Lipstick Traces (40 page)

He was born in 1928, into a bourgeois, suburban Paris family; socialist, almost red, but cut with doubt. His father was a municipal architect, dependent on political connections for his commissions. No Mourre, he proudly told his only child, had been baptized for a hundred years, and Michel did not see the inside of a church until he was sixteen. The official family hero was Michel’s paternal great-grandfather, a member of the Paris Commune. But when Michel’s father was away, Michel’s maternal grandmother whispered tales of another ancestor—an aristocrat, she thought, who ended on the guillotine, martyr to the bloodlust of Robespierre and Saint-Just.

Politics dominated the dinner table, all brags and taunts; Michel’s mother kept silent. She was crazy. When Michel was eight and the family was on vacation in Brittany, she took him to a narrow wooden bridge overhanging a deep gorge and said that she was going to dash herself to pieces on the rocks below. If Michel loved her he would follow: “We’ll punish the lot of them!” Back in Paris, she turned to tarot cards, seance tables, automatic writing: suburban surrealism.

In 1940 she died a long and miserable death from cancer; Michel’s father had all but abandoned her for his mistress. As the Nazis approached Paris, the father made ready his escape to the south, convinced that as a socialist he would be immediately put up against a wall and shot. He led Michel up to the attic and there burned twenty years of left-wing newspapers, manifestos, talismans: his pictures of Léon Blum, Popular Front prime minister of France in 1936–37, of La Pasionaria, Communist heroine of the defeated Spanish Republic. He did it, he explained, to protect the family—Michel and his grandmother—who were to be left behind.

To Michel his father was already as dead as his mother. He was a hypocrite. Before the war he parked his car well away from Popular Front meetings, so as to arrive on foot “like the rest of the workers”; following the
Communist Party line that with the Hitler-Stalin pact in force “National Socialism was still Socialism,” he soon returned to Nazi Paris. He married his mistress; Michel refused to live with them. He went through puberty parentless, under the wing of his hapless grandmother. Sometimes he was shunted off to his Alsatian uncle, who reveled in the Nazi conquest. Why not? The Germans put on good concerts in the parks. They were polite. Life went on.

Right from the start,
In Spite of Blasphemy
is full of real venom: throughout, “I hated” seems its most common claim. The book offered no apologies to the pieties of the postwar period. “[He was] a weak man,” Mourre wrote of his father, “who could not understand the need for heroic adventure or the lust for power . . . [he] refused to admit that Fascism was the price he had to pay for Democracy, for the lies of Democrats like himself.” La Pasionaria, a Stalinist, might have agreed—but to Michel’s father, whose politics were as sentimental as they were convenient, La Pasionaria was an innocent. To Mourre, looking back after Notre-Dame, or even to adolescent Michel, looking forward into oblivion, no one was innocent. As Michel and his grandmother tried desperately to board a train out of Paris, as they were shoved back by the crowd, the boy saw the same people he had seen at his father’s Popular Front rallies, and he was sickened.

I think that the memory of those terrified men and women crowding round the Gare de Lyon on the 11th of June 1940, that soulless, spiritless mob which was without hope because it was without a leader, will keep me forever from believing in the fine fairy-tales of Democracy. In my childish heart there occurred a sort of revelation, through which I recognized the necessity for order and the advantages of authority. The god that my father had wanted me to worship was crying for a railway ticket! The masses, the divine masses, were dying of fright because they were leaderless and cursing the freedom that had led them to ruin.

Such rhetoric might have been acceptable after May 1958, after de Gaulle seized power out of the chaos of the Fourth Republic. In 1950, it was obscene.

Abused at school for his shabby clothes and beaten up for his inherited anticlericalism, Michel fought back. Still, he had nowhere to go—and so in early 1944 he found himself caught up in the teenage collaborationist milieu. Fascism was a noble, exciting cause, Mourre wrote: “an amazing adventure was taking place.” The amazing adventure consisted mainly of rescuing victims of Allied attacks on the outskirts of Paris, but Michel’s group leaders wore attractive uniforms and carried real revolvers. He claimed in retrospect that he might just as well have joined the Resistance. But this was safer.

