H-France Review Vol. 1 (February 2001), No. 3
Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of
Robert Brasillach. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000. xvi + 308pp.
Notes and index. $25.00 (cl). ISBN 0-226-42414-6.
Megan Koreman, The Expectation of Justice: France 1944-1946.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. xviii + 340pp. Notes, maps, index
and bibliography. ISBN 0-8223-2373-7.
Review by Robert Zaretsky, Honors College, University of Houston.
Alice Kaplan’s important book brings Camus' name to mind. Albert Camus,
of course: editor of the resistance paper Combat, author of the classic
account of Occupied France, The Plague, and embattled conscience
of postwar France. Camus played a signal role in the Brasillach affair,
crossing swords with François Mauriac over the competing imperatives of
justice and mercy. Camus at first held that France’s future depended upon
delivering exemplary, severe punishment to those who had betrayed the
nation. Yet, when presented with a petition to commute the death sentence
of Brasillach, accused of treason, Camus signed it. He explained: “I’ve
always held the death penalty in horror and judged that, at least as an
individual, I couldn’t participate in it, even by abstention. That’s all.
And this is a scruple that I suppose would make Brasillach’s friend laugh.”
Camus signed neither for the writer, whom he found insignificant, nor
the individual, whom he despised; instead, moral scruple dictated his
decision.
A second Camus, however, hovers over this book: Renaud Camus. During
most of 2000, Paris intellectuals were boxing one another’s ears over
the publication of the lesser Camus’ journal La Campagne de France.
Renaud Camus would have remained obscure in France, and unknown in the
US, had he not decided to share with his journal, and thus with his few
thousand readers, his belief that elements of the French media are dominated
by Jews -- a people, he added, who require at least a few generations
to become truly French. The subsequent debate sparked by Camus' dim, Barresian
reflections, which his publisher Fayard expunged from a revised edition,
has centered on the conflicting duties of the public intellectual. Some
insist upon the right to “mal penser,” which echoes the claim made
by the editor Jean Paulhan, in the wake of Brasillach’s sentencing, that
the writer has the “right to error.” Others emphasize the imperative to
challenge any and all instances of racist or anti-Semitic discourse. The
recent furniture breaking and breast beating that constitutes the Camus
Affair reminds us of the relevance of the issues raised in the Brasillach
Affair. Kaplan’s study, however, provides a welcome perspective in the
current welter of bruised egos and name-calling. Her study is a deeply
personal, yet selfless account -- one that unsettles by the power of its
insights and candor of its interpretation.
A professor of French at Duke University, Kaplan specializes in the literature
of French fascism and may be best known for a memoir published in 1993,
French Lessons. The book is a deeply moving account of Kaplan’s
relationship with her father, who had served as a lawyer at the Nuremberg
Trials -- a relationship which, in marvelous ways, led to her love of
French. Kaplan recounts a series of interviews with Maurice Bardèche,
Brasillach’s brother-in-law. Refined, courteous, even charming, Bardèche
was a man of letters and a specialist on Balzac and film. He was also
a “negationist” (the more accurate French term for revisionist), fascist,
and anti-Semite, devoting his life to maintaining the flame of Brasillach’s
memory. Kaplan had brought a plum tart to one of the Bardèche family gatherings,
leading Brasillach’s widow, Suzanne, to say, “Robert loved these tarts.”
Confusing, disturbing moments for anyone, not to mention for a young graduate
student. Alice Kaplan left these encounters as doubtful and troubled by
her own reasons as Bardèche’s for entering this relationship. She wondered
why she fought “the battles of another time and place, as though they
were mine” (p.199). Following the publication of her first book, Kaplan
received a letter from Bardèche, in which he released the pent-up venom
of his racist urges. In response, she describes an “imaginary movie” about
visiting Bardèche’s summer house: “I run back to [his] study and challenge
him; tell him I despise him, that he is lying, that he can’t face the
truth of his own guilt. I refuse to eat with his family, out of ethics.
I put on my headphones, and I put him on the stand” (p.200).
