And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (44 page)

With a circulation that exceeded 300,000 in 1944, the newspaper’s new editor was Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, the older brother of the explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and an obsessive Anglophobe. Under Cousteau,
Je suis partout
’s political voice became shriller, endorsing the violence of the new
milice
, but the weekly also continued to cover the arts scene in Paris. Lucien Rebatet, its talented music and cinema critic, was also known for his vicious turns of phrase, which he used against anti-Nazi writers. To portray Paulhan as a friend of Jews, for example, Rebatet called him “an Aryan ashamed of his foreskin and baptism.” Like Brasillach, Rebatet had passed through L’Action Française on his way to Fascism and a compulsive anti-Semitism. Unlike Brasillach, this son of a provincial notary carried with him a hatred of the Paris bourgeoisie.

In June 1940, the first instinct of Rebatet, still only thirty-seven years old, was to applaud Pétain’s armistice to end the fighting. He wrote, “I was moved to tears with enthusiasm and tenderness for this old chief who had achieved this disengagement. With his great voice of a grandfather, France, for the first time in so many years, assumed its national sovereignty.”
⁶
But after he failed to find a good job in Vichy, he turned against Pétain. Back in Paris, he complemented his column in
Je suis partout
by also writing in
Le Cri du Peuple
, published by Jacques Doriot’s extremist Parti Populaire Français, and
Le Petit Parisien
. In his constant search for scapegoats for France’s troubles, he accused the Catholic church of succumbing to international
Jewry when some bishops protested deportations of Jews. A measure of Rebatet’s audience was that his vitriolic memoir
Les Décombres
(The Ruins), published in July 1942, sold over sixty-five thousand copies in the occupied zone alone. In it, he boasted of his Fascism. “I have never had a drop of democratic blood in my veins,” he said, recalling that twenty-two years earlier he had written, “I aspire to a dictatorship, a severe and aristocratic regime.”
⁷
Along with endless anti-Semitism, he also mocked his former mentor Maurras as a “false Fascist” for not backing Germany. And he expressed his fervent hope for an outright German victory in the European war. Unsurprisingly, Radio-Paris declared
Les Décombres
to be the book of the year for 1942.

A more moderate publication was
Comoedia
, which described itself as “the entertainment, literature and arts weekly” and largely avoided controversial subjects. Launched in June 1941 by an experienced journalist, René Delange, it had no ties to a similarly named weekly that circulated between 1907 and 1937, but it benefited from the earlier
Comoedia
’s good image. Delange proved a skilled operator: he proclaimed the weekly’s total independence at the same time as declaring that his “main aim is to work toward total Franco-German collaboration in the domain of culture.” He gave another nod to the occupier by offering a “European” page each week to German cultural news. Yet while every edition of
Comoedia
required German approval, Delange nonetheless provided an objective account of cultural events in occupied Paris. The Propaganda Abteilung would occasionally censor articles or references to Jewish artists, but it never demanded that
Comoedia
publish outright propaganda or even positive reviews for collaborationist artists. This was as close to freedom of the press as the occupation would know.

As a result, with the respected writer Marcel Arland as
Comoedia
’s book editor, many artists and intellectuals felt comfortable publishing there, even some who otherwise followed the resistance diktat of “no writing for occupied-zone newspapers.” Certainly few refused
Comoedia
’s request for an interview or an essay if they had a new play, movie or book coming out in Paris. This explained the appearance in its pages of the playwrights Montherlant, Claudel and Anouilh, the actor-director Barrault, the composer Honegger and the movie directors Carné and Pagnol. The collaborationist writers Jouhandeau and Jacques Chardonne were frequently published there, but so also were the
résistant
poets Éluard and Desnos and the literary
critic Paulhan. Colette, the only woman to write for
Comoedia
, contributed short stories, while Arland was the first critic to proclaim Camus’s
L’Étranger
a masterpiece. Sartre, too, wrote for the weekly, which his companion Simone de Beauvoir proclaimed to be “a real newspaper” after Arland praised her first novel,
L’Invitée
.
⁸
For the newspaper’s first edition, Sartre reviewed a new translation of
Moby-Dick
. He was interviewed before the premiere of his first play,
Les Mouches
, in 1943. And early in 1944, he wrote an appreciation of the playwright Jean Giraudoux, who had just died. In all, although Delange was called before a purge committee after the liberation, he served both readers and writers without inordinate compromise.

