And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (60 page)

Brasillach’s case was difficult: he was an admired writer who had gone beyond opinion to finger people who had ended up jailed or deported. The verdict against him nonetheless intensified the debate among writers about how to deal with collaboration by their peers. In public, the issue confronted Camus in
Combat
and Mauriac in
Le Figaro
. Both agreed that the
épuration
was chaotic, but Camus insisted that a genuine purge was necessary if France was to be reborn. Without such justice, he added, “one sees that Mr. Mauriac is right, we will need charity.” Mauriac had asked whether, in a world of “pitiless cruelty,” human tenderness and mercy should be discarded.
¹⁵
In this spirit, Mauriac had already taken a stance by defending Béraud, whose death sentence was commuted immediately before the Brasillach trial.

Responding to Camus on January 7, 1945, in a column headlined “Contempt for Charity,” Mauriac again argued the virtues of national reconciliation and the importance of judicial impartiality at a time of high emotions. A few days later, with “Justice and Charity,” Camus replied: “On the matter of the purges, every time I have spoken of justice, Mr. Mauriac has spoken of charity. And the virtue of charity is sufficiently singular that, by demanding justice, I have given the impression of advocating hate. In listening to Mr. Mauriac, one truly has the impression that, in these daily questions, it is absolutely essential to choose between the love of Christ and the hatred of men.” He continued: “As a man, I will perhaps admire Mr. Mauriac for knowing how to love traitors, but as a citizen I deplore it because this love will inevitably lead us to become a nation of traitors and mediocrities as well as a society of a kind that we do not want.”
¹⁶

Mauriac, whose campaign prompted
Le Canard Enchaîné
to nickname him Saint Francis of the Assizes, was not deterred. After the verdict in the Brasillach case, he organized a petition addressed to de Gaulle asking for clemency—not on moral grounds but because Brasillach’s father had “died for France” in World War I. Among its sixty signatories were Valéry, Claudel, Anouilh, Paulhan, Colette, the composer Honegger, the painters Derain and Vlaminck and, added at the last minute, Camus. De Gaulle rejected the appeal and, on February 6, Brasillach was shot. But just six months later, Camus, too, had serious misgivings about the purge. On August 30, 1945, he wrote in
Combat:
“We beg the reader’s indulgence if we begin today with a basic fact: there can no longer be any doubt that the postwar purge has not only failed in France but is now completely discredited. The word ‘purge’ itself was already rather distressing. The actual thing became odious.”
¹⁷
In 1948, he conceded that Mauriac had been right all along.

The trial of Charles Maurras, already seventy-six years old when France was liberated, had an entirely different significance. Although elected to the Académie Française only in 1939, Maurras’s political importance dated back to the turn of the century when he had led the campaign against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish army officer wrongfully accused of spying for Germany. In the years that followed, notably after World War I, his movement and its newspaper,
L’Action Française
, came to represent a peculiar blend of anti-Semitism, nationalism, Germanophobia and monarchism. At the same time, Maurras became the ideological mentor of a generation of bright young intellectuals, Brasillach and Rebatet among them, who in the late 1930s embraced Hitler’s National Socialism. When France fell in 1940, Maurras moved to the unoccupied zone and backed Pétain’s National Revolution. He remained violently anti-Semitic, but also so overtly anti-German that, after Germany took over the unoccupied zone, he feared Gestapo reprisals.

Maurras’s arrest in September 1944 set the stage for a sensational trial, which began on January 26, 1945, in the middle of the writers’ campaign to save Brasillach. Since he could not be accused of collaborating with an enemy he hated, the formal charge against him was that of demoralizing France. His real crime, however, was that of founding the Fascist movement that had so harmed the country. The prosecution asked for a death sentence but, because of his age and the Brasillach case, Maurras was condemned to life imprisonment. “It’s
Dreyfus’s revenge,” he cried out. He was released in March 1952 on health grounds and died eight months later.

