Sorel and Mythomania in Interwar France

“ La mythomanie ” emerged in the 1930s as the name for a recurring trope in French intellectual politics, although nobody could agree on what it meant. Far-right intellectuals, mainly lower middle class, found myth-talk congenial to their cause. It gave them a vocabulary to revisit longstanding problems of modernization in its anticlerical or capitalist trajectories. 2 This was especially true for those associated with the Parti populaire français (PPF) like Jacques Doriot and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle – men who are remembered today for invoking myths of decadent homosexuals and abjected Jews in contrast to the “new Man”. 3 Robert Brasillach, in his summer 1938 Je suis partout essay, “ Introduction à l'esprit fasciste ”, explored “how myths are formed” while supplying French fascism its own mythic genealogy from Salazar to La Tour du Pin. 4