Paris, Capital of the Debacle: Aragon, Jasieński, and Revolutionary Catastrophism

• Published in: Contemporary French and francophone studies Vol. 24; no. 3; pp. 271 - 278
• Main Author: Fuller, Jeff
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 26-05-2020; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Aragon, Louis (1897-1982); Avant-garde; Bruno Jasieński; Catastrophes; Communism; Futurism; interwar avant-garde; Interwar period; Jasienski, Bruno; Literary criticism; Louis Aragon; Novels; Poetry; Surrealism
• ISSN: 1740-9292; 1740-9306
• DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2020.1785718

Expressions of desire for catastrophe, imagined as a remedy for bourgeois inertia, are common among writers of the interwar avant-garde. This catastrophism exerts a powerful influence upon their conceptions of political revolution. Whereas the dominant revolutionary force in the period-Soviet Marxism-understood revolution to mean the seizure and wielding of state power by the proletariat, sympathetic intellectuals of the avant-garde tend to conceptualize revolution as the wholesale destruction of the institutions and symbols of capitalist modernity. Here I explore the "revolutionary catastrophism" of the interwar avant-garde through two texts in which the destruction of Paris, an exemplar of the bourgeois order, is evoked: the Polish Futurist Bruno Jasieński's 1928 novel Je brûle Paris (first published serially in the French Communist daily L'Humanité), and Louis Aragon's 1930 collage-poem "Front rouge." Each of these texts represents revolution as a blind, destructive force, akin to a natural disaster. But they also contrast interestingly with much apocalyptically-themed literature because of their utopianism. It has become a cliché to remark that today it is easier to envision the end of the world than a more modest end to capitalism; what these texts propose is that the two might not look so different.