Vol. 10 No. 8 (August 2000) pp. 489-493.

THE COLLABORATOR: THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF ROBERT BRASILLACH by Alice Kaplan. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. 308 pp. Cloth $25.00.

THE EXPECTATION OF JUSTICE: FRANCE 1944-1946 by Megan Koreman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. 340 pp. Cloth $54.95. Paper $18.95

Reviewed by Philip Kronebusch, Department of Political Science, St. John's University, Collegeville, MN.

When one political regime overthrows another, the victors must decide how to deal with their former enemies. At the same time, victors need to begin establishing the legitimacy of the legal system that will play a central role in restoring social and legal order. Both of these tasks are combined when we see the symbols and rituals of a legal proceeding used to decide the fates of former rulers and their supporters. The recent examples of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa demonstrate the difficulty of this task.


Both of the books under review here focus on the same period of time in France: the time between the beginning of the WWII liberation of France and concluding with the election of the post-WWII government in mid-1946. During this period, Charles de Gaulle's Liberation regime came to power as French cities and towns, one by one, were liberated from Nazi occupation or Vichy control. The trials of suspected collaborators during this time remain a controversial and sensitive subject in French society.

Alice Kaplan, professor of Romance Studies and Literature at Duke University, writes an account of the life, trial, and execution of Robert Brasillach. His trial is noteworthy because it led to the execution of a person, widely recognized early in his career as a talented writer, who became a fascist polemicist during Nazi occupation. Brasillach, who was educated at elite schools in Paris, was the most distinguished French author executed during the Purge. His crimes were the articles that he wrote.

Brasillach, the editor of a fascist weekly, JE SUIS PARTOUT, wrote numerous articles that were plainly pro-German, anti-Resistance, and anti-Semitic. In one notorious article categorizing the enemies of France, he argued for the need to "separate from the Jews EN BLOC and not keep any little ones." In other articles, he revealed the new names of Jews who had changed their names to escape deportation. Although Adolf Eichmann represented, in Hannah Arendt's (1963) famous description, "the banality of evil," Brasillach, in Kaplan's account, was a vicious ideologue and a man who could make no claim that he was following orders. Following the liberation of Paris, based on his newspaper articles, Brasillach was charged with treason

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against France, a charge that included providing useful information to an enemy of France.

Professor Kaplan places the one-day trial of Brasillach on January 19, 1945 at the center of her book. She provides background information not just on the defendant's life and career but also on the trial's prosecutor, judge, defense attorney, and four-person jury. She pursued her investigation in both archival materials from the period and through interviews of family members of the trial's major actors, when possible. In the course of the book, Kaplan uncovers several ambiguities in the trial. For example, both the prosecutor and the judge for the trial had served under the Vichy government, yet Brasillach was charged with treason for supporting the policies of the Vichy government. On this point, Kaplan provides a story from the daughter of the prosecutor, Marcel Reboul, that while he working for Vichy, he had helped members of the Resistance escape prosecution, but Kaplan reports that she was unable to confirm or deny this family story in historical records. Brasillach's defense attorney, who had defended Resistance fighters under Vichy, would now go on to defend not only Brasillach, but also Marshal Petain, who served as Premier of the Vichy government until 1942 and then as head of state until 1945.

Kaplan also sensitively addresses the rumors at the time that Brasillach was homosexual and what impact those rumors might have had at the trial. Kaplan finds no evidence that Brasillach was involved in a sexual relationship with anyone, though she recognizes a homoerotic element in some of his novels. The point is relevant here because prosecutor Reboul's speech at the trial invokes a metaphor of homosexual rape to describe the occupation of France. This metaphor may have capitalized on the rumors about Brasillach and blunted the defense's plea for sympathy. The defense chiefly relied on the argument that, at the time he wrote those articles, the Vichy government was the government of France and that government was allied with Germany. Brasillach contended that he had, in fact, been loyal to France. Brasillach's defense also included evidence, accepted by the prosecution, that Brasillach had attempted to use his influence with Nazi officials to have a Resistance figure (who was a fellow graduate of the elite school Brasillach had attended) released from prison.

The packed courtroom, which included Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir along with other writers, journalists, Resistance figures, and friends of Brasillach, needed to wait only 25 minutes before the jury returned with its decision that Brasillach was guilty of treason and that he be executed by firing squad. Brasillach made a request to de Gaulle to be pardoned and a petition signed by fifty-nine writers, including Albert Camus, supported that request. About two weeks after the trial, de Gaulle rejected the request for pardon and Brasillach was executed the next day.

Kaplan continues her attention to the ambiguities in the trial and its aftermath in her discussion of the request for pardon. Another writer of equal stature to Brasillach, Henri Béraud, who had also become a propagandist was condemned to death, but pardoned by de Gaulle. In another case, Brasillach's colleagues, who maintained JE SUIS PARTOUT as a hardline fascist publication after Brasillach left in late 1943, escaped to Germany for a time. When they were tried in 1946, they were condemned to death, but their sentences were commuted to

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forced labor. They were later granted amnesty. Marshal Pétain was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison. Pierre Laval, who served as Premier after Pétain, was tried and executed in October 1945. Kaplan's examination of Brasillach's pardon file in the French National Archives does not reveal how de Gaulle reached his conclusion, but she notes that de Gaulle's memoirs refer to an unnamed writer who was executed because, as de Gaulle wrote, "in literature as in everything, talent confers responsibility" (p. 212). The timing of Brasillach's trial, which occurred after the liberation of Paris but before the end of the war, also meant that his request for pardon took place during the most severe phase of the Purge.

