Robert Brasillach

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Robert Brasillach
Robert Brasillach (1938)
Born31 March 1909
Perpignan, France
Died6 February 1945(1945-02-06) (aged 35)
Fort de Montrouge, Arcueil, France
Cause of deathExecution by firing squad
Occupation(s)Journalist, author
Conviction(s)Treason
Criminal penaltyDeath

Robert Brasillach (French pronunciation:

collaborationism, denunciation and incitement to murder. The execution remains a subject of some controversy, because Brasillach was executed for "intellectual crimes", rather than military or political actions.[1]

Biography

Robert Brasillach was born in

Action française of Charles Maurras. After the 6 February 1934 crisis in the Place de la Concorde
, Brasillach openly supported fascism. His politics are shared by several of the protagonists in his literary works, notably the two male main characters in The Seven Colours (see below).

Author

Brasillach wrote both fiction and non-fiction. While his fiction dealt with love, life and politics in his era, his non-fiction dealt with a great variety of themes, ranging from drama, great literary figures and contemporary world events. His work in the realm of cinema history (see below) was particularly influential.

Cinema

Brasillach was fascinated by the cinema and in 1935 co-wrote a detailed critical history of that medium,

Falstaff which he hoped to film with Raimu
.

Politics and wartime activities

He became an editor of

Falangist movement.[9] By contrast, he described Mein Kampf as a "masterpiece of cretinism" in which Hitler appeared to be "a sort of enraged teacher."[10]

A soldier in 1940, Brasillach was captured by the Germans and held prisoner for several months after the

Nazi policies and began to criticize the Vichy state. He joined a group of French authors and artists in a trip to meet with German counterparts in Weimar[12] and in November 1942 he supported the German militarisation of the unoccupied zone (Case Anton
) under the Vichy government because it "reunited France".

He visited the site of the

left-wing politicians, and in the summer of 1944 signed the call for the summary execution of all members of the French Resistance. He considered himself a "moderate" antisemite and was replaced as editor of Je suis partout in 1943 by the even more extreme Pierre-Antoine Cousteau.[15] He was a member of the Groupe Collaboration, an initiative that encouraged close cultural ties between France and Germany.[16] He worked for various journals, including Révolution nationale and le Petit Parisien.[12] After the liberation of Paris, Brasillach hid in an attic, joking in his diary: "Jews have been living in cupboards for four years, why not imitate them?".[17]
He surrendered on 14 September when he heard that his mother had been arrested. He spent the next five months in prison and continued his literary endeavours while incarcerated.

Trial and execution

Brasillach was tried in Paris on 19 January 1945. The trial judge had served under Vichy.

homophobic sentiments by repeatedly drawing the jurors' attention to the author's homosexuality (alleged, but denied by those who knew him best), noting, inter alia, that he had slept with the enemy and approved of Germany's "penetration" of France.[19][14] In so doing, the prosecution was making hay with Brasillach's own words, as he had suggested, as Liberation approached, that France had slept with Germany and would remember the experience fondly. Brasillach was sentenced to death. Brasillach responded to the outrage of some of his supporters then in attendance by saying "It's an honour!"[18]

The death sentence caused an uproar in French literary circles and even some of Brasillach's political opponents protested. Resistance member and author

Charonne in the 20th Arrondissement of Paris. His brother-in-law, Maurice Bardèche
, was later buried next to him.

Legacy

Brasillach sought to protect his own legacy as his life drew to a close. He composed several works while awaiting trial and execution, including a collection of verse and a letter to French youth of the future, explaining and justifying his actions (Lettre à un soldat de la classe de soixante (Lettre), see below). In Lettre he was unrepentant about his fascism, his anti-Semitism or his wartime activity, although he insisted that he had no idea that deported French Jews were being murdered.

Brasillach's trial and execution inspired Simone de Beauvoir's essay "An Eye for an Eye", in which she defended the role of emotion (especially hatred) in politics and the role of revenge in punishment.[14]

His biographer Alice Kaplan noted that his death made him the "James Dean of French fascism" and a martyr to the extreme right. François Truffaut was both aware and appreciative of Brasillach, stating that Brasillach and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle shared similar political beliefs and that "views that earn their advocates the death penalty are bound to be worthy of esteem."[23]

Dominique Venner's Nouvelle Revue d'Histoire has praised the author's intellectual oeuvre.[6]

A group called Association des Amis de Robert Brasillach[24] celebrates the author's work and legacy.

