The Collaborator, The Trial & Execution of Robert Brasillach

Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. First edition. Hardcover. Fine copy/fine. 8vo. Cloth-backed boards. Pp. xvi, 308, (iv). Notes. Index.

The trial of Robert Brasillach was—and remains—a cause célèbre in France. He was charged not for what he did during the German Occupation but for what he wrote. Yet by all accounts Brasillach was a gifted and charming intellectual. He attended the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and might have joined the elite of the country. Instead he became a poet, a novelist, a scholar of cinema history, and a journalist. He had always supported the conservative right. In 1931 he began writing for Charles Maurras' royalist Action Française. By 1937 he had become the chief editor at the fascist tabloid Je sui partout, and then after a rupture with his colleagues he wrote for two other right-wing journals, Révolution nationale and Le petit Parisien. He was deeply involved in the divisive controversies of the time which became more and more polemical and violent. One of the more despicable things he was involved in was a weekly column in Je suis partout called "Partout et ailleurs" in which were publicized the real names—and sometimes the addresses—of Jews, dissident writers, left-wing politicians, Gaullists, and resistants who were in hiding from the authorities. In September 1943, when it was clear that Germany would lose the war, he wrote: "De collaborationiste de raison, je suis devenu collaborationiste de coeur." He was the most notable victim of l'Épuration, the purge of those who had supported the enemy during the four very hard years of the Occupation. While he was in Fresne Prison awaiting his trial for what was in effect intellectual treason, he wrote poems which attempted to portray himself as a "brother" to the writers who had resisted but were captured and suffered in the very same prison: "C'est à vous, fréres inconnus, / Que je pence, le soir venu, / O mes fraternels adversaires!". However his words in Je suis partout were remembered, and so he was convicted. A petition for clemency was circulated in the literary world, and many notable figures signed it, although for different reasons: Mauriac, Claudel, Valéry, Cocteau, Derain, Vlaminck, and Camus because of his opposition to the death penalty. The appeal went to De Gaulle who rejected it, writing later about his decision: "le talent est un titre de responsibilité". Robert Brasillach was executed on February 6th, 1945, aged 35. His last words were: "Vive la France quand même".