The presence of these familiar titles was important to the Germans because it nurtured the illusion that life was continuing as normal. To fill the void left by the absence of Le Temps, France’s most respected newspaper, Abetz sponsored a replacement, Les Nouveaux Temps, which appeared from November 1940. The editor was Abetz’s old friend Jean Luchaire, a lifelong Briandist. As a journalist in the 1930s, Luchaire had been supplied with funds by the Quai d’Orsay; after 1940, he was equally happy to take them from the Germans. One observer commented that he would have taken money from the Mongols if they had arrived in Paris. Luchaire was not alone in this. The collaborationist press was heavily subsidized and firmly controlled by the Germans. Increasingly also, they sought a financial stake in it. With the backing of the German Embassy, the German businessman Gerhard Hibbelen built up a press empire in France. By 1944, he controlled almost half of the Parisian press.38
The total readership of the Parisian daily press was considerable—about 3 million in October 1940, about 1.7 million by 1944—but this cannot be assumed to reflect the real audience of collaborationism. There are many practical reasons why people read daily newspapers. The case of political weeklies, however, is different: they imply some level of interest in, or support for, the principles they represent. The total circulation of political weeklies in the Occupied Zone was about 300,000. If this figure is supplemented by the circulation of weeklies in the Unoccupied Zone defending a similar line, one reaches a total readership of about one million. This implies a considerable audience for, or at least curiosity about, collaborationist ideas.39
The first new collaborationist weekly founded in the Occupied Zone was Alphonse de Chateaubriant’s La Gerbe, founded in July 1940. De Chateaubriant was a self-important minor novelist who had won the Prix Goncourt in 1911. He was a conservative Catholic whose epiphany had been a meeting with Hitler in 1936. On his return he wrote that if Hitler’s one hand was stretched out in Nazi salute, the other invisibly clasped the hand of God.40 At the time even French fascists had ridiculed such pronouncements, but Chateaubriant increasingly saw himself as a sage and prophet. La Gerbe became the vehicle of his conviction that Nazism was the only spiritual force capable of withstanding communism. The paper paid its contributors well and attracted significant names like Henri de Montherlant, Colette, and Jean Giono. Chateaubriant was too distracted to interfere much with what they wrote. It sold as many as 100,000 copies, and its readers received a somewhat partial view of the realities of Germany. One article in 1943 was devoted to Goering, the huntsman and lover of forests.41
Chateaubriant’s other venture was the group Collaboration founded at the end of 1940. Its governing committee included worthies like the rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris, the director of the Opéra-Comique, and the curator of the Musée Rodin. The movement sold the message of collaboration through lectures, cultural events, and in the columns of its journal, Collaboration. Although the group claimed 100,000 members, the real number was nearer 40,000. Nonetheless, its events attracted good audiences: a lecture tour of the Unoccupied Zone by Professor Friedrich Grimm was greeted by full houses everywhere. The Embassy estimated in September 1943 that some 200,000 people had attended events organized by Collaboration. The movement was authorized in the Vichy Zone, demonstrating again the porousness of the frontier between Vichy and Paris. It was the respectable face of collaborationism, and the elite of local society, including usually a representative of the prefect, attended its events. This was collaboration as provincial self-improvement, a world away from the street brawlers of the PPF.42
Collaboration as Hatred and Fraternity: Je suis partout
More strident was the tone of the weekly Je suis partout, which resumed publication in February 1941 and became the most successful politico-literary collaborationist weekly, selling up to 250,000 copies in 1942, 300,000 by 1944.43 Like La Gerbe, it attracted some distinguished writers who were not politically committed (Marcel Aymé, Jean Anouilh), but its regular contributors were unconditional supporters of collaboration. The editor, Robert Brasillach (1909-45), was one of those young Maurrassians increasingly attracted to fascism during the 1930s. Sharing his generation’s disgust with parliamentary politics, Brasillach’s original interests had been more literary than political. He became literary editor of Action française at the age of 22, and by 1937 he had published four novels. It was after 6 February 1934 that politics started impinging on him. Writing for Je suis partout in the late 1930s, he developed a strong sense of camaraderie with the other young contributors. Ever since his student days at the École normale supérieure, Brasillach idealized what he described, using the English word, as the life of the ‘gang’, the group of convivial comrades, linked by a common vision of the world. He had never entirely got over the memory of student life or developed emotionally beyond it. One theme running through his novels is that life is not worth living after 30. The same cult of camaraderie and youth informed his vision of fascism.44
