Populism

Author(s): Felix Walter

Source: PMLA , Mar., 1934, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Mar., 1934), pp. 356-364
Published by: Modern Language Association

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 XIX

POPULISM

NEEDLESS to say, it is not with an American agrarian revolt of the

end of last century, nor with the fortunes of a German political
party that this paper is concerned, but rather with that fruitful and
significant grouping of a score or more of contemporary French novelists
under the banner of a common conception of the novel, its aims and ap-
propriate media. If the name "Populism" is misleading because of cer-
tain political implications, one can at least be thankful that Andre
Therive and Leon Lemonnier in the consultations that preceded the
launching of the new school a little over three years ago rejected labels
such as "humilism" and "demotism" which might have proved even
more puzzling.
What is Populism? There have been a variety of definitions: epigram-
matic with Professor W. L. Schwartz's "Populism is the antonym of
snobbisme"' humorous with Frederic Lefevre who calls it "une machine
de guerre contre . . . le nombrilisme litteraire,"2 or somewhat more
elaborate in the critical work of Leon Lemonnier, the chief theoretician
of the school. He writes:3

Populism is a reaction founded on the realistic tradition and directed against the
literature of analysis. It is a call to an art based on observation and sincerity. It
entails sympathy for the chosen subject-matter and in particular sympathy for
the people.... It designates on the one hand any work dealing with the common
people, whatever its purpose may be, and on the other hand any book which is
a continuation of the realistic tradition and which reacts against preciosity in
thought or style.... Populism is a return to reason.

For the moment these definitions suffice to indicate in a general way some
of the aims both positive and negative of the new school. But before em-
barking on a more detailed discussion of the theory of Populism, a his-
tory of its founding, or an estimate of its position and the contribution of
its members to the general body of French literature, I feel bound to
sketch the usual chapter of origins. Not for pedantic reasons, but be-

1 A Literary Portrait of M. Andre Therive, French Review (March, 1932).-An excellent

short study of the movement as a whole was contributed by Professor Schwartz to the May,
1931, number of the same review. As far as I am aware the only other academic treatment
that the subject has received on this continent is to be found in the lectures delivered re-
cently at the University of Michigan by M. Jean E. Ehrhard on Le Roman fran ais depuis
Marcel Proust (Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique).
2 Leon Lemonnier, Populisme, Interview au microphone, p. 115.
' Op. cit., pp. 127-128, 193, 199.

356

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 Felix Walter 357

cause Populism except as a part of a traditional stream has no real mean-

ing. It started as a neo-realism or neo-naturalism, and it is as such that
I should like to approach it.
Thanks to the hatreds and prejudices engendered by the- politico-
religious conflicts of the end of last century that realistic revival in liter-
ature which crystallized consciously into a school with a definite body
of doctrine under the name of Naturalism has been completely mis-
represented by literary historians almost to the present day. After being
vilified and distorted in its own time by a Brunetiere or a Faguet,
Naturalism was represented by the writers of subsequent manuels as a
mere episode exercising no real influence on the evolution of the French
novel. Rising seemingly out of thin air in 1880 with the publication of
the Soirees de Medan, it was supposed to have perished miserably from
the death-blow of the Manifeste des Cinq in 1887. For years the telegram
which Paul Alexis dispatched to Jules Huret, "Naturalism not dead,
letter follows," was regarded as a pathetic joke. Until the last of the
Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards had either died or ceased to count this
absurd underestimation of Naturalism could not be corrected. Only
today, in the comparatively recent manuels of a Rene Lalou or an Andre
Billy can one find an adjusted presentation of the facts.
The Alexis telegram was not a joke; it was a prophecy. It would be
possible to show that at any given moment since 1891 there have been at
least a dozen French novelists of repute writing in the Naturalist tradi-
tion. Maurice LeBlond has shown this as well as anyone in his Survivance
du Naturalisme.4 The line of filiation runs clear through forty years.
Tendencies may change but the technique does not, whether in the social
novels of the later Zola or in the sentimental ones of the Naturalistes of
the type of Bubu de Montparnasse. Unanisme in the first decade of the
new century, though more particularly concerned with poetry, was also
to strengthen the Zola tradition in the novel and today, a quarter of a
century after the dissolution of the A bbaye, it is not altogether surprising
to see the Prix Populiste awarded to the most recent of the novels of
Jules Romains.5 It was perhaps in the years immediately before the war
that the Naturalist tradition was least in fashion and exerted least influ-
ence. But after 1919 and especially after the exciting discovery of
Proust had ceased to agitate the new generation, the tradition revives
once again. It is obviously present in the early war novels of Barbusse
and Dorgeles, which hark back across twenty-five years to the so-called
anti-militarist novels of Descaves and his associates, the recorders of
camp and barrack-room life. The industrial novels of Pierre Hamp and
4 In Le Naturalisme et les Soirges de Mtdan (1930).
' Le 6 Octobre and Crime de Quinette.

