Fascist ideology and theatre under the Occupation: the case of Anouilh

See Patrick Marsh, 'Le Théâtre à Paris sous l'occupation allemande', in Revue de la Société d'histoire du théâtre, iii (2) (1981), 213 ff.

This did not, however, stop Laubreaux from writing his own propaganda play, Les Pirates de Paris (on the Stavisky affair) under a pseudonym and then writing a favourable review of it! See Marsh, 238 ff.

In this regard the French appear to be close to the Italian fascists' (theoretical) contention that whereas overtly propagandistic art was a vulgar 'Bolshevik' form, 'true art' produced in a fascist era would inevitably be fascist art. See my 'Fascist discourse and Pirandellian theater', The South Atlantic Quarterly, xcii (2) (1992), 303-331.

The case of Vermorel is perplexing. Drawing on the recollections of contemporary spectators including Simone de Beauvoir, reviews in the clandestine press, and his own reading, Patrick Marsh argues that Vermorel's play on the trial of Joan of Arc, Jeanne avec nous, produced in January 1942, spoke more clearly to the Resistance than any other production under the Occupation (Marsh, 292 ff) Serge Added, on the other hand, points out the favourable reception of this play in the collaborationist press (including a review by Rebatet who called Vermorel's Jeanne 'la patronne d'un fascisme français'!) and concludes that it falls in line with Vichy-fascist Joan of Arc propaganda. The myth of Jeanne as a play of the resistance would have arisen after the post-liberation productions. (Le Théâtre dans les années Vichy, 1940-44, Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1992: 262-73.) The play was first written in 1938 and contains no direct topical allusions. It is indeed difficult to reconcile the Vermorel author of 'Théâtre de demain' in 1941 with the purported author and co-producer of a Resistance performance in 1942.

The 'purification' theme, according to Robert Paxton, began with fascist appeal to youth in the thirties and also fit in with Vichy's mood of national self-recrimination. 'What we need most is a cure of purity, wrote Jacques Benoist-Méchin, in La Moisson de quarante, quoted in Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940-1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 33. Brasillach defines fascism in part as the desire on the part of the young for 'une nation pure, une histoire pure, une race pure'. ('Pour un fascisme française', Robert Brasillach, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Maurice Bardèche (Paris: Au Club de l'honnête homme, 1963, XII, 501)). Another contributor to Je suis partout defines fascism as follows: '... c'est beaucoup de dureté et beaucoup d'exigence, c'est une constante volonté de grandeur et de pureté ...' (italics mine) (P. A. Couteau, 'Les Fascistes au pouvoir!', Je suis partout, 12 September 1943). Regarding the theatre, Lenormand writes: 'Il s'agit, n'est-ce pas, de mettre le théâtre au pas de la Révolution Nationale, de balayer tout ce qui traîne encore en lui d'idéologie partisane, de complaisance aux valeurs de la démocratie bourgeoise, d'érotisme sournois ou affiché. Il s'agit de l'assainir sans l'affadir, de le purifier sans le déviriliser.' ('Pour un conseil de l'ordre', La Gerbe 13 November 1941: 11.)

See, for example, André Fraigneau, 'Couleur du nouveau théâtre français', Les Cahiers français, vii, 31-7. The new public, he claims, comes to the theatre not to escape but to 'boire en commun aux sources de la grandeur'.

See, for example, Christian Michelfelder, 'Une Epoque tragique', (Les Cahiers français, iii, 15-23).

See, for example, Georges de Wissant, 'Le Théâtre et l'État', La Gerbe, 5 December 1940 and Alphonse Seche, 'Sur une corporation du théâtre', La Gerbe, 20 March 1941. Charles Dullin also published a series of articles lamenting the influence of 'big money' in the theatre and calling for a 'corporation'. (La Gerbe, 25 July 1940, 15 August 1940, 22 August 1940 and Comœdia 21 June 1941.)

The references for these articles, along with those for virtually all of the reviews and criticism written on Antigone in French (and many in English and German) are to be found in Manfred Flugge's exhaustive and heavily documented thesis, Verweigerung oder neue Ordnung: Jean Anouilhs 'Antigone' im politischen und ideologischen Kontext der Besatzungszeit 1940-1944 (2 vols) (Rheinfelden: Schauble Verlag, 1982). Flugge's research efforts have greatly facilitated my work.

Cit. Marsh, 206.

According to Marsh, 212.

Programme in 'Fonds Rondel', Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal.

'L'Hermine' in Pièces noires (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1942), 78.

