Memory of War in France, 1914-45: Cesar Fauxbras, the Voice of the Lowly

Memory of War in France, 1914–45

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Also by Matt Perry: BREAD AND WORK: The Experience of Unemployment 1918–39 MARXISM AND HISTORY PRISONERS OF WANT: The Experience and Protest of the Unemployed in France, 1921–45 THE JARROW CRUSADE: Protest and Legend

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Memory of War in France, 1914–45 César Fauxbras, the Voice of the Lowly

Matt Perry Reader in Labour History, Newcastle University, UK

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© Matt Perry 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–59441–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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To Kelly and Frank

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Contents

List of Abbreviations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Preface

x

Introduction

1

Part I Great War at Sea 1

An Ordinary Sailor

17

2 Black Sea Mutiny: Consciousness and Memory

Part II

38

The Crisis of the 1930s

3

Amongst the Unemployed: Meat to be Burnt

61

4

A Candide for the 1930s: The Myths of the Popular Front

81

5 Pacifism on the Precipice of War

Part III

100

Defeat and Occupation

6 Survey of Defeat 1940

123

7

147

Occupation Diary 1941–44

Epilogue

170

Appendices

182

Notes

196

Select Bibliography

241

Index

253

vii

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Abbreviations AEAR Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists). CAA Comité d’Action Antibolchévique (Anti-Bolshevik Action Committee). CGT Confédération Générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labour). HLM Hébergement à loyer modéré (low rent social housing). LVF Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme (Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism). PCF Parti Communiste Française (French Communist Party). POW Prisoner of war. PPF Parti Populaire Français (French Popular Party). PSF Parti Social Français (French Social Party). RNP Rassemblement National Populaire (literally, National Popular Assembly). SFIO Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (French Section of the Worker’s International).

viii

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Acknowledgements I am indebted to a host of people who assisted me while I was working on this book. First mention must go to Fauxbras’s grandson Anthony Freestone who extended such generous assistance and access to his grandfather’s personal papers. Friends and colleagues – Claudia Baldoli, Steve Cannon, Alejandro Quiroga and Xavier Guégan – have read drafts of the typescript and provided invaluable comments. I am grateful for the help of archivists at Archives Nationales, Archives Départementales de Seine-Saint-Denis, Préfecture de Police de Paris, and Archives de la Service Historique de la Marine. I would also express gratitude for the financial support of British Academy, the Welcome Trust and School of History at Newcastle University. Michael Strang and Ruth Ireland have been most helpful and supportive at Palgrave. The anonymous referee was both insightful and generous. Finally, special thanks to MLG.

ix

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Preface I first encountered César Fauxbras’s work in the French National Library when working on a previous book about unemployment in interwar France. Perhaps more than any other French novel about the slump, his Viande à Brûler raised interesting issues about the experience of joblessness. The degree to which the book corresponded to the author’s own experiences was unclear. Was he, I wondered, one of the unemployed? I later found such ambiguity of authorial status elsewhere in Fauxbras’s work. In a sense, this did not matter, Viande à Brûler came closest to a classic depression novel in the mould of Love on the Dole or Little Man, What Now? that I could find in French literature. A little bibliographical inquiry about Fauxbras revealed three other novels: Jean Le Gouin, Mer Noire and Antide. Having read these, I had become intrigued by this new tangent to my research. At this point, my inquiries were thwarted. The biographical dictionary of French labour, Le Maitron, frustratingly yielded only a couple of lines, confirming my ignorance of the obscure César Fauxbras. I did not even know his true identity. I returned to other matters. It was the republication of Jean Le Gouin and the resulting chance connection via its publisher with Fauxbras’s grandson that opened up Fauxbras’s other writings and access to his personal papers. Fauxbras’s grandson Anthony Freestone was himself attempting to rescue the author from the amnesia of posterity, which even extended to his own family as Freestone’s mother had not read the books and his grandmother only spoke vaguely of ‘books about boats’. Fauxbras’s papers included his survey of defeat, his wartime diary and his extended essay about the French navy and Vichy. By now, serendipity – the muse of microhistory – had assembled such a variety of material that it seemed difficult to ignore. So it was that this book began to take shape. Not only did Fauxbras deal with unemployment but also the sailors of the Great War and the naval mutinies thereafter, the Popular Front, the defeat of France and the German occupation of Paris. For someone interested in the social history of France, it was a cache of great historical riches. To give a flavour of Fauxbras’s work – particularly his unpublished materials – I have translated extracts as appendices.

x

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Preface xi

For those who wish to consult Fauxbras’s work, intrigued like me by this enigmatic figure, his maritime novels Jean Le Gouin and Mer Noire are available in the British Library. All his novels are in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Éditions Allia are in the process of publishing his survey of prisoners of war Sondage 1940. Perhaps, publication of Fauxbras’s war diary will follow.

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Introduction

Fauxbras as a historical witness Neither conventional biography nor literary study, this book summons the author César Fauxbras as a historical witness. In so doing it treats his writings primarily as historical documents, rather than as the objects of literary analysis. The goal is to use these texts to illuminate Fauxbras’s age. Both as an author and as a political activist, Fauxbras is relatively unknown. The person behind this literary pseudonym was Kléber Gaston Gabriel Alcide Sterckeman (1899–1968).1 What is initially exciting about Fauxbras is the extraordinary variety of his writings about contemporary events which are so richly inscribed with insight and experience. These writings might be grouped into three chronological phases. What first prompted him to write was his time as a sailor in the French navy during the Great War, only finally being discharged in 1921. Based on his knowledge and experience of the sea, he wrote two novels: Jean Le Gouin (1932) about the French Mediterranean fleet during the u-boat campaign, and Mer Noire (1935) about the naval mutiny in the Black Sea in April 1919.2 A second phase opened after his maritime fiction when Fauxbras authored two novels that attempted to capture the spirit of the 1930s: one about unemployment and the second about the political crisis of the late Third Republic. In both Viande à Brûler (1935) and Antide (1938), despite their departure from the nautical theme, the experience of war continued to frame the narrative.3 The outbreak of the Second World War and the interruption that it constituted to Fauxbras’s literary career marked a third phase in his work. In June–July 1940, Fauxbras reacted to the peculiar climate of France’s defeat by conducting interviews with French soldiers in German prisoner of war camps. On his return to Paris, he recorded his experiences 1

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Memory of War in France, 1914–45

of occupation in an unpublished diary. In sum, then, Fauxbras performs a remarkably varied role as a witness during these years. The chapter structure of this book considers each of these works in turn. What follows – given the lack of knowledge about Fauxbras’s life – is an unavoidably sketchy outline. We know that he was born on 30 January 1899 in the fishing community of Rosendaël, near Dunkirk, the Flemish port with its proletarian mix of dockers, sailors, steelworkers and shipyard hands.4 His father, Clovis Ernest Sterckeman, was a shipping insurance agent who was able to maintain his family in relative comfort. A Fauxbras short story described how as a youth he played Dunkirk’s derelict boats and that the sea had a magnetic appeal with which algebra could not compare.5 Abandoning school despite good results, Fauxbras’s own association with the sea began in April 1914 as an apprentice marine aboard the Amorique located at the naval military academy École des Mousses in Brest. Shortly afterwards, on 18 February 1915, with the Great War in its seventh month, he enlisted at Brest town hall for a term of ten years with the French navy, as an apprentice sailor. In October 1915, at the tender age of 16, he became sailor third class (aide gabier, assistant topman) and joined the battleship Danton, on which he served until 11 May 1916.6 It was these months that formed the basis of his nautical novels. Fauxbras was not in fact at sea during the period of Jean Le Gouin. Whilst, according to his service record, he was aboard the Danton between October 1915 and May 1916, Jean Le Gouin purported to be about the period February to December 1917 when Sterckeman was stationed at Bizerte on the North African coast at the Centre Aérien de Bizerte (27 October 1916–1 July 1917) and then the Aérostation Maritime de Bizerte.7 Bizerte, it should be noted, became the principal location for a second wave of mutinies on the battleships Voltaire (19–22 June 1919) and the Condorcet (11–12 June). He gained his airship pilot’s licence in January 1918, so would have patrolled the shipping lane between Algiers and Marseilles that he described in Jean Le Gouin. After these assignments, he returned to the sea aboard the Surveillante between 22 September 1919 and 4 January 1921. After his spell in the French navy, he found himself once again in Maloles-Bains and entered the merchant navy, gaining his captain’s certificate on 25 April 1922 at Le Havre.8 But in the early 1920s, he abandoned his maritime career and moved to Paris. There, he married Marcelle Renée Franck whose parents lived in Boulevard Beaumarchais in the fourth arrondissement. Between 1 December 1925 and 5 January 1931, he acted as a chief accountant for a car garage and showroom, passing his accountancy diploma in 1929.9 From the fourth arrondissement, he moved to the

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Introduction 3

17th in 1930, finally settling in Vincennes in 1934.10 In the summer of 1931, Fauxbras moved to the Villa Keror, La Ciotat in the south of France with the idea of establishing a bookshop, presumably because this could be combined with writing. The bookshop never materialized, instead Fauxbras bought a boat and went through the money that his father had donated until nothing remained and his return to Paris was unavoidable. After that, between 1 June 1932 and 31 January 1933, Fauxbras found more work as a jobbing accountant with a marble supplier.11 During the interwar period, he appears to have worked irregularly, lived modestly, and, though he was periodically broke, this allowed him to pursue his literary ambitions. When this approach failed, he on occasion relied on help from his or his wife’s family. Having failed in 1925 to secure publication for Les Patouillards with Flammarion, Fauxbras tried several publishers for Jean Le Gouin in 1930.12 On 5 March 1931, Fauxbras met with Max Fischer, the literary director of Flammarion. Four months later, the prospective author signed a contract for Jean Le Gouin that gave Flammarion first refusal on his future novels.13 This was the beginning of his literary and journalistic career which lasted until the outbreak of war. After 1940, despite producing interesting material that he offered to various publishing houses, his efforts to rekindle his career were frustrated. The world had changed. The pacifist left had at the time of the outbreak of war become an isolated, despairing, persecuted minority and after the liberation was tainted with collaboration, given that many of its ranks had accepted cooperation with the Third Reich as the most likely means of bringing peace to Europe. His contacts dried up, his organizational networks atrophied and the literary space in which he published no longer existed. The work of Fauxbras has not been accorded the interest that it merits. This is surprising given that it cuts across world-altering events that have drawn such unflagging attention from scholars and the general public. As well as its historical significance, César Fauxbras’s oeuvre warrants serious consideration on the grounds of its intrinsic literary worth and competence. The pinnacle of his literary career was Viande à Brûler, his novel about the unemployed written in the depths of France’s depression. Widely reviewed, Viande was a critical success.14 It was nominated for the prestigious Prix Goncourt and the Société des Gens de Lettres and the agent for film director Jean Epstein approached the author for the film rights. It established Fauxbras’s reputation. Consequently, he was flattered in literary circles with epithet ‘the French Gorky’. The retrieval of Fauxbras from his current obscurity is thus worthwhile from a literary and historical

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Memory of War in France, 1914–45

perspective. This is a process that has already begun with the republication of his first novel Jean Le Gouin in 2004. Moreover, his survey of prisoners of war is about to be published in the original French with Allia. Given the almost ethnographic character of his writing, Fauxbras lends himself to examination as a historical witness. Indeed, within his family, he was known as ‘mouche’ (the fly) because of his love of eavesdropping the conversations of others. In his work, Fauxbras proposed that he could offer the perspective of the intimate spectator or provide the insider’s knowledge of events.15 He acts as participant and observer of the Great War and how that conflict shaped the two subsequent decades. To consult witnesses in this way is to navigate treacherous methodological waters. Of late, some historians have objected to the role of the witness in the framing of historical interpretation. Where 1914–18 is concerned, the debate about the role of the witness revolves around the work of Jean Norton Cru. In Témoins (Witnesses), the veteran and academic surveyed the combat literature of over 300 books. For him, it was imperative that those who wrote about the war had witnessed it.16 Cru highlighted the truth imperative that urged combatants on to write. They sought to dispel the myths and propaganda of war (known as bourrage de crâne, literally the stuffing of the skull) that obscured, mystified and diminished their combat experience. The republication of Témoins in 1993 provoked a historical controversy. Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker spoke of the ‘dictatorship of the witness’ and argued that understandings of the Great War have been at the mercy of such witnesses, ignoring their silences and internalizing their assumptions. In particular, post-war pacifist veterans censored their complicity in and patriotic consent for violence.17 In response, Frédéric Rousseau defended Cru’s work and historical reconstruction of the Great War that deployed witnesses to frame interpretation.18 It would be dangerous to become enmeshed in these large and complex fields of scholarship here. Suffice it to say that whilst it is true that Fauxbras was, as Leonard V. Smith put it, an ‘embattled self’ who struggled to deal with the empirical and semantic aspects of his memories of war, this does not entirely severe his referential connection to the war experiences that he was able to access – however problematically – via personal memory.19

A micro-historical itinerary Even if a standard biography were desirable, the gaps in the evidence of Fauxbras’s life are too great. Instead, my aspiration is to use his writings and experiences to reconstruct a view of the world: to let him provide

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Introduction 5

the basis for a microhistory of these years. This is not an exercise in mere antiquarianism. To examine Fauxbras is to scrutinize a microcosm of a generation’s experiences, activities, emotions and thoughts. He is simultaneously normal and anomalous. To deal with these years at the general level would offer little to the existing historiography. In contrast, Fauxbras’s micro-perspective is distinctive, selective and suggestive and therefore has the potential to contribute a new perspective. His life allows us to shorten the focal length of investigation and the small scale permits the examination of bigger questions in distinctive or unconventional ways. To this end, the book will delve beyond Fauxbras’s work into the historical records to elucidate the issues that he raised and bring clarity to his historical situation. Fauxbras’s engagement with great contemporary issues and events thus entails an interplay of scales between the miniscule and the grandioise. Consequently, in a sense, the heterodox Fauxbras resembles an early twentieth-century equivalent of Menocchio, the heretical Friulian miller in Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, whose cosmology could be reconstructed from the records of the inquisition.20 Fauxbras’s heterodoxy eclectically drew on pre-war heresies of anti-militarism, anti-clericalism, syndicalism, and socialism already well established in French political culture and a left literary culture of Lucien Descaves, Henri Barbusse, Paul Vigné d’Octon and Roland Dorgelès. This terrain nourished his experiences of war. The reader might be tempted to treat this book as a series of essays related to vital elements in French social history: the Great War at sea, the naval mutinies of 1919 and anti-militarism, unemployment and France’s Second World War. With such a diverse body of writing and experience as Fauxbras’s, it might be easy to lose sight of continuities and connections in a mire of episodic incoherence. From a certain viewpoint, each aspect of Fauxbras’s writings warrants sufficient interest to be studied in its own right. However this would miss the continuum that Fauxbras’s subjectivity provides. Particular concerns were integral to Fauxbras’s outlook and these persisted throughout his literary career. They connect all his writings. The most significant is his memory of the Great War and the meanings that he drew from it. With wartime propaganda as his reference point, he aimed to counter the ideology of those in authority. In so doing, he spoke the vernacular and sought to reflect the interests of the lowly: the Jean Le Gouin (Jack Tar), the poilu (footslogger), the unemployed, the lampiste (literally the lamplighter or scorned unskilled worker), the prisoner of war or the populo (people) of occupied Paris. He championed throughout the perspective of the ranks and the lower depths.

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Memory of War in France, 1914–45

It is possible to draw two senses of continuity across an analysis of Fauxbras’s writings. First, there is the persistence of self or Fauxbras’s personality. Second, time arrowed through events that were, for Fauxbras, sequential and were therefore connected, or at least perceived to be. This doubly unbroken trajectory suggests the analytical possibility of deploying the itinerary approach that has become popular in French intellectual history. With this approach, historians have tried to go beyond the demarcations of political philosophy to follow the real intellectual journeys of individuals. The focus in this regard has been biographical in a limited intellectual sense. Research has often focused on unusual or transgressive trajectories: such as those who, like Doriot or Hervé, broke with socialism or communism to move to the far right.21 Some, such as Zeev Sternhell, have sought to ascribe an ideological causality to such intellectual genealogies, whilst others, like Philippe Burrin, are less prescriptive. More ambitious projects have deployed a collective biography approach to understand the intellectual dynamics of such groups as interwar pacifists or revisionist Marxists in their respective journeys to wartime collaborationism and fascism. The assumptions of the totalitarian school, which were in the ascendant in French historiography after the arrival of the ex-leftist New Philosophers in the mid-1970s and the conversion of François Furet, frame some of the key works concerned with collective itineraries. These distinctly political and idealist approaches to intellectual history might be contrasted with a more sociological stance. For instance, Christophe Charle explored the social position of intellectuals and the determinants of their perspectives during the Dreyfus affair, finding especially significant their relationship to political authority and economic power.22 Gisèle Sapiro applied such a methodology to the ‘war of the writers’ of intellectual collaborators and resistors between 1940 and 1953.23 In the case of Fauxbras, the scope is more limited and less ambitious, being concerned with an individual who belonged to wider networks of intellectuals who subscribed to different itineraries. His journey perhaps casts light upon this approach and adds a sense of intimate detail to this process. The ambition here then is that Fauxbras’s various entanglements with events and ideas will hopefully bring illuminating glimpses into French history in the period of the two world wars.

Memory and consciousness: a critique of cultural memory Confronted with the unique combination of forms of evidence (novels, newspaper columns, satire, diary, survey) and discrete historiographies

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Introduction 7

(the Great War, unemployment, Popular Front and the Second World War) a further challenge has been to outline a conceptual and methodological framework that can connect these elements. The prevailing master categories of these respective historiographies (war culture, sites of memory, public opinion) are unable to straddle the episodic variety of Fauxbras’s journey. This conceptual deficit licences a distinctive approach. The intention is that the concept of consciousness – which emerges from a critique of cultural understandings of memory – would underpin the entire study. Witnesses, of course, do not provide us with direct access to historical experience. Instead, they relay their past to us in mediated form as they rely upon memory to recall their experiences. Over the past twenty or so years, the analysis of memory has opened up rich historiographical vistas not least in modern French history and has become a staple ingredient in the cultural paradigm of history. With historians such as Pierre Nora, Maurice Agulhon and Philippe Ariès, French scholarship has pioneered the historiographical ‘memory boom’. The principal approach to memory is that of the examination of the sites of memory. This is a phrase that Pierre Nora coined in the multi-volume project Lieux de Mémoires (1984–92) which sought to understand the realm of signs through which France had a relationship with its past, and thereby constructed a sense of Frenchness.24 It drew together essays on the ‘sites of memory’ or ‘points of crystallization’ of French tradition such as Marianne, Verdun or the Marseillaise. The greatest influence on Nora was the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945), who premised his work upon a radical rejection of memory as the attribute of atomized individuals and their personal experiences. Halbwachs drew on Emile Durkheim’s sociology of collective representations. Thus, memory was collective and shaped in social frameworks such as families, nations, religions or classes. This sites of memory approach has produced some of historiography’s most compelling recent works. Several historians have probed the interplay between interwar France and collective memories of the Great War. Jay Winter has explored this cultural realm of European landscape, architecture, commemorative practices, film and novels and their relationship to the memory of the Great War. His Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995) posited that such commemoration was a largely apolitical outpouring of grief amongst a generation in mourning.25 As part of his pioneering and broad-ranging work on the post-war veterans’ movements, Antoine Prost argued that civic and funerary practices reinforced the republican values of the veterans.26 Following on from Prost,

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Memory of War in France, 1914–45

Daniel J. Sherman focused upon the commemorative practices and the monuments to the dead to find traces of social and political conflict.27 Drawing on Foucault, Sherman identified how the relations of power and knowledge insinuated themselves into the ‘emergence’ of these monuments across fund-raising, design, location, symbolism, iconography, dedication and rituals. These three writers, despite their differing emphases, locate memory culturally in the broader and narrower senses of the word: culture meaning either the normative environment or the evidence base of cultural artefacts. Hence, those terms of reference that Halbwachs set have been fruitful for historians in recent years. Where this study is concerned, Halbwachs’s insights are useful to identify the social frameworks of memory, such as the corporate and occupational milieux (sailors, veterans and journalists) as well as the associational networks (political, syndicalist and pacifist) in which Fauxbras formed and retrieved his memories. In sum, such explanations of the meaning of war through memory have deepened our understanding of the persistence of the Great War in European culture. However, historians have recognized that there are significant limitations to this culturalsemiotic standpoint.28 The approach in this book is predicated upon a critique of the Halbwachian understanding of memory. First, there is the problem of semiotic autonomy, which results in a difficulty connecting this semantic realm to the realm of extra-semantic human agency. Second, the neo-Halbwachian approach is consequently blind to the relationship between memory of war, agency and the indeterminate openness of events; or to put it in other words, not only how memory informs actions but also how these actions shape events. This critique therefore renders memory part of a dynamic process of conscious action, reopening this period as an age of historical possibilities. To understand this period too exclusively through modes of memory as mourning results in a backward-looking present, which fails to capture the modernist sensibility of crisis and historical openness. Finally, an individual’s memory of war is connected with the shared realm of political ideas, dialogical decision-making and practice: or in shorthand, individual and collective political praxis. To put it another way, the neo-Halbwachian approach has tended to have as its object of analysis cultural representations or practices rather than memory in the making in the crucible of consciousness. This has reified the study of memory, transforming it into the study of things such as war monuments and displacing it from its proper cognitive abode.29 The corollary is a rather limited latitude for

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Introduction 9

conscious agency circumscribed to the contested signification of these commemorative representations (although even less space existed in Halbwachs’s account of collective memory). This is not a new criticism. Marc Bloch expressed the same problem slightly differently, criticizing Halbwachs for his failures to acknowledge three aspects of memory in history: personal memory, the relationship between the individual within the group and the problem of the transmission of memory. 30 Equally perceptively, Valentin Vološinov objected to the Durkheimian approach that Halbwachs adopted on the grounds that it entailed a form of abstract objectivism akin to Saussure.31 Where language was concerned (and it holds true for memory), Vološinov proposed a dialectical relationship between the subjective actor (the utterance) and the objective system (the language). The subject matter of this inquiry – Fauxbras’s memory – accentuates the Halbwachian failure to recognize agency in collective memory formation. This study therefore shifts the camera angle from cultural memory located in a system of representations to memory as an attribute of the consciousness of the socially situated individual. To reconstruct memory through consciousness requires theoretical perspectives other than those of Halbwachs. Vološinov emphasized the dynamic, social and dialogical character of consciousness. He observed that consciousness and language take the form of an inner speech or an inner dialogue and develop communicatively between the subject and others. For him, language is a shared territory of ideological contestation, upon which the tussle of agency resulted in a many-layered multiaccented process. Also opting for a processual rather than a structuralist approach, Lev Vygotsky shared many of Vološinov’s propositions but deepened these insights through a focus upon intellectual development of the child. For Vygotsky, the childhood transitions from speech-foroneself to speech-for-others and from external to inner speech revealed the critical importance of the social environment to cognitive development. The stage of speech-for-oneself, or of egocentric speech, allowed the child to formulate concepts and make decisions about the world around it. Hence, from an early stage, thought developed through interaction with the social environment and mediated human activity. The development of more sophisticated forms of memory, guided by meaning rather than rote, is part of this process and pivotal to learning. Vygotsky also cautioned against a simple equation between thought and memory, which intersected but also had independent properties.32 According to Vygotsky, human evolution provided further explanatory force to the view that language was social in character. Rejecting

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10 Memory of War in France, 1914–45

an enclosed semiotic realm, he judged signs to be psychological tools that, like physical tools, facilitated human interaction, the meeting of human needs and the understanding of our natural environment. The key for the argument here then is that memory is called upon as part of a socially situated conscious process.33 This dialogical or communicative dimension of memory emerges in all Fauxbras’s writings – with dialogues amongst the unemployed to make sense of the depression, sailors to judge the consequences of revolt, supporters of the Popular Front to make sense of the failings of the left – and most manifestly in his survey of prisoners of war. Socially framed memory of personal war experiences prompted and guided Fauxbras’s writing and activism as well as his reactions to unfolding events. Where Halbwachs found difficulty in accommodating individual agency within his notion of collective memory, the consciousness approach reconciles the creative capacity of the individual within wider language and mnemonic systems. Fauxbras’s adoption, to illustrate the point, of the poilu slang and his inventive satirical word play fit nicely with this dialogical understanding of language and consciousness. Others have explicitly connected memory and consciousness. Overlooked by historians, biologist Steven Rose’s Making of Memory appealed for the gap to be bridged between the natural sciences and the humanities in the understanding of memory.34 His argument is as much with scientists with their naïve positivism and reductionism as it is with those in the humanities. He takes issue with those reductionist disciplines such as evolutionary psychology, sociobiology and behaviourism that are particularly guilty of these errors. His work reminds us that memory is an attribute of both the mind and the brain and that such an insight can identify certain parameters within which memory operates. As Steven Rose outlined, memory and consciousness evolved as adaptive strategies in relation to the environment in which we find ourselves. Humans differ from other animals in the degree of sophistication of memory because it becomes embedded in language and culture. Hence memory is about learning and about meaning. Also appealing beyond the science and humanities divide, psychologist David B. Pillemer – examining the work of historians of China into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and secondary or vicarious trauma – has called for an interdisciplinary agenda between history and psychology. He maintained that these investigations opened a fruitful avenue for historians but questioned the notion of collective memory as ambiguous and analytically misleading.35 I would stop

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Introduction 11

short of an outright rejection of the term because the two obvious alternatives have their own problems. The first is to see in collective memory merely the exercise of a dominant ideology. Whilst it is the case, taking an instance from this book, that the state in the shape of the French navy sought as an institution to project its version of a shared past, it was not entirely successful and not uncontested. Having said this, we should be aware of the way in which the formation of collective memory is not an enterprise between equals, and that the term collective memory can mask an ideological purpose in the service of particular social interests. With this in mind, Bodnar distinguishes between official and vernacular memory. 36 The second alternative to collective memory – the aggregate memory of individuals – fails to encapsulate the communicative dimension of memory formation or the recall of received images, discourse and wisdoms not personally experienced. The position then is one of a qualified or provisional retention of the concept of collective memory. These judgements should not mean an abandonment of cultural anthropology for cognitive psychology but an effort to understand the parameters and intersections of both. The influence of such interdisciplinary dialogue has led to a growing preference amongst historians for the term social memory which might be understood as the nexus of private memory, socially determined frameworks of memory and human agency.37 An interdisciplinary cognitive understanding of memory would reassert the following features: memory as a learning process and the basis for action; the relationship between memory and forgetting; memory as a dialectic of the sensuous and the semantic; memory as a central source of identity; the role of voluntary and involuntary memory cues; and, formation and retrieval of memory as a creative process rather than one of simple storage and information accessing. These observations of course do not set narrow deterministic parameters and allow very considerable latitude for culture and politics. Nevertheless, they do say something definite about consciousness as a historical process. Multidisciplinary insights can help to guard against misconceptions about the way memory works and can assist in discriminating between memory and ideology. Furthermore, such an approach suggests the limitations of idealist accounts of memory, consciousness and consequently historical change. Arriving at this conclusion via a different route, Jay Winter and Antoine Prost recognized the problem of the cultural paradigm of the Great War as a ‘new idealism’ and ‘de-materialization’ of historical explanation.38

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Consciousness as the meeting place of culture and politics It is a contemporary commonplace that we inhabit a post-political age. Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière and others have noted that symptomatic of this dominant neoliberal discourse is the way that politics has been culturalized.39 This has happened in modes of historical investigation with the emergence of a cultural conceptual paradigm in which memory and everyday life are considered to operate within a cultural realm and are an attribute of cultural processes. As Charles Maier observed, the memory boom can be associated with the contemporary abandonment of transformative politics and, by extention, the pessimistic closure of the possibility of transformative politics in the past.40 Less problematically, culture has also gained ground on politics at the evidentiary level with, as in this study, the growth in historical writing based upon cultural sources. Finally, following cultural conceptualizations and cultural forms of evidence, there has been a growth in cultural explanatory modes. A clear example of this tendency can be seen in the debate about France’s Great War, its memory, its mutinies and the status of its witnesses. Political historians have fought a rearguard action against the culture of war as an overarching explanatory framework of the Great War. In response to this contemporary trend for culture to consume politics, Žižek proposed an elegant solution: not politics versus culture but a politicization of culture. This would seem an interesting proposition given that this study scrutinizes cultural primary source materials. With the conceptual focus upon Fauxbras’s consciousness, the mutual exclusivity of culture and politics seems to be especially problematic. Some of the historiographical difficulty derives from shifting and ambiguous definitions of the political and the cultural. Culture is sometimes used in the sense of the ‘field of representations’; or, at others, the everyday practices and normative assumptions that ensure the reproduction of a way of life. Such often unacknowledged ambiguity clouds understandings of social and cultural processes. To explore the interplay of culture and politics, as is intended here, requires clarity about what is meant by politics. For our purposes, the political is how power relations are constituted, exercised or challenged. From the subaltern position that Fauxbras adopted, his politics is a conscious challenge to the routinized norms of thought and action in such a way that contests existing power relations. Consciousness is therefore the arena in which norms which constitute culture are processed: being internalized, ignored or challenged.

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Introduction 13

Consciousness then becomes the meeting place of culture and politics and consequently the true locus of agency and the motive force of intervention into the external world out there. With Fauxbras, cultural practices – such as humour in the prisoner of war camps, or rumour in occupied Paris, or graffiti and song in the case of mutineers – took on a political dimension in the sense that they contested power relations and prompted active engagement or deliberate inaction; in Fauxbras’s world, politics mediated culture and vice versa. In comparison to the neo-Halbwachian paradigm which identifies agency with signification, consciousness relocates or broadens agency in relation to action, to culture and to politics, connecting these elements. We thereby begin to reconsider the relationship between culture and politics. The binaries of either a political primacy or a cultural one in interpretations of the Great War in view of this seem less appealing. We might not insist on either culturally determined consent or politically determined constraint. By an extension of this logic, if this is the case with individuals, then it can certainly be the case for collective attitudes and collective behaviour. For this reason, consciousness is a more fruitful starting point for understanding Fauxbras’s itinerary through these events, than others such as public opinion, sites of memory or cultures of war.

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Part I Great War at Sea

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1 An Ordinary Sailor

César Fauxbras’s first novel Jean Le Gouin probes the veteran experience and memory of the Great War in an insightful and distinctive manner. First, Jean Le Gouin can be located within the abundant contemporary representations of war and considered within the context of wartime and post-war military propaganda.1 Initially, the war was depicted through official and unofficial propaganda. However, combat experience and the emergence of political opposition undermined the propaganda monopoly over information and the consensus struck in high politics. This wartime misinformation left a deep scepticism on the part of veterans. This chapter considers the post-war work of the Historical Service of the French Navy, weaving together the writings of Paul Chack, its chief, and Fauxbras who sought to contest this view. Their dispute bore a particular significance given that it took place against the specific backdrop of a crisis of the navy. The legacy of wartime propaganda was such that both Fauxbras and Chack asserted the truthfulness of their own accounts. There was no more important question in this respect than death at sea, perhaps the most poignant and indignant element of Fauxbras’s Jean Le Gouin. Finally, this leads to an assessment of the relationship between the war and memory, as it was through these contested reassertions of truth that collective memory of the war in France was formed.

Remembering the Great War When Flammarion published Jean Le Gouin in 1932, there already existed abundant literature based on the experience of the Great War.2 The experience of the war marked an entire generation in France. The battle of Verdun alone – fought between February and December 17

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18 Memory of War in France, 1914–45

1916 – cost 350,000 French lives. Collective grief, national memory and patriotic symbolism assigned Verdun an intoxicating visceral significance. 3 Three-quarters of the French army had circulated through its ferocious landscape. It came to be a metaphor of France’s war, the sacrifices of its poilus (infantrymen) and Pétain’s greatness. Initially, authors, often themselves too old to fight, penned a nationalist combat literature conforming to their conservative assumptions and patriotic convention. It was their vicarious contribution to a glorious war effort. Their language was one suffused with a romantic-heroic vision of war in which noble French soldiers fought to defend civilization against a barbarous enemy intent on its destruction. The prodigious writings of monarchist Maurice Barrès, the president of the League of Patriots, epitomized this literature: its quasi-religious imagery and rhetoric of ‘the French soul’ or the ‘sacred road’ to Verdun; the heroism of the French soldier ‘the sons of France’ who ‘fell gloriously on the field of honour’; the civilizational threat that the barbaric enemy posed; and, intolerant polemic against those critical of the war ‘the sowers of hatred between Frenchmen’.4 The patriotic literature of war was transformed when younger writers such as Henry Malherbe and René Benjamin incorporated their own experiences from the front.5 If the patriotic imagination fetishized Verdun, then the mutinies of 1917 were symptomatic of the growing questioning of the war. During these events that were occasioned by General Robert Nivelle’s offensive at Chemin des Dames, around 30,000 troops disobeyed their orders.6 This dissenting spirit was articulated in an oppositional literature about the war. The starting point of this anti-war literature was Romain Rolland’s essay Au-Dessus de la Mêlée (1915) written from Switzerland, arguing for a rational response to overcome the passionate turmoil of war. Though they were subject to censorship, newspapers appealing to the attitudes of soldiers and hostile to propaganda such as Le Canard Enchaîné (the duck or newspaper in chains) and Le Crapouillot (trench mortar) emerged.7 In terms of combat novels, the most successful wartime rejection of the conflict was Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu (1917).8 By the war’s end, this novel had sold a quarter of a million copies, had won the Prix Goncourt and conferred upon Barbusse an intellectual status of international renown and influence. He sought to mobilize both fellow veterans and intellectuals in the cause of peace and revolution in transnational organizations.9 His Le Feu opened up the genre of the anti-war combat novel of which Roland Dorgelès’s Croix des Bois (1919) – the title taken from the slang to be killed: ‘to win the wooden cross’ – was another notable literary and commercial success. As Jay

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Winter noted, Barbusse had introduced an apocalyptic aesthetic into literature.10 Reinforcing this point more generally, Martin Hurcombe accentuated the absurd in French combat novels.11 Film-makers such as Abel Gance took up this aesthetic to great effect. In Gance’s J’Accuse (1919 and 1938), the dead rise from their graves to accuse the living, a vivid metaphor for the abiding presence of the Great War in French political culture. By the time of the publication of Fauxbras’s Jean Le Gouin in 1932, an anti-war culture had spread across media and continents. The beginning of the second post-war decade marked a return of the theme in culture as the Locarno optimism of the late 1920s disintegrated. In 1931, the great pacifist novelist Jean Giono produced Le Grand Troupeau. In the year of Jean Le Gouin’s publication, Raymond Bernard directed a film version of Roland Dorgelès’s Croix des Bois and Louis-Ferdinand Céline published the astringent and libertarian Voyage au Bout de la Nuit, which followed a cynical officer-hating infantryman from the trenches and hospitals of war to post-war civilian adventures. Pacifism continued to generate cultural works of stature such as Jean Renoir’s classic film La Grande Illusion (1937), but by the mid-1930s other political concerns rivalled or confused opposition to war. Thus in 1937, Fauxbras lamented the declining popularity of the war novel, recommending Barbusse’s Le Feu and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, but counselling against Henry Bordeaux or the ‘infantile stupidity’ of René Benjamin. The ‘ten million corpses in waiting’, he argued, would do well to read these works.12

French Navy and the Great War What set Fauxbras’s Jean Le Gouin apart from most war novels was that it addressed the war at sea rather than in the trenches. As such it dealt with a very different combat experience. The institutional context also contrasted, as the navy was in many ways unlike the French army. Its political standing was inferior to the army and had a distinctive sociology. However damaging the Dreyfus affair to the army, the navy had had its own sharp public controversies about strategy before the war.13 Fauxbras steered a highly critical line through these naval policy debates. Amongst the entente powers, the French navy was distinctly the junior partner to the Royal Navy. From the late nineteenth century, German naval construction posed an increasing threat to British maritime supremacy and to two guiding assumptions of British military

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Memory of War in France, 1914–45

strategy: British naval superiority and the effectiveness of a naval blockade against central Europe. In 1913, Britain and France struck naval accords that envisaged naval cooperation in the event of war against Germany and her allies. The Anglo-French naval conference allocated the Mediterranean as an arena under French naval command, freeing greater British resources to guard the North Sea and the Channel against the German threat. The focus of much of France’s navy was therefore upon the Mediterranean during the war. At the outbreak of the war, in the Mediterranean the French navy confronted the Austro-Hungarian navy and the uncertainty about the affiliation of the Italian navy. The latter’s entry into the war meant that the Mediterranean balance of power strongly favoured France and their allies. The appearance of German submarines in the Mediterranean in May 1915 presented a new challenge that threatened to upset France’s advantage. The u-boat campaign reached its peak in 1917. This dimension of naval warfare was a troubling novelty and one that required strategic adjustments. In total in the four years of the conflict, France lost 644 vessels with a combined tonnage of 782,057.14 It was not until 1918 that the German submarine menace in the Mediterranean was eventually ‘contained, but it was not eliminated’. Even this ultimate ascendancy rested upon a combination of factors: the numbers of German submarines needing refit or repair, Allied counter-measures and the convoy system.15 The French navy emerged from the war with an ambiguous record. Though on the victorious side, its role was indecisive in that outcome and its status was relegated to that of a regional power. There was no great naval battle to salvage French maritime prestige. Events denied it a Verdun around which to construct an institutional myth of heroism or a Trafalgar to amplify its global status. Indeed, the most spectacular events in the Mediterranean were the loss of French battleships and the Dardanelles fiasco. Just as the naval ministers and official naval historians asserted that without the navy, France would have lost the war, so Fauxbras polemicized against the navy’s balance sheet of war. In Jean Le Gouin, the narrator Vignes observed that the only triumph of the French navy consisted of the sinking of a solitary Austrian cruiser and, in Fauxbras’s second novel Mer Noire, that 56 months after the declaration of war and 4 months after the armistice, the French navy registered its first victory, which entailed the destruction of a hangar in the Ukrainian town of Kherson.16 The official position was that the navy’s control of the Mediterranean and lines of supply from North Africa had been essential to victory. Fauxbras continued his criticism of the navy

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in his journalism. He wrote an open letter to the Minister of the Navy in L’Oeuvre which was reproduced as a pamphlet.17 The substance of his arguments turned on the redundancy of the large battleship in the era of the submarine and aviation. Paul Chack (Chief of the Historical Service of the Navy, 1923–35) refuted such charges, asserting in 1939 that whoever held the sea would hold the land.18 In Jean Le Gouin, Fauxbras sought to articulate the sailor’s perception of the record of the French navy during the Great War. His experience counselled a jaundiced view of the official account of glorious achievement. He also suggested that the central lesson that rank-andfile sailors had gained was that the navy’s overblown rhetoric belied contempt for their lives. Hence Fauxbras criticized the design of the cruiser-battleship, the lack of torpedo ship protection and the lack of both lifeboats or lifejackets. The consequence was that several hundred sailors drowned unnecessarily when German or Austrian submarines struck. The names of those ships that sank and the dates of their loss provided sharp lessons for French sailors. Rank-and-file reactions to maritime events revealed an increasing gap between propaganda and reality; from this developed a shared framework of injustice.

The simple sailor’s battle for the truth: Fauxbras and Chack Fauxbras’s first two novels Jean Le Gouin (1932) and Mer Noire (1935) see the French navy through the eyes of Vignes, a lowly gabier (topman). In both, Fauxbras claimed to speak for the average sailor, or the archetypal Jack Tar or ‘Jean Le Gouin’ (hence the title). This name had revolutionary associations given that La Page de Jean Le Gouin and then Jean Le Gouin were the titles of the communist propaganda sheets produced for sailors in the French navy from the mid-1920s.19 Providing an insight into Fauxbras’s motivation, the preface to Jean Le Gouin evoked a scene to explain why the work of Paul Chack so enraged him that it prompted him to write (see Appendix 1). Fauxbras’s almost obsessive targeting of Chack resulted from the urge, common to Great War veterans, to challenge the propaganda of war. Fauxbras later noted that the historians of Chack’s ilk were simply completing the process of brainwashing that the newspapers had initiated during the war.20 Fauxbras perceived Paul Chack as his great intellectual adversary and their contest is crucial to understanding Fauxbras’s work.21 In a letter to a publisher, Sterckeman observed that with Paul Chack and his ‘consorts’, ‘truth undergoes many distortions’ in their ‘fantasist apologia’.22

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Memory of War in France, 1914–45

References to Chack appeared time and again in Fauxbras’s work even in writing bearing little relation to the navy.23 To give a flavour of Chack’s tone, he could observe of the campaign in the Dardanelles that this was ‘an undying monument to the heroism of our race’.24 Having been assigned to the Historical Service in 1920, later becoming its chief, Commander Chack emphasized the heroic efforts of officers. As one sympathetic reviewer said of his Branlebas de Combat, ‘Still more officers, nothing but officers ...’ and believed that, in Chack, ‘the navy has someone to tell France what it thinks.’25 Though hardly merited from a literary standpoint, the prolific Chack received prizes, accolades and prestigious positions with the literary world. He won the Prix de la Renaissance in 1927, became vice-president of the Société des Gens de Lettres in 1932 and was the president of the Association des Écrivains Combattants.26 Chack’s writings were deeply imbued with the conservative mentality of the naval officer class. Having graduated from naval school in 1896, Chack himself was a naval captain and had commanded a destroyer during the war. Given Chack’s time as Chief of the Historical Service of the French Navy, Fauxbras’s contest with Chack was more than a personal rivalry but one where a struggling author confronted institutional power. In 1919, Minister of the Navy Georges Leygues had reorganized and expanded the Historical Service of the Navy with a new archive and library section, a museum, a history section and the relaunch of Revue Maritime.27 According to Leygues, the purpose was to learn the lessons of the war as well as to provide and centralize resources for the writing of French naval history.28 These institutional dynamics shaped Chack’s early writing and, as his position became more entrenched, he in turn contributed to the transformation of the function of the Historical Service and to the reinvention of the French navy. In contrast to Leygues’s account of the rationale for the navy’s historical service, Fauxbras offered an alternative explanation in his unpublished manuscript Pourquoi La Marine a Trahi (1945). According to Fauxbras, Chack and the Historical Service of the Navy sought to restore the confidence of the navy as an institution, to rewrite the history of the Great War with the intention of once again bidding for more naval resources from the taxpayer. Fauxbras believed that the official account of the Great War at sea was the product of the ‘Chackian’ imagination and stupidities. In the 1920s, with tributes, prizes and accolades, the navy invented the literary standing of Chack and Chack reinvented the navy. A new heroic past and glorious sea battles during the Great War restored the navy in the favours of the government. By 1930, Fauxbras

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believed everyone seemed to accept ‘Chackian fictions’ and it was only the rank and file of the navy who knew otherwise. Gulling ‘sea scouts, schoolkids and adults’ alike, Chack had rescued the morale of the officer class after an ambiguous war, mutiny, disarmament and the release of mutineers. Moreover, he had restored its reputation in public opinion and had eclipsed the memory of the mutinies. Fauxbras observed: I met, at that time [the 1930s], former infantrymen convinced that they’d suffered much less in their trenches than the officer of the navy in his bunk. Modestly, I tried to explain matters. They did not believe me. They imagined the life of the sailor as a series of explosions of mines and torpedoes, drownings to the cry of Vive la France!, providential rescues after a fortnight of thirst on a raft. Whether they’d read Chack or not, ‘chackonnerie’ had seeped into them. On the other hand, they only knew one incontestable thing of the drama of the Black Sea: the mutineers were traitors. The Chack team, so skilful at making an entire volume from an indecisive exchange of three shells between a patrol ship and a submarine, prudently kept their distance from Sebastapol. Dangerous territory! The navy had forgotten everything! Just as they forget Mers el-Kébir today.29 The restructuring of the Historical Service of the Navy took place in the context of a many-sided institutional crisis. Internal navy documents recognized this disarray. First, the officer class was in manifest crisis. Vice-Admiral Merveilleux du Vignaux who ended the war as the Chief of the Naval General Staff (Chef d’État Major d’Armée) identified a ‘crisis of morale’ in the French officer class in the aftermath of the Black Sea mutinies.30 Second, the level of insubordination resulted in a crisis of discipline in the relations between the officers and the ranks. The officer class could only conceive of relations with the men through the prism of discipline and, as Rear-Admiral Dumesnil observed in July 1919, a ‘crisis of authority’ existed inside the navy and its manifestations were ‘dangerous in themselves and perhaps more so by their revolutionary influence’.31 Third, Dumesnil also recognized a crisis of ideas: the ideas of the naval hierarchy no longer held unquestioning sway over the navy as a whole. In order to address the institutional crisis, Dumesnil proposed a tighter relationship between the high command and the officer, the restoration of discipline and, anticipating the role that Chack would play, a ‘counter-propaganda to combat anarchist propaganda’. Dumesnil was not alone in attempting to analyse and prescribe remedies for the navy’s crisis. Admiral Docteur blamed

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24 Memory of War in France, 1914–45

politicians and government for the naval mutinies because of lax censorship ‘which darkened the joy of victory so painfully won’.32 In his memoirs, capitaine de vaisseau (captain) Georges Débat reflected upon this some years later: This was in the difficult times after the war. Even the lustre of military victory was tarnished in the morose destiny that France sank into. The crews, poorly paid, sailed little and the ships of a certain age were covered with reminiscences of the troubles of the Black Sea. It was hardly edifying to go roaming the oceans without a precise goal.33 The navy’s investigations omitted a final dimension of its own crisis, that of leadership. The conduct of the war brought about polemics and recriminations within the naval elite. Before the war’s end, Admiral Dartige de Fournet broke silence and criticized Vice-Admiral de Bon and the government over the handling of the Greek revolt.34 Retired admiral and nationalist deputy Amédée-Pierre-Léonard Bienaimé was highly critical of Victor Augagneur, the Minister of the Navy, and of Admiral Boué de Lapeyère.35 The navy’s diagnosis of its ills also failed to contextualize them within the wider contemporary revolutionary crisis of European society (1917–20). This manifested itself differently in each European country. In France as elsewhere, with the exception of Russia, the elements of crisis (labour, countryside, national question, army, navy) did not synchronize, thereby facilitating Europe’s rulers in their efforts to recast their hegemony.36 Despite the threat of revolution passing, institutional difficulties persisted in the French navy until around 1925.37 Naval disarmament, recruitment problems, their neglected war record and the difficulties of defining a new role all followed the wave of mutinies. Until the naval statute of 1924, naval planning was in tatters: the war had identified the deficiencies of the Normandie class battleship, upon which naval construction programmes had been established in law in 1912.38 Moreover, unlike other maritime powers, the French government had converted much of its shipbuilding capacity to the production of materials for the front and therefore lost relative ground during the war with the result that her navy was, according to insiders, ‘agonizing’ by the war’s end.39 Thus, the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–2 threatened to prevent France from restoring her navy devastated by wartime losses and already suffering from relative decline in relation to newer naval powers such as the United States, Germany and Japan. Symptomatic of the

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sentiment in naval quarters in 1923, Captain Ven penned an alarmist pamphlet about the inadequacies of the fleet.40 This was more than mere scaremongering. Personnel numbers tell the story. Enrolments at the École Navale declined from an average of 5–600 in ‘normal years’ to below 200 between 1921 and 1925.41 It was not just young officers that the navy had difficulty attracting. General recruitment collapsed in 1921–2.42 This crisis compounded a long-held threefold sense of inferiority: to the army, to the British navy and in public esteem. After Trafalgar, as Chack repeatedly observed, France ‘obstinately turned its back on the sea’, had a ‘fleet without a soul’ and the French were ‘always too prone to ignore the importance, and the glory of their navy’.43 Revealing their profound anxiety, both Chack’s works and the memoirs of admirals so often concluded upon the need for France to possess a powerful navy in order to retain its colonies and great power status. Nevertheless, there were limits to the crisis especially after the summer of 1919. Despite the PCF’s anti-militarist campaign, discipline was largely restored with only the occasional outbreak of unrest. For the officer class, peace allowed time to re-establish the usual and slower mechanisms of career, promotion and patronage that war had disrupted. Demobilization also allowed the discontented, like Fauxbras, to quit the navy. So it was against the backdrop of institutional crisis that the naval history of the Great War was written. After 1918, there was a division of labour for writing the official history of the war at sea and drawing its strategic lessons. It was the Chief of the Historical Service of the General Staff, Adolphe Laurens and former chief of staff to Admiral Ronarc’h commander in chief of the French navy in the north, Captain Auguste Thomazi who wrote the most scholarly treatments of this subject.44 Regarding the strategic insight to be drawn from the war, Captain (later Admiral) Raoul Castex became the French navy’s principal analyst. Castex had been the chief of the Historical Service of the Ministry of the Navy (1 September 1919 to 16 July 1921) and established through his seven-volume Théories Stratégiques a reputation that persists to the present.45 Alongside the works of Laurens, Thomazi and Castex, the Revue Maritime dealt with such matters as strategy, new technology, naval history, the size of rival fleets, naval literature and policy. Beyond these serious intellectual projects, though he might not have seen it this way, Chack by way of contrast sought to glorify and glamourize the French navy’s wartime role. As his oeuvre expanded, he turned to heroic popularizations of the great personages and battles of the French navy’s past: Lepante, Trafalgar, d’Ormessan. His books possessed common narrative conventions. Following a contextual preamble

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26 Memory of War in France, 1914–45

highlighting the grand significance of the particular moment of the war under discussion, Chack dramatically reconstructed the actions and decision-making of individual officers. Several of his nautical potboilers became bestsellers. Chack’s work should thus be seen as a response to this crisis of the navy. Reading him, it is clear that his priority was to restore the self-confidence of the officer class and make the navy an attractive career.46 He left to others a serious investigation of the lessons of war and the new strategic implications of aviation and submarines for war at sea. Chack was not alone in the production of a popular literature lionizing the navy. Claude Farrère and Maurice Larrouy assisted him in this patriotic duty. As head of the Historical Service, Chack had at his disposal the resources for a prodigious oeuvre. Unlike Fauxbras, he never had to worry about rejected manuscripts. He did not have to struggle for literary recognition. His office ensured such matters. Ranged against Fauxbras therefore were professional naval historians employed by the Historical Service (as well as amateur historians from the officer class) who had privileged access to documentary sources. They also disposed of institutional resources and a common esprit de corps that allowed them to dominate the field of maritime history. As with other literary accounts of the Great War, Fauxbras’s central motivation was therefore the restoration of truth in contradistinction to wartime propaganda and patriotic commemoration. Truth was perhaps the connecting theme of the literature of the Great War. Barbusse amongst others railed against the denaturing of the truth during the war.47 Fauxbras was very careful to construct a sense that the reader was being introduced to a neglected veracity. War prompted him, like others, to adopt a realist approach. The means by which Fauxbras sought to establish his claim to truthful representation was by disclosing a reality that the patriotic fog of war obscured. He sought to offer an authentic experience from the ranks. He did this through the thick description of their lives and the use of sailors’ vernacular. Accordingly, the author’s note at the beginning of Mer Noire underlined this notion of the battle for the truth.48 He asserted that his account, unlike those funded by the Ministry of the Navy, was ‘sincere from start to finish’ and had provoked indignation: For some have charged me with the crime of speaking my mind: it seems that it is not good to tell all the truth. Yes, all the truth is good to tell, on condition that it is the veritable truth [la verité vraie (sic)].49

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In the contested arena of naval history of the Great War, assertions and counter-assertions of truth were prevalent.50 Admirals invoked the truth in their rivalry to establish their reputations. Despite Fauxbras’s purposes being quite different, he was equally assertive in his truth claims. Though this was a novelistic device, he declared that Jean Le Gouin was based on a journal he had kept between February and December 1917.51 Fauxbras presented a double paradox of truth. First, the illusion of truth was established through the use of the sailor’s vernacular, which is alien to the reader. Thus, by its very nature the language simultaneously convinces the reader and demonstrates that she or he is in no position to judge the veracity of the account. Second, Fauxbras’s writing had its own inaccuracies and evasions: his truth was (at least in part) negative, exposing significant untruths in the official record. As an illustration of the oppositional perspective adopted, his narrative of the sinking of two French battleships is instructive. It also shows the complexity of these battles for the truth and the status of Fauxbras’s own claims within them. These episodes formed the core of the narrative in his first novel.

