Montherlant’s argument for collaboration as a moment in the millennial rise and fall of civilizations was also employed by Alfred Fabre-Luce who compared France’s defeat to that of Greece by Rome. Like the Romans, Fabre-Luce argued, the Germans were ‘respectful, almost timid, conquerors’ whose rough edges would be smoothed out by time: French intelligence would prevail over German force. A long-standing advocate of Franco-German reconciliation, in the Occupation Fabre-Luce was one of the most seductive and sophisticated proponents of collaboration. His anthology of French writers who allegedly prefigured ‘the New Europe’ gave Hitler a pedigree which included Renan, Paul Valéry, Péguy, Maurras, Pascal, and Gide. Nazism was almost transformed into part of the French patrimony.
Fabre-Luce was one of those grands bourgeois—son of the founder of the Crédit Lyonnais bank—whose Europeanism derived from a sense of belonging to a cosmopolitan civilization of taste, refinement, money, and manners, collaboration as viewed from a grand apartment on the Avenue Foch. During the Occupation, he published three successive volumes of his Journal de la France. These offer a well-informed portrait of the period and also function as subtle apologetics. The first volume contains a passage showing that the disadvantages of Occupation had compensations: cars might no longer be available but one could cross the road safely; there might be fewer books published but one could return to the classics. (This celebration of the more austere virtues was a stock-in-trade of collaborationist writers, especially those likely to be seen at glamorous Embassy parties.) But one hardly has to scratch the surface of Fabre-Luce’s polish to find some standard themes: the decadence of the old regime, the Jewish ‘problem’.62
Far removed from Fabre-Luce’s Parisian sophistication was Jean Giono who spent most of the Occupation in Provence, dreaming of the day when the peasantry would march on Paris and sweep away the rotten civilization of the city. When indulging these fantasies, the supposedly pacific Giono happily imagined ‘rivers of blood’. In this context it is not surprising to find him telling a fellow-writer in August 1940 that the defeat of France was insignificant compared to the fact that a world based on machines was coming to an end. Since German civilization was based on machines, it was doomed, and if the defeat had ruined the industry of the north-east of France, it was to be welcomed. In these circumstances, Giono’s five contributions to Drieu’s NRF and others to La Gerbe are not surprising, nor that he was the subject of a flattering article in the German magazine Signal in March 1942.63
Other NRF contributors included the philosopher Alain whose lifelong pacifism made him an easy target for Drieu’s invitation, even if his entire philosophical and political writing had been about defending the freedom of the individual; the critic Ramon Fernandez, unable to survive without his name in print; and Paul Morand whose anti-Semitism and conservatism had become more pronounced in the 1930s: his Chroniques de l’homme maigre (1941) celebrated a Paris free of Americans and Polish Jews.64
These trajectories all have their own logic: pacifism in the case of Alain; a sort of peasant Messianism in the case of Giono; a cult of force in the case of Montherlant; conservative solipsism in the case of Chardonne; Europeanism in the case of Fabre-Luce. Their degree of commitment varied. How many collaborationist papers did they write for? How long did they continue doing so? How political were their contributions? Did they go on either of the two trips to Weimar organized by the Germans in October 1941 and October 1942? The answers to these questions defined each individual’s level of commitment.
Chardonne was one of only three writers on both Weimar visits, but after 1942 he abstained from further public statements, and decided not to publish a third collaborationist volume, already in proof, from which his already tarnished reputation would never have recovered. Jouhandeau went on the first Weimar trip, but avoided public statements. Giono, who was well viewed by the Germans, went on neither trip. He turned down an invitation to the second on the grounds that his mother was sick, and despite the fact, as he wrote to the German consulate in Marseilles, that ‘I had been waiting for it with impatience’ since it ‘would have allowed me to continue with yet more faith in the work of Franco-German reconciliation for which I have worked since 1931’.65 Montherlant went on neither trip and gradually distanced himself from collaboration. He contributed to no more collaborationist publications after February 1943.
