In a “letter from Germany” published in 1920, the philosopher Bernard Groethuysen wrote of his German contemporaries that they had “a way of asking if you’ve read a book that amounts to saying that, in the highly unlikely case that you haven’t read it, you are ignorant of almost everything. It is thus that I was questioned on the subject of M. Spengler’s book: Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The Decline of the West, first published in two volumes in 1918 and 1922]” during a recent trip across the Rhine.Footnote 1 Although Groethuysen went on to summarize some of the arguments of Oswald Spengler’s magnum opus, his main focus in this dispatch was on what he characterized as the “intellectual crisis,” linked to a broader social and political crisis, that had “predisposed” German readers to “receive [Spengler’s] revelations.”Footnote 2 He held World War I responsible for politicizing German intellectual life and creating the widespread appetite for philosophical history that attracted so many readers to Spengler. For Groethuysen, this trend bespoke the central, tragic fact of the immediate postwar moment, which was that “for a long sequence of years, man has felt his powerlessness and lost confidence in his own energies.” What Spengler offered to German readers devastated by total war and its aftermath was “a history without God and without providence,” addressing itself to “needs that interpretations drawn from individual life could not satisfy.”Footnote 3 This was a universal history particularly congenial to the interwar European atmosphere of political ruin and disappointed nationalism.
The Decline of the West did not appear in French translation until 1931 and was never as widely read or discussed in France as it was in Germany. Nevertheless, the book’s significance was evident even to French writers who scorned Spengler’s work. For some of the (relatively few) French intellectuals who read and responded to Spengler, his high-flown theories and gloomy prophecies were, at best, emblematic of or epiphenomenal to what Paul Valéry called post-World War I Europe’s “spiritual crisis.”Footnote 4 Others—fewer still in number, and including French-educated intellectuals from the colonies for whom a “decline of the West” may have held some appeal—took Spengler and his ideas more seriously. For different reasons, both groups saw Spengler’s diagnosis of Western decadence as a useful lens through which to understand the devastating immediate past and envision a brighter future.
This article explores Spengler’s reception in late imperial France—without, however, intending to offer a systematic study or comprehensive history of this reception. Instead, I will argue that the themes of Spengler’s Decline gained the attention of francophone thinkers whose willingness or ability to engage in detail with Spengler’s ideas may have been limited. Within the Hexagon, the eclectic audience for these ideas included patriotic French intellectuals fearful of their own nation’s decadence, on one hand, and, on the other, left-leaning authors whose style of thinking, if not their politics, bore latent affinities to Spengler’s own. The themes of Decline had a more immediate resonance for its Algerian-born French translator, Mohand Tazerout, who was drawn to Spengler’s philosophy for reasons that may be unexpected (that is, not primarily because of any shared antipathy to France or the West). Other anti- or postcolonial intellectuals read Spengler and deployed the concept of cultural decadence in the service of critiques of Western arrogance or aggression, as well as of flawed or limited anticolonial nationalist thought and leadership.
The decline of the West did not, in Spengler’s view, preclude—and might even accommodate—a future German renaissance. Along similar lines, the tenacious vitality of nations suffering under the yoke of European colonial domination was a central precept of the anticolonial movements that began to gather momentum in the interwar period, many of whose adherents were educated in France and some of whom were readers of Spengler.Footnote 5 Though it would be a stretch to describe Spengler’s Decline as a condemnation of European imperialism, it should not be surprising that anticolonial thinkers felt drawn to his work. Built on a conceptual grid of sharp dualisms that combined to form a rigid logic, the book understandably captured imaginations preoccupied by asymmetric counterconceptsFootnote 6 such as colonized/colonizer, Orient/Occident, or tradition/modernity. Professing to see culture as a living organism, Spengler described history as a biological process of growth followed by decline, death, and decay, with civilization representing culture in its terminal state. As such, he argued, history was not subject to mechanical laws of cause and effect and should be studied with methods drawn from Goethian botany rather than Newtonian physics.Footnote 7 Though Spengler insisted that cultures were irreducibly distinct and did not influence each other, his method was both comparative and universalist: he sought to show how every historical culture—he identified a total of eight, stretching from ancient Babylon to the modern West—passed through the same phases, analogous to the four seasons, before succumbing to death by civilization.
French readers sharing Spengler’s culturally pluralist view of world history—left-leaning advocates of Franco-German reconciliation and European unity—were repelled by his politics. They balked, in particular, at Spengler’s rejection of the French conception of culture as civilisation in favor of the German distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, his insistence on which seemed to betray an anti-French bias. Reviewing the French translation of Spengler’s Decline in 1932 in the pacifist journal Europe, Emmanuel Berl praised his account of “diverse cultures, each envisaged as distinct organisms,” but described this as nothing more than “the application in the cultural domain of prewar pluralism and postwar relativism.” He found other Spenglerian tenets—“the concordances [he] establishes between diverse moments of diverse cultures” and his distinction between Apollinian (Greek) and Faustian (Western European) cultures—“contestable” or even “puerile.”Footnote 8 For Berl and similar figures, a relativism or pluralism they largely approved of in Decline went too far when it questioned the unity and continuity of Western civilization, whose origins, in Spengler’s account, postdated the ancient Greeks by more than a millennium.
I focus on Spengler’s early French reception, from Decline’s initial publication in Germany to its eventual translation into French, in the article’s first section. Across the political spectrum, I attempt to show, Spengler’s work was largely dismissed, ignored, or rejected by French intellectuals, even as a few authors recognized Decline as a revealing expression of the wartime zeitgeist. Despite their apparent missed encounter, I further argue, we can identify broad affinities between Spengler and interwar French intellectuals of a certain stripe. While Spengler, who saw Western civilization as culturally dead, placed his political hopes in what, in his view, remained alive in German culture, many of his French contemporaries—equally attached to the ideals of an ostensibly universalist, ostensibly Western civilization and obsessed with their potential eclipse—looked to republican internationalism as a site of political vitality. Although few of these figures unequivocally embraced anticolonial politics, the global society of nations they envisioned was not dissimilar to the world order that took shape after the Second World War, when pressure from armed anticolonial nationalist movements and the newly founded United Nations forced France and other European imperial powers to abandon their colonial holdings.
