Throughout the years, one particular issue that captured the attention of our public was the collaboration of the Vichy government with the Nazi occupancy during the Second World War. However, once the fighting was over, the image of an active Resistance movement had increasingly prevailed in the national narrative, obscuring the somber role this regime had played for the sake of the country’s unity. In fact, one of the first artistic attempts in France to bear witness to the truth was Marcel Ophuls’s documentary film Le chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity) that came out in 1969. Deemed too controversial, it was immediately censored and retracted.*
Meanwhile, American scholars were conducting research on Vichy and in 1972 the renowned historian Robert O. Paxton published Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, an in-depth account of this government’s active collaboration with Nazi authorities in the deportation of foreign and French Jews to extermination camps.
Its revelations, based on documents found in a number of German archives collected by the US Army, were incriminating evidence. Yet, if the truth could no longer be ignored, it was not always well received. At first rejected by Éditions Gallimard as inexact, Paxton’s Vichy France was published by Le Seuil, causing an outcry that more or less amounted to “What right does this American have to come to France and unearth skeletons in our closets?”1 While this incensed question didn’t necessarily reflect the attitude of the entire population, it still revealed the private stirrings of a large number of French people. We will look at the works of four Anglophone writers who, each in their own way, take us to the very heart of the Vichy scandal, as well as the testimony of a French author who recounts his understanding of dubious US military wartime practices.
On July 16 and 17, 1942, the Vichy government stepped up its collaboration with the Gestapo by ordering its own Parisian police to arrest over thirteen thousand foreign-born Jews, including children, in the capital and Greater Paris area. They were to be held in a bicycle racing stadium in the fifteenth district before being deported to French internment camps and, ultimately, to Auschwitz.
One of the rare survivors of this tragedy, known as Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver (the Vel d’Hiv’ Roundup) was the French-born American writer Raymond Federman who told his story at the Village Voice on March 25, 1986, as a prelude to the presentation of his recent novel Smiles on Washington Square.2 In fact, he was thirteen at the time when he became an unseen witness to the arrest of his parents and sister at their home in Montrouge, just south of the Montparnasse district.
It was five thirty in the morning. His parents woke up to the voices of the police in the courtyard and that of the concierge indicating “the Federmans on the third floor.” In a hurry, his mother got him out of bed, pushing him into a stairway closet where he would sit hidden and cramped for more than thirteen hours: “His tomb and his cradle, his death and his renaissance.” These were the words going around in the boy’s head in Yiddish, the language spoken by his parents in private. Sadly, they rang true, for no one in the family ever returned home to him. At the age of eighteen, Federman immigrated to the US, and much later, wrote The Voice in the Closet, the sober memoir of this secret hideout.3
Smiles on Washington Square did not, however, focus on the Vichy collaboration, but was a New York love story that, he specified, “was not about love, but rather about loneliness, the loneliness of two separate individuals who, instead of getting together, will only have an exchange of glances, a reconnaissance of one another through the eyes, on a rainy day in New York on Washington Square.”4
This novel is one of missed opportunity, absence, and longing that pays particular attention to language and its multiple possibilities. Being bilingual, Federman experimented with the words and sonorities of the French and English languages. He likewise addressed his mostly bilingual public that evening as “the happy few and the happy fous,”5 a play on words in line with the puns of Beckett whom he personally knew and highly admired, as seen in the two essays he wrote about him.
Yet if Beckett was the writer of silence, Federman wrote from silence. In the course of his reading with us, he jokingly announced that “my favorite key on my typewriter is ‘delete.’” This definitive kind of erasure was also a feature of the work of Georges Perec, the French writer who shared with him the fate of a child orphaned by parents who had been expedited to the death camps.
An experimental writer himself, Perec was the author of La disparition, the unique example in world literature of a lengthy three-hundred-page novel in which the letter e has been entirely deleted. The work was later translated into English as A Void. All of these stark terms bring to mind the gaping hole left by the quasi-inexpressible blank space of Jewish lives that had been snuffed out so drastically in Vichy France.
This regime was much later laid bare by the Australian-born British writer Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago Press, which specialized in women’s world classics in literature. Living in London, she had no particular ties to France and no apparent reason to write about Vichy until the unexpected 1970 suicide of her lifetime friend, Anne Darquier, which left her with unanswered questions.
