Dominique Venner, historical thinker
Interview with Clotilde Venner
Interview by Robert Steuckers
RS: Why did Dominique Venner become interested in history?
CV: Dominique became interested in history for several reasons. As I explain in my book (A la rencontre d'un cœur rebelle), Dominique had three lives, a first one in which he was a political activist, a second more meditative one that I call the recourse to the forests, and a third in which he became the historian that we know. The study of history, I think, took on its full importance when he gave up politics, at the end of his first life. He experienced his retirement from politics as a small death. To overcome this ordeal, he retired to the countryside, started a family, and for about fifteen years devoted himself to writing books on the technical history of weaponry, but at the same time he read, methodically and intensively, mainly historical works. Throughout these years, he never stopped asking himself the questions "what to do?" and "what to pass on?". And it was in the study of history that he found the answers. History, if questioned with active thought, is an inexhaustible source of reflection. His attitude to history was that of a thinker, not a scholar interested in insignificant details. It was the study of history that enabled him to understand the crisis of civilisation and meaning that the peoples of Europe were going through. And he never ceased to seek, through numerous historical works, an answer to this crisis of meaning. I'm thinking in particular of two books: Histoire et Traditions des Européens and Le Samouraï d'Occident.
RS: Two concepts recur in Dominique Venner's editorials: the unforeseen in history and the shock of history. History is therefore open: it has neither a good nor a bad end. As someone who has questioned Dominique Venner at great length on these issues, resulting in a book as magnificent as Le choc de l'histoire as it is thought-provoking, what do you have to say about this dual theme, which should be the foundation of a truly alternative vision of the world?
CV: By studying history and meditating on it, Dominique came to the idea that history was the place of the permanent unforeseen. It's easy to analyse events once they've happened (e.g. the fall of the Berlin Wall) but rarely to predict them. This notion of the unforeseen in history, instead of making Dominique pessimistic, in a way made him optimistic, not in the sense of blissful optimism but in the sense that nothing is ever set in stone. At any moment, an apparently hopeless situation can change. This means that we should never despair, because even the most tragic situations are subject to change. In 1970, no one imagined the collapse of Soviet power. In 1913, no one foresaw the European conflagration that would take place in 1914, as Dominique analyses so well in Le Siècle de 1914. Absolute pessimism and blissful optimism are equally stupid, because nothing is ever definitive, whether good or bad. Long-winded complaining and joyful pessimism exasperated him to no end. This trait is found in certain right-wing circles. All his life, he never ceased to combat this state of mind. He considered that these postures are often a front for a form of laziness and cowardice.
When I say that Dominique was an optimist, that doesn't mean that he wasn't more than aware that history is tragic. If I had to define his conception of history, I'd say he was a tragic-optimist, a slightly oxymoronic concept that sums up his thinking. But you might say to me, how can you be optimistic when you study human history, which is a constant succession of horrors? It's true that throughout history, people go through trials and tragedies that threaten to annihilate them, but at the same time this same history remains permanently open, it is never static, it is what people make of it, it has the meaning that we give it. This is why Dominique writes at the end of Le Samouraï d'Occident: "When will the great awakening (of Europeans) come? I don't know, but I don't doubt it. In this Breviary, I have shown that the spirit of the Iliad is like an underground river, inexhaustible and ever reborn, which it is up to us to rediscover".
RS: Who creates the unexpected and the shock of history? This is not an innocent question, because Dominique Venner studied historical events such as the adventure of the German Freikorps, the Bolshevik revolution (with the figure of Lenin), the Resistance and Collaboration in France...
CV: Dominique had read Marx, Spengler and Evola carefully, and found some interesting ideas in them, but his thinking was very far removed from any form of historical teleology. He didn't believe that history had a meaning or obeyed cycles; he thought that it was people who made history. In Le Choc de l'Histoire, he wrote: "On the other hand, I can criticise the theories that were fashionable at the time of Marx or Spengler. Each in its own register, they denied the freedom of men to decide their own destiny".
To answer your question, I'd like to borrow a phrase from the sociologist Michel Maffesoli: events often seem unpredictable to us because "we don't know how to listen to the grass grow". Major historical events are more often than not the fruit of a subterranean maturation that is invisible to the untrained eye. Another element that was important to Dominique was the notion of representations. For him, human beings live and distinguish themselves through their representations (be they religious, political, aesthetic). And if we want to understand major historical phenomena, we have to study mentalities. In Le Siècle de 1914, he analyses with great finesse the great ideologies of the twentieth century - fascism, liberalism, immigrationism - and how they influenced the course of European destiny.
RS: So what we have here is not an abstract vision of history, but a vision rooted in Life, in historical figures, men and women of flesh and blood, sometimes providential. Can you elaborate and/or give examples?
CV: In many books Dominique has portrayed exceptional men and women. These portraits had several functions. The first was to flesh out the events, which is much more meaningful for the reader. In the book he devoted to Jünger (Un autre destin européen), he wrote a long portrait of Stauffenberg. I think that by evoking this officer's life, he gives us an inside view of the opposition of part of the German aristocracy to Hitler. A portrait sometimes says more than long conceptual digressions. In his books, there are also many portraits of women, who I think have a pedagogical role as 'exempla' figures in the Latin sense of the term, in the sense of Plutarch and his 'Lives of Illustrious Men'. Through his evocations - I'm thinking of Catherine de la Guette, Madame de Lafayette in Histoire et Traditions des européens, and the portrait of Penelope and Helen in Le Samouraï d'Occident - he shows us what it is to be a European woman. In our dark and decadent times, I think we need models to hold on to, and these evocations of historical figures can be a great source of inspiration. They tell us how our ancestors loved, suffered and overcame the tragedies of history.
Clotilde Venner's long interview with the Belgian philosopher Antoine Dresse, in which the figure of Dominique Venner gets a more lively shape with the opportunity to understand better the fascinating figure he was. Unfortunately, there isn't yet an English translation of this important book. To order it: https://nouvelle-librairie.com/?s=clotilde+venner&asp_active=1&p_asid=6&p_asp_data=1&termset[product_cat][]=-1&aspf[editeur__3]=&aspf[auteur__2]=&filters_initial=1&filters_changed=0&qtranslate_lang=0&woo_currency=EUR¤t_page_id=604
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