And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (59 page)

The High Court of Justice, which was authorized to order death sentences, was set up to try a small number of senior politicians closely associated with the Vichy regime, several of whom returned to France, voluntarily or by force, after V-E Day. The next level, the Courts of Justice, which dealt with other serious cases of collaboration, were far busier, handing down 6,760 death sentences, almost 60 percent of them in absentia; in the end, only 767 of these sentences were carried out. Finally, the Civic Courts heard cases involving lesser forms of collaborationist and unpatriotic behavior. Those found guilty of
indignité nationale
were sentenced to prison terms or
dégradation nationale
, which prevented them from working in the police forces or as teachers and from holding any other government job.

De Gaulle’s own position added new variables. While in exile, he had viewed the resistance as a potential threat to his power and played down its importance. Now, as part of his strategy to reunify the country, he portrayed France as a nation of resisters, with only a
small number of genuine collaborators. This meant displaying considerable tolerance toward those “forty million
pétainistes”
of the early 1940s. “If it is urgent to punish true traitors,” he said in a speech on October 14, 1944, “it is not a good idea to remove from French society those people who, in the name of legality, were misled to follow the marshal.”
⁶
Put simply, de Gaulle favored punishment but not deep soul-searching.

The trial of Vichy was evidently a priority, not only because of the regime’s criminal record, but also because it was important to demonstrate that l’État Français created by Pétain was not a successor to the Third Republic but an entirely illegal regime. Supporting the prosecution’s case was Article 75 of the penal code, decreed in July 1939, which defined the crime of treason and required the death sentence for those found guilty. Pétain, who had asked to be repatriated from Switzerland in late April 1945, was brought before the High Court three months later. But while the trial stirred enormous interest in a country that had looked to him in hope not many years earlier, it was largely anticlimactic. After his opening statement, the marshal refused to speak and, now eighty-nine, dozed through most of the hearings. His lawyers argued that he had played a double game, appeasing the Germans while helping the Allies, but evidence of this was thin. Verdicts of guilty of high treason, intelligence with the enemy and
indignité nationale
(which meant losing his military rank) were returned, but his death sentence was commuted by de Gaulle, and Pétain died in prison on the Île d’Yeu, off the Atlantic coast, in 1951.

Laval’s trial in October 1945 was more dramatic, with the presiding judge struggling to maintain order as jurors shouted insults at the accused. After he was sentenced to death, Laval tried to kill himself with cyanide, but doctors saved him by pumping out his stomach. He had attempted suicide, he said, so that French soldiers would not be parties to a “judicial crime,” but he went to his death courageously. After he was refused the right to give the firing squad the order to open fire, he told the soldiers, “I don’t hold this against you. Aim for the heart. Vive la France!”
⁷

Of the sixteen others sentenced to death by the High Court, only two—Joseph Darnand, the
milice
leader, and Fernand de Brinon, the government-in-exile leader in Sigmaringen—were executed. Abel Bonnard, the Académie Française member who had served as Vichy’s education minister, had fled to Spain and was condemned to
death in absentia. Granted asylum by Franco, he returned to France in 1960 for another trial, at which he was given the symbolic sentence of ten years’ banishment, retroactive to 1945. Believing that he had been treated unfairly, he returned to Spain, where he died in 1968. Others sentenced to death in absentia included Darquier de Pellepoix, the infamous head of Vichy’s General Commission for Jewish Questions, who also spent the rest of his life in Spain.

In the world of culture, all the disciplines set up their own
comités d’épuration
, which were authorized to investigate and interrogate collaborationist artists and writers. They could also recommend cases for trial by Civic Courts and issue professional sanctions, such as a ban on performing or publishing for up to two years. In practice, however, there was much confusion and overlap, since disciplines were often represented by several professional organizations. For instance, six different groups representing writers held hearings, while many institutions, such as the Comédie Française, the Académie Française and the Paris Opera, carried out their own inquiries and purges.

