Authors: Ruth Brandon
The Nazis, with their embrace of naturism, sport,
and motherhood, officially abhorred such degeneracy. Hitler stopped short of
closing beauty parlors and hairdressers, allowing them to remain open throughout
the war because, as he remarked to Goebbels in 1943, “women after all constitute
a tremendous power and as soon as you dare to touch their beauty parlors they
are your enemies.”
40
But as always when women
were offically relegated to the kitchen and the nursery, cosmetics were frowned
upon. As early as 1933, it was decreed in Breslau that “painted” women could not
attend Party meetings. The single women chosen to breed for Germany in the
“Lebensborn” project, in which Aryan maidens were put at the disposal of SS
officers, were not permitted to use lipstick, paint their nails, or pluck their
eyebrows. Reddened lips and cheeks might suit the “Oriental” or “southern”
woman, the sort of woman destined for Auschwitz or Belsen, but Aryan beauties
supposedly preferred the purity of a suntanned skin, with its natural sheen of
perspiration. “Though our weapon is but the wooden spoon, its impact must be no
less than that of other weapons!” declaimed
Reichsfrauenführerin
Gertrud Scholtz-Klink.
41
This stern philosophy was alien to France, where
feminine beauty was an important part of the culture, and where devotion to
style was epitomized by the
haute couture
for which
Paris was renowned. Schueller’s own taste, however—oddly, it might be thought,
for one whose business was so bound up with feminine beauty—tended, if his
Révolution de l’économie
is to be believed, rather
toward the Nazi
Kinder, Kirche, Küche
(children,
church, kitchen) model of womanhood.
Votre Beauté
reflected this. Its stern emphasis on fitness, sport, and diet, not to say the
commercial imperative of selling more bottles of Ambre Solaire, had always
inclined it to promote a healthy tan rather than lipstick and face powder, which
were not L’Oréal products. Now it bracingly reflected the new hardship.
Reappearing in a half-size format in November 1940, its first issue began with
several pages of exercises as prescribed by Jean Borotra, the aging tennis star
who had become the new regime’s General Commissioner for Sports. “Beauty,” the
magazine declared, “is a discipline: it’s cowardly to let yourself go.”
Naturally, wartime imposed certain difficulties when it came to grooming. But
they could—must—be overcome. “No hot water? Tell yourself it’s all for the good!
Cold water is far better for your health than hot. Hot water is a luxury for
people made soft by carelessness. No more hot water,
vive
l’eau froide!
” The magazine urged readers not to be nostalgic for the
old days of culinary plenty: pictures of lamb chops were sternly crossed out,
while plates of potatoes received a nod of approval with the exhortation:
“Accept the restrictions bravely and with good grace—rationing will help you
live longer.”
1
Feeling the winter cold? Exercise was
the thing! As for cosmetics, they were quite simply a relic of a discredited
past age. “Women used to use far too much makeup—now we’re finding our true
nature again,” readers were assured in the April 1941 issue.
When it came to product placement, however, the
demands of commerce won out over propaganda. “For a woman used to looking after
her body, soap is as necessary as bread!” urged an ad for Monsavon. A
neighboring ad for L’Oréal was equally forthright. “Dyeing your hair is no
longer a matter of coquetry, it’s a gesture of defiance, a social necessity.”
But the tone remained stern. Frivolity and flirtation in the dancehall belonged
to a past age. In wartime, survival was what mattered—and the race went to the
fittest. “Jobs are scarce, competition’s hot—you have to look young! However
capable and experienced you may be, gray hair will mean you don’t get
hired.”
Strangely,
Votre Beauté
continued to feature the couture collections, some of which—Lanvin, Gres,
Balenciaga—continued throughout the war years. Few of the magazine’s readers
would have been able to afford these creations, but they had always been
featured, and perhaps provided a comforting sense that life as it had once been
was not wholly extinct. The most enthusiastic wartime clientele, however, was
German. There was even a plan (soon abandoned) to remove the Paris couture
houses wholesale to Berlin, a strangely schizophrenic notion given the official
Nazi attitude toward chic, but one accurately reflecting the invaders’ taste for
luxury.
