A Rare Specimen of Nationalist Collaboration in Robert Brasillach

Paul Fischer

10/18/2017

Professor Zdatny

Kaplan, Alice. The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach. Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Word Count: 708

A Rare Specimen of Nationalist Collaboration in Robert Brasillach

In 1942 in France there existed a certain writer devoid of integrity. Once a member of a politically diverse group of gifted academics, Robert Brasillach drifted into the sphere of a close family friend, Maurice Bardèche, and then through conservative society in France to Nazism. In The Collaborator by Alice Kaplan, two major implements of innocence are offered in addition to an intimate history of the writer’s career and trial. The career of the writer is difficult to reconstruct; even such important facts as the nature of his sexuality have been lost to history.

Apologizing for denouncers of the Resistance and anti semites is serious. By the millennium, the case of Robert Brasillach had attracted attention as a case in which French Justice was too harsh, and great in its reach (234). Enough stress cannot be placed on the seriousness of the actions of Brasillach that resulted in the death of writers. Facts have not changed since the event of the trial.

In the early moments, Brasillach appeared to be one of the greatest minds of France. Even in a POW camp, though his mind had begun to experience the creeping poison of anti semitic indoctrination, he demonstrated a genius intellectual prowess, writing novels in their entirety before other inmates without edits (40). The work of Alain-Fournier inspired him to write in “tight, voluptuous little paragraphs” in his early novels and essays (5). Sitting adorned with all of the splendor and “iron jewels” of a prisoner, he wished during his trial to appear a quiet and humble writer of novels and romantic work, and to shed the subsuming odor of collaborationist denunciation, murder, and pillage that his actions cloaked him in (190).

At that time, with a bleak outlook, the attorney of Brasillach, Jacques Isorni told him that they could only “remain steadfast and hope” (185). Unable to prove innocence of the crimes that resulted or contributed to the deaths of fellow Frenchmen, the legal case rested on the impropriety of the proceedings. With his offensive retaliation to the accusations of Marcel Reboul, the prosecuting attorney, Isorni subtly pointed to the Prosecution’s historical quest to convict black marketeers of the Resistance.  This fails exactly because the black market in occupied France was frequently run by Germans themselves, and many of the targets of Reboul’s court had been Germans through the war (102).

Isorni’s own work in the Special Committee defending Jews helped serve a contrast of collaborative administrative roles. It would not be until much later that speculation was offered that this was a trial about crimes against the “humanity of the pen” (218). At the time of the trial, concentration camps had shocked the nation, those defending in such cases as the Brasillach trial as well. In his last days the poetry he writes is despondent and both sexual and racial postures atypical of a racist denunciatory Nazi are presented (189). The guilt of the defendant can be supposed, and there seems to be an understanding of the justice in the verdict at the end of the war in this literary and social critic.

Brasillach himself had few pieces of credible defense. He quit his job at the denunciatory Je Suis Partout, but too late to be considered an act of resistance (152). His work selling classics may have been miscast in the trial, but a trial does not consist of the facts that fall, but those that stand. Brasillach is a man who sat up straight at the docket and defended collaborationist nationalism in the light of the holocaust and Nazi defeat.

Kaplan’s treatment of the life is light by necessity, and with about 100 pages devoted to the trial, she focuses on what is known rather than what is forgotten and lost of his life. As a historian, she exhibits a restraint in tackling a difficult case that has seduced many into sympathy for the Nazi at trial. This is not done by political maneuver or conjecture, but a simple and logical progression through the facts of the case that are known.

One Thousand Pieces of a National Drama in the Unfree French

Paul Fischer

9/10/2017

Professor Zdatny

One Thousand Pieces of a National Drama in The Unfree French

Contemporary historians struggle to piece together the dramatic events that unfolded in France during the German occupation of World War II. There are a number of grounded facts that make analysis difficult, even contradictory, in practice. Ranging from former occupation to censorship such empirically founded agents of complexity are disambiguated in The Unfree French by Richard Vinen from the distinctly political and deliberate upheaval of institutions, persons, and property in France that occurred. Rather than dwelling on the tragedies in the course of war or the jubilation of victory and resistance, Vinen successfully navigates the integral developments through the war making a perplexing narrative tangible to modern historians.

The presence and widespread impact of prisoners of war in Germany and France blurs the lines between these two narratives; a political narrative was initiated in the hearts of every Frenchman, and stuck in the gut of the Frenchwoman as well (373-5). Uncertainty became a critical theme in this narrative early in the war, and though “it was probably in the bitter cold of January of 1941 that most prisoners finally accepted there was not going to be a large scale release” and that no orders to escape existed as for British soldiers, massive numbers managed to escape from early internment camps (157). On the countryside, both the confusion and the determination to serve France manifested in the panic of the exode.

While a popular film depicting the era, The Last Metro, includes a dialogue in which a woman refuses the implications of an agent of the censor by excusing herself as non-political to which he replies, “but you are wrong, everything is political,” the integral nature of politics to the era is matched by social considerations. Integrity of cached events deliberated through subsequent hunting is best reflected by the opinions of the survivors: “French people recalled the period in terms of what happened to them and those around them, the idea that these multitudes of individual dramas were part of a broader national drama only developed later” (16). The Unfree French succeeds in bringing this social collection of considerable import to political immediacy.

Intractability of the course of action of Vichy France cannot be dismissed as in the words of Bénoit-Méchin “the crowd possesses no organ for thought. Victim of its mental hallucinations and its nervous reactions, it is without defence against rumours and delirious dreams” (94). As much as silence defined the government of Pétain, and the subsequent Pétainism that dominated the colonies, circumstance dictated the actions of the individual French (31, 75). This occurred heroically, as one woman pinned a yellow star to her dog and others donned the symbol in protest though “gentiles who wore the yellow star were often themselves in some doubt about the precise significance of their act” (140). Even Marshall Pétain used the murky nature of the Franco-German occupation in a manner bordering on heroism, declaring to the Germans “if it would take you five days to invade France, it would take me five minutes to deliver my colonies and ships to Great Britain” (81).

The tale is not only one of gangsters and murder, of treaties and betrayal. There is also the final defeat of Germany, and the restoration of France. With the exception of some of the bourgeouisie, almost none found German occupation preferable to the Allied invasion: “Where the Germans had been systematically ruthless with the population, the Allies were confused and tactless” (331). Exposing the system of agents, censorship, and oppression that were in play in occupied territories through World War II helps an understanding of the formal initiation of military operations and of the subsequent blood bath to be formulated. 250,000 Gypsies in France were killed, as were 75,000 Jews. While death camp activity was lower among French citizens than many parts of Europe, and “Vichy aimed to exclude Jews from public life rather than to kill,” foreign born Jews in France suffered near complete extermination, and the highest kill rates of any civilian population in Europe was seen there (136).