Ideology,cultural politics and literary collaboration at La Gerbe

I would like to thank Texas A & M University for a Faculty Development Leave during the Spring of 1992 which allowed me to research and write this essay. I would also like to thank my colleague Nancy Dyer for her expert advice in formulating the proposal for which Development Leave was awarded.

Robert Paxton , Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (New York : Columbia University Press, 1972 ), 256.

See the Histoire générale de la presse française, Tome 4 (de 1940 à 1958) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975), 52.

See David Pryce-Jones , Paris in the Third Reich ( New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981), 202.

Ibid., 51.

For a detailed discussion of these novels, see the first three chapters of L.-A. Maugendre's biography of the author, Alphonse de Chateaubriant 1977-1951 (Paris: André Bonne, 1977).

Robert Brasillach , Les Quatre Jeudis: images d'avant-guerre (Paris : Les Sept Couleurs, 1951), 189.

This and subsequent references are to La Gerbe des forces: Nouvelle Allemagne (Paris: Grasset, 1937).

For a more detailed discussion of Chateaubriant's conflation of Nazism with an anachronistic and militant Catholicism, see Paul Sérant, Le Romantisme fasciste: Étude sur l'œuvre politique de quelques écrivains français (Paris: Fasquelle, 1959), 119-122.

Quoted in Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat, Je suis partout 1930-1944: les maurassiens devant la tentation fasciste (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1973), 159.

Pascal Fouché , L'Édition française sous l'Occupation, Vol. I (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Littérature française contemporaine de l'Université de Paris 7, 1987), 396.

Pascal Ory , Les Collaborateurs (Paris: Seuil , 1976), 75.

Op. cit. (Paris: André Bonne, 1977), 239.

Ibid., 257.

Ibid., 256.

For a brief discussion of Fégy's journalistic career, see Bertram Gordon, Collaboration in France During the Second World War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 86.

Ibid., 323.

The diversity of French collaborationist groups and leaders and the rivalries and disagreements between these groups are well known. Moreover, disagreements between Parisian fascists and Vichyites lasted throughout the war. Chateaubriant and his team sought to overcome the differences between these groups in order to make the collaborationist movement a united front. According to Michèle Cotta (La Collaboration 1940-1944 [Paris: Armand Colin, 1964], 34), in 1942 Chateaubriant joined Déat's Front Révolutionnaire National to promote solidarity among the various collaborationist groups. He also invited Parti Populaire Français speakers to address his own Groupe Collaboration. (For a discussion of the Groupe Collaboration, its aims and membership, see Gordon, 230-243).

For a discussion of Lucien Combelle's career at La Gerbe, see his comments in Pryce-Jones, 222-4.

Historians of French fascism have long debated whether fascism in France was fundamentally reactionary and conservative or revolutionary and to a certain degree leftist in its origins and outlook. Two recent and important studies to be consulted on this topic are Zeev Sternhell's Ni droite ni gauche: l'idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Seuil, 1983), and Robert Soucy's French Fascism: The First Wave 1924-1933 (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1986).

On 3 April 1941, Lucien Combelle praises Bernanos, the royalist admirer on Drumont, for his critique of French decadence during the inter-war years. On August 14 of the same year, Combelle is forced to concede that Bernanos can no longer be counted on in the current circumstances, since he has become a critic of Vichy living in exile in Brazil.

Pierre Sipriot's recent biography of Montherlant (Montherlant sans masque, vols I and II [Paris: Laffont, 1982, 1990]) makes it clear that Montherlant's masculine public image was not in keeping with his private life. It is doubtful that Montherlant would have been praised as the 'man of the new France' had his pederasty been public knowledge.

Travelingue initially appeared in serialized form in Je suis partout in 1941.

Aymé's status during the Occupation has been the subject of a good deal of critical attention. For an excellent discussion of Aymé's activities during the Occupation, his treatment of the period in his fiction, and the role of the fantastic in these writings, see Nicholas Hewitt, 'Marcel Aymé and the Dark Night of the Occupation' in G. Hirshfeld and P. Marsh (eds), Collaboration in France: Politics and Culture during the Nazi Occupation, 1940-1944 (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 203-26. See also Pierre Hebey, La Nouvelle Revue française des années sombres 1940-41 (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 281-6.

Previously Éditions Calmann-Lévy.

For a discussion of Vichy censorship policies, see Serge Added, Le Theatre dans les années Vichy, 1940-1944 (Paris: Ramsay, 1991), 37-44.

See Roger Peyrefitte and Pierre Sipriot (eds), Henry de Montherlant - Roger Peyrefitte Correspondence (Paris: Laffont, 1983).

The domestic and daily hardships with which women had to contend during the Occupation have recently been vividly portrayed in Claude Chabrol's film, Une affaire de femmes.

Colette has never been considered a hardline collaborator, and it is not my intention to cast her as one here. Nevertheless, her involvement with La Gerbe is certainly compromising, and apparently not the worst of her indiscretions. In The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), Henry Rousso reports that she also contibuted to the newspaper of the Milice (:64).

Fresnay was known to be a supporter of Pétain during the Occupation, and he made nine films during the period, four for the German-controlled Continental films. After the Liberation, he was arrested for collaborationist activities. See Gilles and Jean-Robert Ragache, La Vie quotidienne des écrivains et des artistes sous l'occupation 1940-1944 (Paris: Hachette, 1988), 181-2, 265.

Despite numerous contributions to other pro-collaborationist journals including Je suis partout and Au pilori, Céline made only one other significant contribution to La Gerbe. The article in question, dated 6 January 1944, is entitled 'Chanter Bezons, voici l'épreuve' and was originally written as a preface for a work published by Céline's publisher, Denoël, entitled Bezons à travers les âges. What is remarkable about the essay is that it contains none of Céline's anti-Semitic invective but includes instead a remarkable lament for the sad state of Paris's working suburbs: 'Pauvre banlieue parisienne, paillasson devant la ville ou chacun s'essuie les pieds, crache un bon coup, passe, qui songe à elle? Personne. Abrutie d'usines, gavée d'épandages, dépecée, en loques ce n'est plus qu'une terre sans âme, un camp de travail maudit, où le sourire est inutile, la peine perdue, terne la souffrance.' The tone and subject matter of the piece are certainly not in keeping with the normal fare of La Gerbe, which rarely if ever addressed the suffering and hardship of the average French citizen, much less the members of the working class, condemned to live in the suburbs Céline describes. Céline's contributions to the Occupation press are contained in Jean-Pierre Dauphin and Pascal Fouché (eds), Cahiers Céline 7: Céline et l'actualité 1933-1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Presumably because it was originally written as a preface, 'Chanter Bezon' is not included in this volume.

For a discussion of Drieu's and other French Fascists' obsession with decadence and the decline of the French birthrate by comparison with Germany in particular, see the chapter entitled 'Bodies and Landscapes' in Alice Yeager Kaplan's Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

The work was serialized in La Gerbe beginning 3 December 1942.

Jeffrey Mehlman , Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press , 1983), 15.

Despite his contributions to La Gerbe, Montherlant received a light sentence for collaboration after the war: he was forbidden to publish for one year. For a full detailed discussion of Montherlant's wartime activities and his misrepresentation of the facts to the purge committees, see my 'Henry de Montherlant: itinerary of an ambivalent fascist' in Richard J. Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992), 143-63.

For a complete list of the writers condemned by the CNE, see Pierre Assouline, L'Épuration des intellectuels (Brussels: Complexe, 1985), 161-2.