Brasillach’s fascination with fascism was sparked by a meeting with the Belgian fascist leader Léon Degrelle in 1936. The small, chubby, and bespectacled Brasillach was seduced by Degrelle’s youthful good looks, describing him as a ‘poet of action’. Brasillach’s views were reinforced by a visit to Nuremberg in 1937 where he was enraptured by this politics of ‘poetry’, ‘youth’, and ‘joy’ (all key words for Brasillach). Fascism offered an aesthetic politics to rescue the world from decadence. But Brasillach’s residual Maurrassianism prevented him from succumbing totally to Nazism at this stage. He had not been impressed by Hitler—‘a sad vegetarian functionary’. Brasillach felt more drawn to the Falange, and he wrote a pamphlet in homage to the Cadets of the Alcazar of Toledo (another group of young men) holding out against the Republicans. His cult of youth and the outdoor life led him also to admire the young hitchhikers of the Popular Front. There is an undeniable homoeroticism in Brasillach’s writing.
After 1940, Brasillach’s reticence towards Nazism disappeared. Victory had shown that fascism was the poetry of the century, the ‘highest artistic creation’ of the time.45 With six other French writers, Brasillach attended a ‘European’ Congress of Writers organized at Weimar in October 1941. There he discovered Germany’s ‘eternal spirit of creative youth’, so different from the ‘wrinkled and decrepit’ French Republic, ‘a syphilitic strumpet, smelling of cheap perfume and vaginal discharge’.46 He became friendly with Karl-Heinz Bremer, this ‘big blond boy’, a ‘young Siegfried’, as he put it. Bremer’s death on the eastern front in 1942 affected Brasillach greatly.47
Those who celebrate Brasillach’s lyrical, almost innocent, fascism, overlook the other side of his wartime journalism: the incitements to murder, the implacable calls to violence, and the frenzied anti-Semitism. On one occasion he wrote: ‘What are we waiting for to assassinate the Communist leaders already imprisoned … Against those who want the death of the country, EVERYTHING is legitimate.’ In the Occupation such articles were not the kind of adolescent provocation they might once have been. The same is true of Brasillach’s notorious comment about the Jews in September 1942: ‘We must remove the Jews in a block, and not keep the young ones.’ In 1943, when it became clear that the war was lost, Brasillach felt Je suis partout should reduce its political content and concentrate more on literature. This issue split the editorial team, and Brasillach stopped writing for the journal from August. But he never disavowed collaboration, and continued to write for other collaborationist papers.48
In this editorial dispute, Lucien Rebatet (1903-72) was on the other side. Rebatet started his career in 1929 writing music and film criticism for Action française. He was one of a younger group of contributors (like Brasillach) who joined the paper at this time, and introduced a breath of artistic modernism. Although this had no effect on Maurras whose cultural tastes had not moved beyond 1890, the fact that people like Rebatet nonetheless felt at home in Action française is further proof of Maurras’s immense power of attraction in the inte
r-war years. During the Occupation Rebatet wrote for Je suis partout on both political and artistic subjects—he was the regular film critic—but what made him famous was the publication, in July 1942, of his book Les Décombres.
Despite its length, Les Décombres, a memoir mixed with long reflections on the current state of France, became the publishing sensation of the Occupation: 65,000 copies were sold in the first month, and Denoël, its publisher, claimed that only paper shortage prevented him selling another 200,000. In Les Décombres, Rebatet proclaimed his total commitment to Germany: ‘I wish the victory of Germany because her war is my war.’ One of Rebatet’s main targets was his former mentor Maurras. The book’s tone is best rendered by direct quotation. One passage nurses fantasies of murder: ‘Oh, my machine gun, so often caressed in my dreams, facing the despised gangs of the Popular Front … the gilded ghettos of Sodom … A hundred well-aimed machine gunners … I shoot like a god, greedily, passionately, in small steady bursts.’ Of François Mauriac, he writes: ‘a rich bourgeois with the shifty face of a false El Greco … oscillating in his prose between the eucharist and the pederastic brothel …is one of the most obscene rascals to have sprouted from the Christian dung-heap of our era’.
