Robert Brasillach

Robert Brasillach in 1938.

Robert Brasillach ({31 March 1909 – 6 February 1945) was a French poet, author, and journalist. He was the editor of Je suis partout, a right-wing nationalist newspaper which supported fascist movements and, later, Jacques Doriot.

Biography

Robert Brasillach was born in Perpignan, the son of Lieutenant Arthémile Brasillach, who served in the colonial regiment of Marshall Lyautey in French Morocco, and Marguerite, née Redo. He studied at the École normale supérieure, at the time a school of the University of Paris, and then became a novelist and literary critic for the Action française of Charles Maurras. After the 6 February 1934 Paris riots in the Place de la Concorde, Brasillach openly supported the Right-wing Leagues. His politics are shared by several of the protagonists in his literary works, notably the two male main characters in The Seven Colours.

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 was particularly influential.

Politics

Brasillach (second from the left in white raincoat) is shown the mass graves at Katyn.

He became an editor of Je suis partout, a nationalist newspaper founded by dissidents from the Action Française led by Pierre Gaxotte. Brasillach was attracted to the nationalist-catholic Rexist movement in Belgium, and wrote an article and later a book about the leader of the movement, Leon Degrelle. Brasillach admired what he perceived to be Degrelle's youth and charisma, and Degrelle's insistence on being neither left nor right, supporting striking workers, encouraging love of God, the King and family and desiring to see the establishment of an anti-communist and anti-capitalist, Christian-influenced corporate state. Degrelle subsequently collaborated with the German occupation of Belgium and served as an officer in the Waffen-SS mainly on the Eastern Front. Brasillach was also greatly impressed by José Antonio Primo de Rivera and his Falangist movement in Spain. In contrast, he described Mein Kampf as a "masterpiece of cretinism" in which Hitler appeared to be "a sort of enraged teacher."

A serving soldier in the French Army in 1940, Brasillach was captured by the Germans and held prisoner for several months after the defeat of France. At his 1945 show trial, the prosecution alleged that his release was due to pro-German articles written while in captivity. He was freed in early 1941 and returned to his editorial role at Je suis partout. He wrote in favour of the French State government but also embraced a more committed Germanophile policy of collaboration with Germany and Italy and National Socialist ideals. He joined a group of French authors and artists in a trip to meet with German counterparts in Weimar, and in November 1942 he supported the German militarisation of the French unoccupied zone following the Allied invasion of French North Africa because it "reunited France".

He was part of the international delegations which visited the site of the Katyn massacre; he then toured the Eastern Front, visited the Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism troops and wrote, on his return to France, that he had gone from embracing a collaboration due to reason and rationality to being a collaborator for reasons of the heart ("De collaborationiste de raison, je suis devenu collaborationiste de coeur.") He is said by Simone de Beauvoir to have published the names and addresses of Jews who had gone into hiding, called for the death of Left-wing politicians, and in the summer of 1944 was one of those signed the call for the summary execution of all members of the so-called French Resistance. He considered himself only a "moderate" anti-semite. He was replaced as editor of Je suis partout in 1943 by the even more extreme Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, a member of the Groupe Collaboration, an initiative that encouraged close cultural ties between France and Germany. He worked for various journals, including Révolution nationale and le Petit Parisien. After the invasion of France by the Western Allies and the German military evacuation of Paris, Brasillach hid in an attic, joking in his diary: "Jews have been living in cupboards for four years, why not imitate them?". He gave himself up on September 14th 1944 when he heard that his mother had been arrested (the sort of tactics the Soviets used). He spent the next five months in prison and continued his literary endeavours while incarcerated.

Trial and murder

Brasillach was given the usual show trial in Paris on 19 January 1945. Ironically, the judge had served during the period of the French State!. The prosecutor reiterated Brasillach's vehement anti-semitism, linked his praise of National Socialist Germany and denunciation of the so-called Resistance, and played upon homophobic sentiments by repeatedly drawing the jurors' attention to the author's alleged homosexuality (denied by those who knew him best), noting, inter alia, that he had 'slept with the enemy' and approved of Germany's military occupation of France. In so doing, the prosecution was 'making hay' with Brasillach's own words, as he had suggested, as the Allied invasion approached, that France had slept with Germany and would remember the experience fondly. Brasillach was, needless to say, sentenced to death. Brasillach responded to the outrage of some of his supporters then in attendance by saying "It's an honour!"

