When the French collaborator Fernand-Joseph Sautès was sentenced to death for treason on July 13, 1945, this forgotten far-right activist had lived in Barcelona for almost a year. He would reside in the city for almost three more decades. Sautès had been and would be a second-rate reactionary journalist, but the reconstruction of his forgotten career allows us to glimpse a dark side of 20th century European history: the web of relations between French fascism and the first Francoism during the Civil War and the years of the Nazi occupation.
The traces he left have been compiled by Xavier Juncosa in archives and newspaper archives. The eight years that he has dedicated to dusting off the character has just been made known in the volume Fernand-Joseph Sautes. Periodisme i extrema dreta entre la França col.laboracionista de Pétain i l’Espnya de Franco (Nèmesi Història Collection) which reproduces the press of the time and hundreds of unpublished documents. They are letters to gyrfalcons of the regime, reports of French counterintelligence, legal proceedings, dozens of anti-Semitic articles or interviews with the all-powerful Ramón Serrano Suñer or Marshal Pétain who ruled Vichy. The investigation is gigantic and the conclusion is clarifying: Sautès was one of many children born from the serpent’s egg and its incubator, the Spanish counterrevolution.
“We maintain, here too, the good fight for the same cause.” In February 1937, this was how he presented himself by letter to a leader of the pro-Franco government. The cause was monarchical reactionism as an alternative to liberal democracy and he vehemently defended it from journalism after a process of radicalization typical of that time.
Born in 1898 near the city of Perpignan, Fernand-Joseph Sautès was the son of a wine merchant who was sympathetic to the royalist cause. Before he was 20 he volunteered in World War I and on the Italian front he was gassed. During the postwar period, this impulsive and vehement young man, in addition to requesting a pension as an ex-combatant, became radicalized. He first lived in the vicinity of Paris, increasingly committed to the main focus of reactionary irradiation in his country: Action Française, which since the twenties had also irradiated in Madrid, Bilbao or Barcelona. Upon returning to the south of France, Sautès joined the action groups of that movement and began to collaborate in its regional dissemination bodies.
His harmony with the Spanish counterrevolutionary coup was absolute. He shares ideology and imagery with the enemies of the Republic. This is clear from the first article that he dedicated to the Civil War. There is the Spain of the Popular Front, financed by the Soviet Comintern, and there is that of El Cid and Teresa de Ávila, who symbolize the best of their “race brothers.” The race is that of Latinos versus Jews and communists.
Sautès wrote in French, spoke in Catalan and understood Spanish. He began to really stand out at the beginning of 1939, by recounting the republican defeat, interviewing authorities of the new regime and publishing in the classic medium of the French extreme right. When he saw himself on the cover of action frenchProudly, Miquel Mateu —businessman from Franco’s circle of trust, Franco’s mayor of Barcelona and later ambassador to France— discovers who will be his head journalist in France. The relationship with this influential millionaire will be key in the life of Sautès.
The Mateu family owned the oldest newspaper in the Barcelona press: el Barcelona newspaper. Decanted towards reactionary positions during the Second Republic, he reappeared in November 1940 and Sautès would be one of his correspondents. Although he signed his chronicles from Vichy —capital of the state presided over by Marshal Pétain, a much less puppet state than we have thought—, he wrote them in his house in Roussillon. His first interpretation of the French defeat was blunt: “We have touched the consequences of 70 years of bourgeois democracy.”
The communicating vessels between that Francoism and French reactionaryism are much more intense than we think. Sautès proves it. During that period he was also a regular byline of one of the most popular forums of collaborationism: the weekly Gringoire. The historian Juncosa analyzes this publication in detail, which had supported Francoism during the Civil War —all kinds of reports and cartoons— and which was committed to Vichy policy during the occupation.
The journalist Sautès was a piece of that editorial policy, basically dedicated to reporting on Franco’s Spain. This position allowed him access to the circles of French collaborationist power, which gave higher quality to the articles that he published in Spain. Here he stood out for interviewing Pétain or the intellectual Charles Maurras —his teacher— and there for publishing interviews in Gringoire with Serrano Suñer or writing reports on the Spain that, according to him, was being reborn thanks to the policies of the Franco regime.
From journalism to politics there is only one step. And he gives it. He is a publicist for the new order and the Nazi power in France authorizes him to cross the border frequently and even carry firearms. The same thing was going to happen to this provocative man with the French liberation as to other writers in the weekly where he published. Some were killed during the purge, others convicted but pardoned by De Gaulle, and some fled France to survive. Sautes, for example.
On August 18, 1944, the day that Perpignan and the Roussillon region were liberated, Sautès fled in the direction of Spain and probably already crossed the border that same day. The mayor Mateu protects him. After a few weeks he was already writing again in the Barcelona Newspaper; but better to use a pseudonym: José Malart. His fear is that France, after Hitler, will be dominated by Stalin, and the position of his articles will not cease to be ambiguous. He writes from Barcelona, where he has settled, and he had also been written about in the same city. Brief information notes such as this one from April 5, 1944: “Gestapo paid agent to be arrested immediately after the Allied landing.” The accumulation of data like these prefigured the sentence in absentia: sentenced to death for treason.
During the following years his name continued to appear on the lists of collaborators drawn up in Barcelona by French espionage. But he lived with a certain tranquility, publishing in the Spanish and French press.
In the early 1950s, Sautès asked for his case to be reviewed and had the death sentence overturned. He even managed to get himself awarded the Legion of Honor as a World War I soldier. The procedures overlapped with a misfortune: his son, a believer like him in an eternal France, enlisted in the French Army and died in combat fighting in Indochina. In 1974, seriously ill, he was transferred to Perpignan. The family’s decision was for him to die in Roussillon. Nobody remembered him in the newspapers where he wrote. Neither there nor here.
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