Death at Sea: The sinkings of the Robespierre and the Léon Gambetta The plot of Jean Le Gouin follows the experiences of Vignes. It describes his several months aboard the warship Robespierre, its sinking, his time spent at Bizerte in Tunisia, and ultimately his second warship the Étonnant. Much of the narrative is concerned with the sailors’ oppressive routines and poor conditions on board with the inspections, gymnastic drills, food and discipline. Most importantly, the reader eavesdrops on the elicit discussions of the crews beyond the reach of the officers and their snitches. The only two events of any wider significance are the sinkings of the Robespierre and the Léon Gambetta. It highlights differences between the lot of the sailor and that of the infantry. In Jean Le Gouin, the enemy at sea was an elusive almost phantasmagoric abstraction embodied in the prowling u-boats whose periscopes the topmen strained to identify on the horizon. Conversely, in the trenches, as both historians and literary representations underlined, although anonymous artillery and bullets accounted for most deaths, the enemy could become palpably human and killing an intimate experience.52 This specificity of the war at sea extended to death as well. Death at sea was quite different. Rather than the individual and visible death of the trenches, sailors did not expect to witness the death

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agonies of others but feared an unknown, unprepared for, collective mortality that was bound up with seafaring tradition with its cultural fatalism and understandings of death articulated through rituals, song, storytelling and slang.53 Jean Le Gouin provided an account of the last voyage and sinking of the Robespierre warship at the hands of a German u-boat.54 This event formed the centrepiece of Jean Le Gouin’s plot.55 Underlining the unexpectedness of the strike, the torpedo that sank the Robespierre interrupted a discussion between Fauxbras’s characters about revolution. The author jolted the reader from considering whether revolution could break out in France (as was the case in Russia at that very moment), to the shock of the torpedo’s impact and the immediate disorientation that ensued.56 At first, Vignes was uncertain: was this a torpedo or a routine explosion that often occurred on a battleship? By the time the second torpedo struck, men were already running madly in all directions. Vignes and his comrades feverishly tried to secure their bidons (cans) as a means to stay alive in the sea. A frantic decision-making process took place. Should they jump into the sea? But, they remembered the fate of those from the transport ship Gallia.57 In that case, several had died trying to jump the 20 to 30 metres into the lifeboats from the ship. Fauxbras presented a scene of swarming, panicking crowds. All sense of time was lost, the authority of the officers collapsed and cries filled the air as the ship listed, swayed and then capsized. Men scoured for wood, either to cling to in the water or to attach together as rafts. Amidst this confusion, the commander called battle stations, vainly hoping to engage the submarine in combat. This only had the effect of delaying the evacuation bell and resulted – Vignes bitterly observed – in a greater loss of life. The sailors started to obey his order. Only Matthieu, the revolutionary, persuaded Vignes and his friends to save themselves rather than follow the futile command: ‘better five years in jail than die in this hole’. Even those who managed to get on a raft had to paddle desperately to avoid the whirlpool created by the submerging vessel. Vignes saved Agostini who could not swim and they both found a lifeboat to board. The disappearance of his hated battleship pleased Vignes, though he mourned the loss of life. He reflected that the sinking confirmed his belief that the battleship construction programme was rendered obsolete by the advent of the submarine. These battleships were doomed mastodons that would be hunted out of existence. For him, no amount of bravado from the officers nor press fulminations about ‘pirates’ (the u-boats) could disguise these facts. The Robespierre was in reality the Danton, which was sunk off the coast of Sardinia on 19 March 1917 with the loss of 296 lives.58 Fauxbras had

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served for seven months and ten days on this warship until 11 May 1916 so was very familiar with its command, functioning and many of the crew.59 There were 946 on board at the time of the attack. At 1.15 pm two torpedoes from the German submarine U-64 hit the Danton, sinking it in 30 to 35 minutes.60 Survivors were picked up two hours after the ship capsized. The escort vessel Massue rescued 479 survivors including 5 officers, the Louise-Marguerite saved 278 and the Chaveau 10.61 In several respects Fauxbras’s account closely resembles the witness accounts gathered from the report into the Danton’s loss. Two torpedoes only a few seconds apart did indeed strike the ship. The location and timing of the attack is correct though the time that the ship took to sink was slightly shorter.62 The numbers of deaths also tallies. Merrien, one of Vignes’s shipmates, was crushed to death as a row boat fell onto the deck just as several had died on the Danton. The survivors were also taken to Bizerte. The commander went down with his ship and this indeed was celebrated in the press. Lemaire, one of Vignes’s comrades, interpreted this last action of the commander quite differently, ‘The old man allowed himself to sink with his boat: he had nothing better to do. Tomorrow the press will sing his praises.’63 Through such callousness, Fauxbras wanted to challenge the most important battle of all in his contest with military propaganda, the battle over the meaning of death. The one major discrepancy between the two versions was that in Fauxbras’s account the commander called for battle stations, thereby losing vital time, whilst this is not mentioned in the reports made during the official enquiry. It did, however, appear in a press report from Ajaccio printed in Le Matin which stated that battle stations were called on the sighting of the torpedo but the distress signal was given as soon as it struck.64 The loss of the Danton was highly significant for the navy. In his memoirs, Black Sea mutineer Charles Tillon commented on the fleet-wide consequences of the sinking of the Danton.65 It led officers to tighten the humiliating discipline on increasingly restless sailors. The navy failed to understand the impact of the Danton on the ranks, who felt that they would be abandoned to their fate if torpedoed. At the time, the French press praised the patriotism of the crew, especially for their last heroic hurrah: shouting ‘Vive la France!’ as they went to their watery graves. Yet Vignes claimed that this did not happen.66 It was the patriotic slogan that was at issue. This small detail transformed the entire meaning of the event, hence Fauxbras’s determination to challenge it. The cry of ‘Vive la France!’ at one’s death was, according to Jean Norton Cru, a clichéd invention of the patriotic literature of the Great War.67 It was one amongst a number of dishonest or fanciful patriotic conventions

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to be found in the combat literature, such as rivers of blood or dead bodies carpeting the floor or the widespread use of the bayonet.68 Cru showed how Victor Boudon, who claimed to witness a soldier shouting the slogan with his last breath, based his account of the war on 27 days at the front and only one day of actual combat with the enemy.69 For Cru, another indicator of Boudon’s lack of reliability was the fact that Maurice Barrès wrote the preface. Another account in which the utterance appeared was that of Alphonse-Louis Grasset, who before the war was employed by the Historical Service of the War Ministry, also writing on that mainstay of patriotic propaganda: German atrocities.70 He was therefore an official military historian like Chack. Again, Cru found him to be unreliable and suspect. Others viewed this phrase with scepticism. In Céline’s Voyage au Bout de la Nuit, hospitalized soldiers used the phrase calculatingly to solicit greater sympathy from nurses and doctors.71 In effect, Fauxbras was pursuing Cru’s observation, with the intention of exposing patriotic propaganda. In Jean Le Gouin, not only were there no shouts of ‘Vive La France’ as the Robespierre sank, but this also typified wartime propaganda for the sailors: A single phrase [Vive la France], which we find in each of them [the newspaper reports of the sinking], suffices to give an exact idea of the way in which the Parisian papers, without forgetting the local rags, represent our odyssey. Lemaire underlined this phrase everywhere with a rage-filled pencil with the result that the eyes fall immediately upon it, and that the comrades invited by Le Havrais to acquaint themselves with their exploits, emit as they begin to read a burst of laughter or a string of obscenities depending on their mood.72 Furthermore, when quizzed by officers about the torpedoing, the sailors in Jean Le Gouin invented the use of the phrase, having already read it in the newspapers to spare themselves punishment.73 Whether Fauxbras could speak with authority about the event is questionable. Rear-Admiral Habert’s secret report about the sinking of the vessel confirmed that sailors had shouted ‘Vive La France!’ before quitting the ship.74 Habert did however divulge that many of the survivors went to Bizerte where Fauxbras was stationed at the time.75 Thus, Fauxbras had a second point of connection with the survivors, as this was a ship that Fauxbras had served on but had left before its sinking. The report also admitted the exaggerated efficacy of the armour-plating and the vessel’s design flaws, including, as Vignes observed, the failure of the compartmentalization to work.76

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Fauxbras also examined in detail the sinking of the Léon Gambetta on 27 April 1915 resulting in 684 dead.77 Vignes recounted the sinking of the battleship in flashback to his reader, contending that there was major violence between the men and the officers attempting to board the lifeboats.78 The Léon Gambetta bore an even greater significance than the Danton. France was to lose other battleships, notably the Gaulois on 27 December 1916, the Danton on 19 March 1917, as well as the cruisers Amiral Charner on 8 August 1916 and the Châteaurenault on 14 December 1917, but this was the first major French battleship to sink and it resulted in the greatest loss of life. The government must have worried about the impact of such a spectacular and unimaginable calamity on civilian and naval morale.79 Unlike the Danton, it was front page news and attracted a lot of press coverage. The catastrophe lingered in the memory. It served as a primary reference point for naval veterans and was commemorated in public monuments.80 The battleship had been built at enormous expense when the naval construction programme had been the subject of an acrimonious controversy in the navy, national assembly and the press. The Jeune École had maintained that new technology – the torpedo boat and the submarine – had made the larger battleship vulnerable.81 This appeared in the novel via Lemaire and Vignes’s discussion of the tension between the radical Minister of the Navy Camille Pelletan (1902–5) and his admirals.82 With the disappearance of the Léon Gambetta in 1915, here, it might be argued, was the proof of the Jeune École’s arguments. The sinking threatened to reopen a dispute that had damaged and demoralized the French navy. It also transformed French naval tactics as the loss of the Léon Gambetta signalled the end of the large battleships patrolling the straits of the Otrante. This had the consequence that, for much of the war, the larger ships were cloistered in the ports of Malta, Corfu or Bizerte, awaiting a titanic ‘battle of the fleets’, as Lemaire put it to Vignes, that was never to happen.83 Paul Chack discussed the event in one of his most successful books, Branlebas de Combat. The versions of Chack and Fauxbras stood in diametrical opposition. Chack created a picture of patriotic sacrifice, the Léon Gambetta’s commander Rear-Admiral Senès nobly allowing ‘his children’ to save themselves while he went down with his ship according to naval tradition. On the utility of this gesture, Chack observed, ‘There is no useless heroism. More so than defeatism, self-denial is, for Frenchmen, contagious. And then, it is not a question of tradition, but simply, a duty ...’84 Noticing that this version of events had been challenged, probably referring to Fauxbras, the naval historian drew on the memoirs of the Austrian submarine commander. Instead of providing a

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footnote for this evidence, Chack evasively brushed off the anticipated criticism with a mixture of circular argument and bombast: I could stuff my book with notes proving the truth of what I write. But besides this uselessly weighing down the text, I believe I address myself to readers who do me the honour of believing my word. What does the opinion matter of those who deny or doubt it.85 The commander in question – Georg Ritter von Trapp of the U-5 submarine – did indeed publish his memoirs. He, however, made no mention of the shouting of ‘Vive la France!’ or corroborate elements of Chack’s account that Fauxbras disputed.86 Rather than witnessing what was happening on board, von Trapp was under the waterline during the torpedo attack and only speculated that the officers went down so that the men could be saved. He also questioned the failure of the French navy to provide a destroyer as protection against submarine attack. On chronological grounds it seems that it was arch-patriot, French academician and editor of Le Figaro, Alfred Capus who appeared to be the first Francophone source that sailors shouted ‘Vive la France!’ as they drowned and this was taken up two days later in an official communiqué from the Ministry of the Navy.87 Newspaper reports of survivors from Brindisi hospital mentioned no such detail.88 Le Temps, L’Intransigeant and Le Figaro tried to present panglossian interpretations of the sinking, stating that the loss of life was unusual and indicative of the important work that French warships were doing. Another writer that Fauxbras was later to challenge, Léon Bailby in L’Intransigeant, spoke of certain victory avenging the ‘sublime death’ of the crew evoking the memory of the loss of the Bouvet when the sailors sang the Marseillaise before drowning.89 Two days later he wrote of the ‘sublime resignation’ of Senès and his officers who died at their post, describing the sinking as ‘one of the most beautiful pages in our maritime annals. They and the six hundred chaps who found death in the waters of the Adriatic had committed themselves to the sacrifice of their lives. All our crews are animated by the same feelings. They want victory with no regard for the price that they will be asked to pay for it.’90 For Le Matin, ‘these brave children went towards danger with the marvellous confidence of youth’ and the event exposed the barbarity of the enemy.91 Also rescuing the sinking for the patriotic cause, two publications celebrated the heroic deaths of Auguste Lefèvre, the son of an admiral, and lieutenant Charles Ballande who were decorated for their actions during the sinking. These publications included their personal correspondence with

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loved ones, poetry, hagiography and generated an honorific and sentimental significance to the event.92 Both these pamphlets included stylized patriotic accounts of the sinking. Thus, it was Ballande who first shouted ‘Vive La France!’ to be repeated by ‘740 victims’.93 Between 30 May and 1 June, the navy interrogated 132 survivors of the Léon Gambetta. These testimonies assist our understanding of the nature of the event and of Fauxbras’s desire to seek a reality beneath its patriotic representation. Fourteen of the survivors stated that they had heard ‘Vive La France!’94 From the official report it seems that 147 were able to save themselves. One hundred and eight of these did so by jumping into the water and boarding lifeboat no. 2. Although one can imagine the cold, confusion and anxiety involved, especially of those who could not swim, their escape was relatively unproblematic. The lifeboat designed for 58 was seriously overloaded and damaged but managed to make it to the Santa Maria di Leuca lighthouse at around 8.30 am. The other survivors had a more harrowing time, desperately clinging onto the floating wreckage from their ship. Of the initial 200 in the water, only 29 remained when Italian torpedo boats arrived at 2.30 pm, some 14 hours after the submarine attack. Sixteen sailors recounted witnessing others ‘disappear’ into the water after long fatiguing battles to hold onto precarious flotsam. The gap between the patriotic imaginary death and the version provided by traumatized witnesses is poignant.95 This response to death suggests an element of self-censorship on the part of men being interviewed by their superiors. There were symmetries between these accounts and that of Fauxbras, who highlighted the adrenaline surge with the struggle for survival, the relief at safety, the grief at the loss of friends and the angry private condemnation of the officers. In contrast to their use of language as a shield for painful recollections, Fauxbras, writing years after the event, broke linguistic taboos about death through, sometimes dysphemistic, poilu slang: se faire casser la gueule (getting one’s head smashed in), zigouiller (to do in), étripaillement (the spilling of one’s tripe). It is also apparent, given the uniform structure of the accounts (and because the questions were transcribed into two of the interviews), that witness statements were framed with a patriotic reconstruction in mind. The sailors were specifically prompted about the actions of the officers and whether ‘Vive la France’ was shouted. The purpose of questioning about the officers was to identify those who could be decorated for bravery and to celebrate them as martyr heroes thereby channelling signification of the sinking in that particular direction. Where ‘Vive la France’

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was concerned, encountering these leading questions about the patriotic utterance, the interviewees may have believed that it was their duty to respond in the affirmative. Indeed, one sailor insisted that he did not hear the phrase.96 On two general counts, the testimonies unwittingly contradict the official report with regard to the utterance Vive la France. First, none of the survivors confirm that it was shouted on two occasions as the report claimed. Second, only one of the sailors admitted shouting it himself, although the report asserted that all shouted the phrase on the capsizing of the vessel. If we accept this evidence at face value, a minority of the men shouted ‘Vive la France’. It is worth bearing in mind, however, the heavy expectation that the sailors should report the shouting of this slogan and the fact that the interviewers wanted to find evidence of this from men who were in a vulnerable, and possibly suggestible, state. The stakes were high. This utterance transformed the overall significance of the event afterwards, reassigning meaning to testimonies that remembered the sinking principally as panic, terror and a desperate personal struggle to survive. The main point is that the navy and the press insisted upon the slogan being at the centre of the accounts of the event when for most of the participants it was clearly not. The interviews read as narratives of personal survival of those confronted by the fear of death. ‘Vive la France’ and a commander going down with his ship were part of the institutional ethos of the French navy, inculcated at the naval academies and were all the more necessary at the times of institutional crisis. In effect, they constituted institutional conventions of dying: the naval art of death.97 They were understood as honourable traditions but they were more than a simple nostalgia for a bygone era of naval warfare. They constituted normative guides for behaviour. Clearly, Chack believed that the reassertion of these traditions was a necessary part of the navy’s institutional recovery. For those such as Fauxbras who sought to challenge the naval hegemony, it was equally essential to undermine such normative frameworks with an insider’s insights into how they were perceived from below. Ironically, at the liberation of France, despite breaking down at his trial for collaboration and offering his propaganda services to the new regime, Paul Chack, according to Henri Béraud a fellow prisoner in the Fresnes, shouted ‘Vive la France’ as he was led away to his execution on 9 January 1945 for collaborating with German occupiers.98 If patriotism and narrative concerns overwhelmed Chack’s historical scruples at times, it would be wrong to accept Fauxbras’s claim to truth uncritically. It is too simplistic to counterpoint a false official account with the true subaltern memory. An aura of truth was constructed

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around Fauxbras. Like other literary accounts of the war, he adopted a realism, claiming to speak on behalf of his generation.99 Recording detailed events of the war with apparent accuracy, his works possess a strong verisimilitude. These texts asserted an autobiographical status with subtitles ‘told by a mutineer’ and ‘journal of a simple sailor’ and they were narrated by ‘Vignes’.100 Yet it was Max Fischer, his publisher’s editor, who encouraged Fauxbras to adopt these titular truth claims. Fauxbras’s service record did not tally with the chronologies of the books.101 Adopting a pseudonym also had its contradictions. The advantage of fictional licence brought the disadvantage of allowing hostile reviewers to challenge the very authenticity of Fauxbras’s nautical experiences on the suspicion that he was not a real sailor but an ‘intellectual in disguise’.102 The author even had to refute a malicious charge of plagiarism.103 Nevertheless, given the observation of his good conduct in his military record, Vignes did not apparently correspond to Sterckeman. The fictional character was an alter ego, heroically defiant of authority, who Fauxbras reconstituted from his own experiences as well as his knowledge of the hidden folklore, argot and attitudes of the crews. His truth lay in the exposure of a feeling of injustice, grievance and exclusion of the experiences of the ordinary sailors from the official narrative of the war at sea.

Conclusion Given Fauxbras’s intention of revealing the memory of the rank-andfile rebels of the French navy, it is unsurprising that the reception of his work should be polarized.104 It contested the accepted verities about the Great War on many levels. The experience of the war at sea was relatively unknown. When Fauxbras’s maritime novels were published, the only point of reference for many reviewers was the ‘excellent’ Paul Chack with the result that they were negatively predisposed to Fauxbras.105 Others disagreed: Jean Pomier, editor of the periodical Afrique, considering Fauxbras the ‘incontestable master of the field [of maritime history]’, observed that if Chack, the heavyweight naval historian, was a battleship (‘gros-cul’), then Fauxbras was not the inconsequential trawler but the devastating torpedo boat.106 The left was receptive to Fauxbras’s assertions about the Danton. The daily newspapers of the SFIO and the PCF printed extracts from Jean Le Gouin about the sinking of the Robespierre. Le Populaire entitled the article: ‘No never again: the truth about the torpedoing of the “Danton” ’.107 Written in 1932, it conformed at this time to the left’s anti-militarist stance.

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Reading the reviews of his publications provides certain insights into the contentious reception of Fauxbras’s works. The first theme repeated by many reviewers is the sentiment of surprise, shock or curiosity. For some, their curiosity underlined the originality of Fauxbras’s approach. Others considered him scandalous or dangerous. The book provoked a conservative backlash on moral grounds, with its crude language and references to prostitution, with Revue des Lectures issuing advice to ignore or boycott Jean Le Gouin.108 Another feature remarked upon frequently, again both favourably and unfavourably, was the violence, brutality and brazenness of the language. His linguistic register elicited comparisons to Céline and Rabelais. The question of truth was highly significant given Fauxbras’s explicit project of challenging the official propaganda version of the war. Pomier underlined the accusatory quality of Fauxbras’s claim to the truth. Some critics stressed the veracity, sincerity and realism of his accounts and it was this quality that was most likely to win over those unsympathetically predisposed to his subject matter or political orientation. A sympathetic review in La Flèche expected a response from those whom his account was likely to antagonize. His opponents, the reviewer had no doubt, would accuse Fauxbras of lies and partisanship.109 Hostile reviewers accused Fauxbras of exaggeration, even occasionally of lies. Despite Fauxbras’s factual mistakes, and the indirect nature of the knowledge of the sinkings, though not of life as a sailor, it does seem that police surveillance of naval morale authenticated Fauxbras’s analysis of the Mediterranean fleet.110 His account of the sinkings of the battleships also revealed the official manipulation of meaning of French deaths at sea. Thus official manipulation concealed and exploited the most profound truth of all – the incomprehensibility of death – as the navy insinuated itself for its own purposes into the most difficult moments of grief and trauma, and obscured culpability for the excessive loss of life in vainglorious commemoration. Fauxbras took upon himself a task strikingly reminiscent of a passage in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History: To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every

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epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.111 By the mid-1930s, the French navy had overcome its post-war crisis.112 As Chack himself put it: In 1920, our fleet no longer existed. In 1928 it counted 120 new ships, totalling 290,000 tonnes. The magnificent élan has not slowed. Ministries have followed without altering the plans and without slowing their execution. To our 18 cruisers, our 66 submarines, our 41 torpedo boards, our aircraft carrier adds our battle corps made up of six modernized dreadnoughts and the two most powerful battleships in the world, the Dunkirk and the Strasbourg.113 Each with their own particular contribution, Castex, Chack, Darlan and Leygues had restored the navy’s fortunes. Their division of labour addressed strategic thinking, the institution’s political position and its place in public opinion. Although longer-term anxieties were not overcome, a programme of naval rearmament, public sympathy and political favour meant that by the end of the 1930s, the French navy was in selfconfident mood; a situation only enhanced when it occupied a place at the very centre of the Vichy regime after defeat on the land. Speaking as a veteran sailor from the ranks, Fauxbras sought to challenge the navy’s official version of the events and its claims about its overall contribution to the war. As the battleship-building programme gained momentum and the political influence of the admirals increased, he continued to challenge naval historians (Chack and Farrère) and admirals (Lacaze, Darlan and so on) through his journalism. He kept these adversaries in his sights during the Second World War. If the navy’s situation improved, Fauxbras’s literary and political milieu of anti-militarism disintegrated. First, the PCF abandoned anti-militarism in favour of Popular Front patriotism. Then, the Popular Front failed to deliver on its promises of peace. Finally, Daladier repressed the small group of militant pacifists that remained. Ultimately, several of Fauxbras’s comrades joined the collaborationist bandwagon.

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2 Black Sea Mutiny: Consciousness and Memory

The same protagonist Vignes narrated Fauxbras’s second novel, giving the impression of an autobiographical account just as Jean Le Gouin had. Whilst his first book had focused upon the war at sea and in particular the submarine campaign of 1917, Mer Noire took as its subject the even more controversial topic of the mutinies of the French fleet during the war of intervention against the newly established Soviet regime. The mutinies contributed to France’s post-war social and political polarization with a wave of industrial militancy that culminated in the railworkers’ strike of May 1920 and the affiliation of the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO, French Section of the Worker’s International) to the Communist International at the Congress of Tours (25–29 December 1920). However, with right-wing victory at the legislative elections in November 1919, the severe repression against the trade union militants, the defeat of the rail strike, and the division of the labour movement following Tours, the French labour movement emerged from the immediate post-war era defeated and divided. If the context of Mer Noire’s subject was the moment when, briefly, the right feared that revolution might spread to France, the time of its writing was over a decade later. In the intervening years, war had continued to profoundly influence French politics. The comparative historiography of the naval mutinies has been concerned with the question of causation (societal or conditions of service), the variety of meanings and types of mutiny (simple refusals or seizures of power) as well as the patterns of escalation (horizontal or vertical).1 With regard to the Black Sea mutiny, its principal historian is Philippe Masson. His study comprehensively examines the mutinies of 1919 and provides a narrative of events. Particularly interesting is his comparison of the two waves of revolt in April in the Black Sea and in June across 38

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the French fleet. As he observed, the second wave escalated across a much greater geography and entailed much greater range and militancy of action taking place within an ‘atmosphere of revolutionary tension’.2 In Toulon, for example, striking shipyard workers, mutinous sailors and soldiers clashed with riot police and cavalry. Much more determined efforts were made to seize the ships such as the Provence and the Guichen. Bizerte, where Fauxbras was stationed, was the scene of some of the greatest militancy. Mutineers from the Voltaire sought to prevent its departure to the Eastern Mediterranean and to capture the ship to assist fellow revolutionaries in Toulon. They marched alongside soldiers and workers in turbulent demonstrations in the port. Paradoxically for Masson, this more serious threat to France’s social order has been eclipsed and effectively subsumed within the legend of the Black Sea mutiny. Yet for all the strength of Masson’s survey of the 1919 mutinies, Fauxbras’s account does highlight a deficiency. Masson was primarily preoccupied with the cause of the mutiny as a combination of material hardships and political propaganda. This led him to probe the unsatisfactory dichotomies of spontaneity-premeditation, extremists-moderates, violence-deference to explain the mutiny. For Masson, a lack of violence and hatred towards the officers revealed continued deference amongst the crews. Revolutionaries were an active but isolated minority and the majority were appeased when the authorities decided to send the France away from the Black Sea. Masson’s account, which relied heavily upon the official reports, largely neglected what was at the core of Fauxbras’s novel, that is, the emergence of a shared political culture of dissent articulated in language, song, symbolism and everyday social practices. It was this culture of dissent that mediated Masson’s dichotomies (of material hardship and Bolshevik propaganda, moderate crews and isolated revolutionaries, mutiny and outward deference) providing a much more convincing explanation of the mutiny. Where for Fauxbras the mutiny was a process with continuities before and afterwards, for Masson it was a momentary breakdown. Philippe Masson described Fauxbras’s Mer Noire as ‘a revealing book ... which one must often revisit’.3 In effect, the significance of Fauxbras’s Mer Noire is that it provides a ‘hidden transcript’ of mutiny. The historiography of the French mutinies of 1917 bears interesting comparison here. Indeed, there is a symmetry between interpretations of infantry and naval mutinies. In the first scholarly work on the topic of the 1917 mutinies after the release of the official documents, Guy Pedroncini emphasized the enduring institutional cohesion of the French army and limits of the mutinies.4 The soldiers essentially remained loyal

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and the mutiny represented little more than temporary breakdowns in discipline or refusals to carry out orders similar to a strike against the military strategy of Commander-in-Chief Nivelle. Three decades later, Leonard V. Smith charged that such an interpretation internalized the assumptions of the army with its normative, top-down framework of authority-obedience. Instead he probed the power relations entailed in the conditional consent of the French soldier-citizen.5 In such terms, obedience was not a fixed given, and hidden or latent resistance conditioned a dynamic renegotiation of relations between officers and men. Historical sociologist Christophe Charle also took issue with Pedroncini for his underestimation of those from working-class backgrounds and their collective traditions.6 Similarly, Loez examined the graffiti on trains during the mutinies, revealing the prevalence of anti-war and revolutionary discourses.7 He rejected the interpretation of AudouinRouzeau and Becker who underlined the patriotism of the mutineers and the endurance of the French army. For Loez, this homogenized the views of soldiers and failed to understand the openness or indeterminacy of the mutinies. Both Smith and Loez identified a problem that was simultaneously methodological and evidentiary, that is, the need to find a theoretical framework independent of the military’s model of hierarchy and obedience as well as finding evidence through which the agency of the soldier can be explored. Fauxbras’s Mer Noire addresses both dimensions of this difficulty given that it provides an explanation of the process of revolt and offers an insider’s evidence of the complexity of views and practices of the crews.

The Black Sea mutiny French policy towards Russia, from the February Revolution to the decision to intervene against the Bolsheviks, underwent a complex evolution. Three actors – the French government, the high command and foreign office – had to process and respond to the October Revolution, the Russian withdrawal from the war and the peace between Germany and the Soviet government at Brest-Litovsk (17 December 1917–3 March 1918).8 The decision to launch full intervention was taken in November 1918. There were two main sites of French intervention on the southern front: the city of Odessa and the Crimean peninsula. That intervention has to be understood in the context of a civil war that began in June 1918 and had a kaleidoscopic complexity, particularly after the withdrawal of German and Austrian forces in November–December 1918.

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When the French fleet landed in Odessa on 17 December 1918, French warships bombarded the city expelling the Ukrainian nationalists (‘Petliurists’) with assistance from local leaders of white General Denikin’s Volunteer Army.9 From the start, French decision-makers were unable to devise a coherent policy and exacerbated the manysided tensions of the situation: between Denikin in Ekaterinodar and his local commanders, between civil and military elements within the anti-Bolshevik camp and between ethnicities from within the old Russian empire, in particular the Ukrainian nationalists. The complexity of this situation was largely lost on the sailors if Fauxbras’s account is to be believed. According to him, although aware of the expulsion of the Ukrainians from Odessa, the sailors saw things exclusively in terms of the Tsarist white officers, who he compared with the Chouans, the ‘royalists of [17]93’, and the Bolsheviks.10 This formed the backdrop for the refusals of French troops to fight in Odessa and the Crimea.11 After the end of the First World War, troops grew impatient for demobilization. The first mutinies of French soldiers in Crimea and South Ukraine took place in February. Refusals of two companies on 8 March 1919 to fight at Kherson proved a turning point in French intervention as a whole. From that point onwards, French commanders had no confidence that the troops would be reliable if ordered into battle and believed their men to be infected by Bolshevism.12 In terms of the navy, mutinies broke out at Sevastapol on 19 April 1919, initially on the battleships France and Jean-Bart spreading to the Vergniaud, Mirabeau and Justice. This consisted in the first instance of noisy gatherings, the singing of the revolutionary anthem the Internationale, the temporary release of prisoners and shouts of ‘To Toulon’, France’s principal naval port.13 The commander of the France wrote of the tension and hesitation on board, the dangers of escalation to the entire squadron, and his inability over the first couple of days to muster enough men to repress the rebellion. Fauxbras’s representation of the events was much more vivid (see Appendix 4). Using shore leave to defuse the mutiny on 20 April, the French command unwittingly provided the rebellious sailors with the opportunity to join a Bolshevik street protest. French and Greek troops fired on the crowd further enflaming the mutiny. On 23 April the most militant ship, France, was allowed to quit Sevastopol alone. The evacuation of Sevastopol was completed on 28 April, ending France’s anti-Bolshevik campaign in Southern Russia and any meaningful direct intervention in the Russian Civil War. The previous day, however, refusals on the armoured cruiser Waldeck-Rousseau led to similar disobedience amongst

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French ships stationed at Odessa. Despite the fame of the Black Sea mutinies, similar lesser known but more serious incidents scattered across the French fleet throughout the summer: in the Baltic, at Vladivostock, Itea, Constantinople, Bizerte and Toulon.14 Interestingly, two principal historians of French intervention and naval mutiny, both Masson and Carley, treated Fauxbras’s account at face value as the memoir of a participant.15 Indeed, Mer Noire followed with accuracy the pattern of revolt, the role of the France and the demonstration in Sevastopol.

Foundation myth of the Communist Party The memory of the Black Sea mutiny constituted the foundation myth of the French Communist Party ‘born and forged in the struggle against war’.16 For French militants, these ‘glorious hours’ were the most palpable point of transnational contact between the October Revolution and the indigenous development of revolutionary forces.17 Hence the PCF’s rejection of patriotism was given an authenticity in the face of claims that it espoused an alien ideology in the service of a foreign power. In particular, the mutineer provided the heroic and human face of international solidarity with the fledgling Soviet state.18 French labour movement activists could sympathize and identify with this authentic revolutionary defeatism that matured due to hatred of the officer class and appalling conditions during the war. In the earnest prose of a Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT, General Confederation of Labour) pamphlet written in 1921, the imprisoned mutineers were heroes, martyrs and the harbingers of new age.19 The prisoners received support from both the revolutionary and reformist left.20 In addition, of course, the mutiny provided a more epic account of the birth of the PCF than the recriminations after the debacle of the strike wave of 1919–20 or the inner-party wrangling at the Congress of Tours, at which the mutineers were honorary presidents. The campaign for an amnesty for the mutineers – the ‘new Dreyfus case’ – of the Comité de Défense des Marins de la Mer Noire (Defence Committee of the Sailors of the Black Sea) scored considerable successes for the left.21 The campaign intensified at the time of the courts martial of André Marty and Louis Badina, the most prominent mutineers, attracting meetings of several thousands in Paris and in their hundreds up and down the country.22 The coup de théâtre of standing Marty in byelections sapped the legitimacy of his imprisonment. Electors returned the jailed mutineer in 38 constituencies across France between 1921 and 1923.23 At a time of acrimonious division with the French left, the

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cause of solidarity with the Black Sea mutineers united the French labour movement and even extended to the Radicals. The defence committee was a model of the operation of the Communist International’s united front policy. Despite the hostility of the nationalist right and a section of veteran opinion, the case of the mutineers and the campaign for amnesty found a strong resonance in post-war France. On Marty’s release, the campaign could claim a significant victory for the methods of mass pressure exerted on the government and military authorities. The Communist Party netted a prize catch when Marty publicly joined their ranks on his release.24 Marty was not the only mutineer to do so.25 The mutiny’s significance persisted after the campaign’s end. André Marty’s La Révolte de la Mer Noire (1927–9) could thus be considered the French Communist Party’s Book of Genesis. Marty became one of the party’s most prominent leaders and personified its founding myth. The party tailored new editions to fit contemporary circumstances, be that fear of French-sponsored invasion of the USSR, the Spanish Civil War or the Cold War.26 By the time of Marty’s expulsion in 1953, the PCF’s rebirth during the Popular Front period or the resistance (‘le parti des fusillés’, the party of the executed) had ousted the Black Sea mutiny as the party’s foundation myth; Thorez’s Fils du Peuple displaced Marty’s text.27 Prior to that, Marty and the mutiny held a profound significance for the left and evidently for Fauxbras. Marty, ‘the chief mechanic on the Protet’, was referred to, though not by name, in Mer Noire.28 When the ‘royalist-Hitlerite’ (as Fauxbras put it) weekly Candide provided an exclusive account of the ‘traitor’ Marty’s court martial, their journalist claimed that the court spurned the death sentence because of the defendant’s ‘imbecility’. Responding in his column in pacifist weekly Merle Blanc, Fauxbras pointed out that Marty had remained true to his revolutionary convictions in the proceedings and that it was the intense fear of consequences that made the judges reject the death sentence.29 Beyond these acknowledged connections between Fauxbras and Marty, a close reading of Marty’s Révolte reveals various borrowings in Fauxbras’s Mer Noire. Moreover, the imposing Château de Vincennes (where Marty had been imprisoned) a hundred or so metres from Fauxbras’s flat was a daily reminder of Marty’s case.30 However, by early 1939, Fauxbras condemned Marty for his abandonment of principle during the Spanish Civil War executing his comrades in arms, gaining the nickname in anarchist circles of ‘the butcher of Albacete’.31 Continued militancy and occasional mutinies in the French navy kept the memory of the Black Sea mutiny fresh in the public mind.32 In his memoirs, naval officer Georges Débat described the continued

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polarization of the navy during the interwar period when the officer class subscribed to the views of Action Française and the ranks were unhappy about pay and conditions. In such circumstances, the memory of the mutinies lingered.33 It is unsurprising then that the Ministry of the Navy apparently banned Fauxbras’s Mer Noire in the navy.34 The mutinies seemed to confirm a particular class-based opposition to war embodied in Barbusse’s ARAC, the anti-militarist campaigns of the PCF and for that matter Fauxbras’s writings.35 Although not necessarily mutually exclusive with the individual stand of conscientious objection, this approach sought to disseminate mutinous sentiment as a collective resistance to war.36 This class-based anti-militarism helps to explain the lateness of the emergence of a unified cross-class peace movement like the British or German ones. Given the influence of this anti-militarism within French pacifism, it is little wonder that the PCF’s rallying to national defence in 1935 sharply alienated several French pacifists, Fauxbras included. That a naval veteran, such as Fauxbras, should turn to the subject of the Black Sea mutiny, when his participation in it is questionable, should not be a surprise in this context, especially given the success of Marty’s account. This is not to suggest that this choice was driven by commercial considerations. The Black Sea mutiny was a richly meaningful event, a metonym for all the naval mutinies of 1919, providing a magnetic north for Fauxbras. In his journalism, he returned to it time and again. The mutiny validated his pacifist and anti-authoritarian commitment as it had prevented the admirals ‘killing and bombing to their heart’s delight’ and forced them to ‘resign themselves to setting sail and peace followed’.37

Fauxbras’s Black Sea As the novel began four months before the war’s end, Mer Noire picked up on the long-running process of discontent in the ranks that finally erupted in mutiny. There were of course mutinies in all belligerent countries, with those in Russia and Germany playing some role in the withdrawal of those countries from the war. 38 In France, the mutinies of May 1917 provoked a major governmental crisis that was only resolved by the combined efforts of Pétain and Clemenceau. After Mer Noire’s publication, Fauxbras’s newspaper column recalled the 1917 mutinies of the ‘PCDF’ in the face of official silence (Pauvres Cons du Front, ‘poor prats of the front’, in the author’s slang), calling for a parade in the honour of those ‘shot as an example’.39 Despite languishing for many

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decades in the oblivion of official embarrassment, mutiny should therefore be considered an integral part of the Great War’s history underlining the value of Fauxbras’s work.40 He sought to rescue this memory of ‘revolts that no rotten hack [plumtif pourri] ever refers to’.41 What for an individual like Fauxbras was a question of memory and forgetting was at the societal level a matter of public recognition and denial.42 Through his novelistic intervention, Fauxbras entered a political terrain of contested representations of the war and his efforts were part of a wider project on the left during the interwar period to keep these questions alive.43 If Fauxbras’s account of the Black Sea draws the reader towards the mutiny, the process begins some time before in Jean Le Gouin. For this reason, there are strong continuities between Jean Le Gouin and Mer Noire.44 On an obvious level, Vignes is the narrator in both and the connection between the texts is made explicit both in terms of the central character’s experiences, personality and its journal format. More profoundly, both are written in sailor’s vernacular with nicknames and naval colloquialisms to the extent that one reviewer thought Jean Le Gouin only to be of interest to a future generation of ‘grammarians and philologists’.45 In so doing, Fauxbras elaborates the social language of the sailors and their vernacular memory.46 Underlying the narrative of personalities and events, the dominant theme of Mer Noire is the social conditions in the French navy. Although Fauxbras touched on the extremes of weather, the dust and the periodic lack of drinking water, it is the social relations inside the navy that really preoccupy him. Despite a review finding no ‘social or philosophical conception of war’ in his work, Fauxbras displays considerable subtlety in his treatment, adopting a quasi-sociological approach based on careful participant observation.47 Through this consideration of the sociology of the navy, Fauxbras challenged key elements of the myth of the war experience: the exclusive focus on the trenches, the sacred union of the French nation, the forgetting of mutiny and the classless comradeship of the war experience. Whereas the navy believed the mutiny to stem from short-term hardships and a breakdown in discipline because of a shortage of officers, for Fauxbras the fundamental cause and dynamic of the events were the social antagonisms of the navy. The French navy had its own hierarchical grading of rank. Sterckeman progressed from being an apprentice sailor to second master helmsman by the end of his military service. This status-based stratification was superimposed onto a complex division of labour based on varieties of work location (observation points, helm, guns, deck or boiler room) and

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skill (engineers, electricians, radio operators and even cooks, carpenters, musicians).48 The narrator, Vignes, was a topman, like Fauxbras himself. In Jean Le Gouin, there was a certain sectional clannishness amongst the topmen particularly on the larger ships.49 Much of their work consisted of spotting u-boats from the crow’s nest.50 For Fauxbras, the real rationale of this social stratification was not purely the complexity of labour process aboard ship but a hierarchical system of status and power whereby each individual knew their own position and was putatively able to exercise authority over those below them.51 As Vignes observed: The chief of police feeds a lot of hatreds, also he reads 60 citations at roll call. We have also stopped being in the frigate captain’s good books. He lashes out hard, the frigate captain. I imagine that the minister bollocked the admiral, who bollocked the commander, who bollocked the officers, who bollocked the NCOs, who pass that grief onto us. The hierarchical way.52 Yet in terms of understanding just how sailors came to mutiny, this stratification model is a poor guide, obscuring the social hierarchies and potential breaking points in the hierarchy on the ship. To appreciate these, Fauxbras deploys another social categorization based not on stratification but on a simpler us-and-them cleavage. On the Léon Gambetta, a dozen or so officers presided over 772 in the ranks. In contrast to Fauxbras’s conceptualization of the social position of the simple sailor, his contemporary Paul Chack provided only the briefest glimpses of the ranks in his histories which followed the conventions of focusing on the decision-making of commanders, the heroism of officers and moments of brave obedience from patriotic sailors. If Chack remained aloof from the squalid conflicts between the officers and the ranks in his histories, Vice-Admiral Salaun’s secret report into the mutiny saw it otherwise. He highlighted the way in which staggered demobilization and leave had resulted in a decline in the ratios of senior sailors to the lower ranks with an ‘alarming’ 25 per cent shortage in the number of quartiers-maîtres (leading seamen), with consequences ‘dangerous to the cohesion of the crews’.53 This dominant mode of social categorization in Faubras’s books, though essentially binary in character, was not as fixed or straightforward as the stratification model. It is not primarily defined in terms of French class society, which is treated as an external reality. Radical disjunctures between sea and land, and war and peace delimited the

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sailors’ social imagination. Incidental allusions to French society do not suggest a straightforward correspondence between these worlds.54 For example, the characterization in Mer Noire of an aristocrat adventurer is relatively sympathetic and in Jean Le Gouin a well-spoken former whitecollar official is a revolutionary agitator.55 The collective antagonism of the crew towards authority on the ship therefore defines Fauxbras’s main mode of social analysis. It is only on rare occasion that the wider class system informs Vignes’s reflections, for instance when he remarks on the disdain of officers from privileged backgrounds for their fellows who had risen from the ranks.56 Elsewhere, Fauxbras sought to locate the officer class in terms of political sociology, though such a view has a subtle presence in the book. The French officer class was largely drawn from a circumscribed aristocratic caste, from the families of officers or, as Fauxbras put it with characteristic hyperbole, the ‘sons of archbishops’. Family connections and nepotism were rife. The few from beyond this privileged background conformed to a common culture of their social superiors at the naval school, which formed a closed community and an insular mentality.57 The ideas of Action Française and Charles Maurras – with its blend of elitism, monarchism, anti-Semitism and Catholicism – thrived in this social environment. This Maurrasianism survived in the navy despite the break of the pretender to the throne and the Pope with Maurras. According to Fauxbras, the officers were socially and doctrinally predisposed to Maurras’s ‘fascism’.58 The French navy of the Third Republic was therefore ‘Maurras’s navy’, the ‘holy navy’ and the ‘royal navy’ (la marine à Maurras, Sainte-Marine, Marine royale). Despite the degree of caricature in Fauxbras’s analysis, historian Ronald Chalmers Hood came to very similar conclusions about the closed ‘dynastic’ sociology and Maurrasianism of the French naval officer.59 Peter Jackson concurred when examining the undue influence that the navy had over interwar defence expenditure in France. Robert Paxton also underlined the Breton and royalist inclinations of the navy when considering the navy’s centrality to the Vichy regime.60 The division between sea and land was significant to sailors’ selfawareness and to public perceptions of them. Twice Vignes encountered the attitude that the war was exclusively about the trenches and that sailors did not share in the authentic experience of the battle. Underlining this point, Marc Ferro noted a generally perceived ‘hierarchy of merit’ constructed through the experience of war with the poilus of the trenches ranking at the summit (especially the war dead) and

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the shirkers (embusqués) at the bottom.61 The place of the sailor in this hierarchy was uncertain. I am called a shirker aboard the Biskra. Nothing surprising in that since most of the passengers on the ship were on leave from the front, the real front, not the front of the sea. The surprising thing was that it annoyed me. I’m still wondering why, and could find no other answer than this: the man had the intention of hurting me, it is the intention that caused the injury. He might as well have called me a patriot.62 This unheeding dialogue between soldiers and sailors even extended to the reception of Fauxbras’s books. Jean Le Gouin left one veterans’ periodical bemused. The reviewer did not understand whether the characters were representative or extreme characterizations of sailors, the hero being ‘a moaner of the first order, and a lot more scathing than the worst heads that I’d known in the trenches’. He granted that the stupidity of the rules and the harshness of the discipline in the navy might have poisoned relations but could not bring himself to sympathize, ‘He [the sailor] had known troubles, the infantryman had known others.’63 Not only did Vignes encounter soldiers holding the view that sailors were shirkers but also found it amongst civilians as well.64 Even his girlfriend Marie also thought him an embusqué by the simple logic that you were either a poilu or a shirker.65 Fauxbras sought to undermine this conventional wisdom. When Vignes discussed the pros and cons of signing up to the navy or the army with a friend who had decided to opt for the latter, they realized that the choice of shrapnel or torpedo was a catch-22. Elsewhere Vignes admired the bravery of the infantrymen but had also witnessed their blind panic when hit by a torpedo on a transport ship.66 The differences in terms of loss of life and injury between these two sections of the French military were considerable. Twice the proportion of soldiers compared with sailors died. However, given that the navy mobilized 156,000 sailors, they were a considerable part of the war effort and deaths amongst sailors were not insignificant.67 Moreover, in the realm of everyday routines, the spatial dimensions of authority and social hierarchies, the services were sharply different. Especially on the large battleships, the sheer human concentrations and the acutely vertical structures of rank mediated by the ubiquitous snitches and military police as well as confinement in punishment cells on ship rendered the claustrophobic contestation of space quite unlike the hundreds of miles of trenches at the front. This explains

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why Fauxbras and his fellow topmen invested such a significant sense of territorial integrity and refuge in their own domain: the crow’s nest.68 Highlighting the need for authority to be exercised in an almost omnipresent fashion, official reports deemed the lack of supervisory grades in the boiler rooms to be an acute problem, one that was pivotal to the events of the mutiny given the refusals to fire the engines on Sunday 20 April.69 Fauxbras’s account therefore suggests that the immediacy of social hierarchies and the abstractness of the enemy accounts for the common perception that the naval mutinies hold a place of privilege in moments of insurgent social unrest. Both gender and ethnicity played only a minor role compared with the dividing line between the authorities and the crews; although, on occasion, these divisions were articulated through a contested sense of masculinity. The navy created a closed masculine world that only shore leave (la permission, or ‘perme’) transcended.70 Although the authorities surveilled such activities, Fauxbras angrily rebutted the notion that homosexuality was widespread in the navy.71 In the narrative, the women that the crews encountered were objectified sexually, usually external to the plot and most were prostitutes. Vignes discusses them (‘poules’) in terms of price and value for money. This was even the case with Marie who was not a prostitute but whose affections he failed to capitalize on despite his 20 francs expenditure on her. The only real exception to this objectification was a Bolshevik woman who slept with Vignes in order that he would disseminate propaganda amongst French sailors. On the rare occasion women figured in conversations on ship, the subject matter was sexually transmitted disease or incomprehension at those who abstained from such liaisons. Given that Bolshevik leaders claimed to be emancipating women, the significance of the Russian Revolution to gender relations only elicited the briefest consideration and then only through the propaganda canard that the reds had nationalized women.72 On the question of ethnicity, although several sailors had Flemish or Italian names, this seemed to be of no significance; only passing references were made to northerners and southerners. As for non-Europeans, on occasion Vignes used the sailors’ routine racist terms for Arabs and black people, although the latter was reserved for Senegalese troops who were being used to suppress the revolt. Having said this, Vignes extolled the brotherhood of black and white mutineers.73 Moreover, Vignes denounced imperialism as ‘pernod, syphilis and conscription’.74 To give a greater appreciation of the fundamental division in the navy, Fauxbras laid bare the elaborate paraphernalia of naval discipline. The

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conduct records, the inspections, the salutes, the codes of dress, appearance and rank as well as the stringent systems of punishment created a dynamic of victim and persecutor and elicited a response, as Leonard V. Smith noted, ‘between mutiny and obedience’.75 Of course, the officer class worried about their ‘crisis of authority’ after the war and believed that for the most part the discipline was exercised in a ‘paternal’ manner. Their discipline was perhaps the master category through which the navy explained and responded to the mutiny.76 For Fauxbras the degree of authoritarianism varied between ships, citing the sailors’ rule of thumb: the larger the ship, the worse the discipline. The battleships (gros-culs) were the worst of all, like the cod liver oil Vignes took as a child. This regime of arbitrary justice and disproportionate penalty widened the division between the officers and the sailors. The sailors’ argot Fauxbras deployed shared many terms with that of the poilus but also had its own distinctiveness. Through this he showed that social conflicts were culturally embedded in everyday practices.77 Fauxbras used the vernacular of the crews to reveal how the average sailor hated those sailors who identified with the officers (fayots or vaches) or who acted as informants for the officers (mouches, mouchards, cafards, casseroles, all words for snitch). Particular odium was reserved for the military police (sakos) and their chief (le bidel) nicknamed Quinze Grammes and Boîte-à-Clous in the two works. If the language of the ranks provides a sense of social hierarchy and antagonism existing prior to open conflict, there also existed a political dimension given the influence of conservative, royalist or later pro-ligues attitudes amongst the officers.78 Despite Fauxbras’s depiction of the sharp hostility between officers and the ranks, there were individuals in contradictory positions. In Jean Le Gouin, there was an example of the rare breed of officer who was ashamed of his status.79 In Mer Noire, the commander of the Iris, Cosquer, described himself as a ‘reluctant’ fayot. He declared to his men that he would be willing to deceive the navy and take the ship in for repairs rather than repress the Russian revolution and the men wrote him a certificate of good behaviour for the eventuality of a fleet-wide mutiny.80 There were even rumours of a fayot who led the mutiny, later turning out to be on a small ship where relations were generally more relaxed. Arguing whether officers were beyond redemption, Vignes believed that these good officers were the exceptions that proved the rule and a really ambitious officer like Bertoni on the Étonnant in Jean Le Gouin could make even a small ship as unbearable as a battleship.81 A subjective division between optimists and pessimists or between naivety and experience overlapped with this dominant mode of social

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categorization.82 Optimists believed, for example, that the Kaiser was not interested in sinking battleships and that, if torpedoed, sailors could easily swim to safety. Pessimists were those sceptical of the authorities and the intentions of the government, particularly about the delays in demobilization and the latter’s aims in relation to Soviet Russia. As time passed, the optimists were exposed as gullible, losing out in discussions and consequently shrinking in number. This division identifies the process of radicalization as one of collective discussion and thought as preliminary to action. The sailors’ cynicism grows towards their own government’s propaganda and the grand claims made for the virtue of its cause: ‘le droit et la civilisation’ (justice and civilization, or more humorously according to sailors, ‘droit et syphilisation’). The French naval bombardment of Kherson highlighted this most graphically for Vignes.83 The hangar in which 2000 civilians were sheltering caught fire and French ships machine-gunned those who escaped.84 For his part in the expedition, Vignes received a medal, which he threw into the sea in disgust.85 Fauxbras added a supplementary distinction between the sailors who, counselling caution, wanted rebellion to take a limited form and those who wanted to go right to the revolutionary end. Thus, in Mer Noire, Jaillet who had been the head of the pessimist faction on the Iris was firmly in favour of limited action in the shape of a strike, whilst Vignes was in the camp of revolution. Vignes himself had undergone an evolution in his attitude to revolution. Although from the first imbued with a deep hatred of the officers, he only became a defeatist in the course of conversations with Dupuy in Jean Le Gouin.86 To borrow from Antonio Gramsci, the author presented an inner dialogue between spurious received wisdoms or ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’ or reasoning based on one’s own experience and interests.87 Before distributing Bolshevik leaflets amongst the hammocks, Vignes reflected upon the significance of the revolution that he anticipated: On board the Jean d’Ust, we spoke only of revolution, Canellec, Marius and me. But what was it our revolution? A simple revenge of oppressed military personnel against military oppressors, a few nooses from which the fayots would hang. It seems to me that the Bolshevik revolution is altogether different. Yes, they are right to defend their country against people who want to reestablish the Tsar and the knout. However, I agreed with my friend Dupuy on board the Étonnant, when he supported the idea that national defence was never justified. But the defence of the revolution is justified. Dupuy was an antimilitarist, and not a revolutionary. What am I?88

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For Fauxbras, a complex and dynamic sailor’s consciousness – in the shape of discussions amongst the crews – mediated the process of rebellion. Not only did this concern the limits and character of revolt but it also had a political aspect, dividing patriots and internationalists.89 Discussions were conditioned by naval mutinies in the German, Austrian and Russian navies.90 The boundaries of the protest forms were an important dimension of the French mutinies. Small numbers clearly had an insurrectionary agenda attempting to gather weapons. However, despite widespread use of revolutionary symbolism and rhetoric, action largely stayed within the parameters of the strike and demonstration. The reports of officers noted the respectfulness and ‘loyalty’ of the delegates of the rebels in their negotiations with the commander.91 The hegemony of the officers was certainly contested but was not definitively broken. Unlike André Marty, for example, Fauxbras did not therefore present the rebellion as a Pavlovian response to social environment. The exchange between the revolutionary Martel and pro-strike Jaillet captured the tensions between revolutionary hopes and the limits of the revolt imposed by the balance of forces. No half measures! We will hang the officer scum, and we will carry the revolution to the motherland! In possession of the battleships we are invincible. From Sebastopol, we go to Bizerte, will round up provisions at Sidi-Abdullah, and all the ships will join us. Head for Toulon, where we will corrupt the rest of the fleet. Here are 15 battleships, 20 cruisers, a mass of torpedoes and submarines, rising to 40,000 men resolved to take their vengeance upon those civilians and those in uniform who profited from the war. What could Clemenceau do to prevent it? The chief among the ringleaders, a sailor of the bridge, is probably going to get his way in Paris, if Paris is not already conquered by the troops and workers who also want explanations from the pile of shit that wanted us to fight to the last drop of our blood. We will install 200 gallows on the place de la Concorde, 50 on each side, and see swinging in the air the MPs, senators, ministers, generals, admirals, cop scum, archbishops, arms manufacturers, journalists and policemen. Like in 93! Jaillet replies: It is too late Martel. The veterans have let the hour of vengeance pass. Our squadron arriving at Bizerte under the red flag would be fired on by the cannons of the forts and doubtless torpedoed. They are young

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there and do not know of our suffering. The same at Toulon. And for a fayot hung, twenty sailors will go to the wall. What does the problem consist of? First: we do not want to make war on the Russians. Second: we want to return home. Solution: we cross our arms until we get the order to leave. By this way, we won’t go to prison, for it seems impossible to me that Clemenceau would have men capable of protesting against an illegal war condemned. The narrator observed, ‘I do not deny that Jaillet speaks the language of wisdom, but slaves are recruited from the wise’.92 The overall effect is that Fauxbras created a fluid and highly nuanced sense of popular consciousness and collective action in the French navy. Not only did his different social categorizations provide fine detail distinctions over time, but Fauxbras also made it clear that there were ebbs and flows in the development of mutinous sentiments amongst the men. The mood of discontent grew over time but was prone to dramatic reverses as well. Thus, when Vignes met up with an old comrade, Marius, the latter had traded his bloodthirsty revolutionary conviction for quietism.93 Similarly in Jean Le Gouin, the rebellious spirit witnessed when eels replaced the meat ration dissipated with the court martial of one of their colleagues.94 The actions of the authorities played their part in the complexity of the unfolding situation given the unevenness of the discipline that they imposed between ships and over time. They used the safety value of shore leave calculatingly, without which, according to Fauxbras, there would have been a generalized naval insurrection. Fauxbras thereby restores human agency and a shifting sense of mood to the otherwise hypostatized communist myth of mutiny or the homogenized interpretation of a deferential strike. Fauxbras identified subtle cultural indices of unrest. At the most basic level, this involved the crews moaning with various degrees of vocalization: passing from the silent inscription of graffiti, mutterings under one’s breath, storytelling amongst confidants, to more public speech.95 Silence was a significant part of the process given that, at times, informants were everywhere and one was not necessarily sure of newer workmates.96 The context of cultural history of the sea underlines the sophistication of Fauxbras’s approach. The shanty and other forms of song were deeply engrained into the nautical culture, though singing was also widespread in the trenches, and provided another index of discontent again with various degrees of openness.97 Music formed an official part of French naval military culture. Larger warships had their own musicians; there were 12 on the Léon Gambetta.98

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As well as the parade ground formalities of military music, the more traditional sea song formed a semi-official part of naval culture encouraged at the École Navale and was patronized or published by members of the naval hierarchy.99 These shanties were associated with the heavy physical work requiring synchronized effort before the era of steam. The shanties fell into three main types: à hisser (tugging on a rope, to raise the sails), à virer (working the capstan, that is, raising anchor), du gaillard d’avant (songs at times of plain sailing). Their themes were often those of allegorical tales, life and death at sea or women and ports left behind. Institutional sponsorship of this culture of song belied a sentimental notion of the past. The navy’s nostalgia indicated a lingering sense of loss for a time when the sea provided encounters with the unknown and when the navy facilitated the establishment of commercial empires before, in particular from a French perspective, Britain had not established its unquestionable post-Trafalgar naval supremacy.100 In the early twentieth-century context, songs created a corporate identity of romance, heroism and exotic adventure, thereby projecting an appealing image to the rest of French society. Despite official sponsorship of the culture of the sea song, the ranks, as Fauxbras stressed, subverted it to their own ends, reflecting upon their own distinct experiences and hostility to the officers. The anti‘fayot’ ditties could be laments, like the Madelon, broaching questions like being home-sick and bad food or anthems of anticipated mutiny.101 Madelon is the song of a young serving woman who turns down a corporal’s offer of marriage for the ‘affections’ of the entire regiment. In Mer Noire, song was a vehicle of discontent. Sung to the tune of Sous les Ponts de Paris, the ‘song of the Mirabeau’ recalls the conversation of father and son about the choice of the navy over the infantry or cavalry, the hard work, the despicable chief of military police Boîte-à-Clous and losing one’s mind.102 The most ubiquitous song of rebellious sailors – that Vignes described as the ‘sailor’s Marseillaise’ – was the Chanson des Fayots (‘the song of the beans (those who crawled to the officers)’).103 Mutineer on the Suffren, Charles Tillon also recalled the singing of the Chemin des Dames mutineers’ Chanson de Croanne, and that the anthem Chanson des Fayots gave the sailors a ‘wild and puerile happiness’.104 Thus, song reveals the polarization in the navy as the ranks subjected the officers to bawdy ridicule and looked forward to their demise (see Appendix 2). As the degree of politicization grew, non-maritime popular songs of the revolutionary tradition such as the Internationale and the Carmagnole replaced or supplemented the subversive songs of the sea.105

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Black Sea Mutiny

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All the reports of the Black Sea mutinies comment upon the singing of the Internationale, which the condemned Eugene Pottier wrote whilst in hiding during the repression of the Paris Commune of 1871. Sometimes when silence and intimidation reigned but repressed anger was widespread, verses of songs would be inscribed on the steel walls of the warships.106 At other times, the words evoking the memories of revolutionary Paris were sung quietly: ‘Instead of saluting when the colours are raised, we put our hands in our pockets and mouth the Internationale.’107 Finally, singing naturally accompanied the festive element of the mutiny itself when French sailors and Russian Bolsheviks fraternized.108 Historical accounts confirm the significance of song not only as an index of discontent but also on occasion as a signal of revolt.109 Realizing the potency of song within maritime culture, the PCF later used the ‘song of the fayots’ as well as writing new songs in its anti-militarist propaganda amongst sailors.110 Yet, given that Paul Chack noted the singing of such patriotic songs as the Chant des Girondins, this cultural medium could also attest to the absence of dissent and the continued hegemony of the officers.111 Equally, though Chack would deny this, songs of revolutionary nationalism could easily accommodate multiple meanings for the officers and the ranks. Thus, this cultural form had a political content which was contested at the level of signification and mediated collective action. Through revolutionary songs, the limits of the mutiny were ambiguous going beyond a simple strike or refusal of orders at a symbolic level, collectively identifying with revolution if hesitant about revolutionary action. The printed word was another measure of the mood of the men. Some smuggled in and covertly circulated satirical, revolutionary or antimilitarist newspapers such as Le Canard Enchaîné, La Vague, Le Journal du Peuple and L’Humanité.112 With strong parallels with Fauxbras’s account, La Vague printed several letters indicating the sources of discontent in the navy during the Russian expedition.113 After long delays, the editor received letters about refusals to fight and accounts of the Black Sea mutiny itself.114 The navy’s surveillance reports repeatedly mentioned the role of La Vague, its distributors (such as sympathetic tobacconists or those responsible for mail on board ship) and networks of readers (with 15 on the Ernest Renan).115 In Mer Noire, one reader had cuttings from La Vague and other left papers stuck inside copies of the monarchist paper popular with the reactionary officers, L’Action Française.116 Contemporary police and naval reports signalled the importance of such a ‘Bolshevik campaign’ or ‘anarchist propaganda’. This surveillance presented this

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propaganda as mischievous and recognized that papers like La Vague were widely read and believed about questions like the Russian intervention or the treatment of the mutineers whereas the authorities were not.117 As one naval spy observed: The article concerning the ‘Life of sailors’ relating to the incidents of the Black Sea, appeared in La Vague of 19 February, has been commented on a lot in maritime circles and has been the object of propaganda in favour of the mutineers. On certain ships, this article was read in the officers’ mess. The general opinion on it is that it is truthful, and that there is only the Sailors’ Defence Committee, having its headquarters in Paris, that can provide accurate information. The great majority of the sailors, principally the class of 18 and the long-term recruits, hope for presidential clemency to amnesty those who have been condemned for these actions. Fauxbras also noted a more agitational use of the printed material which came in the shape of posters and leaflets disseminated amongst the sailors at the time of the mutiny.118 Beyond these means of communication, direct action in Jean Le Gouin and Mer Noire passed through a complex repertoire: individual indiscipline, collective disobedience, sabotage, feigning illness, song, graffiti, strike action and outright mutiny.119

Conclusion This multiplicity of means of dissent allows the audience to grasp the gradations and fluctuations along the axis of obedience and mutiny. Thus despite Marty’s book being based on the testimony of 66 sailors, Fauxbras presented a more convincing account than the more famous mutineer. With Marty the process seems automatic, rigidly connecting class society, naval grievances, mutiny and wider revolution. A simple didacticism proposed that only a party along Bolshevik lines was missing.120 In contrast, although Fauxbras too spoke of the absence of a ‘Lenin in Paris’, he provided the microcosm wherein human agency, cultural practices, contingency and timing mediate and render more problematic these relationships. Fauxbras’s account of the mutiny itself (see Appendix 3) captures how this dynamic and plural sense of consciousness interacted with collective action.

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Perhaps Fauxbras’s most important contribution to our understanding of the Black Sea mutiny was that he highlighted the cognitive complexity of the process of mutiny. The existing literature on mutinies has tended to homogenize opinion and judge collective states of mind from an outsider’s observations or by the limitations of collectively negotiated deeds. The mutinies from such a perspective resemble a strike with clear boundaries that the rebels were not willing to breech. Whilst this is undoubtedly true, Fauxbras suggested that a conscious dialogue with a variety of political positions and strategies – including that of revolutionaries – was integral to a fluid decision-making process during phases of collective action. Moreover, we know that Fauxbras had direct experience of these dialogues, given his posting in Bizerte an epicentre of the second wave of mutinies. He rendered accessible a process that naval authority and the fear of the snitch drove into clandestinity. Not only did he allow us to listen in to the unheard voices of the disgruntled ranks, but he also decoded their vernacular. Overall, he provided a culturally enhanced account of revolt revealing the everyday contestations between officers and the ranks whilst retaining a place for politics within this process. Fauxbras’s novel, thus, goes some way to addressing what Leonard V. Smith identified to be one of the key historiographical problems in the comparative study of mutiny: the relationship between the micro- and macro-histories of mutiny.121 His sense of the personal networks of revolt needs to be inserted into transnational patterns of mutiny and revolt during the war and its immediate aftermath.