The Liberation of August 1944 struck Michel as a joke. Everything changed and nothing changed. One form of cowardice was exchanged for another. Jailed for collaboration, Michel attended his first mass: anything was better than the boredom of a prison cell. He heard a message he didn’t understand; he was filled with a vague sense of possibility. Released, he was arrested twice more in 1945; finally the charges were purged. “What had I betrayed?” Mourre said. “My country? I could not have betrayed it. I had never belonged to it.”

Expelled from school for his presumptive crimes, sixteen-year-old Michel found a job as a government bureaucrat. He was required to sit in his chair for eight hours and work for one; he spent his time reading newspapers. In Lyons, Charles Maurras was on trial for treason.

Maurras founded Action française in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair. In 1894 the French officer Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was convicted of treason and sent to Devil’s Island; thanks in part to Emile Zola’s polemic “J’accuse,” the documents on which the conviction was based were proven false, and in 1906 Dreyfus was exonerated. The controversy split France. It exposed French antisemitism and official corruption; to many it deprived all hierarchical power of legitimacy. The scandal drew a line through French society, attaching thousands of intellectuals not to country but to values free of any nationalist patrimony; it set the stage for the surrealist
revolt. To Maurras, the whole matter proved one thing: French culture was decadent, weak, and bankrupt. And he drew this conclusion not because Dreyfus had been expelled from French society, but because he was welcomed back to it: wearing the badge of the Legion of Honor, the kike traitor walked the streets like an honest man. France no longer existed; Maurras would recreate it.

In fringe newspapers and pamphlets Maurras campaigned for a return of the monarchy, simultaneously calling for a revival of classicism and an end to modern art. Against modernist ambiguity and relativism he demanded the purity of the Greeks; he discovered a “Mediterranean” link between the founders of Western civilization and their now lost and scattered descendants—all those who might read him and understand. It was a marginal movement in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, but it was fierce, seizing every defeat as a promise of final victory; brick by brick, Action française laid the foundation for the French acceptance of Nazism. Conquered by Hitler, Denmark tried to shield its Jews; France vomited them up.

With Hitler dead and Nazis on trial in Nuremberg, Michel was less captured by Maurras’ doctrines than seduced by his tone of voice. In the dock, the old man stood on his feet and denounced his accusers. Deaf and condemned, he spoke for hours; he left nothing out. He called for a greater France, a “true France.” He asked the youth of France to follow him—to avenge him. He “focused the first beams of order and essential discipline onto my spiritual anarchy,” Mourre wrote. “I no longer felt I was on my own. For several months I was as happy as an orphan who suddenly finds he has a mother and father.” As he faced the judgment of history, Maurras was a relic. To Michel he was the first promise of youth: no compromise, against all odds.

Michel embarked on his first obsession. Looking over his shoulder, he searched the bookstores for Maurras’ banned tracts; in a great coup, he found a twenty-five volume set. With France surrendering to a soulless materialism, to the survivalist mentality of food rationing and the mindless craze for gadgets and conveniences, the now-illegal AF was the new underground,
the new resistance; Michel sought it out. Joining secret gatherings in the postwar 1940s, Michel and other acolytes tried to relive the heroic prewar 1930s.

At a royalist meeting, Michel encountered “Jacques,” the young man who would become his best friend. For Jacques fascism was merely the least corrupt part of a wholly corrupt modern world: he lived for true salvation, for a Church Militant unafraid of stakes and fires, for the wonders of an epoch close to heaven, innocent of the rationalism that had brought life down to earth. He introduced Michel to the notion of faith: the goal was surrender and the spark was authority, but there was no authority to be found in France. The Spanish Civil War, Jacques told Michel, was the first true crusade in seven hundred years, and France turned away from it. Michel’s father burned his picture of La Pasionaria; no matter what the torture, Michel knew Jacques would never disavow Franco.

