Reactionary masculinity as empty provocation: Côme Martin-Karl

Being right-wing as a pose

Côme Martin-Karls The reaction Published in 2019, this is a satire on the far-right and reactionary milieu in contemporary France. The novel caricatures its manifestations very specifically: the libertarian-Catholic-identitarian hybrid scene (Yvon with his program of "death penalty, weak state, privatization of land, air, fire and water"). ¹ ), the online trolls and masculinist gaming forums (Jérôme), traditionalist Catholicism (Marine, Joie & Combat) and above all the disintegrating world of royalist-integralist splinter groups ("Reactionary Renewal", "Merovingian Land", "Committee for Royalist Reunification" ² The comedy thrives on the absurd dynamics of division within these microgroups – in the end, the Renouveau réactionnaire (RR) splinters into a dozen groups, many of which are “empty shells consisting of only one person”. ³ .

However, it is not primarily a parody of the "Nouvelle Droite" in the narrower, intellectual-historical sense—that is, the intellectual current around Alain de Benoist and the GRECE of the 1970s. This movement was metapolitical, neo-pagan, and decidedly not Christian. Martin-Karl's target is rather the current, broader spectrum: the Catholic reactionary right, the online reaction, and the "France des ronds-points" of the late 2010s. The invented RR, with its condemnation of printing, is a fabrication that takes the "principle" of reactionary thought to absurd extremes—the question "Jusqu'où remonter?"—not a portrait of a real school of thought.

And the crucial point: the sharpest satire isn't directed at a doctrine at all, but at the emptiness behind it. Matthieu doesn't become right-wing out of conviction, but out of dandyism and a thirst for distinction – and in the end, effortlessly switches to the left. Thus, the novel is less a parody of an ideology than a satire on posturing, on an understanding of masculinity, and on a milieu in which political stance degenerates into mere self-promotion.

Looking back on his youth, Matthieu explains how he first discovered at the Gymnasium (grammar school) that a right-wing stance afforded him social capital. This passage comes immediately after his calculated school essay on the compatibility of homosexuality and reactionary thinking and describes the roots of his political activism.

This passage lays bare the mechanics of the lust for distinction even before ideology is mentioned. Matthieu's reading is chosen for effect, not content—he reads the Romantics "because they were ruthless and anti-liberal," poets like Vigny "because they were pessimists": the justification always lies in the gesture of deviation, never in conviction. The black coats, the affected "Robert-Pierre," the memorized verses are props in a performance whose goal is succinctly captured by the formula "pestiféré sublime"—the sublime leper. The decisive factor is the reward: admiration and desire ("girls wanted to sleep with me"). Being right-wing functions here as erotic and social capital, arising precisely from the contempt of the majority ("one only loves the disliked"). Politics has always been about self-stylization as the guru of a circle that "enorgueillissait" its ostracism.

When Matthieu Richard confesses in the very first sentence of the novel that it is to his great surprise that he exists at all. ⁴Then the paradoxical basic structure of a masculinity that can only be grasped as a pose, never as substance, is already named. This essay argues that REA exposes reactionary masculinity not as an ideology, but as an aesthetic method of distinction: The narrator does not become right-wing because he believes something, but because being right-wing in his milieu is the most effective way to distinguish himself from the "formless mass" ⁵ to stand out from the others—a masculinity, then, whose hardest core is emptiness and whose provocative harshness tips precisely where the narrator's only genuine desire, the homosexual one, hollows it out from within. To discuss this thesis, the essay asks: With which genre and narrative techniques does the novel generate the tension between confession and self-presentation? How does the constellation of characters arrange the men as mirrors of an ever-present emptiness? Which spaces, times, and semantic fields—from the sealed-off suburban wasteland to the thousand-year apocalypse—provide this masculinity with its stage? And finally: What is the poetics of the fact that a novel about the enemies of the printed word is itself a printed book, showing its narrator writing an essay on his own identity?

