Michel Guénaire

Michel Guénaire's "La visite" (Grasset, 2025) reconstructs Hitler's two-hour visit to Paris on June 23, 1940, not as a historical episode, but as a highly concentrated aesthetic act. The text depicts a deserted city, which Hitler traverses at dawn like a museum without an audience: Paris appears as a "dead star," as pure architecture, detached from social life. Guénaire replaces action with perception, making the walk, the gaze, and the silence the very substance of the narrative. The city becomes both the benchmark and the rival against which Hitler's aesthetic ambitions are ignited: Paris is admired, assessed, and simultaneously interpreted as a challenge to the never-realized "Germania" project. In the encounter with monuments such as the Opéra, the Trocadéro, and the Invalides, the narrative unfolds as a political-aesthetic study of power, form, and appropriation, in which architecture becomes the language of totalitarian imagination. The review reads "La visite" as a model case of authoritarian rule and analyzes Guénaire's argument beyond its historical context. It shows how the text does not explain power psychologically, but rather exposes it as a form of perception and staging: Hitler appears not as a thinking subject, but as a seeing entity, surrounded by an archetypal entourage of technicians, artists, and functionaries who aesthetically secure power. The deserted city, however, refuses the expected response, thus revealing the emptiness of totalitarian gestures. The review particularly emphasizes the metaphor of the "silent film," with which Guénaire describes the visit as an unreal, almost surreal moment—a peaceful staging at the heart of a war of annihilation. From this perspective, "La visite" becomes a universal reflection on authoritarian systems: The focus is not on the individual dictator, but on the recurring structures, roles, and images through which power produces itself—and ultimately fails in a world that cannot be fully appropriated.