Ugly Beauty (10 page)

Untrammeled by the need to accommodate public
opinion, what had begun as a benign dictatorship soon changed into something
altogether unpleasant. Ford’s Sociological Department, begun in a genuine spirit
of philanthropy, was after a few years replaced by a Service Department, which
sounded equally altruistic but whose function was very different. Set up to
coordinate the protection of the plant, the Service Department soon transmuted
into a network of spies, informers, and enforcers who terrorized the Ford
factories and suppressed all dissent. Labor organizers were beaten, strikes were
broken brutally, protesters were sacked: one ex-member of the Service Department
referred to it as “our Gestapo.”
7
43
Indeed, Hitler was a fervent admirer of Ford.
Mein
Kampf
was written with Ford’s autobiography,
My
Life and Times
, and philosophy—“an absence of fear of the future and
of veneration of the past”—much in mind.
8

Schueller, too, was an unashamed authoritarian: as
he put it, “An elected leader is already less of a leader.”
44
He thought democracy should mean government
for
all, but not
by
all. Running a modern state was too difficult to be left to anyone the masses
might choose.
45
However, when it came down to
picking actual men, he showed himself to be somewhat uncertain. The list of
leaders he admired included Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Horthy, Atatürk,
Pilsudski, Roosevelt, Chamberlain, and Daladier—that is, pretty much every
available one, elected or otherwise. From which we can only conclude that the
mere fact of making it to the top was evidence, as far as he was concerned, of
the right stuff. Similarly, although he did not at this stage think France
should ally herself with Germany—on the contrary, his great concern was the
unpreparedness of the French army—as a committed authoritarian he could not help
admiring Hitler’s style. Hitler hadn’t pandered to the trade unions with a New
Deal like Roosevelt in the United States, or with a forty-hour week and
unemployment pay like Léon Blum in France. Instead, he had taken all the men he
could get hold of and put them to work, creating a formidable military power.
France, Schueller felt, should do likewise. Nevertheless, despite his dislike
and distrust of the unions (a dislike wholeheartedly reciprocated), he continued
to employ union men, and did not persecute them as Ford did.

Of course Schueller and Ford were not alone in
being attracted by the idea of dictatorship. They were probably unique, outside
the ranks of politicians, in actually running, to a greater or lesser extent,
their own state; but as the broke and dithering thirties limped on, many
idealists with no personal experience of power were attracted by the capacity
for unimpeded action that dictatorship seemed to offer. “I am asking for a
Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis,” declared H. G. Wells, addressing the
Oxford Union in 1932, still, despite all the evidence, apparently believing that
a benign dictatorship was not an oxymoron. “The world is sick of parliamentary
democracy. The fascist party is Italy. The Communist is Russia. The Fascists of
liberation must carry out a parallel ambition on a far grander scale.”

With hindsight, Wells’s call seems extraordinarily
naive. But it was a true expression of his personal creed, which managed to
combine socialism with unambiguous elitism. Many of his novels—
The Time Machine, A Modern Utopia, The New Machiavelli,
Anticipations
—envisaged worlds ruled by a special governing order of
the best and the brightest. And Wells was not alone in this seemingly
incompatible combination of beliefs: this was the generation of socialists who
embraced the new “science” of eugenics—but who were appalled when those theories
were actually translated into action.

It is tempting—though probably false—to wonder
whether eugenic considerations partly explain the fascist sympathies of Europe’s
beauty tycoons. The perfumier François Coty famously backed the far-right
Faisceau and Croix de Feu movements during the 1930s, and a little later founded
the infamous paramilitary group Solidarité Française; Coco Chanel was a renowned
horizontal collaborator. Eugenics, after all, did identify physical
beauty—which, for these Europeans, naturally meant Caucasian beauty—as a
prerequisite for most other desirable qualities. As the then-celebrated American
psychologist Knight Dunlap put it in 1920, “All dark races prefer white
skin.”
46

In his book
Personal Beauty
and Racial Betterment
, Dunlap, who,
inter
alia
, saw baldness as a sign of physical degeneration—“It is
difficult to conceive of a baldheaded musical genius or artist”
47
—pointed the way, twenty years before the
event, to notions of the Untermensch and the Final Solution. “Perhaps there are
limits beyond which the preservation of the individual is undesirable. It seems
not only useless but dangerous to preserve the incurably insane and the lower
grades of the feeble-minded.”
48