One must not exaggerate the number or importance of the writers on this list. Intellectual collaboration was the case of a few names spread thinly, not the abdication of an entire elite. Raymond Aron in London concluded that ‘none of the great names’ of French literature were collaborating, the most significant ones being, in his estimation, Chardonne, Montherlant, and Fabre-Luce.66 A year into running the NRF, Drieu noted that he had attracted only ‘second rank’ people: ‘apart from a few pages of Montherlant I have published nothing worthwhile’. In January 1943 he recognized that ‘almost all that is intelligent and lyrical in France is against us’.67 In June 1943 he abandoned the editorship, aware that he had failed and Germany was going to lose.
Drieu: Collaborationism as Self-Hatred
Such weary disillusionment was a leitmotif of Drieu’s entire career. This made him quite different from Brasillach who genuinely enjoyed the presence of the Germans and felt nostalgic, but never regretful, as the war drew to its conclusion. In February 1944, he wrote his famous phrase: ‘All Frenchmen of intelligence have more or less slept with Germany during these last years, not without quarrels, and the memory will remain sweet.’68 Drieu, however, moved from disappointment to disappointment, into ever deeper waters of rancour and self-pity.
Drieu was the most talented intellectual to throw himself so fully into collaborationism. In 1939 he was an established writer with eight novels and numerous short stories to his name. The Communist writer Louis Aragon had been one of his closest friends, and Malraux, who had been another, could write of him in 1959 that he was ‘one of the most noble beings I have ever met’ and a ‘magnificent writer, a stylist of the first order’.69 Anyone who has sampled the bile of Drieu’s war diaries must take the nobility on trust, but the eclecticism of Drieu’s friendships reveals his substantial reputation among his contemporaries.
Drieu was one of those intellectuals whose moorings were definitively broken by the Great War. From the war, which was the defining experience of his life, he drew contradictory conclusions. In his Comédie de Charleroi (1934), Drieu described war as an epiphanal experience, revealing that it was possible to become a Man. Elsewhere he wrote the opposite, asserting that modern technology had deprived war of its heroism: it had become impersonal and industrial. Such contradictions are characteristic of Drieu: there was little coherence in his restless quest for political bearings. He flirted with Dadaism and surrealism in the early 1920s; he briefly participated in Redressement français and then joined Bergery’s Front commun in 1933; he announced his conversion to fascism in the book Socialisme fasciste in 1934; he joined Doriot’s PPF in 1936, and resigned from it in October 1938; he opposed the Munich agreement and considered going to Britain after the Fall of France, but instead stayed, and rallied to collaboration.70
The only consistent thread to Drieu’s politics lay in his belief in France’s decadence. In Mesure de France (1922), he concluded that France’s victory had set the seal on this decadence. France had only won thanks to her allies, and the French soldier had not shown the fighting qualities of the British or Germans. Drieu felt increasing disgust for his compatriots: ‘it is horrible to go for a walk and encounter so much decadence and ugliness … the bent backs, the slumped shoulders, the swollen stomachs, the small thighs, the flabby faces’.71 He particularly despised the ‘small, brown Frenchmen of the South and the Centre’. The French, he said, were only interested in fishing, aperitifs, and belote.
During his PPF period Drieu wrote a hagiographical biography of Doriot. Unlike the average ‘pot-bellied intellectual’ politician, Drieu’s Doriot was a real man, ‘an athlete who em
braces the debilitated body of France … and breathes into it his own bursting health’.72 But France’s decadence was moral as well as physical. The hero of Drieu’s autobiographical novel, Gilles, returns from the front to find Paris rotted by drugs, sodomy, modern art, and dancing. The symbol of this decomposing modernity was the Jew: ‘I cannot stand the Jews because they are par excellence the modern world’, says one of his characters.73 ‘I hate the Jews. I have always hated the Jews’, he wrote in 1942.74 In fact, he was not even consistent in this. In the 1920s, he claimed not to be a racist. His first wife, Colette Jeramec, whom he married in 1917 and divorced three years later, was Jewish. If the depiction of the marriage in Gilles is to be believed, Drieu could not forgive her for the fact that he had married her for her money.