My analysis of Spengler’s impact on twentieth-century French intellectual life continues in the article’s second section, which focuses on Spengler’s Algerian-born, French-naturalized translator, Mohand Tazerout (1893–1973). His immersion in the German philosopher’s historical metaphysics and pluralist cultural vision informed Tazerout’s own considerable body of writing, which combined efforts in sociology, history, philosophical reflection, and political commentary. Tazerout treated Spengler’s philosophy, stripped of its nationalist and authoritarian political bent, not only as a powerful analytical instrument, but also as a tool for overcoming cultural rivalries, both within the West and between Europe and its non-Western others. Instead of appropriating Spengler’s historical formulations wholesale, Tazerout was moved by his political sympathies and his reading of Spengler and other thinkers—notably Karl Marx—to develop his own vision of universal history.
Tazerout’s interest in Spengler must be understood in the context of his Algerian origins and investment in North African nationalism, which he openly embraced starting in the 1950s. In the article’s final section, I compare Tazerout to francophone North African authors from his own and the succeeding generation who were similarly preoccupied with problems of Western decline and a potential North African or Arab renaissance. These figures can be usefully distinguished by their differing orientations toward European orientalism, which anti- or postcolonial thinkers increasingly saw as an instrument of empire—while Tazerout was less inclined to doubt its intellectual authority. The shifting landscape of world history makes this difference—and the emergence of an influential critique of (particularly French and British) orientalist scholarship in the wake of decolonization—easily understandable. More importantly, however, Tazerout’s creative, critical engagement with Spengler can serve as a reminder that imaginative responses to the intractable cultural conflicts of the postcolonial era remain to be discovered.
Publishing Spengler in France
Tense Franco-German relations immediately after World War I seemingly ensured that Spengler’s Decline would meet with ambivalence in the Hexagon. Nevertheless, the book’s central theme of Western decadence captured the imaginations of intellectuals worldwide, including French writers whose political and philosophical views were at odds with Spengler’s. In his essay “Optimisme du pessimisme,” first published in the journal Clarté between 1921 and 1922, Jean-Richard Bloch—one of the “prewar vitalists” identified by Christophe Prochasson in his study of early twentieth-century French socialismFootnote 9—offered a critical survey of some of this discourse, focusing most of his attention on his friend Romain Rolland’s play Liluli (1920) and the Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero’s The Ruin of Ancient Civilization (1921). Bloch referred, in passing, to the Sorbonne geographer Albert Demangeon’s Le déclin de l’Europe (1920), which focused on declining French geopolitical prestige and the related rise of the United States. Similar themes would preoccupy a number of interwar works, notably Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu’s Décadance de la nation française (1931).Footnote 10For his part, Bloch opposed what he characterized as these works’ pessimism to an idiosyncratic interpretation of Marxism—“a movement of faith and mystical hope,” in one of his formulations—inspired by Georges Sorel.Footnote 11 Against Ferrero, who saw a crisis of authority analogous to the one that brought down Rome as threatening the modern West, Bloch argued that, in conjunction with industrial technology—an “agglutinating force” that, however much it threatened modern civilization with destruction, also held it together—Marxism brought hope for a better future.Footnote 12
Despite the urgings of his friend and German translator, the Austrian philologist and historian Paul Amann, Bloch did not include a discussion of Spengler in the updated version of “Optimisme” that appeared in his book Destin du siècle (1931). As Bloch’s correspondence with Amann reveals, cultural prejudice was a persistent temptation in the postwar moment even for intellectuals seeking to promote reconciliation between France and Germany.Footnote 13 Discussing his work Tradition und Weltkrise (Tradition and World-Crisis) (1934), Amann wrote to Bloch, “I treat, like M. Spengler—without comparing myself to him either favorably or unfavorably—a subject of the philosophy of history,” namely the characteristics of a wide range of historical cultures, with a particular emphasis Northern Europe’s singularity.Footnote 14“We other Germans,” Amann continued, “have a mania for fiddling with history. This is owing to the fact that this historicizing people has lived a much less coherent history than yours; their efforts to understand history are a function of this lack and an attempt to fill this gap.”Footnote 15
Contemporaneous claims of Franco-German difference were often refracted through the distinction between culture and civilization. In Decline, this opposition became the basis for sprawling metaphysical reflections on universal history, in which Spengler saw Germany as playing an exceptional role. In a work like Pierre Viénot’s Incertitudes allemandes (1931), in contrast, the culture/civilization distinction is intentionally collapsed, arguably to the advantage of a specifically French perspective (even as Viénot accused French commentators on the “German question” of letting themselves be misled by their own skewed values and prejudices). Viénot preceded his discussion of the German sense of Kultur by claiming that the term was equivalent to the French civilisation, and that Zivilisation, in German, “only designates material progress.” He went on, however, to argue that Kultur possessed “none of the abstract meaning” typically given by the French to civilisation.Footnote 16 At the root of the contemporary German “crisis of bourgeois civilization” that Viénot diagnosed was, he claimed, precisely the historical relativism that led German thinkers to equivocate dreamily while the French confidently rationalized. If his activities in Germany were motivated by a desire to bridge a supposed gap of mutual incomprehension between the two nations, Viénot was unable to avoid giving voice to a feeling of cultural superiority endemic, perhaps, to republican universalism, in which a French understanding of civilizational progress subsumed and prioritized itself over all others.
