Degrees of Collaboration

...Mitterrand's academic career, though less brilliant than Brasillach's, was very good: He earned degrees from the undergraduate law faculty of the University of Paris and from the Institute of Political Science...

...Captured in June 1940, he spent 10 months as a POW Two million French soldiers had been taken prisoner, and since the political consequences of freeing these men were unclear, the Germans interned most of them...

...Even in normal times, however, French trials differed from ours...

...The jury of four retired to deliberate at 6:35 p.m...

...it had rendered its verdict...

...Many leading postwar politicians had been Vichy officials...

...and a printer who had his own shop...

...Like Brasillach, François Mitterrand (born in 1916), France's Socialist President from 1981 to 1995, was raised in a conservative, Catholic family...

...Mitterrand's strategy worked...

...Mitterrand's past was known to his peers and acknowledged in works about him...

...She rightly doesn't attempt to defend the way the jurors were selected but does establish that, contrary to neofascist legend, only one of them, an electrician, was a Communist...

...But beyond this Reboul's case was strong...

...In the Presidential election of 1974, he lost narrowly to Giscard in the second round...

...Elie Wiesel, a good friend of his who claimed that it came to light only in 1994, is mistaken...

...No longer worried about the increasingly insignificant Communist Party, Mitterrand moved to the Center...

...Moreover, the book is less a biography than a collection of essays on aspects of Mitterrand's career...

...Mitterrand openly proclaimed his strategy: destroying French Communism by embracing it...

...Brasillach, who went into hiding after the liberation of Paris in August 1944, surrendered in September when he learned that his mother had been arrested to flush him out...

...Furthermore, he had consorted with the Germans throughout the War, encouraging and assisting them in many ways, some of which put French patriots at risk...

...if its candidate survived the first round, many people would desert to the other camp...

...Kaplan's contribution to the story—a very worthwhile one, since it enables her to puncture many far-Right myths—is new material on the judge, the lawyers and the members of the jury...

...He first became involved in the underground in June 1942, when it was hardly certain that the Allies would triumph...

...Except in one respect, anti-Semitism did not play an important role in the charges...

...Thus a Left dominated by the Communists, as it had been in the Fourth Republic, could not take power in the Fifth...

...he refused a position in the Commissariat for Jewish Questions at three times the salary, perhaps because his best friend, Georges Dayan, was a Jew...

...The Right was divided between Gaullists (nationalist and socially conservative) and European-style liberals (economically conservative and socially tolerant...

...Mitterrand joined and became the leader of a reorganized Socialist Party in 1971...

...The title, reflecting the author's view that no French leader after Mitterrand will be able to exploit the Fifth Republic's "tendency to elective monarchy" or to carry on an independent foreign and domestic policy, is a bit silly...

...As a writer, he had a knack for personal attacks against his enemies on the conventional Right, the Center and the Left...

...As a result, in 1969 the Socialist Presidential candidate ended up with merely 5 per cent of the vote...

...The trial started at 1 p.m...

...the Left between Communists and Socialists...

...to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew...

...And in the opening round of the 1981 Presidential contest, Mitterrand cut the Communists' usual 20 per cent of the vote to 15 per cent, himself winning more than 25 per cent...

...Brasillach, age 35, was executed on February 6,1945...

...his work as a novelist, playwright and poet was much less successful...

...Family ties got him a job in Vichy's Commissariat to Aid Returning Prisoners of War in 1942...

...At the War's end, Mitterrand joined a small Centrist party...

...the more extreme fascist writers who fled to Germany were spared because they were tried in later, cooler times...

...The prosecutor followed with a very strong presentation that in part implicitly attacked the defendant as a homosexual...

...He had undoubtedly committed treason: "intelligence with a foreign power or its agents [in wartime], with a view toward favoring the enterprises of this power against France...

...We grant ourselves permission," he wrote, "to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew [?], at the movies...

...No doubt he did so because he was an easygoing opportunist, but it was the opportunistic Mitterrand, not the more scrupulous Mendès-France, who undermined the French Communist Party...

...He did admire Pétain in 1942, but most other Frenchmen did as well, and this did not make anyone a fascist...

...In the second round, he won 52 per cent despite the Communist leaders' secret efforts to promote a "revolutionary vote for Giscard...

...Fascist writers were easier to prosecute than, say, fascist bankers...

...The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach by Alice Kaplan (Chicago, 308 pp., $25.00) tells the story of his last few weeks...

...But it did come to wider knowledge that year with the publication of Pierre Péan's Une Jeunesse Française [A French Youth]: François Mitterrand, 1934-47...

...If his attitude toward Jews had formed a major part of the case against him, he would at least have had a defense...