The book is riddled with an almost delirious anti-Semitism. One of Rebatet’s criticisms of Maurras was his lack of racism. Rebatet’s comment on the film Jew Süss was that it was agreeable to watch, even if only fictionalized, the hanging of a Jew; he expressed his joy at seeing Jews forced to wear a yellow star; he poured out his bile on Jewish art, Jewish writers, the Jewish ‘bacillus’, the Jewish ‘microbe’. Rebatet admitted that some Jews had talent, but this concession only allowed him to demonstrate the disinterested purity of his anti-Semitism: he declared himself ready to smash the ‘marvellous’ recordings by Menuhin and Horowitz, and to incinerate the paintings of Pisarro, ‘the only great painter of Israel’.49
The only writer whose rage matched Rebatet’s was Céline. But Céline was not a member of the Je suis partout group, which he described as a ‘feverish club of ambitious little pederasts’.50 In fact Céline was too anarchistic to belong to any coterie. For this reason, his defenders exculpate him from any accusation of collaboration. At a dinner at the German Embassy in February 1944, he brooded in surly silence before launching into an impassioned tirade whose theme was that the Germans had lost the war, and that Hitler was dead and had been secretly replaced by a Jew. The rant went on until Abetz had him taken home by the embassy chauffeur.51 But although the Germans found Céline difficult, they certainly considered him an ally, and the picture of Céline as an irascible and eccentric misanthrope, disconnected from politics, is too convenient.
In 1941, Céline published a third anti-Semitic pamphlet, Les Beaux Draps, and reissued the previous two. In his new preface to the École des cadavres he proudly affirmed that it had been the only work of its date to be anti-Semitic, racist, and collaborationist. He visited the anti-Semitic exhibition and wrote to complain about the absence of his books, and he was present for the opening of the IEQJ. In March 1942 he was at a dinner organized by the Association of Anti-Jewish Journalists, attended by the cream of the collaborationist press, as well as by Abetz’s deputy Schleier. He was also on good terms with several figures in the SS.
Although it is true that Céline contributed no article to the collaborationist press, he wrote numerous letters to it (five to Au pilori, six to Je suis partout), usually to denounce the inadequacy of anti-Semitic measures and the prevalence of philo-Semitism. The extremism of some of Céline’s statments made people wonder sometimes if he meant to be taken seriously—the German officer Ernst Jünger reports him as saying in December 1941 that he was ‘amazed that we don’t shoot, hang, exterminate the Jews … Amazed that someone possessing a bayonet doesn’t make use of it’52—but his letters to the collaborationist press in fact represented greater political involvement than he had ever shown before the war.53
Drieu’s NRF: Literary Collaborationism
The ravings of Céline or the fury of Rebatet were less valuable to the Germans than the support of writers not previously known for pro-German sentiments. For this reason they attached great importance to the editorship of the NRF by the fascist writer Drieu la Rochelle, hoping that the journal’s prestige would encourage distinguished writers to contribute to it. Abetz allegedly remarked: ‘there are three great powers in France: communism, the big banks, and the NRF’.54 Drieu had originally gone to see Abetz about setting up a single party, but there were quite enough of these on the horizon already, and he was instead charged with taking over the NRF. He secured the agreement of its publisher Gaston Gallimard who hoped this would safeguard his publishing house. For the same reason, the NRF’s former editor Jean Paulhan also gave his benediction, but refused any further association with the NRF for himself.55
Writing for Drieu’s NRF did not make one a collaborator, even less a collaborationist. This was certainly not the case of Paul Valéry (despite his ardent support of Pétain),56 who contributed a poem to the second issue in January 1941, nor André Gide who contributed pieces to the first and third issues. But many who agreed to write, particularly if they continued after the initial few issues, were aware of the implications of their decision, and the roster of contributors provides a gallery of the more celebrated writers willing to lend their name, at some level, to collaboration. Of the sixty or so writers who agreed to contribute something, slightly over half had already written for the NRF before the war.