Kaplan concludes by observing that, although Brasillach's trial and execution served an important symbolic role in legitimating the Liberation government, his execution has also helped create a myth of Brasillach as a martyr that is used today by the French right-wing. According to Kaplan, too much attention to Brasillach's execution obscures the more important question of whether he was guilty of treason. On this latter question, Kaplan argues that he clearly was.

Megan Koreman's THE EXPECTATION OF JUSTICE: FRANCE 1944-1946 serves as an effective counterpoint to Kaplan's book on several issues. Although Kaplan focuses on a single, high profile trial in Paris, Koreman studies the issue of how justice was understood and pursued in three French towns following their liberation. Although Kaplan has written a gripping account of the trial of Brasillach, Koreman's book reminds us that such a trial was an atypical example of a purge trial, or at least that a trial that captured the attention of the literary community of Paris might be little noted in the provinces.

Koreman, formerly an associate professor of history at Texas Tech University, chose for her study three French towns whose population was between three and seven thousand. She made this choice because, during WWII, half of the French lived in towns of that size and because community disagreements in towns of this size would likely appear in local newspapers, an important source of information.

In short, the three towns - Saint Flour, Moûtiers, and Rambervillers - understood and pursued justice differently in the post-war period because each town had different experiences before WWII, different experiences during the war, and different experiences of liberation. For example, the location of Moûtiers near the border with Italy created the opportunity for more collaborationist activity than other areas of France. As a result, Moûtiers residents experienced a high level of dissatisfaction with the official purge courts and a high level of vigilante violence against collaborators.

Foreman usefully distinguishes among three overlapping spheres of justice. Legal justice holds people accountable to written and customary law; social justice refers to a fair distribution of goods; and honorary justice recognizes the heroism of the community's living and dead. Although the author describes tensions in the three towns, her chief focus is on how the national purge courts violated local conceptions of honorary justice. Following Henry Rousso (1991), she faults de Gaulle's "Resistencialist myth," which claimed that only a small number of the French were collaborators and that most of the French

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had supported the Resistance. The purge courts of the Liberation government, as well as the process used to grant pardons, fostered this myth, according to Koreman, by trying and severely punishing only a relatively small number of collaborators. By defining the pool of collaborators narrowly, the myth allowed the vast majority to claim to have supported the Resistance, ultimately denying the actual heroes of the Resistance the honorary justice they were due.

Koreman effectively presents the growing tensions between the operations of the national purge courts and local conceptions of justice. She uses newspaper articles and editorials from the time to provide a vivid account of how the French in the post-war period dealt simultaneously with food shortages, vigilante violence against alleged collaborators, official trials of alleged collaborators, and the return of deportees, and decisions on how to memorialize the dead. At the same time, her reliance on newspaper coverage sometimes limits her to covering just the public reaction to a decision in a purge case. The court case, itself, is often described in a few sentences. As a result, some details that might have been important to the court decision or the decision to grant a pardon are lost. Purge cases were often complicated by the fact that someone who was a collaborator at one time might have helped the Resistance at another. Recall that even Robert Brasillach had tried to help an imprisoned member of the Resistance and his request for a pardon was supported by a writers' petition.

It is also difficult to accept Koreman's characterization of the French purge as "the mildest purge in western Europe" (p. 102). On this point, her footnoted source provides little support. Although historians dispute the number of collaborators summarily executed before and immediately after the Liberation, there is wide consensus that the number is over 9,000. This number is in addition to the 768 who were executed and the more than 40,000 who were sentenced to prison or forced labor by the official purge courts. Koreman conveys the locally felt frustration well, but there is little reason to believe that even hundreds of additional executions would have helped the French come to terms with widespread collaboration during the war.

Koreman's book would be stronger if it had incorporated a more complex view of courts as not merely dispensers of justice, but also as political institutions that serve to legitimate new governments by restoring legal order. Though some vigilante violence occurred against suspected collaborators months after the Liberation, the purge courts largely succeeded in restoring order, even if they often frustrated local demands for justice.

Although both books focus on the same period in France, it is fortuitous that the authors approach their topics from such different perspectives that there is very little overlap between the books. As such, the two books provide a remarkable demonstration of the political, legal and social complexities involved in purge trials. Kaplan's book on Brasillach shows how his execution played an important symbolic role by demonstrating how the new government could punish one type of collaboration. At the same time, his execution created a martyr for France's right wing. Koreman's book reminds us how variable and deeply felt are local community demands for justice and, ultimately, how inadequate are courts in dispensing justice when millions share collective guilt.

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REFERENCES:

Arendt, Hannah. 1963. EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM. New York: Viking Press.

Rousso, Henry. 1991. THE VICHY SYNDROME: HISTORY AND MEMORY IN FRANCE SINCE

1944. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Copyright 2000 by the author.