Emilie Anne-Yvonne Luse

The Salon des Indépendants– its slogan: "neither jury nor prizes"– holds an important place in the history of modernism.2 As one of the first artistic salons to admit entrance to any artist, regardless of their skill, nationality, or gender, it would provide an institutional context for some of the most important avant-garde gambits of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...The open salon or salon libre was a quintessentially Republican institution, whose genesis could be traced to the formative years of the French Revolution a century earlier. During the ancien régime, the only public space for artists to exhibit had been the crown’s official salon, a nepotistic, juried institution whose default sanctioning of the baroque style was indelibly linked to a corrupt autocracy.5 Dismantling the jury had thus been a priority for revolutionaries like Quatremère de Quincy and the more militant Jacques-Louis David, leader of the Commune des Arts. During the constituante nationale, these Jacobins called for a salon libre open to all. Underscoring the theoretical links between political and artistic representation, and between political and artistic speech, they had put forth a set of principles that would later prove to be defining features of artistic modernity: “The equality of rights that is the base of the Constitution has permitted all citizens to expose their thought; this legal equality should then also permit all artists to expose their works; his painting is his thought; his public exhibition is the permission to print.”
A free salon also meant freedom from the partisan judgment of the state, an aesthetic independence that Quatremère had argued would always reap the greatest artistic fruit for the nation. Though the revolutionaries did host a salon libre in 1791, it survived neither the National Convention (1792–1794) nor the Directory (1795–1799).
The French would have to wait until the return of Republicanism, with the Third Republic of Jules Ferry and Léon Gambetta, for the liberalization of artistic representation to finally take effect. Partisans of a free press, male universal suffrage, and private enterprise, the administrators of the Third Republic established an artistic policy of eclecticism and “strategic nonintervention” in the arts.10 In early 1881, the state would thus renounce its stewardship of an official salon, extricating itself from political controversies indelibly linked to the ancient regime. In line with the policies of capitalist liberalism, the qualities believed to be crucial to the cultivation of national talent under the new Third Republic were independence and individualism (including a fragmented art market).
The advent of the autonomous Salon des Indépendants, run entirely by artists, neatly coincided with this Republican position. Despite the rebellious characterization that its chroniclers have assigned it, state and municipal officials immediately recognized its value.12 Marking the institutionalization of values wished for in the crucible of early Republicanism, its representational structure also concretized the stated values of the Third Republic: rehearsing the principle of male universal suffrage (established in 1875 with the loi Wallon) while also serving a politique culturelle (ca. 1880) of broader artistic access and education for the public.By the 1920s, the Indépendants would be granted official state recognition as a public utility.

Abstract
Art historians have identified a rightward turn in the artistic climate of France in the interwar period, one opposed to an avant-garde accused of being foreign to national culture, and reflective of a broader cultural and political shift towards the right. However, a study detailing the strength and variety of forces opposed to modernism and the avant-gardes in this period has yet to be written.
Drawing on newspapers, art journals, art history books, and sources from private and national archives in France, my dissertation presents four detailed case studies of reactionary, anti-avantgardeist and anti-modernist critics, art educators and art historians during this period, expanding our understanding of the position and influence of these rightwing intellectuals. Analyzing their aims, the artists they supported, their audiences, their social networks, and finally their links to the French state, the dissertation will reconstitute the multiple and multifaceted platforms of conservative cultural activism, revealing the contours of a powerful, persistent, and often successful cultural and political agenda that sought to undermine or reverse the course of modernism.
Accounting for the strategies through which rightwing art world actors battling modernism and the avant-gardes sought to institutionalize their campaigns, this dissertation complicates and revises our understanding of the substantial challenges posed to modern art in the interwar period, demonstrating the power of these interventions while also pointing to the tacit complicity of the French state with these efforts.

On December 3, 1930 members of the far-right paramilitary league Jeunesses Patriotes1 interrupted a screening of Salvador Dalí's Surrealist L'Âge d'or at Studio 28 in Paris, in an attempt to stop a film whose anti-clericalism and iconoclasm they found offensive. Screaming "Death to the Jews"2 and "Let's see now if there are any Christians left in France," the protesters threw a pot of ink at the screen and tossed smoke bombs into the audience before exiting the room. With walking canes that doubled as weapons, they then began to destroy the entry hall outside the screening room, slashing paintings by Dalí, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy, and destroying materials on display, like issues of La Révolution surréaliste, as well as the furniture and windows (figs 1-2).
In the weeks that followed, the press on the far right applauded these actions of vandalism, reprinting a notice from the Ligue des Patriotes that claimed the "immorality of this bolshevist spectacle"3 justified the violence. Though the affected parties had gone to the police for the restitution of some 80,000 francs in damage, the scandal compelled the Préfecture de Police to order a new review of the film by the Examination Commission, which now mandated that offensive scenes featuring bishops be removed from future screenings of the film. On December 7, articles in L'Ami du peuple and Le Figaro, both owned by the fascist and anti-Semite François Coty, demanded more, asking for the banning of a film that dragged "family, religion, and nation" through the mud,4 adding that if censors did not act