The movie has finally been produced. One of the many merits of the present
book is its dissection of Bardèche’s suppression of numerous anti-Semitic
passages, and his fanciful interpretation of other treasonous or simply
despicable passages, in Brasillach’s writings. Kaplan thus succeeds, many
years later, in challenging Bardèche. She challenges his and his brother-in-law’s
decision to engage in the adventure of French fascism, she challenges
his subsequent revision of this adventure, and she makes a powerful case
against their knowing and willful acts. Her analysis of Brasillach’s trial
is a second trial of sorts: it weaves the re-construction of her father’s
role at the Nuremberg trials -- a young man wearing headphones, listening
to the testimony of the defendants -- and Brasillach’s trial at the Palais
de Justice. Historian and lawyer, Kaplan provides a lucid commentary
on the public and historical events, and a liberating conclusion to her
private and autobiographical events.
Based on one’s perspective, Robert Brasillach was either the beneficiary
or victim of the education provided at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
Yet Brasillach left before graduating and made a dazzling entrance onto
the Paris literary scene. In 1931, when he was just 21, Brasillach was
named literary editor at Action Française; a few years later, he
became editor-in-chief of Je Suis Partout. The papers were equally
notorious for their anti-Semitic rants and conspiratorial world views.
But as Kaplan notes, Action Française’s literary qualities claimed
the attention of even those opposed to its politics: “Even Walter Benjamin
read the Action Française daily” (p.11). In addition to his meteoric
rise as a critic, one who expressed a steady admiration of Nazi Germany,
Brasillach also published a number of novels during the 1930s, most notably
Comme le temps passe and Les Sept Couleurs. France’s defeat in
1940, followed by a stint in a POW camp, hardly dampened Brasillach’s
frenzy to write. In 1941, Brasillach was released from his POW camp --
an act initiated by the German Embassy in Paris, which had fingered Brasillach
as a willing and talented collaborator in the construction of the New
European Order. He reassumed his editorial duties at Je Suis Partout,
which had the highest circulation of any daily in Occupied France, and
also wrote for other collaborationist journals. He wrote and wrote to
the day of France’s liberation. In hiding, then in prison, during his
trial, and to the very eve of his execution for having betrayed France,
he continued to write. He wrote as if it would save his life. He wrote,
in fact, as if it was the sole way to create his life. On both counts,
Brasillach failed.
Brasillach failed to live up to his literary ambitions. Even for fellow
writers on the Right, like Thierry Maulnier, Brasillach’s novels were
naïve and sentimental, flat and empty of complex characters. Kaplan points
to a “radical disjunction” between Brasillach’s two writing styles: on
the one hand, it is nostalgic and sentimental, on the other hand, it is
cruel and dehumanizing. He was incapable of channeling “anger and criticism
into the world of his fiction, and wasn’t able to nuance his critical
judgment in the world of journalism” (p.25). It was, in the end, as a
journalist and critic that Brasillach left his mark. The enfant terrible
of the Paris intellectual scene, Brasillach mocked, cursed, denounced
the literary and political institutions of the Republic. His writing was
steeped in the tropes of anti-Semitism -- for example, recasting the so-called
“Jewish Question” as the “The Monkey Question” -- and, as editor of Je
Suis Partout, he oversaw the even more defamatory prose of writers
like Lucien Rebatet. His journalistic and editorial practices, noxious
in peacetime France, became criminal in the context of Occupied France.
Denunciatory and hate-ridden, his writing could now be fatal to others.
As Kaplan writes, following France’s defeat, the “written word had a new
status, a new power to do evil and good. Writers and intellectuals, whether
they liked it or not, were read politically” (p.33).
