The morphology of the collaborator: the French case

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989), III, 469. For continuing negative connotation to 'collaborator', see Clyde Haberman, 'Words, war and sensibility: linguistic fog in the mideast', New York Times, 29 August 1992, 2.

OED, III, 469.

Loc. cit.

Trésor de la langue française (Paris: Éditions du C.N.R.S., 1977), V, 1028-29.

Brockhaus Wahrig , Deutsches Wörterbuch (Wiesbaden: F. A. Brockhaus , and Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt , 1982), IV, 203. See also Duden, Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, ed. by Günther Drosdowski (Mannheim, Vienna, and Zürich: Dudenverlag, 1978), IV, 1513.

Diccionario Básico Espasa (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1980), II, 1371. See also Diccionario de la Lengua Española (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1984), I, 334.

Salvatore Battaglia , Grande Dizionaria della Lingua Italiana (Turin : Unione Tipografico, 1961), III, 279.

Ibid., 280

In doing a morphology of collaboration, it is helpful to do a closed series on 'collaboration', 'traitors' and 'treason' in several different types of sources. The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, from 1890 through the present, generally cross-references 'collaboration' to joint authorship and literary collaboration, as well as 'treason'. At ten-year intervals for 'traitors', it peaks in 1940 and 1950, with references to 'fifth column' and 'Quisling'. Its reference to 'treason' is occasional, peaking in 1950 with a concern for treason in the United States during the McCarthy period. It also cross-references 'treason' with 'trials: treason'. It would be of interest to compare the generally political use of these terms in the Reader's Guide to what might be expected to be different vectors of collaboration found in Biblical concordances or in interviews with male and female teenagers contemplating suicide.

Sophie Bertho , 'L'Attente postmoderne à propos de la littérature contemporaine en France' Revue d'histoire de la littérature française, #4-5 (1991), 740.

Alain Choufflan , 'Du PPF de Doriot au FN de Le Pen, Malaguti, I'homme qui nie son passé', Le Nouvel Observateur, 5-11 March 1992, 30.

For references to the revolts of the bad gods against the good in ancient Babylon mythology, the motifs of the treachery of officers and ministers, and punishment of treason in Buddhist folklore, see Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1955), I, 74; IV, 486-7; and V, 202; respectively. There is also a Swiss folktale about priests who betray their city during an attack by prolonging the Mass long enough to allow the enemy to destroy it, in ibid., IV, 494.

II Samuel 17. Achitophel was David's treasonous counsellor who deserted to the King's rebellious son Absalom. In his satire Absalom and Achitophel, 1681, Dryden used this name for the Earl of Shaftesbury.

William Brandon , The American Heritage Book of Indians (New York: Dell, 1964 [1961]), 166.

Robert Rogers , Ponteach or the Savages of America. A Tragedy (Chicago: The Caxton Club, 1914), see especially 201-2, 218-19, and 255; the last for an account of treason committed by some of Pontiac's followers against him. Pontiac's deal with the French paralleled de Gaulle's in 1940 with the English, except, unlike de Gaulle, Pontiac lost. Since the Americans later did to the British what the British had done to Pontiac, in the end he collaborated with the right side and, accordingly, a town is named for him in Michigan.

General Mola besieged Madrid with a military force of four columns but counted on the Quinta Columna, traitors from within, to help him capture the city. See Max Gallo, La Cinquième Colonne ... et ce fut la défaite de 40 (Paris: Complexe, 1980 [1970]), 20. The collaborationist press in occupied France was called 'Fifth Column', in Jean Quéval, Première Page, cinquième colonne (Paris: Fayard, 1945), 11. For a satirical sabotage of 'social values and worldly confidence by the Comic spirit' see Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky, 'Introduction', in William Gerhardie's God's Fifth Column, A Biography of an Age 1890-1940 (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1991 [1981]), 11.