...Brasillach was drafted in 1939 when the War broke out...

...One of them, René Bousquet, the Vichy police chief in 1942 and 1943, was convicted in 1949 of collaboration and then pardoned because he had given important help to the Resistance...

...Reboul's collaboration did not go beyond the minimum that almost every French official had accepted...

...Writers & Writing Degrees of Collaboration By Roger Draper Collaboration with the Germans was largely a matter of degree in France during World War II, for everyone in the country had to acknowledge their power...

...By tradition, the lunatic wing of French conservatism was no less anti-German than anti-Semitic, so many reactionaries rejected cooperation or were ambivalent about it...

...Both Brasillach's prosecutor, Marcel Reboul, and his judge, Maurice Vidal, had signed the oath, but they were Third Republic holdovers and served the French government, not Vichy...

...As for the wartime photo with Marshal Pétain, Tiersky notes that the third person in it became a resister and died en route to Buchenwald, so Mitterrand's presence here isn't very significant...

...In any event, his job didn't implicate him in acts of racial or political persecution...

...The President was now chosen directly, in two rounds of voting, with the two highest candidates in the first facing off in the second...

...Although anti-Communism may have been the longest thread in his political career, the Left could not win without the Communists' support, so he was willing to do business with them—unlike his more high-minded mentor Pierre Mendès-France...

...Just one of his anti-Semitic statements, written in September 1942, figured in his trial: "We must separate from the Jews en bloc and not keep any little ones...

...That November, he secretly left France to meet Charles de Gaulle in Algiers...

...It isn't clear whether she believes this herself...

...Almost 20 years later, another collaborator accused him of directing the first roundup, in 1942, of Jews who had held French citizenship...

...But inconveniently for Mitterrand, the Socialists regarded him as damaged goods for several reasons, including his involvement with Vichy, and would not have him as a member...

...Brasillach's lawyer, Jacques Isorni, argued that the prosecutor was tainted by his association with Vichy...

...The writer and resister Albert Camus signed a clemency petition because he opposed it in principle...

...The son of an Army officer killed in 1914 in Morocco, Brasillach was a product of the summit of the French educational system, the Ecole Normale Supérieure...

...Brasillach, who probably was gay, had written that in the War, "Frenchmen given to reflection" had "more or less slept with Germany...

...Nonetheless, some of the essays are very good, and this is the only English-language life of Mitterrand written after 1994, when new revelations about him came to light...

...Resistere were few and, at least in the beginning, they were outnumbered by those who actively supported the occupiers...

...By the second half of 1943 he had quit his Vichy job and joined the Resistance full-time...

...The trial was held on the afternoon of January 19,1945,when the Germans still occupied parts of France...

...The first (and so far only) Socialist President of the Fifth Republic presided over the collapse of not only MarxismLeninism in France but also any conception of socialism as something other than the modest amelioration of capitalism...

...Her discussion of the wartime records of Vidal and Reboul succeeds in showing that neither had taken part in the special wartime tribunals that had enforced specifically fascist legislation...

...Some of the friends Mitterrand made on the Right he kept for a very long time...

...He was later charged with crimes against humanity, but was assassinated before the case came to trial...

...But a younger generation of Rightwingers who had no personal recollections of France's defeat by Prussia in 1870, or even of World War I, did not share this hatred of Germany...

...Of the Mitterrand photos from the '30s, I can say only that in the '60s I myself appeared in a picture of a far-Left demonstration that ran on the front page of the New York Daily News...

...By 7 p.m...

...It was not until 1986 that Mitterrand dropped Bousquet as a friend...

...There was also another electrician...

...François Mitterrand passed through every part of the political spectrum, Right to Left...

...The boom failed to develop because the economies of France's trading partners were contracting...

...The verdict did not have to be unanimous, and the vote was never announced...

...This was the most indefensible thing he ever produced...

...At the start of 1945—following the liberation of Paris but before the War's end—he was convicted of treason, sentenced to death and executed, all within a few weeks...

...The most prominent writer in this group was Robert Brasillach (born in 1909), the editor in chief of a pro-Nazi newspaper, Je Suis Partout (1 Am Everywhere...

...Serving during the Fourth Republic (1947-58) as Colonial Minister, Interior Minister and Minister of Justice, he seemed headed for the Prime Ministership...

...Whether bad timing or bad policy, the turn to the Left had failed...

...Was Mitterrand ever a Socialist...

...Brasillach saw himself as a "moderate" anti-Semite...

...Principles, it would seem, count for only so much in politics...

...Reboul, evoking the trial of Oscar Wilde, called it the "feeling that dare not say its name...

...The author finds this odd yet makes it fully comprehensible...

...The argument wasn't effective...

