by Ruth Brandon
But was Schueller’s real motivation as innocent as he tried to make it appear? One man testified that when he and his group left, “M.Schueller gave us lunch and a little pep talk, saying we didn’t need to be afraid, he had always felt more at home in Germany than in England.”42 The man was shocked to hear this overt enthusiasm for the invaders, though perhaps it was not entirely surprising given Schueller’s Alsatian parentage. Alsace borders Germany, its dialect is a form of German, and many Alsatians (though not Schueller) felt more German than French—so much so that some of the SS troops who perpetrated the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glâne in 1944 were Alsatian.2
There is no doubt that Schueller, like all employers, tried to minimize the number of workers obliged to undertake this hated journey, as much for his own sake as for theirs. Experienced men were hard to replace. His line was that the reason he had agreed to fulfill some German business orders was in order to keep his workers in France, which may have been true but of course was also a handy way of justifying collaboration. He pointed out that his products had no military value, produced figures showing that the profits derived from German sales were zero in 1940 and 1941, less than 3 percent of profits in 1942, just over 5 percent in 1943, and zero in 194443—and reiterated that he thought taking a few German orders would reduce the number of his workers forced to go to Germany. Schueller’s loyal manager at L’Oréal, Georges Mangeot, confirmed this story. He said they began to deal with the Germans in 1942 because they thought that otherwise, with no German business and in a nonvital industry, they would be disadvantaged with regard to STO.
The STO numbers did indeed come down—from 200 to 93 for L’Oréal, and from 75 to 5 for Monsavon. But Mangeot also described how, after discussing the matter with Schueller, he got the numbers reduced in quite another way—by bribing a German member of staff at the Bureau Allemand, who was later shot, having been caught taking similar bribes.44 And at Monsavon, the reduction was achieved by the young François Dalle, who persuaded a friendly commissaire de police to mislay, at considerable risk to himself, the factory’s list of eligible men (which included Dalle himself).45
Necessary collaboration, or bribes, or a bit of both? In the complex and shadowy world of occupied France, survival, even for those as well-placed as Schueller, was an endless balancing act, this morsel of disobedience bought at the price of that obeisance to authority. And this balancing act was inevitably reflected in the postwar trials that came to be known as the épuration, or purge. Evidence depends on record, and the record reflected at best only a small part of the reality. The judging panels had to reconstitute what was missing as well as they could.
Notoriously, people’s motive for testifying in these cases was, more often than not, revenge. Schueller’s case was no exception. His chief accuser, in both his trials, was a man called Georges Digeon who had once managed the L’Oréal canteen. It was Digeon who, in 1944, first drew the authorities’ attention to Schueller, in an affidavit accusing him of giving the MSR more than 20 million francs; of providing a room for it at rue Royale; and of being a member of the executive committee of Déat’s party. Digeon also raised the question of two vans: the one mentioned earlier, requisitioned by the Germans in 1944, and another allegedly given by Schueller to the MSR. This van had all its windows darkened except one at the back, enabling people to be photographed without their knowledge. Schueller, Digeon said, had provided these vehicles without question when asked. But others raised questions about Digeon himself. He was loathed throughout L’Oréal, was known by all as a collaborator who had done regular business with the Germans, and had been sacked in September 1944 “on the demand of the factory” for making baseless accusations. He had then gone straight to the local mairie, and had laid the accusations against Schueller that formed the basis of both the personal and industrial épuration trials.46 It could hardly be clearer that he was motivated by fury—and also, as with many such accusers, by an urgent need to divert attention from what he himself had done. On the other hand, that did not mean his accusations were groundless.
Another piece of evidence presented at Schueller’s trials was an anonymous letter from some members of the CGT trade union at Valentine, denouncing Schueller for his support of the STO, and for employing known collaborators.
If the few workers who are still there can bring themselves to tell the truth, they’ll confirm all this. We swear on the heads of our wives and children that we’re telling the truth, and we hope you’ll arrest that whole nest of collaborators, whether they’re millionaires or just working for a boss. . . . We promise to tell you who we are as soon as you start your enquiries, but you can’t trust these bastards, and as we need to eat we can’t sign our names yet because we’d be thrown out. . . . We swear on our honor that there’s no question of vengeance in all this, we’re just good Frenchmen who want to see the wicked punished.47
But of course they were a bit more than that. As everyone knew, the trade unions had obvious reasons for hating Schueller, who publicly despised the workers’ democracy they stood for.
Another difficulty was that, as the war progressed, people’s behavior changed with their expectations. In June 1940, a Nazi victory seemed imminent and inevitable. But in June 1941, Hitler invaded Russia, extending his fighting front by 1,800 miles and bringing the Red Army into the war on the Allies’ side. And in December 1941, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor finally brought America, too, into the war. The German victory, which had seemed so certain, now seemed far less assured. Behavior that had seemed most ill-advised yesterday suddenly began to make sense, as prudent persons hedged their bets—among them, Schueller. On December, 10, 1942, he sent a note to L’Oréal representatives:
Competitors are spreading lies about me. They come to clients with their order book and my book The Economic Revolution with passages underlined in red pencil, and use them to present me as a bad person who shouldn’t be dealt with.
