Authors: Ruth Brandon
However, in the middle of 1941, when the Germans
abandoned the Nazi-Soviet pact and marched on Moscow, Deloncle lost interest in
expropriations. The most important task as he now saw it was to join the fight
against the Bolsheviks. He therefore set about raising a French volunteer force
to fight in Russia alongside the Germans. The Légion de Volontaires Françaises
(or LVF) was perhaps the extreme point of the collaboration. Of little
consequence militarily (only 3,205 volunteers signed up), it had considerable
psychological importance, allowing French fascists to feel that the Germans
really valued them as partners. Corrèze, Deloncle’s loyal protégé, was one of
the first to sign up. He spent the hellish winter of 1941–42 on the Russian
front, failing to take Moscow, and returned in April 1942.
By then, however, the MSR was in disarray. For now
that German victory seemed less certain, Deloncle was rethinking his position
vis-à-vis collaboration. Unseated in a putsch by the assassin Jean Filliol, he
opened contacts with the Americans, hinting that he was working with the
résistant
(and ex-cagoulard) General Giraud. The
German army was already less than enthusiastic about him on account of a
mini-Kristallnacht he organized in October 1941, when his men blew up seven
Paris synagogues using explosives supplied by the Gestapo—a gesture that may
have pleased the Berlin high command but appalled the Wehrmacht because it
needlessly antagonized the French, without whose cooperation, or at least
indifference, the Occupation would become much harder to sustain. Deloncle was
becoming a liability.
On January 7, 1944, he was dealt with. At seven
thirty that morning, the concierge of his apartment building in the fashionable
16th arrondissement was awakened by repeated knocking on the door. She opened it
to find fifteen civilians armed with machine guns, some speaking perfect French,
others with heavy German accents. They ordered her to go up to Deloncle’s
apartment via the service stairs. They would follow. She was to ring Deloncle’s
bell and say it was the gas meter reader. On the stairs, however, the party met
Lucienne, the Deloncles’ maid. She opened their door with her key, and the armed
men found themselves face-to-face with the Deloncles’ son Louis and a manservant
holding a breakfast tray. Louis shouted, “
Papa!
Papa!
Des terroristes!
” and Deloncle appeared, wearing
only his pyjama jacket. He left the room to get his pistol; the armed men
followed. There were a number of shots. When the men left, Deloncle was dead,
and Louis had a bullet in his head, leaving him permanently disabled.
Corrèze, who still lived with the Deloncles as one
of the family, and who was standing naked in the hallway when the posse burst
in, threw himself to the ground as soon as the shooting started, and escaped
unharmed. He and Mercédès Deloncle, with whom he was still in love, were
arrested and imprisoned, but released after a few days. Mercédès then vanished,
not reappearing until more than a year later, when her daughter Claude married
Guy Servant, an LVF stalwart and the son of a pro-Nazi friend, Patrice
Servant.
Corrèze, for his part, abandoned politics following
the assassination and went underground to join a Resistance network. This
volte-face counted in his favor when it came to the
épuration
: he was sentenced only to ten years’ hard labor. At the
end of the Cagoule trial he received a further ten years, to run concurrently
with the first sentence.
He was freed in 1949, when an amnesty was
announced: the three years he had already served before the Cagoule trial were
judged to count as part of his sentence, making him eligible for freedom as this
meant he had served five years in all, 50 percent of his sentence. However,
prison was not his only punishment. Like many collaborators, including Mercédès
Deloncle, whom he married as soon as he was freed, he had also been sentenced to
dégradation nationale
(public disgrace) and
confiscation of all his property in France, past, present, and future. He turned
to the man at once most likely to sympathize with him and most able to help: his
old friend from the MSR, Eugène Schueller. Schueller had, after all, employed
François Mitterrand, whose brother was married to Mercédès’ niece. And Schueller
did not disappoint him.
In fact, it was not Schueller who officially hired
Corrèze, but François Dalle. Dalle insisted he did so without any input from
Schueller. He thought Corrèze had paid his debt to society, his sentence was
“not amongst the most serious,” and “as a participant in the Resistance, I
thought it was important to demonstrate tolerance at a time of reconciliation in
France.”