A similar mixture of sympathy and condescension—and scattered references to Spengler—can be found in the letters of Pierre Bertaux, a student of German literature at the École normale supérieure (ENS) who befriended Viénot during a research trip to Berlin. In one letter, Bertaux expressed surprise at finding two German writers he had encountered to be “uncultivated, ignorant of elementary things, having almost infantile preoccupations.” In light of this, he continued, “one understands their admiration for Spengler.”Footnote 17 In another letter, Bertaux speculated that Germans experienced time differently from the French, who were able to perceive the movement from past to future as a “regular succession,” while Germans tended to confuse future and past. This temporal confusion produced “brilliant connections, resounding prophecies (Spengler, etc.),” but stemmed from pathologies at once linguistic—the German language’s lack of a future tense—and historical: Germans “don’t have the sense of the slow, long, patient evolution that forms a bourgeois people.” Among these pathologies’ by-products, Bertaux claimed, were Protestantism and, relatedly, the need for “one book that says everything”—responsible, in his view, for the commercial success of works like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924; or, we could add, Decline), and for making “books cost so much: it suffices to buy one good one and one finds everything in it.”Footnote 18
Thus a group of French intellectuals seemingly likely to take an interest in Spengler—cosmopolitan socialists with ties to the literary world, whose interest in German culture coincided with advocacy of European peace and unity in the wake of World War I—were just as likely to ignore or dismiss him, motivated at once by political differences and cultural bias. Nevertheless, it was a figure with close ties to this milieu—Gaston Gallimard, for whom Bertaux acted as a kind of literary scout—who took the initiative to publish a French translation of Decline.Footnote 19 This effort seems to date to late 1924, when Gallimard wrote to Spengler’s German publisher, Oskar Beck, inquiring about translation rights.Footnote 20 A few months later, he wrote to Amann—the translator of multiple Gallimard publications—requesting Spengler’s contact information and copies of his work and announcing, “I would be happy to make him known to the French public.”Footnote 21
For reasons that are unclear, the project does not seem to have progressed until Gallimard came into contact with Mohand Tazerout in 1930—seemingly through their mutual acquaintance, the Polish-born art critic Waldemar-Georges, who published an excerpt of Tazerout’s translation-in-progress in the journal he edited, Formes.Footnote 22 Tazerout’s initial interest in Spengler may have been sparked by André Fauconnet, the author of the first book-length study in French of the German philosopher and a professor at the Faculté des lettres at Poitiers, where Tazerout studied in 1924.Footnote 23 (Jean-Richard Bloch was also a professor at Poitiers, and a friend of Fauconnet’s.)Footnote 24 It is also possible that Fauconnet encouraged Tazerout to pursue a doctoral thesis on Spengler and German sociology, leading Tazerout to seek Spengler out in person and perhaps inspiring his translation work.Footnote 25
A missionary zeal animates much of Tazerout’s correspondence with Gallimard and the book’s eventual editor, André Malraux. In a letter of 30 January 1930, after outlining the conditions of what he claimed was a preferential deal offered by Spengler, “who I know very well,” to Tazerout alone—better, even, than the one given to “Mr. Mussolini himself” to publish the book in Italy—he noted that the two other Parisian houses he had approached balked at the price at which Spengler’s German publishers insisted the book be sold. Behind this financial scruple lay, Tazerout suggested, unease at “the novelty of the Spenglerian doctrine.” For his part, Tazerout was convinced of the book’s immense importance: “For me, there is no doubt that the Decline of the West is the inexhaustible source of all postwar German historical, sociological, philosophical, aesthetic, and scientific thought.” This was the case, he maintained, despite the negative critical attention the book had received, of which he cited two examples by French authors: the Action française-affiliated Henri Massis’s Défense de l’occident (1927) and Ernest Seillière’s Les pangermanistes d’après guerre (1924).Footnote 26 In a letter to Malraux, Tazerout claimed that the bad press that Decline had received in Germany had not prevented the book from “exercising a global influence that no book of this type has exercised since Nietzsche.”Footnote 27
Like Gallimard, Malraux was aware of and interested in Decline well before Tazerout arrived on the scene. He could have learned of Spengler’s work from his German-speaking wife Clara (née Goldschmidt), who brought a copy of Decline back from a trip to Berlin in 1921 or 1922, or from reading the Gallimard-published Nouvelle revue française (NRF). Many of Malraux’s works bear the influence of Decline, starting with La tentation de l’occident (1926): an epistolary novel in which French and Chinese correspondents, having traveled in each other’s countries of origin, share their observations about the two cultures, understood in a Spenglerian manner as self-contained and incommensurable. In a late-in-life interview, Malraux referred to Decline as “one of the century’s most considerable books.”Footnote 28
To some extent, La tentation, which Tazerout praised in his letters to Malraux, can be read as a rebuke to Massis, whose Défense Malraux reviewed for the NRF.Footnote 29 In the book, Massis warned of what he saw as “the Asiatic peril” threatening Western values (i.e., “personality, unity, stability, authority, continuity,” and, above all, the notion of an “abstract, universal man”).Footnote 30 He traced this putative threat’s origins to World War I, which, he wrote, destroyed “European unity” and paved the way for an “awakening of Asian and African peoples, turned by Bolshevism against Western civilization.”Footnote 31 In Massis’s view, Germany’s defeat in the war had equally turned its “spirit, [which] perpetually hesitates between Asiatic mysticism and Latinity,” definitively toward the East. He saw Spengler’s work, which repudiated “the classical idea of man,” as symptomatic of this shift.Footnote 32