'La Sauvage', in ibid., 194.

Benito Mussolini , 'La dottrina del fascismo', in L'enciclopedia italiana (Florence, 1937), 29.

'Eurydice', in Jean Anouilh, Eurydice suivi de Roméo et Juliette (Paris: Editions Folio, 1991), 159-69. Subsequent references will appear in the text.

Interestingly, Anouilh echoes these words in a text written some twenty years later on Brasillach's trial during the épuration. Here it is those who judge and condemn the 'youthful' Brasillach who play in the melodrama of life. 'L'histoire n'est pas fameuse. Ces gros effets de théâtre, ce mélo absurde, ces pitreries sinsitres, ces traitres à demi ridicules et puant la convention, avec leurs uniformes, leurs Légions d'honneur, leur gloire, leurs grands mots - c'était bien elle, c'était la vie.' ('Février 1945' in Pol Vandromme, Un auteur et ses personnages (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1965), 180.)

The Self-Conscious State in Modern French Drama ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 158-9.

Paris-Soir, 30 November 1940; Aujourd'hui, 3 December 1940.

Flugge, 216-17.

'Jean Anouilh ou le mythe du baptême', Oeuvres complètes, ed. Maurice Bardèche (Paris : Au Club de l'honnête homme, 1963 ), viii, 409-14, 412.

According to Marsh, prompt books censured by the Germans show that they tended to cut out anything that could be construed as a reference to the contemporary situation. However, the public notably applauded lines such as 'En prison se trouve la fleur du royaume' from La Reine morte, and 'Liberté aux âmes captives', from Le Soulier de satin.

Flugge, I, 324.

Steiner, Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 193. Weinstein, The Subversive Tradition in French Literature (Boston: Twayne, 1989), II, 126.

Arthur Honegger and Jean Cocteau , Antigone: tragédie musicale ( Paris: Éditions Salabert, 1928).

Comoedia, 13 March 1944, cit. Flugge, I, 255.

This information, with more detail, can be found in Flugge I, 255-9 in a section entitled 'Der Antigone-Stoff in der Okkupationszeit'. See also Steiner, Antigones.

'Antigones', in Dictionnaire des mythes littéraires ed. J. P. Bertrand (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1988), 90-2.

With the appearance of Antigone, Maurras wrote an essay for the Lyon-edited Action française (25 May 1944) entitled 'Et si l'anarchiste était Créon?' This essay is not, however, a review of Anouilh's play (there is no indication that Maurras had seen or read it), but rather his re-reading of Sophocles. In Maurras's reading, it is Antigone, daughter of the royal family, who incarnates 'les lois très concordantes de l'homme, des Dieux de la cité. Qui les viole et les défie toutes? Créon. L'anarchiste, c'est lui. Ce n'est que lui.' See also Maurras's poem 'Antigone vierge mère de l'ordre' (1946) in Oeuvres capitales (Paris: Flammarion, 1954), IV, 358-60. In the same vein, Maurras wrote that Joan of Arc's revolt against the laws of the English was legitimist. 'Le caractère de son oeuvre politique fut de reconnaître, affirmer, annoncer, consacrer le roi légitime.' ('Le Bienfait politique de Jeanne d'Arc', Oeuvres capitales (Paris: Flammarion, 1954), II, 309.)

Annie Brassie , Robert Brasillach ou encore un instant de bonheur (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont , 1987), 290.

'La Jeune Fille Médée' Oeuvres complètes, XI, 41. Brasillach's admiration of the two heroines' 'insolence' conforms to his definition of fascism. 'Mais le fascisme, ... c'est un esprit anticonformiste, d'abord antibourgeois, et l'irrespect y avait sa part.' ('Pour un fascisme français', Ouevres complètes (Paris: Au Club de l'honnête homme, 1963), XII, 500).

Flugge (I, 112) cites a 6 June 1940 paper by the 'French specialist' Professor Grimm urging that both Joan of Arc and Napoleon should be promoted as anti-English propaganda motifs. Marsh, 288ff, describes how the Joan of Arc theme was exploited by the collaborationist press and promoted by Vichy. According to Jean Plumyène and Raymond Lassierra, the Jeanne d'Arc symbol was used to bind the right and left aspects of fascism, and Jeanne was conflated with Doriot. (Jean Plumyène and Raymond Lasierra, Les Fascismes français: 1923-1963 (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 127. See also Gerd Krumeich, 'The Cult of Joan of Arc under the Vichy Régime', in P. Marshand and G. Hirschfeld (eds), Collaboration in France (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 92-102; and Added, 262-73.

