LUCIEN COMBELLE

Péché d’Orgueil

1978

ONE OF MY EARLIEST MEMORIES dates from June 1940. A four-year-old, I was at Royaumont, our family house near Chantilly. Woken up in the middle of the night I understood that the Germans might arrive at any minute. I dressed in the dark. The grown-ups were in a panic. All day long, we drove south. At some point we slowed down amid desperate people from all levels of the population clogging the road in a sauve-qui-peut already being compared to the biblical Exodus. The face of a woman staring through the car window has stayed with me.

A good number of politicians and writers, with Irène Nemirovsky at their head, have come up against the fact that the absence of moral structure committed the French to save themselves at all costs, putting paid to any idea of sacrifice and resistance on behalf of the nation. As the German army was marching unopposed into Paris, to give one example of degradation, a solitary colonel tried to set up a machine-gun position at the Porte d’Orléans, only to be prevented by a police inspector. Or again, Otto Abetz, the German Ambassador, accompanied the troops in a civilian car flying a swastika. To his amazemernt, crowds in notionally Communist working-class districts turned out to applaud him.

The decision not to defend the historic capital city of France led irrevocably to surrender and humiliation. Under enemy occupation life of course must go on. The relationship between victor and vanquished is decidedly ambiguous because it has to take into account all sorts of obligations. Disregarding a century’s experience of hostility and harm at the hands of Germans, a majority of the French became willing collaborators. Intellectuals, some of them very public figures, in particular miscalculated the costs and benefits of Nazi collaboration, compromising themselves and leaving a lasting stain on the national character.

By general consent, André Gide was the leading French writer of the day. The armistice had hardly been signed when he was noting in his Journal, destined for publication: “To come to terms with yesterday’s enemy is not cowardice but wisdom; as well as accepting what is inevitable.” Each and every collaborator would have subscribed happily to that pronouncement. Gide retired to Tunis, where he lived out the rest of the war apparently unconcerned with events in his own country. Compare and contrast this self-indulgence to the campaign against Hitler led by Thomas Mann, by general consent the leading German writer of the day.

Commissioned to write Paris in the Third Reich, I had assumed that former fascists and collaborators would not be willing to speak to me. Literary etiquette made me introduce myself first of all to Henri Amouroux. His history of the German occupation runs to ten monumental volumes, pulling off the exceptional feat of writing objectively with a patriotic bias. Enthusiastically, he opened his files, providing names and addresses and vouching for me. A dark underworld emerged.

Jacques Benoist-Méchin still believed that it was rational for a defeated France to side with a Germany out for conquest. Morality did not come into it. “I was pushed by events,” was his excuse. He had been to Germany with his good friend Ambassador Otto Abetz, and he had accompanied Admiral Darlan to Berchtesgaden in 1941 to negotiate with Hitler over Syria. It had been impressive to meet Hitler, this “very extraordinary man” who had so much power. After the war he was sentenced to death and indignité nationale, but his presidential reprieve after a few years gave away that this was more for the sake of appearances than justice. Alfred Fabre-Luce, another influential intellectual, had taken greater care to cover his tracks. Henry Coston, himself a born conspirator, specialized in the accusation that Jews and Freemasons were conspiring to remake the world in their image, and the whole purpose of his career, implicitly murderous, was to denounce them to the authorities. In 1948 he was sentenced to life imprisonment with forced labor. Listening to him, I discovered that in the three years he actually served, he had forgotten nothing and learnt nothing.

In this rogues’ gallery, Lucien Combelle stood out. A young man from a modest background, he had come a long way. Undoubtedly intelligent, he had literary ambitions and by the end of the Thirties he had become the secretary of André Gide. The writers he hoped to emulate valued achievement above equality. Pride in himself was the source of his Fascism. A key sentence, “I went and listened to the sound of the drums,” allows Péché d’Orgueil to be both confession and excuse. Condemned to fifteen years of hard labor, he benefited from the amnesty granted to French fascists of all sorts. For several decades now, the European Union has been doing its utmost to reduce the concepts of occupation and collaboration to anachronisms in order to spare the feelings of French intellectuals of Combelle’s generation. The inscription here nonetheless conveys residual memories of shame and guilt. “Cette insolite histoire franco-allemande pour un historien anglais, une façon comme une autre d’être européen, en profonde entente cordiale.” I translate: “This exceptional Franco-German story which for an English historian is one among other ways of being European, with the deepest Entente Cordiale.”

Postscript. Pierre Belfonds, a go-ahead publisher, bought the French rights to my book. A wretched first translation had to be scrapped. I was due to talk about the book on “Cinq Colonnes à la Une,” then the leading television program covering the arts. Four weeks before publication, Belfonds telephoned. Someone very important was objecting to my book but he could not divulge who this was, nor what the grounds for suppression were. All he could say was that he was not prepared to put the future of his firm at risk for my sake.