SubStance

SubStance 29.3 (2000) 142-146

Book Review

The Collaborator:
The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach

Among French literary fascists who collaborated with the Germans and supported the Nazi cause during World War II, perhaps no figure is more emblematic than Robert Brasillach. Hated and despised after the Liberation for his role as editor of the vehemently pro-German Parisian weekly Je suis partout and for his denunciations in the newspaper of Jews attempting to flee Nazi and Vichy persecution, Brasillach nevertheless became a martyr for the postwar extreme right following his trial and execution for treason during the first few months of 1945. In this sense Brasillach remains a "site of contested memory," and serious efforts to gauge his literary worth have more often than not been overshadowed by the attempts of his apologists to inflate his talent as novelist and critic and by his detractors to dismiss him as a third-rate hack who is only remembered because of his unsavory politics and the dramatic nature of his death.

Alice Kaplan's The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach is unquestionably the best effort to date to assess the career of the man Kaplan labels "the James Dean of French Fascism" and to contextualize that career in relation to the tumultuous period in French history between 1930 and 1945. After a brief account of Brasillach's family background and coddled [End Page 142] early years in Perpignan and Morocco--Brasillach's father, a colonial officer serving under Marshall Lyautey in Morocco, was killed in battle in 1914--Kaplan turns to Brasillach's brillant career as a student in Paris at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and then at the École Normale Supérieure. It was at Louis-le-Grand that he met Maurice Bardèche, his friend, eventual brother-in-law, and keeper of the flame following Brasillach's execution (Kaplan devotes a harrowing chapter to her interviews and correspondence with Bardèche in her memoir, French Lessons), and it is also at Louis-le-Grand that Brasillach became connected with Action Française, a connection that would serve him well as he launched his literary and journalistic careers.

In following Brasillach's ascent in the 1930s as France's leading young fascist intellectual, Kaplan examines his output as novelist, critic and columnist--primarily at Je suis partout--while dealing as well with the events that paved the way to his wartime vocation as an ardent admirer of the Nazis and champion of collaborationism. Among the most formative events were Brasillach's visit to Nazi Germany and his witnessing of a Party rally in Nuremberg, his meeting with the Belgian fascist Léon Degrelle, his trip behind Francoist lines during the Spanish Civil War, and, closer to home, his connection with the reactionary Rive Gauche group, which would later open the notoriously collaborationist Rive Gauche bookstore on the Place de la Sorbonne during the Occupation. (Brasillach would serve on the bookstore's board of directors).

In examining Brasillach's novels written during the 1930s, Kaplan stresses their maudlin sentimentality and their curious detachment, and contrasts this "softer" Brasillach with the acerbic and often vicious critic and anti-Semite who, as early as 1937, was calling for racial laws against the Jews in the pages of Je suis partout and disparaging the literary output of leftist writers like André Malraux. Both practices would of course continue into the Occupation, the only changes being that the persecution and destruction of the Jews was in full swing under the Nazis and Vichy and figures like François Mauriac had replaced Malraux as the target of Brasillach's ire. That Brasillach was aware of the ultimate fate of many of those he denounced is made clear, according to Kaplan, in his post-Liberation "Lettre à un soldat de la classe '60," where Brasillach acknowledges that the goal of the deportations was "death, pure and simple."

Kaplan devotes a lengthy and...