And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (46 page)

Faÿ’s only positive achievement was to create a new department of music, but his principal obsession was his hatred of Freemasons. He organized conferences around La Franc-Maçonnerie Dévoilée, the exhibition at the Petit Palais in late 1940; he denounced Freemasons in
La Gerbe;
and in 1941 he began publishing an anti-Masonic review,
Les Documents Maçonniques
. After the liberation of Paris, Faÿ was arrested and, despite claiming to have protected Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, he was sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor. In 1951, while undergoing treatment in the prison hospital, he escaped dressed as a priest and made his way to Switzerland, where he lived until he was pardoned in 1959.

The Académie Française, in contrast, retained its traditional autonomy, which shielded it from direct interference by Vichy. Founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 as the guardian of the French language, it had become renowned in recent times for electing new members on their political, military and ecclesiastical merits rather than their literary talent. Thus, in June 1940, its forty so-called
immortels
included not only Pétain but also Cardinal Alfred Baudrillart, who was rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris, as well as other generals and prelates.

Others who were quick to support Pétain and to collaborate with the occupier were also not outstanding writers, among them: Abel Bonnard, later Vichy’s education minister; Charles Maurras, the lifelong
leader of L’Action Française, who chose to live in the unoccupied zone; and André Bellessort, the academy’s
secrétaire perpétuel
, who until his death in January 1942 wrote a column for
Je suis partout
. These and other right-wingers further abused the academy’s prestige: Bonnard, Abel Hermant, Pierre Benoit and Baudrillart joined a
comité d’honneur
of the Groupe Collaboration; Bonnard, Hermant and Baudrillart even gave their blessing—literally in the case of the cardinal—to the Légion des Volontaires Français, created to fight alongside the German army on the Russian Front.

The academy’s two Jewish members were lucky to escape such company. Émile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog, better known by his pen name of André Maurois, was in London when France fell, and he moved to the United States before joining the Free French Forces in Algeria in 1943. The other Jewish academician, the venerated philosopher Henri Bergson,
^*
who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1927, died of natural causes in Paris in January 1941.

A small group of members fought to rescue the academy’s honor. Among them, Mauriac and Valéry helped to dissuade the academy from applauding Pétain for embracing collaboration during his meeting with Hitler in October 1940. Valéry’s eulogy at Bergson’s funeral, in which he surmised that the philosopher had been struck down by the “total disaster” engulfing France, was also hailed as an act of courage. But while the old poet was distrusted by Vichy, which dismissed him as administrator of the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen, a cultural complex in Nice, Valéry was apolitical by nature and never threw his weight behind the intellectual resistance. In fact, Mauriac was the only academician to join the active resistance, although there were enough silent
attentistes
within the academy to prevent it from becoming a collaborationist covey.

From 1942, following Bellessort’s death, the election of Georges Duhamel as
secrétaire perpétuel provisoire
reinforced the academy’s independence. Thanks to Duhamel, whose own books had been banned by the Otto List, the academy’s 1942 prize for literature went to Jean Schlumberger, one of the founders of the
NRF
, and for fiction to
L’Orage du matin
(Morning Storm) by Jean Blanzat, who was also writing for
Les Lettres Françaises
. In 1943, the literature prize went
to Jean Prévost, a poet who later joined the maquis in southern France. As important, Duhamel, Mauriac, Valéry and several others resisted conservative pressure to fill the seats of twelve academicians who died during the occupation.

The Académie Goncourt had less of a reputation to defend. In fact, even its claim to be an academy seemed pompous since it had no building of its own; its ten members merely gathered for lunch on the first Tuesday of every month in a private room in the Restaurant Drouant in Paris. However, since its foundation in 1900, the Goncourt’s annual fiction prize had become the most coveted of numerous French literary prizes. This brought intense lobbying by publishers as they competed to see their friends elected to the jury and their books rewarded. And few years went by without some related scandal spilling into the newspapers. While the Femina and Interallié juries suspended their prizes during the occupation, then, it was characteristic of the Goncourt to carry on. Because its jurors were scattered around France, the academy did not meet until December 1941. It then retroactively awarded the 1940 fiction prize to a writer in a German prison camp, his name to be chosen later. Meeting under the occupation, however, the academy’s traditional personal and generational squabbles were enriched by ideological differences.

