Robert Brasillach

Visiting the Eastern Front, including the site of the Katyn massacre, with the French Legion: Robert Brasillach with Jacques Doriot and Claude Jeantet 

A French author and journalist. Robert Brasillach is best known as the editor of Je suis partout, a nationalist newspaper which came to advocate various fascist movements and supported Jacques Doriot. After the liberation of France in 1944 he was executed following a trial and Charles de Gaulle's express refusal to grant him a pardon. Brasillach was executed for advocating collaborationism, denunciation and incitement to murder. The execution remains a subject of some controversy, because Brasillach was executed for "intellectual crimes", rather than military or political actions.

Born in Perpignan, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure and then became a novelist and literary critic for theAction Française of Charles Maurras. After the 6 February 1934 crisis in the Place de la Concorde, Brasillach openly supported fascism. His politics are shared by several of his protagonists, notably the two male main characters in The Seven Colours.

He became an editor of Je suis partout, a fascist paper founded by dissidents from the Action Française and led by Pierre Gaxotte. Brasillach was attracted to the fascistic Rexist movement in Belgium, and wrote an article and later a book about the leader of the movement, Leon Degrelle. Brasillach admired what he perceived to be Degrelle's youth and charisma and Degrelle's insistence on being neither left nor right, supporting striking workers, encouraging love of the King, family and God and desiring to see the establishment of an anti-Communist and anti-Capitalist Christian-influenced corporate state. Degrelle went on to collaborate with the German occupation of Belgium and served in Waffen SS. Brasillach was also greatly impressed by José Antonio Primo de Rivera and his Falangist movement. By contrast, he described Mein Kampf as a "masterpiece of cretinism" in which Hitler appeared to be "a sort of enraged teacher.

A soldier in 1940, Brasillach was captured by the Germans and held prisoner for several months after the fall of France. At his trial the prosecution alleged that his release was due to pro-German articles written while in captivity. He was freed in early 1941 and returned to his editorial duties at Je suis partout. He wrote in favor of the Vichy regime but later embraced a more wholehearted germanophile policy of collaboration and Nazi policies and criticized the Vichy state. He joined a group of French authors and artists in a trip to meet with German counterparts in Weimar and in November 1942 he supported the German militarization of the unoccupied zone under the Vichy government because it "reunited France".

Brassilach visited the site of the Katyn massacre, toured the Eastern Front, visited French volunteers and wrote, on his return to France, that he had gone from embracing collaboration due to reason and rationality to being a collaborator for reasons of the heart ("De collaborationiste de raison, je suis devenu collaborationiste de coeur.") He called for the death of left-wing politicians and in the summer of 1944 signed the call for the summary execution of all members of the French Resistance. He considered himself a "moderate" anti-Semite and was replaced as editor of Je suis partout in 1943 by the even more extreme Pierre-Antoine Cousteau. He was a member of the Groupe Collaboration, an initiative that encouraged close cultural ties between France and Germany. He went on to work for various journals, including Révolution nationale and le Petit Parisien. After the liberation of Paris Brasillach hid in an attic, joking in his diary: "Jews have been living in cupboards for four years, why not imitate them?" He gave himself up on September 14 when he heard that his mother had been arrested. He spent the next five months in prison and continued his literary endeavours while incarcerated.

The sentence caused an uproar in French literary circles and even some of Brasillach's political opponents protested. Resistance member and author François Mauriac, whom Brasillach had savaged in the press, circulated a petition to Charles De Gaulle to commute the sentence. This petition was signed by many of the leading lights of the French literary world, including Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Arthur Honegger, Jean Anouilh and Thierry Maulnier. De Gaulle did not comply and Brasillach was executed by firing squad in Montrouge. It has been argued that De Gaulle refused to spare Brasillach because the author had on numerous occasions called for Georges Mandel's execution. De Gaulle admired Mandel, a prominent conservative politician (who happened to be Jewish), and who was murdered by the Milice during the closing days of the Occupation. Brasillach called out "Long live France anyway!" ("Vive la France quand même!") immediately before his execution.

[Wikipedia (Adapted slightly)]

Unlike other gay fascist ideologues, Brasillach probably just "happened" to be gay. But Brasillach was also the only right-wing gay Catholic French collaborationist that I know of who actually lost his life because of his pro-German wartime activities. And particularly shockingly he was killed not for military or political crimes but for "intellectual" ones (Orwell's famous "thought crimes"). By some he is regarded as a "martyr" to this day. Although William Joyce wasn't gay, there are some fairly obvious parallels. In practice quite probably he was also targeted because de Gaulle harboured a personal grudge against him.