by Ruth Brandon
Deloncle agreed to Abetz’s arrangement—he could hardly have done otherwise. But, as always, there was a plot. He would take over the RNP from within, à la Cagoule, beginning, in the classic manner, by assassinating several Déatists. When these assassinations happened, Déat himself was in the hospital. A former secretary of Deloncle’s, a Mme. Massé, went to visit him there. A few days later, she too was killed and her body found in the Seine. She may have shown Déat some documents proving that Deloncle, his supposed ally, had been behind the assassinations, or perhaps simply wanted to warn him that Deloncle planned to use his absence in the hospital to take over the RNP. Either way, the visit proved fatal. An attempt was made, some time later, on Déat himself. It failed. But Marx Dormoy, who had once been Déat’s colleague in the Front Populaire, and who was now under house arrest in Montélimar, was blown up in his bed that July. Dormoy had been minister of the interior at the time of the Arc de Triomphe bombs and had overseen the arrest and imprisonment of the cagoulards. They had not forgotten—“nous sommes méchants”’—and this was their revenge.
Not surprisingly, morale in the wider RNP plummeted. Its membership had expanded during the early weeks of the enforced cohabitation, but soon fell into an irreversible decline. For Schueller, so accustomed to success, this was his first real experience of failure. “I’ve never known a man able to inspire so much confidence in a movement, so long as he was in charge,” Soulès observed.34 But now he was not in charge, and MSR no longer inspired confidence. Was it a good idea to associate so closely with a man as shady as Deloncle, and to throw good money after bad into a product as unsatisfactory as the RNP’s dreadful magazine, the Révolution Nationale? It was clearly time to distance himself. In late 1941, Schueller severed his connection with Deloncle and the MSR. This prompt dissociation was one of the main planks of his defense during his postwar trials for collaboration. Whatever his dealings with MSR, it was to his credit, the judges decided, that he had quit it in good time.
II
It is the opinion of German men and women that women who pluck their eyebrows, use cosmetics, color their hair, and try to draw attention to themselves through eccentric behavior (for example smoking, face powder, etc.) belong to an older generation whose time has passed. The younger generation is against all these things, and youth has to be counted not by years but by strength of feeling. The women who are doing such things should be ashamed. . . . To be young means to be natural, and to understand the admonitions and demands of a great era.
—DR. KRUMMACHER, LEADER OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST WOMEN’S ORGANIZATION, WRITING IN Koralle (A GERMAN GENERAL-INTEREST MAGAZINE), 1936
Schueller could not deny that throughout the war years he had been one of the voices of the Occupation. The radio broadcasts and newspaper articles, the public lectures and the pep talks to his workforce spoke for themselves. But politics, he assured the court, had played no part in those talks: they had been concerned purely with economics. “If, like me, you’re convinced that you’ve found the answers to the world’s economic and social problems, you obviously can’t stop talking about them just because the wrong people listen.”35
The burden of his broadcasts, speeches, and articles was indeed economic, the same ideas—about the proportional salary and bosses’ responsibilities—that he had been preaching for years. Thus, a radio talk on May 8, 1941, entitled “How Not to Die of Hunger This Winter,” was about the efficiency, or otherwise, of workers’ allotments and the importance of making the most of small parcels of land. And a public lecture titled “The Revolution of the Economy Is the Economy of a Revolution” (given at the Salle Pleyel, the concert hall on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré) was about the proportional salary and new ways to calculate taxes. But there were other ideas, too. In June 1941, he promised, to a standing ovation, that “We are going to become the first state of a new Community. We shall issue twenty decrees in twenty days, one a day following the Rassemblement Nationale Populaire’s assumption of power. Then, in spite of her defeat—because of that defeat—France will once again take her rightful place in the world.”36 A talk on taxes was more problematic, culminating as it did with the phrase: “There can be no patriotism without a mystique of blood and soil.” Since ignorance of that mystique’s associations was unlikely for one so well acquainted with Hitler’s writings, this implies extreme innocence, Nazi leanings, or amoral opportunism. After the war he pleaded ignorance and innocence; and since that was what people preferred to believe, they did not question it, or him, too closely.
These broadcasts and lectures were often published as articles, in propaganda newspapers such as L’Oeuvre or La Gerbe, or periodicals such as Révolution Nationale (which Schueller financed himself). But there was also another, and much more popular, vehicle for his ideas—his beauty magazine, Votre Beauté. For cosmetics were still, as they had always been, acutely political.
In Britain and America, where women worked alongside men as a vital part of the war effort, glamor was recognized as being of the greatest psychological importance. When Helena Rubinstein asked President Roosevelt what she could do to help the war effort, FDR told her the story of a woman in London being stretchered out of a blitzed building. Offered a sedative, she insisted, first, on touching up her lipstick. “It just does something for me,” she said.