No Goncourt
académicien
joined the resistance, a few avoided taking a position and several would later have to answer for collaboration. The dominant figure was Guitry, who used his connections with the Germans to strengthen his hand within the Goncourt jury. And he had as an ally the novelist René Benjamin, an early admirer of Mussolini’s, who devoted a book and numerous odes to Marshal Pétain. Through their campaigning, the 1941 Goncourt Prize went to
Vent de mars
by Henri Pourrat, also a loyal
pétainiste
. Another right-wing member was the writer Jean Ajalbert, a proud member of Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français, who unsuccessfully promoted Rebatet’s
Les Décombres
for the 1942 prize. They joined forces to block the election to the academy of André Billy, the respected literary critic of
Le Figaro
.
^*
At least this dispute was not over politics—Billy had in the past dared to criticize the books of some Goncourt jurors—but it did nothing to improve the Goncourt’s standing. In the December 1943 issue of
Les Lettres Françaises
, an anonymous
writer pronounced his verdict on the Goncourt jury: “It is inadmissible that, after the victory, men who in the midst of this enemy occupation adopted a spirit of treason should exercise the least influence over the French public.”
²⁷

With writers no less than other artists, however, it was often trips to Germany as invited guests of the Third Reich that drew public attention to their collaboration. With photographers recording their every move, they would be waved off with a reception at the German Institute or the Propaganda Staffel, they would be wined and dined by Goebbels in Berlin and they would be interviewed on their return to Paris.

Of the writers on two separate trips to Germany, none needed persuading of the virtues of occupation. Heller was in charge of invitations and organization and accompanied the delegations. The first trip was ordered by Goebbels, who wanted writers from all “friendly” countries to attend the First European Writers’ Congress in Weimar in late October 1941. For this voyage, the French delegation included
la crème de la collaboration
—Drieu La Rochelle, Brasillach, Bonnard, Fernandez, Jouhandeau, Chardonne and André Fraigneau. In contrast, Montherlant, Arland, Giono, Benoit and Morand, although far from being
résistants
, found excuses not to go.

Jouhandeau may also have wavered. He noted in his
Journal sous l’occupation
that he consulted his closest friend—Paulhan—and was told, “You’re the only person who can make this journey without my holding it against you.” Soon after leaving Paris, Jouhandeau was still trying to justify himself. “If anyone saw this journey to Germany as a follow-up to my reflections on the Jewish question, they’d be wrong,” he wrote, referring to
Le Péril juif
, his anti-Semitic tract of the late 1930s. “I only want to prove in this way that a Frenchman is not necessarily a Germanophobe, even under the present circumstances. Still further, I would like to make my body a fraternal bridge between Germany and us.”
²⁸
Here, at least, Jouhandeau appears to be speaking metaphorically, but, as a well-known homosexual,
^*
he may also have been signaling his hopes.

In the event, he spent much of the voyage in the company of an attractive young German poet, Hans Baumann, although it transpired that he was really infatuated with Heller. In a later book,
Le Voyage secret
, which Paulhan described as “pitifully idiotic,” Jouhandeau wrote of Heller, “Without him, I am only darkness and desert, with no hope of dawn or vegetation.”
²⁹
Referring to him as X, he added, “Without X, I would never have come, but when I decided to follow him, I did not know what I was doing. I only came to trust him later. Had I known, I would not have gone. I left with his hand over my eyes.”
³⁰