These “trials” could be incestuous affairs since, not infrequently, the judges and the judged knew each other well and may have worked together before the war and even during the occupation. Some may also have rubbed shoulders at German receptions. “I can recall no case where a French intellectual refused an invitation to such receptions in the German embassy in Paris,” Abetz told French interrogators after the war. “Even those who declared themselves opposed to collaboration at a political level were in favor, they said, of the confrontation and exchange of ideas in culture.”
⁸
Adding to the disarray was the power struggle between Communists, who dominated most
comités d’épuration
, and moderates, who were reluctant to join a witch hunt. In some cases, personal vendettas translated into political charges; in others, professional envy played a role, since prohibitions to work could remove competitors from the scene; in a few cases, old friendships survived political differences and helped to soften punishments. Ideological feuds also resurfaced: when Aragon denounced Gide for a defeatist journal entry in September 1940, published after the liberation,
^*
it was apparent that the
poète de la résistance
, as he was soon known, had not forgotten Gide’s 1936 attack on Moscow in
Retour de l’U.R.S.S
.

In all, what looked relatively simple during the occupation proved immensely complicated immediately after the liberation. Almost every artist and writer had worked during the occupation, so where should the line be drawn? What exactly constituted collaboration? Did it embrace early sympathy for Pétain? Did it include performing before German audiences? Was it treachery to attend a reception hosted by Germans? Was it credible when a prominent collaborationist insisted that he was secretly working for British intelligence? Was there evidence to support claims by some Fascists that they saved the lives of Jews by warning them of imminent roundups? In practice, because no consensus ever emerged, the
épuration culturelle
was rife with inconsistencies; among artists, writers and journalists with comparable records of collaboration, some were sanctioned, others were jailed, a handful were even executed, while a good many were never arrested. Only in hindsight did one pattern appear: the longer an arrest, trial and sentence could be delayed, the lighter the punishment. “If Drieu La Rochelle had agreed to hide in a basement for two years, he’d have been made a minister,” Paul Léautaud later quoted Jouhandeau as saying.
⁹

Among the different cultural
comités d’épuration
, that of writers was the best organized and most radical, just as the Comité National des Écrivains, or CNE, had been the most effective cultural resistance group. Its
commission d’épuration
, which included Éluard, Queneau and Jean Bruller (now better known as Vercors), began by naming twelve traitors in early September 1944, among them Céline, Drieu La Rochelle, Brasillach, Montherlant, Giono, Jouhandeau and Châteaubriant. To these were added another 153 “undesirables,” defined as journalists and writers who had remained loyal to Vichy after Germany occupied southern France in November 1942. Their names were then splashed across
Les Lettres Françaises
, which added the names of a few more “professionally repugnant” writers of its own choosing. Many of the “most wanted” were the editors of pro-German newspapers who had not only celebrated Hitler and denounced Jews but had also attacked and insulted the Communists and Gaullists who were now in power. These cases, however, were handled by the Courts of Justice, where, to add to the confusion, many presiding judges had also worked under Vichy. Initially at least, punishments were severe.

The first to be tried and sentenced to death for his writings was Georges Suarez, the editor of
Aujourd’hui
. Although Youki Desnos spoke up for him, saying he had tried to save her husband, Robert, from deportation, he was executed on November 9, 1944. Paul Chack, a writer and former naval officer who had also written for the collaborationist press, was condemned to death. “You took the side of Germany at the moment the French were uniting against the invader,” he was told. He was shot on January 9, 1945. Three other well-known journalists were also executed. Jean Hérold-Paquis, who had broadcast German propaganda on Radio-Paris and was famous for ending his nightly news program with the cry “England, like Carthage, must be destroyed,” was executed on October 11, 1945. Paul Ferdonnet, accused of broadcasting Nazi propaganda in French from Radio Stuttgart between 1940 and 1942, was arrested in Germany in May 1945, tried in July and executed in August. And Jean Luchaire, the former editor of
Les Nouveaux Temps
whose old friend Abetz was brought from jail to testify on his behalf, was shot on February, 22, 1946.