John Sutherland, 'GBS as GOM', Times Literary Supplement, (6 September 1991), 6. For the 'fellow travelling' of W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot, see Claude Rawson, 'Playwright Pleasant and Unpleasant', New York Times Book Review (20 October 1991), 3. Heidegger, also accused of collaboration, obviously did not collude with a foreign enemy. See Thomas Sheehan, 'Heidegger and the Nazis', New York Review of Books (16 June 1988), 38. The American journalist Walter Duranty, said to have coined the term 'Stalinism', pictured the Soviet leader as a heroic idealist. When forced to acknowledge severe food shortages during the 1932-33 famine in the Soviet Union, Duranty used a metaphor that was to become legendary: 'to put it brutally - you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.' See Ernest R. May, 'Making omelettes and influencing people', Times Literary Supplement (25 January 1991), 13; also David Caute, The Fellow Travellers, Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988 [1973]), 90. For a more recent discussion of fellow travellers' willingness to overlook unpleasant realities in the Soviet Union, see Marie-Thérèse Vernet-Straggiotti, 'Moscou avec les yeux d'Elsa', L'Express (7 February 1992), 63.

David Pryce-Jones , 'The Shield of Ignorance', Times Literary Supplement (3 January 1992), 20.

Avishai Margalit , 'The Violent Life of Yitzhak Shamir', New York Review of Books (14 May 1992), 21.

Emma Duncan , 'Hitler's Indian Allies', New York Times Book Review (21 April 1991), 27. For Asia, see also Philippe Pons, 'Un mouvement "détourné" par les militaires pendant la dernière guerre', Le Monde (4-5 August 1991), 4.

Merle Rubin, 'US-Nazi spies: cold-war blunder', Christian Science Monitor (17 October 1988), 22. See also the account of Nicholas Poppe, a professor at the University of Leningrad and a specialist in Soviet Asian languages, who worked with the Nazis from 1942 and in 1943 was brought to work at the Wannsee Institute, where he assisted in locating the Soviet Jewish communities for the SS extermination campaign; Jon Wiener, 'Bringing Nazi Sympathizers to the U.S.', The Nation (March 6, 1989), 306-7. U.S. utilization of 'Nazi rocketeers' is discussed in John Tagliabue, 'At Space Age Cradle: Shades of Nazi Racketeers', New York Times (9 May 1992), 4.

Henry Coston , Dictionnaire de la politique française (Paris: La Librairie Française, 1967), 265.

Stephen Kinzer , 'Germany's Governing Party Is Wrestling With Skeletons', New York Times, (19 December 1991 ), A6. Lothar de Mazière, East Germany's last Premier, and also a CDU political figure, argued that as few voted in opposition or dared to abstain in East German elections, all must share the blame. See Steven Lukes, 'The year that shook the world', Times Literary Supplement (23 August 1991), 9.

Edward A. Gargan , 'Kuwait Will Begin Trying Collaboration Suspects', New York Times (10 May 1991), A8. For the Palestinians see John Kifner , 'Palestinians turn ire on collaborators', New York Times (27 March 1988), 3 and Robert R. Goldman , 'Spare and rename the "collaborators"', International Herald Tribune (30 October 1989), 4.

Eunice Lipton , 'Justify my hate', Women's Review of Books, ix, #8 (May 1992 ), 16.

Nicole Leibowitz , 'Les États-Unis, comme au temps du maccarthysme: Quand les gays se dénoncent entre eux', Le Nouvel Observateur (7-13 November 1991), 10. See also Dominique Fernandez , 'Cessons d'être lâches!' in ibid., 11.

Paul Avrich , 'Preface', in Sam Dolgoff, Bakunin on Anarchy (New York: Adolph A. Knopf, 1972), xv. Félix Fénéon, a fin-de-siècle anarchist in France and a professed believer in 'propaganda of the deed', referred to the 'intimate charm' of the bombing of a café in Paris, adding that such attacks had been 'directed toward the voting public, more guilty in the long run, perhaps, than the representatives they elected to office'. See James R. Mellow , 'A dandy and a terrorist', New York Times Book Review (5 March 1989), 12.

