Authors: Ruth Brandon
One of the people most anxious that Frydman should
not pursue his vendetta to the bitter end was Mitterrand himself. “This story
has gone too far,” his aide Charles Salzmann told David Frydman. The president
didn’t want the affair discussed in the press because they might write “all
sorts of things.”
50
But it was too late: they already had. As more and
more of the L’Oréal story seeped out, Mitterrand’s many detractors seized upon
the Schueller connection, pointing up his far-right relations and questioning
whether he had played the important part in the Resistance that he had always
claimed. In particular, they pounced upon a decoration he had played down: the
Francisque, the medal awarded for outstanding service to Vichy and Pétain.
Mitterrand could hardly deny receiving it—when his party went into opposition,
in 1962, the Gaullist deputies amused themselves by shouting “Francisque!
Francisque!” whenever he rose to speak
51
—but he
had hitherto explained it away by saying “When I received it in 1943, I was in
England [i.e., on Resistance business]. That was really useful when I got
back—it was the best possible alibi.”
52
Now,
however, when people looked into the issue more closely, they found that a
photograph existed of him receiving the medal in person from the Marshal’s own
hand.
That Mitterrand should have been part of Vichy was
no surprise. Of all the gang from 104, his background was probably the furthest
right, and his family was intertwined, in many ways and on many levels, with La
Cagoule. Not only was his sister, Marie-Joséphine, for many years the lover of
Jean Bouvyer, who was involved in the Rosselli assassination, but the
Mitterrands were actually related to the Deloncles via Mitterrand’s brother,
Robert, whose wife was Mercédès Deloncle’s niece. During the days of La Cagoule
and the MSR, the Mitterrands cut off contact with the Deloncles, but after
Deloncle was killed they looked after his daughter, Claude, and her young
children. And when, in 1949, Mercédès Deloncle finally married her long-time
love Jacques Corrèze, the Mitterrands were present in force at their wedding. In
1984, when President Mitterrand, visiting New York, attended a party at the
Hotel Pierre in New York given by the local French community, Corrèze’s friends
and colleagues were astonished to see the president greet him with a warm
hug.
53
But the point about Mitterrand’s far-right
connections, which he so fervently did not wish exhumed, was that
they had never been secret
. When he first emerged as a
leader of the left, during the 1950s, the political scandal sheets made much of
this sudden volte-face. “Our aim here isn’t to determine the exact relations
between M. Mitterrand and La Cagoule: everyone knows that that monster (by which
of course we mean La Cagoule) had many heads and thousands of feet. We merely
note that it’s odd that an eminent member of the UDSR [Mitterrand’s party]
should be mixed up in the intrigues of [cagoulards] . . . who managed,
during the Occupation, to construct a Vichyist/Gaullist/
collabo
/
résistant
synthesis before which
the most persistent bloodhounds would lose heart,” commented one in 1953; in
1954, another invoked “the political waters in which Mitterrand first met his
friend Schueller, the father-in-law of Bettencourt, who’s now a minister.”
54
And the same was true of Jacques Corrèze. If
anyone wanted to look, his beginnings with L’Oréal were an open secret. The
latter article went on to mention “the cagoulard Jacques Corrèze, who owes his
job in Madrid to Schueller . . . .” And later, as Lindsay Owen-Jones,
Dalle’s successor, said quite plainly, “This is not a guy who tried to hide in
Argentina or Brazil. He never changed his name.”
55
It was all out there—if you wanted to know it.
The truth was that most people did not want to
know. They wanted to look forward, not backward. In the words of Mitterrand’s
Socialist Party colleague Laurent Fabius, whom he had made France’s
youngest-ever prime minister, “What did I care what he’d done thirty years
ago?”
56
François Dalle, for instance, knew
all about Corrèze, but decided to employ him nonetheless. In Dalle’s eyes, he
had paid his debt to society. “As a participant in the Resistance, I thought it
was important to demonstrate tolerance at a time of reconciliation in
France.”
57
But, then, neither Dalle nor Owen-Jones had ever
suffered at the hands of Corrèze and his like. Those who had were not so blithe
about letting bygones be bygones. And France’s problem, in the postwar years,
was that the two sides—the victims and the rest—could never agree as to the best
way forward. One side wished to move on, the other—for whom closure was
impossible unless the past was recognized—could not move on until it had seen
justice done. The L’Oréal affair exhumed this split, which was why so many
people found it so painful.