Côme Martin-Karl's novel tells the story, in retrospect, of Matthieu Richards, an unemployed man in his late twenties who drifts into the burgeoning reactionary scene in France out of sheer dandyism. The first part introduces the "communauté de l'Expiation," a luxurious Parisian commune where the libertarian heir Yvon Saillac de Livès supports far-right internet trolls as a patron. Matthieu, who rants in comment sections and social networks under various pseudonyms such as "Bearnais2souche" or "Gaystapo," lives between Marine Versot, a Catholic blogger, and Jérôme Noyel, the operator of masculinist gaming forums. His motivation is not conviction, but a panicky fear of normality: he wants to stand out at any cost.

The second narrative thread opens with an encounter at a demonstration for "freedom of science," which Jérôme himself instigated with a fabricated rumor about censored racial research. There, Matthieu recognizes Maximin, an activist of the tiny "Renouveau réactionnaire" (Réactionary Revival), a man he had slept with a year and a half earlier, when he was still a leftist. Maximin, now a devout Catholic, integralist, and doctrinaire, draws Matthieu into the milieu of the Réactionary Revival, whose founding principle is to combat the invention of printing as the beginning of civilizational decline, the "Grande Déliquescence" (Great Deliquency). At Maximin's side is his younger lover, Enguerrand, an Algerian born Khalid Derradji in Bobigny who converted to strict Catholicism.

As Matthieu becomes entangled in the sect's life of conferences, schisms, and biblical quotations, the plot escalates in two ways. Privately, he is pushed out of his "expiation": Yvon, angered by Matthieu's inaction, has a friend from his shooting club rid the apartment door of his friend Issouf—a Burkinabe Muslim with whom Matthieu is temporarily staying—with buckshot, plunging the neighborhood into paranoia. Politically, the situation escalates when Maximin is knocked unconscious in a street fight between left-wing and right-wing thugs and falls into a coma. At Maximin's bedside, Matthieu feels primarily a fascination with the catastrophe, less compassion; his true, unspoken longing is for Enguerrand.

Shortly after moving into the "communauté de l'Expiation," Matthieu stands at his window and describes his feeling of unease. In an environment where everyone shares the same right-wing views, he faces the worst prospect: normality.

This passage is the explicit key to the thesis and anticipates the novel's concluding point. Matthieu's fear is not of betrayal of a cause, but solely of the dissolution of his "anticonformisme"—the specter of being "consensual." Right-wing convictions interest him only as long as they are "réprouvées," that is, as long as they guarantee deviation; as soon as they become the majority, they lose all value. The conditional clause formulates the principle with logical coldness: If the spirit of the age were "entièrement, absolument, indistinctement réactionnaire," he would consider "being a communist." The political axis left-right is thus revealed as arbitrary—the only constant is the function of setting oneself apart from the majority. The novel's conclusion executes precisely this mechanism when the former troll runs a left-wing bookstore and is now attacked by right-wingers: No purification has taken place; rather, the change of sides was inherent in the system of the craving for distinction from the very beginning.

The final part shows Matthieu and Enguerrand during a clandestine break-in at the RR headquarters, where they steal the members' "biographical notebooks"—forced confessions whose publication shatters the group into dozens of absurd splinter factions. This day with Enguerrand remains Matthieu's happiest memory. A later act they commit together lands them both in court in Pau; after the trial, Enguerrand breaks off all contact. In the epilogue, the aging Matthieu runs a left-wing bookstore near the Belgian border, holds Marxist evenings, and is now himself being attacked by right-wing activists. He learns incidentally that Maximin has awakened from a coma after twenty-three years—forgotten, speechless, a political martyr without a movement.

