Dancing with the devil is an old pursuit among French writers. Even such a stalwart of the Enlightenment as Diderot created a fictional character (the seductive Nephew of Rameau) who could remark, “If there is any genre in which it matters to be sublime, it is evil, above all.” From Diderot through de Sade and de Maistre, Baudelaire and Huysmans, down to Michel Houellebecq and Jonathan Littell, a powerful tradition within French writing has challenged the bounds of conventional morality, loudly defied the dictates of Enlightenment reason, and expressed an abiding fascination with blood. It is as if the culture that, perhaps more strongly than any other, celebrated reason and geometrical order, also provoked within itself a deep, wild, and willfully primitive reaction, a return of the repressed par excellence.

Never in French history did this cultural impulse prove more pernicious than during the troubled decades of the Third Republic (1870–1940). In this period, some of France’s most talented writers gazed longingly into the abyss, and then turned the full power of their eloquence against the institutions of parliamentary democracy. Even as the frail Republic lurched from scandal to scandal and crisis to crisis, writers on both the left and the right subjected it to endless, pitiless mockery and abuse. Robert Brasillach, one of the most brilliant writers and critics of his generation, likened it to “a syphilitic old whore, stinking of patchouli and yeast infection.” Charles Maurras, an enormously skilled polemicist, endlessly denounced it as “the Jew State, the Masonic State, the immigrant State.” Such attacks did much to drain French democracy of legitimacy precisely at its moment of greatest peril. They made it all too easy for a portion of France’s elites to treat the crushing defeat of 1940 as history’s judgment on a corrupt and senile society, and therefore to embrace Hitler’s grotesque New Order rather than to struggle against it.

Frederick Brown, an accomplished literary biographer, has emerged as the leading English-language chronicler of this appalling but fascinating French story. In his book For the Soul of France, he examined the fin de siècle, with particular attention to what he called the “culture wars” between left and right. He centered his account on the Dreyfus Affair, in which the trumped-up conviction of a Jewish army officer on treason charges unleashed a political firestorm that came close to bringing the Republic down. Now, in The Embrace of Unreason, he has taken the story through the interwar period. This time no single “affair” dominates the landscape, but the specter of Vichy looms on the horizon, as the final destination at which so many of those who “embraced unreason” eventually arrived.

Had Lillian Hellman not already (mis)used the title, Brown might well have called his book Scoundrel Time. The 1920s and 1930s in France were a moment when extreme ideological currents swept unstable, marginal, even criminal figures out of their ordinary recesses into positions of remarkable prominence. One of the worst was a pathologically dishonest drunk and embezzler named Louis Darquier, who styled himself Baron Darquier de Pellepoix and spent most of the 1920s stumbling from one fraudulent scheme to another, half a step ahead of his creditors. Then, in 1934, he took part in a massive riot in which extreme right-wing groups tried to overthrow the French National Assembly, and was shot in the thigh by police. The resulting celebrity catapulted him to the front ranks of the extreme right, and over the next years he established himself as a leading voice of French anti-Semitism, editing a journal called L ’ Antijuif. Brown quotes a representative article: “The element of disintegration, the element of division, the microbe is the JEW.... [We] assert that the solution to the Jewish problem is the prerequisite for any French renovation.” Even as France was finally awakening to the dangers of German rearmament, Darquier was secretly taking money from the Nazis. During the occupation, he became head of Vichy’s General Commission for Jewish Affairs, and helped the Germans to organize the deportation of Jews from French soil. (Seventy-six thousand of them died in the camps.) In 1944, he escaped over the Pyrenees to Franco’s Spain and lived to a ripe old age in Madrid, insisting to the end that only lice had died in Auschwitz.

Although Darquier appears in The Embrace of Unreason, Brown reserves his principal attention for writers of real talent—three in particular. Maurice Barrès, who died in 1923, was a wildly popular novelist and anti-Dreyfusard best known for his work The Uprooted, published in 1897. A story of a group of young men from his native province of Lorraine, it excoriated the Republic’s secular educational system for supposedly destroying the connection between French students and their native soil and “race.” Maurras, a hugely prolific poet, critic, and journalist, became the guiding spirit of the reactionary movement known as the Action Française, and lived long enough to spend his last years in prison for “complicity with the enemy” during the Occupation. Upon his conviction in 1945, he exclaimed: “It’s Dreyfus’s revenge!” Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, younger than the others, was a novelist and critic who openly embraced fascism in the 1930s. Rather than face trial as Maurras had done, he committed suicide soon after the liberation.