...The truth, as Tiersky writes, is that during the War Mitterrand "took more risks than almost all French people and nearly all members of the political class...

...Yet in each phase of his career, he tacked to the Center...

...Mitterrand said he acted "to avoid reigniting national divisions...

...There had been no previous hint of this and the source was questionable, but in 1983 the Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld made public supporting evidence...

...He was tried by a criminal court system compromised by the War...

...By the 1973 parliamentary elections, the Socialists had pulled almost even with the Communists...

...he spent the next 23 years in opposition...

...Isorni failed to mount what Kaplan suggests might have provided a successful defense: "there were a hundred, a thousand political collaborators whose actions were far, far worse than his...

...Since there was only one opposition—the Left—Mitterrand swung Leftward...

...and the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz...

...Brasillach, though, was allowed to return to Je Suis Partout, the most widely read newspaper in the Occupied Zone (northern France, including Paris...

...Brasillach was executed because he stayed in France following the liberation...

...The secondround was a straight contest of Right against Left...

...a middle-class Protestant engineer who, like Brasillach, was a graduate of the high end of the French educational system...

...Then he was drafted into the Army and spent 18 months as a POW, making three attempts to escape...

...The jurors, like most in the purge, were chosen by a committee of resisters and were resisters themselves...

...As a young man he knew many people in the most extreme fascist groups but never joined them himself, though he briefly belonged to an organization that Ronald Tiersky describes as "xenophobic" in François Mitterrand: The Last French President (St...

...For better or worse, his predecessors in the Elysée Palace, Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing—neither a Resistance hero—had taken the same position...

...and the memory of it will remain sweet for them...

...as he put it in 1938, "We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organize any pogrom...

...The accused was examined chiefly by the judge, who sat with the jury as it deliberated...

...Martin's, 464 pp., $29.95...

...The most problematic items in the dossier are newspaper photos of Mitterrand at far-Right demonstrations in the 1930s, a 1942 photo of him looking admiringly at Pétain, and his requests to be nominated for a Vichy medal he won in 1943, when he had already joined the Resistance...

...During the interrogation Brasillach actually dominated the judge...

...Our fundamental objective," he wrote, "is to rebuild a great Socialist Party on the terrain occupied by the Communist Party, showing that of the 5 million Communist voters today, 3 million might vote Socialist...

...As Tiersky explains very well, Mitterrand did not fear an alliance with the Communist Party because he understood, early on, that the electoral system adopted in 1962 worked to its disadvantage...

...Mitterrand's dislike of the Free French leader, who aimed to control Resistance networks like his, was to be the single most important factor in his whole political career...

...It was now clear that the Socialists could do little by themselves...

...By the time they had revived, the franc was too weak for Mitterrand to keep social spending at its 1981 -82 levels...

...But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-Semitism is to organize a reasonable anti-Semitism...

...A regular column denounced specific people and served, writes Kaplan, "as a source of information and encouragement for many arrests" by the Germans...

...Péan foundnothing sensational...

...In office he first steered to the Left, a strategy that depended on trying to generate a boom to keep employment levels high and to finance ambitious social policies...

...On the third, in December 1941, he succeeded...

...Then, in 1958, de Gaulle mounted what Mitterrand saw as a coup d'état...

...In the case of the medal, Péan and Tiersky consider Mitterrand's account—that he asked to be nominated as a cover for his Resistance activities—to be plausible...

...Certainly, in his case, as in most involving the death penalty, it was dispensed arbitrarily...

...While the Right was normally dominant, this largely reflected fear of the CP...

...In the aftermath of France's collapse in 1940, high-ranking public officials were made to swear fealty to Marshal Philippe Pétain, the World War I hero who became chief of state of Vichy France...

...Most of the collaborators came from the ranks of the Right...

...Apart from Pierre Laval, Prime Minister of the collaborationist Vichy state set up in the South after France's defeat in 1940, he was the most prominent casualty of the purge carried out in 1944-45...

...to admire Proust, a half Jew...

...others did the same...

...Hadn't Brasillach himself written, "Why wait to execute the Communist deputies...

...But capital punishment...

...No doubt Mitterrand should have cut him off earlier, yet more important were the President's efforts to discourage his prosecution and that of other collaborators...

...Nor did they want an alliance with the Communists...

...The feeling is there now...

...Kaplan, who takes the same position, as do I, thinks it was Brasillach's execution that has made him a symbol for today's neofascists...

...An essay he composed in prison contained a remarkably convoluted sentence attacking genocide: "that [Jewish] families have so often been separated, children cast aside, deportations organized that could only have been legitimate if they hadn't had as their goal—hidden from us—death pure and simple, strikes me, and has always struckme, as unacceptable...