Nikolas Schreck , ed., The Manson File ( New York: Amok Press, 1988), 20.

See Charles Debbasch and Yves Daudet , eds, Lexique de termes politiques (Paris: Dalloz, 1974), 229-230.

See Azar Gat , 'Clausewitz and the Marxists: yet another look' , Journal of Contemporary History, xxvii: 2 (April 1992), 372-3. See also Gallo, op. cit., 11.

James R. Mellow , Charmed Circle, Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Praeger, 1974 ), 446.

Robert Irwin , 'Messages from Cairo', Times Literary Supplement (13 March 1992 ),23.

See the account of the efforts of the Pétainists to make contact with de Gaulle and his rebuff of them in Jacques Laurent, 'Préface', in Gabriel Jeantet, Pétain contre Hitler (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1966), xi. See also the post-war perspectives of the 'Pétaino-Gaullists', a term used by Henry Rousso in The Vichy Syndrome, History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 48.

The problem of the poor who collaborate with their seeming social enemies is the ultra-collaborationist morphology problem which has confounded virtually all political theorists including Marx, the feminists and racial solidarity theorists. The complexities of this problem are evident in labour disputes, in which refusing to go on strike is collaboration with the bosses, going out on strike is collaboration with the unions.

Ganelon (also Gan of Mayence, Gano of Maganza) was the traitor among Charlemagne's paladins. In the Chanson de Roland he is responsible for the defeat at Roncesvalles. Jean-Louis Bourlanges, a member of the Veil group in the European Parliament, denounced the 'eternal party of the collaboration' that he saw extending from Ganelon through Laval and Marcel Déat to Jean-Marie Le Pen, criticized because of his support of Iraq in the Gulf crisis of 1990. See Valérie Dousset, '"Le Pen, c'est Ganelon!"' Le Figaro (24 August 1990), 5.

Edwin L. James , 'Parisians Insult American Tourists', New York Times (24 July 1926), 2 and 'French Now Fear Tourist Exodus' , New York Times (25 July 1926), 1-2.

The various Extreme Right youth groups are discussed in many of the police reports in the Archives of the Police Prefecture in Paris. See especially the following reports: 21 January 1935, B A/328 (79.501.508.G); Police Report, 11 October 1934, and Sûreté Générale report, 12 November 1934, BA/342 (209.670). See also report of 5 July 1935, BA/342 (209.670).

Auguste Viatte, La Crise de l'intelligence française (Quebec: Cahiers de l'École des Sciences Sociales, Politiques et Économiques de Laval, 1942), 14.

Bertram M. Gordon , Collaborationism in France during the Second World War (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), 67.

Roger Martin du Gard in Nouvelle Revue française (December 1958), 1150; quoted in John M. Sherwood, Georges Mandel and the Third Republic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 205. For discussion of the 'naive' acceptance of arguments for German Lebensraum by French 'pacifists' in the late 1930s, see Richard Griffiths, 'Combative pacifists', Times Literary Supplement (23 August 1991), 8.

Bobbet in Le Petit Parisien, quoted in William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic. An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969),405.

Gordon, Collaborationism, 34.

Henri Michel , Vichy Année 40 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1966), 109.

Laurent Theis, 'Le Taureau fourvoyé', Le Nouvel Observateur (7-13 February 1991),72.

Tony Judt , 'The Judgements of Paris', Times Literary Supplement (28 June 1991), 3.

Gordon, Collaborationism, 127.

Loc. cit.

Paul Sérant , Le Romantisme fasciste ( Paris: Fasquelle, 1959), 45-6.

Raymond A. Sokolov, review of Robert J. Courtine, Feasts of a Militant Gastronome, trans. by June Guicharnaud (New York: Morrow, 1974), in New York Times Book Review, (27 October 1974), 31.