Malraux—who, as a young man, founded a newspaper in colonial Indochina promoting “Franco-Annamite rapprochement” and critical of the colonial administration—voiced a similarly antihumanist sentiment through his Chinese protagonist Ling in La tentation: “For you [i.e., the West], absolute reality was God, then man; but man is dead, after God, and you anxiously seek someone to whom you will be able to entrust his strange heritage.”Footnote 33 Responding to Massis’s claim that “Asia” had turned the West’s ideas against it in the form of a budding anticolonial nationalism, Malraux agreed that Western imperialism was responsible for the destruction of “traditional authority” and “spiritual values” in the East, but argued that the “Asiatic” threat to the West was much less grave than the West’s to its Asian colonies. Between “the English government and the Indian people,” wrote Malraux, “it is perhaps not the English government that needs to be defended.”Footnote 34
Both Massis and Seillière attempted to buttress their arguments with references to rebellion in the colonial Maghreb: “the revolt of a Berber rogui” first alerted the French public to the emerging Asiatic threat, according to Massis,Footnote 35 while Seillière pointed to “the adventure of a certain marabout from southern Algeria” as evidence that what he described as the underlying “mysticism” of German nationalist ideology was dangerous and deceptive.Footnote 36 For both authors, that is, Spengler and rebellious colonial subjects could be associated with threats to French universalism, embodied either by the Catholic Church or by the Republic. The Algerian-born Tazerout, however, distanced himself from Spengler’s politics while defending the merits of Decline, whose cultural relativism and declensionist outlook could be seen as incompatible with the nationalism Spengler espoused in his more overtly political works.Footnote 37 In the preface to his translation, Tazerout wrote that, having thoroughly studied Spengler’s thought, he was “sincerely converted to that which is necessary and scientific in his doctrine,” but not to Spengler’s “politics and subjective preferences, which we do not share.”Footnote 38
Without necessarily sharing Massis’s right-wing Catholic perspective, Spengler’s French critics were eager to call attention to his underlying German chauvinism, which Seillière described as “aesthetico-racial mysticism.”Footnote 39 In addition to rejecting Spengler’s politics, French readers balked at his grandiose claims and avowedly unscientific methods. Reviewing Fauconnet’s book in Europe, for example, the philosopher Félicien Challaye praised the work’s careful exposition of Spengler’s thought, particularly since Fauconnet had avoided “hiding its weaknesses. It seems to me that Spengler does not justify any of his essential theses, neither his supposed law of cultural evolution, nor his application of it to the decline of the West.” For Challaye, this doctrine was not only erroneous but dangerous; he approvingly cited Thomas Mann’s assessment of “Spenglerism” as “false, pretentious and shameless to the extreme limits of humanity.”Footnote 40 In a review of the same work, the Annales cofounder Lucien Febvre lamented that Fauconnet had written such a sober account of Spengler’s ideas, which Febvre described as a “mixture of dogmatically pronounced truisms and laborious paradoxes that offend our sense of restraint” and behind which he detected “hatred” of “France and the French.”Footnote 41 In a later essay comparing Spengler to the British philosopher of history Arnold Toynbee, Febvre described Spengler’s readers as “future faithful Nazis.”Footnote 42
An earlier, less polemical example of Febvre’s engagement with Spengler shows the French historian, in a meeting of Henri Berr’s proto-Annales Centre international de synthèse, agreeing to dedicate further study to the “project for a historical atlas” presented by Spengler in 1925 at the Munich Congress of Orientalists.Footnote 43 Along with the political danger Febvre would see in Spengler’s work amid the rise of Nazism, we can thus detect hints of a shared intellectual interest in merging history with geography. As for Fauconnet, whom Febvre would chastise for treating Spengler as a serious thinker, epistolary evidence reveals considerable intellectual and personal sympathies for the German philosopher. In a letter of 3 March 1927, responding to Spengler’s “words of thanks and recognition” for his work, Fauconnet compared himself to “an electrical transformer which converts too powerful a current [i.e., Decline] to household use [Fauconnet’s own vulgarization],” apologized for incorrectly describing Spengler as a member of the Nazi Party, and provided a fragment of autobiography. Born in 1881, with a twenty-four-year-old daughter and an “absent wife,” Fauconnet lived in an “old country house” in Poitiers, “the garden of which is enclosed by a genuine Roman wall”; “I read your marvellous book on a high terrace which looks out over the world-famous old town.” However, “life here is not inspiring; the modern town: a small provincial hole, any quantity of specialist and alas daily-bread students, but no fellow workers … What wonder that your letter, dear master, was a great ‘joy’ to me. Its magic restores what fashion had taken away.”Footnote 44
From this panorama of Spengler’s early French reception, I now turn to the figure whose translation of Decline would make Spengler legible to French readers: Fauconnet’s former student, Mohand Tazerout. In a productive life of writing and teaching, Tazerout would prove himself more than worthy of being considered a “fellow worker” to someone like Fauconnet. Nevertheless, I will argue, the idiosyncratic use he made of Spengler’s ideas was symptomatic of the insider–outsider status that marked his life and work. On one level, Tazerout was a consummate Frenchman: naturalized shortly before his service in World War I, he spent a long career in that civilizing institution par excellence, the national education system. Yet a variety of factors—his Algerian origins, war wounds that prevented him from completing his education, and perhaps a certain mental intransigence—conspired to keep him on the margins of French intellectual life.