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 358 Populism

the peasant novels of C. F. Ramuz begin to attract attention. So

much so that in February, 1924, a writer in the Mercure de France sums
up the current trend by saying: "There is no doubt about it, the new
writers are going back purely and simply to the old Naturalist formula
of Zola."6
1924 is an important date in other respects. It marks a decided up-
turn in the chart-line of the Naturalist tradition. 1924 is the year of the
Surrealiste manifestoes, and Surrecalisme stripped of its symbolist meta-
physics is largely a splitting-up and formalizing of the old Naturalist
"document," as Cubism was a formalizing of objective painting, a
splitting-up of reality such as one can observe in the slow-motion pic-
ture. It was in 1924 that Emmanuel Berl published his Mort de la pensee
bourgeoise, a semi-political attack on the literature of snobbery and
artificiality. In this year too the revision begins before the bar of public
opinion of the literary reputation of Zola and his associates. Gustave
Guiches and Lucien Descaves, the last two who had not already done so,
make their amende honorable in public for the part they had played in the
Manifeste des Cinq. More important than this mere gesture, however, is
the beginning of the serious, objective study of Naturalism about this
time: the exhaustive works of P. Martino, Leon Deffoux and Emile
Zavie, of Matthew Josephson on this continent and, quite recently in
France, of Henri Barbusse.7
It is in 1924, moreover, that one of the future co-founders of Populism
begins to show definite signs of his new orientation. Andre Therive, al-
ready of some repute as a grammarian and a novelist, joined the Huys-
mans-Club that year and began to devote more and more attention to
the theory both of realism and of the novel. He championed Herman and
Duhamel, wrote on various aspects of Zola and, in 1927, began an
abortive crusade on behalf of what he called "social Naturalism."
Comoedia published his Plaidoyer pour le naturalisme in May of that
year. A month previously he had written enthusiastic reviews of Leon
Lemonnier's La Femme sans pecheI, a novel of simple working-people
studied against the background of the mean streets and impasses of the
l8ieme arrondissement. It was not until June, 1929, that Therive and
Lemonnier actually met. After that the plan to set up a loose, informal
federation of writers holding roughly similar views on the state and
future possibilities of the novel rapidly took shape. The inevitable mani-
festo appeared, though before it was intended that it should,-in L'Oeuvre

8 Mme. Rachilde in her review of the Genitrix of Frangois Mauriac.

I P. Martino, Le Naturalisme franfais (1923); Deffoux & Zavie, Le Groupe de Mtdan
LUon Deffoux, Le Naturalisme (1929); Matthew Josephson, Zola and his Time (1928)
Henri Barbusse, Zola (1932).

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 Felix Walter 359

on the twenty-seventh of August. The year from that date until the
autumn of 1930 roughly embraces the polemical phase of the new school.
Therive had by this time been appointed to succeed Paul Souday as
literary critic of the Temps. Lemonnier wrote explanatory articles in the
Grande Revue and in the Mercure de France and even engaged in contro-
versy over the radio in defense of Populism. The critical offensive of
these two was strengthened by the collaboration of Deffoux and of
Louis-Jean Finot, who already two years previously in the preface to his
novel, L'Allumeuse, had spoken of his horror of the literature of snob-
bery, of his liking for the simplicity of the common people and for un-
pretentious sincerity. Such phrases remind one irresistibly of that other
prophetic preface, the one which the brothers de Goncourt set at the
beginning of their Germinie Lacerteux and which heralded the onslaught
of Naturalism ...
Le public aime les romans faux, ce roman est un roman vrai. I1 aime les livres qui
font semblant d'aller dans le monde: ce livre vient de la rue . . . nous nous som-
mes demandes si ce qu'on appelle les basses classes n'avait pas droit au Roman.