Pierre Andrieu was a food writer for the magazine Pour Elle, which appeared in occupied Paris; see Bertram M. Gordon, 'Fascism, the neo-right, and gastronomy: a case in the theory of the social engineering of taste',Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 1987 Taste Proceedings (London: Prospect Books, 1988), 92, footnote 65.

Sérant, op. cit., 36-37.

For the collaboration of 'realism', see Eric Conan, 'Ici Vichy', L'Express (24 January 1992), 56.

Stanley Hoffmann , 'Collaborationism in France during World War II', Journal of Modern History, xl (September 1968), 376-7.

Irwin M. Wall , Book Review of Roger Bouderon and Ivan Avakoumovitch, Détruire le PCF: Archives de l'État français et de l'occupant hitlérien 1940-1944 (Paris: Messidor/Éditions sociales , 1988), in American Historical Review, xlvii: 2 (April 1992), 566.

Fred Kupferman , Laval 1883-1945 (Paris: Balland, 1987), 434.

Eberhard Jäckel ,Frankreich in Hitlers Europa, Die deutsche Frankreichpolitik im zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1966), 276.

Patrice Higonnet , 'How guilty were the French?' New York Review of Books (3 December 1981), 15.

Jean-Pierre Rioux , 'Les Duettistes de Vichy', Le Monde, Édition Internationale (2 May 1987), 12.

Pierre Gounand , 'Les Groupements de collaboration dans une ville française occupée: Dijon', Revue d'histoire de la deuxiéme guerre mondiale, xxiii (July 1973 ), 56.

Ibid., 52-53, footnote 1.

See Tony Judt , 'Here be monsters', Times Literary Supplement (17 April 1992), 9.

Sam White , 'The Collaborationist left', Spectator (30 December 1978), 11.

Patricia Highsmith , 'Desperate connections', Times Literary Supplement (17 April 1992), 4.

Interview, Paris, 13 July 1973. This informant added that Laval's deportation of Jewish children had been done for humane reasons and he suggested that the anti-Semitic articles that Déat wrote after 1942 may not have been sincere.

Interview, Paris, 25 July 1973. The interest of some of the French Leftists in 1940 National Socialism is discussed in Rémy Handourtzel and Cyril Buffet, La Collaboration ... a gauche aussi (Paris: Perrin, 1989), 29. For discussion of the desire for pacifism and reconciliation with Germany, see also Robert Wohl , 'French Fascism, both Right and Left: reflections on the Sternhell controversy' , The Journal of Modern History, Ixiii:1 (March 1991), 94.

Yves Durand and David Bohbot , 'La Collaboration politique dans les pays de la Loire moyenne: étude historique et socio-politique du R.N.P. en Indre-et-Loire et dans le Loiret', Revue d'histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale, xxiii (July 1973), 76.

Interview, Paris, 17 July 1974.

Interview, Paris, 20 July 1973.

Interview, Paris, 10 July 1974.

Interview, Paris, 22 July 1974.

Interview, Paris, 26 June 1974.

Interview, Paris, 25 July 1974.

Interview with a female member of the JEN, Paris, 25 July 1974.

Interview with Victor Barthélemy, Paris, 9 July 1974. See also Victor Barthélemy, Du communisme au fascisme. L'histoire d'un engagement politique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1978), 235.

Interview, Madrid, 22 August 1974. See the discussion of the view of fascism as poetry in Robert J. Soucy, 'The nature of fascism in France', in Nathanael Greene, ed., Fascism, An Anthology (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), 299.

Interview with Marc Augier, Paris, 4 July 1974. Augier tells his story in his book, Les Partisans (Paris: Denöel, 1943).

Interview, Paris, 6 July 1987. For a discussion of Pétain and the Catholic community, see W.D. Halls, 'French Christians and the German Occupation', in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Patrick Marsh, ed., Collaboration in France, Politics and Culture during the Nazi Occupation, 1940-1944 (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 90.

