B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  Cocteau cannot be classed as a collaborator in the manner of a Brasillach, a Chardonne, or even a Montherlant. The nearest he came to burning his wings irremediably was his involvement in one of the high spots of cultural collaboration: the exhibition, at the Orangerie, of works by Breker who was Hitler’s favourite sculptor. Breker’s monumental male nudes conformed perfectly to the Nazi Aryan ideal: Sacha Guitry commented to Cocteau that if the statues had been in a state of erection, it would have been impossible to circulate around the room.41 What gave the exhibition such significance was the official character conferred on it: Laval invited Breker to lunch; Bonnard made a speech at the opening; the most famous living French sculptor, Aristide Maillol, came specially to Paris for it and declared his admiration for Breker’s art. Cocteau’s contribution was an article in May 1942 entitled ‘Salute to Breker’. Breker was an astute choice to symbolize Franco-German cultural collaboration. Having worked in Paris in the 1920s, he retained many French friends to whom he was now ready to lend assistance. Maillol was grateful to him for intervening to save his young Jewish model Dina Vierny. As Laurence Bertrand Dorléac has noted, France’s homage to Breker’s studies in virility, and Breker’s admiration for the curvaceous female forms of Maillol’s sculpture, could be read as a metaphor for collaboration as a whole, an artistic replication, or anticipation, of the respective roles of the two countries in the New Europe.42

  Playing on the idea of the ‘good’ Germany of Beethoven, the Germans used music even more systematically than art as an instrument of cultural seduction. The cream of German musicians—von Karajan, Jochum, Kempff, Schwarzkopf—gave concerts in France. The Berlin Staatsoper performed Tristan und Isolde in May 1941 (with a French singer as Isolde). The German Institute organized seventy-one concerts between May 1942 and July 1943.43 There were also visits by German theatrical groups—starting with the Schiller theatre of Berlin in 1941—but the language barrier made these less successful.

  Cultural exchanges operated in both directions. Invitations to visit Germany represented a temptation that many found irresistible. If the writers who attended the two literary conferences at Weimar in 1941 and 1942 were already so notorious for their pro-German views that their participation was of limited propaganda value to the Germans, the same was not true of the eight leading film stars who accepted an invitation to Germany in March 1942. They met Goebbels, visited Sans Souci, and attended the Vienna Opera. For German propaganda, this was worth a thousand editorials by Déat. The trip was so successful that another one was planned for the summer. Twenty-one directors or actors were sounded out, and all but four (Jean-Louis Barrault, Madeleine Renaud, Yvonne Printemps, Pierre Fresnay) accepted. The trip never took place because the Germans were furious to discover that the French actor Harry Baur, who had made a film in Germany and met Hitler, was of Jewish origin.44

  There were other celebrated visitors to Germany. The pianist Alfred Cortot— an ardent Pétainist and member of the Conseil National—gave concerts there. French musicians—including Jacques Rouché, director of the Opéra, and the composer Arthur Honegger—attended a Mozart festival in Vienna in December 1941. The dancer Serge Lifar paid frequent visits to Berlin.45 But the most notorious cultural tour to Germany was made in October 1941 by thirteen leading French sculptors and artists, including Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Cornelis van Dongen, and André Dunoyer de Segonzac. Their motivations were mixed: the promise of getting some POWs released, the desire to keep the banner of French art flying, even simple curiosity. Most of them had hoped the visit would be a discreet affair, but the Germans made sure of the opposite. Setting off from the Gare de l’Est, the painters were greeted by a barrage of cameras. Some were chastened by the affair; the more credulous, like Dunoyer, declared themselves impressed at the interest shown in art by the Nazis. For Vlaminck, the visit had more conscious political overtones. As a repentant Fauve, he had written an article in 1942 attacking Picasso as a painter of ‘impotence and death’.46