The death sentence caused an uproar in French literary circles and even some of Brasillach's political opponents protested. :Leading Resistance member and author François Mauriac, whom Brasillach had savaged in the press, circulated a petition to Charles de Gaulle to commute the sentence.(Neither the trial or de Gaulle possessed any legality under French law.) This petition was signed by many of the leading lights of the French literary world, including Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Arthur Honegger, Jean Anouilh and Thierry Maulnier. De Gaulle expressly refused to grant him a pardon and Brasillach was executed by firing squad in Montrouge. It has been argued that De Gaulle refused to spare Brasillach because the author had on numerous occasions called for Georges Mandel's execution. De Gaulle admired Mandel, a prominent Jewish politician, and who was eventually assassinated by the Milice during the closing days of the war in France. Brasillach called out "But all the same, long live France!" ("Vive la France quand même!") immediately before his execution. He was buried in the cimetière de Charonne in the 20th Arrondissement of Paris. His brother-in-law, Maurice Bardèche, was later buried next to him.

The murder remains a subject of controversy, because 35-year-old Brasillach was executed for "intellectual crimes", rather than military or political actions.

Legacy

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

Brasillach's show trial and murder 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.

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."

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

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

Cultural references

• The Jean-Luc Godard film Éloge de l'amour features the recitation of Brasillach's "Testament", written before his execution.
• Brasillach is described in Jonathan Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes, where he is one of the fellow students of the main character Maximilian Aue.
• French black metal band Peste Noire dedicated to Brasillach Psaume IV from the album Folkfuck Folie.

Works

Below are some of Brasillach's oeuvre (fiction, non-fiction and poetry), including works published posthumously. 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.

• 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, (The Cadets of the Alcazar); later renamed the Defenders of the Alcazar

This short work chronicles the siege of the Alcazar in Toledo by Spanish communist forces in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. While it lionises the defenders, Brasillach does not shy from mentioning the execution of the prisoners in Toledo's hospitals after the relief of the city and the Alcazar. The author also discounts certain elements of Nationalist propaganda concerning La Pasionaria, the Communist Dolores Ibárruri. The work remains heavily pro-Nationalist, with Falangist and 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 his show 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 to the well-documented atrocities committed by the French in their colonial empire, especially French Indo-China. He re-iterated his commitment to anti-semitism, although he insisted that he did not know of and entirely repudiated the so-called holocaust, despite having advocated the deportations and resettlements 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 co-operation and the pivotal role of the two nations in the European 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.

• 1947 Chénier, La Pensée française (Chénier: French Thought)
• 1950 Anthologie de la poésie grecque (Anthology of Greek Poetry), ISBN: 2-253-01517-2.
• 1952 Lettres écrites en prison (Letters Written in Prison)
• 1953 Six heures à perdre (Six Hours to Kill)
• 1954 Bérénice (Berenice) (play, first run - 1957)
• 1955 Journal d'un homme occupé (Journal of a (Pre)Occupied Man)
• 1961 Poètes oubliés (Forgotten Poets)
• 1961 Dom Rémy
• 1962 Commentaire sur La Varende (Commentary on La Varende)
• 1963 En marge de Daphnis et Chloé (On the Edge of Daphnis and Chloé)
• 1963 Nouvelle prière sur l'Acropole (New Prayer on the Acropolis)
• 1967 Écrit à Fresnes (Written at Fresnes)
• 1968 Une génération dans l'orage (A Generation in the Storm)
• 1970 Vingt lettres de Robert Brasillach (Twenty Letters)
• 1971 Abel Bonnard biography
• 1974 Les Captifs incomplete novel
• 1984 Le Paris de Balzac (Balzac's Paris)
• 1985 Hugo et le snobisme révolutionnaire (Hugo and Revolutionary Snobbism)
• 1985 Montherlant entre les hommes et les femmes (Montherlant between Men and Women)
• 1992 Fulgur novel, compilation
• 1999 La Question juive, articles de Brasillach et Cousteau (The Jewish Question: Articles by Brasillach and Cousteau)
• 2002 Relectures Robert Brasillach (Re-reading Robert Brasillach)

External links

• Photograph
• Killed for His Words by Richard Corliss
• NOXIOUS WORDS, HEINOUS ACTS, THE POWER OF SPEECH by Kim Koster
• Robert Fulford's column about Marguerite Duras & Robert Brasillach from The National Post

Sources

• Kaplan, Alice (2000). The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-42414-9. 
• Wesseling, H. L. (2002). "Chapter 6: Robert Brasillach and the Temptation of Fascism", Certain ideas of France: essays on French history and civilization. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-32341-6. 

Further reading

• Fascist Ego: A Political Biography of Robert Brasillach by William R. Tucker, ISBN: 0-520-02710-8
• The Ideological Hero in the Novels of Robert Brasillach, Roger Vailland & Andre Malraux by Peter D. Tame, ISBN: 0-8204-3126-5
• Translation of Notre Avant-Guerre/Before the War by Robert Brasillach, Peter Tame, ISBN: 0-7734-7158-8