Interview, Paris, 13 December 1989. See also Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order 1940-44 (New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1972), 219.

Interview, Paris, 10 January 1990.

Cited in Eugen Weber , Action Française. Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 468.

Alan S. Milward , The New Order and the French Economy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 74.

Gordon, Collaborationism, 164. See also Jacques Nobécourt, 'Deux wagons du Berlin-Paris', L'Express (22 March 1991), 64.

David Pryce-Jones , Paris in the Third Reich, A History of the German Occupation, 1940-1944, (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981), 88.

See the description of Paris as a rest and rehabilitation centre for the Germans in 1941 in the memoir of Alfred Fabre-Luce, Journal de la France 1939-1944 (Brussells: Cheval Ailé, 1946), 349. Occupied Paris was the scene of opulent dining at restaurants or bistros for those willing to collaborate. See La Gerbe, on 2 January 1941, in André Halimi, Chantons sous l'Occupation (Paris: Ollivier Orban, 1976), 43. For opulence depicted in the films produced in Vichy France, see the undated stills of champagne drinking in the film, 'Le Dernier des Six', a dining scene with wine in 'Félicie Nanteuil', and a wine drinking scene in a nightclub in 'Donne-moi tes yeux', a Sacha Guitry film, reproduced in Jacques Siclier, La France de Pétain et son cinéma (Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1981), photo section.

See 'Audience du 22 Janvier 1946, Plaidoirie de Me. Floriot', Luchaire's defence counsel, in the stenographic account of the trial of Luchaire, in Procès de collaboration (Paris: Albin Michel, 1948), 595.

Durand and Bohbot, op. cit. (Note 66), 61.

After the war, Ingrand's collaboration ties helped him rebuild his life in Argentina, where he was hired by the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, which had financed French businesses working for Germany during the war, and found him a position with a branch in Buenos Aires. There he also built up a flourishing service for the Alliance Française, with more than 30,000 students. See Eric Conan, 'Les Regrets d'un serviteur de Vichy, 'L'Express (16 August 1991), 36-40.

Durand and Bohbot, op. cit., 73.

Interview, Paris, 4 July 1973.

Higonnet, op. cit. (Note 57), 15.

The fate of Simon's son François is interesting. Late in 1940, François was preparing to escape to join de Gaulle in London. Simon drove all night to Port-Vendres on the Spanish frontier and brought him back. François was killed in Russia in a German uniform in 1942. See Robert O. Paxton, 'The friendly fascist', New York Review of Books (27 April 1989), 42.

Robert O. Paxton , Review of Hervé Coutau-Begarie and Claude Huan, Darlan; in American Historical Review, xlvi:1 (February 1991), 182-3.

Interview with René Theveste [pseudonym], Gonesse, France, 14 July 1974.

Bernard Wasserstein , 'Writing on the wall', Times Literary Supplement (14 June 1991), 10.

Interview, 4 July 1973. For discussion of people who joined the RNP to escape the labour draft, see also Durand and Bohbot, op. cit., 62.

Interview, Paris, 9 July 1973.

Interview, Paris, 22 July 1974.

Interview, Paris, 6 July 1987.

Interview, Paris, 3 July 1974.

Interview, Paris, 28 August 1973.

Interview, Paris, 25 July 1973. See also Gordon, Collaborationism, 256, n. 14.

Interview with Henriot's 1944 Chef de Cabinet, Paris, 6 July 1974.

Interview, Madrid, 22 August 1974.

Alice Yeager Kaplan , Reproductions of Banality Fascism, Literature and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16.

Bertram M. Gordon , 'Un soldat du fascisme: l'évolution politique de Joseph Darnand, Revue d'histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale, lviii: 3 (October 1977), 66-67.

Darnand to Pétain, 6 August 1944, in Gordon, Collaborationism, 279.

Gordon, Collaborationism, 313.

Interview, Paris, 13 July 1974.