Methods of staging and exposure

The refusal to develop

REA adopts the surface of the coming-of-age and disillusionment novel in order to systematically subvert it. The novel begins with a job interview that never takes place—Matthieu returns his visitor name badge and leaves the high-rise before he can become "chef de produit haché/sous vide" (head of a frozen/uncovered product production). This denied initiation into adulthood sets the tone: instead of the bourgeois maturation demanded by the Bildungsroman, the text stages a movement into marginality, which the narrator himself recognizes as an addiction to subversion. His image for this is that of a demolition expert who incessantly plants explosives in an already mined field. ⁶The genre expectation of the "hero" who grows through trials is thus dismantled from the outset as a self-destructive, endless loop. The blurb, which ironically calls the book "un roman édifiant sur notre époque" – an "edifying" novel – takes the parody to its extreme: edification here exists only as its opposite.

Unreliable narration and self-construction

The novel is told entirely homodiegetically and retrospectively, yet the narrator constantly undermines its own authority. Matthieu openly admits that memory and invention merge for him – for example, when he concedes Enguerrand's backstory: "I'm reconstructing it from memory, but perhaps I'm also inventing a little bit." ⁷This admitted unreliability is not a side effect, but rather the poetics' core: it transforms every description into an act of self-construction. The episode of the "cahiers biographiques," the RR's forced confession notebooks, is telling: Matthieu doesn't feel his privacy violated by the derogatory marginalia ("mensonges," "pédé," "caractériel") because half of what he himself wrote was a lie anyway. The text thus presents a character whose inner self consists of fictions—and a narrative that chooses not between truth and lies, but between versions. The reader is forced to read against the narrator's will.

A printed book against printing

The novel's sharpest irony lies in its self-reference. The "Renouveau réactionnaire" dates the beginning of the decline to the widespread use of printing in the 15th century – and at the same time prints its pamphlets, such as "Terror or Barbarity," which consists of a single paragraph hundreds of pages long. ⁸Matthieu voices the contradiction (“Mais vous imprimez vos tracts.”), and Maximin responds with the cynical formula that one fights with the weapons one is given. ⁹This scene is an allegory of the novel itself: A printed book tells of men who condemn the printed word, thus exposing the performative self-contradiction of reactionary rhetoric. This is intensified by the key scene in the café, in which Matthieu, with notebook and black pen, "as if I had to write an essay" ¹⁰ The topic addressed is: "How can homosexuality and reactionary thinking be reconciled?" ¹¹ Here, the character becomes the author of their own ideology: conviction arises not from experience, but from a written exercise in coherence. The novel presents writing itself as a technique of reactionary self-invention.

Here, homosexuality is completely transformed into an intellectual construct—it is not to be felt, but proven. The essay's form, with its diagrams and evidence, is revealing: for Matthieu, identity arises not from experience, but from a written exercise in coherence. The argument itself is a grotesque contortion that welds two "partially enemy" legacies (persecuted Christianity, persecuting Rome) into a "block of Western continuity" in order to retrospectively assimilate his own sexuality. The absurd reference to the "Vase de Soissons"—the textbook symbol of the Frankish Empire—pushes the pseudo-scholarship into the comical. The self-assured concluding punchline, "I am a reactionary in the future," reveals what it's really about: not self-acceptance, but maintaining a special status. Even homosexuality is reinterpreted as a gain in distinction, as proof of being ahead of the avant-garde.

The emptying of language: communication as war without content

Right at the beginning of the novel, Matthieu leaves a job interview before it even begins. He reflects on what had attracted him to the position of "chef de produit haché/sous vide" in the first place – and in doing so, reveals his attitude towards any kind of job positioning.

The scene transfers the logic of distinction from the political to the professional sphere, thus revealing that Matthieu is never concerned with the object itself, but always with the reaction of the other person. What attracts him is not the meat industry itself, but its status as an "industrie détestée" – the despised draws him in, just as the taboo pose did previously at the lycée. The anticipated small talk is constructed as a provocative dramaturgy: it imagines "incomprehension or disgust." ¹² He is in the eyes of others and revels in the conflict he would provoke. His anti-ecological stance ("animalo-vegétalienne," "protection de l'environnement") is interchangeable—it merely provides the resistance against which his exceptionalism can be demonstrated. In reality, he doesn't accept the position, because genuine belonging (colleagues, canteen, hierarchy) would shatter the pose. The attitude exists only as an inconsequential assertion at the soirée, not as lived practice.