It is worth noting that the manifestoes and critical proclamations of

the new school met with very little irritated opposition. A certain
amount of misunderstanding and controversy there was, but none of
that obstinate ferocity which greeted the literary claims of the Natural-
ists. Such a large proportion of the intelligent reading-public felt that
Populism as a definite literary spring-cleaning was long overdue and
were ready to accept it. They sensed in it the logical culmination of a
traditional current which had been growing in strength; they knew it was
neither a fad nor a publicity stunt. Also, no important political or re-
ligious preserves were endangered by the claims of Populism. What
political criticism did arise, came, much to the rather naive astonish-
ment of the Populists, from further to the Left.
Having sought to establish Populism as a traditional growth, it re-
mains to examine its essential doctrine and incidentally to show to what
extent it differs from the Naturalism of the 1880's. As Populism is so
largely a movement of protest it is convenient to begin by a consideration
of its negative aspects. Though the realistic novel of the common people
may have grown in favour during the past decade, the "fashionable"
novel of the post-war period with its eccentricities, its snobbery, its end-
less and intricate analysis, its geographic vagabondage has bulked much
larger. Barbusse has described the sort of thing I mean and I quote this
passage from his latest work not only because it is such a fine piece of
invective but also because it defines the absolute antithesis of Populism.
He writes:8
8 Henri Barbusse, Zola, pp. 290-291.

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 360 Populism

Cette litt6rature A la mode a

de salon, surimpressionisme de kodak et de stenographie, atmosphere de vitrine,
rebus et ironie, cas exceptionnels et pieces uniques, egoisme, quintessence, ab-
straction deracinee, pessimisme, reaction. 0 residus de Stendhal, caricatures de
Dostoievsky, psychologie de jesuites, philosophie de papier, chirurgie a coups
d'epingle, ignorance 6rudite, c6remonies funebres. Oeuvres en vogue, qui autant
que celles des ineptes amuseurs des treteaux du boulevard, suscitent le plus
outrageant des griefs: celui de manquer totalement d'interet.

Lemonnier has summed it up more definitely in another way by saying

that Populism is a reaction against the snobbery of Proust, the analytic
immoralism of Gide, the preciosity of Giraudoux.9 Not that the Popu-
lists underestimate the genius of these three writers, but they deplore the
effect of their doctrines and example on their less gifted imitators, the
Paul Morands, or, to descend to the lowest common denominator, the
Maurice Dekobras of the contemporary novel. The tramp novel of
Wagon-lit exoticism generally combines all the worst features of snob-
bery, analysis and preciosity. And, as Emmanuel Berl has said, "Quand
on a fait trois fois le tour du monde, la Californie vous etonne moins que
la foire du Trone."'0 Three quarters of a century ago Flaubert expressed
the same truism more succinctly with his "Yvetot vaut bien Constan-
tinople."
Populism is a reaction then against preciosity for which it would sub-
stitute "une trivialite de bon goftt,""l against snobbery: "L'Ecole popu-
liste n'a-t-elle pas l'ambition de tuer la litterature du 16eme arrondis-
sement, d'ailleurs mourante?"'2 It is a reaction against analysis, against
those who "pick their souls as other people pick their teeth,"'3 for the
Populists believe with the Naturalists that the novel like life is a syn-
thesis and that the proper place for unrelieved analysis is the psycho-
logical essay. This leads to a further elaboration of Populist doctrine, the
insistance on the novel for the novel's sake, on the belief that too many
poets and essayists and moralists are trying to write novels today. The
essence of this theory Lemonnier and Therive find set forth already in
Maupassant's preface to Pierre et Jean, though the latter would add to
this gospel some of the ideas contained in Conrad's preface to The Nigger
of the Narcissus.14 Paradoxically enough, perhaps, while insisting on the
integrity of the novel, the theoreticians of Populism reject the novel-

' From a letter to Professor W. L. Schwartz quoted in his article on Populism in the
French Review.
10 On an article on Populism in the Nouvelles Littraires.
S1 Lemonnier, Populisme, pp. 101-102.
12 Henri Clouard in the Revue Hebdomadaire (August 20, 1932).
IS Ibid., p.a135.
I' See in particular Th6rive's article on Lemonnier in his Galerie de ce Temps (1931).