While the Weimar conference was the formal purpose of the voyage, it was also designed to exhibit the glories of the Reich. In the end, Drieu La Rochelle, Brasillach, Bonnard and Fraigneau traveled directly to Weimar later in October. But Chardonne, Jouhandeau and Fernandez left the Gare de l’Est on October 4, 1941, for an extended tour of Germany and Austria. Chardonne became the spokesman of the trio, Jouhandeau was the cultural tourist and Fernandez the bon vivant who impressed the Germans with his consumption of alcohol. They opted out of touring Strasbourg, the French city now annexed by Germany, but they visited Aachen, Cologne, Bonn, Frankfurt, Mainz, Heidelberg, Freiburg, Lindau, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna and Berlin. In the German capital, they were received by Goebbels, who warned them that a Russian victory would bring Communism to all Europe. Jouhandeau seemed reassured when Goebbels added that, after the German victory, “each people of the European community would preserve its own physiognomy and individuality.”
³¹
The French group then joined their colleagues as well as other European writers in Weimar, where Goebbels personally invited them to a wreath-laying ceremony at the tombs of Goethe and Schiller. Then, as Goebbels had planned, they founded the European Writers’ Union.

On November 4, the Propaganda Staffel welcomed them back to Paris with a reception at which they could share their experience with journalists. Many would also do so in the press. Jouhandeau, for instance, wrote in the December 1941 issue of the
NRF:
“I saw a great people at work, so calm in its labor that one was unaware of the war.” Heller had good reason to be proud, as he noted in a year-end report: “The participation of the French writers in the voyage to Germany and poetry meetings of Weimar has had a considerable echo in the Paris daily press and in periodicals. Exploitation of the voyage will continue.”
³²

The voyage had indeed been noticed, including by the intellectual resistance. On December 16, 1941, the clandestine Communist weekly
L’Université Libre
, whose editors would be shot by the Gestapo a few months later, addressed a long public letter to “Bonnard, Fernandez, Chardonne, Brasillach, etc., former French writers” and signed it “French writers.” As if anticipating the charges these writers would face three years later, it said, “While in Paris the Gestapo was imprisoning five members of the Institut de France, you went as ‘invited guests’ of the German Institute to Weimar and Berlin to receive your orders from Mr. Goebbels. Is this your concept of patriotism?” The letter concluded, “You have chosen abdication, treason, suicide. We, free French writers, have chosen dignity, fidelity, the battle for the existence and glory of our French writing.”
³³

One incident during the train ride taken by Chardonne, Jouhandeau and Fernandez might also have made them question the wisdom of their voyage, although the only reference to this “meaningful and moving meeting” can be found in Heller’s memoir. He recalled that when their train made an unscheduled stop in the German countryside, the three writers heard French being spoken. Leaning out of the train windows, they saw a dozen Frenchmen, their heads shaved and their tattered coats painted with the letters KG, for
Kriegsgefangenen
, or prisoners of war, in striking contrast with the well-dressed and well-fed writers. “They are somewhat ashamed of their privileged situation in the face of the misfortune of their compatriots,” Heller wrote. “They try to engage in conversation, but they do not know what to answer when the others ask them what they are doing on the train. Only a few words are exchanged before we leave: they sufficed to move deeply the French in our group.”
³⁴

The following year, Heller led another group of French writers to Weimar for the Second European Writers’ Congress, although only Drieu La Rochelle, Chardonne and Fraigneau were again on the delegation. Two lesser-known writers, Georges Blond and André Thérive, were added to fill the ranks after Brasillach and Jouhandeau turned down fresh invitations. Heller also made a new attempt to persuade Montherlant to join the group, visiting the playwright in his apartment on the quai Voltaire overlooking the Seine. Montherlant again declined, although blaming his decision on his nervous disposition rather than a reluctance to collaborate. “I have provided ample public and private proof of my hope and my faith in an improvement in Franco-German relations,” Heller quoted him as
saying. “I have done so before and since this war, most recently by collaborating with your review
Deutschland-Frankreich
.”
^*
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