Against the modern world, Drieu idealized the golden age of medieval Europe as an ascetic epoch of warriors and master builders. His book Geneva or Moscow (1928) argued that the only cure for French decadence was a European federation. After 6 February 1934, Drieu decided that only fascism could regenerate France. The dilettante hero of Gilles redeems himself fighting for Franco. By the outbreak of war, disappointed by Doriot, Drieu had become detached from politics. He was now obsessed by the idea that he was insufficiently appreciated by the NRF literary establishment, and one consolation he took from France’s defeat was a chance for revenge over the ‘gang of Jews, pederasts and timid surrealists’ who ran the NRF.75 Drieu had not otherwise welcomed defeat. Before 1940, he was not particularly Germanophile despite being enthralled by a visit to Nuremberg in 1935. He had left the PPF because of Doriot’s support for Munich. After France’s defeat, however, Drieu came to see Hitler as the incarnation of fascist force and the instrument of European unity. The continuity between Drieu’s collaborationism and his previous beliefs lay in his conviction that France’s salvation would be found in a unified Europe: Drieu’s fascism was genuinely European.
In arguing that the French should succumb to the virile embrace of their conquerors, Drieu displayed in almost pathological form the prostration before strength—even self-annihilation—so characteristic of many intellectual collaborationists: ‘I have loved force …Since my childhood I have known what force is, but the French no longer like it.’76 The case of Drieu was one of the inspirations for Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous 1945 essay ‘What is a Collaborator?’ which diagnosed a ‘mixture of masochism and homosexuality’ in collaborationism. Sartre noted the recurrence in collaborationist writing of metaphors ‘presenting France’s relationship as a sexual union, in which France plays the woman’s role’.77 Sartre was not alone in noting that collaborationism was supported by a surprising number of homosexual intellectuals. Apart from Jouhandeau, Montherlant, Bernard Fäy, and possibly also Brasillach (although his sexuality remains unclear), one could mention Roger Peyrefitte who wrote to his friend Montherlant that the ‘Germanic ideal is closer to that of antiquity, and thus our own’ than France’s ‘civilization of shopgirls’.78 Although he was no collaborator, homosexual fascination with the German occupier is a theme of Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites;79 although he was no homosexual, the idea that the French had become ‘devirilized’ is a key theme in the writing of Rebatet.
Drieu was not homosexual—although his obsession with ‘pederasts’ (the second favourite insult in his Journal, after ‘Jew’) and his combination of profound misogyny with a Don Juanesque pursuit of women has led to suggestions of repressed homosexuality—but otherwise he fits Sartre’s analysis well. Ashamed of his petit-bourgeois background and of his periodic bouts of indolence; wanting to be a warrior, but feeling himself to be only a narcissistic dilettante; haunted by fear of sexual impotence, despite being one of the sexual athletes of his era, Drieu, in his own words, ‘transposed on to France the weakness of my being [la défaillance de l’être en moi]’.80 Later, his foreboding of German defeat turned his thoughts to suicide: ‘Always masochistic for France as for myself.’81
Even while hoping in June 1940 that Nazism might be the ‘aristocratic and warlike socialism’, the ‘virile force’, which Europe required, Drieu was wondering if Germany would be infected by France’s decadence like the ‘soldier by the syphilitic girl’. By 1942 he concluded that collaboration had not worked, and he reverted to the morbid pessimism with which he was most at ease. His final definition of collaboration was: ‘Germans who did not believe in Hitler enough supposedly indoctrinating French who believed in him too much.’82 Once he realized that Germany had lost, Drieu’s consolation was that Stalin would succeed where Hitler had failed: in destroying the rotten French bourgeoisie. With ‘savage joy’, he contemplated a Europe dominated by Stalin whose men were ‘aristocrats such as have not been seen for centuries’. They would represent the triumph of ‘totalitarian man’, of strength over weakness.83 But Drieu knew there was no place for him in that new world. As he dreamt of the immolation of bourgeois Europe, he pondered Hinduism and the peace of non-being. He refused all opportunities to escape, and after two failed suicide attempts in the summer of 1944, he finally succeeded in poisoning himself, on 15 March 1945, in an apartment belonging to his first wife.
