Revenge of the fascist knights: masculine identities in Je suis partout, 1940-1944

The débâcle of 1940 permitted an attack in France both on republican institutions and on republican ideas. Indeed, sections within the radical Right, including the Parisian literary fascists involved with the collaborationist weekly Je suis partout, staged an elaborate revenge on all that the Third Republic had symbolised. The contributors to the newspaper envisaged, not always consciously, that the new European Order would be based not only on such a reinvention of politics but on a reconfiguration of manliness. In this way, they were able simultaneously to blame the swiftness of the French collapse on the inadequate nature of the French male population and to seek a discursive rehabilitation of that same body of men through their narratives. A reading of the fiction and journalism in Je suis partout suggests that such gendered ruminations allowed these authors to reconcile the defeat with their faith in the grandeur of France and its soldiers