21
But like so many of the
pronouncements emanating from L’Oréal after Frydman’s revelations, this left
much unsaid. For Corrèze was by no means the only cagoulard to find salvation at
L’Oréal after the war. It was rumored that even Jean Filliol, who had been
sentenced to death in absentia on three separate counts and had lived the rest
of his life on the lam, was among them (though one scandal sheet hinted that
Filliol didn’t actually have a L’Oréal job but was living on blackmail money
extorted during a clandestine trip to Paris in 1946).
22
Indeed, it was common knowledge in certain circles that Schueller
“looked after his own” and “could be relied on to fish out people who were going
under.”
23
Of course this was hardly surprising. Schueller had
only by the narrowest of margins, and by a concerted effort on the part of
influential friends, escaped the punishments meted out to so many of his wartime
colleagues. The least he could do was to help the less fortunate as he himself
had been helped. Just as Helena Rubinstein’s business success had allowed her to
provide a refuge from the Jew-hunters, in the shape of far-flung employment, for
her nieces, nephews, sisters, and brothers-in-law, L’Oréal allowed Schueller to
do the same for Deloncle’s band of brothers. Jean Filliol’s son and daughter,
using their mother’s name of Lamy, took a job with L’Oréal’s Spanish subsidiary,
Procasa, as did the son of Michel Harispe, Corrèze’s confederate in Jewish
expropriation, and Deloncle’s brother and son.
1
Corrèze, like the other ex-cagoulards, followed the
well-trodden route to Franco’s Spain, where a sympathetic regime allowed them to
start life afresh. But unlike most of them, for whom this exile was little more
than an afterlife, he took his work seriously and put all his considerable
energy and charm into making a success of it. Sent to the United States in 1953,
“he visited all the New York hairdressers with his little bag of samples,
selling our hair dyes.”
24
Within a few years
Corrèze was heading a sizable organization, had become an important figure in
L’Oréal, and was considering the purchase of Helena Rubinstein, Inc. His
subsequent negotiations in Israel were congenial on both sides. “They knew all
about my past,” Corrèze said (somewhat of an exaggeration: what he told the
Israelis was that he was not proud of his past during World War II, and that
they should not bruit his name about because “then he wouldn’t be able to help
anymore”
25
). He found them “delightful
people.”
26
And this liking was wholly
reciprocated. “He was a big man, very warm and charismatic. You really wanted to
please him,” said Gad Propper, the Israeli businessman who dealt with him.
27
In 1959, Corrèze was officially amnestied, and in
1966 he was rehabilitated. He could once more participate in French life and own
property there. From then on he lived between the Bahamas and Paris, where his
apartment overlooking the Seine was described by those who knew it as
“palatial.”
But although his past was now officially expiated,
it lived on in the minds of those Corrèze and his friends had hunted. Deeds that
the perpetrators recalled only with great difficulty remained vivid in their
victims’ memories. Serge Klarsfeld, the indefatigable French lawyer and
Nazi-hunter, had amassed a large collection of papers pertaining to the Nazi
persecution of the Jews in France, among them several documents attesting to
Corrèze’s anti-Semitic wartime activities. In the wake of Frydman’s accusations,
Klarsfeld passed these papers on to the American Office of Special
Investigations, so that the Justice Department could decide whether or not to
place Corrèze on its special watch list of foreigners believed to have
participated in religious or racial persecution.
The affair was now getting seriously embarrassing
for L’Oréal, and on June 25, 1991, Jacques Corrèze resigned from the company. He
was seventy-nine years old and suffering from cancer of the pancreas: on June
26, the day after his resignation, he died. A short statement was issued in his
name. “I cannot change what has been. Allow me simply to express my most
heart-felt and sincere regrets for the acts that I may have committed 40 years
ago, and their consequences, however indirect.”
28
IV
A
t the same
L’Oréal annual meeting, in 1991, where Lindsay Owen-Jones had been cheered when
he rejected any taint of racism, André Bettencourt, L’Oréal’s vice president,
had reiterated Dalle’s contention that Jean Frydman’s real concern was
financial.
