Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France 9780804765268

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Allegories ofthe Put;ge

ALLEGORIES OF

THE PURGE How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials ofWriters and Intellectuals in France

PHILIP WATTS

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1998 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data appear at the end of the book

Preface This book in its present form would not have been possible without the support, and insights, of colleagues, institutions, friends and family. I am particularly grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting this project with a summer stipend, which allowed me to complete the fmal version of several chapters. The University of Pittsburgh faculty development grant generously permitted me to pursue research in Paris. Alice Kaplan has been a great inspiration from the time I began graduate studies to the present. I am grateful for her rigorous reading of my manuscript and her constant encouragement. Ora Avni encouraged me to present parts of this book as talks, and her comments on my manuscript were always extremely helpful. I have also benefited from the input and constant support of Antoine Compagnon. My thanks too to Suzanne Guerlac, who encouraged me to send the manuscript to Stanford University Press. Yves Citton, Mathilde Doubinsky, Elizabeth Houlding, Cheryl Morgan, Apama Nayak, Pani Norindr, Rosie Reiss, Dan Russell, and Mark Sanford provided me with intellectual support while I was working on this project. Rich Watts read the entire manuscript twice, and his suggestions about style and sources were always helpful. Special thanks also to Keith Sears for his advice on legal matters. My colleagues and students at the University of Pittsburgh have always been extremely supportive and encouraged me to develop many of the ideas in this book. Monika Losagio provided me with

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valuable assistance and advice over the last few years. My thanks also to Andre Braga for his expertise in computers. I am extremely grateful to Dennis Looney for his assistance and critical acumen. John Feneron and Mitch Tuchman were invaluable in bringing the manuscript to its fmal form. My greatest thanks go to Sophie Queuniet. Her intelligence and generosity helped me bring vague ideas into book form. One final note. My parents showed me unfailing support over the years. My mother tirelessly answered my questions and my father read several chapters of the manuscript: his comments and his arguments helped give the manuscript the form that it has today. This book is dedicated to his memory. P.W.

Contents Introduction 1.

Literature on Trial

2.

Sartre: Sentencing Literature

3.

Blanchot: Rebuttals

15 59

83

4. Eluard: Purging Poetry

s.

ctline: Style Wars

6.

ctline: Denying History

106

140 164

Conclusion: The Spirit of the Trial

Bibliography Index

217

207

187

Allegories ofthe Put;ge

Introduction

H

ow many times have we been reminded that the purge isn't over? If we can be certain of anything about the epuration, it is that the trials of fascists and collaborators, the judgments, verdicts, and debates that took place in postwar France, are still with us, like an endlessly repeated epilogue to the drama of the Occupation. The trial and conviction in 1987 of Klaus Barbie, captured and returned to France from Bolivia; the trial, acquittal, and subsequent conviction for crimes against humanity of Paul Touvier, captured and returned to Paris from a monastery; the summary execution by a lone gunman of Rene Bousquet, who, fifty years after the end of the war, answered the door in his bathrobe and found himself face to face with a self-declared avenger; the dissemination in its many and perverse forms of Holocaust revisionism; the revelations about Fran~tois Mitterrand's Petainist past; the rediscovery of Heidegger's ties to Nazism; the scandal about Paul de Man's youthful enthusiasm for fascism-these are only a few examples illustrating that the purge today remains what French historian Henry Rousso has called an "unfinished project." Even in the immediate postwar years the purge of French collaborators was not a tidy affair. Not only were the trials a contentious and divisive moment in modem French his-

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tory, but also, as Rousso points out, the Resistance authorities themselves often had to choose between an imperfect justice and an unrestrained revenge, between the continuity of the state apparatus and a complete renewal of the bureaucratic elite, between restoration and revolution (Rousso, "L'Epuration"). Today's conflicts and controversies about the purge have at their source not only the events that took place during the German Occupation of France, but the very imperfection, the ambiguity that surrounded the postwar attempts to judge those responsible for the horrors of the war. The purge was intended solely as a transitional phase, from the Occupation to a renovated democratic society. It is one of the ironies of history that this transitional phase has lasted so long, but the reason can perhaps be found in the fact that the ambitions of the Liberation authorities were numerous and, according to Rousso, "sometimes contradictory'' (Rousso, "L'Epuration," 104). The purge authorities had several goals in mind: to maintain security from a fascist counteroffensive in France; to release the animosity built up over four years of Occupation; to legitimize the provisional government and the different political parties that had come to power after the Liberation; and to rebuild the identity of the French nation (104-5). In order to achieve these goals, the purge authorities, many of them members of the Resistance, set up several tribunals and distinguished between capital offenses, such as treason, and lesser crimes, such as "national indignity," a rubric reserved for men and women who, by supporting Vichy and the Nazis, had failed in their duty as French citizens. The High Court was thus created in November 1944 to judge the most active collaborators, notably Marshal Philippe Petain, head of the French state, and his ministers. The judgment of Petain began in July 1945 and, in Peter Novick's words, was less a trial than "an elaborate ceremonial aimed at symbolically condemning a policy'' (Novick, The Resistance, 173). Petain was found guilty of treason-a crime that carried the death sentence-but the jury recommended that given his advanced age, the sentence be commuted to life in prison. As for Pierre Laval, he too was sentenced to death for treason after a trial that lasted only four days. In October 1945, on the eve of his execution, he attempted suicide by swallowing cyanide but was