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 Felix Walter 361

esque, just as the Naturalists in their reaction rejected plot in favour of

the "slice of life." The tranche de vie does not happen to be part of the
Populist vocabulary, but the direction and intention is similar.
This raises the question of the real relationship of Populism to Natu-
ralism. Which elements in both schools are more or less identical? In all
the negative reactions which have been mentioned, Populism is essen-
tially Naturalistic. It is Naturalistic also in its choice of subject-matter,
that focussing on the lives of the common people, whether workers or
petits bourgeois, from which it derives its name. "II faut peindre les
petites gens, les gens mediocres qui sont la masse de la societe et dont la
vie elle aussi compte des drames."'5 Finally Populism is naturalistic even
in its mysticism, its interest, or rather the interest of certain Populists,
in weird folk-cults and even in diabolism. Here the filiation stretches
back to Huysmans and indeed the author of A Rebours and of Les
Sceurs Vatard sometimes seems more an idol of the Populists than his
contemporary Zola. What Populism rejects in Naturalism is firstly the
pessimism it distilled from its simplified conception of scientific de-
terminism. A sort of Tolstoyan sympathy is a cardinal virtue in the eyes
of the Populists. It is not for nothing that acquaintance with the Rus-
sian novel intervened between Naturalism proper and its modern re-
vival. The Populist critics also reject the insistance on a scientific basis
for the novel which Zola stressed. Lemonnier carries his anti-scientific
divergence to some lengths in his attacks on Freud and Freudian ele-
ments in the modern novel. The attitude is not quite rational. The
scientific bias was probablv the weakest stone in the Naturalist edifice,
but after all it was perfectly natural for a novelist in the eighteen-
seventies to be influenced by the ideas of a Taine or a Claude Bernard
even if he distorted them. In the same way it is surely legitimate in the
nineteen-thirties for a novelist to make use of what is most easily as-
similated in Freud or Einstein. The fact that these scientific ideas, which
in fiction may become pseudo-scientific, may not stand the test of time,
seems beside the point.
Is there any other important factor in the doctrine of Populism? The
political factor is probably the most debatable problem remaining. The
Populists, Lemonnier especially, proclaim complete objectivity tem-
pered only by doctrinal sympathy in their art of the novel. On no ac-
count must the novelist take sides in the social and political questions of
the day. This sturdy art-for-artism, so easily comprehended in the
writer of the middle of last century, seems a little incongruous at the
present day. Indeed, this is the heaviest piece of excess baggage which

15 Lemonnier, Populisme, p. 102.

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 362 Populism

the Populists are attempting to carry with them from a dead past. I do
not dispute Lemonnier's claim that a writer of non-proletarian origin may
be perfectly competent to write about the common people, though in
parenthesis I would remark that, ceteris paribus, a proletarian writer,
Eugene Dabit, for instance, may make a more successful job of it. What
I seriously question is the possibility that a writer can continue to study
the common people and to write about them and their problems without
ultimately taking sides, unless he be completely anaesthetized. This
weak point in the Populist doctrine has naturally been taken full ad-
vantage of by the practitioners of a genuinely proletarian literature.
Barbusse makes fun of what he calls "this bourgeois literary doctrine of
the left centre."16 The Populists have been accused, not always without
justification, of "literary slumming"'7 and of "visiting the people as one
might visit the zoo on a Sunday afternoon to see the animals."'8
The acid test of Populism, however, is not the complete validity of its
theory, but the ultimate value of the fiction it stands sponsor to. Natu-
ralist theory was always rather wobbly; the Naturalist novel is an endur-
ing monument. The future historian of literature may regard Populism
in the same way. To discuss all the contemporary novelists who are con-
sidered as belonging to the school would be obviously impossible. The
original half-dozen who signed the manifesto have grown to more than
a score and as the Populist movement is purposely a loose association and
not a sect, no one author can be dissected as a guide to the technique and
mood of all the others. I shall content myself with the briefest descrip-
tion of three or four outstanding Populists.
Therive and Lemonnier, in spite of individual differences, can be con-
sidered together. Their novels adhere most closely to the tenets of Popu-
list doctrine, for the simple reason that they themselves forged that
doctrine. In both there is a sort of grandiose fatalism drawn from the
lives of outwardly simple people. With the reading of both comes the
realization that Populism in its recoil from the bizarre to the normal, in
its simplicity and measure, is simply a part of that neo-classicism which
is apparent today in other branches of literature. Therive and Lemon-
nier are the most classic of the Populists. In the case of Lemonnier alone
there is a further and very special contribution to the contemporary
novel: the attempt with Le Baiser de Satan to create a Populist historical
novel. The Naturalists always shirked this task because they considered
the historical novel inextricably bound up with Romanticism. Lemon-
nier has shown that this need not be so. He has managed to depict a

18 Barbusse, Zola, p. 291.

17 Frank C. Hanighen, "A New Literary Movement in France," The American Bookman
(September, 1931). 18 Barbusse, Zola, p. 293.