A year later, as Callil was watching The Sorrow and the Pity on the BBC, through the subtitles she was able to identify the Frenchman shaking hands with the Nazi officer at the Ritz Hotel as none other than Anne’s father. She told us that “there had never been a conversation in all those years I’d known Anne that could have indicated to me that she was aware that her father was a war criminal. Bewildered, I set out to reconstitute the puzzle by searching for, hunting and collecting all its pieces, which I patiently assembled into Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland.”6
A strong-willed woman, Carmen Callil was at the Village Voice on April 18, 2006, to launch this personal investigative journey. Her editor, Marc Parent,7 opened the evening by alerting the audience to the fact that Bad Faith had been rejected by seven French publishing houses before it reached him.8 “The reason put forward was its length,” he explained, “but the truth is that the Vichy collaboration is still a sensitive issue in today’s France and now, barely out, Bad Faith in French is already the target of harsh critics so as to deflect the attention of the reader from the core of the issue at hand. A revisionist history is at work in this country,” he offered, “and Petain’s spirit is not dead, far from it.”
Callil agreed with him, pointing to “the British obsession” with the French for not facing their war past. “The first villain of my book,” she said, “is Vichy, a story of evil and a reflection about how a civilized country can find itself collaborating with the most horrible, horrifying system. Yet,” she went on, “as in all tragedies, this one has its own lining of burlesque and black humor as it reveals the grotesque villain, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, commissioner for Jewish Affairs in the Vichy government.” As the executor of all policies against Jews, he organized the Vel d’Hiv roundup.*
She had heard of a book about the Vichy Commissariat aux Affaires Juives, the commissariat-general for Jewish affairs, written by a young French scholar, and wanted to find out if anyone in the audience knew anything about it. Someone in the audience quickly pointed out the presence of the author in question, and, in acknowledgment, a man raised his hand and stood up. Though he basically agreed with Callil, he stressed that “Darquier was incompetent and an immense opportunist.” While going through the archives, he had come upon a letter written to Darquier by an admirer. It was a find, “a rarity,” he added, “because, at the time, nobody paid attention to the man. He was just a puppet.” Callil snapped back: “. . . and a dream for the Nazi occupant . . . someone greedy like him was a blessing for the Nazis whose strategy was to have the French to do the dirty jobs, and they found plenty of them to do it. [pause] And it took a foreigner to tell the story!” she angrily concluded.9
As a literary editor, Callil paid close attention to words, and especially those used in propaganda. They are “the same ones over and over again, and it is important to spell them out in order to uncover what goes on.” She gave a probing and most chilling example: “The Vel d’Hiv Roundup was referred to as ‘vent printanier’ or ‘spring breeze’ by Darquier & Company, disguising the terrible reality as some sort of a spring-cleaning operation—a renewal!”
Someone asked what had most surprised her in her enquiry.
Callil: “I would say the financing of the far-right movement and anti-Semitic actions. The list of those sponsors is long, and I will mention only a few: Coty—perfumes—Taittinger—champagne, admirer of Mussolini and Hitler—L’Oréal, the financier of the most extreme and murderous fascist leagues that, after the Liberation, provided hideouts for many war criminals. It took me a full year to track that money and the payments that went to intellectuals who used words to propagate the venom of anti-Semitism through such newspapers as Gringoire in which Colette wrote, and many others. Rosenberg, Himmler, Goebbels, and the industrialist Krupp were a Nazi hotbed for funding French intellectuals.”10
The fact that Colette wrote for a French paper financed by the Nazis is shocking, but she was not the only one. However, we continue to wonder about the collaboration of influential artists and intellectuals in a country so proud of its enlightened culture and literature. In his masterful and authoritative book about artistic life in Paris under Vichy, Alan Riding, the New York Times Paris bureau chief,11 tries to answer this question that remains an especially thorny one for the French.
Frenzied Parisian cultural life under Nazi occupation was a paradox: artists continued to paint and exhibit their works in galleries, musicians gave concerts, writers wrote, publishers published, and films were made and shown. Who were the creators and intellectuals that joined the Nazis in this dance of death? The author’s detailed and informative quest for facts sheds a new light on this dark episode of French culture.