The novel's predominant form of communication is detached, inconsequential speech. Yvon's table monologues—the narrator compares him to the Hitler of anecdotes, who harassed his guests with incoherent prattle late into the night—serve as the model: politics here is pure declamation, capable of contradicting itself the next day without contradiction. Yvon's absurd "theory" that the plains constitute the true French soul, while river dwellers are traitors because they belong to "a fleeting society without ties" ¹³ What they belonged to is language that has detached itself from any claim to truth. The same structure underlies trolling: Jérôme's fabricated rumor about censored racial research spreads, as it is said, "with the speed of a bullet fired into an empty space." ¹⁴ and pierces the membrane between the world of trolls and the "world of humans." The novel diagnoses a masculinity that derives its power not from arguments, but from the speed and violence of provocation—a form of communication in which assertion replaces proof and the non-existence of evidence paradoxically serves as proof.

When Jérôme's fabricated rumor about censored racial research reaches the established media, every political person has to take a stand – including the Minister of the Interior.

Without naming real names, the novel precisely traces the mechanism of contemporary French debate culture: how a fabricated piece of misinformation, originating in troll circles, pierces the "membrane" of respectable public discourse and forces the entire political establishment to take a stand. The minister's statement is a textbook example of rhetorical cowardice—it calls the rumor "completely informed" and, in the same breath, legitimizes it with the statement "it will not remain in it." The catchphrase "unique thought"—a real battle cry of the French right against the perceived left-wing consensus—precisely marks the allusion to contemporary discourses. The novel diagnoses a center that does not resist right-wing provocation but, out of fear of being accused of conformism, half-adopts it: "de-diabolization" in action.

Mirror of Emptiness: The Hollowing Out of Reactionary Masculinity

Variants of male emptiness

The constellation of characters arranges itself around Matthieu as a system of mirrors, each reflecting a variation of empty, reactionary masculinity. Yvon, the thirty-year-old heir with the face of a "nineteen-year-old who would die at twenty-five" ¹⁵, embodies the libertarian variant: His program – the privatization of air, fire and water ¹⁶, his enthusiasm “I love global warming” ¹⁷ – is pure provocation from an idler who dismisses his crew as soon as they bore him. Jérôme, the masculinist forum operator, whose political contributions the narrator attributes to his presumed sexual frustration, demonstrates the masturbatory variant: a “physical courage that is inversely proportional to the vileness of his virtual pronouncements.” ¹⁸, who collapses at the first real confrontation and begs for mercy. And Maximin, who within a few months went from Marxism-Leninism via three right-wing groups to the RR, embodies the doctrinal variant, whose “doctrinal purity” ¹⁹ It's just the flip side of complete arbitrariness. Matthieu mockingly tells him: "Ultimately, you're trying to please everyone." ²⁰ – a diagnosis that applies to him no less.

Misogyny and negation of the feminine

The novel's gender order is an almost entirely male-dominated world in which femininity appears only as a caricature or as a commodity. Marine Versot is a caricature of the Catholic "folk," whose verbal and visual rhetoric the narrator gleefully dissects; Sabrina, the RR activist and traffic policewoman, is reduced to the derogatory image of a "living traffic light." ²¹ reduced.

Matthieu reconstructs the life story of Enguerrand (born Khalid Derradji), Maximin's younger lover who converted to Catholicism. The passage recounts how the boy was expelled from the Catholic school for a sexual act.

This passage radicalizes the motif by presenting homosexuality as the origin—not the contradiction—of the reactionary turn. The school punishes asymmetrically: the giving partner, marked as "feminine," is excluded, while the receiving partner is not, because "a hole is a hole." The novel thus exposes the homophobic logic of the institution, which tolerates active penetration but condemns submission as "repugnant, deliberate, and unacceptable." The causal chain is tragic: from humiliation and further, partly forced, experiences at the boarding school arises Enguerrand's escape into the "eternal France [...] of Christ, Joan of Arc, and Vendéen blood." The turn to integralism here is an act of repression—the hatred is directed outward to cover up one's own sexuality, experienced as shameful. The novel interprets male-male desire as the repressed center that simultaneously produces and destroys reactionary masculinity.

