In England, where Fascism never took hold, many of the leading modern writers—Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Pound, and Lawrence—were reactionaries who sympathized with that movement. In France, by contrast, the best modern authors—Gide, Malraux, Sartre, and Camus—were passionately committed to the left. Robert Brasillach (1909–45)—“the symbol of the collaborator”—was the exception. Alice Kaplan’s clear, elegant account of Brasillach’s career, trial, and legacy raises several important questions: “the accountability of writers and intellectuals, the power of words to do harm, the possibility of justice during wartime, and the dangers of revisionist history.”
Born in Perpignan, the son of an army officer who’d been killed in a colonial skirmish in Morocco, Brasillach was educated at the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. In the 1920s he became a journalist and freelance writer for Charles Maurras’s Action Française, which “stood for anti-Semitic nationalism, royalism and Catholicism, and for hatred of foreigners.” From 1937, Brassilach edited a newspaper, Je Suis Partout (“I Am Everywhere”), which proudly revealed the names and addresses of French Jews hiding from the Gestapo. Kaplan describes him as short, round, with tiny shoulders and owlish spectacles, “a man of great culture and enormous charm, capable of great loyalty and friendship . . . a sparkling, feared critic, a controversial political pundit, and a cultural celebrity of the extreme right”—“the James Dean of French fascism.” The dreamy, effeminate writer was also thought to be homosexual.
As the Nazi occupiers’ principal cultural spokesman, he romanticized their political