29
Infuriated, Frydman vowed he
would not rest until Bettencourt had been forced to retract and, hopefully, was
hounded out of L’Oréal.
His task was not, on the face of it, easy. Since
the war, Eugène Schueller’s group of young friends from 104 had done
spectacularly well—and become spectacularly influential. By 1991, when the
Corrèze scandal broke, François Dalle had become one of France’s industrial
elder statesmen; Pierre de Bénouville was (among other things) second-in-command
to Marcel Dassault,
né
Bloch, the aviation magnate;
François Mitterrand was well into his second term as president of France. As for
André Bettencourt, he had become not only a powerful political figure but
immensely rich. He had been a valiant
résistant
,
with the Resistance Medal and the Croix de Guerre 1939–45, with palms, to prove
it. He was a senator, and had been many times a minister under presidents of
both the right and the left—in the Foreign Ministry during the presidency of
Pierre Mendès-France, a minister under General de Gaulle, and a cabinet minister
under Georges Pompidou, who had been not just president but a close friend, as
was François Mitterrand, the current holder of that office. And he was one-half
of France’s wealthiest couple: the fortune inherited by his wife on her father’s
death had grown. She was now France’s richest woman.
Frydman was undeterred. In 1994, after reading
Pierre Péan’s book
Une Jeunesse française
, which
revealed the far-right connections and dubious youth of Bettencourt’s friend
Mitterrand, he thought he would do some basic research himself—starting with the
weekly columns Bettencourt had written for
La Terre
Française
between December 1940 and July 1942. On the rare occasions
Bettencourt had been confronted with his authorship of these pieces he had
played them down as being harmless, unimportant contributions to an obscure
farming magazine. But was that true? It should be easy enough to find out: the
Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine at the Nanterre
campus of the University of Paris had a set of copies. Frydman’s brother David
went to have a look at them.
His first finding was that
La
Terre Française
was by no means as innocuous as Bettencourt implied.
It might have been, once, but during the Occupation it had been taken over by
the Germans, acting through a small company called “Le Comptoir financier
français.” This was wholly financed by the Nazi Propagandastaffel and in 1949
suffered the fate narrowly avoided by Eugène Schueller, of having its assets
confiscated as punishment for aiding the enemy. The magazine’s contents were a
careful mix of agricultural articles and general-interest hearts-and-minds
pieces designed to appeal to a deeply conservative and distrustful section of
the population.
Bettencourt’s column
Ohé les
jeunes!
was a mix of religious and political uplift geared to the
Church calendar and the changing seasons. The pieces appeared between December
1940 and June 1942, and were featured prominently, sometimes taking up the
entire front page. And what they contained was dynamite. Bettencourt’s public
image was founded on his being an old
résistant
and
a pillar of the Republic. But his wartime writings promoted a down-the-line
antidemocratic pro-Nazi agenda. “All the old formulas of excessive liberty” must
be abandoned: “the words democracy, dictatorship, republic, universal suffrage,
organized proletariat, liberty, equality, have had their day.”
30
Denunciations of suspect neighbors were a duty
“insofar as they truly serve the community.”
31
As for the Jews, “rubbing their hands [after the crucifixion, they] cried, ‘Let
his blood fall on us and our children!’ You know exactly how it fell, and still
falls. The edicts of the eternal Scriptures must and will be accomplished.”
32
And, if this material were not graphic enough,
“Their race is forever stained with the blood of the just. They will be
universally accursed. . . . Today’s Jews . . . will be spat
out [
seront vomis
]. It’s already happening.”
2
33
All these prejudices had long been familiar to the
devotees of
Action Française
, and it was no surprise
to find them voiced by an ambitious young man of Bettencourt’s religious and
conservative background. His generation had never seen the Republic as anything
but enfeebled and corrupt; for the circles in which he moved, the Jews embodied
everything—liberalism, secularism, cultural dilution—that was destroying their
beloved France. For forty years these same prejudices had been brandished in an
ongoing and increasingly bitter war of words. Bettencourt was simply repeating
what he had heard all his life.