Whether
Votre Beauté
’s
readers shared its stern outlook was doubtful. Most wartime photos of young
Frenchwomen show no sign of a retreat into scrubbed dowdiness. On the contrary,
they tried their best to stay seductive against the odds. One urban legend told
how a smart hairdresser employed young men to generate electricity for the
dryers by cycling on stationary tandems in the cellars. And perhaps it was true:
similar tandems can still be seen in the catacombs beneath the 15th
arrondissement.
I
n
those days of scarcity, when only approved publications were allotted paper and
ink,
Votre Beauté
’s continued appearance confirmed
that its owner toed the official line. It would form part of the case against
him when, after the Liberation, Schueller had to face trial. In fact he was
tried twice: once in 1946 for industrial collaboration as the owner of L’Oréal
and Valentine—when he was all but convicted, scraping out an acquittal on the
second hearing—and once in 1948 in his personal capacity as one of the leaders
of MSR, when he was acquitted. Had he been found guilty on either count his
businesses would have been nationalized, and he would have been banned from ever
running a business in France again.
Fortunately for him, little of the evidence brought
against him was as clear and undeniable as the volumes of
Votre Beauté
. As usual when alleged collaborators were brought
before the courts, there was a jumble of conflicting testimony, leaving gaps and
ambiguities that could be interpreted more or less according to taste. The
transcripts of the evidence given in Schueller’s trials show how hard it was to
be certain either of witnesses’ motivations or of their veracity.
For example, an item of evidence in both trials
concerned a van requisitioned from L’Oréal by the Germans in 1944, when the
Occupation was ending and they needed transport to evacuate both themselves and
their loot. Everyone agreed that a van had indeed been handed over. But the
courts heard three different versions of this story. In one, a late-model van
was unquestioningly provided; in another, a van was provided, but it was a
gazogène
, a vehicle developed for use when petrol was
unavailable and that ran on methane gas; in the third, a smart new van was
promised, but the German in charge omitted to make a final check, and a
broken-down old
gazogène
was substituted—one so
decrepit that it had to be towed to within a few meters of the factory gate on a
trailer, as it would never have made the entire journey unaided. Which story was
true?
At least vans were visible objects. Either they
were or were not there, had or had not been provided. Less tangible, and so that
much harder to pin down, were policies and attitudes. The detested Service du
Travail Obligatoire, or STO, under which Frenchmen were compelled to go and work
in Germany, was one example.
At first the Germans had tried to raise a volunteer
workforce by promising that for each volunteer who went to Germany, a French POW
would be released. This arrangement was known as the Relève, and many of
Schueller’s employees attested that he had addressed his workforce urging those
unmarried and without family responsibilities to volunteer in this way. He
offered substantial sums to any who did so volunteer, and explained that no one
should hesitate to leave because they were worried about the living conditions
they might expect: they would sleep in good beds and eat well. This was very far
from the general horrific experience, though L’Oréal employees returning from
Germany testified that they had received regular food parcels.
Schueller admitted that he had indeed encouraged
men to volunteer for the Relève, but insisted that he had been motivated purely
by the desire to repatriate prisoners. When it became evident that the Germans
were not in fact fulfilling this promise, he ceased to support it. In any case,
the program soon ceased to be voluntary, and the Relève was replaced by the
compulsory STO.
But was Schueller’s real motivation as innocent as
he tried to make it appear? One man testified that when he and his group left,
“M.Schueller gave us lunch and a little pep talk, saying we didn’t need to be
afraid, he had always felt more at home in Germany than in England.”
42
The man was shocked to hear this overt
enthusiasm for the invaders, though perhaps it was not entirely surprising given
Schueller’s Alsatian parentage. Alsace borders Germany, its dialect is a form of
German, and many Alsatians (though not Schueller) felt more German than
French—so much so that some of the SS troops who perpetrated the massacre at
Oradour-sur-Glâne in 1944 were Alsatian.