They accuse me of being German. I’m not.
They accuse me of being Jewish. I’m Catholic. My father was a seminarist for a time. . . .
I’m not interested in politics, but in political economy. . . . I was almost made a minister or an undersecretary but I refused because it would have been impossible to do what I would have wanted.
I belonged to the Economic Commission of MSR—but only so long as MSR was approved by Marshal Pétain. When that was withdrawn, I resigned. . . .
I think it my duty, in the present circumstances, to do all I can to help in what I consider to be the revival of my country. . . .48
He did so by quietly extending his support to the Resistance as well as the occupiers. On the one hand, L’Oréal set aside a room for MSR meetings; on the other, Schueller also organized a weekly mail and parcel drop across the boundary between the zone occupée and the zone libre, using a L’Oréal van driven by an employee who happened to have an American passport (accredited with a forged German stamp). On the one hand, he continued to finance La Révolution Nationale; on the other, he gave 700,000 francs to the underground in the maquis in the Puy de Dôme and sent 2 million francs to de Gaulle. He joined a network that helped more than two hundred people escape into the zone libre in the Cher, near Saint-Aignan; he helped others escape from Paris. At the beginning of 1944, his paint firm, Valentine, gave over 100,000 francs to help réfractaires—workers who went underground to escape the STO. And all the time, while publicly supporting the official line, he mainta
ined, within occupied Paris, amicable contacts with friends from earlier days.
One such was Fred Joliot-Curie. The two had moved far apart since the early days at L’Arcouest. Joliot-Curie had remained in academic research, which, far from being “dusty,” had won him, together with his wife, Irène Curie, the 1935 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Like Schueller, he had always been socially conscious, but there, too, they had moved in opposite directions. Joliot-Curie was now a Communist and active in the Resistance, and had sent his papers on atomic research to London as soon as war broke out, keeping them out of Hitler’s grasp.
The contrast between Joliot-Curie’s wartime life and that of Schueller illustrated the material advantages of collaboration. Both men were now famous and distinguished. But despite his eminence, Joliot-Curie was not sheltered from the general hardship, while for Schueller, life in wartime was far from austere.
Schueller’s only real wartime inconvenience occurred in 1941, when he was forced to move out of his luxurious apartment on boulevard Suchet, in the smart 16th arrondissement, as all the apartment buildings in that street had been requisitioned by the Germans. The owner of the buildings wrote a pleading letter on behalf of his lessees to the sinister Fernand de Brinon, then Vichy’s “Ambassador to Paris.” None of the foreigners living in the apartment buildings had had to move; couldn’t at least the Aryan French be spared? These were important people: Madame Roederer of the champagne family; the president of Cinzano; M. Guerlain the perfumier; bankers; industrialists.49 No, they all had to go, even though Schueller’s name was included on a list of important industrial collaborators who, on the strict and express instruction of Reichsmarschall Göring, were to be allowed to keep their apartments in otherwise requisitioned districts. He moved to avenue Paul Doumer, a short walk away, but preferred to spend his time at his grand house, the Villa Bianca, at Franconville. Joliot-Curie, by contrast, could not even obtain a new tire for the motorbike on which he relied to commute between the Collège de France, where he held a chair, his lab at Ivry, and his temporary home outside Paris. His request was turned down, and a little later he registered the acquisition of a bicycle, with gears.
Despite this disparity, the two remained on surprisingly amicable terms. For Joliot-Curie, Schueller presumably represented that invaluable wartime necessity—one of the enemy who could be trusted on a personal level. Despite what he must have felt about Schueller’s politics, he still felt able to request help for a Jewish chemical engineer languishing in a prisoner-of-war camp and who might be a useful employee in Schueller’s businesses. Schueller replied to his “cher ami,” from a spa where he was taking the cure for rheumatism, that to his great regret he could not help—he had “approached M. Scapini many times, and we got a few people out at first, but there’s been nothing doing on that front for a while now. You can imagine, I’m really sorry about this.”50 Georges Scapini was the man deputed by Pétain to negotiate with the German authorities regarding prisoners of war. If he couldn’t help, no one could.
In return, Schueller requested a favor of his own—one that throws a rare light on his personal life. In 1927 his first wife, Berthe, had died, and in 1932 he had married again. The second Madame Schueller was Liliane’s English governess, Miss Annie Burrows from Fulham (a genteelly run-down part of southwest London), a choice that may reflect her charm, or simply Schueller’s own loneliness and lack of social life. He felt that a wife at home was something every man needed. It was one of the social rules set out in the Révolution de l’économie. And his work-centered life afforded him few opportunities to meet suitable ladies.
