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| 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 the
Action 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.