Introduction

resuscitated just in time to be dragged before the firing squad and executed at dawn. The government's attempt to bring about a successful purge was hampered by another series of events. While the provisional government set up legal channels for purging France of its collaborators, certain French men and women took justice into their own hands. In the months immediately preceding and following the Liberation, legality gave way to an often unrestrained popular justice, and courts of law were replaced by street comer tribunals. What Rousso has called an "extra-juridical" purge was responsible for the public beatings of suspected collaborators and for the tonte, the shearing of women suspected of having collaborated or of having had sexual relations with the Nazis. Opponents of the purge also liked to claim that this extrajuridical purge resulted in xoo,ooo deaths: the reality is closer to 8,ooo or 9,ooo, a sizable number but one that could have been much higher considering that France was in a state approaching civil war (Rousso, "L'Epuration," 81-85). Whatever the exact number, what came to be known as the "unauthorized purge" (l'lpuration sauvage) further eroded public confidence in the process and added to the French public's ambivalence toward the purge.' The prosecution of writers and intellectuals who were suspected of having supported Vichy and the Nazi occupiers stands out amid the postwar trials. Never before in French history had the state put a caste of writers on trial for treason. The policy of the Liberation authorities to "strike at the head" of the collaboration meant that they were targeting both political and intellectual leaders. Because the writers were visible public figures, however, because they had left traces of their collaboration in writing, their trials often took place before those of the politicians, industrialists, bureaucrats, and soldiers who had declared their allegiance to Marshal Philippe Petain after the armistice ofJune 1940. Writers and intellectuals carried an important symbolic weight in France, and public opinion focused on these trials 'The unauthorized purge is still a "hot'' topic today as evidenced by a recent study claiming to reveal the untold truth about this "taboo subject" in contemporary French history. See Bourdel, L'Epuration.

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at least as much as on those of political and economic collaborators. The most notorious of these intellectuals, Robert Brasillach, who as editor of the collaborationist weekly ]e suis partout had become for many the very symbol of intellectual collaboration, was tried for treason, convicted, and executed in February 1945, fully two months before Petain had been brought back to Paris from his exile in the German town of Sigmaringen. The swiftness of this and other judgments has led many present-day commentators to see in the trials of collaborationist intellectuals a symbol of the fundamental injustice of the purge. Novick points to what he calls the "crudely partisan use" made of the purge and the blacklists of writers by the Communist intellectuals in postwar France (Novick, The Resistance, 127). For Tony Judt, the hard-line position of certain intellectuals during the purge was motivated by "feelings of guilt" about their inactivity during the war and their search for "compensatory activities." This resulted, according to Judt, in a "notoriously unfair" purge. 2 Seen from today's perspective, the purge of intellectuals appears excessively violent, arbitrary, highly politicized, and on the whole, ineffective. If contemporary historians agree that the purge was at best a botched and incomplete effort, it is perhaps due to the impossibility of attaining anything that resembled a consensus about the trials in the postwar years. Reactions to the trials were swift, diverse, and often violendy antagonistic. As much as any event in recent French history, the purge became aguerre franro-franfiJise, a moment of conflict between different ideological positions, no less for writers, journalists, and intellectuals than for the political class. The hostility released at the Liberation had been building since the first days of the war, and one of de Gaulle's first preoccupations upon arriving in London was to declare the illegitimacy and illegality of the Vichy regime, thus paving the way for the juridical proceedings at the Liberation (121). In the world ofletters things were no different: the very first issue of the clandestine Resistance publication Les Lettres franf'Jises, released in 2Judt, Past Imperfect, s6, S9. For concurring opinions about the unfair treatment levied upon writers and intellectuals see also, Lottman, The Purge, z+o-s+; Assouline, L'Epuration.

Introduction September 194-2, declared that its mission was not only to liberate France but also to "punish the traitors," and throughout the Occupation the Resistance writers accumulated evidence against intellectuals suspected of treason, collaboration, or complacency toward the Nazis. It is not a stretch to claim that the purge of collaborators began in spirit if not in deed as soon as Petain signed the armistice at Rethondes. When the trials of writers began in earnest in October 194-4- with the indictment of Georges Suarez, editor in chief of the pro-German daily Aujourd)hui and author of articles denouncing Jews, Communists, and members of the Resistance, writers from all sides began to comment direcdy or indirecdy on these events that were once again splitting France in two. Whether they were imprisoned, blacklisted, or solicited to judge their peers, whether they had resisted, collaborated, or formed part of the wait-and-see (attentiste) majority, writers positioned themselves in relation to the trials and contributed to a process that took place as much in the forums of public opinion as in the courts. No moment in recent literary history better illustrates how writers and intellectuals defined themselves through what Bourdieu has called their "position taking" (