Mohand Tazerout: translating Western decline
Born in 1893 in the village of Aït Ouchen in Algeria’s mountainous Kabylia region, Mohand Tazerout profited—and suffered—from the French prejudice whereby Algerian Berbers were closer to European culture and thus more assimilable or civilizable than Arabs.Footnote 45 After learning French early in life alongside his traditional Quranic education, he was sent to the École normale de Bouzaréah, near Algiers, to be trained as a teacher.Footnote 46 Refusing the role of mediator between indigenous and French culture in which this training cast him,Footnote 47 Tazerout joined the French Army at the beginning of 1914, subsequently renouncing his Muslim “personal status” in order to become a French citizen.Footnote 48 According to popular legend, he spent the several months between his French naturalization and the outbreak of World War I traveling to Russia, China, and Persia, among other destinations, becoming conversant in these countries’ languages and cultures.Footnote 49Finding this story implausible, Alain Messaoudi has speculated that Tazerout could have instead spent these months assisting the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, who led an Algerian expedition between 1912 and 1914 and published a lengthy study of Kabyle folklore, and whose theory of “cultural morphology” influenced Spengler.Footnote 50
Like those of Jean-Richard Bloch, Pierre Viénot, and their ilk, Tazerout’s life was profoundly shaped by his experience as a soldier in World War I. Mobilized in the first regiment of Algerian tirailleurs for less than a month at the war’s outset, he was struck in the chest by machine gun bullets and captured on the first day of the Battle of Charleroi, in Châtelet, Belgium.Footnote 51 The next two years of his life, spent in captivity (first in Germany, then Switzerland, where he was sent as part of a projected prisoner exchange), were decisive: the imprisoned Tazerout studied German and met his future wife, Angèle Foucher, a schoolteacher in La Roche-sur-Yon, who first entered into correspondence with him as a “war godmother” (marraine de guerre).Footnote 52 After the war, in addition to marrying and starting a family, Tazerout continued his education in France, earning an undergraduate degree in German at the University of Bordeaux, then a diplôme d’études supérieurs at the University of Poitiers. He prepared for the agrégation in German at the University of Strasbourg, but his war injuries prevented him from sitting for the oral exam. Nor would he complete a projected doctoral thesis on Spengler and post-World War I German sociology, which was to be directed by Célestin Bouglé (an influential researcher known for his collaborations with Émile Durkheim).Footnote 53 A teacher in France’s national education system for several decades, Tazerout was unable to work in Paris due to his lack of an agrégation—a rule he lobbied the Popular Front education minister Jean Zay to have changed, apparently unsuccessfully—and spent the bulk of his career in provincial lycées.Footnote 54
Tazerout was a prolific author whose interest in German social thought and promotion of Franco-German reconciliation in the wake of World War I echoed the preoccupations of the cosmopolitan socialists discussed above.Footnote 55 His background and experience led him, however, to occupy a professional niche situated just outside the institutional strongholds of French literary and intellectual prestige. His earliest publications appeared in the Revue internationale de sociologie (RIS) under the editorship of Gaston Richard: the chair of sociology at Bordeaux (Tazerout’s alma mater) and a dissident from the Durkheimian school.Footnote 56In one of the many book reviews he contributed to the journal, Tazerout gave an unfavorable notice to La sociologie allemande contemporaine (1935), by Raymond Aron: a fellow enthusiast of Weimar German social thought whose trajectory would diverge widely from Tazerout’s, leading from the ENS to a storied career in academia and journalism. Tazerout’s review almost seems to foretell this divergence. Initially, he wrote of Aron’s book, “we were a bit dazzled by the expository talent that the author learned at the École normale supérieure in Paris.” He went on, however, to take Aron to task for neglecting Spengler and Marx and overvaluing the work of Max Weber.Footnote 57
Tazerout took the metaphysical grounding of Spengler’s philosophy—the notion of “a logic of destiny, immanent to the history of our planet,” according to which historical cultures inevitably fell into decadence upon developing into civilizations—to be his most valuable contribution, unjustly ignored by critics.Footnote 58 Reviewing Tazerout’s L’État de demain (1936) in the RIS, Richard’s successor as editor, Émile Lasbax, argued that the policy prescriptions Tazerout offered in the book rested on a similarly metaphysical foundation.Footnote 59 Tazerout’s analysis proceeded from a definition of property as humanity’s “taking nature into possession.”Footnote 60 The basic political question, he claimed, was to whom property belonged: a question that would, in practice, be decided legally.Footnote 61 Law, wrote Tazerout, was “necessarily the work of men” who would impose “their law on all, always a posteriori and following a political act incumbent only on them.”Footnote 62 The basic political actor was the party; the state was a “system of forces” defined by the actions of parties and the legal regulations that validated or enabled them.Footnote 63 A successful democracy, in Tazerout’s view, would harmonize the state’s competing partisan interests;Footnote 64 in contrast to many of his contemporaries, he saw not parliamentary government but conflicts between the legislative and executive branches as responsible for the political instability that shook France in the 1930s.Footnote 65 His proposed solutions included reining in executive power, reorganizing parliament, and shortening the byzantine Journal officiel that reported on its activities (“an unreadable organ, unknown to citizens”) to a slim six pages.Footnote 66
Spengler’s influence may be faintly detectable in Tazerout’s work on the French state, but L’État de demain equally brings to mind the thought and politics of Jean-Richard Bloch and other prewar vitalists, readers of Henri Bergson and Georges Sorel. For Tazerout, society was “the eternal Revolution,” politics a means of directing or “canalizing” society’s revolutionary course.Footnote 67 The primordial political act of appropriating nature, in Tazerout’s account, might bring to mind Bergson’s élan vital.Footnote 68 Just as Bergson saw life as channeling itself into evolutionary dead ends, Tazerout understood law as a means of both harnessing and calming popular political energy. Like the earlier generation of vitalists, Tazerout placed his political hopes on the rebirth of the French state in the form of a more perfect—or simply less dysfunctional—democracy. He offered harsh criticism of the reigning “pseudo-democracies” that, in his view, unjustly ceded popular sovereignty to either “a single man” (in the case of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy), “a single party” (the Soviet Union), or “parties stripped of their own sovereignty by their ministers” (France, Britain, and the United States).Footnote 69