This problem was not unique to France. In one form
or another it affected many countries after the war. But what made the French
situation particularly edgy was that anti-Semitism had for so many years been
one of the mantras of the anti-Republican right—and that for many, the
differentiation this implied between French Jews and the “real” French had never
really been effaced. Thus, in 1980, when a bomb exploded at a synagogue in
Paris’s rue Copernic, the then prime minister, Raymond Barre, commented, “This
disgusting attack was aimed at the Jews who were going to the synagogue, but it
actually injured innocent Frenchmen who were crossing the street.”
58
If as late as 1980, in the mind of a moderate
politician, Jews and “innocent Frenchmen” were still instinctively
differentiated, then it was clear just how embedded in the national psyche
Action Française’s demonization still remained.
Obviously, there were real differences between a
Bettencourt, who simply blew with whatever wind prevailed, and a Corrèze, who
had been a committed Nazi and who made a point of insisting that he had always
acted on principle. The Senator Bettencourt of 1994 probably was genuinely
different from the young man he had once been, just as the climate of postwar
opinion was genuinely different from that in which he had been brought up.
Admittedly his career was based on lies. But by the time Frydman resuscitated
them he had told the official story so often that he had probably come to
believe it. Had he truly been that young fascist cheerleader? His reaction to
David Frydman’s revelations showed that he knew he had. But how could that young
man have turned into the person he was now? Was it really he who had inveighed
against “the republic and her masks of parliamentarianism and liberalism,” he
who had called for “a leader who commands, not a crowd of clerks eternally
discussing”?
59
It was impossible—yet it was
true. A journalist who spoke to him on the phone after his resignation said he
sounded “wounded and tormented.”
60
“There’s
this incredible atmosphere of hate,” Bettencourt said.
I had to withdraw from
the only occasion I’ve been offered to put my side of things on television.
. . . because I found out they were going to accompany it with
images of the Germans marching up the Champs-Élysées. . . . You
just have to put up with it; every time you talk about it you just fall into
another trap. To say I’m an anti-Semite is shameful when my only daughter is
married to a Jew who’s like a son to me. After fifty years of an existence
devoted to my country, am I only to be seen as an anti-Semite and
anti-Freemason? It’s horrible.
61
No such bitter regret was ever felt by Corrèze. He
had never, as Bettencourt had, suppressed the person he had once been. On the
contrary, he insisted that he did what he did when the MSR was in its prime “for
a noble cause,” haughtily declaring that although he had lost faith in the MSR
some time before Deloncle died, he had not abandoned his old mentor while he
lived because “I do not desert my friends.”
62
Had his views changed simply because they were no longer admissible? It seems
unlikely. Rather, his whole life had been a continuation of the same game, and
when that game was exposed, he was not so much embarrassed as furious.
Naturally, he never went so far as to publicly
glory in his past. When first questioned about his role in expelling
Jews—including Georges Mandel, who until June 1940 had been minister of the
interior, and Bernheim the well-known art dealer—from their homes and
businesses, he, too, resorted to evasion, first denying everything. “I can’t
recall it—I don’t think that can be true,” he said first, then insisted that
there was a difference between what he had done and actually maltreating Jews
(“
faire des saloperies contre les juifs
”).
63
Which was true enough: he had waited for
others to do the dirty work, and then taken the profits. A few days later he
issued a written statement asserting that “There’s no one, among those hunted
during the Occupation, Jewish or not, who can complain of having suffered, in
his person or his goods, from my activity.”
64
But in the end his actions were what they were, and he did not apologize for
them.
The characteristic that struck reporters during the
Cagoule trial in 1948 was his arrogance. He sat aloofly at the end of the row,
leaning away from his fellow accused, his handsome head thrown back, viewing the
proceedings from a distance down his well-shaped nose. He answered questions,
when addressed, with a weary politeness. He was, journalists remarked, a
romantic figure. He was also utterly unrepentant. And unrepentant he remained.
Interviewed on television in June 1991, he was asked, “Do you feel you were a
real anti-Semite?” to which he flashed savagely back, “I don’t know if I was,
but I’m about to become one!”