The imposing Alan Riding introduced his work And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris12 at the Village Voice on February 3, 2011, opening his reading with a friend’s quip: “Sorry, dear friend, too many names, too many names.” So, Riding assured us, “I’ll stick to writers, not only because we are in a bookshop, but because they best illustrate the premise of my book which is, in my belief and somewhat supported by experience, that artists and especially writers have a special obligation.” He also reminded the audience that “traditionally, writers in France enjoyed great prestige among the population—they spoke out on political issues and were listened to. For this reason, I set out to investigate to what extent French writers lived up to their moral duty under the Occupation.”
He first traced the volatile political background of the Vichy years in a France torn between two extremist political currents: “There was no other choice in the thirties than being a communist or a fascist. No one wanted to be a ‘democrat,’” Riding learned from French historians who had been students during that decade. He likewise quoted Beauvoir, who lamented the failure of European democracies: “Was there no place on earth where we could cling to hope?” Beauvoir wondered.13
With the Fall of France in June 1940, other writers were at a loss as to where to turn: to Vichy? Even the aforementioned Gide initially nodded to Pétain as a savior. This feeling of relief did not last long as the German occupant immediately implemented rigid forms of censorship in France. The number of banned books was soon staggering and, according to the Otto list alone, 2,242 tons of books were eventually burned.14 However, the Nazi authorities decided to compromise with French publishers. Some publishers accepted money to keep their business going, but the majority of them went along with the ambiguous ruling of self-imposed censorship.15
As an example of the Nazi stranglehold on the French editorial profession, Riding brought up the case of Gallimard, the most prominent of all French publishers at the time (probably still today). Under some pressure, this company fired two of its most distinguished editors: Jacques Schiffrin, the founder and director of La Pléiade, because of his Jewish origins, and Jean Paulhan, the anti-collaborationist founder of the prestigious NRF (Nouvelle Revue Française). The latter was immediately replaced by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, a rightist author and friend of Otto Abetz, the instigator of the outrageous list of banned books.
Even more puzzling was the attitude of the Jewish American writer Gertrude Stein during the Occupation. She enjoyed the protection of her friend, Bernard Faÿ, the director of the Bibliothèque Nationale under the thumb of the Otto List. Perhaps for this reason, the Gestapo left her in peace, even allowing her to hold on to her impressive collection of modern art. At the same time, this guarantee of safety came at a price: Faÿ asked her to translate a number of Pétain’s speeches into English, and she complied with the request.16
The situation of other writers was even more complex: they could continue to write and publish books “as long as they didn’t write for the collaborationist press.”17 With this rule in mind, most French authors resumed their work with their usual publishers under the pretext that, by doing so, they continued to defend French culture.
This being said, a few writers and publishers known as the Grands Resistants wrote and printed their books in clandestine reviews and presses, such as Les Éditions de Minuit, which published Le silence de la mer (1942) under the pseudonym of Vercors, the name of one of the largest Resistance networks in the country. Fairly early on that year, British planes parachuted copies of the novel, along with weapons, over France, and the book became a lasting symbol of resistance against the enemy.
During the Liberation, business as usual replaced “the ideological maelstrom generated by the ‘Purge’.”18 Among the intellectuals who had collaborated with the Nazis, only Robert Brasillach, the editor-in-chief of the collaborationist and anti-Semitic weekly Je suis partout was tried and executed (in his case, by firing squad). In response to a petition from intellectuals to pardon Brasillach, President de Gaulle declared that “people with more talent have more responsibility.”19
On the other hand, Brasillach’s expedited trial and death sentence left a number of questions unanswered; they were to be taken up by the American scholar Alice Kaplan in her outstanding biography The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach.20
However, the book Alice discussed at the Village Voice was her more recent title, The Interpreter (2005). It dealt with another sensitive issue: the abuses and highly questionable practices within the US Armed Forces stationed in France.
“My role as interpreter made me feel important. But equally embarrassed, worried and distressed.”