Another metaphysical principle of Spengler’s whose importance Tazerout stressed was that in the wake of cultural exhaustion, human beings stood once again—as they had before culture’s emergence—on the side of nature. Uncultivated, ahistorical humanity was embodied, in Spengler’s account, by the fellah (Arabic for “peasant”: a reference to Egyptian peasants after the fall of Rome).Footnote 70 As Tazerout summarized in his translator’s introduction to the second volume of Decline, “After the ruin of Thebes, Babylon or Rome, soon to be that of London, Paris, Berlin, and New York, the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, ‘ancient,’ or Western peasant home remains and will always remain what it was and has everywhere been: that of the ‘fellah’; that is, of the absolute man, who is neither educated, civilized, nor primitive.” He went on to claim that the fellah could not be understood “through a scientific theory of history or a philosophy of history.”Footnote 71In some ways, this description resonates with what Omnia El Shakry calls the “ethnographic and romantic description of the [Egyptian] peasantry” favored by orientalists and Ottoman elites in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth.Footnote 72 For such figures, Egypt’s fellahin were frozen in time (as Tazerout’s gloss of Spengler also suggested), but not because they lacked culture; rather, they represented a cultural type specifically characterized by indolence, childishness, and moral degeneracy.Footnote 73 Elsewhere in the literature surveyed by El Shakry, different value judgments attach themselves to similar descriptions: the peasantry as susceptible to “rehabilitation and education,” or even as the “‘true sons’ of Egypt.”Footnote 74
Tazerout’s own estimation, at this stage of his life and career, of the fellah’s moral character is difficult to assess. As a philosophical assumption rather than a concrete historical referent, Spengler’s fellah could be seen as standing aloof from the thorny world of colonial politics; hence, perhaps, the concept’s appeal for Tazerout. Yet for both Tazerout and Spengler, politics and the philosophy of history tended to overlap. In later writings, Tazerout would apply his understanding of Spenglerian metaphysics—whereby culture sprang haphazardly from the ground on which “absolute” humanity stood, only to recede into oblivion after running its historical course—to the most salient military conflicts and geopolitical tensions of the twentieth century. This, however, was precisely where his views diverged most dramatically from Spengler’s: the latter hoped that Germany would become the global hegemon of a future defined by “Caesarism,” while Tazerout insisted that, from cultural decline and the carnage of two world wars, a system of peaceful coexistence between rival powers could emerge.Footnote 75
Like Spengler’s, Tazerout’s thinking was at once universalist and partisan. Toward the end of his voluminous World War II-era survey of German social thought, Les éducateurs sociaux de l’Allemagne moderne, he wrote that this critical study of “German social education” revealed “a philosophy of catastrophe or of eternal war” seemingly at odds with “our [French] logic of peace.”Footnote 76 He went on, however, to suggest that the dichotomy between French and German national characters was a false one. This opposition, he argued, obscured a crucial “third factor”: “oriental rationalism, that of Al Farabi and Avicenna, Spinoza and Marx.” In Tazerout’s view, the former two figures had successfully integrated “Greek polytheism” (Aristotelian philosophy) with “medieval monotheism” (Islam). The rationalism they represented had subsequently become “European philosophical monism” in the hands of the “deracinated Jews” Marx and Spinoza, whose “noble” attempts at rationalist synthesis Tazerout depicted as instructive failures.Footnote 77
Tazerout argued that a “new form of rationalism” could transcend, and thereby dissolve, the nationalist enmities and bloodthirsty doctrines of racial purity that brought unthinkable destruction to the world in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote 78 Though he saw “oriental rationalism” as irreducible to any single culture or nationality, he suggested that precisely because of its “complacency” toward and tendency to imitate its bellicose German neighbor, France—“protecting nation par excellence of Muslim rationalism”—might be “capable of neglecting racial difference and the idolatrous cult of racial superiority” that obsessed German ideologues and politicians, including Spengler. If his introduction to Decline already stressed his distaste for Spengler’s politics, Tazerout’s own work can be read as directly challenging Spengler’s claims in explicitly political works like The Hour of Decision (1934), which warned of a rising tide of mass politics combining working-class agitation and the challenge posed by the world’s “colored peoples” to European imperialism or “Caesarism.”Footnote 79
It is tempting to connect Tazerout’s dualist philosophy, combining universalist humanism with historico-cultural relativism, to his own biography—in particular, his successive identifications with French, then North African or Algerian, culture. A tension between his two nationalities is already evident in L’État de demain, whose policy proposals include an appeal to French authorities to allow the proto-nationalist Young Algerians to participate in colonial Algeria’s government.Footnote 80 In the 1950s, galvanized by the events in Morocco that led to the forced exile of Sultan Mohammed V, Tazerout would make what Sadek Sellam has characterized as a turn from “assimilation to radical anti-colonialism.”Footnote 81 Published at the height of the Algerian War, Tazerout’s Histoire politique de l’Afrique du nord (1961), for example, combines a scathing assessment of Charles de Gaulle’s handling of the conflict with a full-throated call for Algerian independence, in addition to developing a narrative of Algerian history designed to debunk colonial myths.Footnote 82
Politically and intellectually, Tazerout’s trajectory from political liberalism and sympathy for French values to a more self-consciously radical stance echoes those of North African politicians and intellectuals like the nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas or the writer Mohamed Sahli, a friend of Tazerout’s who edited and contributed to nationalist journals and wrote his own politicized history of the Maghreb.Footnote 83 The following, concluding section situates Tazerout alongside North African authors from his own and the succeeding generation who were similarly drawn to the philosophy of history and themes of civilizational decline. These authors did not, however, treat Spengler as a privileged interlocutor, and their critiques of orientalist scholarship more closely resemble later postcolonial theory than anything to be found in Tazerout’s corpus.
Tazerout, Spengler, and North African critiques of orientalism
Tazerout’s discussion of “oriental rationalism” as a hidden “third factor” in vexed Franco-German relations includes a cryptic, passing swipe at the thinker responsible, in his view, for the contempt in which “historians of philosophy” had held “oriental” thought since at least the nineteenth century: the French philologist Ernest Renan.Footnote 84 Tazerout seems to have in mind the famous 1883 lecture in which Renan posited an antithesis between “Islam and science,” arguing that Averroes and other Golden Age Islamic philosophers had nothing to do with Islam as it continued to develop during the “second age,” beginning around the twelfth century, when it “fell into the hands of the Tartar and Berber races, dull and brutal races devoid of culture [esprit].”Footnote 85 In an equally famous reply to Renan, the Islamic modernist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani agreed that Islamic civilization had fallen into decadence but attributed this fact not to inherent cultural deficiencies but to an eternal conflict “between dogma and free investigation, between religion and philosophy.” If Christian civilization had managed to “advance rapidly on the road of science and progress, whereas Muslim society has not yet freed itself from the tutelage of religion,” this should not be taken to mean that Muslims everywhere were “condemned to live in barbarism and ignorance.”Footnote 86 Along with the other political and intellectual figures comprising the nineteenth-century nahda (“awakening”), al-Afghani promoted a uniquely Islamic vision of progress and enlightenment.
