[From an article soon to appear...]
The publishing house founded by Gaston Gallimard in 1911, and bearing his name, is an institution that matters to French literary life in a way for which it is difficult to find equivalencies in other countries. Farrar Straus and Giroux? MacMillan? The New Yorker? All of these together do not begin to approach the importance of Gallimard as an arbiter of literary taste, and therefore also, as the French see things, as a guardian of French culture and history. To be among the editors at Gallimard is thus to serve as a high priest and a kingmaker, even as a god who keeps the world going by what Descartes (who died of pneumonia in Stockholm in 1650) called ‘continuous creation’. By ‘the world’ here, we should of course understand le monde, a fascinating French invention which reduces everything –the planets and stars, the comets, the earth with its core and mantle, and all the plant and animal and human life crawling upon its surface-- to the experience of a certain class of people in a certain smallish country. Gallimard sits atop this world.
On July 22, 2011, the 32-year-old Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, committed, in Oslo, the worst atrocity in Western Europe since the end of World War II. He murdered 77 people, most of them teenagers and young adults attending a summer camp organized by the Norwegian Labour party. Breivik’s goal was to initiate a war against multiculturalism in Europe, which he saw as inevitably leading to a loss of authentic European existence, a mongrelization at best, and a total Saracenization at worst. He is currently serving a 21-year prison sentence, the maximum allowable under Norwegian law. This comes out to a little over three months for each person dead.
A year or so after the attack, an editor at Gallimard, the well-known French novelist and essayist Richard Millet, would publish what he called an Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik: a literary elogy to the Norwegian murderer. The author distinguishes between the 'artistic' quality of Breivik’s mass slaughter, on the one hand, and the political and moral dimensions of it on the other. He stresses repeatedly that he has only come to praise the first of these. It is only the liberal multiculturalist herd, which for him is the same thing as the uncultured, illiterate, un-literary herd, that is incapable of making this distinction.
Millet was born in the region of Corrèze, in south-central France, in 1953, but would spend much of his youth in Lebanon. He spoke Arabic as if natively, and would later complain of not feeling entirely French upon returning to his home country. In the mid-1970s Millet would join up with the Christian Phalangists in the Lebanese civil war, a right-wing and ultranationalist organization founded by the Lebanese Maronite leader Pierre Gamayel in 1936. He would later write in his 2009 Confession négative, "I had to kill men back then, and women too, and elderly people, maybe children," though according to the newspaper Libération Millet only spent a few months in the phalanges, and at most had an occasion to fire his Kalashnikov into some sacks of sand...
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