After Brasillach, no writer was executed. Some who would certainly have faced severe punishment stayed abroad. Alphonse de Châteaubriant, who had headed the Groupe Collaboration and edited
La Gerbe
, managed to reach Austria and took refuge in a monastery in the Tyrol, where he died in 1951. Alain Laubreaux,
Je suis partout’s
venomous theater critic, found refuge in Franco’s Spain, where he died in 1968. With the CNE and
Les Lettres Françaises
beating the drum for quick and radical justice against collaborationist writers, however, others did spells in jail before their cases were judged.

Jean Giono, who had been jailed as a pacifist during the phony war, was again arrested, in September 1944, and detained for five months. His offense was to have published articles in some collaborationist outlets and to have written—as he always had done—about rural life in what now seemed like a
pétainiste
manner. In the end, no formal charges were brought against him since he had never defended the Nazis and he claimed to have protected a German refugee and two Jews. But the CNE still banned him from publishing for two years. Some of Giono’s friends said that his real mistake was to have fallen out with Aragon and the Communist Party before the war.

The case against Georges Simenon, the popular thriller writer, dragged on for six years. He was not part of the Paris literary scene, preferring to stay in Vendée. But because nine of his novels had been adapted for the screen during the occupation, four by Continental Films, the German-owned studio, in 1950 he was banned from publishing new works for five years, although the sentence was retroactive and therefore meaningless.

For many writers, uncertainty was their main punishment. Jacques Chardonne, the novelist and shareholder of Éditions Stock who had been on two French delegations to Weimar writers’ conferences, was jailed for six weeks in 1944, but charges against him were dropped in 1946. Marcel Jouhandeau, Florence Gould’s friend who had also accepted the German invitation to Weimar, was never jailed, but he lived for several months in fear of arrest. Even before Paris was liberated, he had begun to receive threatening telephone calls, and he had taken Paulhan’s advice to go into hiding with his wife. In his journal, he had started rehearsing his defense: “Ours was a simple offense of opinion, imprudences which brought us no reward.”
¹⁸
After his name appeared on the CNE’s list of “undesirables,” he fled Paris. Then, when nothing further happened, he returned and resumed teaching. But in May 1945, he was summoned for questioning and found himself in the company of Montherlant. “Before nightfall, they’re going to take you to Drancy and me perhaps to Vincennes, and we’ll never see each other again,” the playwright told him. “They will strangle us in our cells.”
¹⁹

The outcome was far less dramatic. While Montherlant was banned from publishing for one year, principally because his 1941 book of essays,
Le Solstice de juin
, was considered pro-German, Jouhandeau’s punishment was to be ostracized by writers on the left. This mattered little to him: soon he was again jousting with Léautaud around Florence Gould’s Thursday lunch table.

Gradually, though, the thirst for revenge against writers began to ease. One important factor was the recognition that writers and journalists were being punished far more severely than, say, many industrialists who had profited from doing business with the Nazis. “In the
épuration
, it is the journalist, threadbare and mangy, who is the scapegoat,” Galtier-Boissière wrote. “One forgets that some of them had only their pen with which to feed their family and wrote only anodyne pieces. Does one reproach the workers at Renault for making tanks for the Wehrmacht? Wasn’t a tank more useful to the Fritz than an item in
Le Petit Parisien?”
²⁰

Paulhan, who as a central figure of the intellectual resistance had supported the
épuration
, also now believed writers were being singled out unfairly. “The engineers, entrepreneurs and masons who built the Atlantic Wall walk among us undisturbed,” he argued. “They keep busy building new walls. They build the walls of new prisons, which hold journalists who made the mistake of writing that the Atlantic Wall was well built.”
²¹
In late September 1944, Paulhan resigned from
Les Lettres Françaises
and gradually began distancing himself from his former colleagues. He worried that, with Communists in the driver’s seat, the
épuration intellectuelle
was beginning to resemble a Stalinist purge. His argument that writers had “a right to err” was dismissed by hard-liners. Other moderates, noting widely differing punishments for the same offenses, began to ask if, in a free country, any writer should be condemned for the “crime of opinion.” Some were unhappy when ninety-three books by Céline, Rebatet and other collaborators were banned: it reminded them of the Nazis’ Otto List.