Kaplan analyzes the words chosen by Brasillach, then broadcast by the
collaborationist press. While still a POW he wrote an article in which
he mockingly identified certain fellow officers as Jewish--an act pregnant
with horrific consequences for those officers. Once released from camp,
he maintained his attack against the “Judeo-Gaullist” forces threatening
France. For example, in “Les Sept Internationales contre la patrie,” written
after the round-up of the Vel d’Hiv, Brasillach identified the
Jews as one of the anti-French elements, demanding that France separate
from “the Jews en bloc and not keep any little ones” (p.50). In
yet another piece, titled “La Conjuration anti-fasciste au service du
juif,” he identifies Léon Blum and Georges Mandel, then being tried at
the infamous Riom trials, as enemies of France. There are yet more examples,
but the point is clear: in a country occupied by a regime whose ideology
dictated the destruction of entire peoples, Brasillach collaborated fully
and willingly. In one of his most notorious phrases, found in an article
written shortly before France’s liberation, Brasillach described the experience
of collaboration with Nazi Germany: “We will have lived together.” This
phrase, cast in the future perfect tense -- a tense that “looks toward
the future by anticipating the past” (p.59) -- serves as epitaph for the
life and death chosen by Brasillach.
The book’s longest chapter is devoted to the shortest event, the trial
itself. It lasted a single afternoon. The jurors heard the defendant’s
own responses to the court’s questions, followed by the arguments of both
prosecution and defense. They quickly returned from their adjournment,
having found Brasillach guilty of violating Article 75 of the French Penal
Code, “intelligence with the enemy.” Kaplan does a fine job in recreating
the context and atmosphere of the trial, helped by the colorful personalities
of those involved. There is, of course, Brasillach himself. One moment
styling himself as Julien Sorel imprisoned in the tower at Besançon, the
next moment posing as an aristocrat preparing to confront the Terror’s
revolutionary tribunal, Brasillach was always playing a role, always conscious
of playing a role. He never grasped the consequences of his playacting
nor the enormity of the charges brought against him. It is perhaps no
accident that his most convincing book is the history of cinema he co-wrote
with Bardèche. As with his writing, Brasillach himself seemed to lack
a sense of reality. Kaplan’s conclusion for Brasillach’s understanding
of fascism, that he “relied on the reference points and vocabulary of
a literary critic -- images, poetry, myths with barely a reference to
politics, economics, or ethics” (p.13) -- can also be applied to his understanding
of life and the consequences of his words and acts.
Brasillach’s defense attorney, Jacques Isorni, turns out to be a surprisingly
complex individual. The child of an Italian immigrant, Isorni was momentarily
subject to Vichy’s law barring the children of non-French parents from
practicing law or medicine. Deeply marked by this experience, Isorni devoted
himself to the cases of those victimized by unjust laws and systems. From
the defense of resistance fighters and hostages during the war, he moved
to the defense of individuals accused after the war of collaboration.
Incapable of distinguishing between the underdog and the criminal, resisting
injustice and resisting justice, Isorni became one of the leading apologists
for Petain and Vichy in postwar France. His gift for intellectual confusion
is revealed in a childhood anecdote concerning Charles Maurras, the leader
of Action Française. Isorni heard him give a public address and
compared the scene to “Socrates teaching his disciples” (p.110). How telling
that Isorni confounds the pedantic and humorless mandarin of reactionary
thought with the sly and ambiguous master of dialectics.
The government prosecutor, Marcel Reboul, was, unlike Isorni, a private
man. Most of what Kaplan learns about him is taken from personnel files,
ministerial dossiers, the court transcripts and, most importantly, the
testimony, given fifty years later, by his worshipful daughter. Kaplan
acknowledges the problematic nature of such evidence. She thus annotates
one of Bernadette Reboul’s anecdotes, for which there is no archival evidence,
about her father’s clandestine resistance activity: “The archives themselves
are no guarantee: what’s in them, what’s missing, has it’s own story.
In this instance [Reboul’s activity], there is only testimony, one generation
removed. I like to imagine that Marcel Reboul was more decent than the
structure allowed, that he was principled in an unprincipled time. Maybe
here I am indulging too much in the American tendency to think about this
period in terms of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’: either I pin a medal on
him, or I suspect his resistance stories. The only real proof we have
of his behavior under Vichy comes after the fact. It is easy to imagine
the way he told the story of the SS men to his daughter, the way he shaped
it, with his booming voice, his rhetorical skills” (p.103).