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Part II The Crisis of the 1930s

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3 Amongst the Unemployed: Meat to be Burnt

Fauxbras’s third novel – Viande à Brûler (1935) – departed from his previous subject matter and addressed the most pressing social issue of the day: unemployment. Conventional wisdom holds that economic depression in France, unlike its German or Anglophone counterparts, failed to endow a cultural legacy of note.1 This reinforces a sense of exceptionalism about France in the 1930s. Though not of the literary merit of some of the internationally renowned work, there is a considerable and neglected store of French cultural representations of the depression and unemployment.2 Indeed, Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot (1952) at its most literal and immediate level is concerned with two workless men living unmistakably in the 1930s. Moreover, the experience of unemployment is dealt with in poetry, short story, play, novels and film. The significance of such cultural offerings is that they provide an alternative register of unofficial knowledge about unemployment. Although it is true that many, yet certainly not all, of these authors or film-makers had an explicit political agenda, it is at the level of the everyday, the mundane level of the insider that they are valuable. A political message is there but so too is a cultural realm otherwise obscured from the historian. Official discourse – readily recovered from politicians, mainstream press, statistics and government reports – shares normative values that rendered the experience of unemployment hidden. Ideological and discursive parameters assumed the progressive and rational character of capitalist modernity, entailing an agenda about unemployment diametrically at odds with the experience, feelings, routines and practices of the unemployed.3 According to much of the mainstream press and political elite, benefits were generous and abuse was widespread, health was unimpaired even improving, employers and landlords were public-spirited, the benefits system was rational 61

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and professionally administered, the police protected all citizens and endeavour was rewarded. The literature and films of the depression form a cultural transcript in counterposition to the official assumptions of the day. Taken together, they provide an engaged artistic response to the crisis of capitalist modernity that the 1930s constituted. For writers like Fauxbras, Steinbeck, Orwell, Greenwood and Fallada, the conventional assumptions could no longer hold and they felt a vocation to challenge these through the depiction of a neglected aspect of social reality and the subjective experience of the unemployed.

César Fauxbras and Viande à Brûler In Viande à Brûler, Fauxbras attempted to expose to his audience the plight of the jobless, to provide an eloquent narrative of slum life. The book plots the last five months of Paul Thévenin’s life through his diary, who in the end commits suicide. Having lost his job on 31 August 1934 to a pensioner, Thévenin’s account commences on 2 December when he can no longer live on his savings and has to sign on for unemployment benefit. The last entry is for 29 April. Like the public silencing of the sailor that Fauxbras identified his maritime novels, the prevailing rhetoric about mass worklessness obscured the experience of the unemployed themselves. The book makes it apparent that politicians and press drowned out the voices of the unemployed with discourses that blamed immigrants for the lack of jobs, that decried the malingerer or fraudulent benefit claimant, the overgenerous left councils and that accentuated the inspiring humanitarianism of wealthy philanthropists.4 With key protagonists of Viande à Brûler being veterans the central reference for the experience of joblessness is that of the Great War. The humiliations, the petty authoritarianism and injustices integral to the weekly routine of the unemployed readily find comparison with those of the military. It was Fauxbras’s Viande à Brûler of all his works that gained him the greatest acclaim. It was put forward as a candidate for the prestigious Prix Goncourt. By now sponsored by the literary director of Le Journal Lucien Descaves as well as Henri Barbusse, Fauxbras was fêted in the press as ‘the French Gorky’.5 Widely reviewed, Viande was on balance a critical success. After its success, Fauxbras addressed the fashionable debating society Club du Faubourg on 18 January 1936 on the subject of the ‘Drama of unemployment’. This was to be broadcast over the radio but the censor intervened.6 Indeed, the Société des Gens de Lettres approached the author and publisher of Flammarion for the film rights.7 The review Les Mois noted that this was the first serious French novel

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about the unemployed, a genre that had flourished in countries such as Germany where the crisis was sharper. It compared Viande à Brûler favourably to the ‘eternal greyness ... false pity’ of the populist school and the ‘immense bluff’ of Céline’s Voyage au Bout du Nuit.8 Jean Pomier, editor of Afrique and the president of the Association of Algerian Writers, also drew the parallel with Céline who spoke the same language as Fauxbras though without Fauxbras’s sympathy for his subject; where Fauxbras spoke frankly from experience, Céline worked on what was alien and vulgar to him.9 Pomier saw in Fauxbras a prototypical ‘social artist’ able to present his audience with a piece of documentary realism, the ‘most emotional testimony’ to the ‘terrible evil of our times’. Fauxbras’s Viande à Brûler is a particularly important document of the French depression. Unlike other French novels about this subject, it deals directly and centrally with the day to day life of the unemployed. French literature and films of the 1930s were more likely to examine the poor in general and sites of poverty (the ‘zone’ of Paris, the suburb, the salubrious hotel) – such as Les Bas Fonds, Sous les Toits de Paris and Hôtel du Nord – rather than the unemployed themselves.10 Several novelists, photographers and film-makers sought, like Fauxbras, to imagine and visualize the landscapes of Parisian poverty. André Kertész documented a Paris of the lower depths in photograph: the tramp, the alcoholic and the unemployed blurred together.11 Implicit in the project of the depression novel was the realist claim to represent life authentically. Herein lay an artistic effort to bring to public attention the major social ill of the day and one that was subject to other hostile discourses in the press. Indeed, French depression novels are keenly aware of hegemonic representations of their subjects. In Viande à Brûler, the social stigma of benefits is brought home to the unemployed: I heard two well dressed people, discussing the crisis, politics and unemployment, how they could come up with these stupidities! The unemployed, all skivers, drunkards on the public purse, the dregs of the population. Beyond these conventional representations of the unemployed, Fauxbras sought to reveal the realities of unemployment to his possibly sympathetic, possibly sceptical readership. There is a strongly persuasive, even polemical element to the novel: I write for three hours. It doesn’t cost much, and it passes the time. I’ll pick up my notebook tomorrow. During the war, numbers of

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soldiers kept diaries. I am a soldier of the economic war, a simple soldier, since I am suffering and here is my diary of hardship.12 For this polemic to work, a convincing and psychologically perceptive narrative had to be constructed. It rested on a claim to authenticity. A major aspect of the narrative is a thick description of the routines of the unemployed. These cadences resulted in conflicting senses of time underpinning the novel. Formally, the diary entry device metronomically schedules a chronology, whereas Thévenin’s experience of unemployment suggests the passage of time to be immeasurable and meaningless. The narrator observed the forlorn abandonment of impatience which signals the acceptance of a new mode of time, ‘Unemployment has the utility of teaching you patience. You wait to inscribe, you wait to sign on. You wait to receive benefit. And it’s not worth getting in a rage, they’ll reply with good reason that you’ve nothing better to do.’13 Waiting went to the heart of the experience of unemployment and, anticipating Waiting for Godot, prompted existential self-doubt.

Hierarchies, institutions and networks of power: the unemployed and the system Not only did the lack of work restructure time, it also shaped the totality of social experience: daily interactions, social hierarchies, structures of authority and encounters with institutional power. Relations with landlords, police, medical professionals, council officials and middleclass patricians were transformed. Fauxbras suggested that the unemployed experienced authoritarian humiliation. An incident in the dole office sums this up. In five minutes, he was noticed; a policeman who’d come to tell him to shut up added: ‘If you kick up a fuss again, I’ll kick you up the arse. Your friends don’t give a shit about your chatter.’ I learnt from this that an unemployed man is worth less than an apache. I muttered in Chouard’s ear. ‘It’s worse than the barracks’.14 On a second occasion, a policeman abruptly tells a man to put out his cigarette. Paul’s friend Chouard turned to the former and said, ‘Been through Verdun and having to take that humiliation’.15 Unlike the self-image of professionalism, rational administration and public service, Fauxbras presented the benefits system as an arbitrary machine of interlocking institutions that subjugated the unemployed.

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Unsympathetic figures of petty authority who operated this machinery in effect enforced the everyday routines of the unemployed. The state and civil society were not discrete, as power over those claiming benefits leaked into existing social relations of power with regard to property, employment and politics. The humiliating journey of the unemployed to acquire benefits began with the employer and the landlord who had to provide certificates of employment and residence. It involved the police, signing on at the council who paid the benefit, summonses to interviews with the authorities, the use of ‘spies’ and ‘snitches’ to uncover abuse, home visits to verify claims and the tripartite commission (commission paritaire) that would hear appeals against disqualification.16 This voyage was one fraught with obstacles, incomprehensible decisions, arbitrary regulations and dangers. During his first trip to the Unemployment Office (Service du Chômage), Thévenin had to queue at several counters in turn: the first to apply, the second to check his application, the third to show his identity card, the fourth to collect benefit and the fifth for information. Despite the ethos of public service, the officials and the unemployed were not equals, they did not mix, like ‘towels and rags’ as the narrator put it.17 Of Thévenin’s friends, several were ineligible for or were disqualified from benefit: Richardon because he had lived off his saving for 18 months after having lost his job, Robert on occupational grounds because he was a sailor in Paris, despite the lack of work in his native Le Havre, Thévenin because he had an estranged wife with an income, Voulaz because his form was lost and Jojo because he did not fulfil the duration of work requirement. Perversely, Armani and his girlfriend both received full benefits, or as Thévenin called it ‘a bonus of concubinage’, because they were not married.18 The ineligibility of Thévenin’s friends resembled those in the casework ledger of the Committee of the Unemployed of the Fourth Arrondissement which was lodged with the Minister of Labour.19 Fauxbras presented a picture wherein the humble virtue of the unemployed is undone by the authorities. Robert could only claim benefit by forging a work certificate. He stole oranges from Les Halles in order to save the health of the sickly infant Guingette. He worked a petty job because of the inadequacy of benefits.20 On these three counts, the reader sympathizes with Robert but in the distorting mirror of the press with their agenda about the unemployed the following byline accompanied his photo: Arrest of an unemployment swindler: the three goldmines of Robert Gibowski: he worked, he claimed benefit and he pinched from Les Halles.21

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Chédeau also lied to secure benefits. Although his wife was working as an usher at the cinema, he was able to claim benefit because she used a pseudonym. The narrator believed that by the strict definition of abuse, which might include such petty incomes as opening taxi doors for people in the hope of being tipped, there would be 200,000 dole cheats in Paris.22 Unconsciously anticipating his fate, when reading the list of those convicted of dole fraud in the benefits office, Paul Thévenin made a mental note not to become a dole cheat inadvertently.23 The merest misdemeanours were deemed fraud and were disproportionately punished. Benefits were no guarantee of a decent standard of living. Even with careful budgeting, it was difficult to live on 140 francs a fortnight.24 With all his accountancy skills, Thévenin still lived on a bland diet, had to resort to makeshift economies such as free haircuts, repaired shoes, trips to the pawnshop, forgoing newspapers and noodles. An insider’s knowledge identified the cheapest places to eat, or that the Louvre on Sunday provided free access to centrally heated rooms.25 Before becoming a claimant, the unemployed went through their savings avoiding the stigma of benefits, ultimately submitting and sinking into debts and arrears. Like Mrs Bastide in Jules Romains’s Les Humbles in whose box of shares on the top of the wardrobe was invested her hopes for a secure old age, each of the residents of Thévenin’s hotel situated in a ‘lost corner of the 13th arrondissement’ had their own tale of exhausted savings and descent into debt, most tragically with the case of the Voulaz family.26 The narrator revealed the dispiriting search for work in which unknown thousands of unemployed read the same newspaper advertisements and haunted the same labour exchanges only to be told that they were too old, or too inexperienced or that the post had already been filled.27 The impression of joblessness given in the novel was that it was an inescapable condition. This bleak outlook did not correspond to the reality of many unemployed eventually finding work. It did however capture the psychological impact of long-term unemployment which was particularly significant amongst certain occupational categories and age groups. Furthermore, unemployment persisted into the late 1930s because the French economy registered a later and slower economic recovery than other major industrial powers. Thévenin’s brief spell of employment in the novel highlighted the relationship between mass unemployment and conditions in the workplace. Fauxbras asserted that employers took advantage of mass unemployment to cut wages. Their supervisory staff became more

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authoritarian as their charges were now easily replaceable. Thévenin was advised to carry a copy of the right-wing Écho de Paris at a job interview with the head of personnel at SIRAB who quizzed him about his political leanings. Thévenin’s job at SIRAB exposed the transformation of labour relations as a consequence of mass unemployment. Whilst skilled workers were more secure, the unskilled performed hard work but were under constant threat of replacement with ‘women’ or ‘tramps’.28 Thévenin’s workmate Raffy had been unemployed ‘naturally, for you had to have been unemployed, and to fear returning to it, to stay at SIRAB’. They were told that their first late start would result in redundancy and that they were not permitted to talk or smoke. The depression had reduced their wages, which were paid by the hour underlining their vulnerability; and of course the eight-hour law was flouted. In such circumstances, personnel officers and supervisors were lording as petty tyrants over their staff at SIRAB and Thévenin was obliged to treat them with subservience. Despite his servility, he lost his job over an innocent and trivial mix-up, having been incriminated by a colleague. At SIRAB, Thévenin experienced the transformed employment relations of the Taylor-Ford era. Fauxbras sought – as was the case with other contemporary representations such as René Clair’s À Nous la Liberté, Chaplin’s Modern Times and King Vidor’s The Crowd – to capture the alienation and subjective distress occasioned by modernity’s shock of the new in the realm of work. Fauxbras wrote in a context where the left – in particular the Communist Party – had developed a critique of and campaigned against various dimensions of this process: rationalization, assembly lines and scientific management.29 The book opens with an exchange between Paul Thévenin and his landlord Rouchot, the ‘grasping Auvergnat’ who treated his tenants like a sergeant would treat new recruits. Thévenin needed a certificate of residence in order to claim unemployment benefit which he received with belittling sarcasm aimed at the unemployed in general. Housing was a key social issue during the depression. Fauxbras identified different situations of the poor: the more or less respectable hotels, the unregulated self-built shanties, the new housing estates (the HLM), central Paris, the red banlieue (the working-class suburbs) and the zone. Private landlords were the principal enemy in the campaigns of the communist tenants’ organizations. These tenants associations and the committees of the unemployed battled against evictions during the recessions of 1926–7 and the 1930s. Employing the same language as this movement, Fauxbras depicted Rochot as an archetypical ‘vulture’ or ‘hotel/ brothel boss’ (tôlier).30 Thévenin decided to leave Rochot’s hotel because

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his landlord moved him into a smaller, darker, unheated and poorly furnished room without prior consent. On discovery of this fact, the landlord told his tenant: I moved your things myself. Run and complain to the police. You will learn that I can change your room if unfortunately I cannot throw you onto the street. Well, Thévenin, they are still the masters of their domains, the vultures.31 The attitudes of landlords to the unemployed registered in other cultural representations. The landlord in the Julien Duvivier film Belle Equipe, Bertheau, chased his tenant down the stairs in a long argument about the rent: ‘You unemployed are all alike ... lazy swine’. In Jean Renoir’s film Les Bas Fonds (1935) based on Maxim Gorky’s novel, the enraged tenants of a dosshouse, to avenge the whipping of their fellow tenant Natacha, set upon and killed their landlord.32 This contrasts sharply with Eugene Dabit’s sentimental treatment of the landlords based on his parents in Hôtel du Nord. Where unemployment and housing were concerned, social surveys of the time revealed a surge in homelessness, overcrowding, lack of light, dampness and dilapidation as well as a connection between poor housing conditions, unemployment and ill health.33

Health, malnutrition and suicide Viande à Brûler addressed another of the aspects of daily life that unemployment affected: health. The unemployed in the novel lose weight. Previously 75 kilos, losing 3 kilos in his first month on benefits, Thévenin weighed only 58 kilos after eight months of unemployment, observing that he was ‘quietly making his way towards suicide and TB’.34 Fifty-year-old former wheeler and dealer, Barjon’s weight dropped from 105 kilos to 70 kilos on the rations of the unemployed.35 Beyond the general impoverishment of diet, the depression picked on the weak. Chouard, the Verdun veteran, his resistance worn down suffered a cold that should have confined him to bed. He died shortly after struggling in to the benefit office to sign on. ‘Miss a signing on and go to tell the bureaucrats later, who would have cut you off benefit, that you were ill: they would know how to deal with you! An unemployed does not have the right to be ill.’36 Another resident at Thévenin’s hotel, Voulaz’s six-year-old daughter Guingette also suffered from ill health. A school medical inspection revealed that she needed to move to the

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countryside, to improve her diet, take cod liver oil and oranges or she would die. Jojo reasoned that the unemployed were like rats doing damage to the national finances and that the government was calculating the savings generated by those who died from malnutrition or suicide.37 Social investigators and medical professionals confirmed the connection between unemployment, malnutrition and ill health.38 Suicide constituted another hidden aspect of the realities of unemployment. Whilst L’Humanité and the press of the communist-led unemployed movements stressed the connection between unemployment and suicide, the political mainstream largely ignored it.39 Jean Renoir’s 1932 film Boudu Sauvé des Eaux opened with the tramp anti-hero’s failed attempt at drowning in the Seine. Eugene Dabit’s Hôtel du Nord, turned into a film by Carné in 1938, opened with a failed suicide pact between young misfortunate lovers. But perhaps the most powerful representation of suicide of an unemployed person is the opening scene (called ‘one unemployed fewer’) of Dudow Slatan and Berthold Brecht’s film Kuhle Wampe (1932). In contrast, Jean Renoir’s Les Bas Fonds wrote the suicide out of the end of Maxim Gorky’s novel as it did not fit with the optimism of the early Popular Front period. Suicide surfaced in Viande à Brûler on several occasions. Juliette, the wife of Albert Chédeau, casually remarked that she would rather put her head in the gas oven than live as the poorest unemployed couples did.40 Chouard observed that he had contemplated suicide and that gambling on the horses assuaged these temptations.41 Thévenin considered the act and alternative methods of committing suicide on more than one occasion.42 Disqualified from benefit and despairing at his family’s situation, Voulaz killed his wife and child and then turned his revolver on himself. Thévenin observed that the newspaper failed to mention the material plight of Voulaz instead attributing his act to insanity.43 Although in previous thoughts about suicide, loss of status appeared to motivate him, Thévenin explained his choice to commit suicide so as not to burden his friends.44 Again emphasizing a sense of devalued and purposeless existence, this selflessness in suicide mirrored the final act of the youth in Kuhle Wampe who removed his watch knowing it to be of value to his family before he jumped to his death. Malnutrition and suicide presented authors of depression novels with a dilemma. As Stephen Constantine observed, Walter Greenwood avoided these questions so as not to make the middleclass reader feel uncomfortable.45 Fauxbras refused to commit such concessions, wishing to overturn contemporary complacency about unemployment.

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Status, masculinity and the white-collar worker Thévenin had to negotiate the changes in his life and the subversion of his sense of self-worth and the independence that this implied. One source that eroded this was his family background, he was acutely conscious that his father, a surveyor, who had taught him to despise those on low incomes, would be ashamed of his son’s descent.46 Having had a well paid white-collar job as a chief accountant and senior executive at Coudurier et Cie, Thévenin had to bear one blow to his status after another, like Dante’s circles of hell. He observed his decline in relation to the mundane: When I was a company executive [...], I had a horror of the metro. If I had to take it, I went first class, with senior bureaucrats, officers and semi-luxurious women. The spectacle of workers in cloth caps filled me with sadness. Now that I go on foot, I regard my pariahs of before as happy mortals, who can buy a newspaper as well as their ticket.47 Thévenin relied as long as he could upon his savings rather than submit to the humiliation of signing on for unemployment benefit. He remarked that he would rather commit suicide than go to a soup kitchen.48 To quit Rouchot’s hotel, he had to reconcile himself to living in the ‘lower depths’ of Paris, whose smell and squalor initially assailed his sensibilities. On meeting an old acquaintance Albert Chédeau at the special labour exchange for technical staff, he initially dissembled, suffering from an intense feeling of shame, the true depth of his hardships.49 Films about the depression often used the aesthetics of industry or modern technology to help in the visualization of unemployment. The cloth-capped male industrial worker – such as Proud Valley’s David Goliath or Love on the Dole’s Harry Hardcastle – was the universally recognizable signifier of the unemployed in film. Despite scenes of industry and male manual workers often composing the visual representations of the depression, the problem of the unemployed white-collar worker, intellectual or graduate did elicit scholarly investigation and imaginative literature.50 Other representations of white-collar joblessness sought to capture its specific character just as Fauxbras did. Indeed, in King Vidor’s film The Crowd, the routines of the Taylorized office and the anonymous uniformity of one of New York’s tower blocks overwhelmed the hero, leading to his mental breakdown. The central character in Hans Fallada’s novel Little Man, What Now? was also a clerk. The loss of a

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succession of jobs degraded Pinneberg. At Bergman’s paternalistic shop he would not lower himself to deliver parcels: he was better than that. At Kleinholz’s seed store, he lost his job because he refused to marry the boss’s daughter. At Mandel’s department store, he fell victim to a sales/efficiency quota system. His descent was epitomized by a moment when he spied his reflection, poignantly noting the absurdity of the marker of his status – his white collar – set against his ragged condition. According to these representations, a pathological modernity presented a double threat to the white-collar worker, through status degradation brought on by techniques of scientific management and proletarianization through loss of employment. Several depression novels contend that exceptional material circumstances disrupt the perceived norms of personal and family life, thereby questioning the possibility of ‘love on the dole’. Little Man and MeansTest Man concluded that the family holds together by virtue of a loveless parental force of will. In general, anxieties gnaw away at young love, pregnancies are unwanted and children are burdensome. These heightened antagonisms in personal relations of the unemployed find expression in a crisis in the sense of self and gender relations. The challenge to masculinity is symptomatic of this crisis of personal relations and the self. Whilst some French depression novels, such as Les Humbles, focus on the family unit and mirror these themes, in both Viande à Brûler and Consulat Polonais unemployed single men are the main protagonists. This reflects contemporary visions of unemployment as a specifically male problem. The troubled nature of their sexual relationships with women emphasized the masculinity of these representations of unemployment. The libertine Liron, in Consulat Polonais, opportunistically awaited his friend’s sister in the dark after their first meeting for a sexual encounter.51 In Viande à Brûler, Paul Thévenin revealed a deep-seated mistrust of women occasioned by his Jezebel-like wife, who was the cause of his ultimate downfall. In the contemporary films Belle Equipe, La Bête Humaine and elsewhere, stereotyped vampish females threaten to undermine solidarities of male friends in the face of economic adversity.52 On the loss of his job, Thévenin’s relationship with his wife deteriorated, and he ultimately responded with physical violence to her daily threats and reproaches for failing to find work.53 In contrast, and again experiencing emasculation, Chédeau had to reconcile himself to being kept by this wife Juliette. The narrator also agreed with his workmate at SIRAB who blamed working married women for white-collar unemployment.54 In this sense, Fauxbras was trapped in the masculine

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conventions about the victims of unemployment. Fauxbras’s characters often defaulted to a masculine discourse of the scorned veteran to revive their self-esteem. At the obvious level, the tragedy of the soldier’s son’s suicide is damning on society and keyed into the discourse of the veterans’ associations that played such a visible and prominent role in 1930s France. The publication date suggests that the book was written shortly after the events of 6 February 1934 when veterans’ and other far right leagues rioted outside the Chamber of Deputies with considerable loss of life. Specifically the slogan ‘à bas les voleurs’ (down with the thieves) connected the hero to the right-wing backlash against the corruption scandals that implicated the neo-cartel government of Camille Chautemps.55 The general tenor of discussion was hostile to politicians, profiteers, and the disrespect for their sacrifices during war. This bellicose rhetoric compensated for the humiliations of Thévenin’s situation. Moreover, there is a strong rejection on Paul’s part of the communists and their committees of the unemployed. The political process failed the unemployed. Whilst Jojo, Robert and Barjon attended a Committee of the Unemployed meeting, Thévenin declined. He suspected the leaders of committee, who were never to be seen at signing on or collecting benefits. Drawing the subscriptions of the unemployed, these self-selecting leaders fed on chicken, periodically calling a meeting to renew their mandate. At such meetings, they extolled the virtues of the ‘country where unemployment does not exist’ and solicited votes for the party that ‘defends the unemployed’. Thévenin was surprised that people fell for this.56 Fauxbras was referring to the communist-led movement of the unemployed. However, passivity and cynical instrumentalization of the unemployed was only one aspect of this movement. Culminating in 1934 and early 1935, there were a number of important protests, hunger marches and representation work on behalf of the unemployed. If Fauxbras’s hero disregarded the movement of the unemployed, for him the electoral process also offered the workless only bluff and humbug. Patterns of disqualifications from benefit were calculatingly synchronized with the electoral cycle and all the parties ‘from the orthodox communist to the shameful fascist protested their love for the victims of the crisis’.57 Despite a hostility to formal politics, Fauxbras explored the politicized reactions of this group of unemployed living in the same hotel. This politicization of the unemployed that Fauxbras suggests in his novel is both his own anti-Stalinist plea and an observation that the unemployed were politically conscious at an informal everyday level undetected in activism or membership of organizations.

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An inescapable crisis The novel emphasizes the connection between war and unemployment and is shot through with the bitterness of war veterans who cannot find work. As the only visible public expression of the unemployed, the dole queue prompted musings on the condition of the jobless. The same civilians who could be overheard castigating the unemployed as scroungers and scum had encouraged the likes of Barjon and Chouard to go and ‘dry their guts on the barbed wire’ in 1914 and no longer talked of altruism, morale and fraternity.58 In general, though Thévenin reflected that veterans looked back on the war as an adventure, they did not glorify it, nor did they cloak their experiences in romantic patriotic phrases as ‘a war for France’ or ‘for civilization’.59 If the trench generation remembered the war, the youth had had to bear ‘servitude and hardship’.60 Overhearing their discussion in a dole queue, a mother who had lost her two sons told Barjon and Chouard that they should stop complaining as it was they who were too scared to settle matters in 1919.61 The politicized memory of war mediates the reactions to the depression of this group of unemployed living in the same hotel. The general tenor of their discussion was hostile to politicians, profiteers, and returned time and again to the disrespect for their wartime sacrifices. Other novels such as Drieu’s Gilles took up this theme. The narrator used the metaphor of unemployment as a war and the comparison of these two experiences served to underline the connections between them.62 Chouard, Verdun veteran, wondered whether he would have been better off had the Germans won.63 Unemployment transformed the attitudes of the highly decorated veteran Chédeau. He, like all veterans, had returned from war believing himself to be superior to those shirkers who had not served. France owed him a pension, preferential employment and medals. This very attitude later disgusted him. He considered his medals to be ‘scrap metal’ that he refused to wear.64 If war and unemployment were connected in Viande to accentuate the failings and injustices of French society, war transcended social division in some representations of depression. In the Proud Valley (1940), Love on the Dole (1940) and Grapes of Wrath (1940), film-makers offered optimistic messages of new deal or social democratic reform in keeping with wartime demands for feelings of national unity. If a claustrophobic sense of crisis confronted the residents of Hotel Desvaux, the prospect of escape intermittently maintained their hopes. A chapter discussing the national lottery identified sublime fantasies to be the corollary of material hardship, constituting part of a collective

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psychology of the unemployed. Introduced in 1933, as the crisis deepened, the lottery, which ‘dispenses hope to the most dispossessed, is a magnificent invention’.65 Each of Fauxbras’s characters had their own form of escapism. Only Lalou found a genuine route out of unemployment via foreign legion though this was a bitter price for an anti-militarist and anarchist. Even this dubious escape failed for his friend Richardon who was ‘denied the right to pacify Morocco’ on the grounds that he was too old.66 Jojo, a graduate who had hoped to secure a university post in history, now repeatedly spoke of an elusive job on the metro as his salvation. The great scheme of the persuasive seafarer Robert enticed Jojo and Thévenin to believe that once they had saved enough money they would sail away to a Pacific paradise ‘Kermadec ... where there are no slums to catch TB in, no prostitutes to catch the pox from and no fascists to crack your head open’; yet, the proposition of amassing these modest savings were equally fanciful as the trip itself.67 This voyage of the imagination substituted for the symbolism of the road widespread in representations of the depression. The metaphor of the road stretching to the horizon with its open-ended uncertainty, and even libertine promise of freedom was deployed as the conclusion of the Grapes of Wrath, À Nous La Liberté, Modern Times, Boudu and Les Bas Fonds. With Viande, such a way out was replaced with an illusory escapism that the reader could never treat with more than the deepest scepticism. Other films – Our Daily Bread, Belle Equipe, Crime de Monsieur Lange and the original screenplay of Proud Valley – explored self-help or workers’ control of production as an alternative to the predicament of unemployment and capitalist proprietorship. This was after all the era of the US sit-in strikes, the stay down strikes of the South Wales and Hungarian miners and the factory occupations of French strike wave of summer 1936. Alongside Kermadec, other temporary respites – whether real or imaginary – also proved to be dead ends. Thévenin sought sexual gratification with Marthe who he had slept with once on a benefits day; however, failure to maintain this arrangement depressed him. Chouard turned to the horses: That means that without the hope of winning the raised stakes, I am then only Chouard, sandwich-board unemployed man, king of those down on their luck. Whilst in my days of confidence, Chouard disappears, it is a future millionaire who lives in my skin.68 As a dark alternative to escapist optimism, Fauxbras premised Viande à Brûler upon a sense of epochal and civilizational crisis. Unemployment

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and war were for the residents of the Hotel Desvaux the modern horsemen of the apocalypse. It was not simply a matter of recession and the personal and temporary experience of unemployment but a world whose moral order had been destroyed by a war fought in the name of ‘justice and civilization’ (droit et civilisation), and consequently a sense of looming catastrophe permeated the thinking of the narrator and his discussions with his peers. Time and again their thoughts returned to this sentiment. Jojo lamented: ‘Civilization repels me, we want to return to nature’.69 That Guingette – the six-year-old daughter of unemployed electrician Voulaz – should speak of the frequent male visitors to no. 4 to ‘play at bouncing up and down naked on the bed’ had made Thévenin and Jojo reflect that this was symptomatic of their ‘sad epoch’.70 Robert observed that everyday in Europe there was a new catastrophe: Hitler, the Anschluss, crisis, unemployment, devaluation, deflation, inflation, chemical war, bacteriological war. The speculations of Fauxbras’s victims of the crisis suggested a link between immiseration and radicalization though this relationship was left open, complex and ultimately subject to disappointment. The discussions of the old comrades possessed an undercurrent of impotent rage. The very title of the novel itself juxtaposes the symmetrical irrationalities of the war and the slump. The meaning of this cryptic and striking metaphor was only revealed in Barjon’s soliloquy some way into the novel: The awkward thing is that there is a stock that the rich will not liquidate. The stock of meat. The unemployed, if you prefer. The world is too rich in hands, it seems. In Brazil, coffee, which cannot be sold, is burnt in locomotives. In Egypt, cotton is burnt. We, the 30 million unemployed, we ought to be treated the same. Yes, that is what we are: meat to be burnt. As long as the excess of workers will not be destroyed by whatever means, by fire or otherwise, prosperity will not return. I think that the governments realize, since they are preparing for us a good new war to end wars ...71 What happened to the Brazilian coffee crop and Egyptian cotton were notorious illustrations of the irrationalities of the world economy and these examples reappeared in various places, especially in the literature of the left.72 The paradox of a world where food was destroyed and the poor went hungry was widely remarked upon. The goal of restoring markets by restricting output and raising prices seemed to be a perverse logic.73 Discussing this contrariness, Steinbeck introduced

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his title-metaphor: ‘... and in the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage’.74 Unlike several French intellectuals at this time, however, Fauxbras rejected the idea that capitalist irrationality could be superseded with the putative rationality of planned production in the Soviet Union. The suggestion of a radical positive outcome of the crisis eventually closed in the novel. The exchange between Chédeau and Thévenin articulated this closure. Renewing their acquaintance after several years, the jobless Chédeau and Thévenin contemplated the future. Chédeau believed a new war to be inevitable but, from its ashes, a new worker’s international would be built. He told Paul that a golden age would follow a revolution that would sweep away capitalism and nationalism, including Russia, which was itself capitalist. In his opinion, war or the probability of a quick death asphyxiated by poison gas was preferable to a slow death from hunger. According to Thévenin, the future would not bring war. In a France where ‘French citizens, capable of work, living in slums and having nothing to eat’ while others live in selfish luxury, the day would come where ‘the empty stomachs would settle accounts with the full ones’.75 Ultimately, Thévenin nihilistically reconciled himself to the cataclysm, ‘I would like Chédeau’s prediction to happen, that a war breaks out, with a lot of poison gas and lot of microbes, and that all this dirty world is destroyed’.76 Captured brilliantly by the soliloquies of Tom Joad, Casey the fallen preacher, or Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, or by Larry Meath in Love on the Dole, a sense of burning iniquity common to other depression novels strongly permeated Viande à Brûler. The slump laid bare the dissatisfaction with inequality that the hopes of social mobility could in normal times diffuse. Early in the book, the voice of the veteran Chouard evoked a strong sentiment of injustice: [W]e’re all idiots and chickens, its not our fault, it’s in our nature. Listen, just now two coppers would have beat up our friend because he was smoking and nobody would have raised a finger. I suppose that we would have clenched our fists, that we would have had trouble holding ourselves back, but we would have. Of course! Get yourself locked up and lose our benefit? Anything, but not that. And there’s five million of us and we continue to queue quietly. It’s like the pleasure of telling your mother-in-law what you think of her. To get angry and do something about it, you have to be really hungry. Because we get 10 francs, just enough to have something to lose, we

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want the cushy life and those who count on us to make a revolution may as well put their finger in their eye. That’s my opinion, expressed with eloquence. Unconsciously, Chouard ended by raising his voice. The same cop rushed up and shouted at the speaker. Listen, you, we’re not at the Bourse du Travail. Your communist speeches, go and spout them outside. Chouard touching his hat, replied in a servile manner. Sorry, officer, I am exactly the opposite of a communist. I was making this lady understand that the communists, no matter what trouble they go to, their famous revolution is not going to happen tomorrow because we are people who do not want to be lead by cudgel blows. True, officer? Don’t you think? Politics, not my business, said the other, mollified.77 It was not just Chouard who realized and articulated this suppressed rage. Paul Thévenin increasingly railed against their situation. On occasion, I would extend my promenade to the Étoile via Corcorde and the Champs-Élysées. I encounter the beautiful people, who laze without pain. Laziness is only terrible for the hard up. I learnt in school and in the barracks that France is my mother, and that all the French were my brothers, and that it was my duty, in particular circumstances, that I should sacrifice all that I possess, my own skin, for my family. That must be true, since 1,400,000 households, as Chouard says, consented to this sacrifice. But why does this famed national solidarity not work at times of unemployment as it does at times of war, why do the Cresuses of Étoile let their dear brothers of Belleville die of hunger? As Chouard says also, there is something wrong with our system.78 The sentencing of Robert at the hands of an assembly line justice to 13 months in prison is one of the tragic sequences of injustice that befall the characters. With poignant innocence, Guingette resentfully told her father she wanted him to get his nice job as being unemployed again (that is, to be on benefit again as he was before his disqualification) so that her mother did not have to go away to work.79 Romains’s Les Humbles also used childish subjectivity to highlight the incomprehensibility of unemployment when a father’s job loss is first encountered in painful perturbing silences around the dinner table.80 Irrationality compounded

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injustice. Thévenin wrote, ‘Shame on the miserable bureaucrats who coerce the unemployed into forced residence, who will kill Guingette because Voulaz cannot leave Paris.’81 Like all the representations of the depression from the photographs of Dorothea Lange to Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, Fauxbras harnessed injustice as a moral imperative just as Edward VIII famously said on a visit to South Wales in 1936, ‘something ought to be done’. Fauxbras raised injustice to an agonizing pitch with visions of suicide resulting from the tyranny of the courts and the benefits system, malnourished six-years-olds near to death and Verdun veterans dying from a cold because hunger had worn down their resistance.

Empathy, personal trajectories and solidarity Fauxbras offered a fleeting vision of idealized lower depths by inverting conventional assumptions about virtue and morality. Unlike Thévenin’s petty-bourgeois friends who abandoned him in his hard times, the novel develops a strong sense of mutual support and empathy amongst the unemployed.82 The stories of personal misfortune served to gain the sympathy of the reader and fellow unemployed: ‘Coffee hardly poured, Voulaz began his story of vicissitudes, without doubt to incite me to tell mine, for the unemployed person is avid for sad confessions, which creates solidarity.’83 Electrical fitter Pierre Voulaz and his young wife who worked as a waitress in the restaurant had hoped to save up to start their own business. Things went according to plan until they had their first child and then both lost their jobs. They sunk deeper into rent arrears. It was a story typical of ‘hundreds of thousands of Parisians’. Thévenin’s diary recorded a number of these. Robert, a sailor from Le Havre, expected to become a ship’s captain by the age of 35 but as more and more young people entered the profession he found himself without work. He came to Paris to skipper one of the river’s pleasure boats but could only find precarious and humiliating jobs such as salesman on commission, showground entertainer or working in the post room of a firm.84 After sex, Jeanette also opened up to Thévenin explaining how she had been forced into sleeping with German soldiers by her mother during the occupation of her native Nord. As a result, she was subject to abuse in the street and decided to quit for Paris only to find that without references material necessity pushed her into prostitution.85 The residents at Hotel Desvaux were bound by ties of daily favours and neighbourly support. They ate together, gave each other clothes, used their contacts to find jobs for each other and rallied round to try to save

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the sickly six-year-old Guingette. As Thévenin observed in his diary: ‘We formed a sort of family, the nine of us.’86 But tragedy intervened to destroy this moral order conjured in the face of the depression. ‘The crisis has killed four of us, led the fifth to jail and the sixth to hospital.’ This was not simply a sentimental evocation of working-class solidarity. This, according to Thévenin, did not exist. Too many – like the foremen and policemen – who came from its ranks and turned on their own or, like the double-income couples, denied jobs to those who needed one.87 In this sense, the novel intersected with some of the trends within French ‘social cinema’. It was closer to Duvivier’s dark realism (réalisme noir) of the original La Belle Equipe than to the hopeful realism (réalisme blanc) typical of Renoir. In Duvivier’s film, circumstance and a scheming woman undo the solidarity of the jobless lottery winners, where their friendship dissolves in a murderous feud.88 Fauxbras’s novel ended with Thévenin explaining how he will commit suicide jumping from the Quai de Bercy on 5 May, 20 years to the day after his father died for ‘justice and civilisation’.89 The suicide plays an important function in the novel. Not only does it connect, despite official denial, unemployment and suicide, it also resolves the narrative in a dramatic manner and underlines its dark realism.

Conclusion When Viande à Brûler was published in 1935, France was at the depth of its depression. It touched a raw nerve. French governments had failed to construct a system of unemployment insurance; consequently, provision for the unemployed was an arbitrary and inconsistent affair. The Laval government was pursuing – through ‘the decree laws of misery’ as they were known in the labour movement – a policy of deflation, cuts in public expenditure and maintenance of the Gold Standard. Fauxbras was exposing a social problem whose true extent was obscured by the inadequacies of official statistics. Social investigators, notably the threevolume study by Letellier and her colleagues, surveyed the problem within the positivist tradition but failed to capture the experience of the unemployed.90 In France, Fauxbras’s novel more than any other cultural representation gives an insight into that subjectivity, being very much more than a tawdry panorama of poverty. It was for this reason that it achieved the acclaim that it did. As such, it shares much with the international literature of the depression. Fitting within these domestic and international attempts to address the question of unemployment through medium of realist cultural representation, Viande à Brûler

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draws on and contributes to a transnational language with its own conventions, themes and symbolism to capture a sense of the experience of the unemployed and the depression. Although it seemed to be a radical departure from his previous work, the memory of war permeated the entire work. War was the primary point of the reference for characters, both those who experienced the trenches and the younger generation who matured in a political culture dominated by its memory. The unemployed made sense of unemployment through this dialogue between these generations. Haunted by the carnage, unemployment was not a passing economic difficulty but a personal catastrophe that fitted into a wider civilizational collapse, which would, Fauxbras feared, result in another war. Fauxbras suggested the existence of a lively discussion amongst the unemployed, exploring their personal and political options or increasing lack thereof. He was keen to stress that the personal and social memory of war framed this cognitive process.

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4 A Candide for the 1930s: The Myths of the Popular Front

Fauxbras’s next novel Antide subtitled ‘the fraudulent failures’ depicts the bewildering kaleidoscope of French politics from the Great War to the International Exhibition of 1937.1 With an original subtitle of ‘or Marxism’, its subject was the French left. The period of the two world wars witnessed a significant remaking of the left in France. Prior to the First World War, two key organizations of the labour movement had only recently come into being. The SFIO formed in 1905.2 The syndicalist trade union movement was centred initially on the bourses du travail, institutions that combined the functions of labour exchange and worker’s meeting halls. The movement came together to form the CGT in 1895 establishing its constitution in 1906 entitled the Charter of Amiens. Both these organizations formally espoused anti-war positions prior to the First World War but both supported the sacred union of France against ‘German aggression’ when war broke out. In the aftermath of war, the Congress of Tours of December 1920 was to reshape the French left for the next 80 years. At it, the majority of the SFIO delegates voted to affiliate to the Communist International. Thus, the mass party of the left split into reformist and revolutionary parties – the SFIO and the French Communist Party – as did the CGT until its reunification in 1936. Quite quickly after Tours, the reformist SFIO under the leadership of Léon Blum established itself as the larger in terms of membership and electorate. The emergence of a mass Communist Party was a distinctive feature of French interwar politics, having a significant influence upon anti-war, trade union, unemployed, left literary and anti-fascist campaigns, all of which were important to Fauxbras. After reversing its collapse from a membership of 120,000 in 1920 to only 29,000 in 1933, the PCF became by the mid-1930s a powerful force in French politics and remained so 81

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until the 1980s.3 During the early 1930s, Fauxbras might be described as a communist fellow traveller, having communist friends Jean Fréville and Wierzbolowiez, and being favourably reviewed in L’Humanité. Over time, the distance between Fauxbras and the party grew. Symptomatic of this, Antide challenged the PCF’s myth of the Popular Front as heroic left victory, highlighting the ambiguities, shortcomings and disenchantment of this supposed golden age. Fauxbras’s novel examined a moment of formative renewal in the history of the French left. Antide provides a micro-study of the French left at its grassroots. The micro-level can provide a sense of the journeys of lowly individuals, complementing Philippe Burrin’s approach that focused upon the process by which former leftwing leaders (Doriot, Déat and Bergery) became fascists. The book’s central character Antide’s odyssey followed an idiosyncratic path, but one with features and encounters that were common to many.

Fauxbras’s Antide and Voltaire’s Candide The title of Fauxbras’s fourth book purposely echoed Voltaire’s classic satire on pre-revolutionary European thought Candide: ou l’Optimisme. Catastrophe – the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Great War – prompted both novels. From Candide, Fauxbras borrowed the structure of staccato chapters with their stylized titles and the premise of a naïve individual lost in an exotic and incomprehensible world.4 Just as Candide travelled to the extremes of the eighteenth-century imagination in the shape of the New World and the novel values of the Enlightenment, so Antide Rebardin confronts an equally confusing age of political ideologies, total war and an Eldorado of sorts – Stalin’s USSR. The two great features of Antide’s age – politics and war – interacted in the novel in complex ways. The central characters of the respective books – Antide Rebardin and Candide – share much. Idiosyncratically naïve, they greeted bewildering misfortune and accident with fatalism and incomprehension. Optimism was their philosophical predisposition. Antide lived his teenage years through a war for ‘civilisation and law’, ‘after which all was for the best in the best of all possible republics’.5 Like Candide, Antide was irresolute, often straddling contradictory positions; his affiliations were flawed and temporary. This characteristic marked his first political steps being an anti-clerical Catholic under the contradictory influences of the chess-playing village priest and his radical father. After a short time, this mutated into another mixture, this time, of radicalism and socialism. Antide’s indecisiveness and conversions continue throughout the novel. Candide and Antide also wrestle with the respective intellectual systems

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of Leibnizian optimism and Marxism, ending ultimately for both in disenchantment and pragmatism. The ideology of the left, like Pangloss’s metaphysico-theologico-cosmo-codology, was seemingly impenetrable to the novice.6 Thus, for instance, Léonard Crassou asked the young socialist Antide, to the latter’s bemusement, whether he was a Proudhonian, Saint-Simonian, Babouvist, Fourierist, Blanquist, Allemanist, Guesdist, possibilist, syndicalist, reformist, Jauressist, Menshevik, Bolshevik or orthodox Marxist. Beyond the principal characters and the formal structure, there are other features and devices that Fauxbras appropriated from Voltaire. Fauxbras imitated Candide’s genre of the philosophical tale as his second subtitle – ‘roman peut-être philosophique’ – underlines. Both plots rely upon the technique of the tardy reappearance of forgotten characters who have often undergone radical changes or astonishing experiences. In the latter chapters, the Stalinist Prosper Julovitch Moliskine was reencountered as SFIO section secretary Prosper Chambougnat, then later still a Radical party ministerial aide; Bidou, the socialist poilu returned as a wavering Stalinist; Antide’s bullying adjutant Choc as a Popular Front demonstrator; Antide’s former colleague the Guesdist intellectual Crassou as an unemployed communist; the wealthy German widow reappeared as an impoverished Jewish immigrant. The most perplexing trajectory was Antide’s who began political life as a radical, became a socialist, then a Guesdist, then joining both the SFIO and PCF twice, with intervening moments of political withdrawal. In another shared device, names have comic aspects or make knowing allusions to the reader: Conégunde or Bizouville and Thunder-ten-tronckh or Palloux de la Teste de Crapaudine (born Mâchicoulis de Château-Canaille). Both novels are political, moral and social as well as philosophical satires. Both novels play with the hypocrisies and absurdities of the day. Thus, for instance, the French occupation of the Ruhr was ‘in order to extinguish hereditary hatreds’ between the French and the Germans.7 Important contrasts also mark the books. The most striking difference is that whilst Candide was the bestselling novel of the eighteenth century, Antide, despite relatively favourable reviews, sank into obscurity. Its failure probably contributed to Fauxbras’s difficulties finding publishers for his manuscripts. Furthermore, whereas Voltaire though inspired by the Lisbon earthquake dealt mainly in the allegorical, Fauxbras rooted his narrative in recognizable history, mixing real and fictional people and events. We encounter Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Poincaré, Renaudel and Clemenceau as well as the cartel government, the Popular Front and its demonstrations, the riot of 6 February 1934 and the international

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exhibition of 1937. There are identifiable but renamed figures: Thorez as ‘Momo’, Blum as ‘Lestète’, Aragon as ‘Andalousie’, Paul-Boncour as ‘Movélon’ and Herriot as ‘Pipécour’.8 Similarly, Rebardin and Ribois visited the Soviet Union not the imagined Eldorado that Candide and Cacambo do. The character dynamics are also very different in that Antide has one key companion, the chess-playing jaundiced veteran of war and politics, Théodore Ribois.

Against fascism and war The conjuncture of the 1930s in France held a specific combination of economic crisis (with its ruined investors, unemployed workers, collapsing agricultural prices) and corruption scandals linking parliament and high finance. The Stavisky affair signalled the sharpest of these interwar scandals, bringing down the centre-left government in February 1934. This event provided a linkage in the book between capitalist crisis and the rise of fascism. The scandal itself resulted from the actions of a con-artist Alexandre Stavisky who had persuaded investors to put their money into the provincial bank, Crédit Municipal de Bayonne. On the likely exposure of the scam, Alexandre Stavisky fled and later was found dead in Chamonix in early January 1934. His suicide led to escalating speculation that the government and police had murdered Stavisky in order to escape implication in the affair. In the novel, Fauxbras emphasized the momentum of events. An Action Française newspaper seller interrupted Antide and Théodore’s chess game to announce headlines about the murder of the swindler and the 367 deputies implicated. Even the politically disillusioned Antide was carried along with the boiling indignation of those days. From the far left to the far right, the press ‘spat with disgust’ at the government. Antide argued that there was no reason for the swindler to commit suicide, while Théodore believed his boss at the Ministry to be implicated. In an atmosphere resembling an auction with rounds of escalating rumour and tension, Antide attended the demonstration of 6 February where the crowds were shouting ‘Down with the thieves’, and on occasion ‘Long live the king’. This evolved into a full-blown riot outside the Chamber of Deputies with bloody clashes between protesters and the police during which 13 demonstrators died and 6 were fatally wounded.9 Anti-fascism developed as a major theme of the second part of the book. Antide and Théodore forgot their political disenchantment in the context of the fascist threat. Capturing the widespread impulse of passionate engagement that the Chamber of Deputies riot elicited, the

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novel notes, ‘One wishes in vain to hold the irrevocable commitment taken with oneself, one cannot become disinterested from politics when one is born a democrat and fascists unite to murder liberty.’10 Unusually, Théodore abandoned his scepticism, joining the SFIO and encouraging Antide to do likewise. A brief chapter captured the general exuberance and sense of urgency of the Popular Front epoch. Théo and Antide participated in all the great demonstrations and meetings and ‘God knows there were some from October 1935 to May 1936!’ Attending their SFIO section meetings, Prosper Chabougnat ‘broke down the wall of money, with great blows of rhetoric, each Friday night’. The more the fascists provoked the left, the weaker were the divisions of the latter. Before our heroes was the spectacle of a new republican dawn. Fauxbras hinted at its false nature. The workers threw themselves into the fray with enthusiasm and the politicians no less enthusiastically rubbed their hands calculating their probable profit. Thus turns the world, and so it should be for if politics does not feed politicians, nobody would please the people anymore.11 The May 1936 election victory of the Popular Front made Théo, Antide and his lover Manoute cry with joy. They felt that they and ‘seven million electors had changed the face of the world’.12 The narrative explained that the workplace occupations brought the implementation of the Popular Front government but the Socialist Party took the credit, whilst surreptitiously increasing army officers’ pay. Antide’s evolving evaluation of the Popular Front hinged to some considerable extent upon its commitment to peace. Given the character of Fauxbras’s previous novels, it is unsurprising that anti-militarism should be a major theme of Antide. Unconcerned by theory, what intrigued Fauxbras about Bolshevism was its anti-militarism and defeatism: Nothing else because we did not know where Lenin was heading. So, I had hardly put on my civilian clothes when I hurried to join the most left-wing party, that’s to say the most anti-militarist. When that party split in two, I chose once more the most left-wing part, which loathed the army and national defence, all the shit which is used to trash the people.13 Norman Ingram, historian of the French pacifist movement, has distinguished between old and new style pacifism during the interwar

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years. The old style pacifism encompassed two distinct elements. First, the legalistic approach of the organizations supporting the League of Nations or the Association de la Paix par le Droit was based upon international legal solutions and pacifist pedagogy. Second, there was the anti-militarism of the pre-war SFIO. A new pacifism emerged from the late 1920s. This was an absolutist pacifism (pacifisme intégral) embodied in the Ligue Internationale des Combattants de la Paix, which included the outright moral rejection of war and the strategy of conscientious objection. Victor Méric was the principal figure in setting up this body in October 1930. Within two and a half years, it claimed 20,000 members. Despite a varied composition, socialists and anarchists played a significant role within it. This pacifisme intégral culminated in Léon Lecoin’s Paix Immédiate appeal of 4 September 1939 demanding peace at the time of Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany over its invasion of Poland.14 Fauxbras seemed to pass from old to new pacifism, associating with the milieu of new pacifism of the late 1930s. He did not, however, convert to an absolutist pacifism. Thus, he did not object to the fight against Franco and did not share the belief that the question of peace transcended the boundaries between the left and the right. During Antide, he retained the class-based anti-militarism typical of the Communist Party prior to 1934–5. In Fauxbras’s novel, it was an infantryman, Bidou, who shared a train journey to Paris with Antide who introduced the young naïf to the ideas of anti-militarism and socialism. For Fauxbras, Bidou represented the honest and authentic reaction against war from the trenches. Antide, true to form, was incapable of taking a coherent anti-war position as the army as an institution held for him from childhood a seductive appeal. He therefore enlisted and learned from his own experience to detest the army. In his description of the military, Fauxbras concentrated upon barracks culture and the friction between the ranks and their superiors. After enrolling in the army, Antide encountered the dispiriting barracks routine where his superiors – ‘a mercenary, a roughnecked soldier and an anthropoid’ expected him to revere fetishistically a ‘piece of cloth on a stick’ (the French flag).15 Clashing with the military authority, he was reduced to peeling vegetables and then was put into the stockade for two months for a minor infraction. After returning to civilian life, he was called up from the reserves with the occupation of the Ruhr and, disobeying an officer and singing the Internationale on the parade ground, he and his comrades were thrown into military prison for two months. For Antide, anti-militarism and socialism were indistinguishable so both his initial socialist commitment and his

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eventual alienation from the Marxist parties (PCF and SFIO) were premised on his anti-militarism.

Antide and Stalinism The period of the mid-1930s evoked potent memories for the French Communist Party. This was the time when it became a mass party with a growing electorate, greater municipal implantation, new trade union influence and a stronger voice in parliament. The rise of the PCF took place in the midst of anti-fascist mobilizations, mass strikes, left cooperation and electoral victory of 1936. That summer the Popular Front government of Léon Blum introduced a series of historic reforms: nationalizations, a 40-hour week and paid holidays. The memory of these halcyon days were sustained in the institutional memory through the party’s and union’s literature. A core of its older generation held a great sentimental attachment to ‘juin 36’.16 The labour movement, especially the PCF and CGT, sustained the myth of the Popular Front through commemorations, novels and memoirs well into the late twentieth century.17 In a sense, alongside the resistance, the Popular Front was the making of the party in the Thorezian mould. Indeed, these were the great formative political moments of a new generation of labour, with a different geographical and ethnic composition from the previous one, integrating on a mass scale the workers of Fordist production into unions and parties of the left. Fauxbras was not seduced when the PCF’s stock was rising. For all the apparent electoral, cultural and industrial successes of the PCF, Fauxbras highlighted the difficulties of those of longer standing or greater unwillingness to accept the party leadership’s line. Fauxbras’s novel perceived these years from the honest ranks of the left parties. It accentuated the process unidentified in electoral and membership statistics or readings of party manifestoes. Moreover, part of the significance of Antide is that it broached the principal themes of the historiography of the PCF: its alien or French character, its sociology, its bureaucratic centralism. These points for Fauxbras were tantamount to the same question: whether the PCF was true to its revolutionary principles and to Marxism.18 Two years before the publication of Antide, Fauxbras wrote on behalf of a fictive character Arthur Pinceplate who quit the PCF after 14 years’ membership.19 He had been proud to hold a party card, participating in a series of campaigns: the May strike movement of 1920, the defence of the Black Sea mutineers, against the cartel of the left, against 18 months conscription,

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for Sacco and Vanzetti, against rationalization. For him, May 1935 was a turning point after which he grumbled and questioned the party. When he opened his mouth, he was called a ‘leftist, Trotskyist, Doriotist, Pivertist and sometimes fascist’.20 Thus Fauxbras tried to imagine the insider’s experience of French communism and estrangement from it. With the insight of a fellow traveller, Fauxbras identified the Communist Party’s multifaceted appeal: anti-militarism, the imagined character of the Soviet Union, anti-capitalism and revolutionary purity. Having been deceived by the cartel’s promises and alienated by the middle-class character of the SFIO, Antide turned to the Communist Party principally for its anti-militarism. Antide’s first affiliation to the Communist Party resulted from being called up in the army. His adjutant Choc singled out Antide for his socialist beliefs and set about humiliating him and breaking his will. It was the hatred of petty military authority that made Antide and his fellow reservists – who were mainly working-class suburban Parisians – receptive to the communist message. And L’Humanité spat fire and flames against the periods of the reserve, militarism, the military, the fatherland, the flag, national defense and all the rubbish and mystifications of that type.21 Within the space of five brief chapters, however, he was utterly disenchanted with the party and with the Soviet Union. Fauxbras ridiculed communist hyperbole about Soviet Russia. Above all, Fauxbras targeted their adoration of the ‘genial Stalin’, who was also described as the ‘Vulcan of the Urals’, the ‘star of the tractors’, the only thing more admirable than the five-year plan, the ‘father of the plan’, the sublime or magnificent Georgian, spawn of Jupiter’s loins. In the SFIO, Antide came across a counter-lexicon of Russophobia where communists were known as Cossacks, ‘moujiks’, ‘moscoutaires’ or ruled by ‘ukases’ (decrees). As an apt example of the book’s humour, Fauxbras satirized the PCF’s Russophilia in a passage about a PCF leader, Prosper Julovitch Moliskine: Ah! Prosper Julovitch needs to come? Says Antide. He will chair, and he will speak, says Tavic. It is very flattering for our cell. Does he speak French well? Says Antide. Yes, very well but not without an accent, says Tavic. The Russian accent is charming, says Antide. Prosper Julovitch has a limousin accent, says Tavic.

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A limousin accent? Where did he get that? In Limoges, I think, Prosper Julovitch was called formerly Chabougnat. Moliskine is his wife’s name, a Russian divorcee of a taxi driver of the former ambassador. A white Russian? Despite being white, she still belongs to the chosen people. Prosper Julovitch changed his name the day of his marriage. He has taken a pseudonym, then! You are mistaken, Rebardin. According to the Soviet law, Proper Julovitch has the right to call himself Moliskine. He got married in the USSR? No Billancourt. What does it matter?22 Fauxbras also derided the suspect characters attracted to Stalinism: aristocrats who saw nobility in Stalin, architects who secured building contracts from PCF municipalities, authors who could publish their material in communist periodicals. Their superficial knowledge of Marxism was exposed as Antide was fêted as a great thinker and seduced by the Viscountess Yolande de la Teste de la Crapaudine because he had managed to read the first 57 pages of Marx’s Capital. Fauxbras contrasted these flighty social types with those communists for whom he had greater sympathy: the unemployed white-collar worker Crassou or the war veteran and industrial worker Bidou. Fauxbras exposed the internal regime of the party as being infested with careerists, who sought only to anticipate the line from Moscow. Fauxbras also satirized the attitude of the PCF towards Trotsky. After writing to the PCF stating that he wished to join, Antide was summoned to a party headquarters and asked to explain this decision. I have two reasons for wishing to join. First of all, I approve of Karl Marx’s conclusions, however the work of this great thinker is generally inaccessible to me. That led me to the SFIO, who kept me for an hour and a half. On contact with these politicians, I felt that there is no real revolutionary party but the Bolshevik Party, whose leaders, Lenin and Trotsky ... Shut your face! Cried Pirot. What? Said Antide. Do you not know that Trotsky has betrayed? Said the undertaker. I know that he is persona non grata, said Antide, but that does not prevent him from having served the revolution well. When the Whites attacked Leningrad ...