It certainly did something for Helena Rubinstein, Inc. The company’s range that year included 629 items: 62 creams, 78 powders, 46 perfumes, colognes, and eaux de toilette, 69 lotions, 115 lipsticks, plus soaps, rouges, and eye shadows. In 1941, its profits were $484,575; by 1942 they had almost doubled, to $823,529. That year every woman in the United States spent an average of twelve dollars on cosmetics.37 “You have got to look right down into their pocketbook and get that last nickel,” Madame remarked.
The war was good for business in other ways, too. In a development that she could never, at her most optimistic, have imagined—and one that would transform the postwar beauty industry—Helena Rubinstein became an official supplier to the U.S. Army. A few years earlier, Madame had tried to introduce a line of men’s toiletries, House of Gourielli, opening a lavish salon on Fifth Avenue she hoped would induce a new habit of male pampering. It failed to take off, however. The salon closed, and the men’s toiletries line faded away. But the war succeeded where all her efforts and advertising had failed, and moved men’s toiletries into the mainstream. When the Allies invaded North Africa in 1942, every GI was issued a kitbox containing sunburn cream, camouflage makeup, and cleanser, discreetly lettered on the inside “Helena Rubinstein Inc” and including instructions on how to apply cosmetics in desert conditions. Army PX stores routinely stocked a range of aftershave lotions, skin creams, deodorants, talcum powder, sunburn lotions, lip cream, and cut-price cologne, for use where no bathing facilities were available.38 A lucrative new market beckoned. “Men could be a lot more beautiful,” Madame observed hopefully in 1943,39 and if she had anything to do with it, they would be.
In Britain, too, glamor was taken seriously. It was becoming increasingly hard to source raw materials for the manufacture of cosmetics, which were classed as a nonessential industry. Even so, recruitment posters for Britain’s all-women Auxiliary Territorial Service, which provided drivers and ran army camps—a laborious and often drab life of catering, cleaning, and general maintenance—emphasized the importance of looking good. The most famous of these posters, Abram Games’s profile of a beautiful, poutingly lipsticked girl, her
ATS cap set becomingly amid blond curls, caused something of a furor—for a poster, the ultimate compliment. People complained it was too sexy—and indeed, the girl might have stepped straight off a film set, perhaps one of those Powell and Pressburger wartime fables in which immaculately coiffed telephonists with cut-glass vowels inspire crashed airmen to cling to life. Games, however, stuck by his poster. It was, he insisted, drawn from life—a genuine ATS girl he had met in a train. British Vogue set out a detailed regime by which its readers might achieve comparable perfection, setting out a timetable for rising, washing, dressing, breakfasting, and making-up in one hour. Twenty of those sixty minutes were devoted to makeup. Lipstick, properly applied—color, blot, powder; color, blot, powder—would last all day without retouching. Helena Rubinstein had begun her career turning evening dresses into curtains. Now Vogue urged its readers to defeat rationing by turning their curtains into dresses—“Toile de Jouy curtains are ideal for pretty housecoats.”
The Nazis, with their embrace of naturism, sport, and motherhood, officially abhorred such degeneracy. Hitler stopped short of closing beauty parlors and hairdressers, allowing them to remain open throughout the war because, as he remarked to Goebbels in 1943, “women after all constitute a tremendous power and as soon as you dare to touch their beauty parlors they are your enemies.”40 But as always when women were offically relegated to the kitchen and the nursery, cosmetics were frowned upon. As early as 1933, it was decreed in Breslau that “painted” women could not attend Party meetings. The single women chosen to breed for Germany in the “Lebensborn” project, in which Aryan maidens were put at the disposal of SS officers, were not permitted to use lipstick, paint their nails, or pluck their eyebrows. Reddened lips and cheeks might suit the “Oriental” or “southern” woman, the sort of woman destined for Auschwitz or Belsen, but Aryan beauties supposedly preferred the purity of a suntanned skin, with its natural sheen of perspiration. “Though our weapon is but the wooden spoon, its impact must be no less than that of other weapons!” declaimed Reichsfrauenführerin Gertrud Scholtz-Klink.41
This stern philosophy was alien to France, where feminine beauty was an important part of the culture, and where devotion to style was epitomized by the haute couture for which Paris was renowned. Schueller’s own taste, however—oddly, it might be thought, for one whose business was so bound up with feminine beauty—tended, if his Révolution de l’économie is to be believed, rather toward the Nazi Kinder, Kirche, Küche (children, church, kitchen) model of womanhood. Votre Beauté reflected this. Its stern emphasis on fitness, sport, and diet, not to say the commercial imperative of selling more bottles of Ambre Solaire, had always inclined it to promote a healthy tan rather than lipstick and face powder, which were not L’Oréal products. Now it bracingly reflected the new hardship. Reappearing in a half-size format in November 1940, its first issue began with several pages of exercises as prescribed by Jean Borotra, the aging tennis star who had become the new regime’s General Commissioner for Sports. “Beauty,” the magazine declared, “is a discipline: it’s cowardly to let yourself go.” Naturally, wartime imposed certain difficulties when it came to grooming. But they could—must—be overcome. “No hot water? Tell yourself it’s all for the good! Cold water is far better for your health than hot. Hot water is a luxury for people made soft by carelessness. No more hot water, vive l’eau froide!” The magazine urged readers not to be nostalgic for the old days of culinary plenty: pictures of lamb chops were sternly crossed out, while plates of potatoes received a nod of approval with the exhortation: “Accept the restrictions bravely and with good grace—rationing will help you live longer.”1 Feeling the winter cold? Exercise was the thing! As for cosmetics, they were quite simply a relic of a discredited past age. “Women used to use far too much makeup—now we’re finding our true nature again,” readers were assured in the April 1941 issue.