Others were luckier. Henri Béraud, a novelist known for his Anglophobia who was the chief editorial writer for
Gringoire
, was also condemned to death in December 1944, but Mauriac came to his defense, arguing that he had not intentionally aided the enemy. He was reprieved by de Gaulle and freed in 1950.
^*
The rabid anti-Semite Lucien Rebatet, who was arrested in Germany on May 8, 1945, was finally brought to trial in November 1946, along with Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, the editor of
Je suis partout
from 1943. Both men were condemned to death, but six months later their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, and within five years they, too, were out of jail.

Two Fascist writers who were also journalists stood out for the literary prestige they enjoyed. Of these, Drieu La Rochelle, who for thirty months edited the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, harbored no illusions about what awaited him. Since long before the liberation, he had not only anticipated Germany’s defeat but also planned his own suicide. On August 10, 1944, he wrote a final letter to his brother Jean in which he defended his philosophy: “In my heart, I stood beyond my nation, beyond all nations—more racist than nationalist.
I would have preferred to have been English or German or Russian: from the north. France has too much mixed blood from the south for us.” Now he was happy to end his days before illness and old age took over. “I am going to kill myself,” he wrote. “My death is a freely chosen sacrifice that will protect me from certain stains, certain weaknesses. And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to have it fill (prison, etc.) my final days.”
¹⁰

Two days later, Drieu La Rochelle took a heavy dose of barbiturates, but he was found unconscious by his housekeeper and taken to the American Hospital in Neuilly. Gerhard Heller later recalled learning of his friend’s condition and hurrying to visit him. “He opened his eyes briefly—‘for the first time,’ the nurse tells me—and he whispers, ‘Ah, it’s you, Heller.’ I slip a passport under his pillow.”
¹¹
The passport contained visas allowing Drieu La Rochelle to travel to either Spain or Switzerland, but he would never use it. While still in the hospital, he attempted suicide anew by cutting his wrists, but was again saved.

After Paris was freed, hiding occasionally in the home of his first—Jewish—wife, Colette Jeramec, he was apparently shielded from arrest by his friends Malraux and Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, the resistance leader who was now interior minister in the provisional government. But Drieu La Rochelle knew that he could not escape trial. On March 15, 1945, after switching on his gas cooker and swallowing poison, he died. Galtier-Boissière remembered warning him five years earlier that he would be shot for being pro-German. “The unfortunate has shot
himself,”
he noted.
¹²
Among those attending his funeral in Neuilly were Paulhan, Léautaud and Gaston Gallimard. Malraux, whom Drieu La Rochelle specifically asked to be present, could not return from the war front, where he was serving in the French army.

While Drieu La Rochelle avoided arrest by committing suicide, Robert Brasillach felt constrained to surrender to the Paris police on September 14, 1944, following the arrest of his mother and his brother-in-law, Maurice Bardèche, a fellow Fascist. After being held in a fort at Noisy-le-Sec, a Paris suburb, he was transferred to Fresnes to await the opening of his trial by a Court of Justice on January 19, 1945. The case against him was simple: it consisted of presenting his signed editorials in
Je suis partout
and his later articles in
La Révolution Nationale
, all of which seemed to support the charge of intelligence with the enemy.

As in similar trials, Brasillach’s anti-Semitic views were not held against him; his crime was supporting the Germans and denouncing Jews and resisters. In his defense, his lawyer Jacques Isorni read from letters of support from Claudel and Valéry, as well as one from Mauriac, who, the lawyer said, wrote that “it would be a loss to French letters if this brilliant mind were extinguished forever.”
¹³
For the government commissioner, Marcel Reboul, Brasillach’s crimes were born of vanity: “Brasillach’s treason is above all a treason of the intellectual, a treason of pride. This man grew tired of the jousting of the placid contest of pure letters. He needed an audience, a public role, a political influence, and he was ready to do anything to achieve that.”
¹⁴
After a trial that lasted just six hours, Brasillach was condemned to death.