Dunlap was not alone in these thoughts. Similar
theories were commonplace among psychologists at the time, some of whom had
little hesitation in acting upon them when they could with impunity. Their use
of inmates in American state hospitals as fodder for experimentation during the
1920s and thirties has become notorious. If fascism is the absolute subjection
of the individual to the needs of the state, as defined by the ruling
dictatorship, then those psychologists—absolute dictators in their own
realm—were undoubtedly fascists. And if—as after World War II—culpability is
graded along a scale of readiness to eradicate undesirable individuals, with
Hitler at one end and, say, H. G. Wells at the other, then Dunlap and his ilk
would probably not have survived a Nuremberg.

Most of those who held these views, however, lay at
some point between these two extremes. In those cases, the matter of gradation
could become a question of crucial personal concern. And one of these cases
would be Eugène Schueller.

Chapter
Three

What Did You Do in the
War, Daddy?

I

Our readers are true Frenchwomen. They are worried
and sad. That’s only natural. But sadness is not the same as losing heart. No
one, in France, should lose heart. . . . Not to care about your
appearance shows a lack of courage. Beauty is a discipline, and it’s cowardly to
reject it.

—
Votre
Beauté
, N
OVEMBER 1940

I
n 1939,
the year World War II broke out, Eugène Schueller was fifty-eight. Small, shy,
rotund, full of a disarming nervous enthusiasm, his words tripping over each
other in a vain attempt to keep up with his ideas, he had, Merry Bromberger
remarked, “the candid eyes and hesitant manner of Charlie Chaplin.
. . . [His] curls, whether permed or natural, have survived fifty
years of experiments. . . . When people say chemicals are not good for
the hair, the great hair chemist need only show his own froth of little
waves.”
1
Those waves were now an odd violet
tint that suggested frequent use of his own products.

Those products had bought him the grandest possible
lifestyle. He had built himself two houses, the villa at L’Arcouest, where he
relaxed, and an imposing pile at Franconville, just northwest of Paris,
surrounded by elaborate terraced gardens—a highly impractical venture, he
observed ruefully: seven servants and seven gardeners were needed to keep it up
properly, and he liked to complain, somewhat hyperbolically, that the taxes he
so bitterly resented paying meant he would never be left with enough to run it
as it should be run. There was also a luxurious Paris apartment, on avenue
Suchet, overlooking the Bois de Boulogne. And now a new war threatened, and who
knew where he, and France, would be left at the end of it?

Unlike Henry Ford, whose enthusiasm for Hitler
(including generous financial support) was rewarded in 1938 by the Grand Cross
of the German Eagle, Schueller spent the prewar years warning his countrymen
against the German “wolf” and the dangers it threatened. General mobilization
and the ramping-up of war industries had at least averted the open civil war
that had threatened France earlier in the decade, getting the economy moving and
solving the problem of mass unemployment. But he saw that France was no match
for Germany. Unless Britain sent 300,000 men and 5,000 aircraft, and the United
States the same, all would be lost.
2

The Ministry of Defense was more sanguine, or more
fatalistic. Its response to the impending threat was to extend the so-called
Maginot Line of concrete fortifications and tank traps built after World War I
to prevent any new German incursion (and to provide its defenders with munitions
that in many cases were the wrong size for the guns).
3
Few people thought it would work. As a gamekeeper on his father’s
land near the Belgian border observed to the young François Dalle (later to
become L’Oréal’s managing director), “You know as well as I do, Franchot, that
the Maginot line won’t stop the Germans. They’ll go through Holland like they
did last time.”
4

They did just that, in a furious attack launched on
May 10, 1940, through Holland and Belgium. By May 26 the French were in retreat
and the British Expeditionary Force, sent to support them, had been driven back
to Dunkirk beach. During the following week over 338,000 British, French, and
Canadian troops were evacuated across the Channel, under constant German fire.
On June 14 the Germans entered Paris, declared an open city to avoid
bombardment; on June 17 Marshal Pétain, whose troops had triumphed over the
Germans at Verdun twenty-five years before, ordered the French army to stop
fighting; and on June 22 he signed the armistice, under the terms of which
two-thirds of France would be occupied by Germany.

