ABSTRACT
While recent centenary celebrations held French novelist Georges Bernanos to be a leading Catholic antifascist Resistance thinker, his most original ideas really belong within that history of “French fascism” which has been elucidated in recent studies. His ardent, lifelong admiration for Edouard Drumont (+1917), the father of modern anti-Semitism, shaped his new kind of politics. On the very eve of the French defeat of 1940 Bernanos advocated a radical anti-Semitic, anticapitalist, spiritually oriented “national revolution,” not unlike that of the prominent writers who would support Marshall Pétain; his case illustrates why it was so difficult to find genuinely antifascist thinkers among the French Catholic intelligentsia of the period.