Cultural references

  • The
    Éloge de l'amour
     features the recitation of Brasillach's "Testament", written before his execution.
  • Brasillach is described in
    Les Bienveillantes
    , where he is one of the fellow students of the main character Maximilian Aue.
  • Twentieth century French composer Denise Roger used Brasillach's texts in some of her songs. [25]
  • French black metal band Peste Noire dedicated to Brasillach Psaume IV from the album Folkfuck Folie.

Works

Below is a list of Brasillach's oeuvre (fiction, non-fiction and poetry), including posthumous works. Certain works have been briefly summarised.

Novels

  • 1932 Le Voleur d'étincelles (The Spark Thief/The Stealer of Sparks)
  • 1934 L'Enfant de la nuit (Child of the Night)
  • 1936 Le Marchand d'oiseaux (The Bird Merchant)
  • 1937 Comme le temps passe (How The Time Passes By), nominated for Prix Femina 1937
  • 1939 Les Sept Couleurs (The Seven Colors), nominated for Prix Goncourt 1939.
The book begins with the courtship of Patrice and Catherine, two students, in Paris in the 1920s. At one point the young couple meet two children, who are also called Patrice and Catherine and who claim to be a couple. His studies completed, Patrice leaves to work in Italy, where he becomes enamoured with Italian fascism. Catherine, desiring a more stable relationship, eventually marries a Communist she has met at the office where she works, François. Patrice leaves Italy and serves a five-year stint in the Foreign Legion, where he befriends a young Nazi. After his time in the Legion, Patrice goes to work in Nazi Germany, where he finds Nazi ritual (e.g. Nuremberg rallies, the banners and marches) very engaging. Patrice learns from a friend from his Paris days that François has become a fascist, having turned from both Communism and the Third Republic following the 6 February 1934 crisis in which the extreme right rioted against government "corruption" and perhaps planned to overthrow the state. Ten years after he last saw Catherine, Patrice returns to Paris to visit Catherine and she agrees to go away with him but asks for a few days to collect her thoughts. She decides to stay with François instead, but François misunderstands and believes she has left him. François leaves France without a word and joins the Nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War, where he has a brief encounter with the Nazi Patrice met in the Foreign Legion. Catherine stays faithful to François, although she meets a young Frenchman who fought for the Republicans in Spain and who turns out to be the young Patrice she had met while he was a child in the 1920s. Meanwhile, the elder Patrice marries a young German woman. The book ends with Catherine on her way to visit François in hospital in Spain after learning that he has been seriously wounded at the front.
The title of the book stems from the seven styles in which it is written: a narrative of Patrice and Catherine's time together in the 1920s; letters exchanged between Patrice and Catherine while Patrice is in Italy; Patrice's journal entries while he is in Germany; a series of reflections or maxims, mainly on the process of aging and turning 30; dialogue, in the form of a play, between François and Catherine and Catherine and Patrice in the mid-1930s; a series of "documents" François has put together in a scrap book about the Spanish Civil War; and finally a "speech" ("discours"), in which Catherine describes her thoughts as she travels to meet François in hospital.
The book is very sympathetic to fascism as a regenerating ideology. However, given his future as a collaborator, readers may be surprised that Communism and socialism are not attacked outright and that the "Patrice" character mentions several times that Nazism may not be as enduring as fascism and that Frenchmen may have to fight the Germans in the future. Also, it is of note that Catherine, who calls herself a "
petite bourgeoise
" and who exemplifies French rationalism (and perhaps represents France herself) as noted in the dialogue section, chooses François, the French/native fascist and turns away from Patrice, who has immersed himself in Italian and German ideology.
  • 1943 La Conquérante (The Conqueror; gender suggests a female conqueror)
  • 1944 Poèmes (Poems)
  • 1944 Poèmes

Non-fiction

  • 1931 Présence de Virgile (The Presence of Virgil)
  • 1932 Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (edited and introduced by Robert Brasillach) (The Trial of Joan of Arc)
  • 1935 Portraits. Barrès, Proust, Maurras, Colette, Giraudoux, Morand, Cocteau, Malraux, etc., (Portraits)
  • 1935 (re-edited in 1943) Histoire du Cinéma, two volumes (with Maurice Bardèche)
  • 1936, Animateurs de théâtre (Theater Directors/Organizers)
  • 1936 Léon Degrelle et l'avenir de « Rex » (Léon Degrelle and the Future of the Rexist Party)
  • 1936 Les Cadets de l'Alcazar (with Henri Massis, see French Wikipedia) (The Cadets of the Alcazar); later renamed the Defenders of the Alcazar
This short work chronicles the
Carlist
songs reprinted in its pages.
  • 1938 Pierre Corneille, a biography of the famous dramatist
  • 1939 Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne (with Maurice Bardèche) (History of the Spanish Civil War)
  • 1941 Notre avant-guerre (Our pre-war)
  • 1944 Les Quatre Jeudis (The Four Thursdays) A series of articles about literature, literary figures, trends, politics and society largely published in the press earlier in Brasillach's career (drawn from articles often originally printed on Thursdays).