Jean Turlais calls Antigone and Joan of Arc 'nos héroines fraternelles' in 'Le Théâtre: Les Sources de la grandeur', Les Cahiers français, viii (May 1943), 65.

Cited by Peter D. Tame in Le Mystique du fascisme dans l'œuvre de Robert Brasillach (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1986), 182.

She was in fact so portrayed by Resistance writers. See for example Jacques Dastrée in Résistance 13 janvier 1943 and R. P. Brückberger's 'La Marseillaise de Clairvaux' in La Patrie se fait tous les jours, ed. Jean Paulhan and Dominique Aury (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1947), 387-92.

Le Mythe d'Antigone (Paris: Colin, 1974), 121. In Fraisse's view, Anouilh's rehabilitation of Creon meant that he intended to write a pro-Vichy play.

See Hervé Le Boterf, La Vie parisienne sous l'occupation (Paris: Editions France-Empire, 1974), 251; Henri Amouroux, La Vie des Français sous l'Occupation (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1971), II, 250; Beatrix Dussane, Notes du théâtre 1940-1950 (Paris: Lardanchet, 1951).

For a thorough list of virtually all of the contemporary reviews of Antigone along with detailed summaries of many of them, see Flugge, II, 47-72. My conclusions are based on my readings of these reviews in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal and the Bibliothèque Nationale, including some (notably in Les Cahiers français) not in Flugge's list.

'Du théâtre!', Je suis partout, 18 February 1944 and review in Le Petit Parisien, 19 February 1944.

In Oeuvres complètes, XII, 699.

See Leo O. Forkey , 'The theatres of Paris during the Occupation' , French Review, xxii, 4 (1949), 299-305 and Edmund G. Berry , 'Antigone and the French Resistance', The Classical Journal, xli (1946), 17-18.

La Vicomtesse d'Éristal n'a pas reçu son balai mécanique (Souvenirs d'un jeune homme) (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 166.

In Flugge's opinion, the arrest of a young assassin in 1941 served as a model for the character of Antigone. His thesis seems to be the following: 'Antigone is as a text a clear product of the first phase of the Vichy period, with its thematizing of the Débâcle, the restoration, the new order as a teaching dictatorship ... the "retour au réel" ...', I, 337, my translation. Déat, Laval and Pétain serve as models for Créon. Such specific historical situating does not, in my opinion, add greatly to our understanding of the play.

Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Au Club de l'honnête homme, 1963), IV, xii. De Gaulle's opinion on Brasillach's sentence, as reported by Pierre de Boisdeffre, does sound curiously like what Anouilh's Créon might have said. 'La justice n'exigeait peut-être pas sa mort, mais le salut de l'Etat l'exigeait.' (Pierre de Boisdeffre, 'Apologie pour un condamné', Le Monde, 18 February 1975. (Referred to by Herbert Lottman, in The Purge (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 139.)

Jean Anouilh , Antigone (Paris: La Table Ronde , 1982), 58. Subsequent references will appear in parenthesis in the text.

Developing Kristeva's rather cryptic statement, 'Le fascisme est le retour du refoulé dans le monologisme religieux ou politique', (Polyloque, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1977: 17), Alice Kaplan stresses the neglected role of mother-bound or 'oceanic' pleasure in fascist texts. Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 10-25.

Antigone's gender, or at least her gender role, has of course been problematic in various ways throughout the Antigone tradition (see Steiner, 144-151). For Josette Féral, 'Antigone is not a woman, or at least she does not conform to society's image of a woman. She is actually representative of the woman who refuses her condition as woman and pays for her transgression of the laws with her death.' ('Antigone or the irony of the tribe', review essay on Irigaray and Kristeva, Diacritics, viii (1978), 2).

Langages totalitaires (Paris: Herman, 1972), 80.

Brasillach did not fail to point out the parallel. 'Polynice était un traitre, autour de son nom se groupaient tous les espoirs de la dissidence, bourgeois dont l'argent est bloqué, prolétariat malheureux et trouble, et les prêtres ... Magnifique raccourci de tant de tragédies contemporaines!' He concludes that Antigone is not fighting for Polynices but for herself, against mediocrity, for 'l'idéal désincarné contre le réalisme'. 'Jean Anouilh, Antigone, le voyageur sans bagages', in 'Chronique de Paris', Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Au Club de l'honnête homme, 1963), XII, 698.