When it came to product placement, however, the demands of commerce won out over propaganda. “For a woman used to looking after her body, soap is as necessary as bread!” urged an ad for Monsavon. A neighboring ad for L’Oréal was equally forthright. “Dyeing your hair is no longer a matter of coquetry, it’s a gesture of defiance, a social necessity.” But the tone remained stern. Frivolity and flirtation in the dancehall belonged to a past age. In wartime, survival was what mattered—and the race went to the fittest. “Jobs are scarce, competition’s hot—you have to look young! However capable and experienced you may be, gray hair will mean you don’t get hired.”
Strangely, Votre Beauté continued to feature the couture collections, some of which—Lanvin, Gres, Balenciaga—continued throughout the war years. Few of the magazine’s readers would have been able to afford these creations, but they had always been featured, and perhaps provided a comforting sense that life as it had once been was not wholly extinct. The most enthusiastic wartime clientele, however, was German. There was even a plan (soon abandoned) to remove the Paris couture houses wholesale to Berlin, a strangely schizophrenic notion given the official Nazi attitude toward chic, but one accurately reflecting the invaders’ taste for luxury.
Whether Votre Beauté’s readers shared its stern outlook was doubtful. Most wartime photos of young Frenchwomen show no sign of a retreat into scrubbed dowdiness. On the contrary, they tried their best to stay seductive against the odds. One urban legend told how a smart hairdresser employed young men to generate electricity for the dryers by cycling on stationary tandems in the cellars. And perhaps it was true: similar tandems can still be seen in the catacombs beneath the 15th arrondissement.
In those days of scarcity, when only approved publications were allotted paper and ink, Votre Beauté’s continued appearance confirmed that its owner toed the official line. It would form part of the case against him when, after the Liberation, Schueller had to face trial. In fact he was tried twice: once in 1946 for industrial collaboration as the owner of L’Oréal and Valentine—when he was all but convicted, scraping out an acquittal on the second hearing—and once in 1948 in his personal capacity as one of the leaders of MSR, when he was acquitted. Had he been found guilty on either count his businesses would have been nationalized, and he would have been banned from ever running a business in France again.
Fortunately for him, little of the evidence brought against him was as clear and undeniable as the volumes of Votre Beauté. As usual when alleged collaborators were brought before the courts, there was a jumble of conflicting testimony, leaving gaps and ambiguities that could be interpreted more or less according to taste. The transcripts of the evidence given in Schueller’s trials show how hard it was to be certain either of witnesses’ motivations or of their veracity.
For example, an item of evidence in both trials concerned a van requisitioned from L’Oréal by the Germans in 1944, when the Occupation was ending and they needed transport to evacuate both themselves and their loot. Everyone agreed that a van had indeed been handed over. But the courts heard three different versions of this story. In one, a late-model van was unquestioningly provided; in another, a van was provided, but it was a gazogène, a vehicle developed for use when petrol was unavailable and that ran on methane gas; in the third, a smart new van was promised, but the German in charge omitted to make a final check, and a broken-down old gazogène was substituted—one so decrepit that it had to be towed to within a few meters of the factory gate on a trailer, as it would never have made the entire journey unaided. Which story was true?
At least vans were visible
objects. Either they were or were not there, had or had not been provided. Less tangible, and so that much harder to pin down, were policies and attitudes. The detested Service du Travail Obligatoire, or STO, under which Frenchmen were compelled to go and work in Germany, was one example.
At first the Germans had tried to raise a volunteer workforce by promising that for each volunteer who went to Germany, a French POW would be released. This arrangement was known as the Relève, and many of Schueller’s employees attested that he had addressed his workforce urging those unmarried and without family responsibilities to volunteer in this way. He offered substantial sums to any who did so volunteer, and explained that no one should hesitate to leave because they were worried about the living conditions they might expect: they would sleep in good beds and eat well. This was very far from the general horrific experience, though L’Oréal employees returning from Germany testified that they had received regular food parcels.
Schueller admitted that he had indeed encouraged men to volunteer for the Relève, but insisted that he had been motivated purely by the desire to repatriate prisoners. When it became evident that the Germans were not in fact fulfilling this promise, he ceased to support it. In any case, the program soon ceased to be voluntary, and the Relève was replaced by the compulsory STO.