ABSTRACT
The reference to the Revolution of 1789 and the 'spirit' of 1793 provided the Left with the means to link the Soviet Revolution to national history, while on the Right it allowed a 'patriotic' expression of disgust for the current state of one's country. The very notion of political purity, with its oxymoronic overtones, implies the inevitable tendency for this extremist discourse in the 1920s and 1930s to bleed into all aspects of social reasoning, collapsing aesthetic, political, and even cognitive categories together in a rejection of the conventions ordering social life and resulting in a pursuit of transgressive, original forms of experience. The cult of freedom and originality thus produces a proliferation of discourse that renews the sense of threat in order to enact freedom, a proliferation Paulhan regrets: 'God knows that writers today apply themselves in their self-justification'.