The gender ideology is most clearly evident in Enguerrand's family history: only the son needs to be "integrated," while the daughters are relegated to the public school system because girls are "malleable by nature." ²² are “that fit into the national narrative, like eggs into a cake batter” ²³This culinary image of woman as a passive ingredient exposes the masculinist logic in which masculinity claims danger, advancement, and history, while femininity is seen as merely malleable. Reactionary masculinity needs woman only as a negative foil for its own purported toughness.

The subversion of desire

A central subversion of the novel lies in the fact that its reactionary men are gay – and their ideology condemns gay people. Matthieu sleeps exclusively with left-wing men and derives erotic pleasure, a "continuation of the sexual act," from the political debate after sex. ²⁴Matthieu recalls a winter night with a left-wing man, whom he kisses, but who then sends him away. This episode serves as a springboard for him to reveal his unresolved contradiction between his reactionary stance and same-sex desire.

The passage presents homosexuality as a desire the character lives out but rejects as an identity. The reflexive "Je ne suis pas pédé" is not an admission but a defense mechanism that doesn't convince Matthieu himself—he calls it an unresolved "contradiction" on which his "cynical persona" is trapped. It is significant that he only makes the desire tolerable through external framing: as an anti-Muslim provocation, as an invocation of historical gay right-wing extremists (Ernst Röhm, the SA leader; Abel Bonnard, the collaborationist writer), or through the refusal of any label. Homosexuality is thus treated not as a lived self, but as an ideological problem to be "unraveled" through argumentation. ²⁵ The novel thus exposes a reactionary masculinity that can only accept its own desire as a problem to be solved, never as part of its own person.

In the novel, desire between men is not a confessional identity, but is consistently staged as a form of provocation and distinction—an extension of precisely the pose that also underpins Matthieu's politics. For Matthieu, sex and political conflict are inextricably intertwined. He sleeps only with left-wing men and derives his own arousal from the post-act discourse: he sees "the irises darken, the breathing become heavier, the bodies tense up." ²⁶The desire is not directed at the other, but at their resistance. Accordingly, he rejects the category of identity: He responds to the accusation, "Isn't it a problem to be gay?" ²⁷ He reflexively replies, "I'm not gay." ²⁸ – an answer that does not convince him and whose contradiction he only attempts to smooth over theoretically with the essay in the café.

Desire as competition and conquest rather than commitment. His longing for Enguerrand is openly instrumentally motivated: he wants to sleep with him, explicitly "because he didn't want me." ²⁹, and to offend Maximin, who saw him only as "meat for activism" ³⁰ The issue is addressed here. Desire becomes a question of power, a conquest of the unavailable, a humiliation of the former partner. The asymmetry with Maximin is significant, his cool "We will not sleep together again" ³¹ Matthieu's narcissistic expectation was violated; he would have "an unforgettable memory." ³² must leave behind.

The novel itself offers an interpretation and immediately undermines it, a psychoanalytic thread and its ironic rejection. Matthieu's mother, who died young, exists for him only as a photograph in red clothing ("une robe incarnate"), in which she is "beautiful, she détache des autres." He provides the reading himself: an analyst would have explained, "I always tried to be like my mother in the red dress: homosexuality, the striving for specialness, blah blah blah." ³³ The “blah blah blah” is programmatic: The text explicitly links homosexuality and the desire for distinction to the same root (the dead mother’s need to stand out), but refuses any comforting deeper interpretation – “There’s nothing you can do about it.” ³⁴

Despite all the posturing, male-male desire is paradoxically the only place of true vitality. Matthieu's happiest memory is not political, but rather the train journey with the laughing Enguerrand, whom he described as "of unparalleled beauty." ³⁵ experienced – a moment he later calls up “to convince myself that I am not dead.” ³⁶ Desire thus runs counter to ideology: it is what hollows out reactionary self-presentation from within.