10
Laval in Power: 1942–1943
The Authoritarian Republic
On Laval’s return to power in April 1942, the Parisian ultras believed their moment had arrived. But Laval had no intention of bringing such voraciously ambitious figures as Doriot or Déat into his government. Having regained power, he was determined to exercise it alone. He received the new title of ‘head of Government’, leaving Pétain only as titular head of State. Pétain mattered less and less. Du Moulin de Labarthète resigned after Laval’s return to power, leaving Pétain increasingly isolated. His mind wandered more, but he was without illusions. In a speech on 17 June, he admitted that the National Revolution had been a series of ‘setbacks, uncertainties and disappointments’.1
Laval took over the key portfolios—Foreign Affairs, the Interior, and Information—and confided the Finance Ministry to his trusted crony, Pierre Cathala. Only five members remained from the previous government. Those who departed included Bouthillier and Caziot, whom Laval had not forgiven for their involvement in the 13 December plot, and Pierre Pucheu, who was too ambitious to be trusted. Barthélemy and Lucien Romier remained as sops to Pétain, but they had little influence. Despite the absence of Doriot and Déat, Laval’s government was markedly more collaborationist than its predecessors. Benoist-Méchin and Marion remained; the extremely pro-German Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s Delegate in the Occupied Zone, entered the government as Secretary of State without Portfolio; and the Education Minister, Abel Bonnard, was an ardent collaborationist whose appointment had previously been blocked by Pétain. Bonnard was a littérateur and member of the Academie française who had become fascinated by Nazi Germany in the 1930s. After 1940 he wrote for La Gerbe and Je suis partout, and joined the committee of Chateaubriant’s Collaboration group. Laval once described Bonnard as more German than the Germans. As Minister of Education, he surrounded himself with ultra-collaborationists: his first chef de cabinet, Jacques Bousquet, shocked Ministry officials by giving the Hitler salute.2
Despite this collaborationist presence, Laval’s return did not pull Vichy in a more ‘fascist’ direction. Laval used the collaborationists because they improved his standing with Germany. He was as indifferent to fascist politics in 1942 as to the National Revolution in 1940. New reviews and and journals devoted to the National Revolution continued to appear: Idées in November 1941, France, revue de l’État nouveau in May 1942. Although the contributors to these journals had links to the regime—the editors of Idées were close to Marion—the fact is that they were reduced to writing about their ideas because they had diminishing hopes of actually seeing them implemented.3 Marion remained formally in charge of propaganda, but he lost influence to the former Radical politician, Paul Creyssel, a Laval loyalist since 1930. Creyssel announced to the Propaganda delegates in May 1943: ‘the single party solution, for vario
us reasons, has been abandoned … French society, more and more, can only be guided by its natural leaders, by the intermediary of the political notables’.4 This signalled a return to the clientelist practices of the Third Republic with which Laval felt most at home.
The commissions administratives set up in 1940 were replaced with conseils départementaux which were closer in style to the conseils généraux of the Third Republic. Their members were chosen by the prefects, but Laval specified that preference be given to figures with local reputations, especially if they had held office under the Republic. The persecution of Freemasons was relaxed. Laval also carried out a reshuffle of prefects (twenty prefects and nine regional prefects were changed), reinstating some who had been sacked in 1940. Laval was not well disposed to those reactionary prefects who had been too enthusiastic about the National Revolution in 1940. Even Jean Moulin, who had been sacked by Vichy in 1940, was offered reinstatement although, unknown to the authorities, he was now de Gaulle’s main emissary in France.5
This did not mean Laval planned a return to democracy. His ideal was an authoritarian republic reminiscent of Daladier’s style of government in 1939. Although Laval required loyalty, he also respected efficiency and technical competence. For this reason he promoted Bichelonne to be Minister of Industrial Production. Considerable power was also bestowed upon two prefects, Georges Hilaire and René Bousquet, who became Secretary-Generals at the Ministry of the Interior. Laval’s government was thus one of administrators as much as cronies.6 All Laval required from domestic politics was that nothing interfere with collaboration. Remaining convinced that Germany had won the war, he intended to resume the policy which he believed would have worked in 1940 if he had not been dismissed. In the summer of 1942, Germany seemed at the peak of success: Rommel had launched an offensive in North Africa, and the Germans were advancing into the Caucausus. Laval told a meeting of CO Presidents on 30 May:
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