The next day, I went to the editorial office of Je Suis Partout. Almost all my Parisian friends worked there or gravitated around it. This went back quite a long way. When I had gone to Paris to take my preparatory classes, at seventeen, I didn’t know anyone. I was attending Janson-de-Sailly as a boarder; Moreau had allocated a small monthly allowance for me, as long as I got good grades, and I was relatively free; after the carceral nightmare of the three preceding years, it would have taken a lot less to turn my head. But I behaved, I didn’t do anything stupid. After classes, I would dash over to the Seine to hunt through the booksellers’ stalls, or else join my friends in a little bar in the Latin Quarter, to drink cheap red wine and set the world to rights. But I found my classmates a little dull. Almost all of them were from the upper middle class and were getting ready to follow blindly in their fathers’ footsteps. They had money, and they had been taught very early on how the world was made and what their place in it would be: the dominant one. Toward workers, they felt only scorn, or fear; the ideas that I had brought back from my first trip to Germany—that workers were just as much a part of the nation as the middle class, that the social order had to be arranged organically for the advantage of all, not just a few of the well-off, that workers should not be oppressed but rather offered a life of dignity and a place in this order so as to counter the seductions of Bolshevism—all that was foreign to them. Their political opinions were as narrow as their feeling of bourgeois propriety, and it seemed to me even more pointless to try to discuss with them fascism or German National Socialism (which had just, in September of that year, won a crushing electoral victory, thus becoming the second largest party in the country and sending shockwaves across the victors’ Europe) than to talk about the youth movement ideals preached by Hans Blüher. Freud, for them (if they had even heard of him), was a sexual maniac, Spengler a mad, monomaniacal Prussian, Jünger a warmonger flirting dangerously with Bolshevism; even Péguy they found suspect. Only a few students on scholarship from the provinces seemed a little different, and it was mostly toward them that I gravitated. One of these boys, Antoine F., had an older brother at the École normale supérieure, which I had dreamed of attending, and it was he who took me there for the first time, to drink rum toddies with his brother and his dorm mates and discuss Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, whom I was just discovering. This Bertrand F. was a carré, or “squared”—a second-year student; the best study rooms, with sofas, engravings on the walls, and stoves, were mostly occupied by cubes, or the “cubed,” third-year students. One day, passing by one of these rooms, I noticed a Greek inscription painted on the lintel: IN THIS CARREL WORK SIX FINE AND GOOD MEN (hex kaloi kagathoi)—AND A CERTAIN OTHER ONE (kai tis allos). The door was open, so I pushed it and asked in Greek: “So who is this other one?” A young man with a round face raised his thick glasses from his book and answered in the same language: “A Hebrew, who doesn’t know Greek. And you, who are you?”—“Another too, but made of finer stuff than your Hebrew: a German.”—“A German who knows Greek?”—“What better language to speak with a Frenchman?” He burst out laughing and introduced himself: he was Robert Brasillach. I explained to him that I was in fact half French, and had lived in France since 1924; he asked me if I had gone back to Germany since, and I told him about my summer trip; soon we were chatting about National Socialism. He listened attentively to my descriptions and explanations. “Come back whenever you like,” he said at the end. “I have some friends who will be happy to meet you.” Through him, I discovered another world, which had nothing to do with that of the civil servants in training. These young people cultivated visions of the future of their country and of Europe that they argued about bitterly, while also drawing on a rich study of the past. Their ideas and interests burst out in all directions. Brasillach, together with his future brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche, was a passionate student of the cinema and had me discover not only Chaplin and René Clair but also Eisenstein, Lang, Pabst, Dreyer. He brought me to the offices of L’Action française, in their printing house on the Rue Montmartre, a fine narrow building with a Renaissance staircase, full of the din of the rotary presses. I saw Maurras a few times; he would arrive late, around eleven at night, half deaf, bitter, but always ready to open his heart and vent his spleen against the Marxists, the bourgeois, the republicans, the Jews. Brasillach, at that time, was still completely under his spell, but Maurras’s stubborn hatred for Germany formed an obstacle that I couldn’t overlook, and Robert and I often quarreled about it. If Hitler reached power, I asserted, and united the German worker with the middle class, once and for all countering the Red Peril, and if France did the same, and if the two together managed to eliminate the pernicious influence of the Jews, then the heart of Europe, both nationalist and socialist, would form, along with Italy, an invincible bloc of common interests. But the French were still bogged down, floundering in their petty shopkeepers’ interests and their backward-looking spirit of revenge. Of course, Hitler would sweep aside the unjust Versailles clauses, that was a pure historical necessity; but if the healthy forces of France could on their side liquidate the