The essay in the café, which portrays Christianity as persecuted by the Roman Empire and constructs homosexuality as a future part of the “bloc de continuité occidentale” to be defended, is a grotesque intellectual contortion, at the end of which stands the proud sentence: “I am a reactionary who is ahead of his time.” ³⁷Enguerrand's backstory radicalizes the motif: as a boy, he is expelled from his Catholic school for performing fellatio on a classmate—only the performing, humiliated partner is punished. From this humiliation arises his turn to the integralism of "France du Christ." The novel thus portrays reactionary masculinity as an act of repression: it directs its harshness outward to cover up its own core desires, which it experiences as shameful.

Women are structurally marginalized in the novel and appear almost exclusively in three devalued roles: as caricatures, for example. Marine Versot is reduced to a grotesque Catholic "fofolle," completely "raided" and gazing skyward with her mouth wide open; Sabrina, the RR activist and traffic cop, shrinks to the derogatory image of a "live tricolor fire." The female characters are given hardly any inner life—they are types, not subjects.

Secondly, women appear as ideological commodities: Enguerrand's family history puts this most sharply into practice. Only the son needs to be "integrated," while daughters are considered "malleable by nature." ³⁸ and “which can be incorporated into the national narrative, just as one incorporates eggs into a cake batter” ³⁹The culinary image – the woman as a passive ingredient – ​​exposes the masculinist logic in which masculinity claims danger, history and advancement, while femininity is merely malleability.

Thirdly, they appear as absent or idealized phantasms. The central women are literally absent: the dead mother, who exists only as a photograph; the "boring" stepmother as her pale negative image; Clarisse, the hostess, who never replies to messages and whose disappearance Matthieu depicts in a drastically sexualized death fantasy. Women here are projection surfaces—idealized (the flamboyant mother in red) or contemptuously imagined—but never equal counterparts.

The novel depicts an almost entirely closed male world in which genuine desire circulates only between men, and women are either absent, caricatured, or relegated to a secondary role. Crucially, however, critical distance is essential here: this gender order is not the novel's own stance, but rather what it satirically exposes in its masculinist-reactionary milieu—and in its narcissistic narrator. Women appear devalued because the depicted masculinity uses them only as a negative foil for its own purported toughness.

Commitment beyond political self-promotion

Significantly, the few moments of happiness and genuine connection in the novel lie entirely outside the realm of political self-presentation. Matthieu's most stable relationship is with Issouf, the Burkinabe Muslim from business school—the only one who didn't wear blue and who later gives him, the troll, shelter and addresses him with the matter-of-fact "on" of a shared future. And his "the clearest, most colorful, and most joyful memory" ⁴⁰ It is not a political triumph, but the train journey after the theft of the confession notebooks, in which Enguerrand laughs and calls him "of unparalleled beauty" ⁴¹ appears – a moment he wishes would last “a thousand years” ⁴² It takes time. He calls the same person later to make sure he's "not dead." The punchline is sharp: reactionary masculinity can only experience connection and vitality where it betrays its own ideology—with its Muslim friend and its secretly beloved husband.

Stages of Decay: Space, Time, and Semantics of Reactionary Self-Presentation

Between bourgeoisie and non-place

The novel sketches a topography of decay that spatially authenticates its thesis. The “community of atonement” ⁴³ is located in one of "the most elegant streets of Paris" ⁴⁴, where the apartments are so large that the population density becomes "ridicule"—a space of inherited wealth that is methodically squandered and in which everyone locks themselves alone in front of their screen. This contrasts with the route to the RR seat, a passage through what the narrator calls "a place without direction, a non-place." ⁴⁵ names: one torn apart by RER lines, high-voltage power lines and intensive agriculture ⁴⁶ Area lined with ten roundabouts and "a small wooded area that is used as an illegal dumping ground" ⁴⁷This ecologically sealed, meaningless periphery is the true site of the reaction. It is reflected in the grotesque detail of a street called "Chemin des bois," where there isn't a single tree within a two-kilometer radius—a name that only hints at a vanished nature. The space itself negates the reactionary yearning for soil, roots, and home.

