The discourse of hygiene in French fascist literature

This dissertation analyzes discursive practices within modern French literature and culture that construe the Other as a parasite that threatens national health. In France, these practices grew out of the nineteenth century's diagnosis that the "body" of the nation was afflicted by the "disease" of decadence, as evidenced by that century's military and political defeats. The new theories of disease causation ushered in by the Pasteurian discovery of microbes transformed such nationalist discourse and allowed writers and intellectuals, starting with Edouard Drumont's La France juive and culminating in Celine's virulently anti-Semitic pamphlets, to tap into the authority that these discoveries conferred on doctors and hygienists in order to identify outsiders as pathological agents responsible for infecting the nation.;The early chapters go back to the nineteenth-century social body metaphors that structure the most prominent discourses of national identity---those found in the writings of Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine and Auguste Comte, for example---and which also provide the foundation for the anti-Semitic writings of Edouard Drumont and participants in the Dreyfus Affair. When in the late nineteenth century, our understanding of the body was transformed by the discovery of the microbe, so that disease came to be located in an external element that invades the body, rather than being a function of instability in the body's mechanisms, the nationalist discourses that exploited social body metaphors were also transformed. I look at metaphors, group psychology and medical history to show how the scientific and the literary converged in this new discourse.;The later chapters show how Celine's works are built on the discourse of hygiene that inherits directly from these innovations. I contend that Celine and his narrators are Semmelweis-like figures possessing what they consider a privileged view of the "infected" nature of the human and national bodies, and posit that Celine's famously dynamic, oral style is an enactment of the discourse of hygiene, that is to say an urgent, impassioned entreaty to cleanse, segregate and expunge, misapplied to the social body.