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 Felix Walter 363

French hamlet in the early seventeenth century which is as genuinely

Populist as any study of modern industrial life. "I wished," he said, "to
recreate the atmosphere in which the common people lived."'9 In this
he has succeeded by getting away as far as possible from what the
terms: "the picturesque and the bric-a-brac of Walter Scott."20
Eugene Dabit, who first achieved a reputation as a novelist with his
Hotel du Nord, might be taken as an example of the Populist left wing.
He is of genuinely working-class origin, as are the Populists Marmouset,
Louis Chaffurin, Marc Bernard and Louis Guilloux. Some day this left
wing may surprise the more conservative, professorial founders of the
school. Already in his most recent novel, Villa Oasis ou les faux bour-
geois, Dabit has to all intents and purposes abandoned the objectivity
of Populist doctrine. It is the novel of a proletarian family trying un-
successfully to gain a foothold in middle-class respectability. The bitter
treatment of bourgeois ideals is reminiscent of the Naturalists and even
of Flaubert. But this is not a mere quixotic sally out of Bohemia; it is a
fragment of the class-struggle. Apart from this interesting political com-
plication, Dabit is one of the most vivid of the Populists, one of the
furthest removed from the polite novelesque tradition of a few years ago.
As French women novelists are usually discussed by critics of their
own nation in a separate chapter, space must be found for Celine Lhotte2'
who reached the novel of the people through her own experiences as a
public health nurse. As a women she prefers apparently to write about
women and children, the unhappy flotsam and jetsam of extreme poverty
in small provincial towns. Her dialogue is extremely picturesque with in-
teresting experiments in phonetic spelling reminiscent of Zola's L' Assom-
moir. Of the same sex and equally gifted is Antonine Coullet-Tessier22
who, in 1931, as an added claim to fame founded the Prix Populiste,
chiefly as a well-merited rebuff to the Academie Goncourt which has so
often in the past decade betrayed those realistic tenets it was founded to
uphold.
Most individual and perhaps most intriguing of all the Populists is
Jean Giono. In the four or five novels of that singularily abundant
stream that he has poured out in the last three years, Giono has con-
fined his talent to the hill-dwelling peasant of the valley of the upper
Durance. No mere rule-of-thumb application of Populist formulae
would serve to classify these novels which, with their dyonisic poetry,
their extraordinary feeling for the earth, for weather and for the folk-
lore of the people, their imagery, their fantasy and even their senti-
19 Lemonnier, Popuilisme, p. 119. 10 Ibid., p. 188.
21 Author of La petite fille aux mains sales, Sur les fortifs du paradis, Coeur triste chez le
sans repos. 22 Author of Chambre d louer, Marthefemme seule.

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 364 Populism

mentality, are as far removed as possible from the popular conception

of realism. And indeed anything more different from Zola's La Terre
than the peasant novels Un de Baumugnes or Regain could not well be
imagined. And yet Giono in all the essentials is a Populist; he is the very
best example of the elasticity of the movement.
Two aspects of Populism in conclusion. One concerns the relation be-
tween this reform in fiction and a similar movement in other branches
of literature and even in other arts. Certain contacts have already been
made outside the novel. The term Populism can already be applied
to a certain type of drama which, considering the alliance which for-
merly prevailed between doctrinnaire Naturalism and the Thedtre Libre,
is not at all surprising. There is even a Populist movement in French
art represented at present by the Compagnie des Peintres et Sculpteurs
Professionels. which is in vigorous reaction against the so-called Sunday
afternoon school of painting. There is even the beginnings of a Populist
cinema which made its first appearance in Paris in the summer of 1932,
when the film Emil und die Detektive, directed by a Group of German
Populists, was officially welcomed to the French capital by Andre
Therive.
The mention of German Populists reminds one that Populism is not
simply a national movement; no artistic movement of any consequence
can be so restricted today. Writing in this quarter in March, 1930, Leon
Lemonnier concluded an article on Populism with this sentence: "It is
not for us to say whether this movement is solely applicable to France,
or whether it may be extended to other countries." As a matter of fact
Populist tendencies are discernible in every country at all actively en-
gaged in the production of prose fiction. A Frank O'Connor in Ireland, an
Alfred Doblin in Germany or a Nora Hoult in England, may not call
themselves Populists, but they are close kin artistically to this fertile
and significant French group.
FELIX WALTER
Trinity College, Toronto

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