observations, Mark! (-Sam)
Know Your Enemy
2021-02-07 21:08:30 +0000 UTCThe Sorelian discussion reminded me of when Eric Hoffer compared public works in the US and USSR. He said the Russians couldn’t understand how the Americans could build a dam just as a matter of course without whipping up revolutionary fervor. In Russia they had to be saving the world when they built a dam. I sense the later Sorel would have been a dam-builder of the Russian school. Also your recent guest Sarah Marshall made the point that a figure like Batman is public wish-fulfillment of getting things done outside the system. A public official like Marcia Clark can’t go too hard on the LAPD when she needs their support for future cases, and everybody feels that frustration. I see mad Batman posters on the Sorelian wall.
Mark K
2021-02-07 20:07:32 +0000 UTCI have this quote saved from Romain Rolland in 1937, I wonder if it was a reaction to the 1934 crisis? Romain Rolland, French (1866-1944): What a revelation this crisis has been to me in regard to human nature, above all, of the intellectual elite. How quickly and totally have these thinkers, so imbued with the great principles of liberty and humanity renounced them and toppled them in the dust! I will not forget it in the sequel when, with peace once more established, I shall be seeing them again professing their ideas, flaunting their spirit, its liberality and its kinships with all that is human.
Mark K
2021-02-07 17:35:42 +0000 UTCthanks i appreciate the reply, i will def check out the blogs, i was just going off the conversation so apologies for that. I do wonder if empire enters into the Dreyfus affair in a more fundamental way than simply personnel rotating from the colonial periphery. Not having read much myself on the Third Republic, I would be curious to hear whether the fact of empire had an impact on why the scandal occurred in the military and not some other part of government? re: anti-Trumpism and anti-imperialism, one of the consistent positions i see in the contemporary Sorelians (I like and appreciate your critique btw) is that liberal critics of Trump often stage their position by recourse to imperial amnesia (eliding the reactionary immigration and war policies of Bush and Obama) or by straightforward cheerleading of war criminals turned Trump critics (Frum, Bolton, Mattis, etc). You will even see some Sorelians put forward the (idiotic) proposition that Trump was somehow better on foreign policy than his predecessors. i see the anti-anti-Trumpism that some Sorelians find themselves putting forward as a way of critiquing the way liberals constantly make american empire natural and invisible. given the general consensus around empire, its an understandable if often unproductive impulse.
Paul Clarke
2021-02-07 00:51:00 +0000 UTCGood overview of the French situation after the Commune. However, panning for gold there to interpret contemporary American politics can mean that you only look within your own chosen frame. Why France? Why not Zapata’s peasants in Mexico? Why not the rural cowboys that helped Bolivar win? I’m a hard-core materialist in how I look at things because ideology is always secondary to money. In Europe, the Ancien Regime in France and its defenders like Metternich were trying to hold onto power, not because they believed in any particular ideology. It was only (later) Nicholas II’s “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationalism” that tried to construct an ideological post hoc rationale for his power. In the US, we must look at the material circumstances that underly our current politics. Ideology is secondary to where someone lives: just look at the map of precinct-level votes for the last 20 years: is the whole rural countryside reactionary? Kulaks waiting to be reduced when the Revolution comes? Are Hispanic Catholics more ideologically correct that white Catholics because they voted more for Biden than for Trump? No, it’s all about the pocketbook. Rural unemployment and disinvestment has been a fairly constant phenom that woke urban liberals and Brooklyn socialists have done nothing to stop. The segregationist policies baked in to the New Deal barely get a look. The highways and tax exempt churches and museums of suburbia? Off limits to discuss. But those are the material policies that support lifestyles of swing voters. Ideology doesn’t make a difference here.
Chad Bailey
2021-02-06 19:52:04 +0000 UTCThat's a very interesting point and I wish we had talked more about imperialism. If you read my blog posts I do mention General Boulanger's experience in the imperial wars in Indochina and Africa. I'm not sure if there's a necessary connection between anti-Trumpism and empire, I think you'll find a number of foreign policy opinions in that coalition. Also it's worth pointing out that the Republicans in France were mostly opposed to the Imperial expansion and it happened over their objections.
Unclear and Present Danger
2021-02-06 15:56:41 +0000 UTCit seems to me that one of the major divergences between the contemporary left critics of the resistance and late-coming anti-dreyfusards is that part of the disgust for the resistance comes from the way the resistance's nationalism consistently abets american empire, providing a broad social base for the military's continued presence abroad and what could be a neo-Cold War with China, Russia etc. That attention to the impact of empire is a huge gap in this episode, which only pays attention to how racism worked in the metropole and leaves untouched how it worked in the colonial peripheries. John talks about the streams of anti-Semitism coming into France from Russia, so it is not as if the analysis is only contained within France. You can't ignore the entirety of France's empire in Africa and South East Asia when trying to understand the social forces that come to bear in the Dreyfus affair nor the question of whether fascism came to France.
Paul Clarke
2021-02-06 15:29:31 +0000 UTCi greatly appreciated the conversation of modern “sorelians” and “gramcians!” As a revolutionary communist myself, I appreciated your interjection of nuance around the modern revolutionary left Sam—especially as we compare the legacies of the thought of these two revolutionary socialist theorists! as as it appears to me, the modern left seems constantly in struggle with an over-reliance on actionism and and a myopic view of “organizing” based on (an often decotextualized) alinsky-an practice. to some extent, those seem to be the dividing lines generally so this more specific identification and critique by all of you was much appreciated!
Samuel Kessler
2021-02-06 13:15:05 +0000 UTCThe nerdier the better. These episodes have been wonderful.
Edward Smith
2021-02-06 09:41:26 +0000 UTCI remember first learning about the Dreyfus affair in high school and just thinking “J’accuse..!” was funny as hell, but now being older and more informed and ideological and hearing your thoughts and thinking about these things just makes me depressed about the capacity for the (western?) world to ever move beyond this stupid stage of the development of society. I don’t think it’s a “stage”
Rick S
2021-02-06 04:33:21 +0000 UTC(There are non-nerdy episodes?)
Ben
2021-02-06 04:10:20 +0000 UTCI haven't even listened to this yet, but I'm already excited. Just what I signed up for: Hot man-on-man-on-man fascist-dissecting action. Whoo-hoo! And look, you can treat it as an experiment. See if your Patreon take goes up or down after a couple more of these nerd-ist episodes.
pixlaw
2021-02-06 01:32:17 +0000 UTC