Although in the immediate aftermath of the invasion
ten million panicked French citizens took to the roads, eventually most of them
trickled back home and tried to take up the threads of their lives. Many put
their faith in Pétain, who at least offered the promise of a French rather than
a German government, and made themselves inconspicuous in hopes that the
occupying authorities would leave them alone. The more defiant retreated into
sullen noncooperation or more active resistance. A core of diehard nationalists
and furious young men joined de Gaulle in London. And at the other end of the
political spectrum, some actively welcomed the new German rulers: among them,
prompted by a mix of practical necessity, economic evangelism, and political
ambition, Eugène Schueller.

A good many French businessmen of the time were,
like Schueller, interested in social reform. Several thought, as he did, that a
benign dictatorship—the equivalent of H. G. Wells’s “enlightened Nazis”—was the
only efficient mode of government. One of these, Ariste Potton, wrote a novel on
this subject in 1937 in which he set out his countrymen’s (and his own)
psychological position: “The Frenchman wants to be free,” he declared, “but he’s
happy to accept discipline, if he has confidence in the person in charge.”
5
Potton’s fictional businessman, clearly a
wishful self-portrait, is loved by his workers, whom he’s always treated
well—something on which Schueller, too, prided himself. Unlike Potton, however,
who left the question of his leader’s actual political standpoint unelaborated
(he simply brings “social progress and economic revival” to France and peace to
Europe) Schueller did not mince his words. “Need I say, I believe in an
authoritarian state, properly led, and that I consider it impossible to build a
representative state based on universal liberty and equality? . . .
Everyone must realize that many are his superiors and deserve more than he. Life
is about opportunity. Everyone must have his chance, and not try to deprive
others of what he hasn’t got himself.”
6

In this state of inferiors and superiors, Schueller
was in no doubt as to his own position. The merest handful of men, so long as
they were true revolutionaries, would be enough, he thought, to change a
nation’s fate.
7
Postwar France would badly need
such men—“what these days are called ‘Führers of the professions’ ”
8
—and Eugène Schueller would be one of them,
hopefully as finance minister in whatever French government would replace the
Germans when they left. He therefore set himself to acquire the skills without
which success in politics is impossible. He was not a natural orator and was
determined not to repeat the experience of Henry Ford. He engaged a private
speech tutor to visit him every morning, and fitted out one of the rue Royale
rooms as a small auditorium, where he could try out speeches on a few friends
before risking himself in front of a wider public. And at the same time he
looked around for a political group that would make a suitable vehicle for his
ideas.

Schueller’s decision to throw in his lot with the
Germans was governed more by pragmatism than doctrine. An engineer hired by him
during the war, and who made it clear he did not wish to work even indirectly
for the Germans, reported that Schueller “saw my point of view.” But “he said he
thought the Germans were very strong, and better organized, while the other side
seemed completely without organization. It was just a social conversation
. . . and I have to say, I think M. Schueller is too much of an
opportunist to risk engaging himself absolutely in favor of anyone.”
9

In fact, there was more than mere opportunism to
Schueller’s vocal welcome of the invaders. The Occupation solved a dilemma that
had long frustrated him: that although Hitler’s new order corresponded
remarkably closely to his own long-held visions, Hitler himself was
unfortunately the enemy. Had that not been so, France would now be in a far
better state. “We haven’t been as lucky as the Nazis, who came to power in
1933,” he would write in
La Révolution de
l’économie
, published in 1941 by Guillemot et Delamotte, whose list was
headed by the collected speeches of Adolf Hitler. But now, at last, the years of
stasis were over. Finally, the French people would realize that only a complete
transformation could save them; and then all the suffering—“the war, the defeat,
the destruction of our armies, an entire nation in flight”
10
—would not have been in vain.

Although almost all enthusiastic collaborators
would have agreed, most had arrived there by a very different route. Schueller
was a pragmatist. But for his future allies, fascism’s attraction lay in
doctrine rather than practicalities. By no means all were pro-German. But the
Germans had achieved something they had long hoped for: the destruction of the
hated Republic—
la gueuse
(the beggarwoman), as they
disdainfully referred to it.