65
He did not, like Bettencourt, try to cheat the
gods. Rather, in a classic tale of hubris, he simply gave them the finger,
pushing his luck, because he felt himself invincible. Given his past, and his
defiant arrogance, it is hard to believe that Helena Rubinstein’s Jewishness
played no part in Corrèze’s absolute determination to acquire her business. He
never showed any interest in the very comparable Elizabeth Arden, who was an
equally powerful player, who died only a year after Madame, and whose business
went downhill in much the same way as Helena Rubinstein’s. On the contrary, it
seems in character that, having arrived in New York and sized up the situation,
he should have decided to resume the old game he had so enjoyed in Paris—Colonel
Corrèze redivivus, minus only the high boots and cross-belts. Everything he did
points to his enjoyment of this underlying drama, his pleasure doubtless
enhanced by the fact that only he was aware of it.
We have no way of knowing when he first set his
sights on Helena Rubinstein’s business, but since Madame was already over eighty
when he arrived in New York, he must have realized even before he met her that
Helena Rubinstein, Inc., would come into play sooner rather than later. He made
a point of getting to know her; and to good effect. Dalle testified that it was
Corrèze’s personal friendship with Madame that enabled L’Oréal to acquire Helena
Rubinstein Spain—the first step to the eventual takeover of the entire
company.
66
When the boycott difficulties
arose, it was he who insisted on conducting the Israeli end of the negotiations.
He dropped hints to the Israelis regarding his past—which helped convince them
that he was an honest broker—but as at the Cagoule trial this apparent
frankness, whose effect was so disarming, in fact concealed far more than it
revealed. And as the saga of the boycott became more and more tangled, his
behavior became increasingly flamboyant. At one point he floated a crazy plan
that might have come from Deloncle himself: a project called Operation Rocher to
create a bogus company in Switzerland, apparently quite unconnected to L’Oréal,
that would buy the Helena Rubinstein international operation.
67
He
would
control
Helena Rubinstein—at, it seemed, any cost—and ended up occupying its chair in
the same way as, during the war, he and his MSR cronies occupied the one-time
offices of the Ligue Contre Antisémitisme, Georges Mandel’s apartment, and the
Bernheim art gallery. Would anyone realize who he was? Would they make the
connection? Eventually, of course, someone did. And then he defeated them after
all—by dying.
VI
T
he story
of L’Oréal’s takeover of Helena Rubinstein, and the ensuing explosions, is an
almost perfect dramatic construct. Had it not been for the vicious anti-Semitism
of Schueller and his friends, Madame would never have rediscovered her Jewish
identity and established the Israeli presence that gave rise to the boycott
problems. Had Jacques Corrèze not been disgraced in France as an old Nazi he
would not have ended up in New York, nor been so enchanted by the prospect of
taking over a Jewish business. His and Schueller’s eventual unmasking was a
direct, if unforeseeable, consequence of their previous actions.
For the businessman who had to deal with the
consequences, however, the scandals were nothing less than a nightmare. Lindsay
Owen-Jones, L’Oréal’s fourth CEO, assumed office in the autumn of 1988—just at
the moment the boycott storm broke—and spent the next six years firefighting, as
successive news stories rose from the dead to rip through L’Oréal’s image.
A large part of his effort to repair the damage was
directed at the reestablishment of that image with the Jewish community and
Israel. American reaction to the boycott settlement had been angry, and L’Oréal
faced a $100 million lawsuit alleging it had broken U.S. laws designed to
prevent American firms from cooperating with the Arab boycott of Israel. In June
1994, therefore, L’Oréal announced that it had bought a 30-percent stake in
Interbeauty (formerly Helena Rubinstein Israel) at a price of $7 million. Six
months later, in January 1995, the company opened a factory in the Israeli town
of Migdal Ha-Emek, producing Elseve shampoo, Plenitude antiwrinkle cream, and a
line of products for export using Dead Sea minerals, called Natural Sea Beauty.
That same year, L’Oréal agreed to pay $1.4 million to the U.S. government to
settle its legal problems, and thanked the Anti-Defamation League “for its
support of L’Oréal’s business and community services activity in Israel.”
Bettencourt had resigned, Corrèze was dead, the Jewish lobby was happy. In 1997,
the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America gave L’Oréal its
International Leadership Award. Owen-Jones heaved a sigh of relief and prepared
to turn his attention to other matters.