In the first chapter, I assess the rejection of modern art as it was articulated beyond the narrow artistic sphere of connoisseurs. Analyzing the common rhetorical features found in a set of texts opposing modern art and aimed at a generalist reader, I outline the contours of a new genre of populist art writing that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, namely the anti-modernist pamphlet, which exploited and politicized the terminally awkward interface between the world of art and an unreceptive, even angry "general public.” By delineating the formal characteristics as well as the content of this genre, I compare parallel texts published in the United States, the UK and in Germany to expose the nature of anti-modernism as a global, generic phenomenon in the interwar period. In the second half of the chapter, I focus on one of the core "argumentative" forms featured in all these texts, an anti-Semitic conspiracy that maligned modern art as a Jewish invention fabricated cynically for profit. The work of French reactionary Camille Mauclair, the best-known and certainly the loudest reactionary in French letters at this time, functions here as a case study. I trace his intellectual history as an anti-capitalist advocate of the working classes, shine light on his personal connections and networks, and consider how he exploited inherent contradictions at the core of modernism to advance an anti-Semitic and xenophobic argumentation nearly identical to the propaganda mounted against modernism in Nazi Germany. I conclude by meditating on these populist forms of bigotry and their relationship to aesthetic critiques of modernism, ultimately arguing that the tolerant crucibles of modern republican democracies forged the conditions that facilitated the uncensored emergence of this genre of writing.

In the second chapter, I focus on Waldemar George, an art critic from the interwar period whose case has fascinated scholars because of his dual identity as a Jewish immigrant from Poland and a publicly-avowed fascist, a follower of Mussolini. Complicating narratives by other scholars who have seen him as a self-hating reactionary, I engage in the first scholarly study of the "neo-humanist" artists he promoted, and consider their affective role in his broader plan for a Universalist Christianity that would efface the problems of discrimination he himself had experienced as a young soldier and critic in Republican France. Tracing his intellectual trajectory and enacting a close re-reading of his texts as well as unpublished archival letters, I show counter-intuitively that this brilliant writer used the rhetoric of nationalism, fascism, and "Latin humanism" as a means of protecting and dissembling the identities of the Jewish émigré artists he regularly promoted.

Camille Mauclair makes another appearance in the third chapter, this time presenting a more sophisticated persona as a member of the advisory team overseeing Le Dessin, a monthly review aimed at national instructors of primary, secondary and advanced drawing education in France. In the first scholarly study of this periodical, I ask how and why state pedagogues and administrators, senators and other key actors who sat on the editorial board and wrote for the journal considered Mauclair their ally and willingly named him a colleague. Analyzing the evolution of Le Dessin over a decade, I show where their respective positions both converged and diverged, while exploring politicized discourse around drawing education in a period when one of the markers of modernist authenticity was the eschewal of traditional draftsmanship. Against ever shifting political tides, I trace the nationalist and anti-modernist ideologies underwriting the content of a journal sanctioned by the Ministry of Education and the Fine Arts and intended to shape the next generation of instructors (and students). At a time when the preservation of "drawing skills" had become central to the conservation of French national identity, I chart the journal's evolving and inconsistent attempts to defend the utility of drawing as a core element of the national public curriculum for school children.

Ultimately, my dissertation findings have led me to re-consider the role that reactionaries like Waldemar George and Mauclair played in the interwar period, moving away from the idea that they were anomalies within the system. Given their multiple ties to establishment and political figures, they were rather representative of the majority of contemporary administrators, including those who were the custodians of French state policy. In my fourth chapter I will turn my focus to major histories of modern art written by curators at the Luxembourg, the Louvre, and other officials of the French state between 1931 and 1946. Analyzing the narrative structures of these texts, I will argue that these art historical schemas replicated, in more subtle ways, the anti- avant-gardist and xenophobic positions put forth by reactionary critics like Camille Mauclair. Re-
affirming and legitimizing discourse present in anti-modernist strands of art criticism, these histories dismiss the contributions of foreign artists and the avant-gardes in France as extraneous to the development of art in France. The material impact of these narratives is considered in the second portion of the chapter, which shows how purchases by the French state during this period, determined by commissions that included the authors of these art histories as well as critics like Mauclair and George, closely reflected these narratives, pointing to the institutionalization of these reactionary tendencies.

The dissertation concludes with a short meditation on the legacy of artistic independence under the Third Republic. By the end of the 1930s, for critics of Republicanism who looked jealously at the cohesive aesthetics of authoritarian regimes, the liberalization of the arts and the institutionalization of artistic independence were, I argue, proof perfect of the Third Republic's failings. As critics adopted ever more militant roles, they soon extended their responsibilities beyond the aesthetic sphere into that of politics. It is their melding of both, and not the rise of modern art, that we now qualify as the “very dangerous turn" in the history of modern France. Though each of these chapters presents a separate issue or case study, the same actors re-appear in different contexts, demonstrating the interconnectedness of the Parisian art world. Likewise, throughout these case studies, certain themes recur, including: debates on the role of the state in aesthetic matters; the interface between the artist and the people; the critique of commercialism in the world of art and letters; and the fear of de-skilling. Given that many of these issues are still relevant today, I hope that the studies presented here can model how aesthetic and cultural debates are politicized and perverted in times of political crisis.