The two linked up with the far-right but legal Republican Freedom Party. Thrown together with demobilized Free French fighters, former Resistance partisans, self-proclaimed Nietzscheans, would-be poets, petty criminals, unemployed workers, French Nazis, homosexuals, and certifiable lunatics, the whole lumpen petite bourgeoisie of postwar France, Michel and Jacques became RFP goons. Like most of the rest, they were recruited out of Latin Quarter cafes—as, more than three decades later, punks and skinheads would be drawn out of British pubs by agents of the neo-Nazi National Front. Promised travel, free meals, and excitement, the gang disrupted opposition meetings and served as an RFP bodyguard. They learned the techniques of ambush; when leftists arrived at their own cafes, Michel and his comrades rose from the tables and beat them up. What they were trying to kill, Mourre would explain, was the dullness of the peace.

Michel was dispatched across France to convert workers in thrall to Marxist ideology—in thrall, the Marxists said in turn, to the sort of businessmen who were standing as RFP candidates. Listening to the laborers, Michel understood one thing: whoever their masters, he could never free them. For that matter the RFP was going nowhere; one by one, the most admirable of Michel’s fellows were heading back to the church. He approached a priest and received instruction; on 14 August 1946 he was baptized.

Nothing happened. He sought a bolt of lightning and gained the right to light a candle. Back in Paris he and Jacques determined to start their own fascist magazine; a government license was required, none could be forthcoming, and so they made common cause with a moribund royalist sheet. Michel floundered; he quit going to mass. He pressed for rigorous narrowness rather than narrow rigorousness, deciding that if lust was the human flaw, Original Sin, for any son of God even marriage was filth. To keep their magazine going, he and Jacques organized lectures on the Left Bank; for a treatise on Socrates, he found himself quoting Nietzsche, stumbled into the arms of Zarathustra, and came face to face with “the fearful, bloody blasphemy: ‘God is dead.’ ”

Today we call such a moment an identity crisis; in those days psychology yielded to politics. For Michel it was a social crisis, world-historical. He had the ability to go straight to the heart of a doctrine, to travel through epochs in an instant. He understood that Original Sin was the beginning of the will; as God’s curse it was man’s blessing. God offered man salvation along with a Master, but along with damnation Original Sin made every man his own master, master of the kingdom of no. With Michel’s ravings, the owners of the royalist magazine began to worry; they accused their editors of fanaticism. “We argued,” Mourre wrote,

that the world had a great burning need of fanatics and madmen, men who would sacrifice themselves entirely for a faith, a belief or a creed. Faced with an East transformed by Communism and Communist loyalties and bursting with fresh confidence, our worn-out West was frightened of losing its material and moral riches which it had not even the courage to defend. To counteract Communist faith on earth and Communist ambitions to appropriate the world, it was necessary to establish absolute faith in Eternity, to create fanatics about Eternity and prove that the craze for Eternity was not yet dead among the people of the West.

They were losing their grip; the kingdom of no turned into the kingdom of yes. Michel reveled in the awful freedoms of Original Sin; Jacques became fixated on Don Quixote. Together they attacked the cafes with rants on the greatness of folly, the folly of greatness, the bottomless pit of sex, the sexless pit of bottomlessness, the splendor of holy martyrs, the marvels of
the Inquisition.
Imagine! Once, only yards from where we stand, men and women were burned alive for the glory of God! My friends, the choice is yours to make!

It was 1947. The young men and women in the cafes smiled and turned away. You saw all kinds on the Left Bank. To Michel everything became clear: “it was not a change in the social system that was needed, but a change in one’s inner life.” He decided to become a monk.

Being under age, Michel met with his father to get permission; relieved that his son was not about to join the army, he granted it. Michel visited a Dominican monk to profess his wish to surrender his worldly existence to the order; overcome by a sense of unworthiness, he fled. Ultimately, on the advice of his father—shockingly, the old church-hater was himself on the verge of conversion—Michel found his way to the Dominican monastery of Saint-Maximin in Toulouse. There he contrived a remarkable fantasy: someday soon, he would administer his father’s first communion. And then he would go forth, herald of a great revival, transforming the “whole world into one vast church,” remaining forever unsatisfied until God was “worshipped and glorified at every minute in the life of every man.” Within two weeks Michel was back in Paris; on Christmas Day 1947 he enlisted in the army for a three-year hitch.