Many issues are involved in this complex and intriguing passage that,
rather than making an argument, confesses a desire. Kaplan’s sincerity
and self-doubts are powerful and sincere. She reminds us of the ultimate
elusiveness of human character, the shifting tones to personal memory,
the role of self-fashioning, and the complexity of human agency. She also
reminds historians that the epistemological foundations of our métier
are not as solid as we would like. Desire may well play as decisive a
role in our elaborate accounts as it does in Bernadette Reboul’s anecdote.
(Implicit in Kaplan’s interpretation of Reboul’s character is her attitude
towards her own father, who had been assigned a similar task at Nuremberg,
and whose memory she clearly cherishes.)
These issues grow thornier as Kaplan continues her account. In a second
anecdote, we learn that soon after Paris’ liberation, the family was listening
to the radio and heard a broadcast from Sigmaringen, the German castle
where the fanatics of Vichy’s last days had taken refuge. The announcer
read out the names of those Frenchmen who, due to their resistance activity,
would be shot if the Nazis retook France. Reboul’s name topped the list
and his wife asked him to quit his job. Reboul refused, telling his wife
that he chose to become a judge, not a haberdasher, and he would do his
duty regardless of the risks. In the endnote, we learn that the account
is based uniquely on an interview with Bernadette, recorded a half century
later. In the same footnote, Kaplan observes that she looked for this
particular radio transcript, but without success.
That Kaplan is limited to a single source is not in itself a problem--we
have all known that in our research. Instead, the discomfort lies elsewhere.
First, there is the nature of the scholarly apparatus. The endnotes are
not numbered, but instead are cued, at the end of the book, by the relevant
page number and key phrase. This streamlines the text, but also renders
it more ambiguous, creating a novelistic sheen and inviting a blending
of citation and speculation, interpretation and speculation. It also contributes
to a kind of free indirect discourse, one that allows the author at times
to confuse the attribution of speakers or sources. For example, in a passage
devoted to the opening phase of the trial, when Brasillach is easily parrying
the clumsy questions of the presiding judge Maurice Vidal, Kaplan writes
“Reboul, who knew the Je Suis Partout articles by heart, was outraged.
Why wasn’t Vidal challenging this distortion?” (p.157). This seems to
be a straightforward passage. Yet, when we turn to the end of the book
for the appropriate sources, we discover there are none. There neither
is documentation for this moment of drama nor any clarification as to
whom, in fact, is speaking. Is it Reboul who is wondering why Vidal is
not challenging this distortion? Is it instead the narrator? Or is it
the reader?
The German Romantic philosopher Novalis wrote that novels are born from
the shortcomings of history. One values these narrative shifts in, say,
Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, but worries about them in a work
of history. My aim is not to question either Bernadette Reboul’s sincerity
or Kaplan’s strenuous efforts to find corroborating evidence. Instead,
it simply is to wonder where the lines are to be drawn between historical
and novelistic narratives. This question crops up repeatedly, sometimes
in the most banal moments. For instance, Kaplan tries to reconstruct the
personalities and lives of the four jurors for Brasillach’s trial. It
is an admirable, brilliant effort to gauge the distance between the working
class suburbs and the Palais de Justice on the Ile de la Cité.
As Kaplan notes, the Purge juries were liberally stocked with representatives
of the working class, who were held a priori to be opponents of
Vichy. But their class backgrounds render difficult any attempt to trace
their lives, leading Kaplan to exclaim, “When it comes to what one might
call the ordinary person, how few traces a life leaves!” (p.127). This
more or less applies to the four Brasillach jurors, all from the Parisian
suburbs. Faced with mere scraps of documentation and a handful of oral
accounts, Kaplan concludes, “I can only describe them, pointing to them
as a cast of characters, locating them on a map of postwar suburban Paris”
(p.142).