But if collaborationist writers ended up enduring a tough
épuration
, this was not only because they were opinion makers; it was also because, by giving them importance, resistance writers were underlining their own importance and reinforcing their own social status. They did not want to abandon the view that writers had special responsibilities, a view that de Gaulle himself endorsed. In his
Mémoires de guerre
, recalling his posture toward collaborators, he indirectly explained why he had not saved Brasillach’s life: “If [collaborators] had not served the enemy directly and passionately, I commuted their sentence on principle. In the opposite case—the only one—I did not feel I had the right to pardon. For in literature, as in everything, talent carries with it responsibility.”
²²
Even Drieu La Rochelle had written of the intellectual, “He has duties and rights above those of others.”
²³

And yet, for all their political and ethical differences, writers had shared one fundamental need during the occupation: that of seeing their words in print. As a result, since so many
résistants
had also published books with German approval, the purge committee for publishing, which included Sartre, Bruller and Seghers among its members, was largely toothless. And its inability to judge publishers soon prompted Bruller and Seghers to resign in disgust. True, Bernard Grasset, the most actively pro-German publisher, was arrested on September 19 and sent to Drancy. But with Mauriac, Valéry and Duhamel among writers jumping to his defense, he was released six weeks later. Éditions Grasset was banned from selling or publishing books, but this sanction was lifted in May 1946. Robert Denoël, the Belgian national who had published the anti-Semitic ravings of both Céline and Rebatet, as well as books by Aragon and Triolet, was never brought to trial: he was found murdered on a street near the Invalides on December 2, 1945, with the killer’s identity and motive never clarified. On the other hand, Gaston Gallimard, who had protected his own business by allowing Drieu La Rochelle to take over the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, had nothing to fear. He had published many writers opposed to the Germans, and twenty of them wrote individual letters to support him. “I believe that any criticism of the Éditions Gallimard would be directed at all the writers who belonged to the intellectual resistance who were published by the house,” Sartre wrote, ignoring the question of whether these writers should have been publishing at all.
²⁴
In any event, two “untouchables,” Paulhan and Camus, were still on Gallimard’s payroll.

Two other literary institutions cleaned up their own houses. The Académie Française expelled Pétain, Maurras, Bonnard and Abel Hermant and filled the numerous seats left open during the occupation. But it remained a conservative body, adding Claudel, Marcel Pagnol, Jules Romains and Édouard Herriot in 1946, Cocteau in 1955 and Montherlant in 1960. Two
résistants
were elected still later, Guéhenno in 1962 and Paulhan in 1963. The Académie Goncourt, in turn, expelled Guitry and René Benjamin and brought in Colette. Soon amnesties, one in January 1951, a second in July 1953, led to the release of almost all jailed collaborators.

A few writers chose to stay abroad, but it was perhaps the return of Céline from Denmark that closed this chapter of France’s literary wars. He reached Copenhagen from Sigmaringen on March 22, 1945, although the French government learned of his whereabouts only months later. Finally, in December, France demanded his extradition to face charges of treason. But while Céline spent the next eighteen months in jail in Denmark, he was never sent home. In early 1950, he was tried in absentia, found guilty of
indignité nationale
and sentenced to one year in prison, a heavy fine and confiscation of half his belongings. Barely one year later, he was amnestied and, in July 1951, he and his wife, Lucette, returned to France. They moved to Meudon, a suburb southwest of Paris, where two years later Céline opened a medical practice. Had he been arrested in 1944, he almost certainly would have been executed. A decade later, while he looked like a mad hermit, he was again publishing with Gallimard and his status as one of France’s greatest twentieth-century writers seemed secure. For many French citizens, his pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic delirium was simply overshadowed by his genius.