  Several popular French singers—Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, Charles Trenet—went to Germany not at the invitation of the Germans, but to sing for French prisoners of war or volunteer workers in Germany. Piaf subsequently said that she had smuggled in some false identity cards; Chevalier said that he had sung on condition that his visit would be given no publicity and that ten prisoners would be released. Even if such claims were true—which they often were— the Germans could not be prevented from exploiting such trips for their propaganda purposes. As a result, Chevalier was listed in Life magazine in August 1942 as a collaborator. Although he had made ardently pro-Pétainist remarks, Chevalier was understandably upset that what he genuinely perceived as a humanitarian visit to Germany should cause him to be singled out in this way. The moral was that the only way to avoid compromising oneself was to abstain from any public gestures.47

  For writers this meant refusing to publish. The few writers who followed this policy were Guéhenno, Tristan Tzara, Malraux, Roger Martin du Gard, André Chamson, and the poet René Char. Their silence was a positive choice. Char, who fought in the armed Resistance, refused to publish until the Liberation. He later wrote that during the Occupation the poet could only ‘complete the sense of his message by the refusal of himself’. Similarly, when Seghers invited the poet René Lacôte to contribute to Poésie, the reply was: ‘I’ve read your letter and honestly I couldn’t be less sympathetic. My literary attitude under current circumstances can only be expressed by silence.’48 The Breton writer Louis Guilloux was more cynical: ‘the big question is to work out what least serves the interests of the occupier: to speak or remain silent. In reality, the occupier couldn’t care less.’49

  Silence was perhaps easier for an obscure poet like Lacôte than for writers in great demand. As Guéhenno noted: ‘the man of letters is not one of the most impressive species on earth … He would sell his soul so that he can appear.’ In his opinion, Montherlant’s ‘worst fault is undoubtedly never to be able to keep quiet’.50 Montherlant’s own view was that ‘I preferred to risk writing stupidities than risk an abstention which could have been interpreted as indifference’. The risk was easier to take when Montherlant could command 2,000 francs for a newspaper article and over 3,000 francs for a radio talk. His journalistic earnings in the Occupation were over 140,000 francs.51 On the other hand, it was easier for Guéhenno to take a moral stand because, as a teacher, he did not need to write to earn his living.

  Even Mauriac, who in October 1942 summoned writers to accept ‘the trial of silence’, had not always observed this rule himself. Mauriac was the only member of the Académie to participate in the literary resistance, but he took time to find his way. The one article he contributed to the press of the Occupied Zone—to a local newspaper in December 1940—was trivial. More compromising was the visit Mauriac paid to Epting in February 1941 to secure German authorization for the publication of his novel La Pharisienne. He told his wife: ‘They made me a little speech on tomorrow’s Europe which I listened to almost in silence. I understood that they would not cause me problems.’ He saw the visit as ‘a simple démarche which commits me to nothing, although clearly it does have significance’. Even after Mauriac had obtained German authorization, his collaborationist enemies had the print run limited to 5,000 copies. Mauriac therefore went to see Heller on 13 May 1941 and got the restriction lifted. In four months, 35,000 copies of the novel were sold. Mauriac sent personally dedicated copies to Heller and Epting as a token of gratitude. After the war Mauriac’s enemies periodically resuscitated this affair to discredit him. Mauriac recognized that he had made an error of judgement although he had refused Heller’s request to declare his support for collaboration. He never set foot in the Institute again. In June 1941, he refused a dinner invitation from Morand because ‘the gentlemen of the Institute will be there’.52

  The problem with publishing anything was that compromises were almost inevitable. To secure publication of his Myth of Sysiphus in 1943, the rising literary star Al
bert Camus had to remove references to Kafka whose Jewishness made him an unacceptable authority to quote. Before publishing Aragon’s novel Les Voyageurs de l’impériale, Gallimard insisted on cuts to satisfy the censor. Aragon accepted this, but when the novel appeared in December 1942, it had been so disfigured that there was even a passage which made it appear that Dreyfus had been guilty. In fact, Aragon had not seen the corrections which were made by Gallimard himself. The book was soon withdrawn from circulation, but the affair demonstrated the need for vigilance.53

