‘The Brasillach Case’ by Alice Kaplan: De Gaulle against Robert Brasillach

Until, hidden in a small attic (“after the first days of the murderers and energumnos”, as will say in his diary) It will be delivered in September 1944, After knowing that his mother and stepfather have been arrested.

He would also be taken to Drancy, until recently made a transit field of the French Jews to Auschwitz, now converted into “Deposit of Collaborationists”, his brother -in -law and faithful cooperator (before and after his death, gathering his complete work and keeping his memory alive) the writer Maurice Bardèche. Once done imprisoned, feeling that he was “accompanied” by other greats of literature such as Cervantes, the poet Villon or André Chénier, executed at the time of terror of the French Revolution, that they had all suffered in their day “the martyrdom of prison” Brazillach would be shot at 36 for betrayal and “intelligence with the enemy.”

All this tells in a magnificent and very documented essay, rather than biography to use, ‘The Brazillach case (La France’ Collabo ‘before the mirror)’, the professor of the University of Yale, a specialist at the time of the occupation, Alice Kaplan. The famous, although brief and expeditious, Brasillach process lasted just six hours. Without witnesses, deliberation, After prosecutor Marcel Reboul ask for revenge for the Republic, and his lawyer, Jacques Isorni, trying to present it only as a poet, a supporter of Vichy and Pétain, the deliberation would last twenty minutes.

The necessary time to convince quickly, without further ado, to a jury that oscillated between overwhelmed emotion and serious doubts for the conviction. But The intermediate path was not possible: either they condemned him to death for the atrocity of his writings during the war, in total collusion with the occupants, or acquitted him of all the positions.

The ‘Brasillach Case’ was a case that shook, and continues to shake, not only the ranks of the extreme lepenist right, which incessantly claim their figure, but the memory of all France. A memory, with a a lot of things not yet assumed, urgently treated And shameful in the first days, referring to the years of the German war and occupation, next to the next, and so many times chaotic, liberation.

And here will be the true debate that surrounds the book and that still resonates, in a extremely interesting and eloquent way, after that anxious and accelerated search for “scapegoats”, as will explain in his brilliant prologue Juan Manuel de Prada, delaying This little known case For most Spanish readers.

But also citing not a few cases of vertiginous jacket changes who gathered at that time: there they would be the famous Sartre couple and Simone de Beauvoir, of infamous political ideas during the postwar period, defending Mao and other butchers, who could live with all tranquility, and represent their works perfectly, during the occupation, without anyone – that is, the Germans – touched them a hair. And that ever, of course, militarized in the resistance ranks.

Brasillach was not a murderer of the guns in the belt or a terrorist to fly buildings with innocent inside. His sin was the word: «The special responsibility hold writers and intellectualsthe potential harmful power of words », as Alice Kaplan will say. He burned the Nazi cause ardently and also reaffirmed, seen the first acts and “brutality” arrived after liberation, that they, the collaborations and the Vichy government, kept calm in the streets and avoided the disorder of the anarchy that bolchevism brought, as he could very well verify in the war of Spain.

The question, until today it would be: Why did Gaulle refuse to sign forgiveness in his case? Why weren’t they convicted to death Céline, whose anti -Semitism was equally fierce, or in Norway the life of Hitler’s enthusiast, Knut Hamsun was forgiven?

In the French ‘losers’ battalion, Drieu La Rochelle He committed suicide Henri Béraudwinner of a Goncourt award with a great novel, ‘The martyrdom of the obese’, by Gaulle, commuted his death penalty. But in a process of revanchista justice, exemplary, and also ashamed, to Brazillach, as they say vulgarly, He had to pay the duck.