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That didn’t happen! Said Pirot. Comrade don’t tell stupid tales, or you will stay with us less time than with the social-traitors. I’m not arguing and it matters little to me. Said Antide. So, the Bolshevik Party seems the only revolutionary one, and its leader Lenin ... Its leader Stalin! Said Pirot. Lenin betrayed as well? Said Antide. Antide and Théodore’s visit to the Soviet Union was a turning point. Our heroes’ political tourism was part of a more general trend; by 1934, 3000 to 4000 French visitors were travelling to the USSR annually.23 They were attracted by, to borrow novelist Jules Romains’s metaphor, ‘this great light from the east’.24 Whereas, there were those – such as Henri Barbusse, Jules Romains and Paul Nizan – for whom this was an ‘iridescent dawn’, others like Boris Souvarine, André Gide and Victor Serge viewed it as a ‘fire of destruction’.25 Western visitors to the Soviet Union came in a number of varieties: Comintern agents, those attending International Lenin School, and those simply curious to see at first hand communist utopia or dystopia depending on their assumptions. The French Communist Party organized public meetings at which returning pilgrims relayed their experiences. This Francophone voyeurism of the Soviet Union mediated the debates about communism, which became increasingly vitriolic with the show trials in Moscow and the campaign against Leon Trotsky.26 With Antide for and Théo against, their dialogue rehearsed the arguments about Stalin’s Russia in France. The narrative moved towards progressive disenchantment. Their first denouement was an encounter with a disillusioned Frenchman who sought to offload his black market rubles. Furthermore, their train’s route across the USSR’s barren interior hardly inspired awe: the only achievement seemed to be the railway itself and that was an accomplishment of the Tsarist regime. On their arrival in Moscow, their interpreter and guide Léonie informed them that the greatest achievement of Soviet socialism was the Red Army, accompanying them to the barracks where her fiancé was a staff sergeant. There, life resembled what Antide had hated about the French army: soldiers swept up horse manure, the adjutants bullied the men at drill and officers played cards in their mess. All was maintained within a brutal regime of discipline. On interviewing the fiancé, they learned that he had served in the Tsarist army and that he was pleased that Stalin restored discipline in the army after Trotsky’s leadership. This experience disgusted Antide and Théodore. Their guide informed them that

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her lack of savings for a dowry meant that she could not marry. Like any western petty-bourgeois, the narrative implied, she was counting on her ‘Marxist’ bonds. She explained how a Soviet technician could have servants and the prospect of buying a villa at the Black Sea. Antide was flabbergasted and declared that whilst he was no longer a Stalinist, he was still a communist, resolving to explain all to his French comrades. This would, he believed, certainly shake them from Moscow’s tutelage. On his return to Paris, Antide’s PCF section organized a public meeting. He and Prosper Julovitch Molisikine addressed an audience of 60 in a hall with a capacity of 1000. When it was his turn on the platform, Antide spoke his mind, naively believing that a real discussion would ensue. He opened: Stalin, although simple secretary of the Russian party, exercises his dictatorship over the USSR and over the International. [...] I visited Moscow, and I observed that the Stalinist USSR is a land blessed with militarism and capitalism. Comrades, there are in USSR adjutants who mistreat soldiers, officers who shoot deserters, and rentiers who live at the expense of the proletarians. Comrades, our Party should break with the bourgeois imperialist Stalin, it must transform itself into an independent French communist party, for ... 27 At this point Prosper Julovitch intervened and four Stalinist thugs set about Antide, breaking his ribs and collarbone. Antide’s analysis of Stalinism as a form of capitalism held a minority position even on the anti-Stalinist left. Later, Antide adopted the position that the Soviet Union was a ‘red fascism’. Antide re-encountered Léonie his Soviet guide at Les Invalides. She had had to flee Russia with her husband after the purge in the army. She described Stalin as a counter-revolutionary despot. Her designation of Stalin as a counter-revolutionary was revealing. Fauxbras submitted Antide in the same year as the publication of Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed which portrayed Stalin as the ‘hangman of the revolution’. That Fauxbras distinguished between Lenin and Stalin suggests that he did not subscribe to the common anarchist interpretation that counter-revolution took place earlier under Lenin. Yet Antide’s designation of the Soviet Union as state capitalism differed from Trotsky’s. Indeed, Revolution Betrayed specifically criticized this view held by Boris Souvarine, the former member of the PCF central committee and Executive Committee of the Communist International.28 Having been expelled for supporting Trotsky in 1924, Souvarine analysed the Russian regime in Staline: Aperçu Historique du Bolchévisme

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(1935) and formed the Amis de la Verité sur l’URSS (Friends of the Truth about the Soviet Union) in 1936.29 State capitalism was also central to Albert Chédeau’s explanation in Fauxbras’s Viande à Brûler.30 In terms of contemporary political itineraries, the failure to develop an antiStalinist Marxism of this type provides an ideological aspect, though not necessarily to the exclusion of a social dimension, to an explanation of the journey from the left to anti-communism and fascism on the part of people like Jacques Doriot. Later in the novel, Antide rejoined the PCF via the cultural front organization SALADE. This is Fauxbras’s fictional equivalent of the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, AEAR), with which Fauxbras was himself associated in 1932. Ridiculing the excesses of socialist realism, Fauxbras latched onto the workerist celebration of literary mediocrity and the uncritical sycophancy towards the Soviet Union. This absurdity reached its height with the celebrated Andalousie’s Ode Aphteuse (Ulcerous Ode), the ‘master of the Kolhozian poetry’ calling for the enemies of the genial Stalin and the five-year plan to be shot. Fire, Fire, fire, fire, Fire in front, Fire behind, Fire on Lestète, fire on Movélon, Fire everywhere. Fire on those who disgust me, Fire on the satisfied, on the sell-outs, on the suckers Of social democracy, The gueules de vache31, the archbishops, Fire on the rotten radical-socialists, Fire, I want to fire Fire, fire, fire, and fire, fire, fire, On the enemies of the Communist Party and the genius Stalin, And of industrialisation, Let’s fire, comrades, [...] Five-yearly and concretized ideal. Fire, fire, fire, Rrrrrr!!! Pan!!! Boum!!! Zim!!! Rrrrrr!!! Pan!!! Boum!!! Zim!!!32

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This bore an unmistakable similarity to Louis Aragon’s agit-prop poem Front Rouge. Aragon had become the Communist Party’s principal cultural spokesperson. The poem coincided with his conversion from surrealism to communist cultural orthodoxy and proletarian realism. Aragon had travelled to Kharkov for the Second International Conference of Proletarian and Revolution Writers in November 1930. His poem’s rhetorical violence articulated the Comintern’s ultra-left Third Period, bloodthirstily anticipating a settling of accounts with social democrats and celebrating the military prowess of the Red Army. It was a marker of the rift inside surrealism with Luis Buñuel citing the poem in his resignation letter from the surrealist group.33 The poem also prompted the ‘Aragon affair’, in which the French authorities prosecuted Aragon in January 1932 over this poem for spreading demoralization in the army and the nation. In contrast to Ode Aphteuse, Antide’s poem at the SALADE meeting ventilated his disgust in the aftermath of the pact between Laval and Stalin. Stalin, incarnation of murderous fascism, They believe you to be a genius but you are more a villain.34 Antide thereby severed his affiliation with the party for a second time. In addition to his satire on Aragon, Fauxbras took another of the party’s cultural exponents, Paul Nizan, to task in a review of Le Cheval de Troie in the periodical Les Humbles.35 Although Fauxbras certainly did not belong to the modernist avant-garde, Antide defiantly flouted the conservative conventions of socialist realism from the perspective of both its political content and its literary form.

One book, two endings Antide’s plot builds towards its penultimate chapter, in which Antide Rebardin returned to his native village. There, he rediscovered Bidou who had first introduced Antide to socialism, but the veteran was now a broken man. Antide persuaded Bidou to explain the causes of his disillusionment over a drink. This chapter reproduced verbatim much of Fauxbras’s article for Les Humbles explaining Arthur Pinceplate’s departure from the PCF.36 The passage confirmed Fauxbras’s rank-andfile perspective, one shared by all the novel’s sympathetic characters: Antide, Théodore, Manoute and Bidou. That Fauxbras had adapted this chapter for the ‘Soliloquy of a comrade of the rank and file’ article

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after his initial failure to secure publication strongly suggests that this chapter carries the central message of the book. Bidou confessed that he understood the PCF until May 1935, but nothing subsequently. He explained that party intellectuals used theory to intimidate the ranks into silence. In his cell, the secretary put the line and everyone else was unhappy with it. The line which had been straightforward during the class against class period had been transformed; it was as though the Catholic Church had declared the Pope fallible and the Virgin Mary a whore. Bidou found that these new positions were untenable in the workplace. The celebration of the Red Army and Stakhanovism were an embarrassment for a left-wing worker. Stakhanovism had indeed become a matter of controversy in the French labour movement, with Kléber Legay, the CGT official of the Syndicats faction, and the communist Fernand Grenier exchanging sharp polemics over the question in 1936 and 1937.37 Stakhanovism had resulted from the Soviet authorities’ desire to boost labour productivity as part of the five-year plan through piece rates and a competitive bonus system.38 Stakhanovism was in Bidou’s eyes what the communists called Taylorism and rationalization until the previous year: ‘why would Stakhanov be a man of great deeds and Taylor a dirty bastard?’ Bidou recounted a workmate goading him that the PCF was a patriotic party and that he should toil as hard as a Russian Stakhanov. He reflected with dismay: I ask myself what the leaders were thinking of when they let the cretinous intellectuals write that the 16 hour day and a fivefold increase in output was good for the working class. It even appears that Marx was a Stakhanovite, according to the intellectuals. When Stalin gives himself the title of Tsar and a crown, the intellectuals will tell us that Lenin was a Tsarist.39 As for the Red Army, in the early years at least, Bidou believed it to be a provisional, temporary and necessary evil. The militarism of the USSR and the PCF’s abandonment of revolutionary defeatism had shattered those principles that had first attracted Bidou to the party all those years before. With the Popular Front, Bidou observed mournfully, the party had abandoned everything: the unemployed, the campaign against overtime and revolution. It was for these very reasons that Antide had quit the PCF for the second time. He rejoined the SFIO because of its apparent commitment to pacifism. Antide encouraged Bidou to sign up to the SFIO because a Popular Front government headed by the socialists would bring the ‘disarmament of the peoples and the liberation of

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the workers’. However, he was incapable of persuading the 50-year-old veteran who recalled the failure of the left in 1924. Bidou, like Candide, would now concentrate on gardening.40 Given the timing of the first failed submission of the novel in 1934, Antide’s hopeless attempt to persuade Bidou to remain faithful to his principles might have formed the book’s conclusion.41 In such an ending, Antide would have once again succumbed to a delusion that, the reader would suspect, he would lose by bitter experience. The book would run counter to the optimism and anticipation of the Popular Front government. Instead, Fauxbras was only able to publish this manuscript after the success of his Viande à Brûler and when disappointment in the Popular Front rendered it more in line with popular sentiment. With the passage of two years and the unfolding of such epic events, Fauxbras inserted a brief chapter about the election of 1936 and an epilogue indicating Antide’s disillusionment with the Popular Front government. The final chapter finds Antide, Manoute and Théodore at the International Exhibition of 1937.42 This exhibition, a signal achievement of the Popular Front government, was noted for the symmetrical architectural monumentalism of the Soviet and Nazi pavilions as well as the humbler Spanish pavilion in the midst of that country’s civil war, poignantly exhibiting Picasso’s Guernica and Miro’s The Reaper. Responding to the recent turn of events, the new focus of the conclusion was to explain the opportunism of the Radicals who had benefited from coalition governments of both the right and the left. The Blum government had fallen because of the ‘conspiracy of the economic feudalism and fascist Radicals of the Republican Senate’.43 The fact that Antide, Manoute and Théodore and so many others were visitors at the reduced Sunday tariff testified to the hardships of the supporters of the Popular Front and the continuing abyss between the rich and poor. On viewing the rich dining at a luxury restaurant, Ribois observed: It’s justice. Not having fought for the Popular Front, they don’t have to undergo the benefits. Whilst we, the fighters, those responsible, we have to enjoy our victory to the point of dying of hunger.44 In the Soviet pavilion, Antide was reacquainted with familiar figures from his past. All reappeared completely transformed. This not merely underlined the fickleness of politics and the human character, it also indicated the effects of left’s failures, highlighting a process that would become more marked during the war as several prominent leftwingers turned to fascism or collaboration. The jobless Crassou was the

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first to reappear. He had abandoned the Communist Party because he was still hungry and voting for them had failed to do anything for the unemployed. Encountering a ministerial delegation of Radical Party, Antide saw three former acquaintances: Prosper now a ministerial aide, Yolande now the minister’s wife and Petronelli, previously a lawyer in his SFIO section. Surrendering to unprincipled passivity, Antide accepted Prosper’s offer of a government sinecure. The hero was in absolute despair. At the novel’s end, the fraudulent failure of the left became fully apparent. The energy, hope and enthusiasm of the lowly Antide had been thoroughly expended. Their failure became his own. Speaking through Antide and Théodore, there were, however, limitations to Fauxbras’s rejection of politics. In the epilogue’s final exchange, Antide counselled ‘distrust Marxists, if not Marxism’.45

Antide’s reception On the whole, reviewers received Antide well. Several reports alluded to the talents of Fauxbras as ‘one of the most powerfully original to be discovered in these last years’ according to a review that was syndicated to several provincial newspapers.46 The most favourable review came from Jean Pomier the editor of Afrique who lavished five pages of rhapsodic hyperbole upon Fauxbras who was a ‘dancing effigy of joy on the horizon’.47 Even the heavyweight literary journal, the Nouvelle Revue Française commented positively, if tersely: ‘a satire, perhaps light, but certainly agreeable, of French political manners’.48 Reviewers recognized their own disconcerting age and they agreed that Antide represented the average Frenchman lost in these bewildering circumstances. More than one critic remarked that Fauxbras was making a courageous stance in writing a book that would make him no friends in official politics.49 In La Grande Réforme, Eugène Humbert even warned, ‘Fauxbras, my friend, you are ripe for a Colt bullet in the brain.’50 For others, Fauxbras was avenging ‘millions of contemporaries’ who the politicians and parties had deceived.51 As L’Idée Libre put it: ‘His book avenges us, oh pariahs, oh deceived electors, oh squeezed taxpayers! He avenges us – and entertains us wildly.’52 Reviewers noticed that the form was borrowed from the eighteenth century ‘but how well transformed, refreshed, adapted to the incredible contrasts of our extraordinary epoch’.53 Less favourable critics questioned whether the novel would really interest those beyond the activist left.54 Libération believed it to be deeply unfair, though very funny.55 The political periodicals of the far left and pacifist movement obviously

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took greater interest in the content. Le Crapouillot’s director and journalist Jean Galtier-Boissière reviewed it favourably in the Parti Frontiste’s La Flèche.56 Louis Loreal’s review in the pacifist La Patrie Humaine cited passages critical of Stalinism and the Popular Front noting how the book would make the ‘disciples of Stalin and Lestète ... howl as though they were being skinned alive, but with its satirical form, it is a page of contemporary history, that is to the author’s credit’.57 In the syndicalist journal Révolution Proletarienne, Chambellard used Antide as the starting point for an analysis of the fraudulent leadership of the metalworkers’ union during the strike waves of June 1936 and after. He concluded that these union bureaucrats bore responsibility for the government’s desire to renege on the 40-hour week.58 Chambellard encouraged the journal’s readers to buy Antide themselves and entreated them to spread its readership to all the victims of these deceptions. Some evidently took this advice: the Trotskyist André Calvès recalled the book in order to make sense of the Popular Front government in his memoirs published in 1984.59

Conclusion If the obvious historical comparison is between Fauxbras’s Antide and Voltaire’s Candide, a second comparator bears consideration: George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It too is a satirical novel about Stalinism. Orwell, like Fauxbras, had difficulty finding a publisher for his work, though completed in February 1944 it was not until August 1945 that Warburg printed Orwell’s zoological allegory of the Russian Revolution. Both Fauxbras and Orwell had the problem of negotiating between left-wing conviction and repulsion from Stalinism. Both operated at a deeper level, probing the non-Stalinist left’s analysis of the Soviet Union.60 Surveying its context and reception, Antide’s significance was not primarily literary but historical. It viewed the Popular Front epoch from below and was indeed a ‘soliloquy’ of a humble militant of the rank and file. It challenged the myths of the Popular Front, highlighting the inadequacy of trying to understand such a great social movement from the viewpoint of parties and their leaders. It captured the spirit of the times that many other left-wing authors, aspiring to write socialist realism, failed to do.61 The cunning of history was not a teleology of workers’ victories, activist heroism, PCF ascension, capitalist agony and Soviet achievement. Having said that, Antide provided an understanding of why Stalinism could have a purchase – albeit, in most cases, a temporary one – amongst French intellectuals and workers. Through

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the medium of satire, Antide evoked the crisis of the Third Republic, the impassioned pulse of politics after February 1934 and how this felt on the ground. The novel suggested that the Popular Front could only be comprehended as a profound social movement. Over five million voted for it in the elections of April and May 1936, by 1937 the CGT had four million adherents and the PCF 137,000 members.62 Yet after the general strike of 30 November 1938, union membership collapsed and after the HitlerStalin Pact, the PCF haemorrhaged support. The subtlety of Fauxbras’s novel lies in the insight that a simultaneously rational and emotional cycle conditioned political involvement in these mass movements. From the rational standpoint, the Popular Front’s multitudinous supporters weighed up political alternatives and responded reasonably to unreasonable circumstances based on their own experiences and judgement. An emotional dimension of elevated affective states mediated their assessments. Fauxbras carefully identified the passage from fear – through urgency and enthusiasm – to disillusion and resignation. He offered us an unsynchronized microcosm of that movement reminding us that all such movements are aggregations of a much greater plurality of experience. First written in 1934, updated and finally published in 1938, the moments of greatest disillusion – of fraudulent failures – were yet to come: the failed general strike over the repeal of the 40-hour week legislation, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 23 August 1939 and even the collaboration of former left-wingers such as Doriot, Bergery and Déat during the German occupation of France. The chronology of Fauxbras’s own political involvement underlined the deeper complexity of this social movement. Membership, electoral and strike statistics fail to grasp the nuances of this process. Fauxbras proposed what careful collective biography confirms, whilst trigger events created patterns, individuals did not conveniently obey general trends, but joined, quit, rejoined or defected according to their own volition. Participants were thinking about events, making sense of them in their own terms. After all, it is metaphorically significant that Antide and Théo were, like Fauxbras himself, chess players: they responded to the unfolding developments, learned by experience and from each other. All this suggests an erroneous over-determination of political ideas in some of the historical literature about political itineraries during this period as though the passage from Stalinism to fascism or from pacifism to collaborationism were inscribed intrinsically in those ideological starting points.

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More particularly, Fauxbras proposed two reasons why participants abandoned the movement. First, there was the general sense of political betrayal. The political leaders one after another revealed their treachery. Fauxbras was at pains to discriminate between the betrayer and the betrayed: between leaders and the ranks as well as between Marxists and Marxism. Second, more specifically, Stalinism spread a double discouragement: the Soviet regime was a horrific masquerade and the PCF had manifestly abandoned its revolutionary ideals. The question of Stalinism was one that could not be avoided. The small revolutionary left confronted this in a formal theoretical sense. Highlighting the longer significance of Antide, it was from this milieu that continuities can be traced through surrealists, anarchists and Trotskyists to the new left of the 1960s. For the mass of Popular Front supporters, the problem of Stalinism asserted itself at a less formal observable level through events and experience. Fauxbras straddled these two positions. Though he was dismissive of theory, Fauxbras’s language suggested that he had some appreciation of the analyses of French leftism. His nuanced retention of Marxism via the formula of ‘reject Marxists, if not Marxism’ contrasted with those who severed their links with Marxism and, as Philippe Burrin put it, succumbed to the drift into fascism.63 If Antide provided insight into individual political odysseys, it was also suggestive about aggregated social dynamics. This was the period in which the mass organizations, collective identities and memories were made in the tumultuous events. The French working class in a sense remade itself in these years, fixing certain characteristics that persisted for decades. Socially, geographically, economically, ethnically and ideologically, continuities with the working class of the nineteenth century were barely recognizable. Its centre of gravity shifted towards modern Fordist industry and the industrial worker away from the artisan and the craft sector. A new generation was inducted into class organizations, principally the PCF and the reunified CGT. Fauxbras observed a microcosm of this process, often at the margins, sometimes carried by the flow, at others caught in counter-currents. His Antide helps us to understand what the pulsating living complexities of this process felt like on the ground.

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5 Pacifism on the Precipice of War

This chapter scrutinizes Fauxbras’s political journalism and his pacifism at the approaches of war. At the outset, a brief survey of the press of the period contextualizes his journalism. After the publication of Viande à Brûler, he had established sufficient reputation to be engaged as a columnist in the left pacifist press. As a journalist, Fauxbras possesses a dual significance. First, he witnessed the events of the later 1930s – in particular the Popular Front experience – from a left-wing but critical standpoint. Second, given his polemics against the right-wing press, he provides an interesting prism through which to examine the right and its journalism. This combination has a particular importance considering the role that journalists played in Parisian collaborationism during the occupation of France. Merle Blanc was the main opening for Fauxbras’s journalism, publishing the Commentaries of Cesar column between 28 December 1935 and 25 February 1939.1 Anarchist and former associate of Gustave Hervé, Eugène Merlo (or ‘Merle’) founded Merle Blanc on 19 May 1919 as a satirical illustrated weekly with Victor Méric, Bernard Lecache, André Dahl, Pierre Scize, Paul Reboux, Henri Béraud and Georges de La Fouchardière. 2 It occupied similar terrain to weekly newspapers of political satire launched during the Great War, most notably Le Canard Enchaîné. By 1922, the paper had reached print run of 812,000 but ceased publication in 1927 to return in 1933. It was in this second incarnation that Fauxbras appeared alongside a number of the original contributors. He also wrote in L’Oeuvre, the radical newspaper, from which he published a powerful open letter to the Minister of War against rearmament.3 Other newspapers – Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste and La Flèche – also published Fauxbras’s articles for brief spells. 100

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The press culture in France in the 1930s was vibrant, partisan and venal. In French newspapers, unlike Anglophone ones, belle lettrisme was valued more highly than professionalism and objectivity.4 The finances of the press were such that many newspapers had to rely upon subsidies from politicians, wealthy backers or even foreign powers who aimed to instrumentalize the press to forward their own views. In 1923 and 1924, the communist newspaper L’Humanité used materials from the Russian state archives to expose the ‘abominable venality’ of the French press during the period 1897–1917, showing the involvement of Russian ministers, the ambassador and secret envoys in subsidizing such newspapers as Le Matin, Le Figaro, L’Echo de Paris, Le Temps and Le Gaulois, implicating prominent politicians and journalists. 5 During the war, the government’s press office surveyed and censored the press.6 Good news brainwashed the French population, though who could really believe that French troops really ‘could not care less about poison gas’?7 At the same time, reporting about peace and industrial conflict – even the parliamentary record the Journal Officiel – was censored. Text was blanked out, issues seized and on occasion newspapers were suspended.8 This corruption of the press, L’Humanité observed, was not just a thing of the past or one of foreign subsidy (though the Soviet embassy, interested in securing a sympathetic French foreign policy, subsidized Le Temps in the 1930s). There was the strong temptation to use money to influence public opinion through newspaper ownership.9 The relationship between industrial interests and newspapers earned ParisSoir the nickname Paris-Sucre because of the influence of a sugar trust on it.10 The case of perfume manufacturer François Coty illustrates such manipulation. He took over Le Figaro in 1922 converting it into a paper prone to demagogic campaigns for taxpayers, veterans and against the communists. Its outlook fused into a base amalgam of antiparliamentarianism, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and sympathy for Italian fascism. This agenda was carried a step further in another newspaper that Coty owned, L’Ami du Peuple.11 Moreover, in 1929, a secret consortium of some of France’s most powerful business figures (including industrialists François de Wendel, Henri de Peyerimhoff and René Duchemin) bought a majority share in Le Temps at four times the market value. They sought political influence over the paper of the liberal bourgeoisie also hoping to prevent it falling into the wrong hands (specifically Coty). When the secret deal came to light in 1931, it reinforced the view that the press was ‘rotten’, ‘bought’ and venal.12 Several scandals tied together politicians, financiers and the press. Indeed, Eugène

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Merle, Fauxbras’s own editor at Merle Blanc, was embroiled in the financial scandal of Madame Hanau in 1929.13 Notable figures who provided large subsidies to the press were the conservative politician Louis Marin and the industrialist François de Wendel (notably in the case of the latter to Journal des Débats). In terms of foreign sympathies, Le Matin (whose famous journalist, Stéphane Lauzanne, Fauxbras focused upon) was pro-Hitler and Le Journal proMussolini. Even the government dispensed secret funds to newspapers. In this way, Aristide Briand subsidized Jean Luchaire’s Notre Temps between 1928 and 1932, followed by Radicals when they were in office in the two subsequent years. The same paper received significant donations from the German embassy. Fauxbras was interested in the press of the far right. The royalist Action Française was a newspaper of the organization of the same name, also producing the more successful Candide. Other titles on the extreme right were Gringoire, Je Suis Partout and the Parti Social Français (PSF, French Social Party)’s Le Petit Journal. The events of 6 February are inexplicable without reference to the way that the press intoxicated the Parisian population with anti-parliamentarianism in the preceding weeks.14 Léon Bailby cried ‘down with the thieves’ loudest in Le Jour. Hervé called for a Pétain government in Victoire. Daudet and Maurras predicted the end of ‘la Gueuse’ (the whore or the Republic).15 If the press was disproportionately right wing compared with the electorate, there was also a left daily press: L’Ère Nouvelle, L’Oeuvre and L’Homme Libre aligned with the Radicals, whilst with a circulation of 340,000 by 1939, L’Humanité was the PCF’s newspaper and Le Populaire was the SFIO’s with a readership of 160,000. Fauxbras, by way of contrast, published in the smaller circulation weekly newspapers of the far and pacifist left.16 In such a context, it is unsurprising that the programme of the Popular Front should seek to reform the French press. It did so in three main ways. First, it called for the repeal of the decree laws (lois scélérates, the villainous laws) that constrained the liberty of opinion over such matters as anti-militarism and abortion. Second, it proposed legislation to halt defamation and blackmail. Third, it suggested the publication of sources of press revenues and pledged to prevent press monopolies. Once elected, the Popular Front government faced vitriolic newspaper campaigns targeting its members. Gringoire led a scurrilous campaign questioning the war record of Roger Salengro, the Minister of the Interior, who consequently committed suicide. The right-wing press also targeted Blum in a campaign of anti-Semitic insinuation and incitement.

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Indeed, Charles Maurras was sentenced to 13 months in jail in October 1936 after his call for Blum’s death had been followed by an attempt on the prime minister’s life in February of that year. The controversy about the Havas press agency using control over advertising revenue to influence newspapers and the suicide of Salengro presented Leon Blum with an opportunity to introduce an even more thoroughgoing press reform than the Popular Front’s programme anticipated. However, in a climate of intense press hostility, Radicals in the Senate sabotaged Blum’s bill which had passed through the Chamber of Deputies in November 1936.17 Press reform, like other aspects of the Popular Front programme, failed to materialize and fell victim to the lack of cohesion of the political coalition upon which it was based.

With the lampistes against Club Botte-Moi-le-Train Fauxbras’s column in Merle Blanc mixed general political satire with opinion. In one article, he explained his method.18 It started with a close reading of the ‘fascist press’, that is, Le Jour, L’Intransigeant (L’Intran), L’Écho de Paris (L’Écot), L’Ami du Peuple, ‘royalist-Hitlerite’ Candide, Action Française and ‘chiappist-Mussolinian’ Gringoire.19 From an article in the ‘fascist’ press, Fauxbras found out ‘that the bastards [the Popular Front or the left] had committed a new unspeakable depravity against the law of normal people that was likely to revolt any human conscience’ and then asked what the fascists would do in their place with the goal of exposing their hypocrisy.20 From its early days, Le Canard Enchaîné used this method when it sought to combat the jingoistic journalism of the Great War. Columns such as ‘à travers la presse déchaînée’ (across the unchained press) or ‘chez les bourreurs de crâne’ (amongst the brainwashers) challenged such journalists as Bailby, Lauzanne, Barrès, Meyer, Capus and Hervé about ‘stories so stupid they would make a mole cry’. 21 The overlap between Le Canard Enchaîné and Fauxbras of method and tone accentuates the memory of the wartime Canard in shaping Fauxbras’s satirical approach; indeed, Fauxbras even targeted some of the very same journalists for derision. Using this method, he would often personalize matters by constructing phoney conversations or mock friendships with the journalists of the right. Collectively, he christened them ‘Le Club Botte-Moi-le-Train’ (the kick-us-up-the-backside club) and over time this fictive Club developed a life of its own. Initially, its membership and activities were fluid and ill-defined. Its original members were Clément Vautel as president and ‘Bailbye’ (Léon Bailby, editor of Le Jour) its vice-president. 22 As director of L’Intransigeant

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during the war, Bailby had committed some of the most absurd examples of patriotic propaganda such as how a French squadron had captured an entire German company in the first days of the war with bread and jam.23 The following month ‘my remarkable colleague’ Gallus of L’Intransigeant was named as vice-president. However, by 1937, the Club had a formal structure and meetings which Fauxbras attended as humble note-taking secretary. To describe this job, he used the term historiographe to denote court historian and to mock the aristocratic presumption of the Club. Fauxbras was not the only employee of the Club: ‘mother Bonnepied-Bonneuil’ (Marie-Edith de Bonneuil who achieved celebrity through pro-fascist reportage of the Abyssinian war) was its toilet cleaner and the Fayard son was its bellboy.24 By this time, Fauxbras had identified all the officers of the group. The columnist at Le Journal Clément Vautel was still the president, Daudet (Action Française) and ‘Bailbye’ vice-presidents, Henri de Kérillis treasurer (conservative deputy and journalist of L’Écho then founding L’Époque in 1937), Charles Maurras assistant-treasurer (Action Française), former minister and deputy Henry Franklin-Bouillon nurse and General de Castelnau (L’Écho then L’Époque) chaplain.25 Other members included Geo London (Le Journal), Blanche Vogt (L’Intransigeant) and Pierre Taittinger; others still (Henriot, Lauzanne and Recouly) were treated as members without being formally identified as such. Fauxbras depicted the Club as a farce of internecine jealousies, conflicts and venality. Indeed, the Club’s founding principle had been to secure subsidies from fascist powers. Thus, at the time of the Japanese invasion of China, the Club resolved to send its price list to Japanese embassy.26 Fauxbras delighted in satirizing the conflicts between de Kérillis and L’Echo as well as the court case involving Tardieu and de La Rocque over accusations of government subsidies to the Croix de Feu.27 Given that sources of revenue could determine a newspaper’s political opinion, Fauxbras joked that the Club had agreed to appoint a defeatist editor in all their newspapers as their foreign paymasters wanted a pacifist France.28 Nicknames formed an important part of Fauxbras’s satirical repertoire. Several of the Club Botte-Moi-Le-Train had their own: Bailbye (Léon Bailby), Double-Louis Dreyfus (Louis Louis-Dreyfus, majority shareholder of L’Intran); as did several politicians: Viscount D’Oriot de la Judassière, Dala, Popaul (Paul Reynaud), André ex-Tardieu or the Emperor Tardius, Kiapopotus (Chiappe), Charlot (Charles Maurras), Count Casimir Delaroconretraite the Führer mort-né français (the still-born French fuhrer – de La Rocque); and political organizations

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Froid-de-Queue (Croix de Feu).29 He described these journalists and politicians as ‘patriotes non-mobilisables’ (unmobilizable patriots).30 Generals and admirals were also given humorous names: ‘Jojo’ Lacaze and ‘Lulu’ Grente.31 Fauxbras also believed that the communists were fair game, renaming Stalin and Thorez ‘père et fissedupeupe’ (father and son-of-thepeople). Denoting irony and sympathy rather than ridicule, Fauxbras attached, given their imagined fate in the coming war, the adjectives ‘asphixiatable’ and ‘mobilisable’ to the common people. Some of his columns were constructed around conversations with imaginary acquaintances in high places able to explain puzzling events. A friend who worked at the German embassy explained that Hitler’s adoption of the slogan ‘Prussia for the Prussians’ was not a sudden conversion to the universal right of national self-determination but rather a warning to the Pope not to interfere with the German Catholic population.32 He supposedly had amicable contacts in the Ministry of War, amongst generals, admirals and academicians. His foes would seek his counsel. His deputy Achille paid Fauxbras 50 francs for advice about how to restore his popularity with his constituency.33 Fauxbras was also able to question his confidant Duke Athanaze de la Force at a literary awards ceremony.34 He adopted personas or titles for himself: he attended seminary with de La Rocque and Bertin or he was a ‘contre-amiral en réserve’ (a reservist rear admiral), or a chaplain to infantrymen or having ‘an armchair amongst the fossils’ in the Académie Française or a member of the Association des Écrivains Combattants, the right-wing veterans writers’ guild.35 He planned to found new organizations such as the Ligue des Jusqu’auboutistes Chrétiens Tricolores (the League of Tricolour Christian Jingoes).36 He imitated the language of the right in order to subvert it. He referred to the left as the ‘salopards’ (bastards), or ‘déterreurs des carmelites (exhumers of nuns)’, to foreigners as ‘métèques’, to the ‘sinister Blum’, to ‘la presse judéo-maçon’ (the Jewishmasonic press), to the republican school system as ‘école sans dieu’ and to the Popular Front as the ‘Frente Crapular’. Fauxbras liked to target the representations of class and social status in the right-wing press. It confirmed his own view that France was profoundly divided along class lines. The employers, like Mimard the armaments and cycle manufacturer, were ‘martyrs of the Fron-popu’ and victims of the ‘cloth-capped vampires’.37 Fauxbras saw himself as the champion of the lampistes, literally the lowly lamp-lighters, meaning those who had demeaning jobs and were blamed when things went wrong. Fauxbras diligently scanned the press for stories of supposed dole abuse. His column sought to challenge those journalistic ‘bastards’ who

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‘ingratiated themselves with the exploiters’ and ‘spewed filth on the exploited’. For instance, he latched onto Clément Vautel’s article entitled ‘The profession of being unemployed’, presenting a picture of longterm jobless as drunkards and wasters of taxpayers’ money.38 Others viewed the unemployed as social parasites, cynical swindlers, exploiting the public’s naïve candour.39 Fauxbras systematically unpicked the dishonesties and inconsistencies of these arguments. Fauxbras’s columns also countered the Botte-Moi-Le-Train journalists’ defence of oppression, privilege and injustice in international politics. Fauxbras was critical of imperialism whether in the form of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia or French rule in Algeria, or French repression in Syria.40 He recalled the 100,000 Algerians who had died during the First World War and the crimes of their colonial masters.41 In contrast to Algerian hardships, the settlers with their 12,000 hectare plots were becoming increasingly enthusiastic about various fascist politicians: Doriot, Abbée Gabriel Lambert, de La Rocque.42 Fauxbras condemned the cartel of the left government’s imperialist repression when the ‘valiant’ French army of ‘justice and civilisation and the right of people to dispose of their own affairs’ launched war on the Rif.43 The first contemporary event that Fauxbras dealt with in his Merle Blanc column was the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. His focus was on the French press’s reaction to the war. Indeed, Mussolini had provided the Italian embassy in France with between an estimated 50 and 100 million francs in favour of the invasion to subsidize sympathetic journalists or newspapers.44 The Club Botte-Moi-Le-Train formed over the question of Abyssinia. The Commentaries of Cesar subverted the discourse of the right-wing journalists and occidentalist intellectuals who praised their ‘Latin sister’ in the war of civilization against barbarism. He ridiculed their outrage at Abyssinian’s use of dum-dum bullets when the Abyssinians faced tanks, planes and poison gas. He exposed the implausibility of the claim that Italy was responding to 91 acts of Abyssinian aggression between 1916 and 1935.45 Marie-Edith Bonneuil, the Club’s toilet cleaner, described Abyssinia as the ‘oldest barbary in Africa’, praised Italy for abolishing slavery there and concluded her account with a peon to fascism and its leader ‘the virile force of the legionnaires carried by the same ideal were irresistible ... but the supreme honour falls upon the leader who had conceived and achieved it without fail, upon Mussolini, the founder of an empire’.46 Fauxbras sighed with regret at the fascist disfigurement of Italy for which he and other veterans had such affection after Caporetto (when large numbers of Italian troops had surrendered en masse).47 He satirized other French supporters of Mussolini’s invasion such as the

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law students who protested against university lecturer Gaston Jèze who they branded a ‘negroid traitor’ for acting as advisor to Haile Selassie and supporting the Abyssinian cause. Fauxbras also wrote scathingly of the Catholic Church for conducting masses in the sites of massacres and ‘licking the boots of the generals’.48 Moreover, Fauxbras addressed the right-wing press’s preoccupation with immigration. With stories of bombings and attacks, the press in the autumn of 1937 launched a ‘new offensive’ against foreigners. Journalists and proprietors with foreign backgrounds participated as Fauxbras pointed out: the Romanian Cotnareau owned Le Figaro and the Swiss Stéphane Lauzanne edited Le Matin. The latter called for concentration camps in the Sahara for the immigrants to France. France, Lauzanne claimed, was the dumping-ground of Europe for ‘foreign scum’ or ‘international rubbish’ by which he meant – according to Fauxbras – the Italian, German, Spanish, Yugoslav and Balkan antifascists. On the question of assimilation of those born in foreign lands into French culture, Fauxbras sarcastically observed that the French genius of Joan of Arc, Bayard and Henriot could not be learned.49

Witness to hope, witness to disillusion If the commentaries polemicized against the jingoistic journalists, Fauxbras was also critical of the leaders of the Popular Front. Fauxbras’s journalism provides an atypical yardstick of the movement being sensitive to the popular mood, sympathizing with it, without illusions in the promises from on high. Despite recognizing that Popular Front electoral victory of April–May 1936 was a ‘kick up the arse for Weygand’ and gloating at de Kérillis’s defeat, Fauxbras was initially sceptical. He hoped for better but alerted his readers to the gaps in the Popular Front’s programme.50 During the factory occupations that took place shortly after the election, he delighted in suggesting that the rich in revenge should occupy the slums and the dosshouses.51 But he became increasingly cynical about the motivations and the rationalizations of Popular Front politicians. Thus, Fauxbras suggested that Daladier had been mistaken for a left-winger because he had innocently raised his fist when hailing a taxi on 14 July 1935 (the date of the birth of the Popular Front).52 In the diary of Arthur Vessymolle, Popular Front deputy which appeared in his column at the end of 1938, Fauxbras presented the picture of a parliamentarian who interrupted a series of catastrophic decisions with long parliamentary recesses so that for his salary of 85,000 francs, he had done 17 half-days of work.53 Fauxbras’s stock description of the first

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Blum ministry as the ‘gouvernement à direction socialiste’ (government of socialist leadership or direction) underlined the paradox of the Popular Front.54 This phrase carefully distinguished between a socialist government and one in which – to use Blum’s words – the socialists were in office but not in power. Shortly after the fall of the Blum ministry in June 1937, Fauxbras wondered as a false naïf whether a government with socialist leadership and radical support, in which the Radicals were able to determine policy, would now be replaced with a government of radical leadership and socialist support, in which the socialists would be able to determine policy.55 He returned time and again to the failures of the Popular Front to deliver on its mandate. Its programme offered a suite of measures ‘against unemployment and the industrial crisis’, comprising a national unemployment fund, a reduction in the working week, pensions to get the older workers out of the labour market and public works. These promises to alleviate the plight of the unemployed were only partially enacted. Though a 40-hour week was quickly promulgated, the record of the Popular Front was less impressive on other counts: the national unemployment fund did not materialize, the ambitions of the public works programme were scaled back and inflation cut into the real levels of benefit.56 Fauxbras remarked upon the continuities between the Popular Front government and its predecessor. He observed that when the price of bread had increased from 28 to 54 sous in a year, it was difficult to distinguish between the effects on working-class budgets of the deflationary decree laws of hardship and the inflationary decree laws of prosperity.57 In such circumstances, a friend wrote to him signing as the PCDFP, which Fauxbras took to mean Partisan Convaincu du Front Populaire (Convinced Partisan of the Popular Front) but led the reader to believe that it meant Pauvre Con du Front Populaire (Poor Sucker of the Popular Front). Despite cataloguing its shortcomings, in the aftermath of the fall of the Blum cabinet in June 1937, he raised a cry of alarm that the ‘gains must remain’.58 He insisted on the differences between the Popular Front and the cartel of the left governments, given that a year into their terms, there were reasons for supporters to rejoice in 1937 but only reasons to lament in 1925.59 When the government pointed to the International Exhibition of 1937 as one of its great achievements, Fauxbras observed acerbically that this bequest from Laval did not feature anywhere in the Popular Front programme and that many parts of the programme such as unemployment, the amnesty and paramilitary leagues remained unfulfilled.60 With this last issue, the freedom of fascism to organize in France, Fauxbras believed that the right-wing press were intimidating Blum and

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appealed to the prime minister to repress the Colonel de La Rocque’s Parti Social Français. He observed that Blum should ignore journalistic criticism as Tardieu had taken such measures against the PCF in 1929–30 to the approval of the very same journalists.61 Fauxbras responded angrily to the shooting of Clichy. On Tuesday 16 March 1937, the PSF planned a film showing in the Parisian suburb of Clichy.62 After the government had pledged to ban the leagues and the Croix de Feu renamed itself the Parti Social Français, the left saw this meeting called in the Parisian red belt as fascist provocation. When the government refused to ban the event, the socialist mayor Charles Auffray and the communists organized a counter-demonstration. The police fired on this counterdemonstration, killing 6 and wounding 200.63 For Fauxbras, the massacre of Clichy reminded him of the demonstration for Sacco and Vanzetti on 23 August 1927, although then the people were enslaved by Poincaré but were now ‘free’ under the Popular Front.64 He observed that the event exposed the fascist myth that the Popular Front had plunged France into disorder. Quite the contrary, the government had tamed the revolutionary crowd. He dismissed widespread talk of agent provocateurs. Fauxbras described attending the demonstration of Sunday 21 March, which followed the cortege of the victims. He observed that there were a good million agent provocateurs there and reported the hostility towards the SFIO Minister of the Interior Marx Dormoy on the demonstration. Fauxbras also complained that the government had failed to address the inequalities of French society: a marshal in Popular Front France received 14 times the salary of a postal worker.65 Whilst Blum’s Minister of the Interior Dormoy was reminding workers of their responsibilities, two of his cabinet colleagues were photographed in ski resort. Look at the photos, published by L’Intran, of Mr Monnet and Mr Lagrange at winter sports. For they are going to winter sports, [ ... ], like opulent idlers. Socialism really puts the ski slopes within the reach of all. One does not need to be a great physionomist to read the face of Mr Monnet and Mr Lagrange that these ministers, with skis on their feet, are thinking frenetically of the socialisation of the means of production and exchange. Everything comes to those who wait, as the Persian adage says.66 Fauxbras cited an apocryphal public meeting in his column, where he quizzed his deputy Achille about the suppression of the two years’ military service and the repeal of the ‘rotten laws’ against press freedom.67

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Laughing at Fauxbras’s naivety, the parliamentarian replied that such measures would only be possible after a seizure of power. Fauxbras reflected that the Popular Front programme was marvellous and has been enhanced since the election victory of 1936: with 14 billion more for the war budget, the shooting of Clichy and the burying of the public works programme (burial, after all, follows execution).68 This unbridgeable gap between the electoral programme and government action was a leitmotif of the Commentaries of Cesar. In a column that examined Chautemps’s distinction between an electoral promise and responsibility to the nation, Fauxbras explained this elementary part of the political profession was very similar to keeping a second bogus set of accounts.69 Fauxbras reflected critically upon the socialists who were transformed from ardent ‘non, plus jamais ça’ (never again) anti-militarists into cheerleaders of the armed forces. However, he shared the flawed analysis of the absolutist pacifists, believing that Hitler did not want war.70 When doubts on this score entered his mind, he observed that French militarism and Versailles had made Hitler. Fauxbras invented an exchange in which a former friend, a socialist, invited Fauxbras onto the official tribune of the 14 July military parade. Fauxbras declined on the grounds that those shot as an example, during the Great War would not be on the march.71 In contrast to the Popular Front’s parliamentarianism, the idea of revolution figured as a key political reference point in Fauxbras’s journalism. He often employed euphemism to denote the idea, such as ‘total and brutal change’ or ‘shake up’ (chambardement), or ‘great cleansing’ (grand nettoyage). He believed that the left had missed opportunities for revolution in the recent past. First, he referred to the revolutionary potential of the soldier’s return from the trenches of the Great War.72 Second, the Popular Front period also held revolutionary potential. He believed that whereas the Popular Front’s supporters wanted revolution in 1936 and 1937, its leaders sought only to line their own pockets.73 Reflecting upon the defeat of the 30 November 1938 strike, Fauxbras regretted the revolutionaries’ failure to move decisively during this earlier period.74 Finally, he predicted that the coming war would end in revolution.75 However, Fauxbras premised his view of revolution upon a sharp rejection of the communism of the PCF. For him, Stakhanovism epitomized Stalinism’s symmetry with the West and its authoritarianism.76 Ranging between a tone of ridicule and resigned irony, Fauxbras underlined the French Communist Party’s transformation from anti-militarism to patriotism. One of his columns imagined the stupefaction of mutineers who had

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been imprisoned for ten years and read L’Humanité on their release.77 With similar disbelief, he noted that the communist daily branded the Centre Syndical d’Action Contre La Guerre (Union Centre of Action against War) a ‘band of traitors, defeatists and extinguishers of the sacred fire’.78 However, there were limits to Fauxbras’s anti-communism, or more accurately his anti-Stalinism. Despite his objections to the Soviet Union, he found the fact that Dorgelès and Gide aired their criticisms in the rightwing press reprehensible.79 Such boundaries are significant when others succumbed to the drift via pacifism or anti-communism to fascism; or later, in the case of Gide, to Cold War partisanship.

The Popular Front’s demise Two events signalled the undoing of the Popular Front: Munich when the PCF voted against their erstwhile allies in the Chamber, and Daladier’s repeal of the 40-hour law. These two events entailed the closure of the movement respectively from above and from below. Fauxbras became increasingly alarmed that the Sudeten crisis would lead to European war. He mentioned it on 3 September 1938, warning against a complacent belief in the easy conquest of these Czech provinces.80 A week later, the nightmare of the past conjured with threats of the present. In strikingly direct and urgent language, he predicted a ‘next last’ war for which 20 million men, women and children were ‘corpses in waiting’. They would have the ‘joy of dying on the field of honour’, which in this war would be their own cellars from gas attacks.81 Fauxbras’s fellow pacifist Armand Charpentier had written a book envisioning such a war.82 In effect, according to Charpentier, humanity faced a stark choice of renouncing war or disappearing, given that there was no protection against the new technologies of war. Putting matters even more apocalyptically than Fauxbras, he believed that a new war would be the ‘most tragic, the most painful, the most total suicide’.83 Fauxbras warned that the arms race created its own military momentum and counselled against the dangers of industrialized modern war or as he put it a ‘war of material’.84 The Great War had also taught Fauxbras about the complacent cosmetics applied over the realities of war and his columns spoke in stark dysphemic terms such as of the spilling of guts (étripaillement). In mid-September, Fauxbras predicted that because of a signature of ‘our unforgettable Poincaré’ war could lead to 14 to 20 million French deaths in defence of Czechoslovakia, a country that he could not find on a map and that did not exist when he was taught geography at school.85 The poilus had been promised that the Great War

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was the war to end wars, that militarism would disappear and that their kids would not have to taste mustard gas. These kids were now being sent to ‘die for Czechoslovakia and Skoda and Schneider’. Unlike some left-wing pacifists, Fauxbras was unwilling to sacrifice leftright considerations over the question of the war’s approach. He had long objected to what he saw as the pseudo-pacifism of those sympathetic to Mussolini over Abyssinia.86 Similarly, he ridiculed the inconsistency of a journalist in Le Matin who opposed war over Czechoslovakia preferring Sudeten self-determination via a plebiscite. Le Matin had not, Fauxbras observed, called for a referendum when the ‘philanthropist Benito asked the Ethiopians, with asphyxiating bombs, to choose ... between the Negus and him’. Neither was Le Matin a partisan of self-determination when it came to the Bolsheviks in 1919 or the Riffians, Indochinese, Algerians or Tunisians. Fauxbras suggested other referenda if Le Matin was so enamoured with the procedure: over the profits of the trusts, over bread prices, over conscription, over the 200 families, over war and over the 40-hour week. With the news of the Munich conference, Fauxbras registered his relief at the avoidance of war. Daladier had called up reservists and the prospect of the front appeared all too real. Fauxbras watched troops boarding trains and saying farewell to their loved ones. On the intervention of police to separate them, the troops did not say a word. Fauxbras sarcastically reflected that Hitler had better beware of such an army. He contrasted this scene with a fictive conversation with the blustering General Morbaque (General Pubic-lice) who claimed that the French people would not endure Daladier’s humiliating compromise of Munich and would instead defy their prime minister and ‘throw themselves into the furnace of war’.87 In another column, Fauxbras objected to de Kérillis labelling him a Gestapo agent for opposing war over Czechoslovakia. This was bad news indeed since it meant that there were 40 million Gestapo agents in France.88 The seeming proximity of war during the Munich crisis revealed for Fauxbras the social discriminations of war. The children of the rich emptied from the parks of Paris as the wealthy evacuated Paris for the safety of the countryside. In contrast, the children of the poor could do nothing other than simply wait for the bombing of Paris to begin. An unemployed friend observed that had the bombing of France’s cities commenced that Wednesday, 4 million of the poor would have perished simply because they could not afford to quit Paris. In this context, Fauxbras questioned the utility of an extra battleship when there was an inadequate supply of gas masks.89 If Munich occasioned the formal end of the coalition of Popular Front organizations, the decree law effectively abandoning the 40-hour week

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signalled the extinguishing of the great social movement on the streets and in the factories. Remarking on the press offensive against this ‘diabolical invention, distressing abomination’ at the time of its introduction, Fauxbras returned repeatedly to the 40-hour week in the months running up to the general strike of 30 November 1938: it shamefully relegated France to the status of Mexico, the only other power to adopt it; it led aristocrats to praise Daladier on their pigeon hunts; and along with paid holidays and strikes, it encouraged idleness amongst workers hampering rearmament.90 The pressure to abandon the 40-hour week mounted.91 With the right-wing press denouncing the ‘republic of the lazy’ anticipating the Vichy discourse of ‘family, work and fatherland’, Fauxbras observed that those who fulminated against the lowly workers were accustomed to relaxing in their casinos, their winter ski resorts and the Jockey Club.92 The Daladier government and the CGT were set on a collision course. Fauxbras dubbed the decree law for the flexibility of the 40-hour week that precipitated the strike ‘their funny little decree law on overtime executed in the spirit of the intangible principle of the 40 hour law’.93 With the enactment of the decree, a general strike was called on 30 November 1938. The government responded with repression. After all their sermonizing about 14 July, Fauxbras noted that the Daladier-Reynaud government sent the police to beat strikers, to shower them with tear gas and throw them in the back of the police vans. Trade unionists were sacked, denied unemployment benefit and blacklisted. The strike was comprehensively defeated and the challenge of labour broken. Fauxbras believed that Daladier would have shot down the workers if he felt it necessary.94 He noted the irony that the prime minister had earned the nickname ‘Daladier le fusilleur’ given to him by the right as a result of 6 February. A week later, Fauxbras compared Daladier’s actions during the strike with Napoleon III’s coup of 1851, describing Daladier as the ‘victor of Billancourt’ (the Parisian Renault plant, the largest factory in France), thereby winning the appreciation of right-wing journalists. Fauxbras reflected that the debacle resulted from the pitiful cowardice of Thorez and Blum (‘leur dégonflement piteux, pausique et thorezmaringouin’) in 1936.95 So ended in dismal demoralization the cycle of social protest triggered by 6 February 1934.