A writer whose contribution to the first issue in December 1940 caused considerable shock was Jacques Chardonne. Born into a wealthy Cognac family from the south-west, Chardonne owned the Stock publishing house. He was most famous for his novel Le Bonheur de Barbezieux (1938) which celebrated the douceur de vie of the community of Barbezieux in the Charente and presented it as an epitome of the charms of provincial France. After the defeat Chardonne rushed to Paris to see if Stock was safe, and was pleasantly surprised by the welcome he received from the Germans. Out of this surprise was born the notorious article, ‘L’Été à La Maurie’, in which Chardonne described a meeting between a French peasant wine-grower and the German colonel posted in his region, both of them Verdun veterans. The German behaves with ‘courtesy’ and ‘distinction’, commenting to his French host: ‘It must be painful for you to see us here.’ The peasant replies: ‘I would have preferred to have invited you. But there is nothing I can do to change things. Enjoy my Cognac. I offer it to you gladly.’ In 1941 Chardonne republished this piece in the book Chronique privée de l’an 1940 which expanded on the theme of reconciliation.57 His next book Voir la figure (October 1941) went further, arguing that Germany, so generous in victory, offered France her only prospect of survival in a reorganized Europe. As Chardonne wrote to Paulhan in November 1940: ‘France was dead, Hitler is our providence.’58 In this second book Chardonne expressed his fear of communism, and perhaps the best explanation of the conversion of a writer not previously known for political statements, was his conviction that Germany was the only protection which the cosy world of Barbizieux enjoyed against this threat.59
Another writer known for his descriptions of provincial society was Marcel Jouhandeau who had created in his fiction the imaginary community of Chaminadour in the south-west. His public conversion to anti-Semitism in 1936 went hand in hand with increasingly conservative politics. In this context his eight contributions to Drieu’s NRF are not surprising. He also attended the Congress of European writers at Weimar in 1941. In his diary of the trip he wrote that his presence was meant to demonstrate that ‘France is not necessarily Germanophobe even in the present circumstances’ and ‘to make my body a fraternal bridge between France and Germany’. Given that he was pursuing an affair with a German officer while on the trip, this was, as Burrin remarks, more than a figure of speech.60
Henry de Montherlant was also not insensible to the physical charms of German soldiers, although he is not recorded as having any affairs with them.
Montherlant arrived in Paris in May 1941 after his compulsive pursuit of young boys had led to two close shaves with the police in the Unoccupied Zone. His rallying to collaboration was not to have been predicted since no one had more violently excoriated the Munich agreement. He declared that the French had become a nation capable only of listening to the Corsican crooner Tino Rossi and playing belote. The same contempt for weakness which inspired Montherlant’s condemnation of Munich now led him to admire the force which had swept France away. For Montherlant, who liked sporting metaphors, France had been fairly beaten, and she must be sportsmanlike in defeat. It was not for ‘narrow-shouldered … balding’ intellectuals to carp at the vitality of these young German troops ‘streaming with sweat’. In Je suis partout in November 1941 Montherlant wrote: ‘Europe will only be saved by a virile aristocracy, a heroic elite which has always to go against Christian morality.’
Montherlant published his reflections on the defeat in Solstice de juin (1941), a collection of articles which had previously appeared in La Gerbe and the NRF. He saw France’s defeat as the victory of healthy paganism over feeble Christianity. The swastika was the wheel of fate, and 1940 was a moment in the eternal cycle of defeat and victory. The passage that caused most shock was Montherlant’s description of a moment in the summer of 1940 when he had watched the writhing of a caterpillar on which he was urinating. Having shown his power over the creature, he had then spared it. The analogy was clear enough—the French being cast in the role of the caterpillar—and so was the moral: the defeated must throw themselves on the mercy of their conquerors. For all his celebration of virility, Montherlant’s was a counsel of prudence and realism. In fact he was an exceptionally timid individual always worried that his sexual escapades would come to the attention of the police. Walking around Paris one day with the writer Jean Grenier, he insisted they lower their voice when passing in front of a building occupied by the Germans in case they were overheard.61
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