The collision of time horizons

On the level of time, the novel plays off two irreconcilable standards against each other. Matthieu calls himself a "millennialist" and claims that only millennia interest him, because "a thousand years is the infinity that is tangible for humans." ⁴⁸ – a megalomania that dismisses every lifespan as meaningless. This contrasts sharply with the dizzying contemplation of contingency at the beginning of the novel, in which every tiny "microdecision" appears as a missed opportunity for a different, better life and "swallows up" the narrator. ⁴⁹The narrative time is also highly condensed and elliptical; entire phases are dealt with in single sentences, which foreshadows the narrator's later conclusion: that life is not a branching tree, but "just a single stem." The irony culminates in Maximin's fate: the man who claimed to be fighting for eternity lies in a coma for twenty-three years and awakens "dazed, lethargic, thawed out." ⁵⁰ into a world that has forgotten him – the reaction that wanted to stop time was overwhelmed by time.

Semantics of resolution

The novel's metaphors condense into three semantic fields, all of which serve the same devaluing purpose. The animalistic and decayal fields dehumanize throughout: Yvon has "sour skin." ⁵¹, an ancestral portrait is like “a large buffalo mozzarella” ⁵², the fleeing demonstrators scatter “like a flock of sparrows in cherry orchards” ⁵³Memories rise up “like stagnant water from a clogged sink” ⁵⁴The image of water carries the ideological contrast between solidity and dissolution – Yvon's contempt for the "liquid" and "sans attaches" – and ultimately returns to the reaction itself: the public funds for the forgotten Maximin dry up "like water from a rusty tap". ⁵⁵The apocalyptic field ultimately structures the entire novel, from the delusional woman at the demonstration who claims that the end has "déjà eu lieu", to the Bible quote from Brother Marie-Marie, "the harvest is the end of the world". ⁵⁶The novel takes this end-times rhetoric at face value and satirically turns it against its followers: while they conjure up a spiritual apocalypse, they ignore the real, ecological one, which is already visible in the sealed-off wastelands and the celebrated climate change.

Emptiness as the core of the pose: reaction as quotation practice and simulation

The novel describes how commemorations of the Ancien Régime and the colonial era become commonplace. When asked about a book fair in honor of Pierre Laval, the Prime Minister gives an evasive answer.

Here, political satire condenses into a sharp diagnosis of our times. The points of reference are real and contemporary: the rejection of "repentance" (the remorseful reckoning with colonial and Vichy history) is a core tenet of the French right today; Pierre Laval, the executed head of government of the Vichy regime, represents the ultimate taboo. The linguistic twist is masterful: by replacing the word "République" (Republic) with "France" in the constitutional clause "indivisible," the Prime Minister effects a tiny but programmatic shift from the republican to the ethno-national idea. The novel shows how the taboo is broken not by extremists, but by the highest levels of government themselves, and how the "chaînes d'information continue" (continuous information channels) with their "bon sens" (good sense) immediately smooth over the scandal—a satire on the normalization of reactionary ideology by the institutional center.

In the novel, reactionary masculinity is essentially a practice of quotation, and the text makes this clear through a dense network of references. The novel's Marxist motto—the allusion to the "middle-class heroes"—frames the entire narrative as a class comedy. Matthieu's youthful reading—Jacques Chardonne, Paul Morand, the Romantics, and the memorized Alfred de Vigny—are less convictions than props for a pose of the "sublime outcast." ⁵⁷Religious intertexts (the Gospel, the Apocalypse) provide the dark tone of the RR speeches, while historical namedrops from Robespierre to Ernst Röhm and Abel Bonnard to the trial in Moscow. ⁵⁸ to feed self-stylization. Intermedially, the novel spans from "American high school pop culture" ⁵⁹, whose logic of the fascination with the despised explains Matthieu's success at the lyceum, right up to the imagery of the internet – pseudonyms, memes, “gigabits of spit” ⁶⁰The reaction thus appears as a collage of borrowed signs without its own center: a masculinity that consists of nothing but quotations.