corrupt republic and its Jewish puppets, then a Franco-German alliance would not only be a possibility, but would become an inevitable reality, a new European entente that would clip the wings of the British plutocrats and imperialists, and would soon be ready to confront the Bolsheviks and bring Russia back into the bosom of civilized nations. (As you can see, my German trip had served my intellectual education well; Moreau would have been horrified if he had known the use I put his money to.) Brasillach, in general, agreed with me: “Yes,” he said, “the postwar is already over. We have to act quickly if we want to avoid another war. That would be a disaster, the end of European civilization, the triumph of the barbarians.” Most of Maurras’s young disciples thought likewise. One of the most brilliant and caustic of them was Lucien Rebatet, who wrote the literary and film criticism in L’Action française under the name of François Vinneuil. He was ten years older than I, but we quickly formed a friendship, drawn to each other by his attraction to Germany. There were also Maxence, Blond, Jacques Talagrand who became Thierry Maulnier, Jules Supervielle, and many others. We met at the Brasserie Lipp, when someone had money in his pocket, or else at a restaurant for students in the Latin Quarter. We feverishly discussed literature and tried to define a “fascist” literature: Rebatet put forward the names of Plutarch, Corneille, Stendhal. “Fascism,” Brasillach said one day, “is the very poetry of the twentieth century,” and we could only agree with him: fascist, fascio, fascination (but later on, having become wiser or more prudent, he would confer the same title on communism).

In the spring of 1932, when I passed my entrance exam, most of my friends from the ENS were finishing their studies; when the summer was over, they scattered throughout France, either to do their military service or to take up the teaching positions offered them. I once again spent my vacation in Germany, which was then in the midst of upheaval: German production had fallen to half the level of 1929, and Brüning, with Hindenburg’s support, was governing by means of emergency decrees. Such a situation couldn’t last. Elsewhere, too, the established order was faltering. In Spain, the monarchy had been overturned by a cabal of Freemasons, revolutionaries, and priests. America was almost on its knees. In France, the direct effects of the crisis were less felt, but the situation wasn’t rosy, and the Communists were quietly and methodically undermining things. Without telling anyone, I sent in my application for the NSDAP, Ausland section (for Reichsdeutschen living abroad), and was quickly accepted. When I entered the ELSP, in the fall, I continued to see my friends from the École normale and from L’Action française, who came up regularly to spend weekends in Paris. My classmates remained pretty much the same as at Janson, but to my surprise I found the classes interesting. It was also around this period, probably under the influence of Rebatet and his new friend Louis Destouches, who hadn’t yet become famous (his Journey to the End of the Night had just come out, but enthusiasm hadn’t yet spread beyond the circle of initiates, and Céline still liked to spend time with young people), that I formed a passion for French keyboard music, which was just being rediscovered and played; with Céline, I went to hear Marcelle Meyer; and more bitterly than ever I regretted my laziness and casualness that had made me abandon the piano so quickly. After the New Year, President Hindenburg invited Hitler to form a government. My classmates trembled, my friends waited with bated breath, I exulted. But while the Party was crushing the Reds, sweeping aside the garbage of plutodemocracy, and dissolving the bourgeois parties, I remained stuck in France. A real national revolution was taking place in front of our eyes and in our own time, and I could only follow it from afar, in the newspapers and the newsreels in the movie theaters. France too was seething. Many people went to Germany to see things firsthand; everyone wrote about and dreamed of a similar recovery for their country. People made contact with the Germans, official Germans now, who called for a Franco-German rapprochement; Brasillach introduced me to Otto Abetz, von Ribbentrop’s man (at that time still the Foreign Affairs Advisor of the Party): his ideas were no different from the ones I had aired since my first trip to Germany. But for many, Maurras remained an obstacle; only the best acknowledged that it was time to move on beyond his hypochondriac vaticinations, but even they hesitated, his charisma and the fascination he exercised held them under his sway. At the same time the Stavisky affair exposed the police connections of corruption in government and gave Action Française a moral authority it hadn’t known since 1918. All that came to an end on February 6, 1934. Actually it was a confused business: I too was in the streets, along with Antoine F. (who had entered the ELSP at the same time as I), Blond, Brasillach, a few others. From the Champs-Élysées, we vaguely heard some gunshots; farther down, near the Place de la Concorde, people were running. We spent the rest of the night walking through the streets, chanting slogans when we met other young people. We didn’t learn till the next day that there had been several deaths. Maurras, to whom everyone had instinctively turned, had stood down. The whole affair had just been a damp squib. “French inaction!” foamed Rebatet, who never forgave Maurras. It was all the same to me: my decision was taking shape, and I no longer saw a future for me in France.