At the time, Miss Burrows (generally known as Nita) must have been overwhelmed by her good luck. Although governesses in novels frequently married their wealthy employers, they rarely did so in real life. But when war broke out, her position, as an Englishwoman married to a leading collaborator, became equivocal, to say the least. She was by no means the only wife to find herself in a similarly awkward fix. The chief Vichy Jew-hunter, the odious Darquier de Pellepoix, was married to an Australian, while Fernand de Brinon, an arch-anti-Semite, had a Jewish wife. How Madame de Brinon felt we do not know. Madame Darquier drowned her troubles in drink. As for Madame Schueller, she seems to have taken refuge in nervous ill health. “The doctor who used to advise Madame Schueller, Dr. Layani, is a non-Aryan, and has escaped to the zone libre,” Schueller wrote. “I’m looking for a replacement, someone really good on women’s illnesses . . . and who can put up with my wife’s short temper. Would the director of the Hôpital Curie know anyone?” Joliot-Curie gave a name, and undertook to write a letter of recommendation. He enclosed, along with his note, two flasks of rabbit urine, one irradiated, the other a control.51 Between the politics and the business maneuvers, Schueller still kept up his interest in chemistry.
Obviously, when forced to account for himself by the épuration, he did his best to emphasize his Resistance-friendly activities and draw a veil over the others. It was not an easy task, given that those others had been so very public. But although Schueller’s was an extreme case, so many businessmen were prosecuted for collaboration following the Liberation that at least one employers’ federation, that of the ironmasters, circulated a questionnaire to its members to help them prepare dossiers in their own defense. Two main defense planks were recommended: one, that they had kept the largest possible proportion of their production for the use of the French civilian economy and had done as little as possible for the Germans; two, that they had obstructed the deportation of their workers for the STO.52
Schueller, like everyone else, stressed these. And like everyone else, he showed how he had helped Jews escape the Nazi horrors. All those he had helped in their hour of need now repaid the debt by writing letters in his support. Two brothers named Freudiger, neighbors in Brittany, had told him they were thinking of joining de Gaulle in London. Schueller warmly encouraged them to do so. Professor Levy of the École Normale, a consultant chemist to L’Oréal, fled to Lyon in the zone libre and received money while he was there, paid through L’Oréal’s Lyon branch. Another professor of chemistry, M. Meyer, who taught at Lyon University, was sacked from the faculty by Vichy and left without work. Schueller offered a loan to be repaid after the war, as well as other unspecified help. Every time the two met, Meyer testified, Schueller repeated his hatred of the Germans, of the Nazis, of racism. A L’Oréal chemist, M. Chain, first continued to work under a false name, but then had to vanish. He continued to be paid. Mlle. Huffner, a secretary, was paid under a false name, and money was sent to her when she left for the zone libre. M. Kogan, the factory manager at Valentine, was a Russian émigré, naturalized only recently, and was therefore caught by the Nazi laws that declared all Jews in this situation to be noncitizens, liable to deportation. Schueller bought him false papers to escape to Portugal; when they failed, and he was stuck in Spain, Schueller arranged a job with L’Oréal’s Spanish subsidiary. M. Schatzkes, L’Oréal’s commercial director, was sent to Lyon; when competitors complained that the Lyon branch had a Jewish manager, he was sent to Marseille; and when that became dangerous, he stayed in a villa at St. Jean Cap-Ferrat until Marseille became safe again. When the Germans finally arrived there, he and his wife were enabled to escape to Switzerland.
Almost everyone hauled up before the courts in the postwar purges could offer similar examples. Admiral Darlan himself, who for some time was Pétain’s deputy (and, thus, effectively head of the Vichy government), and who negotiated a p
olitical alliance between French Vichy forces and Nazi Germany, pleaded for Jews who had married into his own family—all belonging to “good old French Jewish families”—to be spared deportation. Perhaps helping a few individuals made it easier not to think about the rest—or perhaps, conversely, the thought of people one knew and liked being subjected to some terrible fate made the awful reality too uncomfortably clear.
The few contemporary documents that survive from the Jewish community show just how difficult it was to persuade people to confront that reality. Hélène Berr, the daughter of a prominent Jewish industrialist,3 kept a journal giving a day-by-day account of life as a Jew in occupied Paris. In entry after entry, she records her helpless horror as one after another of her friends and acquaintances is deported. In November 1943, the Berrs’ neighbor, Mme. Agache,
came rushing in because she had just heard that young Mme. Bokanowski, who had been sent to the Hôpital Rothschild with her two infants when her husband was in Drancy, had been taken back to Drancy. She asked Maman: “You mean to say they are deporting children?” She was horrified.
It’s impossible to express the pain that I felt on seeing that she had taken all this time to understand, and that she had only understood because it concerned someone she knew. Maman . . . replied: “We have been telling you so for a whole year, but you would not believe us.”
Not knowing, not understanding even when you do know, because you have a closed door inside you, and you only can realize what you merely know if you open it. That is the enormous drama of our age. Everyone is blind to those being tortured.53
Schueller, of course, had invested everything in not confronting these realities. While he comforted his conscience by helping his own Jewish acquaintances, his new friends and colleagues from MSR were dividing the spoils of abandoned Jewish property—that property whose “administration” was such a valued perk of collaborationist life. “I didn’t much enjoy the Friday policy meetings [of MSR at the L’Oréal offices] because they went on too long,” Henry Charbonneau remembered. “I was only too happy to leave L’Oréal’s fancy panelling for my office in rue Paradis (where we had taken over the LICA building) and get on with working on propaganda.”54 LICA was the Ligue Contre Antisémitisme.