  Some writers in Paris claimed, like those in the South, that their work contained coded resistance messages. It was later useful to Montherlant that the line ‘En prison se trouve la fine fleur du royaume’ in his play La Reine morte, performed at the Comédie-Française in 1942, should be interpreted as a criticism of the Germans. Given Montherlant’s political statements at this time, the interpretation was patently absurd. But what about Sartre’s play Les Mouches, his version of the Orestes/Agamemnon legend, which was first staged in 1943? The play might deserve the resistance interpretation Sartre later claimed for it—‘why write about the Greeks’, he said, ‘unless to disguise one’s thoughts under a fascist regime?’—but if one was not attuned to his philosophical language, the message was thickly disguised. It was not picked up by the collaborationist Paris critics who were always on the lookout for political dissidence. Indeed they even offered a Nazi reading of the play, interpreting Orestes as a sort of Nietzschean superman pitted against Jupiter as tyrannical rabbi. What, then, was the value of a resistance message that was so oblique as to be invisible to all but a few initiates? Did it not matter more that the theatre in which the play was performed, originally the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, had been renamed ‘Théâtre de la Cité’, owing to anti-Semitism, or that Charles Dullin, the director, was viewed favourably by the Propaganda-Abteilung? Can the message be so easily separated from this context?54

  Context could transform the implications of the most anodyne literary efforts. Joliot gave an interview to the collaborationist Notre temps about the need to reform the teaching of French science. This may have been innocent or naive; it was certainly unwise. Was it ever innocent to write purely literary and unpolitical texts if they appeared in collaborationist journals like La Gerbe? Cocteau wrote in La Gerbe, Anouilh in both La Gerbe and Je suis partout. When Drieu became disillusioned with running the NRF, he took solace in the fact that he had at least caused some writers to compromise themselves.55 The risk of guilt by association was particularly insidious in the case of the cultural magazine Comoedia, launched in 1941. Comoedia was soon attracting the cream of literary Paris much more successfully than the NRF. Contributors included Cocteau, Colette, Paul Valéry, Claudel, and Jean-Louis Barrault. It was here that Cocteau published his homage to Breker.

  Comoedia contained nothing directly political, but every issue carried a page on ‘European’ culture. This was not an innocent Europe: it meant primarily Germany (Bayreuth, Mozart, ‘contemporary German poetry’) but also Italy, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Croatia. The European page was under the control of the German Institute (although it was not always viewed favourably by the Propaganda-Abteilung).56 Mauriac, who was invited to contribute, wrote to Duhamel in June 1941: ‘it is quite tempting and all the names are acceptable … it would be good to be able to express oneself sometimes on the literary front… What do you think?’ In the end he decided against.57 But not everyone was so cautious. The first issue contained Jean-Louis Barrault, Arthur Honegger, Jean-Paul Sartre (on Moby Dick)—and also Henry de Montherlant. Was the proximity of Montherlant sufficient to compromise those who appeared besides him? Was the European cultural orientation of the magazine not a form of ‘soft’ collaboration? Whether it was acceptable to contribute to Comoedia continued to exercise many writers who had no doubts that it would not be acceptable to write for the NRF.58 The answer was not obvious. It was after all the Jewish journalist Joseph Biélinky who noted in his diary in December 1941: ‘we regularly read Comoedia, the only paper in Paris which does not insult the Jews’.59

  How far could one push the argument of contamination by context? Was it wrong for Aragon to publish with Gallimard, who also published the NRF, or for his wife Elsa to publish a novel with Denoël, who also published Céline and Rebatet? One writer whose rejection of the argument of guilt by association has to be taken seriously was Jean Paulhan, because in his case there is no suspicion of special pleading. Editor of the NRF before 1940, he had been involved since August 1940 in the first resistance group to emerge in Paris. The group was broken by the Germans and Paulhan arrested in March 1941. In the nick of time, he threw into the Seine the stencil machine on which the group produced its newspaper. He spent a week in prison, but was released thanks to the intervention of Drieu. Paulhan went on to play a pivotal role in organizing resistance among writers, but none of this stopped him encouraging writers to contribute to the NRF, or even himself contributing to Comoedia in 1943. Paulhan’s processes of thought were famously subtle, but his position seems to have been that everybody was ‘terribly responsible’ for what they wrote—he judged Chardonne to be ‘abject’—but not for what others wrote alongside them.60 For this reason, after the war he denounced the excesses in the purge of intellectuals.