Posthumously published works

  • 1945 Poèmes de Fresnes
  • 1946 Lettre à un soldat de la classe 60 (Letter to a Soldier of the Class of 1960).
In this 'letter', written while Brasillach was awaiting trial, the author expressed his thoughts and hopes to a future generation. He argued that he had few regrets about his social and political role in World War II era France. He admitted that certain excesses had occurred under the occupation but contrasted the Germans' worst crimes against Frenchmen (e.g. the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre) to the well documented atrocities committed by the French in their colonial empire, especially Indochina. He re-iterated his commitment to anti-semitism, although he insisted that he did not know of and entirely repudiated the holocaust despite having advocated the deportations of French Jewry. In the letter Brasillach insists that Franco-German relations would inevitably continue to improve and that the occupation had ultimately brought the two nations closer together. While these statements would have shocked many at the time, when one considers the rapid rapprochement between the two nations post-war, the general idea of Franco-German unity he expressed in some way presages the development of Franco-German cooperation and the pivotal role of the two nations in the European Community/Union, although the causes of this rapprochement may not have been what he foresaw. Brasillach also re-iterated his commitment to fascism and argued that, whether it survived as an ideology or not, the generation of the class of 1960 would doubtless look back on and consider German fascism with a sense of awe. Brasillach also argued that he believed that the spirit of fascism should be mixed with the English sense of liberty and free expression, despite the apparent contradiction in terms.

References

  1. Salon. Archived
    from the original on 23 June 2016. Retrieved 7 September 2019.
  2. ^ Kaplan 2000, p. 1.
  3. ^ David Bordwell, On the history of film style, Harvard University Press, 1997, at p. 40 and 42
  4. ^ 1943 additions: On the history of film style, p.40
  5. ^ On the history of film style, p.39
  6. ^ a b Philippe d'Hughes, "L'étincelante génération Brasillach" 41 (March–April 2009) NRH, 25-27
  7. ^ see Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach, Histoire du cinéma «Le cinéma japonais» Tome II, p:381-412, Les sept couleurs, Paris, 1964
  8. ^ "Lettre a une provinciale: visite a Leon Degrelle" Je Suis Partout, 20 juin 1936
  9. ^ Philippe D'Hugues, "Brasillach et l'Allemagne", in La Nouvelle Revue d'Histoire, Numero 50, 2010 at p. 45
  10. ^ Philippe D'Hugues, "Brasillach et l'Allemagne", in La Nouvelle Revue d'Histoire, Numéro 50, 2010 at p. 46
  11. ^ Quatre procès de trahison devant la cour de justice de Paris: Paquis, Buchard, Luchaire, Brasillach (réquisitoires et plaidoiries) (Les éditions de Paris, 1947)
  12. ^ a b Philippe D'Hugues, "Brasillach et l'Allemagne", in La Nouvelle Revue d'Histoire, Numero 50, 2010 at p. 47
  13. ^ Philippe D'Hugues, "Brasillach et l'Allemagne", in La Nouvelle Revue d'Histoire, Numero 50, 2010 at p. 47-48
  14. ^
    Tablet Magazine
    . Retrieved 20 August 2019.
  15. ^ for a history of Je suis partout see: Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat Je suis partout (1930-1944). Les maurrassiens devant la tentation fasciste (éd. La Table ronde, 1973, rééd. 1987); Les 700 rédacteurs de « Je suis partout », éd. SEDOPOLS, 1993
  16. ^ Karen Fiss, Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France, University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 204
  17. ^ Kaplan 2000, p. 71.
  18. ^ a b Kaplan 2000, p. 187.
  19. ^ "Quatre procès de trahison".
  20. ^ Jean Lacouture, La raison de l'autre, Montesquieu, Mauriac, Confluences, 2002.
  21. ^ Jean-Luc Barré, « Brasillach, Robert (1909-1945) », Dictionnaire de Gaulle, Paris, Éditions Robert Laffont, coll. Bouquins, 2006, p. 147.
  22. ^ Kaplan 2000, p. 210.
  23. ^ Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography (University of California Press, 1999)at p. 85
  24. ^ "...::: Bienvenue sur le site des ARB :::..." Archived from the original on 3 April 2009.
  25. ^ "Denise Isabelle Roger Song Texts | LiederNet". www.lieder.net. Retrieved 8 May 2024.
Bibliography

Further reading

External links
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