2
There is no doubt that Schueller, like all
employers, tried to minimize the number of workers obliged to undertake this
hated journey, as much for his own sake as for theirs. Experienced men were hard
to replace. His line was that the reason he had agreed to fulfill some German
business orders was in order to keep his workers in France, which may have been
true but of course was also a handy way of justifying collaboration. He pointed
out that his products had no military value, produced figures showing that the
profits derived from German sales were zero in 1940 and 1941, less than 3
percent of profits in 1942, just over 5 percent in 1943, and zero in 1944
43
—and reiterated that he thought taking a few
German orders would reduce the number of his workers forced to go to Germany.
Schueller’s loyal manager at L’Oréal, Georges Mangeot, confirmed this story. He
said they began to deal with the Germans in 1942 because they thought that
otherwise, with no German business and in a nonvital industry, they would be
disadvantaged with regard to STO.
The STO numbers did indeed come down—from 200 to 93
for L’Oréal, and from 75 to 5 for Monsavon. But Mangeot also described how,
after discussing the matter with Schueller, he got the numbers reduced in quite
another way—by bribing a German member of staff at the Bureau Allemand, who was
later shot, having been caught taking similar bribes.
44
And at Monsavon, the reduction was achieved by the young François
Dalle, who persuaded a friendly
commissaire de
police
to mislay, at considerable risk to himself, the factory’s list
of eligible men (which included Dalle himself).
45
Necessary collaboration, or bribes, or a bit of
both? In the complex and shadowy world of occupied France, survival, even for
those as well-placed as Schueller, was an endless balancing act, this morsel of
disobedience bought at the price of that obeisance to authority. And this
balancing act was inevitably reflected in the postwar trials that came to be
known as the
épuration
, or purge. Evidence depends
on record, and the record reflected at best only a small part of the reality.
The judging panels had to reconstitute what was missing as well as they
could.
Notoriously, people’s motive for testifying in
these cases was, more often than not, revenge. Schueller’s case was no
exception. His chief accuser, in both his trials, was a man called Georges
Digeon who had once managed the L’Oréal canteen. It was Digeon who, in 1944,
first drew the authorities’ attention to Schueller, in an affidavit accusing him
of giving the MSR more than 20 million francs; of providing a room for it at rue
Royale; and of being a member of the executive committee of Déat’s party. Digeon
also raised the question of two vans: the one mentioned earlier, requisitioned
by the Germans in 1944, and another allegedly given by Schueller to the MSR.
This van had all its windows darkened except one at the back, enabling people to
be photographed without their knowledge. Schueller, Digeon said, had provided
these vehicles without question when asked. But others raised questions about
Digeon himself. He was loathed throughout L’Oréal, was known by all as a
collaborator who had done regular business with the Germans, and had been sacked
in September 1944 “on the demand of the factory” for making baseless
accusations. He had then gone straight to the local
mairie
, and had laid the accusations against Schueller that formed
the basis of both the personal and industrial
épuration
trials.
46
It could hardly
be clearer that he was motivated by fury—and also, as with many such accusers,
by an urgent need to divert attention from what he himself had done. On the
other hand, that did not mean his accusations were groundless.
Another piece of evidence presented at Schueller’s
trials was an anonymous letter from some members of the CGT trade union at
Valentine, denouncing Schueller for his support of the STO, and for employing
known collaborators.
If the few workers who
are still there can bring themselves to tell the truth, they’ll confirm all
this. We swear on the heads of our wives and children that we’re telling the
truth, and we hope you’ll arrest that whole nest of collaborators, whether
they’re millionaires or just working for a boss. . . . We promise
to tell you who we are as soon as you start your enquiries, but you can’t
trust these bastards, and as we need to eat we can’t sign our names yet
because we’d be thrown out. . . . We swear on our honor that
there’s no question of vengeance in all this, we’re just good Frenchmen who
want to see the wicked punished.
47