In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said would give Renan a central role in the development of what he portrayed as a science of European superiority, deeply implicated in the hyperactive imperialism that defined the late nineteenth century. Notwithstanding Tazerout’s disapproving reference to Renan, a broader critique of orientalism is difficult to discern in his work. Rather, his own understanding of Islamic culture and history—as discussed, for example, in Au congrès des civilisés, Tazerout’s attempt at Spenglerian universal history—was strongly influenced by orientalist scholarship.Footnote 87 In 1949, he published a translation of the German orientalist Carl Brockelmann’s Geschichte der Islamischen Völker und Staaten (History of Islamic Peoples and States) (1939), writing in his preface that he hoped it “could be read in France and the French Union”—the Fourth Republic’s attempt to integrate metropolitan France and its overseas empire into a single political entity—not only by scholars or professors but “also, and above all,” by the general public. Seemingly, then, Tazerout saw Brockelmann’s book—which he described as offering “a condensed summary” of “a long scholarly career” marked by the publication of multiple “great scientific works on the Orient”—as valuable both in correcting the biases of prejudiced French thinkers and in educating Muslims in colonial France eager to learn their own histories.Footnote 88
Arguably, the force and influence of Said’s critique have obscured the extent to which orientalist scholarship—particularly German orientalism, which Said deliberately excluded from his accountFootnote 89—either explicitly sought or implicitly functioned to upset rather than reinforce claims of Western cultural preeminence. Of Spengler in particular, Suzanne Marchand has suggested that his “Decline of the West would be … unthinkable without the radical historicization” of Western civilization “produced in large part by orientalist critiques.”Footnote 90 Tazerout undoubtedly absorbed these critiques, in part through the influence of Spengler. Equally, however, he lived through what Anouar Abdel-Malek described as a moment of crisis for orientalism, whose creative energy and intellectual prestige declined after World War I as European empires began to founder and social-scientific methods displaced linguistic or philological approaches. Abdel-Malek illustrates the further impact of decolonization and Third World solidarity on orientalist scholarship by quoting the Soviet official Anastas Mikoyan, who delivered an opening address to the International Congress of Orientalists in Moscow in 1960: “now, the peoples of the Orient create themselves their own science, elaborate their own history, their culture, their economy; in this way, the peoples of the Orient have been promoted from being the objects (matter) of history to the rank of creators.”Footnote 91
If the crisis of orientalism left only faint traces on Tazerout’s work, North African intellectuals sharing his (and Spengler’s) intellectual interest in the rise and fall of world-historical civilizations would develop vigorous critiques of orientalist thought. One such figure was Malek Bennabi (1905–73), a prolific Algerian essayist whose trajectory offers suggestive points of comparison to Tazerout’s. Like Tazerout, Bennabi was educated in both French and Islamic schools in Algeria before pursuing higher education in France, where he studied electrical engineering, encountered elements of the Algerian nationalist movement, and began his literary career.Footnote 92 To a greater extent, however, than even the later, apparently radicalized, Tazerout, Bennabi both identified with Arab culture and critically examined its complex and fraught relationship with the West. For example, in an essay on orientalism written in 1968, Bennabi distinguished between polemical or denigrating and “apologetic” or admiring orientalism, acknowledging the latter’s “salutary influence” and crediting it with “the conservation of the Muslim personality” in the face of European domination.Footnote 93 However, he went on to assert that “the cure has proved itself to be … more pernicious than beneficent.” Recalling “the splendours of its past” would not allow Islamic society to develop the “sense of efficiency” required for modern civilization building.Footnote 94
The problem of Algerian society’s “conditions of renaissance”—to cite the title of an important early work—would animate much of Bennabi’s intellectual output. In Les conditions de la rénaissance algérienne (1949), he credited al-Afghani with introducing the idea of an Islamic renaissance or awakening, echoed in the Algerian context by Abdel-Hamid Ben Badis, the founder of a group of religious teachers (ulama)—the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama (AOMA)—that would play a central role in the Algerian independence struggle. (Bennabi also claimed that Abd el-Krim, the leader of the Rif uprising in 1920s Morocco that terrified French reactionaries, had put to an end to the “era of the Arabo-Berber tribe” associated, in Bennabi’s mind, with North Africa’s long “slumber.”)Footnote 95 Part of his purpose in this work was polemical: Bennabi argued that a brief “period of renaissance” in Algeria, sparked by the AOMA’s activities, came to an end in 1936 (when the death of the Emir Khaled, a revered opponent of French rule, sparked debates within the nationalist movement about Algeria’s relationship with France).Footnote 96 In Bennabi’s view, the “current crisis” was characterized by “misrecognition or forgetting of the fundamental law of political phenomena.” In order to overcome French colonialism, he argued, the Algerian people must cease to be “colonizable” by fighting back against subjection.Footnote 97
Bennabi developed elaborate theories of culture and civilization, aspects of which bring to mind Spengler’s or Tazerout’s views. Like both of these thinkers, Bennabi was interested at once in universal history and a partisan cause (i.e., the regeneration and rebirth of the Algerian nation). He echoed Spengler’s quasi-biological conception of history: government was an “administrative organ,” the individual an “organic cell”; sociology was the “biology of social organisms.”Footnote 98 He also followed Spengler and Tazerout in seeing the fellah as humanity in its natural state, living “between decadences [and] halfway to an idea, a thought, an evolution.”Footnote 99 (This formulation would seem, however, to put Bennabi more in line with the politics of contemporaneous Arab nationalists than with the historical metaphysics borrowed by Tazerout from Spengler.)
