Robert Brasillach: The Fascist Fever Dream

by Zoltanous

Born March 31, 1909, in Perpignan, Brasillach wasn’t just a scribbler. He was a poet, novelist, journalist, playwright, and film critic — a Renaissance man wielding his intellect like a sword. At fifteen, he was spitting ink for local rags, and by 1925, he stormed Paris to study philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, a crucible for his radicalism, sparked perhaps by his family’s middle-class decline. By twenty-six, with brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche, he co-authored Histoire du cinéma, a work still respected for its cultural insight. His pen never rested — poetry, drama, and a literary column for L’Étudiant français in the early 1930s cemented his rise. His 1935 reaction to Hitler’s Mein Kampf in a letter to José Lupin showed both mockery and fascination, hinting at his complex view of Nazism:

“the masterpiece of excited cretinism in which Hitler appears as a kind of enraged schoolteacher.”

— Robert Brasillach, letter to José Lupin, 1935

A photo of Brasillach

Brasillach didn’t flirt with fascism; he wed it. As literary editor at Charles Maurras’s L’Action française and a writer for Je suis partout alongside Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, he became a high priest of radical nationalism. His comrade Drieu La Rochelle, in 1934, captured their shared defiance, urging them to reclaim “fascism” from liberal sneers and wield it as a battering ram against democracy in Socialisme fasciste

When the Popular Front seized France in 1936, Brasillach, leading a fiery editorial crew, turned Je suis partout into a megaphone for global fascism. Mussolini’s Italy? He saluted it. Franco’s Spain? He cheered louder than the locals. For Brasillach, fascism was a revolt against the modern world’s soullessness — a visceral, anti-bourgeois force that rejected class prejudice and promised national renewal. In Notre avant-guerre, he framed it as a living spirit, not a cold system, rooted in his disgust for France’s Third Republic and its perceived moral and cultural decline:

“Fascism is a spirit. It is a spirit of anti-bourgeois anti-conformism more than anything, but also an irreverent one. It is a spirit opposed to every type of prejudice, especially that of class.”

— Robert Brasillach, Notre avant-guerre

He saw fascism as art, a poetic surge akin to communism’s allure, a vision he tied to his support for the Falange in his 1939 Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne, co-authored with Bardèche, which cast the Spanish Civil War as a “spiritual crusade” against leftist chaos:

“For us, fascism was primarily poetry—the poetry of the twentieth century (as was communism). I am deeply convinced that this poetry cannot die.”

— Robert Brasillach, Les Sept Couleurs

He railed against seven enemies strangling the world: communism, social democracy, religious institutions, freemasonry, capitalism, Judaism. His venom spilled into Combat, a magazine founded by Thierry Maulnier and Jean de Fabrègues, where he amplified these anti-Semitic and anti-modernist rants, viewing Judaism as a corrosive force undermining national vitality — a belief that hardened through the 1930s as he saw France weakened by internal division and external threats.

World War II turned the heat up. Captured in 1940, Brasillach was a POW briefly before being sprung, returning to Je suis partout by mid-1941 to cheerlead for the German war machine. On September 25, 1942, he doubled down, calling for a total break with Jews. He sneered at Archbishop Jules-Géraud Saliège for protesting Jewish deportations, and Je suis partout mocked Saliège and other bishops, spinning Gestapo roundups as harmless “relocations.” After the Allies hit North Africa, Brasillach turned on Vichy’s softness, demanding Jewish blood in France for every nationalist harmed in Algiers. This stance cost him his alliance with Maurras, who despised collaboration with the Germans.

Under occupation, Brasillach’s star burned bright — until Paris was liberated. Je suis partout collapsed, its staff scattered, arrested, or executed. Brasillach, ever the dramatist, surrendered to the French Resistance to secure his family’s freedom. His trial in January 1945 was a kangaroo court, a theatrical lynching for his “offense of opinion.” No evidence showed him profiting from collaboration or snitching on anyone, but his articles were his noose. After a measly twenty minutes of deliberation, he was sentenced to death. The courtroom erupted, calling it a “disgrace.” Brasillach, cold as steel, shot back, “No, it’s an honor.”

Brasillach during the trial

Anti-fascist intellectuals — Paul Valéry, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau — begged de Gaulle for mercy. No dice. Jean Lacouture argued it was a political move and spectacle, a bone tossed to the communists who loathed Brasillach’s fascist fervor. De Gaulle himself later mused on the weight of a writer’s influence:

“An intellectual is not less but more responsible than others. He is an instigator. He is a leader in the strongest sense. François Mauriac wrote to me that a thinking head must not fall. And why this privilege? A big head is more responsible than a stupid head! Brasillach was smart. He had talent. What he did is all the more serious. His commitment to collaboration strengthened the Nazis. An intellectual does not have more right to indulgence; he has less, because he is more informed, more capable of critical thinking, and therefore more guilty. An intellectual’s words are arrows; his formulas are bullets! They have the power to transform the public mind. He cannot enjoy the advantages of this power and refuse the disadvantages! When the time comes for justice, he must pay.”

— Charles de Gaulle, quoted in C’était de Gaulle, vol. 2, by Alain Peyrefitte

On February 6, 1945, Brasillach faced the firing squad, no blindfold, staring death in the face. His final words? “Long live France, in spite of everything!” Even in his last breaths, he wrote Poèmes de Fresnes. As the Axis powers crumbled in late 1944, locked in Fresnes prison, Brasillach reflected on the Soviet Union’s totalitarian turn under Stalin. He saw it morphing into a “red fascism,” a borderless, iron-fisted mirror of the fascist spirit he’d championed — a bitter irony that marked his disillusionment with the faltering fascist regimes of Italy, Germany, and Spain, which he now saw riddled with errors:

“I see how in the East, in Russia, fascism is growing—a borderless, red fascism.”

— Robert Brasillach quoted in Fascism—Borderless and Red by Alexander Dugin

Buried in Charonne cemetery, his literary shadow lingered through works like Présence de Virgile and Lettre à un soldat de la classe de soixante. Alice Kaplan dubbed him the “James Dean of French fascism,” a rebel whose execution sparked endless debate: was it justice or a witch hunt against his ideas? His trial remains a raw wound, a warning of what happens when a democracy punishes thought itself.

“And I, who in recent months have become so sharply disillusioned with so many errors of Italian Fascism, of German nationalism, of Spanish Falangism, can say that I will never forget the wonderful radiance of the universal Fascism of my youth, Fascism, the fever of our century.”

— Robert Brasillach, Lettre à un soldat de la classe de soixante

The Robert Brasillach Cultural Association, founded to preserve his literary contributions, keeps his name alive, hosting events and publications that wrestle with his ideas and their fallout. His grave in Charonne Cemetery, Paris, has drawn many pilgrims. His monument at the Alcázar of Toledo received a tribute from Léon Degrelle, the Belgian SS officer and fascist leader, who visited to pay homage to a fallen icon of their shared cause. Brasillach’s life was a Molotov cocktail of brilliance and fanaticism, an epic of a man who lived for the “fever” and died by its flames. De Gaulle transformed him into an immortal martyr in the minds of many.

¡Viva la muerte! Comrade Robert Brasillach, Presente!

During a visit to the Alcázar of Toledo, Léon Degrelle visits the tribute paid to Brasillach