From journalism to action: syndicalism, pacifism and frontism During this period, Fauxbras made occasional references to moments when he laid down his pen and joined the mass movements on the

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streets. There is evidence beyond this that he engaged in political action. César Fauxbras was – alongside Charles Mettler the union’s general secretary – a principal animating spirit in a new CGT-affiliated union the Syndicat National des Officiers de la Marine Marchand (SNOMM, National Union of the Officers of the Merchant Navy). It was set up at the time of the strike wave of the summer of 1936.96 It seems that the union was involved in a number of disputes reflecting the turbulent labour relations of the times that with hindsight Fauxbras believed had little net result.97 Based in the Rouen branch, Fauxbras deployed his actuarial skills, becoming the national treasurer and his literary talents contributing to the union bulletin. Indeed, he wrote the opening article in the first bulletin of the SNOMM.98 In this article, he noted the horror with which the shipowners received the news that the officers of the merchant navy were joining the CGT and demanding a statute with rights. The owners responded with divide and rule tactics in the press, smearing the officers as greedy and privileged. Fauxbras also contributed the opening word in the third bulletin.99 This amalgamation of the different officers’ groups into a single union federation was unsuccessful and the union had to narrow its representative platform, having to restrict itself to officers of the bridge. Fauxbras later blamed the CGT for allowing the continued sectionalism amongst the officers of the merchant marine and was particularly critical of Eugène Vasset, the president of the officer-mechanics, who he deemed to be a careerist. His foray into trade union activity, like his other engagements, proved ultimately to be a disappointment. Fauxbras’s engagement lasted until war broke out and after the liberation he attempted unsuccessfully to resurrect this union and his participation in it. Syndicalism was not his only avenue of activism. Fauxbras was associated with the Croix de Bois a left pacifist veterans’ association. He spoke at their public meeting during the Abyssinian war on the role of the French navy in this conflict. He was also involved in public pacifist campaigning. In line with Thorez’s the ‘outstretched hand’ to the Catholics, on 20 March 1938, a group of 13 writers, including Aragon, André Chamson, Colette, Lucien Descaves, Jean Guéhenno, André Malraux, François Mauriac, Henry de Montherland and Jules Romains, printed a manifesto of ‘national unity’ between Catholic and communist writers.100 It called for solidarity in the face of the threat to France and French culture. One left-wing newspaper described this alliance as the ‘Thorez-Reynaud brigade’.101 It fitted with the logic of the Popular Front, which supported rearmament, national unity and reconciled the Communist Party to national defence. In response to this echo

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of the sacred union of 1914, Fauxbras was one of the signatories of a pacifist riposte entitled the Refus de penser en choeur (refusal to think in unison). This grouping identified the intellectual pacifist milieu, of which Fauxbras had become part. The initial list bore illustrious literary figures as well as prominent new style pacifists: Alain, Jean Giono, Pierre Hamp, Joseph Jolinon, Jean Galtier-Boissière, Georges de La Fouchardière, Victor Margueritte, André Pézard, Georges Pioch, Henri Poulaille, Marcel Martinet, Léon Werth, Félicien Challaye, Armand Charpentier, Georges Demartial, André Breton, Maurice Wullens and Francis Delaisi.102 In the circumstance of the widely anticipated certainty of mobilization, the writers undersigned believe that our actual duty towards culture and France is more than ever to remain true to ourselves, to not consent to think in unison, and for starters, not to credit without thinking the rumour of immanent danger of war, a rumour which could easily serve a manoeuvre of high politics, but which, in the present state of Europe, constitutes an assault on common sense, on dignity and on the deepest interests of this country. The example that we would like to give is, on the contrary, that of an obstinately lucid freedom. The example that we refuse to follow is that of a fraternity in acquiescence and in propaganda. With such resignation, the memories of 1914 and the experience of the totalitarian states suffices to make us expect an inevitable development. These two manifestoes elicited a third from the far right.103 This deployed the discourse of France’s fascist right of national renewal: ‘to remake a France stronger than all its dangers’.104 It talked of the present government preparing future catastrophes for the nation and the need for national union. Amongst the signatories were literary figures of the far right, members of Doriot’s PPF, admirals and Fauxbras’s great foe Paul Chack.105 These three manifestoes reflected different responses amongst public intellectuals of the pressing issues of the day: war and fascism. Each group responded differently providing a synthetic reaction, each in their own way informed by the Great War. The first group was a last gasp of popular frontism soon to be broken apart by Munich and the Hitler-Stalin pact. The refusal to think in unison grouping fell victim to Daladier’s repression of the pacifist movement and several succumbed to the appeal of peaceful collaboration with Germany in a defeated France. For the third group, many had little ideological distance to travel to engage in virulent anti-Semitism, ideological

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collaborationism and military support for the German war against the Soviet Union. Each group in their own ways had abandoned conventional distinctions between left and right and provided an interesting insight into the crisis that French intellectuals faced in the late 1930s. In addition to pacifism and syndicalism, between March and June 1939, Fauxbras also contributed to Gaston Bergery’s La Flèche whose Parti Frontiste Fauxbras joined in February 1939.106 Before his slide to fascism, Bergery had quit the Radicals during Daladier’s ministry of 1933 and had tried to establish a common front against fascism.107 He stood for antimilitarism and revolution at a time when the PCF seemed to be abandoning these positions through its Popular Front strategy. Fauxbras’s letter of adhesion to the Frontist Party makes interesting reading. Having previously described himself as an anarchist and having avoided party affiliation, he indicated that he had observed ‘frontisme’ for the past three years with approval. His old anarchist suspicion remained however hoping that this would not ‘turn to putrefaction like the others’.108 In La Flèche, Fauxbras wrote on similar themes to those he had in Merle Blanc: rich and poor, Daladier’s repression, pro-natalism and the threat of war. At a time when Daladier opted for increasingly repressive measures against sections of the left, Fauxbras sought to twist scenarios to argue that the patriots were themselves defeatists and should therefore be subject to repression. He also commented upon topical events such as the Italian invasion of Albania, Hitler’s latest speech or the capsizing of the Paris. In one remarkable article in May 1939, he anticipated the Hitler-Stalin Pact signed to general surprise three months later. In it, Fauxbras invented the story of a communist friend Arthur who visited a tarot card reader in order to make sense of the resignation of Litvinov. Arthur wanted to know the new line. Perhaps, Molotov would offer the outstretched hand to Hitler? As it turned out, the tarot reader ‘miraculously’ predicted that a miner with callous hands (Thorez) would write an article in L’Humanité providing the line. After a three-month association, a misunderstanding occurred between Fauxbras and the Parti Frontiste in that he expected payment for his column; the organization claimed that it did not have the finances to permit this.109 He ceased to write for the paper in early summer 1939 finding alternative outlets for his journalism. He did not entirely severe his connection to the party. Gaston Bergery had tried to intervene on Fauxbras’s behalf (though it is difficult to judge with what degree of seriousness) in his capacity as a parliamentarian in the court case over anti-natalism.110 Furthermore, Fauxbras maintained an intermittent correspondence with Bergery until May 1940 over the question of his

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call up.111 Unfortunately for Fauxbras, Frontisme turned out to be yet one more fraudulent failure and Bergery became a Pétainist collaborator, cast as ‘counselor to the prince’.112 Fauxbras made only passing and indifferent references to Bergery in his wartime diary.113 When Fauxbras’s La Flèche column ceased, he started to write for Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste. Grouping together various figures from the revolutionary left, this paper campaigned for political prisoners especially Spanish republicans and took an anti-Stalinist position over the Republican repression of the Spanish far left. In May 1939, the paper claimed 7000 subscribers and the organization had 45,000 members.114 Fauxbras contributed to SIA from 5 June 1939 to 4 August 1939.115 It was Fauxbras’s participation in this group that resulted in him falling victim to Daladier’s repression. The authorities prosecuted Fauxbras on 30 October 1939 for his criticism of the pro-natalist campaign to boost France’s low birthrate. Fauxbras’s anti-natalism was a function of his anti-militarism.116 In 1920, under the influence of the pro-natalist lobby notably the Alliance Nationale Contre la Dépopulation, the Bloc National government effectively banned pro-abortion or procontraception ‘propaganda’ as well as outlawing abortion and contraception.117 Shortly before Fauxbras’s prosecution, Daladier’s family code of 29 July 1939 introduced further repressive measures both over the freedom of speech regarding abortion as well as against those practising abortions. Those for and against war had long connected natalism and militarism.118 Fauxbras’s difficulties were part of Daladier’s general repression of the far left which targeted the SIA as well as the Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan and Union Anarchiste with prison terms for many of its leading figures, including Pivert, Lecoin, Faucier, Vintrigner, Louzon and Jeanson.119 It was Fauxbras’s article ‘Pleading on Fernand’s behalf’ that drew the attention of the authorities.120 He addressed his audience as ‘my dear anti-rabbit breeders’ (mes cher camarades antilapinistes). The Fernand in question was ‘famous rabbit’ Fernand Boverat, the president of the pro-natalist lobbying organization, the Alliance Nationale Contre la Dépopulation. Boverat epitomized the linkage between militarism and pro-natalism, specifically advocating increased battleship construction, an issue that would have antagonized Fauxbras.121 In the article, Fauxbras insinuated that Boverat was benefiting financially from his campaign to deprive women of a say in their own affairs. Fauxbras mischievously ‘defended’ Boverat against the misconceptions of his left-wing detractors. Boverat’s pro-natalist propaganda might halt the 500,000 abortions a year (except those for ministers, parliamentarians

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and other of his sponsors) but the left was mistaken in the belief that this would lead to an increase in the birth rate. Fauxbras proposed in addition to the decree laws against abortion, decree laws against people contracting syphilis, because it was, in his view, equally possible to force people to have large litters of children as it was to instruct them not to catch the pox.122 For this article, Fauxbras was prosecuted for ‘propaganda against the birth rate’ under the law of 31 July 1920 rather than Daladier’s new legislation.123 Gerard Rosenthal, Trotsky’s lawyer in France, agreed to defend him.124 The court case took place on 30 October 1939 and Fauxbras was tried in his absence. The judge deemed Fauxbras’s satirical article to be ‘anti-conception propaganda from beginning to end’. The columnist was tried alongside two other SIA collaborators.125 Sentencing was punitive. Fauxbras received a fine of 3000 francs and the maximum sixmonth jail sentence. Patorni received a 1000 franc fine and six months and Fraudet the same term and a 2000 franc fine.126 Gringoire delighted in the court cases against the contributors to SIA, speculating that soon they all would be reunited in prison and called for their paper to be banned.127 Despite, the historiography suggesting a lack of left-wing opposition to pro-natalism, this was not Fauxbras’s first intervention over ‘Taylorist rabbit-breeding’ (‘lapinisme au Taylorisme’), having addressed it on more than one occasion during his spell with Merle Blanc.128 Fauxbras had previously criticized Boverat in Merle Blanc, and he continued to do so. He noted with exasperation in his diary in September 1944 that Boverat, who had contributed to the collaborationist press, was published in the newspapers of the resistance during the liberation.129

Conclusion Fauxbras’s journalism roughly coincided with the political cycle of the Popular Front that began with rising hope but slid into gathering despair. His writing captured the sense of looming tragedy. Fauxbras was simultaneously participant, critic and witness. With a recognizable Fauxbras dressed in toga and laurels, chalking wisdom on his slate, the cartoon that accompanied his column in Merle Blanc demonstrated how he perceived his relationship with his audience. He feigned the mock heroics as the ‘cesar’ of the commentators. His journalistic persona extended and adapted the one that he had already cultivated in his novels. He was a writer from and of the people: a sailor, a jobless Parisian, a mutineer and simple militant. He constructed a model of intellectual

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engagement which viewed the intellectual as inseparable from the people. His columns highlighted the contradictions of the Popular Front: between being a mass movement and a government; between a momentary phase of reform and the sense of revolutionary possibility; between initial momentum and paralysis; between parliamentarians and popular aspirations; between programme and action; and between utopian desire and inescapable crushing conjuncture. Fauxbras took the Popular Front’s rallying cry ‘Bread, Peace and Liberty’ at face value. The slogan expressed his most deeply felt concerns: unemployment, anti-militarism and press freedom. During turmoil-plagued years, these words opened themselves to many readings, both self-deceptive and disingenuous, and in this semantic battleground Fauxbras insisted on trying to fix their meaning with reference to political tradition and programmatic declaration. Fauxbras’s journalism and his political action ran in parallel, the one informing the other. His milieu was that of non-Stalinism and the pacifist left. His engagement drew him to the great demonstrations of the Popular Front, 14 July 1935, the protest after the shooting of Clichy, the union campaigns and strikes in the merchant navy and ultimately a brief affiliation to Gaston Bergery’s Parti Frontiste. Towards the end of this period, the boundary between his journalism and activism became increasingly blurred. He came to write in the political press and his writing prompted the reaction of the authorities. Where once a mass movement had opened broad possibilities, a sense of a narrowing vista, isolation and closure imposed itself on Fauxbras; just as it did for his comrades on the pacifist left. The despairing urgency of these pacifists as war approached is palpable. Memories of the previous war and premonitions of the new technologies of industrial killing troubled their imaginations. They remembered the powerful deceptions of the patriotic mystique. This maelstrom systemically destroyed reference points and intellectual safeguards for this milieu. Many, under such circumstances, lost all sense of bearings and this disorientation opened a road, after defeat, of resignation to peace and collaboration with Germany. Clues as to why Fauxbras was immune to the pacifist appeal of collaboration can be found in his writings. He mixed with the circles of the absolute pacifists but for him pacifism did not transcend left and right. He was hostile to Stalinism but there were limits to his anticommunism, his quarrel was with Marxists not Marxism. For Fauxbras, the left-right dichotomy was enmeshed with hierarchies of class, corruption, authority and wealth. His hostility to the right was nourished with every page he turned of newspapers of his Club Botte-Moi-Le-Train.

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As he first observed in relation to Abyssinia, the lowly could not associate with the pacifism of such people, which could only be self-serving and pro-fascist.130 He preferred political disengagement and the ending of his journalistic career rather than the pursuit of pacifism in association with Vichy and the occupiers. After his energetic political satire and campaigning commitments, he opted for refuge in irony and the internalization of politics. His wartime diary captured his sense of despair and isolation: I’m astonished that the government is interested thus in my deeds and gestures, or rather my absence of such. Do they imagine that by chance I will get mixed up in a conspiracy, to act in whatever way, syndicalism, pacifism or any other see-saw? After the disappointment that the French people have caused me, I will not lift a finger, and I’m promising myself that if I continue to write after the war, that I’ll specialize in maritime novels. I’ve been sufficiently annoyed, stifled, bullied. To others the flame of pacifism! I’m quitting! And judging by the discouragement of all those who believed like me in pacifism before September there will not be many left from our team. So let the French people get on with it. For all the use my prose was to them. It’s true that the government is unaware of my feelings and believes me to be perhaps good for revolutionary action. Fishing, yes! And as soon as possible.131

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Part III Defeat and Occupation

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6 Survey of Defeat 1940

Fauxbras produced a remarkable document during his time as a prisoner of war in German camps. This chapter explores this text, which provides a unique insight into the debacle of June of 1940. France’s ‘strange defeat’ was the focus of obsessive scrutiny in its immediate aftermath, but it was forgotten amid the redemption of liberation and, since the publication of Marc Bloch’s celebrated examination, has become the subject of historical dissection.1 In the short term and domestically, this traumatic defeat led to fierce recriminations, the search for alibis and villains. A one-sided literature flowed from French publishing houses in the Vichy years. Fauxbras commented on several of these works in his diary.2 Initially, those within the Vichy regime sought political explanations for France’s defeat: it was pacifism, the Third Republic’s democracy, the Popular Front, the Communist Party that led to the loss of nerve and failures of duty amongst the ordinary soldier. Vichy established a tribunal to investigate defeat and tried General Gamelin and Popular Front politicians at Riom opening on 19 February 1942. This sideshow articulated the regime’s ideological explanation of France’s collapse. Indeed, Julian Jackson observed defeat ‘provided Vichy with its moral authority; it was the foundation myth of the regime’.3 He emphasized the military causes of defeat especially doctrinal lethargy rather than failure to realize the need for new technology.4 Martin S. Alexander has attempted to refute the charge that the French soldier had ‘no taste to fight’. This view, he maintained, originated from the French generals, many of whom both ensconced themselves in positions of authority in the Vichy regime and sought to deny their own responsibilities for the defeat through insinuations against the hapless scapegoat of the cowardly, defeatist or self-interested French soldier. Alexander observed that the French army was highly uneven in terms of training, experience, 123

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leadership, equipment and performance. He differentiated the betterplaced sections which battled creditably against the German advance from the less well-equipped reservists who were unsurprisingly overwhelmed by events. Alexander observed that the unevenness of military performance should not be taken as an explanation for defeat as it existed in a general context wherein the French military leadership was incapable of dealing with the technologically transformed character of military strategy.5 Even discounting the effect of his own pacifism, that Fauxbras focuses upon captured reservists is in this sense telling. Fauxbras’s survey is of uncommon significance. It provides a voice silenced during Vichy, giving an insight into the state of mind of the soldier and allowing a consideration of the extent and character of defeatism amongst them. It permits an examination of how the defeat was experienced, how it was dealt with emotionally and how it was made sense of from below. Other sources such as postal censorship, the reports of prefects or military authorities and memoirs also offer this. What is unique about Sondage is that whereas these others provide such information from the outside or from an individual, this source demonstrates the group dynamics from the inside (a selection of these are translated in Appendix 4).

Surveying French prisoners of war César Fauxbras, a pacifist and reluctant reservist, was mobilized at the rank of sergeant into the 511th regional infantry battalion of Dunkirk on 4 March 1940.6 At the beginning of April, his battalion was stationed with the Seventh Company of Civil Defence at the small Flemish market town of Hazebrouck. On 13 May, the Wehrmacht invaded France, sweeping south from the Ardennes and west to the coast. By 21 May, the German army had cut the line of supply and possibility of retreat to the south by reaching the sea and stranding a large part of the French and British armies, Fauxbras’s company included. On 23 May at 6 pm, his company left Hazebrouck in an ultimately futile bid to reach Dunkirk 50 km away across the department of Nord. A German air raid cut the journey short after half an hour, forcing them to shelter in a farmhouse. After three and a half hours, they embarked once more, entering Bavinchove the next day at 1 am, having made 10 km progress. They waited until dark before setting off on the same route. They appeared in Ochtezeele 5 km away just after noon on 26 May. At 5 pm this same day they quitted Ochtezeele, arriving in Ledringhem roughly three hours later. The following day, on 27 May, Fauxbras’s

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company met up with contingents of the British army who themselves were on route to the evacuation point of Dunkirk. The German infantry attacked the village on 28 May, the day of the capitulation of Belgium. By 5.30 am the next morning, the German army had captured Fauxbras and his comrades.7 Between 29 May and 7 July 1940, Fauxbras painstakingly jotted the comments of his fellow prisoners of war in notebooks that were typed up after his return to Paris. These observations formed the research for a novel Crever au Stalag that Fauxbras tried to publish shortly after the war. Although the manuscript no longer exists, the letter of rejection from publishers Emile Paul explained that they could not publish a novel of such ‘extreme left’ views but that its dialogue was ‘alert’ and that its representation of the prisoners’ milieu was ‘novel in its vigour and the frankness of its tone’.8 It was not until the 1960s that he tried unsuccessfully to publish Sondage. Fauxbras and his fellow captives followed a long circuitous route, in the main on foot, from one camp to another via northern France, Belgium, Germany, eventually to Kaisersteinbruch Stalag 17a, south of Vienna, arriving there on 17 June.9 Francis Ambrière recounted just such a ‘confused and isolated’ journey from one camp to another of more than a month as being like a ‘perpetual whirlwind’.10 Fauxbras entitled this work: Survey 1940: Or the Reasons Exposed by Himself, Why the French Soldier of the Reserve Did Not Want to Die for Danzig. In a preface, he explained that he only wanted to undertake the ‘role of the tape-recorder’. The enlisted citizen, previously silenced by military discipline, now wanted to ‘spill the beans’ (il vida son sac).11 With defeat and encirclement, the German army captured 1,800,000 French prisoners of war, a million of whom remained in Germany until the end of the war.12 They were used as a bargaining counter in Vichy’s relations with the Third Reich. In the context of the wartime labour shortage, the Third Reich won Vichy’s collaboration in supplying French labour to the German war economy on condition of the return of prisoners. The Vichy authorities deployed this as a major justification for collaboration. The failure of the Vichy regime to secure the return of prisoners meant that the Pétain-Laval administration, though initially looked upon favourably for being associated with armistice, became increasingly discredited in the prisoners’ eyes. As a veteran of the Great War, Fauxbras was in one of the categories for early release and this may explain his repatriation to France in the spring of 1941.13 Although far right journalist Jacques Benoist-Méchin also published a diary of his time spent in a POW camp, Fauxbras’s Sondage provides a

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unique testimony of a phase of war that has attracted particular interest from historians.14 Covering a similar period, Benoist-Méchin’s account was an occidentalist, collaborationist and Germanophile, being – alongside other prisoners’ accounts – on the German Propaganda Department’s list of works to be promoted in France; indeed, he soon was to become a Vichy secretary of state.15 Fauxbras read Benoist-Méchin, commenting acerbically about its misrepresentations and ingratiating attitude towards German officers.16 There were also publications that followed liberation that attempted to assess the experience of the prisoners of war, such as André Chassaignon’s Retours vers la France and Jean Cazeneuve’s Psychologie du Prisonnier de Guerre.17 Chassaignon asserted the right of the returning prisoners to be respected and presented an image of a patriotic anti-German prison camp population. According to this ideal, they suffered great hardships, repeatedly attempted escape and fiercely resented the accusation of cowardice.18 An expert in Bergsonian vitalism, Cazeneuve published his psychological observations formed in camps between May 1940 and 1944 about the French prisoner of war. He constructed a psychological profile composed of the following elements: ... physical suffering and the notion of the relativity of pleasure; apprehension based on the awareness of danger; separation anxiety following from the idealisation of the loved object; crisis of personality; need for self-determination and need for continuity that the abnormal conditions of life render difficult to satisfy; a sense of waiting which determines an escalation into hope and faith.19 Subsequent to these works, historians have turned to this question. Fauxbras’s account ties into the current historiographical concerns of those such as Richard Vinen and Sarah Fishman who have considered the gap between the Vichy regime’s sentimentalized iconography of patriotic suffering behind the barbed wire, wherein the prisoners constituted the regime’s legitimizing rationale, and the prosaic and more complex realities of the prisoners’ fractiousness, contradictory attitudes, identifications and everyday experience.20 In another study of prisoners’ opinions, international relations expert Christopher Hill analysed the notebooks of Gustave Folcher (from phoney war to liberation), a peasant from Languedoc, who remained a captive in Germany until 1945.21 Folcher comes much closer to Fauxbras’s work as the unofficial voice of the ranks.22 Folcher’s diary possesses certain similarities to Fauxbras’s Sondage: a tone of fatalism, reconciliation to defeat, concern

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for survival over patriotism, initial support for Pétain and the Great War as a privileged point of reference. However, Fauxbras’s focus on defeat and its ethnographic character mark it out as genuinely unique. In contrast to the intelligence and police reports of the German and Vichy authorities, Sondage provides an insider’s perspective, allowing in a mediated way prisoners to speak for themselves, in a collective and evolving setting. From the methodological viewpoint, Fauxbras’s survey requires careful attention. Sondage roughly coincided with the birth of French public opinion polling and his title draws on its positivistic concept of a reified ‘public opinion’. 23 This was crucial to Fauxbras’s problematic claim to both neutrality and objectivity. For the analysis of Sondage, the concept of public opinion is a cul-de-sac. One problem with the concept of public opinion is that it embodies a range of contemporary and historiographical meanings that are usually not carefully distinguished in the historical literature. 24 Fauxbras’s Sondage, with its dynamic interactions between participants and events, allows a different conceptual approach drawing on a combination of social history’s and cognitive studies’ notions of consciousness. As an alternative to public opinion, a cognitive or consciousness model licences an emphasis on process (thought) rather than outcome (‘opinions’), whether that be individually or in communicative settings, as well as scrutiny on the relationship between memory, emotion and reason anchored in experience. From an empirical standpoint, the numbers of prisoners in his sample provide a reasonable representativeness. Totalling roughly 43,000 words, there are 247 entries; they might be short single statements, extended monologues or discussions. He also recorded some aggregated biographical details of occupation, rank, regiment and place of origin. In terms of rank, the interviewees ranged from a staff sergeant to a private second class and were aged between 22 and 46 years. Interviewees were from 59 regiments amongst which were 24 infantry, 10 artillery and 7 engineers’ regiments.25 The geographical origins of the prisoners in the sample are not evenly distributed across France with high representation from the Paris region and a disproportionate number of prisoners coming from the north. On a simple north-south divide, 54 were from the north and 13 from the south.26 In terms of an urban-rural classification, out of 71 interviewees whose place of origin is indicated, 19 are from the Paris region, 4 are from large industrial cities, 1 is from a large commercial and administrative city, 4 are from ports, 20 are from rural departments or villages (see Appendix 6).

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In terms of social structure, Fauxbras’s categories do create a degree of uncertainty. Fauxbras noted down the occupation of participants, or on occasion nationality, but not their employment situation or class position. It is difficult to locate several occupations in terms of employment relations as, for instance, a hairdresser, plumber, baker or joiner might be an employee or self-employed and thus be designated either lower middle class or working class (Appendix 5). Because the officers were separated from the ranks, the sample is disproportionately plebeian with the exception of a smattering of liberal professionals (an Algerian architect and four teachers). It is reasonable therefore to view Sondage as a snapshot of popular attitudes: a view of defeat from below. Having said this, there are very few from some of the typical strongholds of the French labour movement – railworkers, miners, steel workers, metal industry workers – because of the reserved occupation system (affectation spéciale). Amongst those from an agricultural background, there are both petty proprietors and labourers. Any understanding of the electoral geography of France would indicate that sharp regional cleavages (from the deep conservatism to communism) existed in the countryside. These dynamics have obvious implications for the attitudes and values of the group. Fauxbras conducted interviews as events shifted rapidly. For French men and women the speed of the events of May and June 1940 made military defeat all the more humiliating and disorientating. The Wehrmacht’s western offensive began on 10 May and three days later it breached the French border in the Ardennes, crossing the Meuse at Sedan. Less than six weeks later, on 22 June, an armistice with Germany was signed confirming France’s defeat. Fauxbras was captured as German panzer divisions swept west across northern France encircling large numbers of British and French troops that had taken advanced positions in Belgium. It was during these days that the British government withdrew its troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo (26 May to 4 June). Fauxbras’s survey began the day after the capitulation of Belgium. On 10 June the government decamped to Bordeaux and Italy declared war on France. German advance continued southwards, entering Paris on 14 June. Two days later, on 16 June, Pétain became premier, announcing to the nation on 17 June the need for an armistice. After the armistice of 22 June, the interviews cover the period in which Pétain and Laval went about establishing dictatorship, with the government moving from Bordeaux to Vichy on 1 July. Parliament overwhelmingly supported the granting of full powers to the Marshal allowing him to revise the constitution on 9 July (just three days after the end of Fauxbras’s survey). It also covered the Royal Navy’s

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destruction of part of the French fleet at the Algerian port of Mers elKébir killing 1300 French sailors in the process on 3 July. For the prisoners, this was a period of forced marches, disorganization, improvised camps in public buildings and the expectation of demobilization.27

Sociability, communicative modes and the shared cognitive process Although he sought opinion and comment, Fauxbras’s survey captured a variety of modes of communication such as humour, personal narrative, argument and reported speech. Much of the dialogue took the form of a humorous banter, which played several functions. The humour that Fauxbras reported was very different from the uniformly anti-German jokes in Chassaignon’s account of prisoners of war published shortly after the liberation.28 Generally speaking, the humour in Sondage dealt with matters in a deflected, indirect or mediated manner. First, the egalitarian sociability of banter eased relations between people who were often strangers in unfamiliar circumstances. It had an integrative function, which was underlined when the group was defined in relation to outsiders be they other nationalities, officers, professional soldiers (that is, for reservists anyway), women or civilians. Second, humour took the form of consolation in defeat, as a defence mechanism that registered rather than transcended the gloom through a fatalistic or morbid irony. For instance, distinguished economists in the financial press, one prisoner jested, would be saying that the conjuncture is less favourable for the coffin industry.29 Commenting on the hurried escape of French and British forces to the coast, the French Grand Prix would take place not in Paris but in Deauville this year, or that the Tour de France would be shorter in future.30 Third, humour had a discursive and cognitive dimension as prisoners articulated their major preoccupations indirectly, using it as a means to think through their personal and collective predicament. Thus, the inadequacy of the French airforce, a principal element in popular explanations of defeat, was the butt of several jokes. It was a good job that France did not have an airforce because the woollen mill that they were temporarily staying in would be a prime target for bombing.31 The prisoners joked about the lack of food. One wit said that his regiment had eaten its mascot: a German shepherd.32 Finally, humour had a functional relationship to contentious subject matter: in the hands of a controversialist, it was a weapon that disarmed opponents or it provided a means of defusing controversy in a group

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where tempers were frayed. Using a joke as safety value for disputatious opinions, one story articulated the defeatist position. I was part of the colonel’s office staff when a very confidential note on defeatism and defeatists arrived. The general staff had discovered that defeatist trade unionists, to recognize each other, wore a badge: a golden pin in their cap. It was necessary therefore to assemble those wearing the pins urgently. We couldn’t find a single pin in the entire regiment, but the colonel received a type written letter. My Colonel, There was a mistake. The defeatists are not wearing pins which would mark them out to your well known perspicacity, they are wearing a white armband with the inscription DEFEATIST in red letters. Thus informed, you can quickly get this rabble out of harm’s way. Your two stars are assured! ... Intelligence Service A.Z.103 How he went into a fit of rage, the old-timer! Here, here is a copy of the letter.33 On occasions, humour smoothed social tensions in what was a moment of bitter recrimination. An agricultural labourer wryly observed that he was a ‘war profiteer’ because his wife and kids were better off on war benefits than on his wages.34 One believed that a statue of the unknown soldier would be most appropriately located in Perpignan.35 Serious matters were trivialized or diffused. The main question after defeat, for one prisoner, was whether Hitler enjoyed horseracing.36 Humour therefore played a variety of often overlapping functions (sociable, consolatory, discursive-cognitive and contentious). If humour was one communicative mode for putative explanations of defeat and the means of coming to terms with it, monologues or personal narratives were a less common but more direct mode of doing these things. Individuals recounted personal experience and thereby contributed to the collective cognitive process. These narratives might be relatively brief but revealed experiences of the recent fighting or more extended life histories that provided a personal framework of explanation that could be shared with peers. There were tales of desertion, capture, the Great War, Verdun, work, family situations, sexual conquest and brushes with authority. It was older prisoners, usually veterans of the First World War, who engaged in the longer accounts of their lives constructing quite complex arguments in so doing. In the

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opening discussion, for instance, a Verdun veteran ventilated his disgust for his inexperienced comrades who were drinking wine and waiting to be captured.37 Communication also took the form of argument. A fractious language of politics disrupted relations between the prisoners. Accusations of fascism or Stalinism were hurled at opponents. A confused residue of anti-fascism existed amongst some prisoners, despite the universal disillusion with the Popular Front and the disorientation clearly created by the Hitler-Stalin pact.38 Another source of sharp argument was between the small number of prisoners who strongly identified with the military ideal and the apparent majority who had succumbed to a mood of quasi-defeatist resignation. The prevalent apolitical atmosphere restricted the scope of these arguments. A further reason why arguments were relatively curtailed was that their fractured quality might bring disapproval as it inhibited group solidarity and the cognitive process of coming to terms with the situation. At moments, sharp political polarization surfaced amongst the prisoners, as the following exchange illustrates: If we had Talleyrand, he would have brought about the confrontation of Hitlerism and Stalinism in Poland. The world would now be rid of its two major plagues. No, but you hear him blather, that one? Stalin says you’re shit, you pretentious prat.39 Revealing the vitriol of these differences, one prisoner blamed the Popular Front for France’s defeat. Accusing him of being a fascist, another prisoner hoped that the Nazis had raped his wife and that she was carrying a ‘little Aryan’ on his return home.40 Reported speech – hearsay and rumour – was another common mode of communication. If it seemed that the German authorities occasionally offered selected news in propaganda form, hearsay filled the vacuum of information. One prisoner related on 17 June that much of Paris was in flight, following the ministers to Bordeaux.41 A rumour also circulated that Pétain had had Daladier shot.42 Another prisoner reflected upon his encounter with a Dominican priest who had refused to engage in speculation thereby proving that false news was voluntary, adding: ‘Compare that a little with all these prats who blather all day about events as if Hitler kept them informed of all that he was doing.’43 The chaos of war added to this nebulous realm of second- and third-hand knowledge. Three tearful members of a regiment had been mourning

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the loss of the rest of their comrades only to discover that they were all in the same Stalag.44 The final extract reported the conversation between prisoners and the camp priest, an Austrian Catholic. The priest mixed four-day-old news of Mers el-Kébir with the propaganda story – contradicted by some who had been there – that British troops had shot on the French at Dunkirk.45 In terms of group dynamics, these forms of communicative interactions highlight the sociability and collective dimension of the cognitive process. The prevalence of humour in particular underpins the group sociability. Even when prisoner were interrogating their own pasts to understand the present they were doing so to assist others (often younger comrades) in the same process. This form of communication and reported speech highlights the prisoners’ preference for insider experience and unofficial knowledge over less trustworthy official knowledge. Sondage suggests that ‘opinion’ was formed, or as Bourdieu insisted, remained largely unformed, through a group decision-making process even if individuals arrived with different views and drew their own conclusions.46

Shared memory and experience in group decision-making The knowledge of, and response to, contemporary events amongst the prisoners was subject to omissions, delays and misunderstandings. Information circulated through hearsay or was controlled by the German authorities. Some of their silences were as significant as their utterances. Unsurprisingly given the circumstances, none of the French prisoners mentioned de Gaulle, let alone his appeal of 18 June. The confusion of war was apparent on several occasions. For instance, there was disagreement about the provenance and target of artillery that prisoners in Thérouanne (Pas-de-Calais) could hear on 30 May: was German artillery already shelling Britain? Was the French fleet firing on German tanks? Or, was captured French artillery firing on ‘Churchill’?47 Reflecting German control of formal information and the uncertainty of the circuits of unofficial knowledge, it is significant that commentary on contemporary events was both sparse – indicating a disengaging sense of powerlessness – and delayed – revealing the slow and incomplete channels of information. Mention of the Belgian surrender took place three days after the event.48 Italy’s declaration of war was known after a week’s delay; this news was greeted with cynicism: Hitler should tell Mussolini that he was keeping Nice for his holidays; or, at least with the loss of Corsica, they would hear no more from the singer Tino Rossi;

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or, another recalled Italy’s record at Caporetto.49 On occasions actual and subjective chronologies coincided for specific reasons. They learnt of the arrival of German forces in Paris from German taunts on the day itself.50 German authorities were also keen to advertise German victory and the resignation of the Reynaud government, which they did in the form of a poster on 18 June.51 The event that occasioned the greatest discussion was the accession of Pétain. The Maréchal had, more than any general, managed to maintain sympathy amongst the poilus because of his association with the defence of Verdun, his avoidance of culpability for the offensives of 1917 and his supposedly sympathetic response to the ensuing mutinies. Although a darling of the far right, being considered the figure that most would like to see as a dictator, he had also cultivated an image as an apolitical humble servant of France and not overtly monarchistic or Catholic.52 Underlining its significance in French collective memory, Verdun cropped up time and again in the conversations.53 The prisoners learnt of the news that Pétain replaced Reynaud as prime minister after two days’ delay on 18 June. Their response was nearly unanimously positive because they believed that Pétain would quickly sign an armistice.54 One soldier was grateful to the Marshal for forgoing his comfortable pension. Another argued that there could be no better choice as Pétain would not sacrifice another million lives fighting along the Loire.55 Another had praised Pétain for understanding the ordinary soldier by introducing more leave in response to the mutinies. A solitary voice dissented over Pétain’s repression of the mutineers of 1917.56 None of the prisoners associated Pétain with the strategic military failings of 1940, for which he bore some responsibility. Favourable impressions of Pétain persisted in the Sondage in the days that followed.57 The discussions revealed common points of historical reference around which disagreements turned. The French revolutions and comparisons between monarchy and republic underpinned some of the conversations.58 Defensively explaining that he was not a member of Action Française, a legitimist framed the present in terms of Louis-Philippe ‘the usurper’, the 1830 revolution, the grandeur of Henry IV and the edict of Nantes.59 His views engendered a lively exchange between republicans and the royalist. Monarchy served as a historical counter-factual. One observed favourably that it would be easier to surrender under a monarchy, like the Belgians had, rather than needing to consult parliament. Others used the past to conjecture about the future, recalling 1870 and the Ruhr occupation, or the peace at the end of the First World War to predict the level of reparations and the material consequences

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of defeat for them personally.60 Unsurprisingly, the Great War was the most common reference point, often drawing upon veteran experience.61 Sympathetic to the attitudes of the young, a veteran observed that if his generation had not been so naïve in 1914 there would have been 1.5 million fewer dead.62 One recalled the pro-war (Clemenceau) and pro-peace (Caillaux) camps during the First World War, observing that the soldiers were Caillauxtistes and the civilians Clemenceauistes, predicting an adverse public reaction to their defeatism.63 More recent political events – the Popular Front government, the strikes of 1936, the failed general strike of 30 November 1938 and Munich – also shaped the prisoners’ views.64 The disappointment of working-class supporters of the Popular Front was still palpable. One quipped that he was a triple ‘c’ (con, idiot) being suckered in 1914, 1936 and 1940.65 A participant in the strike of ‘May [sic] 1936’ observed that, after that, 30 francs a day was not enough to make him lift a finger for Danzig.66 Another noted the unfulfilled promise of ‘bread, peace and liberation [sic]’.67 The experience deeply alienated another erstwhile Popular Front supporter from politics: ‘Politics, don’t ever talk to me about it. ... [B]efore I take an elector’s card or a union card again, some water will have to pass under the Neuilly bridge.’68 Another regretted that the ‘great strike of 30 November 1938’ had failed, believing this to be an important turning point in their fate. Seeking to make sense of the strike’s collapse within the realm of everyday experience, he defaulted to his own prejudices: failure stemmed from wives warning their husbands about the threat of unemployment if they took strike action.69 This cynicism about the leaders of the Popular Front found its strongest expression in the comments of a prisoner who jested that he was the only member of the ‘French Inertist Party’, whose doctrine was inertia, doing nothing. The agony of the Popular Front project lingered into the phoney war in the sense that those elected in 1936 remained in the Chamber of Deputies. Daladier’s repression of the pacifist movement and the communists resulted in a bitter taste amongst some prisoners, reinforcing disillusion with the Popular Front and politicians in general. Several prisoners criticized his decree laws that punished those expressing ‘anti-French remarks’, the same decree laws that Fauxbras and the newspapers that he wrote for (Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste and Merle Blanc) had fallen foul of.70 In order to come to terms with defeat, the prisoners therefore drew on long- and short-term sedimentary layers that time had deposited, combining their own political experiences and longer political traditions.

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The period between spring 1936 and the summer of 1940 constituted a shared – though not necessarily by all – cycle of enthusiastic expectation and disorientating disillusion. This short-term pattern of events combined with deeper-seated attitudes and experiences forged in or by the Great War. This reflected an intergenerational dialogue wherein different events – simply put the Great War and the Popular Front – provided the formative moments in the prisoners’ political consciousness. As a consequence of the previous war, many possessed cynical opinions about the military authorities and the government. These ideas were located within longer enduring historical understandings of France’s past and political traditions of republicanism and royalism.

Cognitive responses to defeat: reasoning and feeling in the making of a complex political consciousness If prisoners communicated through a range of forms each with their own characteristics in relation to group dynamics and framed their understanding with a particular sense of the past and present, then it is necessary to understand which attitudes were forming at this time and the relationship between these and the making of public opinion during the Vichy years. Each of the key themes of the conversations – explanations of defeat, hunger, other nationalities, return, French society and masculinity – had greater or lesser symmetries with Vichy or resistance viewpoints. Furthermore, the Sondage allows an evaluation of the affective state of the prisoners and this range of emotions helps to understand the cognitive process at work. Recent historical literature about war has focused on death, killing, mourning and trauma.71 Death featured in the Sondage in two principal ways. First, the memory of the last war rendered death an impersonal statistical lottery as the dead were talked of in the hundreds of thousands and millions. Second, individuals outlined how they had avoided or planned strategies to avoid death. Self-censorship reigned with regard to dead friends. The words of grief and mourning – le chagrin, la peine, le deuil, la détresse, la douleur, la désolation – were a taboo and in their stead were references to an objectified colloquialism: les macchabs (corpses).72 Moreover, resistance and collaboration were predicated upon the choice facing France, to fight on alongside Britain despite German victory on metropolitan France or to accept German victory and sign an armistice. Whilst Sondage began on 29 May nearly three weeks before the armistice, nobody doubted France’s defeat. There were attempts to

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decipher it. Often reasoning was deduced from their own experiences. One explanation of defeat drawn from their own observations of the war was age. A third of those mobilized in 1939–40 were over 40 years old.73 The prisoners remarked that the French soldier was older than British and German troops. For one the significance was that the old are less courageous.74 Several blamed the poor pay of the French soldier.75 The military superiority of the German army was apparent to many. This might be at the level of training: one soldier complained that he had been taught horse-riding rather than vehicle repair.76 Another commonplace was the inadequacy of an army based on reservists.77 Indeed, one professional soldier lost his temper with the reservists around him and their discussions. Threatening them physically, he shouted: Blokes like you, the reservists with their return-home defeatism and their endless stories of 10 francs a day, now its proven that we don’t need you. If we, the specialists didn’t have you under our feet, we could have done a good job, we would have fought Hitler with the young and the active, the volunteers and two or three cohorts of the reserves not yet on their last legs.78 In addition to explanations that related to their direct experience, prisoners singled out two principal reasons for defeat.79 First, prisoners returned time and again to the theme of the ‘aviation of the imaginations’, as it was once vividly described. Although part of France’s deficiencies stemmed from battlefield strategy, the airforce – unlike infantry or tank numbers – was one area in which Germany had an overwhelming numerical superiority; Germany had over a 3:1 advantage over France in combined bomber and fighter numbers.80 German command of the skies was a terrifying aspect of the war and a crucial element of its blitzkrieg strategy. For one prisoner, the airforce was the ‘key to the mystery’ of defeat.81 One of the prisoners asked if anyone had seen a single one of ‘France’s 6,000 invincible airplanes’ of which they had all been told.82 One speculated that the planes were all destroyed on the first day of the fighting.83 Another believed that it was the lack of aircraft production that was the problem.84 Ministers were blamed for embezzling the money earmarked for the airforce.85 A right-wing prisoner argued that the airforce had been given to the Spanish reds.86 Second, the Maginot line was identified as a cause of defeat. Named after André Maginot, the Minister of War and constructed between 1930 and 1937, the Maginot line symbolized the French general staff’s defensive military philosophy and its plans for a war modelled on the

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experience of the previous one. Whilst one prisoner observed that if the Maginot line was such a good idea the Belgians would have built one, another commented that half a Maginot line was a stupidity, believing that this was a conspiracy of arms manufacturers, cement manufacturers and the officers who prefer defeat to a future without war.87 Both the Maginot line and the deficiencies of the airforce combined with accusations against former Commander-in-Chief General Maurice Gamelin or politicians.88 Implying that the obvious had been overlooked, it irked one prisoner that politicians, journalists and newspaper fortune tellers had failed to predict the French army’s encirclement in Belgium and northern France.89 Whilst prisoners sought to explain defeat, there was also a strong current of defeatism amongst the prisoners. This is significant because defeat was in one sense a choice – the choice upon which the Vichy regime was established. The alternative – to continue the fight alongside Britain from France’s colonies – was the route that de Gaulle took. Without any voices of objection, several prisoners expressed their preference for peace with Germany over the pursuit of war alongside Britain.90 In so far as affective states can be determined from these comments, defeat induced acceptance, ambivalence, apathy and relief. In the sense of being reconciled to defeat, the majority of prisoners were defeatist. The Sondage opened with a conversation in which one soldier argues that he and his comrades should have surrendered the previous evening.91 Another predicted that in the chaos of French retreat there were probably one million deserters.92 Another powerful indicator of a fatalistic defeatism was the numerous references to Hitler’s prediction that the German army would enter Paris on 15 June.93 In the stronger sense of being defeatist by political conviction, there is weaker evidence. The discourse of the prisoners was composed of a range of signifiers, themes and references revealing a common language of defeat. The repeated utterances of Danzig (‘to die for Danzig’ had been the slogan of those who rejected the war) and ‘the war to end war’ (‘der des ders’) are the most obvious signifiers of defeatist and pacifist discourse amongst the prisoners.94 Munich was another signifier of longer pacifist conviction.95 ‘Anti-French talk’ referring to Daladier’s repression of the freedom of opinion also acted as a signifier of pacifist or defeatist sentiment.96 The idea of anti-French talk was subverted using humour to highlight its demoralizing injustice and absurdity. If it was possible to identify a pacifist element within the broader majority of situational defeatists, then it is also possible to identify traces of an anti-militarist

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defeatism rooted in hatred of the army as an institution and its officer class. The prisoners’ attempts to understand the defeat and the course of war focused upon assessments of the national allies and enemies. Anglophobia became an ideological mainstay of the Vichy regime. For the collaborationists, Germanophilia supplemented this Anglophobia. British sponsorship of de Gaulle meant that Anglophilia correlated to some extent to Gaullist resistance. Attitudes towards these nationalities at the time of defeat therefore bear a significance for the respective resonances of those who tried to win over the French people during the war, especially to the camp of either collaboration or Gaullist resistance. Usually the prisoners considered these nationalities as homogeneous expressions of a national character: the ‘English’ were arrogant or tough, the Germans militaristic, Italians cowardly, and so on. For some, these national characteristics shaped military performance. For others, it was pay, age, military organization, weight and quality of arms that explained such performance. National character also explained the nature of one’s political regime, but on other occasions the English and their king or Hitler and the Germans were distinguished one from another. Prisoners viewed the English with curiosity: the highlanders were ‘English’ in skirts, one quipped.97 Another could not shake his preoccupation with steak and chips at their mention. Several commented on the youthfulness of their soldiers compared with the French. In discussions of Churchill and the English in general, there was usually indifference but no great hostility. France’s surrender invited a couple of comments favouring defeat in dishonour than escaping to Britain to fight on.98 There seemed to be no generalized or deep-seated Anglophobia amongst the prisoners of war and when they were informed of events at Mers el-Kébir, they suspected that it was German propaganda. Discussions turned more frequently to the Germans than any other nationality. Unlike, for example, the English or the Belgians, the Germans were always referred to by nicknames, ‘Allemand’ was not used once in Sondage. The evolution of this lexicon is interesting. The most common term was the relatively familiar Fritz (a shortened version of Friedrich), originating in the First World War. It was used throughout the six weeks during which the Sondage were taken. Prisoners used this term in a range of settings such as the military context, their treatment and national comparison. Whilst being a pejorative nickname, it did not necessarily denote great hostility. This was not true of the second most common epithet ‘Nazi’, which like Fritz was uttered throughout the six-week period of the Sondage. ‘Fridolin’ and ‘Fridolie’ (German and

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Germany) were less frequent and ‘Boche’ the least frequent of all only surfacing in later conversations from 4 June onwards.99 The term Fridolin denoting German stemmed from the First World War and had previously simply meant ‘bloke’. It tended to appear in ironic, humorous, resigned or anecdotal speech. The use of the term Boche denoted the greater hostility to the Germans appearing in talk about the treachery of a snitch, the harsh treatment of prisoners and anti-Semitic persecution. It indicated a Germanophobia amongst a section of the prisoners.100 The term Nazi had similar connections with the addition, on several occasions, of a politically conscious anti-fascism.101 The same could be said of the term Aryan which highlighted Nazi claims to racial superiority.102 If the affective states are considered it is significant that aggression towards other nationalities, even the Germans, was absent. The language and tone of discussion about the Germans betrayed the passive hostility of some prisoners, but not at this moment a belligerent or revanchist aggression. Where it is possible to identify aggression, it was internalized within French society. Hardships of the camps were significant, though they were overlooked in the idealized versions of camp life that Vichy propagated. More generally, the entire experience of Vichy was underpinned by scarcity and this shaped the evolution of attitudes to the regime. Food was a regular feature of discussion.103 Yves Durand noted that prisoners of war obsessed about food and the Sondage highlights this. It is clear from Fauxbras’s survey that hunger created an element of solidarity and common cause amongst the prisoners. Because of their great number, one prisoner feared being starved or machine-gunned en masse.104 In early June, food was central to their anxiety about the course of the war as the following conversation demonstrates: –Twenty kilometres on foot and a ladle of herbal tea in our stomach! We will all be dead before arriving in Paris. Because we won’t arrive in Paris before Hitler! ... Him, he will be there on 15 June, in thirteen days. For us as a consequence it must be three weeks. We’ll not hold out until then, nourished on herbal tea. ... –They will feed us when they perceive, according to their nazi techniques, that they’ve destroyed our morale. But on the other hand, we can hope that at the speed they’re going, they will be in Paris before 15 June.105 How lack of food affected social hierarchies in defeat fascinated the prisoners: one had heard that the queen of Holland had lost weight,

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another wondered whether the king of Belgium was, like them, eating mouldy bread.106 The food of officers, of course, drew special attention. For some, life had defaulted to immediate survival mechanisms with food as an overriding concern. Thus, the very first reaction that Fauxbras recorded when his comrades heard the news of German victory was: ‘Now they’ve won, they will perhaps feed us with something other than potato peelings.’107 Seemingly unrelated events prompted thoughts of food. Beauraing, a site famed for Marian apparitions, conjured the hope of a real miracle: the Virgin’s appearance with a pot of beef bourguinon.108 From 18 June, conversations turned away from the causes of defeat to speculation about return to France and the future of their country. The Third Reich used the return of prisoners as enticement to gain greater cooperation from the Vichy regime in military and economic terms. In the camps that Fauxbras surveyed, the prisoners’ speculations focused on whether they would be made to work for the Germans, or they would become a bargaining token for the French fleet, or whether ill health would ensure an individual’s return. One stated that he did not care about the detail of the armistice except the return of prisoners to France. If return became a prevailing preoccupation amongst prisoners after the armistice, the course of the war was another. They discussed the permutations of the new situation: the future of France’s colonies and its navy, German invasion of Britain and the role of Italy.109 There were only glimpses of latent collaboration and resistance practices. Anticipating the collaborationist crusade of the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme (Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, LVF), one soldier argued for an alliance with Germany against Russia.110 In contrast, another threatened a prisoner – whom the Germans had designated a barracks’ leader – for cooperating with the camp authorities.111 Although Vichy and the occupation authorities presented France with an image of moral and spiritual regeneration in orderly disciplined community of French prisoners in line with the ideal of the Vichy’s ‘national revolution’, the camps hosted a multiplicity of social fissures as Sarah Fishman has demonstrated.112 In terms of emotional responses, prisoners targeted aggression at particular groups within French society, which in some cases were represented amongst the prisoners themselves. Within the army, there were antagonisms of the ranks towards the officers who were resented on the grounds of their better pay, food and conditions as well as in some cases because they were able to avoid the fighting. Although one witness spoke of good and bad officers, and

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the others objected sharply, a near consensus of antagonism towards the officer class can be gleaned from the conversations of rank-and-file prisoners.113 One wittily encapsulated this sentiment, describing himself as a ‘religious objector to saluting’.114 A captive questioned the value of medals when they simply marked one out as an officer and for the attendant social disapproval.115 Whilst one prisoner believed that the captive officers were being pampered by the Germans, others delighted in a perceived levelling aspect of the camps: the officers had to queue for food or do menial tasks.116 A bistro owner imagined a reversal of fortunes whereby an officer would have to work for him and he would be able to pay six sous a day to give the orders.117 One soldier even went so far as to express his pleasure about the death of his ambitious lieutenant who had accidentally blown himself up because he had sought promotion at the expense of his inferiors. Anti-officer attitudes did not stop at such passive sentiments of Schadenfreude or malicious fantasy. More than one raconteur amused his colleagues with tales of their own subordination and humiliation of their officers.118 Illustrating how this intense dislike of the officers might also be constructed into broader societal understandings and speculations, one soldier fulminated: Betrayed, you say? Betrayed and sold out! All those who were in command, they’re the traitors, Bazaine and company. Now, they hide behind Hitler and take away our forty hours and paid holidays.119 As well as antagonisms within the military, there were also militarycivilian ones as prisoners recounted the hostility that they had encountered from the civilian population.120 Sometimes these discords were grounded in the wider social context. Soldiers articulated class hostility to the rich. One railed against the trusts and the ‘200 families’.121 One revelled in the belief that the rich would be deprived of their cruises.122 Unwillingness to cringe before the boss had resulted in the loss of reserved profession status for one worker.123 Social antagonism might even extend to those in petty positions in authority, as another prisoner believed that he had been denounced as a defeatist by his caretaker.124 The survey also exposed the self-interested individualism of those concerned to save their skins or livelihoods. One bragged how he knew where the regimental money box had been buried.125 Another could only think about his harvest and the prices that the Germans would impose on him for his wine. Some discussed means of dodging military service such as through injury. A prisoner had hoped for injury anywhere but in his private parts.126 Another regretted that his prosthetic

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arm did not prevent his call up.127 One prisoner did not care what Hitler said just as long as he received the childbirth bonus next month.128 Hitler troubled one individual only now that he was starting to go without food.129 Another who regretted that his Belgian father had naturalized him as French was happy for Hitler to be given the Polish corridor as long as the prisoners of war were able to return home.130 With defeat and the uncertain territorial terms of armistice, fractious regional identities surfaced indicating and indeed anticipating the geographical fragmentation of France. Several prisoners articulated a north-south antipathy. Those from Gers stated that Hitler was welcome to the north and east of France.131 Later on, a northerner reciprocated the sentiment speculating that it would be good if the Germans went to Toulouse so that the ‘Auvergnats’ (those from the Auvergne, though it is not clear why they are singled out) experienced what war was really like.132 Another northerner mused that everything bad came from Lot or Corsica and that there were no ministers from the north, only traditions of hard work. He would be in favour of Hitler establishing a state composed of northern France and the low countries. The numbers engaging in this discourse should not be exaggerated and there were those who sought to dissipate such hostility through humour comparing the awkwardness of rugby league to the southerners.133 Uncertainty about the future of the territorial integrity of France clearly encouraged such animosities as it was apparent that France would lose AlsaceLorraine, lose territory to Italy and there was the possibility of Breton secession. Speculating about this last possibility, one prisoner believed that if Brittany succeeded, France could not longer count on the shipbuilding of Saint-Nazaire and Nantes as they would simply be concerned with fishing boats.134 Mingled with these centrifugal regional identities was a peasant rural hostility to Paris with their ‘cinema and silk stockings’, one peasant observing that they, with their six hectares and chicken, did not need France.135 The Sondage can also be used to assess the degree of symmetry between mindset of these defeated soldiers and the ideals of the Vichy regime which were only beginning to emerge at this time. In terms of the core values of the new French state – ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’ (Work, Family, Fatherland) – these themes were in weak evidence in Sondage. In terms of affective states, pride, shame, remorse were largely absent, especially patriotic pride. On the rare occasion that patriotism appeared in the prisoners’ dialogue, it was viewed negatively as ‘exaggerated’ and likely to result in unnecessary deaths or the attribute of the ‘great patriot ... weirdo’ and assassin of Jean Jaurès, Raoul Villain.136 Where

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work was concerned, a single prisoner articulated a strong work ethic; most references to work were troubled by poor pay or anticipations of hardships and overwork consequent upon punitive German reparations. As regards ‘family’, whilst wives, homes, the desire to return and personal circumstances were mentioned, the prisoners did not indulge publicly in shows of sentimentality but were rather concerned with material questions such as the harvest. No voices articulated the traditionalist values of family as a means of moral renewal of the nation. Each component of Vichy’s threefold dictum was in its own way strongly gendered. Masculinity was therefore at the centre of Vichy’s value system. If combatants had understood the Great War within the cognitive frame of their own masculinity, then the prisoners’ sense of manhood was quite different in June 1940.137 Several historians have probed the relationship between masculinity and the years of total war. George Mosse highlighted the context of industrialization, nationalism and military service in the late-nineteenth-century reconstruction of masculinity through classical Greek myths of war.138 The First World War created a crisis of this modern construction of masculinity whereby the veteran experience clashed with the myth of a noble death. During the Great War, masculinity was constructed around notions of male attributes of heroism, comradeship, and thus war and death were perceived as a test of manhood.139 The defeat of 1940, as Luc Capdevilla observed, renewed and recast this crisis. He traced analogous ‘quests for masculinity’ of both the Vichy regime and the resistance via a revision of the martial virility myth based upon the ideal of the volunteer.140 In Sondage, we witness prisoners’ efforts to understand their own actions and sense of selves as men in circumstances that could not be reconciled to dominant or institutional discourses of masculinity. The prisoners partook in a gendered and sexualized humour, in effect forming a sense of masculine community. Discussions involved sexual organs, sex acts, sexual opportunity, sexually transmitted diseases, virility and impotence.141 More seriously, in May–June 1940, rationalizations of surrender and capture were gendered. The most common was that this was the preferable, more intelligent option (and hence denoting manhood). This counterposition of intelligence and death in war was generalized in some voices, inversely ranking nationalities by intelligence according to their military ardour: so the Italians were three times more intelligent than the French, according to one prisoner, because they had only a third of the French war dead in the First World War. Another deemed the Belgians intelligent for surrendering.142 For others, it was the specific circumstances of having rifles against tanks, or low pay, or not

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being a professional soldier that made surrender the rational choice.143 The discussions relativized and mocked heroism, which was the supposedly martial attribute of masculinity.144 A deserter who was proud of the fact observed that he had been transformed from a coward to a hero as he was now a prisoner of war.145 One soldier quipped that they had fought less ardently because of the bromide.146 Above all, its association with the deceptions of 1914 tainted the notion of heroism. After such an experience heroism seemed futile, deluded and stupid. Their prospective reception on their return to France also probed their sense of masculinity. Several anticipated encountering shame from the public, one going so far as to challenge the complacency of his fellows by predicting that even their own mothers will despise them. Having said that, only one prisoner actually expressed shame.147 The fear of being a cuckold or the opportunity to cuckold others were also articulated more than once. This deep-seated cuckold anxiety perhaps anticipated the aspect of the purges during the liberation of the humiliating public head-shaving of women (tondues) who had allegedly consorted with Germans.148 The prisoners were therefore able to refashion masculinity to fit their own experiences and although it was a prevalent discourse amongst them, it did not determine their conscious reactions to defeat.

Conclusion War possesses distinctive features – its propaganda battles, material hardships, heightened emotional states and uncertainty – that distort normal patterns of time, truth and reality. An unstable gap existed between events and their inter-subjective communication. This created particular relationships between objective and subjective temporalities. In terms of content of discussions, the Sondage identifies the evolving preoccupations of the prisoners – explanations of defeat, assessments of allies and enemies, contemplations of the future. They do not, despite what Fauxbras hinted in his subtitle, definitively explain why the reservist would not ‘fight for Danzig’. Though defeatism was widespread amongst the sample of captured soldiers, it is not safe to extrapolate from these views to the moment of, or before, invasion. If the Sondage does not conclusively answer that question, it does give us a cross-section of opinion at the beginning of a complex, contradictory and evolving thought process. If the caricature of the reservists as being cowardly, defeatist and individualist rings true when reading Sondage, it is because as caricatures often do it contained an element of

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truth. But on each of these grounds, such a conclusion is misleading. The reservists explained how they were badly prepared, ill equipped and poorly motivated for battle. They emphasized the institutional and conjunctural context of ‘cowardice’. Whilst defeatism is undeniable – and there was evidence of pacifist views – it was mostly situational: a reconciliation to a seemingly inevitable defeat. As for the prevalence of self-interested individualism, whilst there was a sense of sauve qui peut, individualism was less apparent than other social fissures. In terms of values and attitudes that suggest potential support for collaboration, it appears that Anglophobia and Germanophilia were both weak but support for Pétain was overwhelming because of the desire for armistice and the received wisdom about his past. At the same time, despite exceptions, there was a general anti-fascist sentiment. These ambivalent attitudes metamorphosized into attentisme, collaborationism, resistance and all the shades and mixtures of consciousness between these polarities. These states of mind formed the starting point of a cognitive process. Unadulterated by the rival ‘nationalizations’ of resistencialist and Vichy myths, the Sondage revealed faultlines of class, gender, geography and identity that the national myths obscured. There was no iron in the soul at this point as certain versions of the resistance myth might suggest. Events were too overpowering and the affective tone was more of stoic withdrawal than heroic engagement. Having said that, a latent class awareness existed in relation to the capitalist authority – the officers, bosses, landlords, the state – but this sense of class had been largely depoliticized and ideologically disorientated by disillusion with the Popular Front project. In summary, Fauxbras’s Sondage is a unique source of grassroots consciousness at this formative moment of French history. Of course, they cannot be a comprehensive account of French soldiers in defeat, or prisoners of war given that they were not aware that the majority would remain captive for the next five years, still less French public opinion as a whole at this juncture. The representativeness of the sample needs to be carefully considered and interpretation is open to a degree of latitude based on this judgement. Clearly, Fauxbras’s evidence cannot be treated at face value and his claim to objectivity must be scrutinized. Like his novels, he sought to uncover the hidden, voiceless or invisible subjects ignored in mainstream historical and political discourse. Yet – for all his sensitivity to the objects of his study, his intellectual scrupulousness and his commitment to realism – his intentions undoubtedly colour his results as his subtitle reveals (to die for Danzig was a principal doxa of French pacifists after the declaration of war).149 As in his other works,

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Fauxbras blurred the distinction between an insider’s authenticity and an epistemology of truth. His assertions of veracity were both rhetorical and polemical. Having made these qualifications, participants in Sondage are fairly representative of urban and rural France, its social structure and its geography though skewed towards reservists and to plebeian types. Sondage does provide insights into both the form and content of attitudes, values and opinions but it also allows us to transcend the public opinion model. In terms of form, the Sondage exposes particular modes of communicative sociability – humour, personal narrative, rumour and argument – each having their own characteristics and place in the cognitive process of coming to terms with such a momentous event as France’s defeat. Sondage also reveals the encounters between propaganda and unofficial knowledge as well as the cognitive process of discriminating information based on experience, stretching back in many cases to 1914. To put it in the straightforward terms of the prisoners, some believed they had been duped before and they were cautious of being had again. This context is important to understanding the effectiveness of Vichy or German propaganda in France over the next four years. Furthermore, the modes of communication and themes of discussion followed chronological patterns that it seems plausible were more than purely arbitrary sequences. This suggests that consciousness was fluid, responsive to events and not trapped deterministically in discourse or identity, dynamics into which the concept of public opinion provides few insights. Prisoners were capable of challenging, discarding or revising received discourse or identities. This cognitive process fused an experience-based reasoning and emotional responses to the situation. This suggests that such a cognitive model might be explored in relation to the other collective settings of France’s dark years such as the workplace, the neighbourhood, the café and the food queue.