The imagined blank slate of the peasant’s mind was an important element of Bennabi’s own cyclical theory of history, whereby the raw materials of civilization—“Man, Land, and Time”—formed a “bio-historical synthesis” under the catalyzing effects of new religious ideas (“the sensational revelation of a God, or the appearance of a myth”).Footnote 100 This accounted for civilization’s initial, “spiritual” phase, which was followed by a second, temporal or political phase marked by territorial expansion, the emergence of critical ideas, and the resurgence of primitive “psychological factors inferior to the soul and to reason.”Footnote 101 For Bennabi, the crossing of a civilization’s spiritual apex was already a passage into decline or decadence; however, he argued that a religion’s “bio-historical force [efficacité]” was “permanent” and could periodically be reactivated. In the Algerian context, he argued, the AOMA had already begun a “new baptism of the Muslim soul.”Footnote 102
Though Bennabi’s spiritual and political stages of civilization bring to mind Spengler’s broader distinction between culture and civilization, the German philosopher earns only a passing reference in Les conditions, where Bennabi briefly acknowledges his perceptive account of “Christian” civilization’s decline. (A more extensive discussion is given to Spengler’s compatriot Hermann von Keyserling, best known for a work thematically, if not methodologically, comparable to Decline: Travel Diary of a Philosopher, published in 1919.)Footnote 103 Differently from Tazerout, then, Bennabi attached no special importance to Spengler’s philosophy and peppered his writings with indications of cultural and political particularity that Tazerout largely avoided in his own work until the postwar period.
In his lecture on orientalism, Bennabi voiced his disapproval of “students” of Western orientalists who “sometimes disguise an insidious anti-Islamic work, clearly of colonialist inspiration, under progressive appearances, denying to Islam any civilisational value and even attributing to it the present stagnation of the Muslim world.” These students included a “young Moroccan”—Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933)—“who has recently published a book built on a false syllogism, under the title, The Contemporary Arab Ideology, with a preface by Maxime Rodinson,” one of the “apologetic” orientalists against whose influence Bennabi warned.Footnote 104 Far from being an apology for apologetic orientalism, Laroui’s L’idéologie arabe contemporaine (1967) is a polemical survey of modern Arab thought inspired, Laroui wrote, by the postcolonial Moroccan elite’s “political weakness” and “cultural sterility.”Footnote 105 Laroui lacked Bennabi’s reverence for Islamic modernism, arguing that Arab thinkers held themselves and their societies back by taking “a surpassed form of the West” as their developmental model. Ironically, however, the “homology between Arab and Western ideologies” that Laroui identified in the book extended to himself. To consider this homology “as the reflection of the analyst’s subjective choice” was, he wrote, to transform his essay into “an autobiography.”Footnote 106 He went on to write, however, that the book was in fact “a call to critical consciousness.” In his view, this meant abandoning cultural particularism and placing the Arab world’s historical evolution in a universalist frame.Footnote 107
In other words, Laroui lamented what he saw as the tendency common to Western orientalists and “Arab ideologues” of seeing each other through the distorting lens of ethnocentrism, ignoring the fact of historical unevenness and failing to accept what the young Laroui saw as an objectively valid Hegelian–Marxist historicism. Laroui’s critics, including Bennabi, have sometimes interpreted his critique of “Arab ideology”—self-consciously modeled on Marx’s critique of “the German ideology”—as Eurocentric or anti-Islamic.Footnote 108 Laroui can equally be seen as an early critic of orientalism, albeit one differently oriented to this complex body of thought than most of the postcolonial era’s polemical anti-orientalists. Bennabi was not wrong to characterize Laroui as the student of orientalists, though this was virtually unavoidable for a student of Arab history in 1960s France.Footnote 109 One of Laroui’s most trenchant critiques of orientalist scholarship targeted the German anthropologist Gustave von Grunebaum, who helped Laroui secure a visiting professorship at UCLA shortly after the publication of Laroui’s first book.Footnote 110 Like Tazerout, then, Laroui both profited from and chafed under the influence of eastward-gazing European thinkers.
Where is Spengler in the critique of orientalism from North Africa? There is some evidence that a version of the culture/civilization dichotomy worked its way into postcolonial analyses of the historical conflict between East and West. In Europe and Islam (1978), for example, the Tunisian historian Hichem Djaït both praised Spengler’s cultural pluralism and historical relativism and developed a distinction between “modernity” and “culture,” with the former standing for the West and the latter for the Muslim world. In Djaït’s view, like Spenglerian civilization, modernity exhausted culture. The cultural decadence he saw as afflicting the West might well, he feared, spread to the Muslim world, where “the temptation of technological modernization” had accompanied a “rejection of colonial domination” and consequent reintegration “into contemporary historicity.” To avoid this, it was “crucial to preserve other forms of value: an identity, a culture, a civilization.”Footnote 111 In other words, Islamic culture could remain vital only by resisting the values and institutions imposed by the West.
Yet just as Spengler’s influence ultimately led Tazerout to develop arguments and theories far removed from the former’s, we can question the significance of Djaït’s apparent Spenglerian inheritance. It seems clear enough that the shifting sands of postwar and postcolonial history drew North African intellectuals away from the complex of issues that created genuine synergy between Spengler and any number of anticolonial thinkers and political figures. One powerful index of this, I have argued, was Tazerout’s willingness to embrace Spengler’s philosophy—an arcane doctrine irreducible to a simple clash-of-civilizations narrative, or to the reactionary beliefs that Tazerout was willing to look past.
Acknowledgments
This article stems from a chapter of my doctoral dissertation, defended at the University of Texas at Austin in 2023. For their constructive feedback and kind words of encouragement, I am most grateful to the members of my dissertation committee: Tracie Matysik, Benjamin Brower, Judith Coffin, Yoav Di-Capua, and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. I would also like to thank the members of the French Empire Workshop and the New York Area French History Group, where I presented early drafts of the chapter/article, and the editors and anonymous reviewers of Modern Intellectual History, who were instrumental in helping the article reach its final form.
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