The
Nouvelle Revue Française
failed to strike such a balance. Better known simply as the
NRF
, it had been France’s leading intellectual journal since its foundation in 1909. With Paulhan as its editor from 1925, it had also long opened its pages to all political currents, but it suspended publication in June 1940 as the Germans approached Paris. Now, as a key symbol of “normality,” Ambassador Abetz wanted it back in circulation, and he proposed his prewar friend Drieu La Rochelle as its new editor.

The choice of Drieu La Rochelle was hardly accidental. Born in 1893, he had emerged as an important new writer in the 1920s and, while initially focusing on fiction and poetry, he was noticed in the 1930s for his political essays. Like many of his generation, having begun on the left, he embraced Fascism after the February 1934 right-wing riots. That same year, while visiting Berlin, he met Abetz, who was courting French intellectuals through his France-Germany Committee. In 1935, at Abetz’s invitation, Drieu La Rochelle attended the Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg and visited the “model” labor camp at Dachau. Already disenchanted by French democracy, he joined Doriot’s Fascist Parti Populaire Français and continued to publish books with Gallimard and occasional articles in the
NRF
. On the eve of war, he published his best-known novel,
Gilles
, a portrait of France’s decadence during the interwar years as viewed by his alter ego, Gilles Gambier, who, like his creator, ends up a Fascist. Throughout this period, he remained in touch with Abetz. On August 10, 1940, the two men met again in Paris and the ambassador initially suggested that Drieu La Rochelle found a new political-literary journal, which, he pledged, would not be subject to censorship. A week later, they decided instead that the
NRF
should
be revived by Drieu La Rochelle, who three months earlier had vowed never again to set foot in what he described as a nest of Jews, Communists, Surrealists and fellow travelers.

The journal’s owner, the publisher Gaston Gallimard, had little choice but to accept. His building at 5 rue Sébastien-Bottin, on the Left Bank, was closed on November 9 after German agents found anti-Hitler books in stock. Further, not only had Gallimard refused to accept German capital into his company, but the firm was also reputed to favor leftist authors. Before the war, he had often been attacked by the extreme right; now he was an easy target. On October 10, 1940, Paul Riche
^*
wrote in
Au Pilori
of Gallimard and the
NRF:
“A band of scoundrels has operated in French literature from 1909 to 1939 under the orders of a bandit chief: Gallimard. Thirty years of abject and underhand propaganda in favor of anarchy, revolutionaries of all colors, the ‘antis’—anti-Fascist, anti-national, anti-everything. Thirty years of literary, spiritual and human nihilism! Gallimard and his gang have prepared the leaders of a distinguished mob rule.”
⁹

Still, in exchange for ceding the
NRF
to an ally of the Nazis, Gallimard could return to business. In a letter in late October 1940, Paulhan noted, “Gaston G. sees it as a kind of protection for his entire company.”
¹⁰
Heller was eager to use his position at the Propaganda Staffel to make this happen. While studying French literature in Toulouse before the war, he had come to admire many French writers. Now he was well placed to meet them. He was also fully aware of the importance of both Gallimard and the
NRF
. In his memoir,
Un Allemand à Paris
(A German in Paris), published in French in 1981,
^*
he said he obtained permission for Éditions Gallimard to reopen and accompanied a German military police officer to remove the seal on its building. He recalled, “I climbed to the first floor to the office of Paulhan—I learned that later—which would become that of his successor. I took the telephone and called: ‘Monsieur Drieu, I am at rue Sébastien-Bottin: the building is open, everything is in order.’ ”
¹¹