Weber, Action Française, 474-5.

John M. Hoberman , 'Collaborating with the Enemy, ' The Boston Sunday Globe (20 July 1986), 45.

Eugen Weber , 'Nasty, brutish and brave', Times Literary Supplement (8 November 1991), 4.

Higonnet, op. cit. (Note 57), 17.

Maurice Rajsfus, Une terre promise? Des juifs dans la collaboration (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1989), 389. As an accusation, collaboration has been thrown at many people in France, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir because they did not risk their lives in combat against the Germans or Vichy and because Sartre wrote an article on Melville in a collaborationist newspaper and participated in juries along with Sacha Guitry and Lucien Rebatet. Simone de Beauvoir agreed to sign a form indicating that she was neither Jewish nor a Freemason. But carrying this argument too far ignores the thrust of the ideas of the two which were hardly sympathetic to Vichy or the Nazis. See Jean-Paul Enthoven, 'Sartre et la France allemande: Les mains sales', Le Nouvel Observateur (26 September-2 October 1991), 70.

Illustrative is the position of Alexis Leger, who supported the military action of General de Gaulle after 1940, but refused to recognize the Free French as a government because they had not followed the constitutional texts of the Republic, see Michel Cournot, 'Les impertinences de Saint-John Perse', Le Nouvel Observateur (5-11 March 1992), 59.

Interview, Paris, 4 July 1974.

Interview with M. Triboulet, Deputy from Calvados, in Daniel Berry, 'Les Groupes parlementaires devant l'amnistie', III, 'La Position du groupe des Républicains indépendants', Paroles françaises, #240 (24 July-6 August 1950), 1, in Archives Nationales; 78AJ28.

S.R. 'En baisse', Le Nouvel Observateur (24-30 October 1991), 28.

Laurent Grailshamer, 'La Cour de cassation est saisie de l'affaire Paul Touvier', and Bruno Frappat, 'Affront', Le Monde (15 April 1992), 1 and 9-10. See also 'French court jettisons case against wartime militia chief', New York Times (14 April 1992), A6; and Alan Riding, 'French angered at ruling on Nazi collaborator', New York Times (15 April 1992), A5.

Henri Tincq , 'Un Entretien avec le cardinal Decourtray sur l'affaire Touvier, 'Le Monde (18 April 1992 ), 11. James M. Markham , 'Fugitive Nazi collaborator seized from a Catholic priory in France', New York Times (25 May 1989), 1. See also 'L'Église et l'Affaire Touvier', L'Histoire, clii (February 1992), 80. For an uncritical account of the report of a team of historians appointed by Cardinal Albert Decourtray and headed by René Rémond to investigate the role of the Church in the Touvier affair, see Peter Hebblethwaite, 'The French Church's confession', Times Literary Supplement (8 May 1992), 9.

'73% des Français sont 'choqués' par le non-lieu', Le Monde (17 April 1992), 9. See also Alan Riding, 'Rulings jar France into reliving its anti-Jewish role in Nazi era', New York Times (10 May 1992), 1.

Jean Daniel , 'Derrière l'affaire Touvier', Le Nouvel Observateur (23-29 April 1992), 30. See also Edwy Plenel , 'Le piège Touvier' , Le Monde ( 22 April 1992), 1.

'Viewer's Guide Amerika', published for the ABC Television Network by Cultural Information Service, New York, 1986: 6. Lessons have also been drawn in France from the collaboration experience. In an editorial during the 1991 Gulf War asking France not to repeat the Vichy experience, Jacques Julliard contrasted the British steadfastness in fighting in 1940, in the Falklands War of 1982, and in the Gulf War of 1991, with what he feared to be more ambiguous positions taken by France and supported François Mitterrand's dismissal of Jean-Pierre Chevènement for not vigorously supporting the war effort against Iraq. See Jacques Julliard, 'Pas de vichyisme bis!' Le Nouvel Observateur (24-30 January 1991), 29.