—louis guilloux, epigraph of The Interpreter
The interpreter in question was Louis Guilloux, a French author known for his social realist novels and close friendships with André Gide* and Albert Camus. He served as an interpreter at an American court martial in Brittany during the ongoing battle to liberate the region in November 1944. As the author of the book OK, Joe,21 he was brought to Kaplan’s attention by Roger Grenier, an eminent French writer and Gallimard editor who had earlier published her biography of Brasillach. Upon reading Guilloux’s text, she was stunned by its revelations that unequivocally pointed to the biased racial discrimination in the 1944 war trials of the US military in France.
Alice launched The Interpreter at the Village Voice on October 6, 2005, and was introduced by Grenier himself, a life-long friend of Guilloux’s whom he described as “a little man with a typical Breton face, his left hand always cradling a pipe.” He then lauded Alice Kaplan for having undertaken a “formidable investigative journey for the writing of The Interpreter, going from local archives in France to the American Army Archives at College Park in Maryland where, in an archive kept secret by the army, she found the evidence that a number of American soldiers had been sentenced to death, hanged, and buried in an unmarked plot.
Gaining access to such sensitive files, whether those of Brasillach or those of the American Army, was a real obstacle course, but, Grenier added with a touch of humor, “Alice’s most difficult challenge of all was getting permission from the local municipal library of Saint-Brieuc to have a look at Guilloux’s manuscript of OK, Joe. [laughter] Each word,” he stressed, “each sentence in Alice’s book is true, but her book is not standard history.”22
A gracious and vivacious woman with an expressive smile, Kaplan opened her reading with the inscription on the book’s jacket that read: “The American Army executed seventy of its own soldiers in Europe between 1943 and 1946. Almost all of them were Black, in an army that was overwhelmingly white. One Frenchman witnessed the injustice and never forgot.” She followed with the description of the preparations for the execution by hanging of James E. Hendricks, a Black GI sentenced to death for the murder of a peasant in a small Breton village, specifying that this chosen form of capital punishment always took place in the community where the crime had occurred.*
She admitted she was startled at first by the title of Guilloux’s book, as “OK, Joe was not a title a French intellectual, peer, and friend of Gide, Camus, and Malraux would use.” However, it was the author’s view of this war that had completely thrown her off, so radically different from any she had grown up with. “Like most Americans,” she told us, “I was raised to think of World War II as the war which made a clear distinction between what was truly good from what was evil, a war where you knew who the enemy was.” Kaplan went on to explain that Guilloux “was trying to make sense of a great democracy with a segregated army. As a witness of these trials, he had an insight into what was going on and detected racial biases in the decisions made at the highest levels.”
Q: “Guilloux could have been influenced or tainted by a personal, distorted understanding of the situation at hand.”
Kaplan: “The ethical universe I’m exploring in The Interpreter is murky and complex. When I read Guilloux’s book, I did not know what was true and what was of the author’s own making. He must have made up the case of the white American officer who had killed a French Resistance fighter, but was acquitted. ‘Too dramatic to be true,’ I thought, ‘and probably not even referred to in local documents.’ I was determined to go and find the historical records of what had happened, which took me to the next phase of my investigation. In addition to archives, obscure reports, and other resources, I interviewed descendants of the victims of the GIs and French people who remembered the American liberators. Most people mentioned by Guilloux were either alive or connected with the accounts in his book. In my acknowledgments, I thanked one hundred and forty people.”
Q: “What were the attitudes or reactions of the French people you interviewed?”
Kaplan: “Some of them had witnessed a hanging, and they never forgot it. Others admitted that the hanging was justified, but I never felt any bitterness toward Americans, even among the people who had a crime in their family. People are still taking care of the graves of the GI’s, very touching. Graveyards, by the way, were invaluable sources of information. In the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery, in the section reserved for executed soldiers, there were ninety-six graves, and among them, I found the grave of Louis Till, the father of Emmett Till.”
Q: “Guilloux waited almost thirty years to publish his observations. Was it from fear of indelicacy toward the liberators?”
Kaplan: “He felt distressed; he felt ‘like a cat who didn’t dare to take a leap through the window,’ he said. Myself, I wonder if he was not thinking of Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas, the man who doesn’t speak.”*