Nor did they find any problem with other aspects of
Nazi philosophy, such as anti-Semitism. Most had begun political life as
followers of Action Française, the right-wing nationalist pressure group that
had arisen out of the Dreyfus affair, and which advocated that the unfortunate
Captain Dreyfus should not be pardoned even though he had been proven innocent,
and that his accusers should not be charged with perjury. That would tarnish the
honor of the French army—something rather more important than an injustice meted
out to a mere Jew. For them, Jews and Freemasons not only represented the
sinister forces of international capital and secularism that had imposed
themselves on France at the time of the Revolution, but threatened, by their
alien culture, everything that made France special.

This toxic mix of xenophobic nationalism, Catholic
fundamentalism, and fascinated envy was summed up by Henry Charbonneau, who
would for a while become one of Schueller’s political colleagues:

In every walk of
life—political, economic, artistic, intellectual—the Jews were
disproportionately prominent. Some professions were effectively under their
control. It was truly a state within a state. . . . Personally,
I’ve always felt defensive about this tentacular Jewish influence. Not that
I’ve actually known many Jews, but they’ve always interested me. I was one
of the first to see The Dybbuk when it was put on at the Théâtre
Montparnasse in 1931. And later, when I was studying the culture of
Andalusia, I really loved digging into the writings of the great Jewish
savants of the Caliphate and Cordoba. . . . So it isn’t that I had
anything against Judaism as such, but what always got under my skin was the
notion that . . . you couldn’t really be talented, intelligent,
witty, or even courageous unless you were a Jew or had Jewish friends. How
could I bear to see intellectual and political life taken over by a minority
many of whom weren’t even properly assimilated yet?
11

For Schueller, who had once been a Freemason and
who had many Jewish colleagues, these obsessions played little if any part in
his thinking. He disliked the Republic not because he looked back nostalgically
to the days of a Catholic monarchy but because, as he never tired of repeating,
he was an authoritarian. For a man convinced that “Everyone’s first duty,
whether boss, employee, or civil servant, is to obey,”
12
the wave of strikes that paralyzed France in 1936 had been a
glimpse into a terrifying future. His main objection to Léon Blum, who ended
this situation by caving in to many of the unions’ demands, was his socialism,
not his Judaism. The formulaic phrase, compulsory for all right-wing orators,
about freeing France from “la franc-maçonnerie et la juiverie,” appeared only
once in Schueller’s speeches and writings, when he used it to underline the need
to make a complete break with the failed Third Republic—an institution with
which, in the circles he was addressing, that phrase was conventionally
associated.
13

For Schueller, as for many industrialists, the new
Europe essentially meant a new economic order, neither French nor German but
“mixte.” They had long hoped for a breaking down of economic boundaries—as
Schueller put it in
La Révolution de l’économie
, “a
day when the mark and the franc would be one monetary unity in a European
economy.”
14
For years that had been a pipe
dream: but if the Germans won, it would be the future. And if one thought this
way, collaboration was a logical way forward.

And this was not just a question of theory. At the
most fundamental level, it was the only way to stay in business. The war years
were very profitable for those who could keep manufacturing—anything that could
be made could be sold, the occupiers would pay any price for luxuries, and there
was a flourishing black market in scarce necessities. But only collaboration
ensured access to raw materials.
15
Later,
Schueller would argue that he did only the minimum business with the enemy, but
L’Oréal’s profits quadrupled between 1940 and 1944, and Monsavon’s doubled. He
must have been selling something, in quantity; and it hadn’t been manufactured
out of air.

Part of this may be put down to ingenuity. Most
industrialists, Schueller scornfully pointed out, were not good at making do.
Despite a law making it compulsory to recycle scarce substances, they found it
impossible to operate without their usual quantities of basic materials.
Schueller, by contrast, tried wherever possible to use substitutes. Before the
war, Monsavon soaps had contained 72 percent fats; during it, only 20 percent.
The quality, admittedly, was less good—but people didn’t complain: anything was
better than nothing.
16
Even inferior materials
had nonetheless to be sourced somewhere. And there was inevitably a price to
pay. The Germans demanded not just that French manufacturers supply them, but
that shares in French companies be transferred to German hands.