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7 Occupation Diary 1941–44

One of the most fascinating aspects of César Fauxbras’s oeuvre is his unpublished diary written during the war.1 This dates from 9 October 1939 to 4 April 1940 and April 1941 to 5 October 1944. From the historian’s perspective, diaries provide an invaluable source of evidence and local perspectives upon this complex period. Keeping diaries was relatively common amongst certain layers of French society. Those in high politics (Rist, De Monzie, Barthélemy, du Moulin de Labarthète), academia (Drouot) and the literary elite (Sartre, Fabre-Luce, GaltierBoissière, Guéhenno, Drieu de la Rochelle) have provided fascinating insights into various geographies and social situations of wartime France.2 Plebeian diarists are rare. Fauxbras is one of the most down-toearth of the war. On his return from the POW camps, intent on avoiding conscription to the German factories, he scratched a living selling articles de Paris (cheap jewellery, buckles, and such like) at a kiosk by his flat near the Château de Vincennes.3 His father-in-law, an articles de Paris wholesaler, helped him in this respect. This job clearly assisted Fauxbras’s assessments of the popular mood, which are perhaps therefore more reliable than more elevated observers or those with outsider status in wartime France. Indeed, school inspector, literary critic and novelist Guéhenno wrote that as a bourgeois he did not share the hardships of the poor and it is clear from Fauxbras’s diary that he did.4 Fauxbras opined much less about the course of the war or Pétain’s strategy than say historian Drouot and economist Charles Rist. Fauxbras mused introspectively much less than author Jean Guéhenno. Fauxbras can be refreshingly terse, though sometimes frustratingly so. Another advantage that diaries have is that at a time of propaganda and censorship they reveal contemporary attitudes in a way that memoirs cannot, giving a glimpse of everyday life unadulterated by hindsight. Fauxbras’s 147

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personal perspective, his circles of acquaintances, his knowledge of politics and his interests in literature and journalism, in addition to his location in suburban Paris make his diary an invaluable source. In April 1941, he returned to his diary after time in the army and in the prisoner of war camps. An extraordinary transformation had occurred in the 12-month hiatus in the diary. In occupied France, the political landscape had changed beyond recognition, in Paris especially the fascist movements, or collaborationism, in the shape of Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français (PPF, French Popular Party) and Déat’s Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP) held centre stage. Fauxbras read what newspapers and literature were available, including the collaborationist press. In his journal, he frequently subjected these to sharp critique. He highlighted the rivalries and ambitions of Doriot and Déat as well as the collaborationists’ attacks on Vichy. He delighted knowingly in their hubris. Fauxbras closely observed their campaigns against Bolshevism and their efforts to mobilize a volunteer force to fight on the eastern front. He tracked the activities of his old adversary Paul Chack, who from the mid-1930s had became a patron of French fascism, joining the political bureau of Doriot’s PPF. Seconded to the Ministry of Information to disseminate official propaganda at the outbreak of the Second World War, he became a principal figure in Parisian collaborationism after the defeat of France with leading positions in the Cercle Aryen (Aryan Circle), Comité d’Action Antibolchévique (CAA, Anti-Bolshevik Action Committee), regularly broadcasting on Radio-Paris during the occupation as well as writing for Gringoire and penning the ‘chronique de notre temps’ column in Aujourd’hui. 5 At the time of the liberation, Chack was tried for ‘intelligence with the enemy’ and he was executed on 9 January 1945. Of late, Chack’s work has undergone a certain rehabilitation, his wartime role has been misrepresented as simple Pétainism and anti-communism, his execution has been portrayed as an injustice (on the grounds that he was punished for his opinions rather than his deeds), and his life has been subjected to sentimental reconstruction.6 His trial, however, showed the porous boundary between ideas and material culpability in the project of collaboration. The transcripts suggest his complicity in the appropriation of putatively Jewish property in the case of the headquarters of the CAA. Furthermore, a Mrs Guieu filed a complaint that Chack had denounced her husband to the Gestapo with the result that he was subsequently deported to Germany.7 Paul Guieu was working for the firm representing the real owners of the CAA offices who were seeking compensation for their loss of property. Chack showed little regard for her plea to intervene on her husband’s behalf.

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The case of ‘intelligence with the enemy’ turned upon something that might seem more trivial than all this: German funding for his anti-communist exhibition. The Vichy regime apparently paid Chack 68,000 francs a year for his services as a propagandist over and above his pension.8 This stipend paid to the already wealthy Chack was more than, Fauxbras calculated, what a family of four had to live on.

Explaining defeat Explaining France’s defeat became the principal obsession of the political literature in the early part of the occupation. Fauxbras read several of these accounts and wryly commented on their inadequacies. Most were penned, in Fauxbras’s eyes, by self-serving reactionaries blaming old scapegoats: pacifism, the Popular Front and the lack of discipline in the French army.9 As a novelist and veteran who had written about his war experiences, Fauxbras provides an interesting counterpoint to early explanations of France’s defeat. Typical of those reviewed was Colonel Michel Alerme’s Les Causes Militaires de Notre Défaite.10 Fauxbras observed that being a supporter of Action Française, Alerme was both a royalist opponent of democracy and shared the assumptions of the officer class. Yet Alerme identified the retrograde thinking of the French general staff as a principal cause of France’s military defeat. Alerme explained this backwardness as resulting from political-institutional framework of the Third Republic. He compared the French parliamentary system negatively with the political situation in which the German general staff found themselves. The mood of recrimination, in which democratic voices were silenced, allowed Alerme to point blame at the Third Republic, parliamentary democracy, the lack of military discipline and ‘the ravages of pacifism and internationalism’. The alleged culpability of pacifism particularly irked Fauxbras whose diary provided a personal sounding-board. He observed that the German army did not win because of the lack of drill, lenient discipline or frequent leave of the French soldier but rather because of the superiority of German tanks and planes. Reading Alerme reminded Fauxbras of a poignant incident when a motorized troop carrier had broken down at Hazebrouck but the infantryman complained that he had no idea how to repair the vehicle because of all the drill with his rifle. Anatole de Monzie’s Ci-Devant, published in 1941, also attracted Fauxbras’s sustained attention. This diary detailed de Monzie’s ministerial experiences in Daladier and Reynaud cabinets from 21 August

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1938 to October 1940.11 This was not de Monzie’s first commentary on the events of the war and it would not be his last. Failing to observe the obvious comparison with Poland that would not serve his own standpoint of appeasement and anti-communism, de Monzie wrote the preface to a short book about ‘unparalleled’ aggression of Russia’s invasion of Finland.12 In Pétition pour l’Histoire, he made a nostalgic case for the significance of history, legitimizing Pétain’s national revolution through its roots in medieval France.13 In Saisons des Juges, his tone had changed somewhat, regretting the premature publication of Ci-Devant as well as criticizing the Pétain regime and calling for reconciliation of the French nation.14 For Fauxbras, de Monzie committed the errors common to many: knowledge after the fact, silences over previous positions, brazenness in the face of his own errors and celebration of his own lack of principle. What interested and infuriated Fauxbras about de Monzie was that the former minister saw from the inside the decay of the Popular Front government and the drift towards war. Fauxbras criticized de Monzie with particular venom because of his role in the defeat of the 30 November 1938 general strike, which was, for Fauxbras, the ‘first cause of the war’. De Monzie replaced Frossard as Minister of Public Works because the latter had resigned over the question of the 40-hour law, which had been the cornerstone of the Popular Front reforms. Daladier, as prime minister, and Reynaud, as finance minister, sought to undo that reform. It was this that led to the end of the Popular Front project and the showdown with the unions in the 30 November 1938 general strike. De Monzie bragged about his role in this dispute in which he criminalized union secretaries and mobilized the railway workers into the army. Fauxbras reflected that nobody would forget de Monzie’s threatening radio broadcast on the eve of the strike or his gloating celebration after the strike’s defeat.15 De Monzie’s pacifism was of a particular brand. He was pro-Munich, a friend of Otto Abetz, the Nazis’ emissary to Paris and later German ambassador (although de Monzie neglected to state this when Abetz was expelled in July 1939) and believed that France should court Mussolini in order to avoid war. Fauxbras observed that de Monzie consorted with anti-Semites, archbishops, arms manufacturers, Stalinists and collaborationists (de Brinon, Verdier, Darlan, Abetz, Worms, de Pellepoix, de Jouvenel). Such pacifism got short shrift from Fauxbras who noted the missed opportunities to resign over the coming war and the failure to involve himself with the pacifist movement whose activists had been fined and imprisoned.16 For Fauxbras an ‘immense and vain imbecile’, de Monzie also sought to bathe in the reflected prestige of Pétain, claiming

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that the Marshal had said on 30 March 1940, ‘I agree with de Monzie on all points.’17 When the former minister compared himself with Thiers, whom he judged was correct to oppose war in 1870, Fauxbras wryly observed that Thiers did not wait for the defeat to make his opposition known.18 Perhaps what is most interesting about Fauxbras’s caustic review of Ci-Devant is his pacifist rejection of the high-political diplomacy-centred pacifism that mutated into collaboration with the Nazis. De Monzie’s account of Daladier and Reynaud formed the basis of Pierre Dominique’s anti-democratic pro-Vichy polemic also read by Fauxbras.19 Dominique heaped odium on the ‘cadaver of parliamentarism’ which ‘smelt as good as the corpse of an enemy’.20 Fauxbras commented that Dominique maintained a courageous silence about the crisis before June 1940, fleeing to Bordeaux, and then Marseilles, and whilst Dominique wanted his political adversaries to fight for France on the Loire, he himself had done nothing of the sort.21 Fauxbras also recorded in his diary that he had read several other collaborationist, anti-Semite and Anglophobe accounts of war and defeat: Rebatet’s Les Décombres, Mousset’s Quand le Temps Travaillait Pour Nous and Béarn’s De Dunkerque en Liverpool.22 Rather than indicating his sympathy for these accounts, it revealed the ubiquity of this agenda and that these were read for want of anything better by the sceptical and convinced alike. The reading public did not simply stop reading because of censorship and propaganda. Indeed, Rebatet’s poisonous polemic first published in July 1942 sold 85,000 copies in two print runs during the war.23 Drawing on Sorel, Maurras and Hitler, in a book that the author later described as ‘the most fascist book to ever appear in France’, Rebatet polemicized against Vichy for failing to bring about the national revolution.24 Thus, after the defeat of France, readership, certainly in Fauxbras’s case, did not equate with approval. Of course, while Parisian readers were offered such works, the occupiers drew up liste Otto suppressing the book stocks of proscribed authors and launched an offensive against Jewish writers. In contrast, the German Propaganda Department in France promoted de Monzie, Rebatet, Alerme and Benoist-Méchin, even translating the latter into German.25 Of the literature that emanated after the defeat of France, only the Belgian Henri de Man’s Après Coup won Fauxbras’s approval. In it, de Man, who had been a minister without portfolio in September 1939, preoccupied himself with raising the moral of the Belgian rank-andfile soldier. In the face of opposition of the high command, de Man promised a new social policy but was not able to win the government to concretizing his reforms and could only effect a small increase in

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soldiers’ pay. Fauxbras observed that the Belgian army collapsed just as the French army had and that whilst de Man saw clearly how to address moral, the military proved how militarism and cretinism were synonymous.26 Fauxbras did not comment on de Man’s abandonment of the Belgian Workers’ Party and his appeal for collaboration in the text. In 1940 and 1941, as Fauxbras’s sympathetic and selective reading of de Man shows, the dividing line between resistor or collaborator, between left and right, was far from clear.27

Observing Parisian collaboration Stanley Hoffman classically formulated the distinction between collaboration and collaborationism. If Vichy was the heart of a state collaboration with German victors as a pragmatic strategy of high politics, then Paris was the centre of collaborationism, making a political and ideological common cause with Nazi occupiers in the hope of constructing a European new order.28 The collaborationists’ efforts complemented those of the German authorities in seeking to win over the local population to their ideology. Fauxbras noted with disdain the participation of Céline and Paul Chack in, as Fauxbras put it, the ‘Centre d’Études des Questions Juives contre les Juifs’ (Centre of Study of the Jewish Question against the Jews). 29 Like much of Fauxbras’s work, his diary was underpinned by his contest with his old adversary Chack. The official naval historian contributed every week or so to the ‘chronique de notre temps’ column in Aujourd’hui under the editorship of Georges Suarez as well as more occasional contributions to Gringoire and other collaborationist newspapers. Aujourd’hui, established under German Ambassador Otto Abetz’s tutelage, had at its height a daily print run of 85,000. 30 Chack’s contributions returned to the same themes – Anglophobia, anti-communism, anti-Semitism and occidentalism – often taking the form of a made-to-measure historical example. His knowledge of maritime history was turned to the record of perfidious England: Mers el-Kébir, Joan of Arc and the battle of Trafalgar all attested to the same national trait.31 His analysis of the war strained to meet his assumptions: Britain and the United States would lose because he reversed his previous nostrum ‘who holds the sea, holds the land’. Now, though it pained him to recognize the limitations of the navy, submarines and aircraft were key to victory. 32 He even admitted, although his entire literary career being based on the contrary assumption, that submarines had outmoded the battleship and that the navy had done very

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little in the First World War.33 His Anglophobia alternated between historical and anti-Semitic modes. The former head of the Historical Service of the Navy held a profoundly racialized view of history espousing that an ‘Aryan Europe’ should dominate the world.34 He schematized global politics and the course of the war in vitriolic anti-Semitic polemic, according to which, Jews had corrupted ‘Anglo-Saxon democracies’ whose broadcasting he described as ‘radio-synagogue’.35 Indeed, he went so far as to say that the Jews are ‘not human beings like us ...’ and that to ‘settle to the Jewish question, is to settle the fate of Bolshevism at home’.36 As for communism, he again turned to racial essentialism: the creed spread amongst inferior races and the Red Army was an ‘Asiatic horde’ of ‘armed Mongols, commanded by Jewish commissars’.37 As the fortunes of war turned, his tone became hysterical. He called for the execution of Allied airmen by way of retribution for the bombing raids.38 The war against the Soviet Union was – in Chack’s occidentalist language – a war to defend a Europe that was the source of all civilization. Chack emphasized the massacres of the Russian bourgeoisie and at Katyn to spread fear of Bolshevism amongst, in particular, the French middle class. Chack was not simply an ideological collaborationist with a record of membership in fascist groups stretching back to 1937, he was also an organizer and indeed a leading figure in various committees and associations that made up the network of Parisian collaborationism. He used his newspaper columns to drum up members for the organizations he led or patronized: the CAA, the LVF and the Milice. One of the means of propaganda that collaborationist Paris had at its disposal was the exhibition. The three most notorious of these were La France Européene inaugurated on 31 May 1941 at the Grand-Palais, Le Juif et la France opening 5 September 1941 and Bolchévisme contre l’Europe. Fauxbras viewed the anti-Semitic exhibition Le Juif et la France at the Palais Berlitz in September 1941. He noted approvingly of the contempt in which the public held it and observed its obvious inconsistencies and bogus statistics.39 Between 5 and 9 September, 18,000 attended the exhibition that was the work of the Institut d’Études des Question Juives. In Le Juif et la France, conspiracy fantasies linked Jewish influence to the defeat of France, the birth of the Third Republic and the Popular Front, it speculated about their domination of the professions, banking, media and medicine, as well as reminding Parisians that they had been responsible for the death of Christ.40 Fauxbras also visited the anti-Bolshevik exhibition, Bolchévisme contre l’Europe.41 This showed footage of the demonstrations of 1936, at which he overheard

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someone comment that ‘they were wrong to show us the good times’. Fauxbras believed, given the distribution of free tickets, the exhibition to be a clear failure.42 He noticed the hand of Chack in the exhibition’s organization, and this was part of the latter’s undoing at his trial for collaboration in December 1944.43 Fauxbras also commented on intellectual collaboration with the groups of artists and writers who visited Germany as part of the propaganda efforts of the occupiers.44 Viewing a range of such activities, Fauxbras’s diary suggested that from very early on popular attitudes in Paris were sceptical and even hostile to such propaganda efforts. One of the organizations that Chack was involved in was the LVF, which brought together the collaborationist factions – in particular the two largest fascist parties: Doriot’s PPF and Déat’s RNP – in mobilizing French volunteers to fight alongside Nazi Germany on the eastern front in their ‘anti-Bolshevik crusade’. The two fascist leaders hoped that it would raise their stock with German powerbrokers and allow them to head up the ‘national revolution’ taking place in France rather than the politicians of Vichy. The creation of the LVF took place shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Fauxbras noted reports on the Vel d’Hiv meeting of 18 July 1941. Fauxbras’s view was that: ‘Here’s a chance for all our officers (fayots) to go and do their duty, but they prefer to be prefects or colonial governors.’45 Within a couple of weeks, he added: ‘The bosses of the French anti-bolshevik legion, Doriot, Déat and co have just signed up ... No doubt they’ve received more ironic letters than letters of engagement. We’re waiting, no less ironically for their departure. Complete fiasco, the legion, despite the promises of German pay and the priority in getting work on return.’46 Fauxbras attended the LVF’s most sizeable and significant public meeting held on 1 February 1942 as a hostile observer. The Parisian press all covered the rally claiming that 30,000 impassioned Parisians filled the Vel d’Hiv.47 Georges Suarez, the managing director of Aujourd’hui, wholeheartedly enthused, ‘the immense ampitheatre was full, [it was] a victory of quality, since the elite of all social classes were found elbow to fraternal elbow, a victory of the new spirit’.48 For Le Petit Parisien, the hall was bursting at the seams and the meeting ‘at last demonstrated that there exists in the capital opinion leaders capable of imposing to the light of day its judgment and faith’.49 Fauxbras provided a very different account. He reflected that some prominent collaborationists – Chack, Deloncle and Constantini – seemed to have deserted the LVF.50 The meeting was well attended but not full. There were many youthful uniformed members of the PPF and RNP as well as a handful of

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German officers and soldiers. A sizeable section of the audience was unsympathetic and did not applaud, saying that they were quite happy that the others should go and fight in Russia. In terms of social composition, there were no workers. The well-to-do who occupied the front stalls, with the women wearing fur coats, had entered through reserved doors. There were several ragged types who Fauxbras believed to be legionnaires on leave. Marcel Déat, Abel Bonnard and Jacques Doriot all spoke, the last of whom receiving the warmest reception. When it was reported in L’Oeuvre the next day, Fauxbras observed that Déat’s role was exaggerated and those aspects of the meeting that would deter attendance – the proliferation of fund-raising collectors, despite it being free attendance, and the lack of heating despite advertising to the contrary – were not mentioned.51 Fauxbras’s pacifism coloured his view of collaboration.52 Whilst focusing on the noisy Parisian collaborationists as his principal object of contempt, he also recorded his reactions to more lowly proponents of collaboration. As historian Simon Epstein observes, many of those ending up in the camp of collaboration did so through a paradoxical or circuitous route.53 Several came from left-wing backgrounds. Fauxbras drew the distinction between high politicians favourably disposed towards peace with Germany or fascist collaborators and activists from the interwar pacifist movement who had suffered repression under Daladier. He noted news reports of the movements of those from within his own milieu of pre-war pacifism: Lecoin, Louzon, de La Fouchardière and Armand Charpentier. Fauxbras curtly logged the (presumably surprising) appearance of Wullens’s letter in the anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.54 Revealing his disappointment with the moral decline of his former comrades, he observed in similar fashion that Léon Emery – one of the signatories of Louis Lecoin’s pacifist manifesto Paix Immédiate of September 1939 – was pictured in L’Oeuvre as one of the RNP university group. Several pacifists (including Léon Emery, Félicien Challaye, Gérard Lacaze-Duthiers, Pierre Hamp, Claude Jamet and Marcelle Capy formerly of La Vague, some of them co-signatories with Fauxbras of the 1938 anti-war manifesto) came together with Céline to produce the weekly Germinal: Hebdomadaire de la Pensée Socialiste Française.55 This claimed to be pacifist, anti-Bolshevik and ‘socialist’ (Fauxbras’s inverted commas). The diarist’s overall impression was ‘emmerdant’ (annoyingly boring). Emery wrote on socialism and pacifism in the second issue.56 Published between 28 April and 11 August 1944, this paper sought to stress the ‘socialist’ character of Nazism and its connections with

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traditions of the French left from Descartes through Louise Michel to Jean Jaurès. It tried to capture the sympathies of the left-reading public by reprinting Poulaille and serializing Dabit’s Hôtel du Nord, though this was without the permission of Dabit’s widow, who sued.57 The authorities had good reason to allow publication of a periodical that indulged in such left rhetoric in the hope that it might widen their base of support in the case of Allied invasion. On an ideological level, this should be unsurprising as fascism in all its manifestations appropriated populist, anti-capitalist and socialist discourses. Moreover, for contributors who had already made their affiliations known, this logic was compounded by an attempt to rationalize ideologically their own isolation. Surely enough, in the aftermath of the Allied landings, Germinal called for a united front to defend France against the invasion.58 Fauxbras counted converts to collaborationism amongst his own circle of friends. At least until August 1941, he did not break off contact with lowly or soft collaborationist acquaintances. Having discussed matters with former shipmate Albert Cornier, Fauxbras identified Cornier’s shifting and increasingly defensive rationalizations of collaborationism; he was nevertheless still ‘as collaborationist as ever’. Fauxbras was less critical of another friend who was generally considered a collaborationist simply for working for the Germans.59 Indicating the generalized loss of political bearings, Fauxbras noted how a friend André Wierzbolowiez had surprisingly turned to religion and the Flemish Nationalist Party.60 His acquaintance Georges de La Fouchardière anonymously received a small cardboard coffin, as other collaborators did, by way of intimidation.61 Despite Fauxbras’s manifest contempt and detestation of the likes of Chack and Doriot, his entries about lowly or pacifist collaborators were brief and mainly non-judgemental.

Contested information: popular attitudes, reading the signs and rumour One feature of life under occupation that Fauxbras provided an interesting insight into was the contested character of information. Fauxbras gleaned news from the broadcast and print media, from posters and from German communiqués. The age of modern mass communication with multiple media forms and outlets created a confused picture of what was happening for those experiencing the occupation. Even officially sanctioned sources of information had subtle differences of agenda or approach. German occupation introduced a complex pattern of censorship and control of media. On 18 July 1940, the occupiers

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established the Propaganda Abteilung (Propaganda Department), with a further organization the Propaganda Staffel specifically for the Paris region. They developed several instruments of control such as regulating the supply of sparse paper, press agencies and increasing share ownership of media outlets. The German embassy under Abetz formed a competing authority in the realm of information and propaganda. Under his initiative, there were a number of new newspapers – La France au Travail, Aujourd’hui, Les Nouveaux Temps – and older newspapers, including L’Oeuvre, reappeared.62 The collaborationist Radio-Paris and the communiqués of the German occupiers did not even always tally. This was even less the case in news print with the rivalries of different pro-Nazi collaborationists and their organizations.63 Fauxbras comments on various newspapers available at the time – L’Oeuvre, Les Nouveaux Temps, La Gerbe and Je Suis Partout – which he described as the French language Hun press (‘la presse boche de langue française’).64 From the slowing down of the German advance in the East, Fauxbras maintained that the people were encouraged that the war would turn against the Third Reich. The course of military events was the subject of interest and speculation with the distrusted RadioParis being balanced against the BBC.65 If the population were presented with propaganda (and if they sought it out counter-propaganda), Fauxbras revealed that their attitudes should not be read as simply a passive reception of such information. He provided fascinating insights in the swirl of popular fears, hardships, expectations and disappointments. Fauxbras noted how particular events penetrate the everyday consciousness of the Parisian public creating an ebb and flow of attitudes and mood. With the battle of the airwaves, the propaganda of the sanctioned press and the counterpropaganda of the resistance, and the significance of rumour and word of mouth, the veracity of these events were all contested. With his concern for the popular frame of mind, Fauxbras reported that ‘the people’ of Paris (‘le populo’: slang for the common people) had relatively homogeneous opinions and became adept at deciphering propaganda and aspects of everyday life to read the real course of the war and occupation. Of course, the Parisian attitudes were far from uniform but he defined the people in contradistinction to the bourgeoisie and collaborationists.66 Fauxbras repeatedly illustrated this popular ability to decode information. One such instance was the popular scepticism of German triumphalism about the eastern front in autumn 1941. This increased when news circulated by word of mouth that the Parisian garment trade was supplying rabbit-skin clothing for a long

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winter campaign or when an abundance of mutton appeared in the butchers’ shops indicating the use of sheepskin for the same purpose.67 Fauxbras wryly observed that the authorities should ban maps of Russia if they wanted people to believe the accounts of German advances.68 Increasing coal stocks were read as a sign that Algeria had been lost to the Allies.69 As early as May 1942, people even picked up on the changing demeanour of German soldiers which betrayed sinking moral and a war that they were losing.70 The people deemed the spells of silence of Radio-Paris about Russia and Lybia to be highly significant, indicating that the war was rapidly slipping away from the Axis powers.71 Fauxbras, like many others, became quite sophisticated at consulting different sources of information to read for inconsistencies, corroborations, silences in order to arrive at the most plausible account of events. The award of the Prix Goncourt to Henri Pourrat for a novel about rural life indicated that the taste for hard-line collaborationist themes amongst the literary academy was waning.72 Other diarists at greater distance from the popular mood also noticed this process though not with the intuitiveness of Fauxbras. For example, Guéhenno read the significance of steady flow of donations to a blind accordion player who flouted the authorities by displaying the tricolour and playing the Marseillaise.73 Fauxbras’s construction of the ‘populo’ may have been too homogeneous but it does provide suggestive insights into the character and shifts in Parisian opinion.74 The propaganda of Vichy, the occupiers and the tolerated collaborationist press was treated with extreme scepticism. As early as May 1941, Fauxbras observed that the people were bemused as to why the authorities tried to use persuasion rather than simply imposing collaboration.75 When Vichy for its own reasons revealed the corruption of Darlan, the people believed that this illicit opulence was symptomatic of the regime rather than a shocking exception. The closure of the collaborationist soup kitchens in early 1943 was welcomed because they had been the means by which the collaborationists had gorged themselves and had been boycotted by the people. There was also popular resentment towards those who went to work in Germany. Though he did not question its plausibility as was often the case when rumours matched one’s own assumptions, Fauxbras reported a piece of hearsay telling of French workers who returned on holiday from working in Germany having amassed 17,000 francs in savings.76 The turn of events often elicited commonplace reactions: in January 1942 there was a lot of speculation about the possible inclusion of Doriot or Déat in the Vichy cabinet and above all there were cycles of hope turned to despair in relation to the expected Allied landing.77

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With the contradictory information from propagandist media and the uncertainties of war, rumours should not be dismissed as merely tittletattle but assumed a greater significance in the conditions of occupied France.78 Confirmed by other diarists, Fauxbras’s diary highlights the centrality of rumour to the formation of popular attitudes and knowledge; or as social psychologists put it, rumour is fundamentally a form of ‘shared sense-making’.79 Fauxbras encountered rumours everywhere and they seemed to compensate for the censored or distorted character of the news, suggesting a popular scepticism and independence of mind. Sometimes, as with the news of the Russians re-taking Rostow, they anticipated official admission.80 Given that the authorities attributed rumours to the opposition and that elicit listening to the BBC often provided their source material, rumours could also be considered a form of non-conformity short of resistance, an expression of passive hostility to the Germans, and a means of consolidating anti-German relationships, such as the rumour that the Russians were parachuting German corpses over Germany.81 Word of mouth also conveyed news of resistance activity beyond the narrower ranks of the resistors: be that over the demonstrations at Belleville in December 1941 or assassinations of German soldiers or collaborationists.82 Not all rumours turned out to be true. False rumours tended to surround events of particular anxiety or anticipation such as the possible re-mobilization in the event of Vichy clashing with Britain over French colonies or the timing of ‘English’ landings or the progress of the eastern front.83 The rumours were also symptomatic of the severing of global communications where uncertainty about other parts of the world or even other parts of France could lead to misunderstanding. Thus, opinions circulated in early May 1942 that the Italian king had abdicated and Mussolini had fled to Portugal.84 Furthermore, this was not a purely informational question; the emotional conjuncture of generalized anxiety facilitated the reception of rumour. Peaking on the eve of the liberation of Paris, Fauxbras noted in August 1944, ‘A thousand rumors circulate, uncontrollably. For example that Paris will be evacuated after-tomorrow on Saturday.’85 False hearsay also acted as an informal means of propaganda serving the partisan interests of the collaborationists, or those of the resistance, in the case of the supposed assassination of Doriot or in the wild exaggeration of the loss of life with the scuttling of the French fleet at Toulon.86 Working on different levels, rumour therefore was one of the key media in which the battle of ideas between collaboration and resistance played itself out amongst

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the majority of residents of France who were neither members of collaborationist nor resistance organizations. Whilst Fauxbras related the content of rumour, he said little of the context, that is, where and how rumours circulated. We can only assume this circulation took place during the day to day routines of the occupation through the overlapping networks of family, neighbours, friends, workmates and acquaintances who mingled in workplaces, bars, markets, churches, cinemas, political meetings, exhibitions, public transport and shops. Stranded in Paris during the war, Andrzej Bobkowski provided a much better understanding of the process: Without doubt there is no city in the world where one can confirm with so much certainty that ‘everyone is saying that’. This time too, ‘everyone is saying that’, and how! And everyone is saying the same thing. ... In the street, on the metro, on the bus, one hears it spoken about. Some people know something, others were there and saw everything, everyone contradicts one another and discuss.87 These shorter circuits of rumour were transcended by broadcasting, propaganda networks, extended families or personal acquaintances. Another mode of communication, which articulated, disseminated and formed popular opinions, was humour. This everyday form of non-conformity has attracted a rich comparative literature.88 Again indicating its plebeian authenticity, Fauxbras’s diary recorded several jokes about various aspects of the war such as the delays in Allied landing, the relations between Hitler and the Vichy regime, Mussolini and German soldiers.89 Jokes are rare in other diaries.90 Furthermore as German prestige and the collaborationist fortunes declined, their propaganda became increasingly incoherent and subject to growing popular derision.91 A joke about German airmen knocking at the pearly gates illustrated popular scepticism about German broadcasts. Two hundred German airmen killed in action wait at the gate of paradise. Saint Peter with the gates slightly ajar asks the first: ‘Who are you?’ ‘A German airman.’ ‘Enter!’ And to the second: ‘Who are you?’ ‘Another German airman.’ ‘Enter!’ Then Saint Peter closes the gates.

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A third German airman knocks at the gates. Saint Peter appears, ‘What do you want?’ ‘To enter into paradise. There’s 198 other airmen killed yesterday.’ Saint Peter laughed loudly, and said after firmly closing the gates: ‘You liar, did you think that I wouldn’t read the German press release?’92 Fauxbras’s diary, as with other diaries, provides an insight into the psychological reception of events. One of the great strengths of the diary is that it is not subject to the filter of time upon sentiment or the retrospective manipulations of self-interested apologism or rationalization. Fauxbras’s diary probed a dialectic of events and popular moods during the occupation. Fear was a recurrent feeling that Fauxbras encountered. Other principal affective states that he found amongst the people were hope, disappointment and impatience. These connected to the perceptions of the course of the war. The diary suggests that events that demonstrated that the military momentum was with the Allies – such as the sinking of the Bismarck, the US’s entry into the war, or German defeat in Lybia – brought pleasure, even jubilation. The disappearance of Rudolph Hess caused ‘great emotion’ and a ‘formidable effect’. News, on the other hand, that seemed to show the strength of the German or axis position – like the sinking of the Hood, the fall of Singapore or the German invasion of Crete – had a negative impact upon popular consciousness.93 It seemed that as events shifted the fortunes of war and public moods swung accordingly. More than any other event, according to Fauxbras, the German invasion of the Soviet Union made the greatest impression.94 Total strangers spoke of this to each other in public, greeting it with ‘total satisfaction’ and ‘jubilation’, supposing that Russia would offer real resistance.95 Initially sceptical of German claims by mid-July, people started to believe that the Red Army would be crushed; but in early August, it became clear that German press releases were exaggerating their fortunes in the east making the people laugh. Up to the invasion of Crete, Parisians had believed in German invincibility but now speculated about an Anglo-Russian victory by the end of the year. Those predictions that Parisians had heard from German soldiers at the end of June of the defeat of Russia in three weeks and of Britain by September were silenced.96 Subtle variations in graffiti signalled the profound impact of the battle of Stalingrad as ‘Vive L’URSS’ and ‘1918’ replaced ‘V’; even the police began to sing The Boatmen of the Volga.97 Propaganda became

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more clumsy and open to ridicule with announcements about the triumphant retreats (décrochages triomphants).98 Several other diarists gave the same impression. Guéhenno noted that everyone was happy at the news of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.99 Marcel Baudot in his study of public opinion over the invasion of the Soviet Union noted the popular sympathy for the Russians, even most surprisingly to Vichy or German officials amongst the middle class and that these feelings intensified over time.100 A major topic of popular anticipation was the possibility of an Allied landing which was expected or rumoured from 1942 onwards.101 The absence of Allied landing became the subject of jokes. Fauxbras cited one: after a string of victories, Stalin reaches Calais and goes to the end of the pier, where he gets out a megaphone and shouts to Churchill who is in Dover, ‘You can come now, they’ve gone’.102

Everyday life: hardships, bombing raids and anti-Semitism Mingled in with the course of the war were more mundane matters of everyday life: budgets, prices, shortages, the black market, bombing raids, continued class divisions, curfews and the weather. On his return from the prisoner of war camps in April 1941, Fauxbras’s first impressions were of a flourishing black market, which benefited the rich despite rationing and high prices. Turnips, for example, were at 24 francs a kilo.103 The availability of coal and the harshness of winters were a recurrent concern in the diary.104 The authorities disrupted the normal routines of everyday life: with curfews, restricted opening hours for shops, bans on entertainment in the efforts to repress the resistance and increasingly as a form of collective punishment.105 Indeed, for Fauxbras, the differences in experiences of rich and poor Parisians manifested themselves in all aspects of everyday life. In a highly visible example, restaurants continued to provide luxuries for those who could afford to pay.106 Restrictions on wine could be circumvented at a price and, by early 1943, matches were impossible to find save ‘for those taking an aperitif’.107 Fauxbras connected the routine nature of such divisions to the participation of the major industrialists such as Lehideux and Pucheu in the Vichy regime and to the evolution of popular consciousness with the rich, unlike their less wealthy compatriots, fearing the consequences of a Russian victory over Germany.108 There were all types of shortages and commodities – soap, paper, matches – whose prices escalated precipitously. From May 1941, the butchers closed for days at a time and meat was unavailable periodically.

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Indeed, Fauxbras registered the belief that there was an instrumental relationship between food and the German authorities, limiting supply as a consequence of resistance activity.109 Rations fell and people became noticeably thinner.110 In late 1943, he outlined the typical budget for a working-class family of two parent and two children in terms of income, consumption and expenditure (Appendix 8).111 Fauxbras’s reconstruction of monthly income and expenditure highlighted the inadequacy of rationing and the impossibility of procuring the necessities of life without going into family savings, or relying on credit. Calculated at the end of 1943, prices and shortages worsened in the months before the liberation. By the end of January, butter had reached 500–600 francs a kilo, and there was a monthly ration of only 50 grams in March and February.112 In June 1944, newspapers were warning against the eating of stolen cats that may have themselves feasted on diseased rats.113 Fauxbras acerbically observed that even a gutter rat would soon cost a thousand francs and that there was ‘nothing to eat’ in Paris.114 In July, many bakeries closed because of the lack of flour.115 A psychological dimension compounded this material deprivation as the deterioration of the German war economy, the uncertainties of impending invasion and the disruptions of warfare on French territory spread fear of a total breakdown in the provisioning of the capital to the extent that people were conserving supplies of drinking water.116 From early 1942, bombing increasingly became a feature of Fauxbras’s diary.117 Here again, his and other diaries allow insight into the limits of official propaganda and the significance of particular events. Between 1939 and 1945, nearly 4000 were killed in bombing raids on the Seine department, in which Paris was located, and 6500 were injured.118 Most victims were in the working-class suburbs. The RAF bombing raid of 3 March 1942 on Paris was the first major raid on the capital. Only two raids of April 1944 resulted in greater loss of life. The bombing of 3 March constituted a major challenge to the authorities in the battle of information. They wished to transform it into a second Mers el-Kébir and entrench anti-Allied sentiments. The raid and its consequences remained on the front pages of the newspapers with photographs of the destruction for nearly a week. The headline of Le Petit Parisien on 5 March is typical of initial reactions to the bombing: ‘A new crime of Churchill. English airmen massively bomb the civilian population of the Paris region.’119 The collaborationist press opened a fund for the victims of the ‘cowardly and shameful aggression’, claiming to contribute alongside several firms and restaurants over a million francs.120 In Nouveaux Temps, Jean Luchaire’s headline read: ‘Blood that cries out for

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vengeance’, claiming the following day that the RAF had killed 2000.121 The messages from Pétain and Brinon underlined the significance for the authorities of the raid. The head of the French State believed, ‘The bloody attack hitting only the civilian population will raise general indignation.’122 By 7–8 March, the newspapers were covering the funerals, which were transformed into a public spectacle by the attendance of ministers and media coverage. Apparently, the whole of Paris was in mourning. Pétain made a second statement, which was read at all of the funerals: History has already judged the criminal aggression of the old ally that let our soldiers die alone only to kill two years later, with the coldest resolution, our innocent civilians. There is no law of war, there is no excuse that can justify, in front of human conscience, such bloody massacres.123 An ‘immense’ crowd marched before the cenotaph at Place de la Concorde.124 Collaborationist intellectuals – including Paul Chack, newspaper editors, Bonnard, Fernandez, Céline, Brasillach, Drieu – published an open letter of protest against English war crimes.125 In the language of the press, the bombing raid was ‘odious’, ‘terroristic’ and ‘criminal’. Whilst the press conveyed the impression of united disgust at RAF tactics, diarists revealed very different attitudes on the ground. It seems that by the time that the authorities and the press could respond, popular reactions had already been formed. The raid took place on the night of 3–4 March but newspaper coverage began on 5 March. By then, information and assessment had already circulated by word of mouth. The whole of Paris had witnessed it directly or indirectly. Fauxbras believed that bombers flew directly over his home at Vincennes and he heard two hours of heavy explosions. The centre of the bombing was roughly 15 km away. Guéhenno could see the fires from the window of his apartment and the sound was deafening. Andrzej Bobkowski observed how the raid was the ‘only topic of conversation’ and that it was being discussed everywhere. One of the reasons why the authorities were unable to mobilize public opinion after the night of the 3 March was that the bombardment took place without an air raid warning and without blackout precautions, according to both Fauxbras and Bobkowski. Indeed, a cynicism about the alerts was developing with the belief that the occupiers were using them for ulterior motives: either their own amusement or to spread panic.126 Inconsistencies about the official figures

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also undermined the credibility of the authorities. Fauxbras noted that the press announced 600 dead and 1200 wounded but that the radio reporting on the funerals several days later inadvertently contradicted earlier reports citing 355 dead.127 Having, as Fauxbras observed, been leafleted from the skies prior to the raid, people saw through the discourse that the RAF intended to massacre civilians, knowing the target to be the Renault Boulogne-Billancourt plant. According to Fauxbras, despite German condolences and Brinon’s protests, the people were ‘satisfied’ that the raid had seemed to achieve its mission with the closure of Renault. Furthermore, the Renault workers, now the objects of sympathy of the ‘reactionaries of Vichy’, had received no such compassion when they were tear gassed during the strikes of the Popular Front period.128 Other diarists underlined the importance of this raid. Like Fauxbras, Guéhenno noted the failure of the authorities to shape opinion through its response to the raid: ‘Nobody was indignant. Most hid their jubilation badly.’129 Bobkowski confirmed this popular reaction: In a general fashion, satisfaction reigns, and even if one mutters that the bombing might have led to 2,000 dead, one approves this action. One might hear someone indignant, but these are the exceptions. Moreover, this energetic action of the English has reawakened the hopes of a spring offensive. Everyone says that Paris is bubbling over with excitement.130 Charles Rist remarked that a rumour was even circulated that whilst it was the RAF that had destroyed the Billancourt factory, the civilian deaths resulted from German bombing!131 Fauxbras cited other bombing raids. On 3 April 1942, he noted that it was rumoured that the RAF had destroyed the Matford factory at Poissy.132 Reports of bombings of other parts of France such as SaintNazaire, Rouen and Rennes took on a significance in the diary specifically as an index of the battle for the skies of France. Radio-Paris tried to make great amount of capital out of the victims of the Rouen bombing raid but Fauxbras suggested that this was perceived positively as a precursor to Allied landings.133 Observable at the level of day to day entries were the subtle cumulative changes that war and occupation brought to Paris. Staged increases in coercion also occurred in the efforts to secure French labour for German factories. In addition, the diary recorded the ratchet points of repression of Paris’s Jewish population: the wearing of the yellow star, the Prefecture’s denial of trading licences, the ban on frequenting places of

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public entertainment, the Vel d’Hiv round-up and the bombings of the synagogues.134 His testimony featured stories of individual Jews poignant for the author because of the personal injustice and hypocrisy of the authorities. On occasion, this involved Jewish veterans: such as one deportee who made the soldiers wait as he donned his military uniform or another who had served in both wars and had an ‘Aryan’ wife.135 In March 1942, Fauxbras noted that Jewish people had to declare ‘Jewish children and the children of Jews’.136 In mid-July 1942, the question of anti-Semitism came to the fore. On 15 July, Fauxbras noted new restrictions on Jews, being banned from cafés, restaurants and theatres. It was followed by the beginning of the three-day round-up of Jews at the Vel d’Hiv. This became the main public topic of conversation. Uncertainty reigned about their fate: they had arrested 40,000, were they being deported? Or sent to Drancy?137

Resistance and liberation Despite Fauxbras’s apparent political disengagement, the diary sometimes commented on the battle between the authorities and the resistance, with its pattern of assassinations and reprisals.138 Early in this cycle of violence in autumn 1941, Fauxbras reported on a single execution, hostage seizures and then mass executions. However, over time these entries became less frequent. He noted the irony of Eugène Deloncle of the Cagoule, directing the regime’s campaign against the ‘terrorism’ of the resistance.139 Fauxbras recorded evidence of the propaganda work of the resistance, painting the trees of the Avenue de Paris with tricolour, the graffiti of ‘V’ or ‘1918’ and even the appearance of resistance literature.140 The attitudes to the resistance evolved over time. In May 1941 after a demonstration in rue de Rivoli, Fauxbras reported that people believed that this would make the Germans punish them by withholding food.141 From 14 July 1941, illustrating a growing popular identification with the resistance, the tricolour was worn on dates of national significance.142 Fauxbras illustrated collective dissent entering everyday life with an incident in which the audience at the cinema coughed throughout Laval’s speech on the news.143 The diary culminated with the Allied advance on Paris and the city’s liberation. Again Fauxbras reflected on popular attitudes to these events: the premature announcement of Paris’s liberation by the Allies, the confusion of the fighting, the police strike, the impression made by the American soldiers with their relative informality and gifts to the

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population and the joyous street scenes with the fighting’s end. There were four days of celebrations and an atmosphere of liberation, ‘Since Saturday, it’s the 14th July. The order is given to return to work yesterday but because the metro was not working, we could not get around and we went for a stroll.’144 For Fauxbras, the liberation held personal ambiguities as well as ones experienced at popular level. He was highly sceptical about the conversion of the police to the side of the resistance.145 He also recognized the limits of the liberation. Reading that the insurrection took place across 20 Parisian arrondissements but bypassed the 16th, he observed, ‘Not so daft the bourgeois! Bullets for the proletarians, rents for the proprietors!’146 Like Guéhenno, he observed that the radio prematurely announced Paris’s liberation by General Leclerc, emphasizing the gap between propaganda and reality during the war.147 He noted how the barricades in Vincennes were only erected after the Germans had gone.148 Despite Fauxbras’s lack of involvement in the resistance, he was critical of its failure to effect a more fundamental social transformation of France. This critique took various forms. Having observed the Parisian collaborationists with their petty factional quarrels, their viciousness and hypocrisy for the previous three years, Fauxbras like other people grew increasingly impatient with the purges, which he deemed to be too slow. On 31 August, for example, the failure on the part of the new authorities to announce the execution of collaborators displeased the crowds.149 He observed that by 4 September not a single collaborator had been shot and two days later that even Pétain’s chief of justice Joseph Barthélemy was walking free.150 He commented sarcastically that the blood was really flowing with Chack’s expulsion from the Naval Academy.151 Chack had been arrested alongside singer and actor Sacha Guitry and classical historian and former Vichy education minister Jérôme Carcopino in late August.152 Whilst Fauxbras shared popular impatience with the purge, he objected to the displaced anger directed at the women subject to public humiliation for relationships with Germans amongst whom the collaborationist ladies of high society were not to be found.153 On first seeing this spectacle, linking its baseness to the equally repulsive acclamation given to the police, both indicating for Fauxbras the limits of the liberation, he commented: At 12.30 am the walk of a female collaborator, about 30 years old, hair shaven, the length of the avenue de Paris. The crowd shouts. Spitting on the shaven head. She holds herself well, despite all. A spectacle that ought not to be offered to the people. The cops in uniforms reappear. Cries of: long live the cops!154

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Fauxbras had encountered the slogan ‘La police avec nous’ (The police are with us) during the Popular Front period and was equally sceptical of it then.155 Keeping a collection of his own articles on these subjects, he might have been reflecting on their role at the shooting of Clichy and the role of their hero Chiappe. With hindsight, Fauxbras’s objection to the continuities of police structures and personnel seems to forebode the Parisian Prefectureship of Papon, 17 October 1961, Charonne, and the CRS violence of 1968.156 Another indicator of the limits of the liberation was the transformation of the resistance from a guerrilla organization hounded by the German and Vichy authorities as terrorists to an increasingly formalized and hierarchical military institution of the new state. On 2 August, he wrote: Now it’s a matter of disarming the FFI. Dangerous for the bourgeois the FFI with their weapons! No time to joke around! They’re still arresting collaborators, but no shootings, no question of that. The problem is to know if these collaborators will be sentenced (?) by judges who swore an oath to Pétain. Naturally, nothing in the Figaro on the society ladies who dined with Abetz. The people are going to get screwed once more.157 As a result, Fauxbras claimed that de Gaulle’s prestige fell rapidly in August 1944. The journal terminated abruptly on 5 October 1944 in postscript to the liberation when three V1s landed on Paris: ‘Newspapers silent. Funny.’ Rather than a profound rupture with the past, a new cycle of propaganda (bourrage) had begun.

Conclusion Fauxbras’s amateur ethnography provided a powerful sense of popular attitudes during the trauma of 1940–4. In his diary, Fauxbras opened our eyes to public life and popular consciousness in occupied Paris. Collaborationists dominated legal politics, broadcasting, newspapers and literature but this formal control of information progressively belied an inability to sway public opinion fashioned through unofficial mechanisms of rumour, humour, everyday contact and symbolic interaction. Oppositional views and symbolic gestures of resistance circulated along the same daily practices that constituted the survival and coping strategies for dealing with the hardships of war. This created a sense of shared experience and suffering out of which the myth of a resisting nation could grow. Under the thin veneer of collaborationist Paris, attitudes

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mixed and evolved, and within this support for the resistance and liberation were slowly prepared. After studying Fauxbras’s diary, it seems appropriate to reassert the usefulness of diaries to the historian but that each one reveals particular aspect of the evolution of attitudes in wartime France. The special strength of Fauxbras’s journal is its plebeian character and its attentiveness to popular moods and consciousness. It also highlights the limitations of diaries, or more precisely their reliance on, or relationship to, other texts (in this case newspapers and accounts of defeat). This intertextuality allows the reconstruction of contested discourses in contemporary France. Yet if this diary is rich from an intertextual perspective, because of Fauxbras’s specific concern with popular consciousness, time and again he allowed us to delve beyond the realm of textual discourses to everyday practices, social interactions and the collective formation of attitudes attendant upon these. It is at this level of everyday social exchange that the evolving attitudes of wartime France were made. It is the problem of accessibility of this realm that has meant that debates over France as a ‘nation of resistors’ or ‘functional collaborators’ have been difficult to resolve. Within a realm of symbols, rumours, moods, jokes, we encounter in Fauxbras’s diary reasoning beings who were trying to understand what the information at their disposal meant in reality, thereby identifying the political dimension of everyday culture. This is certainly what Fauxbras himself was trying to do. Consequently, an investigation of his diary suggests a model of wartime consciousness that is based upon the dialogues between culture and politics, between spatial and temporal dimensions, and between forms and contents of consciousness formation. This is not to say that Fauxbras provides us with definitive answers to these questions. Whilst he was insightful and sophisticated about cultural, social and ideological processes, his great weakness is that he homogenizes the diversity of opinion. Ultimately, this constitutes a recurrent motif of his writings and political outlook.

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Epilogue

The world of César Fauxbras On the surface and viewed from the vantage of the present, Fauxbras’s literary pursuits and his life experiences appear fragmentary and coherence. What did the worldly encounters of the sailor, the accountant, the writer, the trade unionist or the prisoner of war have in common? Yet, for all the fact that he reinvented himself, passing from one social situation to another, he developed his own understanding of the way that the world moved. Only the overall panorama of his life and writings allows the reconstruction of his view of the world. Through his subjectivity we can grasp something of the world in which he lived. He was in no sense typical and this – from a certain perspective – is to his advantage as a witness. His non-conformity implied that he did not assimilate received wisdoms or a common sense shaped by the acceptance of existing power structures and conventional thinking. He is able to tell us a great deal about the first half of France’s twentieth century. Although reading Fauxbras’s oeuvre permits the reconstruction of his subjectivity, this was a realm bearing the physical and emotional scars of real world events. This is why his generation refused relativism and asserted what seems to be a naive epistemology of truth. The system of lies that descended like mist during the Great War set an imperative upon testimony to the realities of the slaughter and the recovery of truth. Marshall Berman’s classic definition of capitalist modernity All That Is Solid (1982) captures very well the environment in which Fauxbras found himself.1 Even in contrast to France in the long nineteenth century (1789–1914) with its periodic revolutionary or military convulsions, the pace of change during Fauxbras’s age accelerated with the 170

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consequence that the undoing of French political culture’s certainties became more pronounced. Modernity seized Fauxbras’s imagination, terrorizing it with total war. He surveyed a traumatized France envisioning the eventualities of fascism or revolution. The next war, though resulting in fewer French deaths, tore even further at French political culture opening the way to collaboration with a barbarized Europe under Nazi rule and the ‘Franco-French civil war’. Comparing Fauxbras’s century to its precedent, this pace of change resembled the surging locomotive passing the ambling horse-drawn carriage. This alacrity of events disrupted the familiar and the assumed, creating a dizzying and disorientating unpredictability. In Fauxbras’s France, there were no more certitudes. Where he tried to establish them, they proved illusory. His understanding of the First World War, or his sympathy for the Russian Revolution, or acquaintances in the left pacifist networks all buckled under the momentum of change. Opposition to war was transformed into collaboration with a Nazi war-machine, anti-fascists turned their coats to fascism, mutineers turned into hangmen, revolutions became reaction, the dazzling prosperity of modernity collapsed. All old points of reference proved an inadequate guide to the present. The journey of Fauxbras through this world, and his attempt to comprehend it, was unique as was every such journey but it also contributed to and elucidated an aggregate experience. Just as during the tense nights of aerial bombing over Paris, his endurances cast a floodlight across the darkness of his times. The Great War irreversibly transformed his view of the world as it did his entire generation. This tipping point did not result in a homogeneous political culture but had complex effects as Fauxbras’s writings testify. At a general level, the Great War exacerbated existing divisions in French society while at the same time an official discourse proclaimed a more profound national unity. The tensions between town and country, between trenches and the civilian shirkers, between officers and the ranks, between profiteers and workers all registered in Fauxbras’s work. Indeed, his writings detected the general fissures in French society. The voice of the veteran had an elevated status in post-war France. Efforts were made to homogenize this voice in national and civic commemoration, to depoliticize and nationalize it. These endeavours continued the wartime propaganda of the French state and those who volunteered for this patriotic task. Fauxbras was one voice amongst many who refused to allow this homogenization. The experience of the Great War provided new constellations guiding French political discourse that held very different significance for right and left. It was a cosmology of the sacred union, the miracle of

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the Marne, Pétain and Verdun, as well as Chemin des Dames, those shot as an example to others and the mutinies of 1917. For the navy, the sinking of the Léon Gambetta and the Black Sea mutiny of 1919 could be added. The variance between the official points of reference and Fauxbras’s signifies the distinction between hegemonic and subaltern memory. Moreover, these signifiers held a range of meanings. For Fauxbras, Pétain was remembered for the post-mutiny executions, for others such as Gustave Hervé or Le Figaro’s Wladimir d’Ormesson, Pétain was France’s (past and potential) saviour. For the navy and the right, the Black Sea mutiny was a painful stain of embarrassment and Marty a traitor; for others, Marty was hero of a celebrated revolt. Fauxbras claimed to speak to the realities of war. He sought to contribute to the collective memory to prevent it falling into an official patriotic manufactured consensus. For him, these truths about war were the panic when a torpedo hits a battleship, the guts hanging out of the wounded, the poor ‘mobilisable fools’ (ballots mobilisables) being egged on by the patriotism of the non-mobilizable journalist, or ordered into battle by the generals behind the line. Fauxbras was not alone in making these points. He was one of a generation of war novelists, acknowledging his respect for some of the most influential: Barbusse, Remarque and Dorgelès. Their stance continued the role that intellectuals assumed at the time of the Dreyfus affair. Despite his status as a man of letters, Fauxbras retained an ordinariness. When talking of the ‘mobilisable fools’ or the ‘poor prats at the frontline’ (PCDF), he remained one of their number. He also became a journalist in an age of propaganda; a feeling of antagonism to press complicity in the lies of war coloured all his writing. He sharply criticized the mainstream journalism throughout the 1930s that he saw as bought, morally corrupt and politically objectionable. His hostility to the corruption of journalism intensified with the collaboration. With voluntary journalistic support for Nazi occupation, bourrage plumbed new depths. Clearly, Fauxbras contributed to a shared cognitive framework that the literature of the left and pacifist movements created. He is only comprehensible in the context of campaigns against the ‘crimes of the courts martial’, against the ‘abominable venality’ of the press, against fascism, against the Rif and Abyssinian wars, or, in support of the 40-hour week and the Spanish republicans. Whilst the Great War constituted the starting point of Fauxbras’s novels, they were written in the 1930s. It was in the light of the 1914–18 war that he understood the features of that decade: its economic crisis and unemployment, the internal and external threat of fascism and

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the approach of war. For Fauxbras, mass unemployment coupled with war in an indissoluble manner. The sense of injustice registered in his war novels was compounded as the very same victims of war were also casualties of unemployment. For him, both these phenomena existed because of the same structures of authority, the brainwashing newspapers, the divide between rich and poor, the profiteers from misery. The Great War framed in apocalyptic fashion Fauxbras’s sense of the economic crisis. Both were inescapable, overwhelming and civilizational in their proportions. As the title of his novel intimated, mass unemployment prefigured future carnage. It was a cultural equivalent to economic catastrophism of the Comintern’s Third Period. If events shaped Fauxbras’s subjectivity, they did so with raw material provided by early life experiences, family background and political traditions. Although the biographical details are sketchy, it seems reasonable to refer to the semi-autobiographical Antide to fill gaps, or suggest explanation. Accordingly, Fauxbras had a set of sensibilities that predisposed him to the left and republicanism (of radical or socialist variants). Like many in his generation, the Great War and the Russian Revolution instilled in him an enmity towards war in general and political hope in revolution. The Russian Revolution, and in particular the French naval mutinies of 1919, revealed for Fauxbras a truth about French society and the possibilities of transcending its existing structures. Yet, Russian communism, in its particular pattern of evolution, turned out to be – as the title of collected essays of Fauxbras’s contemporaries later put it – ‘a God that failed’.2 In a country where the Communist Party was for three decades the largest party of the left, Fauxbras did not deny that failure. On the contrary, he sought to explain it through a revolutionary critique of Stalin’s Russia. In so doing, he was willing to face isolation and insult at a time when the PCF was growing exponentially. In the full tide of the social movements of the Popular Front period, however, it did not result in him being a spent political force. Instead, holding to principles constructed around war and mutiny, he participated in both syndicalist and pacifist activity. These also in sequence turned out to be demoralizing ‘fraudulent failures’ as the employers and government crushed the trade unions and destroyed the pacifist movement. Each element of Fauxbras’s work provided its own insights into these years. His two novels – Jean Le Gouin and Mer Noire – went beyond a simple recounting of the neglected experience of the naval rank and file, as useful as that might have been in itself. They highlighted the crisis of the French navy. Most especially, he exposed how one response to this institutional blockage took the form of the rewriting of history. This

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was part of a process of the restoration of naval prestige so essential to the navy’s fortunes within the political process of the Third Republic. Fauxbras’s account of the navy’s internal social and political dynamics help to explain why later participation in the Vichy regime compromised much of the navy’s hierarchy. Jean Le Gouin’s focus is upon the character of wartime propaganda and the gap between that and the perspectives of the ordinary sailors. Mer Noire is sensitive to the subtle dynamics of revolt depicting a nuanced account of the Black Sea naval mutiny as the interaction of cultural practices, politics and events. It is more satisfactory heuristically than other contemporary paradigms such as the disciplinary model of the navy or Marty’s communist teleology. Indeed, it goes some distance to persuasively addressing questions posed within the historiography of the revolt such as the spontaneity of the revolt and the externality of politics. Although marked by an allconsuming pessimism, Fauxbras’s novel about unemployment – Viande à Brûler – is simply the most effective literary reconstruction of the experience of the unemployed in France in the interwar period. In his fourth and final novel, Antide, Fauxbras used satire and the genre of the philosophical tale to explain the failures of the left during the Popular Front period and captures brilliantly the disorientation and demoralization felt by many of its sympathizers and members of the French labour movement. This zeitgeist also comes through in his journalism which relied heavily on humour and satire. In his newspaper columns, he relentlessly tackled the rottenness of the French press of the day. With the return of war, and the end of Fauxbras’s literary career, he surveyed his fellow prisoners of war providing a unique insight into their views. Together with his diary, Fauxbras was attempting to reorientate himself in relation to the common people thereby providing suggestive observations about the popular consciousness. There has been a tendency, that Jay Winter and Pierre Nora brilliantly pioneered, in the writing about the memory of war to focus on the objects of memory: ‘sites’ or cultural artefacts and their collective signification. This study has shifted towards the mnemonic subject, suggesting that memory can be fruitfully reconceptualized as part of consciousness and through that reconnected to political action. Fauxbras’s work raises a further point. The status of intellectuals has been the subject of considerable debate in recent years. Amongst Fauxbras’s contemporaries, Julien Benda questioned the role of intellectuals in La Trahison des Clercs (1927), criticizing their descent from dispassionate reason.3 Tony Judt in Past Imperfect has problematized the political engagement of post-liberation intellectuals over their failure

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to embrace liberal democracy and their accommodating attitude to Marxism.4 The antecedents for this 1950s intellectual generation can be found amongst those whom the industrialized slaughter of the First World War and the threat of fascism prompted to political engagement. Both the experience of war and the grotesque prospect of a future war created, as far as many intellectuals were concerned, a moral and political imperative. They envisaged a war of aerial bombardment of cities and gas attacks on civilians. The specific role of intellectuals during the Second World War warrants scrutiny in its own right. Simon Epstein perceived a ‘French paradox’ after the defeat of France wherein left pacifist intellectuals collaborated with the German occupiers as the option most likely to maintain a lasting peace in Europe and in so doing subscribed to an occidentalist, antiSemitic and Anglophobic vision of Europe, but a significant contingent from the extreme right joined the resistance.5 Epstein shares a methodological orientation upon individual itineraries and intellectual history with a wider literature. This interpretation identifies the trajectory of several of Fauxbras’s contemporaries who did indeed, much to his chagrin, write for the collaborationist press. In a sense, this followed the logic of an absolutist pacifism which emerged in the 1930s and sought to supersede left-right divisions and all other considerations. Thus several of those who wrote in the pacifist press alongside Fauxbras made their accommodations with new post-defeat regime. Wullens, who had been sympathetic to Trotsky in the 1930s and had published Fauxbras’s articles and reviews in his periodical Les Humbles, would write in the vitriolically anti-Semitic Je Suis Partout, stooping so low as to call for the censorship of various left writers.6 Several of Fauxbras’s fellow travellers of the pacifist movement – Léon Emery, Félicien Challaye, Armand Charpentier, Georges de La Fouchardière – all maintained their journalistic careers in the pages of the collaborationist press of Paris.7 Yet Fauxbras did not make such a transition himself, notwithstanding the material temptations of doing so. Instead he registered the moral decline of former associates as passing references in his diary. From the perspective of political action, his war was one of passive withdrawal and a break from his former associates and commitments. He shared the hardships of his fellow Parisians, or at least those without access to the opulence of the best restaurants, nightclubs and the luxuries available on the black market. It was not only pacifism that predisposed some to the ‘fascist drift’. As Philippe Burrin’s study highlights, an absolutist anti-communism could assist in the transformation of former leftwingers – Doriot, Bergery and Déat – into prominent fascists.8

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Why Fauxbras resisted the temptations to rally to the victors when others yielded is an intriguing question.9 Most obviously, it was his profound hostility to the journalists of patriotic mystification that made such a transition inconceivable for him. The converse was also true: it would have been difficult indeed for those who Fauxbras ridiculed, satirized and caricatured to accept him as a co-worker. There are more clues in Fauxbras’s literary career. Fauxbras’s self-image was as a writer of a different type: a plebeian intellectual, someone with an insider’s experience of the ‘PCDF’, the ‘Jean Le Gouin’, the prisoner, the unemployed, the ‘lampiste’; whether his claim always matched his own past is a different matter. As such, Fauxbras did not conceive of himself as part of a social group apart or above society as many intellectuals did. He never adopted the label of intellectual himself. Quite the reverse, this mock Cesar seized on every opportunity to deflate the self-aggrandizing reputations of the intellectual, the academician, the author or journalist. The social historian might observe that Fauxbras’s self-conception approached Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the everyday philosopher or ‘organic intellectual’.10 Indeed, the social ambiguity of the intellectual exposes the limitations of generalized historical interpretations based on individual itineraries framed within a paradigm of the history of ideas. Furthermore, satire with its partisan, critical and anti-authoritarian predisposition may have also made Fauxbras’s wartime choices easier. In the later 1930s, Fauxbras became predominantly a satirist both in his journalism and his final novel. A satirist’s reconciliation to authority – particularly as it was reconstituted in Paris after June 1940 – would have been difficult indeed. Satire became ugly caricature taking on a sinister undercurrent of incitement in which the objects of derision were Jews, communists, freemasons and the Popular Front at a time of raids, show trials and deportation. If there might have been the attraction of material advantage and the precedent of erstwhile colleagues, there was also the deep revulsion of the potential colleagues amongst his Club Botte-Moi-Le-Train in the ranks of prominent Vichyite or collaborationist journalists: Chack, Henriot, Lauzanne, Recouly, Vautel and Béraud. Although, as Epstein observes, several of the limited band of integral pacifists joined the ranks of collaboration, greater were the numbers of right-wing journalists who continued the anti-democratic, antiSemitic, occidentalist and pro-imperialist themes that they articulated prior to the outbreak of war. Epstein’s perspective contrasts with that of Norman Ingram who has tried to rescue the French pacifist movement from posterity’s teleological dismissal consequent upon its ultimate associations with collaboration.