But Kaplan is being overly modest, if only because she has, at times,
an ample, generous understanding of the term “description.” For example,
she writes that the four jurors, before leaving that afternoon for the
court “bolted down their meals” (p.143). We don’t know, of course, if
they actually did so. That Paris was gripped by food shortages, that these
men were about to judge the life of a fellow human being, might have incited
them to drag out rather than dash through their meal of (we assume) soup,
bread and cheese. But is it important, finally, that we don’t know if
the men ate slowly or quickly, thoughtfully or mechanically, praying for
wisdom or asking for salt? Yes, it is important, if only because Kaplan,
through her thoughtful reconstruction of the event -- and candor concerning
her own motives -- makes it so. In the end, it is for the reader to accept
or reject the author’s effort to imagine her way into the everyday thoughts
and gestures of these men. At critical moments, Kaplan reminds us of these
interpretative constraints. When, for example, the jurors are called upon
to decide Brasillach’s fate, she concedes: “They listened and wrestled
with their consciences, according to their personalities, their own experience,
their sense of justice. We have virtually no access to their subjectivity.
What leads up to their decision is inaccessible” (p.141).
In the end, the problem, if that is the word, is that Kaplan is not consistent
in the work of historical recreation and empathy. On the one hand, she
respects the inaccessibility of the jurors’ consciences (if not their
lunch menus), yet on the other hand, she assumes access to Reboul’s motivations.
Why one and not the other? And what is the key to this access? Or, in
fact, to the reader’s assent? Reboul’s moral portrait is compelling, but
is it because, like his portraitist, who worked largely from snapshots
provided by his daughter, we wish him to be good? The meaning to some
stories, as Kaplan notes, may be “wishful” (p.103), but where does this
leave the ultimate historicity of this or any account?
And where does it leave our understanding of human agency? For example,
Kaplan briefly traces the moral itineraries of a few other intellectuals
across the rupture of 1940. She cites the case of the novelist and critic
Claude Roy, who had been a member, like Brasillach, of Action Française
during the 1930s, but met Louis Aragon in the wake of France’s defeat:
“This association changed the course of Roy’s life and his politics” (p.33).
Roy left the Action Française for the French Communist Party, and
thus the Resistance. Kaplan concludes, “Many intellectuals changed their
positions radically during the Occupation. Brasillach didn’t” (p.34).
But, phrased in this way, we are left with the impression that the choice
between collaboration and resistance was a matter of chance, not will.
Rather than falling in with Louis Aragon at Ecole Normale Supérieure,
Brasillach attached himself to Maurice Bardeche. But this, as Kaplan makes
clear, was a choice made by the young man -- just as Roy, in turn, was
clearly disposed to cast his lot with the PCF and the Resistance.
At a more superficial level, there are a few hesitations. In terms of
her historical account of Vichy, one might take issue with the reference
to Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation as the one notable exception in the
“administrative continuity” that existed between late Republican France
and Vichy. (p.31) Though there was, of course, no anti-Semitic legislation
in Republican France, there were, in the waning years, official policies
of exclusion and surveillance of Communists and Spanish Republican refugees.
Philippe Burrin, Robert Paxton, and Michael Marrus, among others, have
suggested that such policies created an intellectual and administrative
space for Vichy’s subsequent frontal assault on French Jewry. Stylistically,
Kaplan’s account sometimes falls short of the heights attained in French
Lessons. There is an occasional faux ami: for example, her
description of the Charonne district as “popular” (p.76). It certainly
is popular today with Parisian yuppies but was “populaire” only with the
Parisian working class in the ‘40s. Sometimes she tries too hard to depict
a scene, as when she describes Reboul’s presence in the courtroom as a
“long black silhouette, the very image of human conscience” (p.169) --
an odd image, to my mind, for human conscience. But much more often, Kaplan
jolts with the apt phrase, as when she describes the post-war Brasillach
as “the James Dean of French fascism” (p.224). Or wonders what would have
happened had General de Gaulle commuted Brasillach’s sentence: “Would
he be sitting with his cohorts in the Académie Française today,
a venerable eighty-eight-year old writer?” (p.214).