  Continuing France

  Those who wished to continue publishing frequently employed the defence that any assertion of the vitality of French culture was a sort of resistance. This was the sense of Matisse’s comment in September 1940: ‘If everyone of any value leaves France, what remains of France?’61 An eloquent statement of this case appeared in Sacha Guitry’s film Donne-moi tes yeux (1943). The film opens with two friends visiting a gallery. One of them points out some works painted in 1871 (Monet, Renoir) and then some contemporary French paintings (Utrillo, Derain). He comments:

  And so in 1943 it goes on. France continues … This is what men of genius could do at a moment when France had just lost the war … Before these marvels one has the impression that what was lost on one side has been regained on the other … One has the right to consider these works as substitutes for victories.

  This position was somewhat undermined by the relative cultural open-mindedness of the Germans in Paris. In May 1941, there was an exhibition of the rising generation of young painters—‘Young Painters in the French Tradition’—presented by its organizer Jean Bazaine as an assertion of the French spirit in the face of adversity. He proclaimed the need to display a ‘certain taste for risk’ since ‘our military defeat should not by extension be seen as the general rout of all the best that our civilization has given’. But the German authorities, having visiting the exhibition, found no quarrel with it; and the only satisfaction came from the attacks of the collaborationist press.62

  Whether compromise was legitimate as a means of preserving a ‘French’ voice was the burden of the discussion between the historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre over the future of Annales, the journal they had founded in 1929. From the autumn of 1940, Febvre was in Paris; Bloch, one of the few Jews exempted from Vichy’s law banning Jews from education, was teaching in Montpellier. Febvre wished to continue producing Annales from Paris, but this meant that Bloch’s name would have to disappear. Since they were co-proprietors, Bloch’s approval was necessary. Bloch preferred to suspend publication or to move Annales to the Unoccupied Zone. He wrote to Febvre: ‘If our work has had any meaning at all, it has been in its independence, its refusal to accept the pressure of what Péguy … called the “temporal”… The suppression of my name would be an abdication.’

  To Bloch’s arguments of principle, Febvre opposed arguments of expediency: the death of Annales would be another victory for those who wished to crush the spirit of France, ‘another death for my [sic] country’. To publish in the South would cut the journal off from most of its readers. To publish in the North required some compromises to be made: ‘[we must] roll up our sleeves, take heart, and shout: “save what can be saved”. One name
on the cover? So what? It’s the enterprise that counts … Maintain it. Let’s swim till the water’s in our mouth. And fight.’ After two months, Bloch finally conceded.

  Febvre’s position has recently been criticized by Philippe Burrin. Certainly Febvre displayed tactless insensitivity in presenting his arguments, seeming more irritated at the problems Bloch’s Jewishness was causing than outraged at the legislation which made it a problem. But, as Peter Schôttler points out, one can be too alert to potential slights: Burrin’s criticism of Febvre’s reference to ‘my’ country is misplaced since Febvre used the same formulation to his own children. This was less a conflict between an opportunistic Febvre and a noble Bloch than a painful dialogue between two intellectuals sharing similar values, but divided about how to remain faithful to them. Bloch continued contributing to the journal under a pseudonym until resistance activities consumed all his time. In March 1944, he was arrested, tortured, and shot. His continued participation in Annales suggests that he did not feel that an unacceptable moral line had been crossed by Febvre. And Febvre’s argument that the continuation of Annales was a way of ‘continuing France’ was not merely a rationalization of self-interest. The philosopher Georges Friedmann who, as a Jew, Marxist, and resister, had no reason to display indulgence, wrote to Febvre in 1942 to congratulate him on the recent issue of Annales: ‘One can already see that you have, in the present conditions, resolved a difficult problem. As far as I am concerned, I disapprove of the publication of certain journals whose editors have paid too dearly … But Annales serves only the best causes, and its courageous continuity is a comfort to me.’ It was, he wrote on another occasion, ‘a thread which links me to what we called and continue to call science and culture … the continuity of all that is best in France’. The contemporary historian surely has no right to a greater severity of judgement than Friedmann’s.63