Aware that the
NRF
’s best-known writers might object to his appointment, Drieu La Rochelle invited Paulhan to stay on as coeditor. Paulhan turned down the offer, but he agreed instead to cooperate in “saving” the
NRF
. It was a peculiar arrangement. Sitting in adjacent offices in Gallimard, Drieu La Rochelle knew that Paulhan was an anti-Nazi. Yet Heller recalled being told by Drieu La Rochelle in early 1941, “Make sure nothing ever happens to Malraux, Paulhan, Gaston Gallimard and Aragon, no matter what allegations are brought against them.”
¹²

In May of that same year, Drieu La Rochelle himself used his Nazi connections to free Paulhan from jail after the Gestapo discovered his ties to the Musée de l’Homme resistance group. Paulhan in turn kept his word by inviting many respectable authors to write for the “new”
NRF
. The first three editions included two excerpts from André Gide’s journal, poems by Paul Valéry and Éluard and an essay by the composer Georges Auric, who, like Éluard, would later join the resistance. Even Mauriac initially believed that the rebirth of the journal would demonstrate “a continuity of the French spirit,” though he changed his mind after seeing the first issue.

But while Drieu La Rochelle’s
NRF
was never openly anti-Semitic, the moderates were soon turned off by its collaborationist tone. In his
Journal des années noires
, the critic Jean Guéhenno described its first edition in December 1940 as “lamentable, even from a literary point of view.” He added, “It would appear that most of these gentlemen have lost almost all of their talent.”
¹³
This issue included an article by Chardonne called “L’Été à la Maurie” (Summer in La Maurie), which describes German soldiers being welcomed in a French village, where a wine-growing peasant offers cognac to a courteous Wehrmacht colonel. “I can only have the highest praise for your soldiers,” he tells the colonel, “and I think all the village has the same opinion. In fact, your soldiers don’t appear to be unhappy with the welcome they have received.” Paulhan described the piece as “abject” and Gide considered it offensive.

In another article, entitled “Lettre à un américain,” Alfred Fabre-Luce
^*
celebrated the fact that Europe’s “new horizons” were giving
birth to “a different race” of Frenchmen. Soon, these writers and other collaborationists like Morand, Jouhandeau, Chardonne, Montherlant, Giono, Fernandez, the philosopher Alain, Châteaubriant and Abel Bonnard were filling the pages of the
NRF
. The journal’s circulation never exceeded ten thousand but, for Abetz, it was a model of intellectual collaboration.

Drieu La Rochelle, however, was unhappy with the review—and with his life. Admirers like Abetz and Heller were impressed by his tall, striking appearance and his dogmatic opinions, but his
Journal, 1939–1945
, published in 1992, forty-seven years after his death, revealed a man consumed by both self-hatred and hatred of the world. “My disdain for myself is intolerable and leads me into sordid adventures,” he mused to himself.
¹⁴
Others fared little better, including Vichy’s prime minister, “this revolting Laval, this half Jew half Gypsy, this trash made behind a caravan.”
¹⁵

More surprisingly, while publicly defending Nazi Germany, Drieu La Rochelle concluded early on that Hitler faced defeat. On December 22, 1941, he wrote, “I am sure that the situation in Russia is very serious and for once I believe the English radio.” He added, “So Hitler has not only the genius but also the stupidity of Napoleon.”
¹⁶
On November 7, 1942, he wrote, “I am beginning to think that a German victory will be very difficult.”
¹⁷
And he asked himself, “If the Germans are beaten, what will happen to me? Could I subsist until the moment that the new Communist-democratic drama begins? Or should I commit suicide before then?”
¹⁸
By this time, boycotted by France’s best writers, the
NRF
was losing subscribers. Already, in the October 1942 issue, Drieu La Rochelle had written with a tone of self-pity, “Almost all French intelligentsia, almost all French lyricism is against us.” He was ready to resign, noting, “Thank God, I have been given enough pretexts. I’m sick of smiling at Paulhan and Arland, who both hate me. In his heart, Paulhan is as Communist as he is Gaullist, while Arland is above all against me.”
¹⁹