In the end, Kaplan is an eloquent and disturbing guide to the historical,
historiographical, and moral issues she raises. These issues often overlap,
as in her reflections upon the issue of timing for Brasillach's arrest
and sentencing. Brasillach did not flee France, as did many of those who
were hip-deep in collaboration. This meant that he was tried approximately
a year before the great majority of collaborators, straggling in from
Sigmaringen or from hiding places closer to home. As passions ran highest
in the first months, Brasillach perhaps paid a higher price than he would
have if he had been tried a year later. Yet Kaplan is unsparing on the
question of Brasillach’s guilt. She makes clear the poisonous nature of
Brasillach’s anti-Semitism, his incendiary, denunciatory and dehumanizing
journalism, his calls for vengeance against the imagined enemies of France,
his pleas for close collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. Was Brasillach
guilty of the charges brought against him? Yes, Kaplan concludes. Should
he have been shot? No, she affirms. Instead of rendering justice, the
execution created a myth that eclipsed the reality of a second rate writer
and truly nasty human being. Had it not been for the firing squad, the
plum tart would have remained just a plum tart.
Brasillach’s trial riveted the attention of Paris intellectuals, perhaps
even suburban workers, but did it also play in Ploermel? In her dazzling
comparative study, Megan Koreman reminds us that justice could mean many
things to “ordinary” men and women living far from Paris. The Expectation
of Justice: France 1944-1946 is a model of local and comparative history.
Clearly written, extensively researched, and deeply reflective, the book
assesses the experience of three provincial towns in the wake of France’s
liberation. Though the Brasillach Affair was largely a Parisian affair,
we find in Koreman’s study that provincial France nevertheless was concerned
deeply by the issues of postwar justice. But it was an understanding of
justice articulated less by the abstract discourses of intellectuals than
by the material and historical peculiarities of local experience. The
great failure of the postwar Provisional Government was its inability
to either understand or act upon these local expectations of justice.
Koreman argues that the nature of the Gaullist, or so-called Resistencialist,
myth -- that all of France, apart from a handful of collaborators, had
risen as one to throw off the yoke of the Nazi occupation -- had a paradoxical
impact on postwar France. On the one hand, by deliberately obscuring the
complexities of French behavior during the Occupation, it allowed de Gaulle’s
France in 1944 to claim equal status with its allies. It also provided
the symbolic means for the Provisional Government to impose its authority
on a deeply fractured nation. On the other hand, however, it collided
with the expectations of justice that the experience of war, and the ideology
of the Resistance, had created in the provinces. As Koreman points out,
the Second World War “created the unusual situation in which ordinary
people thought about the social contract and had an opportunity to renegotiate
it. In après-libération France, the general consensus of the people
in the provinces was that the new, postwar society should be based on
justice” (p.4).
Whereas the issue of justice in Brasillach’s case was largely legal,
Koreman shows that provincial Frenchmen and women understood the question
in other, equally compelling ways. They too, of course, were concerned
by the legal implications of a just society, but they also worried about
the imperatives of social and honorary justice. Social justice governs
the equitable distribution of essential good and services. In liberated
France, hobbled by a severely damaged infrastructure and mushrooming inflation,
social justice was articulated in the operations of the rationing system
and the distribution of scarce commodities. As for honorary justice, it
was fulfilled or denied in the ways in which heroes, dead or returning,
were acknowledged by the state. For example, should honor be translated
into political or electoral power? Here and elsewhere, Koreman reveals
how these three facets of justice often overlapped.
No less importantly, she shows how the particularities of the various
prewar and wartime experiences of each of these towns led, at times, to
very different postwar attitudes. Koreman chose three ordinary, yet exceptional
towns as the basis for her comparison: Saint-Flour, Moûtiers and Rambervillers.
She reveals how Saint-Flour, located in the Auvergne, was largely spared
the torments of the Occupation thanks to its proximity to Vichy (and its
distance from sensitive areas or frontiers). The small Savoyard community
of Moûtiers was galvanized by intense anti-Italian sentiment, as it fell
within the Italian zone of occupation. It also became, given its strategic
position and proximity to the Vercors, an arena for intense battles between
the Resistance and Germans. Finally, Rambervillers, a settlement in the
Vosges, lived under an overwhelming German presence during the war, followed
at Liberation by an equally overwhelming American “occupation.” As Koreman
rightly notes, these towns’ itineraries remind us that there are many
histories of France’s liberation. She thus explodes the images d’Epinal
we have of France’s liberation, restoring to each of these towns the specificity
of its historical experiences.