A comparison of the novel's beginning and end confirms the central thesis with absolute clarity. The beginning opens with the narrator's astonishment at his very existence: "To my great surprise, I exist." ⁶¹...and from this unfolds the horror of countless unlived lives – a radical openness to all possibilities. The ending shows where this openness has led: The former troll now runs a "small bookstore of the extreme left." ⁶² near the Belgian border, he holds Marx evenings and is now being targeted by right-wing activists with explosives and slogans like "Proletarians of all countries, piss off!" ⁶³ attacked. The reversal is total – and precisely therein lies the proof that conviction was never at play. Early on, Matthieu had admitted that he considered becoming a communist should the zeitgeist become completely reactionary, simply to stand out. The conclusion follows exactly this logic. The initial "There was a crucial difference between me and the others" ⁶⁴ It has shifted from the right to the left pole without the underlying mechanism changing. Where the beginning celebrates contingency as a deception, the conclusion resignedly summarizes: a life is "just one line," and even the most dense can be dismissed "in three lines." The pose has survived; the person behind it has vanished.

In the book, Matthieu finds lodging with Clarisse Salers de Ménard de Fretz, a royalist heiress. At the same time, he learns that Maximin and Enguerrand met at a Bernanos colloquium. Both details place the characters within the real intellectual heritage of the French right.

The passage anchors the fictional characters in the real traditions of the French far right and reveals its sociological structure. The "cercles maurrassiens" refer to Charles Maurras and the Action française, the monarchist-nationalist movement whose legacy is still cultivated in royalist circles today; the Bernanos Colloquium mentioned elsewhere and the reading lists (Maurras, Joseph de Maistre, Julius Evola) reference the real intellectual arsenal of this milieu. Crucially, it employs satirical elements: Clarisse combines Maurrasian ideology with "dirty sexual escapades." ⁶⁵ and the “neo-fascist scum of Parisian youth” ⁶⁶ – the lofty ideology coexists with decadent bourgeois lifestyle. Their formula: “My heart belongs to France.” ⁶⁷ It parodies and simultaneously exposes the self-stylization as a pure lover of the fatherland: behind the pathetic national devotion lies a bored heiress of "a gigantic pension". ⁶⁸The novel portrays the reactionary movement as an inheritance of real ideas, but one driven by a stagnant, privileged youth.

Read in this way, REA isn't a novel about politics at all, but about the impossibility of separating conviction from self-presentation – and reactionary masculinity is its most precise example of this impossibility. Martin-Karl presents a world of men whose harshness, provocation, and apocalyptic pathos are consistently empty: Yvon's libertarianism is boredom, Jérôme's masculinism is frustration, Maximin's doctrine is arbitrariness, and Matthieu's "millennialism" is the bombast of a man who, overwhelmed by his own existential wonder, can't create a life for himself. What corrodes this masculinity from within is its repressed homosexual desire, the only genuine thing in the book, which, ironically, runs counter to every ideology – with his Muslim friend, with his secretly beloved husband, on a train journey that was supposed to last "a thousand years." The genre parody of the anti-Bildungsroman, the unreliable first-person narrative that sees through itself as fiction, the autopoetological loop of the printed book against printing, the sealed-off "non-lieux" of the periphery, and the ironically literal apocalypse combine to form a single conclusion: the reactionary forces defend not content, but a gesture of distinction, and their toughest man is the most hollow. That the narrator effortlessly switches to the left at the end and plays the same role of the persecuted outsider is a bitter twist in the novel—not the triumph of purification, but proof that it was never about the issue itself, but always only about being different from the others.