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The composition of the Vichy regime also deeply alienated Fauxbras. Although he welcomed the armistice of 22 June 1940, Fauxbras was immune to the Pétain cult, identifying the Marshal with summary executions of mutineers in 1917. Attempts during the 1930s to hail Pétain as France’s future saviour had not escaped Fauxbras’s hostile regard.11 Other individuals within the Vichy regime – Laval, Darlan, Admiral Platon, Admiral Abrial, Admiral Decoux, Admiral Esteva – were equally object of Fauxbras’s long-standing enmity, which drew on a sense of class and republicanism. Beyond its personnel, Vichy revolted Fauxbras on the grounds that it entailed an internal institutional recomposition of the state. Pétain’s regime significantly enhanced the position of the military, especially the navy.12 First, unlike the shattered French army and airforce, the navy remained at the moment of armistice a force that could significantly alter the balance of military forces between Britain and Germany.13 Vichy still commanded a powerful navy and an empire. Second, admirals held key posts in the Vichy regime and the Empire, not least Darlan who was for 13 months prime minister and Pétain’s number two.14 Third, the navy, unlike the army or airforce, could claim not to have been defeated and humiliated. Finally, it could construct an Anglophobic myth of treachery at Mers el-Kébir consonant with a long corporate tradition of hostility to perfidious Albion. Fauxbras’s manuscript Pourquoi la Marine a Trahi underlines his awareness and trenchant criticism of the role of the navy under the Vichy regime. Not only were the admirals in positions of authority in cabinet and the Empire, the navy in the shape of Darlan pushed France closest to the threshold of military collaboration with Germany. As an institution, it was the navy that had the greatest reserves of Anglophobia and events bore out this at Mers el-Kébir, Dakar, Beyrouth and Casablanca.15 Fauxbras explained that the navy underwent a new crisis at France’s liberation with either amnesia of, or apologetics for, the actions of the admiralty and their complicity in collaboration. Though he could not find a publisher for Pourquoi la Marine, Fauxbras tried to outline the navy’s culpability and this stands in marked contrast to subsequent accounts often from insiders who sought to exculpate Darlan and the navy during the war years.16 Historians such as Paxton and Thomas have challenged the overindulgences of these works towards Vichy’s navy.17 If Fauxbras did not succumb to the temptations of collaborationism that were so rife in the world of Parisian journalism, neither did he join the resistance. As a consequence of the repression and disappointments

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of the left pacifist, he had withdrawn from political activity, explaining his reluctance to resist. Given that the recent historiography has cautioned against viewing France as either a ‘nation of resistors’ or a ‘nation of collaborators’, Fauxbras provided an interesting perspective on the experience of the occupation in Paris.18 His nuanced observations in some significant respects anticipated recent historiographical challenge to the resistencialist myth. In other matters, Fauxbras succumbed to the post-war consensus. His writing ended at the time of the liberation or at least surviving documents do. Despite his scepticism, change did take place at the liberation that addressed his prior concerns. There were social reforms that altered the situation of French labour. There were press reforms and the disappearance of the collaborationist press. The navy and other state institutions were purged, though less thoroughly than Fauxbras would have liked. He will have witnessed the trials of long time adversaries from the navy and the press: Paul Chack, Henri Béraud, Admiral Esteva and Stéphane Lauzanne. But in a sense, 1944 liberated France from the nightmare of 1914–18 only to trade it for new pathologies inherited from another war. It did not bring revolution as Fauxbras had at one time expected but instead an alliance between the French Communist Party and the Gaullists which stabilized the economic, social and political structures allowing the reconfiguration of French capitalism along the lines of a mixed economy, indicative planning and welfare state.19 This alliance established new conventions of social memory and forgetting that have troubled France to the present. Neither conforming to the resistencialist myth nor the pro-Pétainist literature of victimhood and rehabilitation, the liberation offered Fauxbras no avenues for publication. Having abandoned politics and failing to resurrect his writing career, Fauxbras remained in the obscurity after the war. Where Fauxbras is concerned, the liberation returns us to the beginning of our narrative: his duel with Paul Chack. This combat finally ended with Chack’s execution on 9 January 1945.20 Reflecting on this contest between Fauxbras and Chack reveals wider features of France’s twentieth century. First, their relationship addresses the significance of war, and challenges to war, as formative of French political culture. If prompted to consider the mutinies of 1917–19 by Fauxbras, we might also think of the French resistance during the Second World War or oppositional strands during the Algerian war (both French Algerian and pro-Algerian) and their impact on French political traditions. Like psychological repression and episodic flashbacks after personal trauma, these wartime conflicts have had lasting consequences as the

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mnemonic turn in French historiography and recurrent political controversies recalling France’s troublesome past have confirmed. 21 This is because each of these wars constituted ruptures and moments of crisis for French elites and the French state. Reconstructing political hegemonies required an official past, an imposed and manufactured consensus, one that could secure a widespread initial consent. In the longer run, however, these versions of the past became vulnerable to challenges. Viewed from this perspective, Chack was an appointed custodian of the official narrative of the Great War, conforming to a reconfiguration of the French navy premised upon the containment of the unruly threat of the mutinies. He and his colleagues created a vision of the past as a means to restore consent for naval hierarchies and to overcome the institutional crisis of the navy. This formed, after the conservative election victory of 1919, part of the French elites’ wider project to ride out post-war unrest. Some veterans, like Fauxbras, challenged that hegemony, both through their writings and through participation in social movements and the French labour movement. They sought to unpick the consensus about the Great War. Viewed narrowly, this was an exercise in counterbourrage that challenged the concealments, distortions and omissions of the official narrative provided by people such as Paul Chack. These veterans broke taboos about the executions of French soldiers, the mutinies, the secret diplomacy, press deception and the shortcomings of military and civilian war leaders. Again future wars brought recurrences of an evasive and propagandistic official narrative concealing new secrets of state: the active complicity of Vichy in the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps or French army’s use of torture in Algeria, 17 October 1961 or even the French government’s sponsorship of the perpetrators of Rwandan genocide. Mark Mazower has identified these troubling pasts as a generalized feature of the ‘dark continent’ of Europe. The Second World War provided a second round in the contest between Fauxbras and Chack, or in other words, a second effort at counter-bourrage. There was some truth in Paul Chack’s assertion at his trial that he was acting according to legally constituted authority in France: he did indeed receive a stipend from the Vichy government for his racialized vision of a new European civilization premised on the crushing of the Jews and the Bolsheviks (although he clearly went further than he was required to do in this regard). Fauxbras and Chack engaged in a wider process fundamental to the shaping of French political culture throughout the twentieth century. Perceived more broadly, Fauxbras and others tried to testify to the new realties of war, rendered

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industrial, scientific and systematic or total by the development of modern capitalism. This systematic understanding helps to explain the reproduction of recognizable features of the past over the decades. It also offers a possible answer to Epstein’s paradox that the prior ideas of an individual regarding anti-Semitism were poor guide to their actions during the occupation of France; that explanation needs to combine the analysis of individual itineraries, ideas and structural processes. Chack and Fauxbras hold a further significance. They stood at different ends of social hierarchies, perceived themselves as such and disseminated ideas with a sense of the particular interests of their social rank. An apt illustration is that during the Second World War, Chack luxuriated in an apartment in the well-heeled 7th arrondissement, renting an entire floor at an annual rent of 18,000 francs, while Fauxbras lived modestly in a small flat, worked intermittently and relied on handouts on occasion to feed his family. Their social distance underscores the attitude both took to revolution. Fauxbras aspired to an emancipation from the bondage of naval authority and to a ‘great shake up’ of French society. He shared these dreams with many others from lowly stations. Equally, the elites countenanced the possibility of revolution with horror. Social explosions – 1919, 1934–6, 1944 – profoundly affected both Chack and Fauxbras, which according to their respective viewpoints threatened or promised social transformation. Both perceived these episodes in civilizational terms, both were spurred to act and to write in the service of their partisan affiliations. As he explained at his trial, Chack engaged in ‘anti-Bolshevik’ (in other words, in his case, fascist) activism continuously after 1934, while these same events drew Fauxbras into the social movements of the Popular Front. Ironically, both died at moments of transformative potential: Chack was executed at the liberation of France and Fauxbras died in 1968 when a new generation of activists believed that all was possible. If May 1968 did not lead to revolutionary transformation, it did revolutionize the relationship between France’s past and its present. ‘The events’ reopened questions about antecedent moments of transformation. Fauxbras’s agenda once again gained currency and interest. The revolutionary left recalled the Black Sea mutiny and fêted former mutineer Charles Tillon. Eberhard Jäckel’s popular book on Vichy posed the question of French complicity in the Holocaust.22 The posters, graffiti and cartoons subverted the symbolism of the Gaullist resistance. The most poignant being a poster which depicted the cross of Lorraine as bourrage twisted as a screw into the skull.23 Fauxbras’s favoured journalistic genre, satire, blossomed.24 Striking workers challenged the

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returning threat of unemployment and there were even rumours of a mutiny on board the battleship Clemenceau.25 These historical echoes underline the significance of Fauxbras’s life. He was simultaneously unique and typical. In the course of Fauxbras’s century, many, many Frenchmen and women have passed through his journey of hope and despair, action and withdrawal, participation in great events, witnessed the brutalities of war and elusive overtures to hopes of an emancipated future, and returned afterwards to the mundane routines of everyday life. On a final note, it is undoubtedly revealing that Fauxbras could not find a publisher for Sondage 1940. Between 1945 and 1966 (two years before his death), his survey was rejected repeatedly. We might agree with the comment he jotted on the folder than contained the manuscript: ‘These gentlemen [publishers] do not think that the truth about May 1940 is good to say in 1965. Wait for 1980 (or 2000?).’ Had he lived a few months longer he would have lived to see the events of May 1968 which challenged France’s post-war assumptions, taboos and myths. Within a few years, Ophuls, Paxton and others had transformed the historiographical landscape making it open to voices such as those of Fauxbras and his comrades in German POW camps. At last, with this publication, these voices can be heard.

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Appendices Appendix 1: Translated Preface to Jean Le Gouin The preface of César Fauxbras’s Jean Le Gouin: Journal d’un simple Matelot de la Grande Guerre (1932), pp. 9–10 The French Jean Le Gouin, the English Jack Tar, having exchanged blows for centuries, made up in order to fight the German Jean Maat. The struggle lasted 52 months, during which the adversaries never or hardly saw each other. Then peace arrived. Ten years later, Jean Le Gouin, passing in front of a bookshop display, has his eye attracted by a seductive colourful cover. It presents some scene of naval warfare, and as the artist combines a lot of talent with a perfect knowledge of the sea, Jean Le Gouin, who the slightest anomaly would repel far from the bookshop window, loses ten minutes contemplating the beautiful image. Then, his appetite whetted, and supposing that the quality of the content corresponds to that of the cover, he decides to purchase the volume. He hopes to find in these pages a faithful picture of his war years. Not that he misses these years of misery. But man is made in such a way that the worst memories are not those that he remembers with any less laxity. Besides, nothing would awaken his distrust, if he had any. The title is lacking in meaning, and the author did not attach to his name an indication of rank which would compromise the financial transaction. Having released his 14 francs, Jean Le Gouin anticipates savouring the prose more valuable than that of a writer of real talent. But, from the first lines, he grimaces. One begins to learn from him that naval war was ‘a struggle of small boats and young leaders’. The sailors, them, they didn’t exist. The fact is that they spent many of their days in prison. As a result, the book loses a great part of its interest. An apology for the leaders, young and old, could not captivate a man who knows where he stands. Jean Le Gouin continues to read, however, for he wants to convince himself that he hasn’t been duped. He goes from surprise to surprise. On each page, shells explode, mines go off, naval officers accomplish marvels, Jean Le Gouin, to whom war appeared a very calm matter, cannot help but admire how certain people are skilful at transforming into great gestures a few piteous misadventures resulting from incompetence. There are some moving passages, others sublime. There is a ship’s captain who cries because the admiral refuses to send his too decrepit warship into the firing line; there is a captain of a frigate whose ship has its guts ripped out by a mine and who ‘arrives in front of the immense breech, faces the sea which is rushing in, wants to stop it, to push it back’. 182

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Appendices 183 There is the unique survivor of a cruiser torpedoed on the Syrian coast who, during five days of solitude, enduring a thousand travails on his raft, killed time by ‘praying, looking for the Holy Land, Bethlehem and the Cross’. There are sailors (at last the sailors show themselves) who want to stay on their ship which is about to sink and hide when they are given the order to evacuate ‘as if it was a matter of a repugnant chore’. There are 50 of the same calibre, but after that one it cannot be bettered. Jean Le Gouin throws the book into its rightful place, with the rubbish. They really swindled his money. I hope that he will find in this journal all that he would have expected between the beautiful covers. The archives of the Historical Service of the Navy, and lots of imagination, provided pen-pushers with the material for ten volumes of heroic gestures. But the truth is told in very few of those lines.

Appendix 2: Songs of the sailors: Song of the fayots I My lad, you see that big ship there All freshly painted and motionless in the water? We slave there, we cry there, We rage there, we die there. For on it, good folks, It’s the empire of the beans, oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Refrain: It is the fault of the fayots If we are bad on the boats Oh! Fayot, fayot, fayot, You make life hell for us No way of digesting my peas In France we must hope That we’ll end up scoffing them with The beans. II The bridge full of cockroaches and bugs,* Makes the French navy shudder every night. We spend time in prison, Big mess tin, small ration, For the fleas, lice and crabs The same as for the pigs. III In Toulon, there are women, without doubt, Who have no arses. Frigid,

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They’ve got faces like cows Feet like camels These are the women of the cursed fayots. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! IV When after slaving away, Jack Tar Thinks he can have a bit of a laugh on dry land, He gets as shore leave The right to menial duties While the officers Go for a feast. [*Also meaning snitches and grasses]

Appendix 3: Extract from Mer Noire (1935) There was, in the harbour, a lot more effervescence than Jaillet supposed. In this memorable evening of 19 April, three crews of warships mutinied. Here is the France. Its sailors shot on the Bolsheviks, to defend themselves. In reward, orders. They murmur. Ah! You are murmuring! Says the Admiral. You will not go ashore on Sunday. Better still: instead of resting like all Sundays, you will load coal. He knows some tricks, the Admiral. At the beginning of the afternoon, the rumour circulated that we would celebrate Easter in the coal depot. We grumble no more, we complain. Those who moan are thrown in jail. When the dinghy returns, we hear about the 300 murders. The crew masses on the foredeck, listening to speeches. Let’s avenge the Russians, lets kill the fayots! That’s how the most angry speak. The wise ones answer: No, let’s calm down, and present our demands. The chief of military police presented himself. A decent man, compared to the other pig-headed ones already huddling up at their posts or in their beds. He is shouted at. He slips in three words. What do you want? That you fuck off, you scum! He fucked off, to the sound of the Internationale. Then someone says: Let’s release the prisoners. Having done that, three delegates were nominated to take an ultimatum to the Admiral. Two mechanics and a sailor from the bridge. The steampowered dinghy took them to the Jean Bart, that the Admiral had just left. The Jean Bart mutinies. After that the Justice. The Admiral’s launch came alongside the France. The Commander and his two deputies get out to receive the great leader. The latter shouts at them, all

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Appendices 185 three begin to cry. It becomes hilarious. But the sailors go back to the rear deck, and the Admiral, who has illusions, shouts at them: Get back, traitors! Like in a drama of cloaks and swords. Five hundred voices: Shut it you old twat! The commanders cry their eyes out. The admiral raises himself on his heels. Return to order, or I will blow the ship out of the water! You’re too much of a coward to blow it up! You’d be blown up with it, you scoundrel! And if you add another threat, we will finish you off! The admiral understands at last that it is not the time for messing around. My children ... says he. We are not your children, we are sorry to say! When a fayot calls you his child, it is because he fears for his skin. The Admiral trembles, the commander and his captains are sobbing. A sailor gets the others to be quiet, and then says: We do not want to make war on the Russians, Admiral. The Russians are not our enemies. We have had five years of prison; we want to return home. We don’t want to be shitted on anymore. We want to be released, and we will only load coal to go to Toulon. If you don’t give us satisfaction, we will massacre the officers, and we will deliver the boat to the Bolsheviks. Long live the Soviets! Death to the vaches [snitches or agents of authority, literally cows]! The chorus: Long live the Soviets! Death to the vaches! The admiral lost all arrogance. My friends, says he, if it was up to me the fleet would leave tonight. But the government ... You only have to telegraph the word, to this bastard government! For once, the telegraph will be used for something other than making us commit crimes. We give you 24 hours. And the noisy troop returned to quarters. Getting into his launch, the admiral hears the Jean Bart, the ship which has the honour of bearing his flag, sing the horrible refrain: C’est la lutte finale [from the Internationale]. He says to the chief: Head for land!

Appendix 4: Translations of Sondage 1940 National comparisons, age and explaining France’s defeat, p. 24 The English, not surprising that they have funny morale! ... Tough men, you say? Me, I say blokes paid for the job will do what is asked of them. Thirty francs a day, they earn, them, yes, 30 francs a day on the second rank, and the

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186 Appendices oldest is 23 years! ... Compare that for a moment with your 50 centimes, with tobacco ration deducted! ... Twenty-three years the oldest and so all are active. Chamberlain knew full well that above 30 years a normal man is no longer useable as a hero. Whilst these kids, they hardly even give a shit about divebombers! ... You can easily explain that an English squaddy on 30 francs is sixty times more courageous than a French squaddy on ten francs. My mate, in life, even at the front, everything is a question of big money. And notice all Hitler’s little Nazis were 23 years old at most. At the end of the day, we were rather like spectators at a football match, we remained with our arses on the seats watching the match between the juniors of Chamberlain and the juniors of Hitler.

Monarchy and republicanism as points of reference, p. 29 The king of France in previous times was allowed to sign letters with the royal seal and send you to the Bastille for a yes or no which embarrassed Pompadour, but he dared not invent military service. This invention dates from Gambetta or Emile Zola, not earlier.

Irony about the French airforce, p. 36 It was a great idea that they had, the Fridolins, of shutting us in a mill. I prefer sleeping on jute than in the open air. But if we had an airforce, I would not rest. Do you see that our aviators would come to bomb the mill? Seen from above, a French prisoner exactly resembles a German victor. ... Thank God, it’s a proven fact that we do not have an airforce.

The police and the home front, pp. 36–8 For me, what makes me laugh, it is when I think of the face of the cops, pigs, fuzz and co. You know how many heads of cattle [police] there are in Paris alone? At least 20,000! ... Yes, my friend, 20,000 and strongmen of 25 years old and who’ve remained carefully stashed away while we others have been sent to die at the front. One time even the government put an article in the papers to explain that they were ashamed that it had to hold back the police! ... Hold them back, bullshit! ... The real reason is that it looks pretty bad to see old codgers of 48 mobilised to the fields of honour whilst Mr Policeman was directing traffic. To think that it was them that bludgeoned us on demonstrations supposedly through patriotism and against the red scum, and that they spend the war in bed leaving the workers to defend their cushy job! ... When it came to fascism, we thought we’d seen it all! ... But now, what will happen? The government in its panic will say to the pigs: ‘These traitors the workers, on the excuse that you really beat them at the time of the Sacco-Vanzetti, they are leaving the glory of destroying Hitler’s tanks to you. There are enough of you elite fighters for two invincible divisions, you are going to leave and get thoroughly stuck in with your truncheons and capes to arrest the Fritz, the beasts, who are at Saint-Denis! ... Forward, into the taxis! ... The police are with us! ...’ You don’t believe that will happen?

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Appendices 187 What do you do as a civilian job? I am a waiter. You’re not a real worker, that’s what I told myself, because you’re totally wrong. You give me spiteful reasons; you are not politically educated, in spite of class consciousness. A supposition that the government would get its police killed, it would not let it happen. ... It knows that Hitler will be in Paris on 15 June, it is ready to receive him respectfully, because Hitler will be the boss, and the police are always for the boss, inevitably. It should not be lost sight of that Hitler or no Hitler, this war will come to an end with the victory of the proletariat, and that then the cops will beat the capitalists like they beat the hooligans in cloth caps. Here is the concrete way of seeing things.

Depoliticization of a Popular Front supporter, pp. 41–2 Politics, don’t ever talk to me about it. According to the union officials, we had to go on strike on 30 November 1938. It was strike or war. By going on strike, we proved that we were against the war, and the government dropped it, like at Munich two months before. Well, we were all demoralised, we didn’t go on strike, fear of unemployment, and the government thought of us: ‘They are too cowardly to roll their sleeves up, therefore they are courageous enough for the new war to end wars.’ But from that failed strike of 30 November 1938 to 1 May 1939, there were some strange dealings between the government and the unions, since the CGT decreed that we would not go on strike on 1 May. At work on 1 May, the workers’ day! ... The motive: a day lost was fewer tanks and planes to smash Hitler with! ... They said that, the leading [union] comrades, without shame in their duplicated news-rags. And my Popular Front deputy – who himself couldn’t be called up – ate masses of Nazis for breakfast in his deputy’s report! ... We, I said to myself: ‘It’s all finished, they all want their share, us others in the rank and file, we are mugs.’ Conclusion: before I take an elector’s card or a union card again, some water will have to pass under the Neuilly bridge.

Capitalist authority and a Belgian woman worker, p. 55 This woman, she forgot to say that she couldn’t come into work. Two years in prison, they locked her up for! ... The funniest thing of all, it’s that she was Belgian, they said so in the newspaper. When we read that, we were stupefied. They had the right to stick women in prison for two years, even Belgian women for an illegal absence! ... A Belgian woman at that time, she was a neutral, who had nothing to do with French patriotism, in a war factory. We should have decorated her, even if she was absent from time to time. There, like everywhere, it was a question of money. For example you’re a prostitute who gets money in bed, you don’t have the obligation of working in a factory, you roll about without bothering anybody, apart from your clientele. But if you’re an honest worker, you’re obliged to slave for Niome et Rhone [sic], and when you’ve got flu, they throw you in jail for two years! Is that

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democracy, bread, peace and liberty? He was right the comrade who talked about full blown fascism at the moment. How I’d be safe if I was in hospital with an injury!

Caillaux, Clemenceau and the forgotten mutinies of 1917, pp. 74–8 You and your teacher colleagues, I don’t congratulate you! ... What did you teach your pupils? Look at this bunch of cretins: not a single one who’s heard of Caillaux! ... They know that Napoleon died at Sainte-Hélène and that is enough. They also have some insights about bishop Cauchon and the mud of Soissons. As for Caillaux, he is not on the curriculum. Besides, I would be singled out by the inspector if I considered Caillaux a historical personality! Yes, I see ... Caillaux, have you got the right to consider him a historical personality? I am obliged to! ... He is in the manual, he takes up a dozen lines. The father of victory, not likely! They will have well and truly had us! No, not totally, since here is a group of young from Clermont happy to fall into the hands of the enemy, good Caillauxtistes without knowing it. Listen, lads, because you’re a bunch of little prats, and I want to rub your nose in your idiocy, listen to an old prat. In 1918, after nearly 4 years of the front line, there were in France two types of individual: the clemencistes who admired Clemenceau, and the Caillautages who admired a certain Caillaux, Joseph. You would have difficulty establishing which of the two, Clemenceau or Caillaux, was the most rotten politician, but, on one hand and the other, one could find at that moment, for undeniable reasons, I imagine, Clemenceau wanted total war and Caillaux peace at all price. Clemenceau would not have seen getting every Frenchman killed as a drawback to save France, for a real patriot has only one idea in his head, to get his compatriots killed. Caillaux, on the other hand, was a traitor. He conspired to end the war, to save a lot of lives. In general, the civilians were clemencistes, the soldiers were caillautistes, but as the civilians always have the upper hand, with this there would never be war, Clemenceau ended up putting Caillaux in prison and Caillaux’s team went to the firing squad at Vincennes. Yes I know about that, it’s Caillaux who slept with Mata Hari. And why not? It’s already not bad that you know about that! ... You know something, you, at least, you’re a little less stupid than your friends. I continue. Clemenceau therefore had the upper hand, hence 500,000 extra dead poilus, your fathers, and Clemenceau father of the victory with his statute in the Champs Elysées. A rue Clemenceau in all the communes of more than 1,000 inhabitants. No rue Caillaux, nowhere. You give the name of a traitor to a street who refused to get 500,000 men killed. If they had given streets the name of Caillaux, they would have rehabilitated Caillautisme, and you see the effect on you conscripts ... You lot! ... You will reply to me without

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Appendices 189 Caillautisme or ignorant of it, you knew how to end a war. Yes, all my congratulations! ... But here is your error, your very serious error: you glorify your demoralisation! ... You little prats. Know that demoralisation and the demoralised have always been very badly looked upon. Even your mother, even your wife will not like to hear you say: ‘And how I got myself out of it!’ It’s all you talk about, innocents that you are! ... Once back home, maintain on the contrary that you fought like lions, and that you had to undergo, alas, the fate of the miserable defeatist-Caillautistes-demoralised! You will be pitied, admired. If you talk like you are at the moment, your fellow citizens will think they’ve discovered the one to blame for the breakthrough at Sedan, and you will never be a municipal councillor, or president of the bowls club. Like Caillaux and his old convicts, you will carry the mark of shame until the end of your days. Tease as much as you want the old prats of 14–18 who were stupid enough to put up with it and to do it all over again, as if they asked us our opinion! ... Then, at least, nobody ever heard them bragging about running away! ... Even at Charleroi ... Not yours, from Charleroi, the first ... In 1917, there were officially 300,000 mutineers, 300,000 men who had had enough and who wanted to pack it all in there and then. Not to mention the 4 million others for whom grumbling and thinking of Caillaux was enough ... 300,000, that takes up a lot of space! ... 200,000 must have survived after the firing squads, Chemin des Dames and the victorious offensive. Well, believe me, from my demobilisation in 1919 to 10 May 1940, I have looked for a mutineer of 1917, a single one. I have never found a veteran capable of admitting to being a former mutineer. Former heroes, they’re everywhere. The former mutineers understood quickly. They joined an honourable association led by colonels; they covered themselves in ribbons, they did not ask for a rue Caillaux, they entered the municipal council. The rulers did not create a Caillaux card, they created a veteran’s card, and all the survivors pounced on them, former mutineers and former obedient servants. Caillaux? Who was he? Oh, yes, the bloke who women took their revenge against. A crab before the war. He died in 1914, unless I’m mistaken? They were less stupid than you think, your forebears. Follow their example. Since you are definitely future and authentic heroes, get used to heroism now. Coach yourself in having attacked an armoured car with a knife, and having done in all those inside. In the very frequent case where you will never have seen a Fritz before surrendering, tip off your best mates while there is still time. Fabricate a plausible story, and don’t change it. Well constructed, it could be valuable, at the right moment, for a citation with accolades. In 20 years time, you will believe in it, in your armoured car, as certainly as iron. Do I see myself in the skin of a mutineer of 1917, when I was a terrorised raw recruit? Following the advice of an old prat, you will prepare yourself a happy old age in unchallengeable glory! How does this phrase sound to you? Happy old age, unchallengeable glory. I add: wrapping yourself in the flag! Tell me, teacher, you won’t get the better of me, in the distribution of prizes!

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Certainly not! Still would I need to learn my speech by heart. Whilst you, its quarter of an hour that you’ve been having us on without taking a breath! Me, having you on, what insolence? I can’t think of a politer term. For in the end, when you millions of prisoners will have massacred teams of so many millions of armoured cars with their knives, the question will be asked who will have taken them prisoner. And he teaches French history to the young generation. But no, do you believe that in ten years in your manual, there will be reference to those millions of prisoners? Nothing of the sort! ... France will have been defeated by tanks and planes and not by sit-down strikes. I was talking a few minutes ago of the mutineers of 1917: where are they in your manual? No? Well?

Defeatists, p. 99 Defeatists ... defeatists ... What does that mean, exactly, defeatist? That we wanted defeat? I never wanted defeat, me, I would have preferred that we gave Hitler a spanking. But there were people paid to give him a spanking. In my village, when there is a fire, it’s the firefighters who extinguish it. Me, I stay in my bed, I am not a firefighter, that does not mean that I would like the house to burn to the ground.

Return-home defeatism of the reservists, pp. 99–100 Blokes like you, the reservists with their return-home defeatism and their endless stories of 10 francs a day, now its proven that we don’t need you. If we, the specialists didn’t have you under our feet, we could have done a good job, we would have fought Hitler and the young with the active, the volunteers and two or three cohorts of the reserves not yet on their last legs.

Regional fracture: north and south, p. 108 Us in the Nord, we weren’t politicians. We cared about cycling, football and cockfighting. Without you lot in the south, we wouldn’t have had all these prats of ministers who drop us in it. You’ve never seen a northerner as a minister. It’s a workshy occupation. Us, we work, we feed you, we clothe you, we heat you, and you, you only know how to play bowls and annoy us with your politics and radical-socialists. More than that, the rare ones who want to pretend to work come to the north to put their arses on a chair. Everything that poisons existence, cops, taxmen, under-prefects, it comes from Lot or Corsica or some other lousy hole. Best of all: you go to the cinema, what do you see, you see Fernandel who speaks in Marseillais! ... Us, we must find that funny, the Marseillais, but if in Marseilles we played a film with a Nord dialect, the audience would shout for its money back. If Hitler wants to make a new country with Holland, Belgium and upper France from Amiens, me I’m for it. There will be courageous people in it. We’re fed up of being humiliated by the Mocos [pejorative, southerners].

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Appendices 191 Excuse me if I reply to you nearly in Marseillais, I am from the Ardèche, but you know being humiliated by the mocos, that is better than being humiliated by the boches. Who is it who will be the boss in your new country? Adolf! ... I believed however that you suffered in Lille during the other war. And the most terrible is, once nazi, you can try but you will never win the cup and the championship! No, not true? You shouldn’t talk in anger, you go too far.

The Pétain myth, pp. 113–14 Don’t forget that Pétain stopped the mutinies saying to the poilus: ‘You will get your leave, stop being prats and I will let bygones be bygones.’ Another general, he would have had all the discontented shot. Him, nobody. He understands the soldier [troufion], he knows we have only one idea in our heads, to return home. He will say to Hitler: ‘My prisoners, first and foremost!’ The rest, I don’t give a damn, above all Danzig! ... Hitler will be more than happy to get rid of us. The little he gives us to eat, it’s so much taken from his people. Don’t worry about his people, he is making good his losses with rillettes and Saumur! ... But who told you that Pétain executed nobody. My father. He was there. He was there perhaps as a gendarme! ... If they died down, the mutinies, it wasn’t because of Pétain but because of the executions! ... They said: ‘One, two, three, four, five. Step out of the line, number five. And twelve bullets for number five!’ The heroes of the gendarme, served it up without delay ... After that, the poilus became heroes again, like the gendarmes. They had too much fear of them not to become so.

Racial inspection, pp. 127–9 I had a moment of great fear when we were inspected by the Aryan expert. The lads, he hardly looked at them, but me, he – this villain – said, with anger: ‘What’s your name? Clin?’ I reply: ‘Yes, Clin Alfred, like it says on the sheet.’ ‘And where are you from?’ he says to me. ‘From Sarthe’, I reply. ‘And what’s your occupation?’ He asks me. ‘Gamekeeper.’ I reply. ‘It’s not true, you are a Jew!’ How he starts shouting, right in my face. And he orders me: ‘Drop the blanket.’ And here I am totally naked. He says to me: ‘Cover yourself!’ I put the blanket back. He says to me: ‘Why are you called Clin if you are not a Jew?’ I reply: ‘Because my father was called Clin Alfred. Where I’m from you always take the same name as your father.’ He says to me, ‘And your mother, what is her maiden name?’ I reply, ‘My mother, it was miss Bastard, Marie-Louise was her first name.’ He shouts once again: ‘When you’re called Clin, you must be a Jew.’ I reply: ‘Listen, me I’ve never seen a Jew, I don’t know what it is, but I’m not argumentative, and if it would make you happy, I want to be a Jew.’ Then he laughs, ‘When did you have your first communion?’ I reply: ‘At 11 or 12. I was first in the catechism class.’

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192 Appendices He says: ‘Say a hail Mary’, I continue ‘Full of grace ...’ He says: ‘Stop that’s enough, you’re not a Jew, despite being called Clin. Next! ...’ The next, he’s heard everything. You remember that after going to the Aryan expert you get some soup? The next one goes for his soup after me, and he says to me: ‘You’re a prat for saying to him that you’d be a Jew if it made him happy. And if he’d have marked you down as a Jew, you see the shit you’d be in?’ I reply to him: ‘No, I don’t see. What shit? Even if I’m a Jew, I’m a prisoner of war like everybody, no? How as a Jew would I get in more shit than the other comrades?’ He says: ‘It would take too long to explain. You’ve not got enough reading material in your forest you’ve not had the chance to learn about the Nazis.’ I ask him: ‘What forest?’ He says to me: ‘The forest, you’re a gamekeeper!’ I say to him: ‘But my boss has only got 300 hectares.’ ‘So?’ he says. ‘That’s not a forest, it’s a wood.’ I clarify. We were both misinformed, me about the Nazis, him about the forests. In life, you can always look stupid, if it’s not one thing, it’s another.

Appendix 5: Socio-economic profile of the Sondage sample Sociological classification

Number

Liberal middle class profession Lower middle class Lower middle class or working class Peasant or agricultural proprietor White collar working class Skilled manual working class Manual working class Agricultural labourer Others Total

Economic sector Agriculture Industry Construction Transport Services Commerce Military Others Total

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5 4 7 9 13 11 25 7 4 85

Number 16 19 3 7 10 27 1 2 85

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Appendices 193

Appendix 6: Geographical character of the Sondage sample Character of prisoners’ place of origin Paris and its region Large industrial city Large commercial and administrative city Industrial towns Rural and administrative towns Ports Industrial departments Villages and rural departments Colonies

Number 19 4 1 9 8 4 4 20 2

Appendix 7: Translated extracts of Fauxbras’s occupation diary The German invasion of the Soviet Union 22–6. [22 June 1941] Great commotion: we have learned this morning that Germany and Russia are at war. On the 1 pm broadcast, the commentaries of Radio-Paris call the Russian leaders a ‘clique’ and hope for the prompt defeat of ‘bolshevism that has poisoned the world for 20 years’. Strangers speak to each other, a sign of total satisfaction. – The Germans have moreover left Vincennes in great number. 28–6. After six days, it seems that the struggle remains indecisive on the Russian front. Despite the headlines announcing ‘decisive’ German victories, the newspapers say nothing. The people are jubilant, supposing a real Russian resistance – A lot of noise in the press about Ci-Devant, a book were the foul de Monzie turns his coat one more time. Reappearance of the Franciste party, with the ineffable Bucard. At least the paper of this party is displayed. Obviously collaborationist and Petainist. A hairdresser of Carcassonne is condemned to four years for having made remarks likely to damage the morale of the population ...

On an LVF meeting 1 February. [1942] Meeting of the LVF at the Vel d’Hiv. Chaired by Marcel Déat, to whom Doriot has passed presidency of the LVF. It seemed to me that Chack was the chair. Check this. The latter has therefore left? He was not

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194

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present at the meeting, Deloncle neither, Constantini. The room was full but not overcrowded. Lots of members of PPF and RNP, young, in uniform, with stripes on their shoulders. The unsympathetic observers noticed that all these friends of the LVF would be better where they belonged in Russia. There is a third opposed who never applaud, who could be recognised. No workers. In the stalls, the well heeled, some women in fur coats. It is there that the privileged spectators, provided with blue or red cards enter by the door reserved for them. Some tramps in rags, but over the rags, a French army coat, they represent without doubt the legionnaires on leave. No official security team inside. In front of the tribune, a rank of young men in uniform, doubtless to prevent an attack. The meeting began at 2.45 pm, Déat’s speech. Polite applause. Déat is not the darling. It is Doriot who is really acclaimed, when he follows Bonnard who bleated for a quarter of an hour after Déat. Two demonstrators, one at the beginning of Doriot’s speech (‘German’ was heard) and the other at the end, were beaten and led away. Doriot put the Bolshevik system on trial, which makes Russians slaves to power, all opposition was suppressed without delay. He speaks even of God who will help the LVF. He is acclaimed, the PPF form the majority of the audience, the RNP and Déat seem to be a skeleton. But it is far from what Doriot knew when he spoke to communists. The meeting rose at 4.30 pm to sing the Marseillaise. The member of the PPF who was condemning the upper classes, who, before the war, when they gave to the Party wanted to know where their money was going: ‘they should have got an auditor’.

RAF bombing raid on Paris 5–3. [5 March 1942] Evening before last the RAF attack began at 9.30, ended quarter to midnight. No air raid siren. No blackout. Very strong detonations for two hours, without break. We had the impression that the planes passed directly over Vincennes and bombed the polygone [in the Vincennes wood, i.e. near Fauxbras’s house]. Today the press give the number of victims 600 dead, 1,200 wounded. Protestation from Brinon, condolences of the German authorities. Yesterday at 1 pm, radio Paris had said that the RAF did not strike its targets, but today, L’Oeuvre advised Renault workers that they can sign on the dole, or find another job (by leaving). Officially, the Parisian population is indignant. In reality, yesterday afternoon, the people showed themselves to be very satisfied. The planes had dropped all over Paris a leaflet announcing new bombing raids. Brinon’s speech provokes these remarks from the people: ‘They spill less tears and make less fuss when the RAF kills French workers in Germany.’ The Renault workers have become quite the object of sympathy for the reactionaries of Vichy. When the police tear gassed them, during the strikes, they [the reactionaries] found it very funny. This morning, 5–3, at 11 am, Radio-Paris reported from a recruitment centre for French workers in Germany. A worker speaks on a microphone, he is in Essen, and is going to bring his wife there. He finds it very good there.

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Appendices 195 Yesterday afternoon (4–5) about 2 pm, a new alert, signalled by sirens. But no planes, everyone considers it’s nonsense. 8–3. Yesterday funeral for the victims of Boulogne, the newspapers give no number. The radio announced 355, which is no longer 600. The Germans bomb the Egyptian ports, says Radio Paris.

Appendix 8: Average worker’s family of four, monthly budget, end of 1943 Monthly income: Father Mother Total

3,000 1,500 4,500

Daily consumption per head: Bread Potatoes Wine Meat

400 grams 300 grams 0.125 litres 15 grams

Vegetables and other (including pasta, etc.):

300 grams

Monthly expenditure: Rent Bread 40 k at 3.70 One black market bread card 400 grams of butter 2 kilos of black market butter Meat 2 kilos of black market meat Gas Electricity Wine (16%) Potatoes, black market 60 kilos at 12 Coal 100 kilos Coal black market 50 kilos Transport Shoes and repairs Vegetables, pasta and other taxed goods Total

300 148 200 30 900 40 400 60 40 112 720 90 225 150 200 900 4,605

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Notes Introduction 1. To name one’s son Kléber after the general of the revolutionary wars indicated the depth of one’s family’s republican values. 2. Philippe Masson, La Marine Française et la Mer Noire (Paris, Publications de le Sorbonne, 1982); Tico Jossifort, ‘The Black Sea revolt’, Revolutionary History, 8 (2002), pp. 99–114. 3. César Fauxbras, Viande à Brûler: Journal d’un Chômeur Roman (Paris, Flammarion, 1935). César Fauxbras, Antide: ou les Banqueroutes Frauduleuses, Roman Peut-être Philosophique (Paris, Flammarion, 1937). 4. During his early years, his family moved across the Dunkirk conurbation to Malo-les-Bains. 5. César Fauxbras, ‘Le fétiche de mon oncle Archie’, in Marcel Berger (ed.), Les Plus Belles Histoires de Mer (Paris, Paul-Émile, 1940), pp. 91–3. 6. A German submarine torpedoed this ship on 19 March 1917 resulting in the loss of 296 lives. 7. Vincennes, Fauxbras papers, Marine nationale: État signalétique et de service: Kléber Gaston Sterckeman, 25 March 1936. 8. Fauxbras papers, Captain of the Merchant Navy certificate, Le Havre, 25 April 1922. 9. Fauxbras papers, Works certificate from SA Garages de France, 5 January 1931. 10. In Fauxbras papers, the author had three Parisian addresses in the 1920s: 84 rue Saint Antoine, in the 4th arrondissement in 1924; 42 rue Rambuteau, in the 3rd in 1925; from 1930 to 1934, he lived at 66 rue Demours in the 17th. In 1934, he moved to Vincennes: in November 1934, 32 Avenue de la Villa, Vincennes; from 1937, 9 Avenue du Petit Parc, Vincennes. He also lived outside Paris in La Ciotat (Bouches du Rhône) in the early 1930s and then in Les Lecques near Saint Cyr-sur-Mer (Var) in 1933–34. 11. Fauxbras papers, work certificate from Établissements Vital Évrard, 31 January 1933. 12. Fauxbras papers, Letter from Secretary of Literary Publications (Flammarion) to Sterckeman, 18 March 1925. No manuscript remains for Les Patouillards. 13. Fauxbras papers, contract between Flammarion and Sterckeman, 7 August 1931. 14. As of the end of June 1937: Jean Le Gouin had sold 2692; Mer Noire, 1047; and Viande à Brûler, 2189, Letter from R. Cabus (general secretary at Flammarion) to Sterckeman, 5 November 1937. 15. On the effort of engaged authors to contribute to the collective memory of war presenting personal memory in the name of a social group, Georges Fréris, ‘Roman de guerre et mémoire collective’, Interlitteraria, 3 (1998), pp. 148–56. 16. Jean Norton Cru, Témoins: Essai d’Analyse et de Critique des Souvenirs de Combattants édités en français de 1915 à 1928 (Paris, Les Étincelles, 1929); 196

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Notes 197

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

first published in 1930, Jean Norton Cru, Du Témoignage (Paris, Allia, 2008), p. 19. Defending Cru’s work after its republication in 1993, Frédéric Rousseau, Le Procès des Témoins de la Grande Guerre: L’Affaire Norton Cru (Paris, Seuil, 2003). Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18 Understanding the Great War (New York, Hill and Wang, 2002) (translated from the French by Catherine Temerson). This is not the place to engage with the polemic between the Péronne historians and the Collectif de Recherche International et de Débat sur la Guerre de 1914–18 that ensued. It is summarized in Leonard V. Smith, ‘The “Culture de guerre” and French historiography of the Great War of 1914–1918’, History Compass, 5, 6 (2007), pp. 1967–79. Frédéric Rousseau, La Guerre Censurée: Une Histoire des Combattants Européens de 14–18 (Paris, Seuil, 1999); Frédéric Rousseau, ‘Autres points de vue, autres regards. Pour une histoire européene de la Grande Guerre’, in Jules Maurin and Jean-Charles Jauffret (eds), La Grande Guerre 1914–1918: 80 Ans d’Historiographie et de Représentations, Actes du Colloque International de Montpellier des 20 et 21 Novembre 1998 (Montpellier, Éditions de l’Université Paul Valéry, 2002), pp. 408–9; Nicolas Offenstadt, Les Fusillés de la Grande Guerre et la Mémoire Collective (1914–1999) (Paris, Odile Jacob, 1999). Particularly problematic is Smith’s narrative primacy, ‘any combatant’s testimony is testimony to something, but that something is often not an empirically verifiable reality. Rather, these texts are about a struggle for coherence. They seek to create a narrative of experience and a narrator capable of telling the story and conveying its meaning to the public sphere through the written and published word.’ Leonard V. Smith, The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. x and 12. First Italian edition published in 1976. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Gilles Heuré, Gustave Hervé: Itinéraire d’un Provocateur (Paris, La Découverte, 1997). Gilbert G. Allardyce, ‘The political transition of Jacques Doriot’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 1 (1966), pp. 56–74. Frédéric Monier, ‘Les obsessions d’Henri Béraud’, Vingtième Siècle, 40 (1993), pp. 62–74. Christophe Charle, La Naissance des ‘Intellectuels’ 1880–1900 (Paris, Éditions du Minuit, 1990). Gisèle Sapiro, La Guerre des Écrivains 1940–53 (Paris, Fayard, 1999). Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris, Edition Gallimard, 1984–92), 7 vols. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). Antoine Prost, Les Anciens Combattants et la Société Française: 1914–1939 (Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), 3 vols. Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999). Entailing an evolution from Winter’s earlier emphasis see the incorporation of cognitive psychology and individual agency into the editorial

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198

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

1

Notes introduction, Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 6–39. Susan A. Crane, ‘Writing the individual back into collective memory’, American Historical Review, 102, 5 (1997), pp. 1372–85. Historians have been more or less generous to Halbwachs’s difficulties – in response to criticism from Bloch and Blondel – in incorporating individual memory into his view of collective memory, Annette Becker, ‘Memory gaps: Maurice Halbwachs, memory and the Great War’, Journal of European Studies, 35 (2005), pp. 102–13. Crane, ‘Writing the individual back’, p. 1376. V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 45–63. Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (London, MIT Press, 1986), p. 204. James V. Wertsch, ‘A sociocultural approach to socially shared cognition’, in Lauren B. Resnick, John M. Levine and Stephanie D. Teasley (eds), Perspectives in Socially Shared Cognition (Washington, American Psychological Association, 1991), pp. 85–101. Steven Rose, The Making of Memory: From Molecules to Mind (London, Vintage, 2003). David B. Pillemer, ‘Can the psychology of memory enrich historical analyses of trauma’, History & Memory, 16, 2 (2004), pp. 140–54. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992). Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, p. 10. Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 26–7. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London, Profile, 2008), p. 119. Charles S. Maier, ‘A surfeit of memory? Reflections on history, melancholy and denial’, History and Memory, 5 (1993), pp. 136–51.

An Ordinary Sailor

1. Each with their own particular contribution, Castex, Chack, Darlan and Leygues had restored the navy’s fortunes. Their division of labour addressed strategic thinking, the institution’s political position and its place in public opinion. Although longer-term anxieties were not overcome, a programme of naval rearmament, public sympathy and political favour meant that by the end of the 1930s, the French navy was in self-confident mood; a situation only enhanced when it occupied a place at the very centre of the Vichy regime after defeat on the land. Speaking as a veteran sailor from the ranks, Fauxbras sought to challenge the navy’s official version of the events and its claims about its overall contribution to the war. As the battleshipbuilding programme gained momentum and the political influence of the admirals increased, he continued to challenge naval historians (Chack and Farrère) and admirals (Lacaze, Darlan and so on) through his journalism. He kept these adversaries in his sights during the Second World War. If the

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Notes 199

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

navy’s situation improved, Fauxbras’s literary and political milieu of antimilitarism disintegrated. First, the PCF abandoned anti-militarism in favour of Popular Front patriotism. Then, the Popular Front failed to deliver on its promises of peace. Finally, Daladier repressed the small group of militant pacifists that remained. Ultimately, several of Fauxbras’s comrades joined the collaborationist bandwagon. For example, the official French account of the entry into war, Jean-Jacques Becker, ‘Le secret et le faux’, Matériaux pour l’Histoire de Notre Temps, 58 (2000), pp. 33–8. Published in 1929, Jean Norton Cru catalogued French war literature, providing a critical summary of each work. He analysed 304 works. Cru, Témoins. Only four of these came from the navy and then all were involved in fighting on the land: Lieutenant de Vaisseau J. Pinguet, Trois Étapes de la Brigade des Marins (Paris, Perrin, 1918); Luc Platt, Un Parisien sur l’Yser (Paris, Larousse, 1917); Claude Prieur, De Dixmude à Nieuport (Paris, Perrin, 1916); and Vice-amiral Ronarc’h, Souvenirs de Guerre (Paris, Payot, 1921). Antoine Prost, ‘Verdun’ in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory, 3 vols, vol. 3 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996–8). Auguste Maurice Barrès, L’Âme Française et la Guerre: Pendant la Bataille de Verdun (Paris, Émile-Paul, 1919), pp. 23 and 162. Emphasizing generalized religious consent for the war amongst troops, Annette Becker, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930 (Oxford, Berg, 1998). Henry Malherbe, La Flamme au Poing (Paris, Albin Michel, 1917). René Benjamin, Gaspard: les Soldats de la Guerre (Paris, Arthème Fayard, 1925). Emphasizing the role of peasant recruits in the mutiny, Guy Pedroncini, Les Mutineries de 1917 (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1967); suggesting greater working-class influence, Christophe Charle, La Crise des Sociétés Impériales: Allemagne, France, Grande-Bretagne: Essai d’Histoire Sociale Compare (Paris, Seuil, 2001); on the deferential limits of the revolt, Leonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry during the First World War (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994). Allen Douglas, War Memory and the Politics of Humour: the Canard Enchaîné and World War One (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002). Initially serialized in L’Oeuvre in 1916, which itself reflected opposition to bourrage, prior to publication as a novel in 1917. Nicole Racine, ‘The Clarté Movement in France, 1919–21’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2, 2 (1967), pp. 195–208. Normand Guessler, ‘Henri Barbusse and his Monde (1928–35): Progeny of the Clarté Movement and the review Clarté’, Journal of Contemporary History, 11, 2/3 (1976), pp. 173–97. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, pp. 178–86. Martin Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict: Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the Great War (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2004). ‘Corpses in waiting’ is my translation of macchabées en sursis, Merle Blanc, 166 (5 June 1937). Previously he added Dorgelès’s Croix des Bois to this list, Merle Blanc, 103 (21 March 1936). For an overview of French naval strategy including a discussion of the Jeune École controversy, Philippe Masson, ‘La pensée navale française de 1871 à 1940’, Revue Historique des Armées, 1 (1982), pp. 42–51. Or, Martin Motte, Une Éducation Géostratégique: La Pensée Navale Française de la Jeune École à 1914 (Paris, Economica, 2004).

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200 Notes 14. Though this was a fraction of British losses, Adolphe Laurens, Le Blocus et la Guerre Sous-Marine (1914–1918) (Paris, Armand Colin, 1924), p. 210. 15. Paul G. Halpern, The Naval War in the Mediterranean 1914–1918 (London, Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 534–41. 16. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 45. 17. His arguments against French battleship strategy in, L’Oeuvre, 30 January 1936. César Fauxbras, Lettre Ouverte à M. le Ministre de la Guerre sur L’Incontinence Oratoire dans la Grande Muette (Rouen, de Vallée, n.d.); L’Oeuvre, 9 November 1935. 18. Paul Chack, ‘Qui tient la mer, tient la terre’, Notre Combat, 4 (13 October 1939), pp. 1–15. Ironically, the collaborationist Chack reversed his position in order to demonstrate that Germany would win the war through its u-boats in the battle of the Atlantic. Aujourd’hui (3 January 1942) and (29 October 1942). 19. Paris, Archives Nationales (henceforth AN), F 7 13163 Minister of the Interior to Minister of the Navy, 13 January 1926; ibid., 18 May 1926. 4,000 copies were produced. The paper was used in the fraternization between French sailors of the Edgar Quinet and US communists in San Francisco, L’Humanité (23 January 1929). AN F 7 13164 Jean Le Gouin, April–May 1930; ibid., April 1931 and La Page de Jean Le Gouin, November 1928. Archives départementales de Seine-Saint-Denis, Archives of the French Communist Party, Bobine 9 3MI6 9 85 La Page de Jean Le Gouin and Bobine 54 3MI6 54 372 La Page de Jean Le Gouin; AN F 7 13350 La Page de Jean Le Gouin, 3 (December 1929). 20. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 89. This anger at propaganda distortions of the media was shared with those at the front, Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War (Oxford, Berg, 1992), pp. 92–108. Laurent Martin, Le Canard Enchaîné: Histoire d’un Journal Satirique 1915–2005 (Paris, Nouveau Monde, 2005). For a right-wing critique of Canard as being a profound cause of French moral collapse, Clément Vautel, Mon Film: Souvenirs d’un Journaliste (Paris, Albin Michel, 1941), p. 149. 21. Archives de la Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes, Biographical file: Paul Chack (1876–1945). On the retirement of Chack, Revue Maritime, 180 (December 1934), pp. 802–3; Vincennes, César Fauxbras’s personal papers, private collection, Fauxbras returned to the distortions of Chack in César Fauxbras, Journal 1939–1944 (unpublished), pp. 6, 18, 31, 41, 56, 57, 67, 72, 77–8, 95, 102, 112 and 126. 22. Vincennes, César Fauxbras’s personal papers, private collection, Gaston Sterckeman to Éditions Victor Attinger, 8 April 1930. For references in his journalism, Merle Blanc, 177 (21 August 1937); ibid., 220 (18 June 1938). 23. For an oblique reference to Chack, Fauxbras, Viande à Brûler, p. 116. 24. Paul Chack, Pavillon Haut (Paris, Éditions de France, 1929), p. 108. 25. Revue Maritime, 155 (November 1932), p. 701. 26. For Fauxbras’s critique of the bombastic, militaristic and self-congratulatory Écrivains Combattants on the occasion of a meeting that Chack chaired, Merle Blanc, 221 (21 May 1938). For another article critical of Chack, the ‘victor of Trafalgar’, Merle Blanc, 224 (18 June 1938). 27. Bulletin Officiel de la Marine (1919), pp. 49–70.

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Notes 201 28. Georges Leygues, ‘Rapport au président de la République, Paris, 19 juillet 1919’, Revue Maritime, 165 (September 1933), pp. 368–70. 29. ‘L’imagination chackeuse’ and ‘chackonnerie’ (chack + (c)onnerie is a pun merging Chack and stupidity), Fauxbras, Pourquoi La Marine a Trahi, p. 30. 30. Vice-Amiral Merveilleux de Vignaux, ‘Du moral de l’officier’, Revue Maritime, 5 (May 1920), pp. 593–601. 31. SHM SS ED 30 Contre-amiral Dumesnil, Note sur la situation actuelle de nos équipages au point de vue de discipline, 12 July 1919. 32. Amiral Docteur, Carnet de Bord (Paris, Nouvelle Société d’Édition, 1932), p. 246. 33. Georges Débat, Marine Oblige (Paris, Flammarion, 1974), p. 12. 34. Vice-amiral Louis Dartige de Fournet, Souvenirs de Guerre d’un Amiral: 1914–16 (Paris, Plon, 1920) in the non-paginated preface. 35. And the British Commander-in-Chief of the Navy over the escape of the Breslau and Goeben which were used in a Turkish attack on the Russian fleet, Vice-amiral Bienaimeé, La Guerre Navale, 1914–15: Fautes et Responsibilités (Paris, Jules Tallandier, 1920). 36. Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975). 37. Chack himself later noted that the years 1919–25 were the navy’s worst, Aujourd’hui (16 December 1942). 38. Being too slow and of too limited artillery range. For the cancellation of orders of Normandie class battleships, AN 434 AP 34 Projet de loi, 171, annexe au procès-verbal de la séance, 13 January 1920. The bill became law in 1922. 39. Chack, ‘Qui tient la mer’, pp. 1–2. 40. Captaine de Corvette Ven, Les Armes Nécessaires dans une Flotte (Paris, Société d’Éditions, 1923). 41. Henri Darreus and Jean Guéguiner, Historique de la Marine Française (SaintMalo, Ancre de la marine, 1996), p. 10. 42. Volunteers halved between the first semester of 1921 and the second semester of 1922 (from 4604 to 1956), a bill called for signing bonuses, 434 AP 34 Parliamentary bill on Navy recruitment in 1923. 43. Paul Chack, Trafalgar (Paris, Éditions de France, 1938), p. 116; Paul Chack, Deux Batailles Navales: Lépante-Trafalgar (Paris, Éditions de France, 1935), p. 339; Paul Chack, The Entente upon the Seas (Liège, Vaillant-Carmanne, 1928), p. 6. 44. Laurens’s job should not be confused with Chack’s. The contrast between Chack and these others was commented upon in prefaces to both volumes, Auguste Thomazi, La Guerre Navale dans la Mediterranée (Paris, Payot, 1929), p. 10 in Vice-Admiral Dumesnil’s preface; Adolphe Laurens, Précis d’Histoire de la Guerre Navale 1914–18 (Paris, Payot, 1929), p. 12 in Chack’s preface. 45. Amiral Castex, Théories stratégiques (Paris, Société d’Éditions Géographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales, 1929), 7 vols; Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, Castex: Le Stratège Inconnu (Paris, Economica, 1985). Masson, ‘La pensée navale française’. 46. This point was made explicitly in Paul Chack, Tu Seras Marin (Paris, Éditions de France, 1939).