Part of this work’s fascination lies in the details that distinguish
the experiences of these communities from one another. For example, we
discover that the postwar purge in the Savoie was far more violent and
enduring than it was in the other two regions. Not only was there a greater
incidence of vigilante activity and head shaving of women accused of “horizontal
collaboration,” but the people of Moûtiers also felt a greater independence
from and mistrust of Paris. When the Provisional Government, determined
to establish its authority and enforce the myth of national reconciliation,
granted clemency to a local member of the murderous Milice, the region
protested so violently that Paris was forced to agree to a retrial (though
we do not learn how it turns out). The region, bloodied by terrific civil
war between the Resistance and Milice, had assumed, well before the Liberation,
the “culture of the outlaw.” Koreman makes excellent use of H.R. Kedward’s
notion to describe those regions, ranging from the Vercors to the Cévennes,
where the local Resistance, and not the central authority of Vichy, embodied
the ideals of justice. Yet, in the Savoie’s case, this vacuum of centralized
power continued through the first several months of the Provisional Government.
Ironically, Paris responded to this vacuum by insisting upon its primacy,
even if it had to do so by granting pardons to criminals abhorred by the
local community. In 1944, there was a greater likelihood in certain regions
for confrontations between the state and locality over the extent of the
Purge and, more broadly, the meaning of justice.
As Koreman reminds us, justice was not only rendered in courts; it also
was upheld or flouted through the rationing of food and the distribution
of honors. Just as the administration of the nation’s laws after the Liberation
seemed, at times, to be a throwback to the Old Regime, so too did the
system of provisioning. The post-liberation economy “looked more like
that of 1738 than that of 1938 in terms of its vulnerability to the weather
and the seasons [and] the prevalence of local economies over the national
economy . . .” (p.148). The Provisional Government was remarkably blind
or indifferent to the grim economic realities of the provinces. As a result,
Paris unwittingly undermined its popular legitimacy in August 1945 by
reintroducing free market principles in the distribution of bread, when
neither the means nor material existed to guarantee equitable distribution.
No less as symbol than as foodstuff, bread has played a critical role
in French history. Just as Steven Kaplan has shown bread’s importance
in determining relations between the French monarchy and people, Koreman
also argues persuasively that bread was the very foundation of popular
legitimacy in 1944-45. Though the government soon realized its error and
reinstated controls of bread provisioning, the damage had already been
done: “the new Resistance government displayed a reprehensible lack of
dedication to the principles of social justice and an inability to implement
them” (p.254).
There are yet other continuities between Old Regime and post-liberation
France. For example, Koreman persuasively argues that the widespread practice
of shaving the heads of women accused of collaborating with the enemy
was rooted in age-old communal methods of punishing transgression. When
central authority is too weak or distant to mete out punishment, it falls
to the local community to do so. But beyond these provocative continuities
across time, Koreman also underscores the constants across space. In other
words, despite the important differences among the histories of these
three towns -- and, by extension, the countless other communes of France
-- there was a certain convergence of attitudes towards the Provisional
Government. In the end, the Provisional Government privileged national
goals, not local expectations. This explains both its clumsy handling
of bread distribution and its inability to control the black market. It
also motivated its generous granting of pardons and ill-considered holding
of elections before the return of the so-called Absents (the approximately
two million prisoners of war, deportees, laborers and others still in
Germany at the time of Liberation). As a result, the government, if not
the person of Charles de Gaulle, gave itself -- and the cause of republicanism
-- a tremendous black eye. It also dealt a fatal blow to the ideals of
the Resistance, whether the perspective was from the heights of the Alps
or the blue line of the Vosges. While in Alice Kaplan’s account, Camus
and Mauriac, Isorni and Reboul battled over the imperatives of justice
for a new France, Megan Koreman observes that the fate of this same France
was also played out hundreds of miles from the Palais de Justice,
in bread lines and municipal electoral lists.
Robert Zaretsky,
Honors College,
University of Houston,
rzaretsky@UH.EDU
Copyright © 2001 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 1 (February 2001), No.
3
ISSN 1553-9172
