97

Maréchal, here they are! cultural anti-semitism in musicDuring the dark years the separation between politics and culture in the press was an established fact while art criticism, especially in music, showed a bright and more social light. The so-called “organic link” between Earth, Culture and People was sanctified in the cultural pages of Je Suis Partout. It always talked about the execrable “Jewish America”, and the “growing numbers of central Europe’s ghettos”. Rabatet, Brasillach and their colleagues were intellectuals and esthetes and they recalled “the joy in art”, “the light of passionate sensuality”, and “physical youth and the human appetite for pleasure”. It was in the name of “beauty” that these individuals who never missed a theater opening could also vomit “the most atrocious intellectual barbarism: the Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy which thrived on Semitic putrefaction”.The joy of art as anti-Semitic material went back to Wagner’s creation of a cultural anti-Semitism which poured, during the 1930s, into a cultural Fascism which drilled its wells in primordial dark waters.The political valorization of the primitive, the sanctification of ties between certain types of music, a territory and a people and the stigmatization of the Jewish enemy perceived as corrupting – these three branches of the “lead triangle” were now in place.