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47. Henri Barbusse, Le Feu: Journal d’une Escouade (Paris, Flammarion, 1965), p. 284. Henri Barbusse, Paroles d’un Combattant: Articles et Discours 1917–20 (Paris, Flammarion, 1920). 48. This was a common desire on the part of many veterans, see Cru, Témoins, pp. 21, 411 and 444, inter alia. 49. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 5. 50. Vice-amiral Bienaimé, La Guerre Navale, 1914–1918: Fautes et Responsibilités (Paris, Tallainder, 1920). Dartige de Fourchet’s byline in the opening pages was ‘to all those who search the truth’ n.p., Dartige de Fourchet, Souvenirs de Guerre. 51. This was the time when the German High Command launched its campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare. Halpern, The Naval War in the Mediterranean, pp. 307–56; Philippe Masson, La Mort et les Marins (Grenoble, Glénat, 1995), p. 356. 52. Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London and New York, Granta Press, 1995). 53. As regards slang, ‘your tripe open to the wind’, Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 22. Or corpses, Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 52; Masculinity and fear of death, Mer Noire, pp. 20, 30, 33. 54. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, pp. 77–85; Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 69. Charles Tillon, La Révolte Vient de Loin (Paris, Juillard, 1969), p. 157. 55. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, pp. 77–85. 56. Newspapers at the time of the sinking of the Robespierre were filled with news of the February Revolution. The Tsar was deposed on 15 March 1917 only four days before. 57. Also, lifeboats and rafts had sunk because they were overloaded and there had been fighting between those aboard and those wishing to get to safety. It was torpedoed on its journey between Toulon and Salonika on 4 October 1916 with the loss of 596. For documents about the sinking see the website. Accessed on 23 December 2008: http://chtiste.com/batailles1418/ gallia/htm. Minutes du Greffe du Tribune Civil de Première Instance de L’Arrondissement de Toulon, Var, 31 October 1917. 58. Service Historique de la Marine (henceforth, SHM) SS G 32 Contre-Amiral Habert, Rapport sur la perte du Danton, 3 June 1917. 59. Fauxbras papers, Détails des Services: Gaston Sterckeman, 25 March 1936. 60. SHM SS G 32 letter Paul Chack to Marcel de Lingeuil, 19 July 1933. 61. SHM SS G 32 telegram from the Massue to CEC and Amiral Atmah, 23 March 1917. 62. 22 rather than 30–35 minutes. 63. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 84. 64. Le Matin (31 March 1917). 65. Charles Tillon, La Révolte Vient de Loin (Paris, Union Générale des Éditions, 1969), p. 157. 66. As survivors watched the Danton sinking they called out ‘Adieu, Danton’, and there is no mention of ‘Vive la France!’, Le Figaro (30 March 1917). 67. Cru, Témoins, pp. 97, 158, 391, 475. For criticism that Cru’s criteria were too rigid, Audouin-Rouzeau and Becker, 14–18, p. 38. 68. Cru, Du Témoignage, pp. 47–72. 69. Victor Boudon, Avec Péguy de la Lorraine à la Marne (Paris, Hachette, 1916), pp. 82–3.

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Notes 203 70. Commandant Alphonse-Louis Grasset, Vingt Jours de Guerre aux Temps Héroïque: Carnet de Route d’un Commandant de Compagnie: Août 1914 (Paris and Nancy, Berger-Levrault, 1918); Colonel Alphonse-Louis Grasset, Les Crimes Allemands. Les Massacres d’Ethe et de Gomery, août 1914 (Paris and Nancy, Berger-Levrault, n.d.). 71. Louis-Fernand Céline, Voyage to the End of the Night (New York, New Directions, 1960), pp. 87 and 119. 72. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 87. 73. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 93. 74. Chack also claimed that the crew of the Châteaurenault also shouted the phrase after a torpedo attack on 14 December 1917, Jean-Jacques Antier and Paul Chack, Histoire Maritime de la Première Guerre Mondiale (Paris, Éditions France-Empire, 1969), p. 737. 75. SS G 32 Contre-amiral Habert, Secret report on the loss of the Danton, 3 June 1917, p. 12. 76. SS G 32 Contre-amiral Habert, Secret report on the loss of the Danton, 3 June 1917, p. 18. Note from Vice-amiral de Bon to Directeur Central des Constructions Navales, 11 July 1917. Jean le Gouin, p. 83. 77. The connection with the Black Sea was that the expedition’s admiral had lost his son, an officer, in this event and according to Fauxbras had harboured a deep hatred of the ranks because of evidence of violence between officers and men as the ship went down. The legend of violence between officers and the men found its way into print in Paul Vigné d’Octon, Pages Rouges (Marseilles, XXe Siècle, 1922), p. 35. Marty incorrectly cites 26 April, Marty, Révolte (1932), p. 209. Paul Chack, Branlebas de Combat (Paris, Les É ditions de France, 1932), pp. 24–62. The sinking is also mentioned in Tillon, La Révolte Vient de Loin, p. 148. As with many legends there was some basis in truth, there were clashes over entry onto the commander’s launch, Amiral Docteur, Carnet de Bord, p. 71. 78. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 212–17. 79. As Docteur put it, ‘The loss of the Gambetta, the bad news from the Dardanelles, tenacious information enervated everybody’, Docteur, Carnet de Bord, p. 70. 80. On the inauguration of a monument at Castrignano del Capo on 18 February 1923, ‘Le monument aux victims du “Léon Gambetta” ’, Revue Maritime, semester 1 (1923), pp. 522–4. Commemorating the 20-year anniversary, Le Moniteur de la Flotte (6 May 1936). 81. Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy, 1871– 1904 (Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 1987), pp. 155–80. Étienne Taillemite, Histoire Ignorée de la Marine Française (Paris, Perrin, 1987), pp. 354–68. 82. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 68. 83. Philippe Masson, Histoire de la Marine Française: de la Vapeur à L’Atome, vol. 2 (Paris, C. Lavauzelle, 1983), p. 240. 84. Chack, Branlebas, p. 43. 85. Chack, Branlebas, p. 46. Fauxbras commented on this point in Pourquoi La Marine a Trahi, pp. 27–8. 86. Georg von Trapp, To the Last Salute: Memories of an Austrian U-Boat Commander (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2007), pp. 21–6. Le Figaro (30 April 1915) reported on the official communiqué from Vienna saluting the U-5 and its commander von Trapp.

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87. Le Figaro (29 April 1915); Le Temps (1 May 1915); L’Intransigeant (30 April 1915). The phrase was first recorded on 28 April in the Italian Naval Commander of Brindisi’s report. He visited survivors in the infirmary on their arrival after their rescue. SHM SS G 3 Naval Commander of Brindisi’s report, 28 April 1915. There is no evidence to link the Italian naval report and the French press and such a link seems implausible. The phrase appeared in official communiqués two days after it did in the press. 88. Le Figaro (29 April 1915). 89. L’Intransigeant (29 April 1915). On the honour of the commander of the Bouvet who went down with his ship, Claude Farrère, Histoire de la Marine Française (Paris, Flammarion, 1934), p. 375. 90. L’Intransigeant (1 May 1915). 91. Le Matin (29 April 1915). 92. Pierre Lhande, L’Enseigne de Vaisseau Auguste Lefèvre (Paris, Gabriel Beauchesnes, 1919). Lieutenant de Vaisseau Charles Ballande: Extraits de ses Lettres (Paris, Librarie de Fischbacher, 1916). 93. Quoting a letter from quartermaster gunner Cado Joachim, 13 May 1915, Lieutenant de Vaisseau Charles Ballande, p. 29. 94. Interestingly, as a ship’s captain Chack encountered one survivor, Jean Le Gall, who told him of the sinking of the ship. Le Gall was one of the men who reported hearing ‘Vive la France!’, Chack, Branlebas, pp. 58–9. SHM SS G 3 Dépositions des survivants, premier maître cannonier Jean Le Gall, 31 May 1915. This testimony was the only one in which an individual shouted ‘Vive la France’ before disappearing into the sea. 95. On the religious dimension of death of a naval officer see Audouin-Rouzeau and Becker, 14–18, p. 128. 96. SHM SS G 3 Dépositions des survivants, Yves Le Goff. 97. On the changing art of dying in nineteenth-century France, Thomas A. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993). 98. Henri Béraud, Quinze Jours avec la Mort: La Chasse au Lampiste (Paris, Plon, 1951), pp. 221–3; see also his granddaughter’s novel evoking his courage in his last hour and the ‘ambiguity of his ideas’, Anne Pons, Dark Rosaleen (Paris, B. Grasset, 1991), p. 261. For another sentimental account by his daughter and granddaughter, Pierre Rigoulot, Les Enfants de L’Épuration (Paris, Plon, 1993), pp. 105–7. Ironically, the phrase featured in the deaths of resisters, including French communists, during the war, Lucien Scheler (ed.), Lettres des Fusillés (Paris, France d’Abord, 1946) 27 out of 71 used the phrase Vive la France! 99. Evelyn Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1993), pp. 10–14. 100. Flammarion’s literary director Max Fischer suggested a change of subtitle for Jean Le Gouin: La Marine de Guerre to Journal d’un Simple Matelot de la Grande Guerre, Secrétaire de la Direction Littéraire to Gaston Sterckeman, 10 November 1931. Likewise with the subtitle of Mer Noire, Directeur Littéraire to Gaston Sterckeman, 4 January 1935. 101. Vincennes, Fauxbras papers, Marine nationale: État signalétique et de service: Kléber Gaston Sterckeman, 25 March 1936. He was stationed in Bizerte

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Notes 205

102. 103. 104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

111. 112.

113.

2

on 27 October 1916, serving at the Centre Aérien de Bizerte and then the Aérostation Maritime de Bizerte. Bizerte became the principal location for a second wave of mutinies on the battleships Voltaire (19–22 June 1919) and the Condorcet (11–12 June). After requesting a transfer from these duties, he eventually returned to a ship – the Surveillante (22 September 1919–4 January 1921) – that is, after the Black Sea mutiny of April 1919. Pierre Vottero, ‘Mutinerie à bord du cuirassé Voltaire en juin 1919’, in Jean Le Ramey and Pierre Vottero, Mutins de la Mer Noire (Paris, Éditions Sociales, 1973), pp. 83–104, also on Bizerte, Jean-Luc Barré and Jacques RaphaëlLeygues, Les Mutins de la Mer Noire (Paris, Plon, 1981), pp. 109–12. La Gazette (10 April 1932). Les Humbles (October 1933), pp. 30–1. César Fauxbras’s personal papers, private collection, press cuttings for 1932 and 1935. On occasion, the references are not full in these, with publication name or date missing. Both the following reviews described Chack as ‘excellent’, Journal du Mutilé et de l’Ancien Combattant (28 February 1932) and L’Européen (29 April 1932). Afrique, 110 (June 1935). Also, L’Humanité (11 June 1935). Le Populaire (24 February 1932); L’Humanité (1 March 1932). Revue des Lectures (16 July 1932). La Flèche (28 June 1935). The Mediterranean fleet did not disguise their discontent complaining that life on ship was unsupportable and that if they were sent to fight the Bolsheviks they would imitate the France, AN F 7 13165 State of morale in the navy, Cherbourg, 18 December 1919. AN7 13349 Report no. 5 of agent P, 24 February 1920. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm On the renaissance of the navy, Peter Jackson, ‘Naval policy and national strategy in France, 1933–37’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 23, 4 (December 2000), pp. 130–59. Chack, ‘Qui tient la mer’, pp. 3–4.

Black Sea Mutiny: Consciousness and Memory 1. Christopher M. Bell and Bruce A. Elleman, ‘Naval mutinies in the twentieth century and beyond’, in Christopher M. Bell and Bruce A. Elleman (eds), Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (London, Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 264–76. Jane Hathaway (ed.), Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective (Westport, Praeger, 2001). 2. Philippe Masson, ‘The French naval mutinies of 1919’, in Christopher M. Bell and Bruce A. Elleman (eds), Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (London, Frank Cass, 2003), p. 119. 3. Masson, La Marine Française et la Mer Noire, p. 338. 4. For him, the mutinies were against the existing strategy of the high command not the war itself, Pedroncini, Les Mutineries de 1917, p. 309. 5. Drawing on Foucauldian anthropologist, James C. Scott, Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience.

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6. Christophe Charle, La Crise des Sociétés Impériales: Allemagne, France, GrandeBretagne: Essai d’Histoire Sociale Compare (Paris, Seuil, 2001), pp. 260–1. On left traditions in the army, Romain Ducoulombier, ‘La “sociale” sous l’uniforme: obéissance dans les rangs du socialisme et du syndicalisme français, 1914–16’, in André Loez and Nicolas Mariot (eds), Obéir/Désobéir: Les Mutineries de 1917 en Perspective (Paris, La Découverte, 2008), pp. 266–79. Emphasizing the social conditions of the poilus in the trenches as the primary cause of the mutinies, Denis Rolland, La Grève des Tranchées: les Mutineries de 1917 (Paris, Imago, 2005). 7. André Loez, ‘Les mots et cultures de l’indiscipline: les graffiti des mutins de 1917’, Genèses, 59, 2 (2005), pp. 25–46. 8. Michael Jabara Carley, ‘The origins of the French intervention in the Russian Civil War, January–March 1918: a reappraisal’, Journal of Modern History, 48 (September 1976), pp. 413–39; Michael Jabara Carley, Revolution and Intervention: The French Government and the Russian Civil War, 1917–1919 (Buffalo, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983). 9. Peter Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977). 10. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 104–5. 11. P. Facon, ‘Les mutineries dans les corps expéditionnaires français en Russie Septentrionale (décembre 1918–avril 1919)’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 24 (1977), pp. 455–74. 12. Carley, Revolution and Intervention, pp. 160–2. Masson, La Marine Français et la Mer Noire, p. 338. 13. SHM SS Ed 30 Captain of the vessel Herber-Pagillère, Commandant of the Battleship France to Vice-Admiral High Commandant at Sebastopol, 23 April 1919. 14. Jean-Jacques Antier, ‘Révolte des équipages de la flotte à Toulon’, Les Dossiers Histoire de la Mer (February–March 1980), pp. 73–86; On mutinies across other foreign interventionist forces, Benjamin Isitt, ‘Mutiny from Victoria to Vladivostok, December 1918’, Canadian Historical Review, 87, 2 (2006), pp. 223–64. 15. Carley, Revolution and Intervention, pp. 145 and 231. 16. André Marty, Le Parti Communiste Français Né et Forgé dans la Lutte contre la Guerre (Paris, Bethune, 1972). 17. André Marty, Les Heures Glorieuses de la Mer Noire (Paris, Éditions du Parti Communiste Français, 1932). 18. See the poster iconography of the naked Marty in his cell or the giant Marty towering above the Château de Vincennes, AN F7 13165 Poster: ‘Marty: peuple, brise ses chaines et tu brisera les tiennes’. 19. Maurice Paz, Les Révoltes de la Mer Noire (Paris, Librairie du Travail, 1921), p. 35. Paz was one of Louis Badina’s lawyers at his court martial held on 6–10 March 1920. The Librarie de Travail of the syndicalist militants (Rosmer, Monatte, Martinet and Hasfeld) published the work. 20. On attitude of the SFIO. 21. Paris, AN F 7 13165 for details of the campaign. For successor campaign, AN F 7 13952 Report on Le Comité Général pour l’Amnistie, 9 September 1923 with meetings of 2000 and 3000 people in Paris and a day of action on 23 October 1923. For a brief discussion of the campaign, Masson, La Marine Française et la Mer Noire, pp. 534–7.

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Notes 207 22. For example between 14 October 1920 and 9 February 1921, 21 meetings were held in provincial France with the largest being in Calais and Le Havre with 800 attending, AN F 7 13165 Table of meetings, n.d.; on 14 December 1919, 6000 attended a public meeting in Paris and 5000 on 13 March 1920, ibid., report on Committee of Defence of the Sailors of the Black Sea, n.d. 23. AN F 7 13952 press cuttings of the campaigns to elect Marty, including Le Peuple, 3 October 1921; L’Humanité, 24 May 1923 and ibid., 25 June 1923. 24. L’Humanité, 27 September 1923. 25. Charles Tillon, Robert Bonnieux, Henri Alquier and Pierre Vottero cited in, Dictionnaire Biographique du Mouvement Ouvrier Français: Le Maitron CD Rom (Paris, Éditions de l’Atelier, 1997). 26. It was republished in 1932, 1939 and 1951 (after PCF cabinet members were expelled from the government and while the Cold War intensified with the Korean War). Indeed, the Communist Party of Great Britain produced English translations of Marty’s experiences during the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Marty-Tillon affair of 1952, when these two Black Sea mutineers lost a factional battle in the PCF leadership, changed all that. The 1970 edition, in association with the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire’s newspaper Rouge, signalled an effort of the 68 generation to reconstruct an authentic French revolutionary tradition free from the Stalinist deformation of the PCF. Similar motives can be attributed to Charles Tillon’s memoirs of the event published in 1969. In a recent edition with a new preface and chapter by Léo Figuères, he recently reclaimed Marty for the PCF believing that his expulsion was a mistake because of Thorez’s absence from the Central Committee, André Marty, La Révolte de la Mer Noire (Pantin, Le Temps des Cerises, 1999), pp. 7–8. On American anxieties about the use of Marty’s publications in the early Cold War, Edward Rice-Maximin, ‘The United States and the French left, 1945–49: the view of the State Department’, Journal of Contemporary History, 19, 4 (1984), p. 742. 27. The Popular Front was also used in this way at times. André Marty, L’Affaire Marty (Paris, Deux Rives, 1955). Yves Le Bras, Les Rejetés: L’Affaire Marty-Tillon (Paris, La Table Ronde, 1974). 28. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 240. 29. Merle Blanc, 133 (17 October 1936). 30. Where he lived from 1934. 31. La Flèche (17 March 1939). For a still sympathetic reference, Merle Blanc, 103 (21 March 1936). Pierre Broué and Émile Témine, La Révolution et la Guerre d’Espagne (Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1961), pp. 335–7. 32. AN F7 13163 reports on unrest and communist propaganda in the navy including the mutiny of the Ernest Renan in Toulon, September 1927. On mutinies at Oléron and Calvi, AN F 7 13351 M. Champeil, La Révolte d’Oléron (Paris, Fédération des Jeunesses Communistes, 1930). AN F7 13164 Secours Rouge International, Les Mutins de Calvi: L’Histoire d’une Victoire Ouvrière et de Cinq Acquittements (n.d.). On mutinies during the Rif war, David Slavin, ‘The French left and the Rif war, 1924–5: racism and the limits to internationalism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 26, 1 (1991), p. 15. 33. Débat, Marine Oblige, pp. 20–6. 34. L’Oeuvre (18 June 1935). 35. AN F 7 13180 police reports on ARAC.

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208 Notes 36. AN F 7 13352 Report on conscientious objection, 19 February 1933. This reports on the Ligue International des Combattants de la Paix formed in 1930. Conscientious objection and religion had a much greater strategic significance in British than French pacifism, see Caroline Moorehead, Troublesome People: Enemies of War 1916–1986 (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1987); Norman Ingram, ‘Repressed memory syndrome: interwar French pacifism and the attempt to recover France’s pacifist past’, French History, 18, 3 (2004), pp. 315–30; Sudhir Hazareesingh, ‘Why no peace movement in France?’, in Sudhir Hazareesingh (ed.), Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 178–206; Norman Ingram, The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France 1919–39 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991). Victor Margueritte, ‘De l’objection de conscience à l’action de masse’, Commune (1935), pp. 573–81. 37. With reference to Admiral Amet, Merle Blanc, 95 (25 January 1936). 38. Richard Stumpf, War, Mutiny and Revolution in the German Navy (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1967). 39. Merle Blanc, 102 (14 March 1936); ibid., 107 (18 April 1936); ibid., 173 (24 July 1937). Frédéric Rousseau, ‘Chemin des Dames, lieu d’amnésie nationale ... un parcours au sein de l’historiographie des trois semaines sanglantes depuis 1945’, in Nicolas Offenstadt (ed.), Le Chemin des Dames: de L’Événement à la Mémoire (Paris, Stock, 2004), pp. 360–72. 40. Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, France and the Great War 1914–1918 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 117–31. Consider Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s controversial speech at Craonne recognizing the mutineers, 5 November 1998. 41. Merle Blanc, 133 (17 October 1936). 42. On the extreme rarity of the sympathetic testimonies of the mutiny, Philippe Olivera, ‘Le mutin derrière le fusillé, ou le silence durable de l’acteur’, in André Loez and Nicolas Mariot (eds), Obéir/Désobéir: Les Mutineries de 1917 en Perspective (Paris, La Découverte, 2008), pp. 416–32. 43. Offenstadt, Les Fusillés de la Grande Guerre, pp. 82–128; Prost, Les Anciens Combattants et la Société Française, vol. 3, pp. 93–8. François Bouloc, ‘Le Chemin des Dames dans l’après-guerre, ou les enjeux de la construction exacerbés’, in Nicolas Offenstadt (ed.), Le Chemin des Dames: de L’Événement à la Mémoire (Paris, Stock, 2004), pp. 255–69; Jean-François Jagielski, ‘Mémoire collective/mémoire individuelle: les monuments commémoratifs du Chemin des Dames après la guerre’, in Nicolas Offenstadt (ed.), Le Chemin des Dames: de l’Événement à la Mémoire (Paris, Stock, 2004), pp. 270–85. 44. Fauxbras failed to publish Le Corsaire Boiteux which was to follow directly on from Jean Le Gouin, Vincennes, César Fauxbras’s personal papers, private collection, letter César Fauxbras to Max Fischer (Flammarion), 14 May 1934. Other rejected manuscripts were La Moche et L’Amour and Tartalain à travers L’Atlantique, letter Flammarion to Gaston Sterckeman, 17 October 1932; letter Gaston Sterckeman to secretary (Flammarion), 18 April 1933. 45. Inviting comparisons with Louis Ferdinand Céline, Vincennes, César Fauxbras’s personal papers, private collection, Le Mois (1 January 1936), p. 197; Nouvelle Revue Critique (December 1935); Jean Pomier in Afrique, 110 (February 1936), pp. 17–21. For the comment, L’Intransigeant (20 February 1932).

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Notes 209 46. Deploying the concepts of official versus vernacular memory, Bodnar, Remaking America. 47. Le Populaire (12 May 1932). 48. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 95 and 117. 49. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 22. 50. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 40. 51. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 136 and 177. 52. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 136. 53. SHM SS Ed 119 Vice-Admiral Salaun, Secret report to the ministry, 12 May 1919, pp. 3 and 10. 54. For a discussion of the workers of Toulon arsenal and the relations of power at Armistice, Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 63. 55. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 76; Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, pp. 75–6. 56. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 240. 57. Fauxbras, Pourquoi, pp. 18–21 and 80. 58. Ronald Chalmers Hood III, ‘The French navy and parliament between the wars’, International Historical Review, 6, 3 (1984), pp. 386–403. 59. Ronald Chalmers Hood III, Royal Republicans: The French Naval Dynasties between the Wars (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1985). 60. Jackson, ‘Naval policy and national strategy in France, 1933–37’, pp. 130–59. Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 109. Robert O. Paxton, ‘Darlan, un amiral entre deux blocs: réflexions sur une biographie récente’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire, 36 (October–December 1992), pp. 3–19. 61. Marc Ferro, ‘Cultural life in France, 1914–1918’, in Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (eds), European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 295–307. For the redefinition of this term to mean the patriotic press, politicians and civic organizations, La Vague, 48 (14 November 1918). The second issue of the Canard Enchaîné was devoted to the embusqué, Canard Enchaîné, 2 (20 September 1915). 62. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 97. 63. Journal du Mutilé et de l’Ancien Combattant (28 February 1932). 64. A soldier calls Vignes a shirker, Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 97. A further comparison, ibid., 75. Soldiers and sailors did share their desire for demobilization and unwillingness to fight in the Russian Civil War, Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 110. 65. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 114. 66. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 98. 67. Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (Lemington Spa, Berg, 1985), pp. 330–1. 68. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 73. 69. SHM SS Ed 30 Captain of the vessel Herber-Pagillère, Commandant of the Battleship France to Vice-Admiral High Commandant at Sebastopol, 23 April 1919. 70. On masculinity and mutineers of Spithead and the Nore, Jeffrey D. Glasco, ‘The seaman feels him-self a man’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 66 (2004), pp. 40–56.

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71. Merle Blanc, 145 (9 January 1937), for his homophobia towards Bailby and Gide as well as his denial of the existence of homosexuality in the navy; for the police surveillance of bars frequented by homosexuals, sailors and communists in the ports of France, AN F7 13960. 72. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 72. 73. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 230. 74. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 127. Shortly after the publication of Mer Noire, Fauxbras campaigned in his newspaper column against Mussolini’s imperial war in Abyssinia, lambasting those right-wing French journalists who expressed solidarity with their ‘latin sister’ against black Africans, Merle Blanc, 93 (11 January 1936); 94 (18 January 1936); 95 (25 January 1936); 98 (15 February 1936); 99 (22 February 1936). 75. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience. 76. SHM SS Ed 30 Contre-amiral Dumesnil, A Note on the Present Situation of our Crews from the Viewpoint of Discipline, 12 July 1919. 77. Of Fauxbras’s language, rouspeter, bousiller, zigouiller, rempilé, fayot, falzar, dégonfler, croustance all appear in François Dechlette, L’Argot des Poilus: Dictionnaire Humoristique et Philologique (Paris, Éditions de Paris, 2004). 78. For example, Admiral Schwerer who was the chef de cabinet of Admiral Lacaze, the Minister of the Navy during the war was a prominent member of Action Française, see Action Française, 12 (December 1936) for his obituary and Amiral Schwerer, Souvenirs de ma Vie Maritime (1878–1914) (Paris, SGIE, 1933). See also Olivier Forcade’s introduction in Olivier Forcade, Éric Duhamel and Philippe Vial (eds), Militaires en République 1870–1962: les Officiers, le Pouvoir et la Vie Publique en France (Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), pp. 30–1. 79. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, p. 49. 80. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 142. His hatred for the officers persisted, being happy to see them volunteer for death on the eastern front, Fauxbras, Journal 1939–44, p. 25. 81. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, pp. 129, 135. 82. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 148–50 and 196. 83. The atrocity at Kherson became a cause célèbre, being the subject of an official complaint from Rakovsky on behalf of the USSR and being frequently cited in revolutionary literature, André Marty, La Révolte de la Mer Noire: 1918–1919 (Paris, Bureau d’Éditions, 1932), p. 11 for photograph, 499–507 for Rakovsky’s statements. See also, Paz, Révoltes de la Mer Noire, pp. 14–16. 84. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 166. See also, Masson, La Marine Française et la Mer Noire, pp. 174–5. 85. Fauxbras discussed the patriots’ attitude towards medals in Merle Blanc, 136 (7 November 1936). 86. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, pp. 109–12. 87. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York, International Publishers, 1971), pp. 419–25. 88. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 111–12. 89. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 47. 90. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 82; as well as a precursor to the Russian Revolution, Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 60 and 70–1.

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Notes 211 91. SHM SSEd30 Captain of the vessel Herber-Pagillère, Commandant of the Battleship France to Vice-Admiral High Commandant at Sebastopol, 23 April 1919. 92. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 196–7. 93. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 65. 94. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, pp. 53–5, 60–2. For similar reactions to ‘monkey food’ (viande de singe, conserved meat), on the République in February 1916, Marty, La Révolte de la Mer Noire, p. 209. 95. Loez, ‘Les mots et cultures de l’indiscipline’. 96. For example, Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 103 and 144. 97. On song in the cultural history of the Great War, Ferro, ‘Cultural life in France’, p. 307; Claude Ribouillault, La Musique au Fusil: avec les Poilus dans la Grande Guerre (Rodez, Du Rouergue, 1996), pp. 44–7 for an antiofficer song, ‘Rongez vos Galons’. Serge Dillaz, La Chanson Française de Contestation des Barricades de la Commune a celles de mai 1968 (Paris, Seghers, 1973). 98. SS G 3 2ième Division légère de la 1ière Armée Navale: Situation des équipages, 20 April 1915. 99. Vice Admiral Bigot provided the preface to François Le Moyne, Chantons la Mer (Paris, Éditions Ouvrières, 1944), p. 92 for the song Branle-bas. Captain Armand Hayet was responsible for another collection, that Georges Leygues, the Minister of the Navy, praised, Captaine Armand Hayet, Chansons de Bord (Paris, Editions Denoël, 1937). Association des Anciens Éleves de L’École Navale, Chansons Baille (Paris, Association des Anciens Élèves de L’École Navale, 1952). 100. It should not be surprising that Vichy participated in this romanticization of simpler times through the sea song, Le Moyne, Chantons la Mer. 101. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 63. 102. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 103–4. 103. Fauxbras, Jean Le Gouin, pp. 32–3 and 67. Underlining the significance and ubiquity of this song, for another version of the ‘chanson des fayots’, see the communist propaganda sheet, Paris, Archives Nationales (henceforth AN) F 7 13164 Le Conscrit (March 1931). Yet another version is in Jean Rabaut, L’Antimilitarisme en France 1810–1975: Faits et Documents (Paris, Hachette, 1975), pp. 132–3. Seizing some ‘quite bolshevik’ literature including songs, SSED30 Enseigne de vaisseau Pirot to Contre-amiral Commandant de la DNBO, 12 June 1919. 104. Tillon, La Révolte Vient de Loin, pp. 210 and 273. See also, Guy Marival, ‘La chanson de Croanne. De la chanson palimpseste à la chanson manifeste’, in Nicolas Offenstadt (ed.), Le Chemin des Dames: de L’Événement à la Mémoire (Paris, Stock, 2004), pp. 350–9. 105. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 169 and 231–2. Marty, La Révolte de la Mer Noire, pp. 163–5. Also the ‘song of Odessa’, Jean Le Ramey and Pierre Vottero, Mutins de la Mer Noire (Paris, Éditions Sociales, 1973), pp. 229–34. The latter includes the ‘Gloire aux marins de la mer noire’ written by the sailors’ defence committee in 1919. 106. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 103, 132 and 136. 107. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 66. 108. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 232–4.

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109. Jossifort, ‘The Black Sea revolt’, p. 112. On the Voltaire, the sailors sang the Carmagnole and Internationale rather than obey orders thereby initiating a rebellion. 110. AN F7 13164 Ministry of the Interior files hold ‘Ne Flanche pas’ (Don’t chicken out) and ‘Honneur aux Marins Rouge’ and AN F7 13165 The song of the Black Sea mutineers. 111. Chack, Branlebas, p. 48. 112. On the growth and influence of anti-militarist propaganda, Paris, AN F7 13349 official report: La campagne pacifiste en France (1916), p.133. Tillon, La Révolte Vient de Loin, pp. 181, 216 and 364 on Pierre Brizon’s La Vague which began publication in January 1918 with a print run of 17,000 had only 2200 subscribers by 12 months but later had a print run of 76,000 and 8000 subscribers and despite confiscations an estimated 200,000 readers, La Vague, 53 (2 January 1919). Jossifort, ‘The Black Sea revolt’, p. 101. 113. La Vague, 44 (31 October 1918) on the terrible food, cramped conditions, poor hygiene and ravages of Spanish flu at the naval base Sidi-Abdullah. 114. La Vague, 58 (6 February 1919) and 61 (27 February 1919). 115. AN7 13349 Report no. 1 of Agent P (Brest), n.d., c. 1920; AN7 13349 Report P no. 5, 24 February 1920. 116. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 193. 117. AN7 13349 Report P, no. 5, 24 February 1920. 118. Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 103. 119. The radio was sabotaged, Fauxbras, Mer Noire, p. 25. 120. Jean Fréville’s sympathetic reviews of Jean Le Gouin and Mer Noire made this comparison, L’Humanité (16 February 1932) and (11 June 1935). 121. Cited in Bell and Elleman, Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century, p. 1.

3

Amongst the Unemployed: Meat to be Burnt 1. Roger MacGraw, A History of the French Working Class (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), vol. 2, p. 254. 2. Jacques Prévert, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange; les Portes de la Nuit: Scenarios (Paris, Gallimard, 1990); Eugène Dabit, Les Faubourgs de Paris (Paris, Gaillmard, 1933), p. 93. Dabit’s novel, Un Mort Tout Neuf, is riven with a sense of anxiety about economic crisis and the war, Eugène Dabit, Un Mort Tout Neuf (Paris, Gallimard, 1934). Jules Romains, Les Humbles: les Hommes de Bonne Volonté (Paris, Flammarion, 1933); D.-J. Guinard, ‘Chômeur’, À Contre-Courant, 2 (August 1935), pp. 88–93. 3. Victor Delacroix, Rationalisation et Chômage (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1933); Jules Moch, Socialisme et Rationalisation (Brussels, L’Eglantine, 1927), p. 58. 4. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 226 on a dole abuse story in the press. 5. La France de L’Est (11 January 1936). 6. TSF Programme (13 March 1936); Describing Léo Poldès as the presidentdictator of the Club du Faubourg, Merle Blanc, 120 (18 July 1936). 7. Vincennes, César Fauxbras’s personal papers, private collection, letter from Délégué general (Société des gens de lettres) to Fauxbras, 6 August 1936; R. Cabius to Sterckeman, 27 August 1936; the option on the film rights expired, Délégué général (Société des gens de lettres) to Fauxbras, 7 January 1937.

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Notes 213 8. Les Mois (1 January 1936). 9. L’Afrique, 116 (February 1936), pp. 17–21. 10. The zone was the area of ramshackle shanties constructed near to the walled fortifications; this area expanded when the walls were demolished from 1919. Les Bas Fonds and Hôtel du Nord focus on the site of poverty rather than specifically upon the unemployed. 11. André Kertész, Paris Vu par André Kertész (Paris, Plon, 1934). 12. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 30. 13. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 18. Contemporaneous social psychologist identified this temporal aspect to the psychological condition of unemployment, Paul Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda and Hans Zeisel, Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community (New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers, 2002). 14. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 6–7. 15. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 40. 16. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 134. 17. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 6. 18. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 110. 19. AN F22 682 Comité des Chômeurs du Quatrième Arrondissement, Le Cahier de Situations de Chomeurs du Quatrième Arrondissement (unpublished, n.d., c. 1933). 20. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 136–7. 21. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 226. 22. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 150–1. 23. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 41. 24. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 16–17 and 48–9. 25. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 186. 26. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 25, 38 and 77–8. Fauxbras papers, Press release, 14 August 1935. Romains, Les Humbles. 27. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 34–5. 28. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 197. 29. For example, G. Fontenay, ‘Qu’est-ce que la rationalisation’, Cahiers du Bolchévisme, 63 (31 December 1926), pp. 2405–11. 30. AN F7 13757 file on tenants associations had several references to the ‘vultures’. The Union Confédéral des Locataires de France et les Colonies’s newspaper – Le Réveil des Locataires – had as its emblem a vulture being strangled. Two posters from this file also feature landlords as vultures. 31. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 57. 32. Renoir wanted to transpose this to a French setting but the PCF which provided some of the finance obliged him to compromise so it was set in ‘Moscow-sur-Marne’. 33. G. Méquet, ‘Housing problems and the depression’, International Labour Review, 27, 2 (1933), p. 178. Gabrielle Letellier, Jean Perret, H. E. Zuber and A. Dauphin-Meunier, Une Enquête sur le Chômage (Paris, Institut Scientifique de Recherches Economiques et Sociales, 1938–46), 3 vols, vol. 3, p. 153. 34. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 237. 35. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 107. 36. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 162. 37. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 171–2.

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38. Claude Thovenot and Annette Minot, ‘Incidence de la crise de 1929 sur les consommations en Meurthe-et-Moselle’, Annales de L’Est, 22, 3 (1970), p. 245. Renée Odic, ‘Les effets du chômage sur la santé publique’, Presse Médicale, 95 (26 November 1932), p. 1973. Maurice Chaumeau, Une Enquête sur l’Influence du Chômage sur l’Alimentation Familiale (Lyon, M. et L. Riou, 1940). 39. L’Humanité (31 July 1932); Le Travailleur (11 April 1936); Le Sans-Travail (Valence) (March 1932); Le Chômeur (Drancy), 3 (December 1932); L’Émancipation (25 February 1933); Le Cri des Chômeurs, 7 (February 1932); for the suicides of the unemployed in the Somme, Archives Départementales de la Somme 99 M 141 Prefectoral report, 22 September 1935. 40. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 158. 41. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 40. 42. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 49. 43. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 230–2. There is an interesting parallel in Hôtel du Nord, when the attempt is botched. 44. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 240. 45. Stephen Constantine, ‘Love on the Dole and its reception in the 1930’, Literature and History, 8, 2 (1982), pp. 232–49. 46. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 32. 47. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 51. 48. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 49. 49. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 149. 50. Denis de Rougement, Journal d’un Intellectuel en Chômage (Paris, Albin Michel, 1937). Paul Guitard, Chômage (Paris, Maurice d’Hartoy, 1933), pp. 33–81; Roland Weil, Le Chômage de la Jeunesse Intellectuelle Diplômée (Paris, Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1937); M. Ingrand, La Main d’Oeuvre et le Chômage. III: Le Chômage des Travailleurs Intellectuels: Conclusions Adoptées par le Conseil National Économique dans sa Session du 20 Décembre 1937 et Rapport (Melun, Conseil National Économique, 1938). 51. Maurice Joyeux, Le Consulat Polonais (Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1957). This is an anarchist account of protests of the Polish unemployed in France during the 1930s critical of the role of the Communist Party. For his experiences in the movement of the unemployed, Maurice Joyeux, Souvenirs d’un Anarchiste 1913–44 (Anthony, Editions Tops, 2002). 52. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 197–9. 53. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 35. 54. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 197. 55. Where unemployment was concerned veterans’ associations generally argued for preferential treatment for Frenchmen and veterans. This added to the xenophobic clamours against the employment of foreigners. 56. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 211–12. 57. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 239. 58. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 87. 59. (‘Me faire casser la gueule’...), Fauxbras, Viande, p. 109. 60. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 109. 61. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 42–3. 62. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 30. 63. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 16. 64. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 154–5.

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Notes 215 65. It was established to provide for veterans’ pensions and those affected by agricultural calamity, Fauxbras, Viande, p. 137. 66. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 164–5. 67. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 115. 68. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 40. 69. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 98. 70. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 75. 71. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 79. 72. Leo Huberman, Man’s Worldly Goods: The Story of the Wealth of Nations (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1968), p. 309; The Rouen committee of the unemployed used it, La Lutte des Chômeurs, 1 (February 1932). It formed the basis of an argument about the irrationality of the world market in a powerful scene on a Berlin tram in Kuhle Wampe. Between 1933 and 1937 over thirty million sacks of Brazilian coffee were destroyed, Fiona GordonAshworth, ‘Agricultural commodity control under Vargas in Brazil, 1930–45’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 12, 1 (May 1980), pp. 87–105. 73. Ellen Wilkinson, The Town That Was Murdered (London, Victor Gollancz, 1939). 74. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (London, Heinemann, 1966), p. 477. 75. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 152–5. 76. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 237. 77. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 43–4. 78. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 52–3. 79. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 175. 80. Romains, Les Humbles, pp. 76–7. 81. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 137. 82. Patterns of social solidarity contrast sharply in literary accounts of Berlin white-collar workers and the Lancashire industrial workers, A. V. Subiotto, ‘Kleiner Mann – was nun? And Love on the Dole: two novels of the depression’, A. F. Bance, Weimar Writers and Politics (Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1982), pp. 77–90. 83. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 77. 84. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 116. 85. Fauxbras, Viande, pp. 91–3. 86. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 236. 87. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 198. 88. Because of audience reaction, Duvivier accepted a more optimistic resolution to the plot more in line with the spirit of the summer of 1936. 89. Fauxbras, Viande, p. 246. 90. Gabrielle Letellier, Jean Perret, H. E. Zuber and A. Dauphin-Meunier, Une Enquête sur le Chômage (Paris, Institut Scientifique de Recherches Economiques et Sociales, 1938–46), 3 vols.

4 A Candide for the 1930s: The Myths of the Popular Front 1. Originally subtitled ‘ou le Marxisme’ when written in 1934 as a satire on the Marxist parties, especially the PCF, from a revolutionary perspective, Fauxbras papers, letter from César Fauxbras to Max Fischer (Flammarion), 14 May 1934.

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2. Via the merger of Jules Guesde’s Parti Ouvrier Français (French Workers’ Party), blanquist Edouard Vaillant’s Comité Central Révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Central Committee) and the reformist Jean Allemane’s Parti Socialiste Ourvier Révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party). 3. Philippe Buton, ‘Les effectifs du PCF 1920–84’, Communisme, 7 (1985), pp. 5–30. 4. Also deploying Voltairean analogy, Alain, ‘Le Roi Pol’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, 26, 300 (1 September 1938), pp. 353–69. 5. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 14. 6. Voltaire, Candide (Baltimore, Penguin, 1947), p. 4. 7. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 29. 8. Identifying the latter two, Panurge (18 March 1938). As well as a ‘certain lady well known on the left’ for Yollande. 9. Brian Jenkins, ‘The six février 1934 and the “survival” of the French Republic’, French History, 20, 3 (2006), pp. 333–51. 10. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 144. 11. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 183. 12. Fauxbras, Antide, pp. 209–10. 13. César Fauxbras, ‘Soliloque d’un copain de la base’, Les Humbles, 4 (April 1936), pp. 28–9. 14. Nicolas Faucier, Pacifisme et Antimilitarisme dans l’Entre-Deux-Guerres (Paris, Spartacus, 1983), pp. 191–5. 15. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 27. 16. On the memory of 1936, Maurice Thorez, Fils du Peuple (Paris, Editions Sociales, 1960), p. 133; In a section ‘Ils l’ont vécu’ (they lived through it), different communists remembered: ‘It was the end of boiled potatoes and dry bread for all the meals’ ... ‘People often talk of dignity, but it is something to no longer be forced to sleep with the animals.’ ... ‘Wages doubled tripled, quadrupled, dignity was rediscovered’ ... ‘At Renault, what a change after 36. Before people spoke of “Renault prison”. ... After 36, everything changed.’ ... ‘With paid holidays, in 1937, I went on holiday, I who had six children, I would never have thought that possible.’ Vie Ouvrière, 1130 (27 April 1966), pp. 44–6. 17. For the struggle of Parisian metalworkers culminating in the 40-hour week, Tristran Rémy, La Grande Lutte: Roman (Paris, Éditions Sociales Internationales, 1937). Also dealing with the unemployed committees, strikes and the French international brigades, Fauxbras’s friend Jean Fréville, Pain de Brique: Roman Contemporain (Paris, Flammarion, 1937). 18. On ‘un-French’ character of the PCF, Annie Kriegel, The French Communists: Profile of a People (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1972). 19. Les Humbles was a left periodical which combined literary and political matters, including the publication of extracts of Trotsky’s writings. 20. Fauxbras, ‘Soliloque d’un copain’, p. 27. 21. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 77. 22. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 119. 23. Sophie Coeuré, La Grande Lueur à l’Est: Les Français et l’Union Soviétique 1917– 1939 (Paris, Seuil, 1999), p. 162. 24. Jules Romains, Les Hommes de Bonne Volonté: Volume 19: Cette Grande Lueur à l’Est (Paris, Flammarion, 1945); André Gide, Retour de L’URSS (Paris, Gallimard, 1936).

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Notes 217 25. Sophie Coeuré, ‘Les récits d’URSS de Paul Nizan: à la recherche d’un réalisme socialiste de témoignage. Suivi d’extraits inédits de Paul Nizan, “Souvenir de Bakou” ’, Sociétés et Représentations, 15 (2003), pp. 99–112. 26. Paul Nizan’s criticisms of Gide’s account of the Soviet Union, Vendredi (22 January 1937). 27. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 123. 28. On state capitalism and implicitly Souvarine, Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (New York, Pathfinder Press, 1972), pp. 245–8. 29. Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates since 1917 (Leiden, Brill, 2007). 30. Fauxbras, Viande à Brûler, p. 152. 31. Literally cow faces, which was used by Fauxbras to denote authority figures, especially officers or police. 32. Fauxbras, Antide, pp. 156–7. 33. Luis Buñuel to André Breton, 6 May 1932 in Paul Louis Thirard, ‘Colloque à Pordenone’, Positif: Revue de Cinéma, 471 (2000), pp. 64–5. 34. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 163. 35. Fauxbras’s review – the first seven lines were enough to send him to sleep – of Nizan’s Cheval de Troie, Les Humbles, 11 (November 1935), pp. 29–30. 36. Fauxbras, ‘Soliloque d’un copain’, pp. 28–9. 37. See the critique of syndicalist Kléber Legay of Stakhanovism and the condition of the Russian worker. Kléber Legay, Un Mineur Français chez les Russes (Paris, P. Tisné, 1937). Fernand Grenier, Réponse à Kléber Legay (Paris, Éditions des Amis de l’Union Soviétique, 1937). Also Gide, Retour de L’URSS, p. 43. 38. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR 1935–41 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988). 39. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 206. For criticisms of Stakhanovism in his journalism, Merle Blanc, 95 (25 January 1936). 40. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 208. 41. He first sent the manuscript to Flammarion on 9 June 1934, Fauxbras papers, letter from Sterckeman to the secretary of Max Fischer (Flammarion), 9 June 1934. He unsuccessfully tried other publishers after Flammarion’s rejection. The original manuscript is dated 25 March–8 June 1934. 42. James D. Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998). 43. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 211. 44. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 213. 45. Fauxbras, Antide, p. 219. 46. Tribune de Genève (7 February 1938). Petit Bleu (1 March 1938). 47. Afrique, 137 (March 1938), pp. 532–7. This was a journal by French intellectuals who had settled in North Africa. 48. Nouvelle Revue Française (1 December 1938). 49. Écho du Nord (21 February 1938). 50. La Grande Réforme (March 1938). 51. Feuilleton du Le Petit Parisien, 1 (5 February 1938). 52. L’Idée Libre (March–April 1938), p. 143. 53. La Grande Réforme (March 1938). 54. Petit Matin (Tunis) (23 May 1938). André Billy in L’Oeuvre (6 February 1938).

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218

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55. Libération (March 1938). 56. This organization was led by Gaston Bergery. Fauxbras later briefly joined this organization, La Flèche (26 February 1938). 57. La Patrie Humaine (11 February 1938). 58. M. Chambellard, ‘Les banqueroutes frauduleuses’, Révolution Proletarienne (25 April 1938), pp. 1–2. 59. André Calvès, Sans Bottes ni Médailles (Montreuil, La Brèche, 1984). 60. For a fascinating account of the influence of John Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution on Orwells’ book, John Newsinger, Orwell’s Politics (Houndmills, Palgrave, 1999), pp. 116–20. 61. Fréville’s novel passed from the unemployed struggles, to the great strikes, ending with the defence of Madrid, Jean Fréville, Pain de Brique (Paris, Éditeurs Français Reunis, 1956); see also, the novel about the strike of Parisian metalworkers during summer 1936 culminating in the announcement of a 40-hour week in the industry, Rémy, La Grande Lutte. 62. Buton, ‘Les effectifs du PCF 1920–84’, pp. 5–30. 63. Philippe Burrin, La Dérive Fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery 1933–1945 (Paris, Seuil, 1986); see also for the view that French fascism resulted from the legacy of revisionist Marxism, Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986).

5 Pacifism on the Precipice of War 1. Merle Blanc, 91 (28 December 1935) and 256 (25 February 1939). 2. Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral and Fernand Terrou, Histoire Générale de la Presse Française, vol. 3 (1972), pp. 522–3. For the editorial board in 1936–7 see, Nomenclature des Journaux et Revues en Langue Française 1936–37 (Argus, Paris, 1937), p. 159. Dictionnaire Biographique du Mouvement Ouvrier Français. For Merle’s activism alongside Hervé in solidarity with Spanish revolutionaries in 1909, see AN F7 13066 report on demonstration at Spanish embassy on 9 September 1909. 3. Fauxbras papers, Fauxbras, ‘Lettre ouverte à M. le Ministre de la Guerre’, L’Oeuvre (28 November 1935). This was also published as a pamphlet. He also wrote accounts of a Parisian dosshouse, Fauxbras, ‘Une nuit dans le château des rentiers’, L’Oeuvre (16 and 17 December 1935). 4. Outlining his journalistic principles, Vautel, Mon Film, pp. 168–85. 5. L’Humanité (5 December 1923–27 May 1924). Arthur Raffalovitch, L’Abominable Vénalité de la Presse: d’Après les Documents des Archives Russes (1897–1917) (Paris, Librairie du Travail, 1931). Jean Galtier-Boissière and René Lefebvre, ‘Histoire de la presse’, Le Crapouillot (June 1934), pp. 67–9. 6. For a critique of the left’s objections to bourrage, Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau, ‘Bourrage de crâne et information en France 1915–18’, in Jean-Jacques Becker and Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau (eds), Les Sociétés Européens et la Guerre de 1914–18 (Paris, Université de Paris X-Nanterre, 1990); for a more standard view, Patrick Eveno, L’Argent de la Presse Française des Années 1820 à nos Jours (Paris, Éditions CTHS, 2003), pp. 77–8; Donna Evleh, The Authorized Press in Vichy and German Occupied France 1940–1944: A Bibliography (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1999).

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Notes 219 7. Jean Galtier-Boissière and René Lefebvre, ‘Histoire de la presse’, Le Crapouillot (June 1934), p. 70. Albert Londres, Contre Le Bourrage de Crâne (Paris, Éditions Arléa, 1998). 8. Christophe Charle, La Siècle de la Presse: 1830–1939 (Paris, Seuil, 2004), pp. 233–4. 9. Charle, La Siècle, pp. 294–303. 10. Joseph J. Mathews, ‘Death of press reform in France’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 3, 3 (July 1939), p. 413. 11. Laurent Joly, ‘L’Ami du Peuple contre les “financiers qui mènent le monde”. La première campagne antisémite des années 1930’, Archives Juives, 39, 2 (2006), pp. 96–109. 12. Eveno, L’Argent de la Presse, pp. 89–92. 13. Merle was found guilty of extortion, AN 8 AR 457 Tribunal Correctionnel de la Seine, Jugement, 5 December 1929. 14. On the role of the press in 6 February 1934, according to the Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifacistes (CVIA), Albert Bayet, ‘Pour que la presse soit libre’, Vigilance, 4 (26 June 1934). On press venality, Vigilance, 6 (27 July 1934). 15. Raymond Manevy, Histoire de la Presse 1914 à 1939 (Paris, Corréa, 1945), p. 274. 16. Pacifist papers: Le Barrage and La Patrie Humaine; revolutionary syndicalists: La Révolution Proletarienne; Trotskyists: La Vérité and La Commune, Boris Souvarine’s Bulletin Communiste; André Ferrat’s Que Faire. 17. Mathews, ‘Death of press reform in France’, pp. 409–19. For the hostility of the right-wing journalist to Blum’s reform, Vautel, Mon Film, p. 313. 18. Merle Blanc, 158 (10 April 1937). 19. Of course, given that most of these papers were not formally linked to a fascist organization, Fauxbras was blurring the conservative and new populist/fascist rights. On the alliances and overlap in membership between the Republic Federation and the ligues or new parties, William D. Irving, ‘French conservatives and the “new right” during the 1930s’, French Historical Studies, 8, 4 (1974), pp. 534–62. 20. Merle Blanc, 158 (10 April 1937) and 133 (17 October 1936). 21. Le Canard Enchaîné, 12 (20 September 1916). 22. Merle Blanc, 94 (18 January 1936). Bailby founded a pro-Pétainist paper in September 1940 called L’Alerte. 23. Manevy, Histoire de la Presse, p. 48. 24. Arthème Fayard was the publisher responsible for the establishment of Candide in 1924 which was close to the politics of Action Française and in 1930 the most extreme of all the far right press Je Suis Partout, Bellanger, Histoire Generale de la Presse Française, vol. 3, pp. 589–90. Recording experiences with the Italian forces in Abyssinia, Marie-Édith de Bonneuil, Bivouacs aux Étoiles (Paris, Plon, 1938). On her journalism in Abyssinia, Merle Blanc, 108 (25 April 1936). 25. Merle Blanc, 151 (20 February 1937) and 159 (17 April 1937). Henry FranklinBouillon was the founder of the Fédération Radicale Indépendente who died on 12 November 1937. 26. Merle Blanc, 180 (11 September 1937). 27. On the de La Rocque affair, Merle Blanc, 176 (14 August 1937). Merle Blanc, 186 (23 October 1937).

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220

Notes

28. Merle Blanc, 186 (23 October 1937). 29. For his first use of the pun (froid-de-queue: cold dicks, the cold in the queue), Merle Blanc, 95 (25 January 1936). 30. Merle Blanc, 98 (15 February 1936). 31. Frequently interviewing figures such as Pétain, Weygand, Tardieu, D’Annunzio, Botte-Moi-Le-Club member Léon Bailby’s memoirs give the sense of this shared milieu inhabited by senior journalists of the right, politicians and generals, Léon Bailby, Pour quoi Je me suis Battu, Souvenirs (Paris, Plon, 1951). 32. Merle Blanc, 184 (9 October 1937). 33. Merle Blanc, 246 (17 December 1938). 34. Merle Blanc, 195 (24 December 1937). 35. Merle Blanc, 164 (29 May 1937) and 176 (14 August 1937). 36. On the hypocritical pacifism of the pro-Mussolini right, Merle Blanc, 94 (18 January 1936). 37. Merle Blanc, 194 (18 December 1937). 38. Merle Blanc, 170 (3 July 1937). He referred to an article in Le Film (8 June 1937). 39. Other articles challenging representations of the unemployed: Le Petit Bleu’s Paul Hubault described the unemployed as a new privileged class, Merle Blanc, 160 (24 April 1937); attacking L’Echo for a report on (usually petty) fraud statistics in the Seine department and failing to report suicide figures, Merle Blanc, 196 (31 December 1937); on Le Petit Bleu calling for cuts in unemployed benefits to challenge the ‘cancer’ of unemployment, Merle Blanc, 190 (20 November 1937); on L’Ami du Peuple linking unemployment and malnutrition but blaming the 40-hour week and paid holidays, Merle Blanc, 150 (13 February 1937). 40. Merle Blanc, 98 (15 February 1936). 41. Fauxbras relied for his anti-imperialism on the writings of Paul-Étienne Vigné d’Octon, Les Crimes Coloniaux de la Troisième République: La Sueur du Burnous (Paris, la Guerre Sociale, 1911), cited in Merle Blanc, 162 (8 May 1937). Henri Brunschwig, ‘Vigné d’Octon et l’anticolonialisme sous la Troisième République’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 14, 54 (1974), pp. 265–98. 42. Merle Blanc, 153 (6 March 1937). 43. Merle Blanc, 188 (6 November 1937). 44. The right published a Manifeste des Intellectuels pour la Défense de l’Occident on 4 October, Max Gallo, L’Affaire d’Éthiopie: aux Origines de la Guerre Mondiale (Paris, Éditions du Centurion, 1967); Highlighting the philosophical incoherence of the ‘pacifist’-occidentalist case of pro-Mussolini intellectuals, Yves Simon, La Campagne d’Éthiopie et la Pensée Politique Française (Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1936), pp. 97–107. On Mussolini’s subsidies to the press during the war, Mathews, ‘Death of press reform in France’, p. 412. 45. Merle Blanc, 98 (15 February 1936). 46. Bonneuil, Bivouacs, pp. 276–7. The preface was provided by Marshal Franchet d’Esperey. 47. Merle Blanc, 93 (11 January 1936). 48. Merle Blanc, 94 (18 January 1936). 49. Merle Blanc, 183 (25 September 1937). 50. Merle Blanc, 108 (25 April 1936), 109 (2 May 1936) and 110 (9 May 1936).

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Notes 221 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

Merle Blanc, 113 (30 May 1936). Merle Blanc, 174 (31 July 1937). Merle Blanc, 247 (24 December 1938). This is used on numerous occasions, for example, Merle Blanc, 165 (29 May 1937). For Fauxbras’s poem about Blum’s shortcomings, ‘Soi-même Léon’, Les Humbles, 5 (May 1939), pp. 6–7. Merle Blanc, 171 (10 July 1937). Merle Blanc, 153 (6 March 1937). Merle Blanc, 181 (18 September 1937). Merle Blanc, 169 (26 June 1937). Merle Blanc, 188 (6 November 1937). Merle Blanc, 153 (6 March 1937). Jean-Jacques Becker and Serge Berstein, Histoire de L’Anticommunisme (Paris, O. Orban, 1987). Of the film Bataille, which was based on naval historian Claude Farrère’s book. Simon Kitson, ‘The police & the Clichy massacre, March 1937’, in Richard Bessel and Clive Emsley (eds), Patterns of Provocation (Oxford, Berghahn, 2000), pp. 29–40. Frédéric Monier, Le Front Populaire (Paris, La Découverte, 2002), p. 62. Merle Blanc, 156 (27 March 1937). Merle Blanc, 157 (3 April 1937). Merle Blanc, 158 (10 April 1937). Lois scélérates referred to the restrictions on the 1883 law of the freedom of the press in 1893 and 1894 against the encouragement of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ practised by anarchists and anti-militarists. It came to denote other such legislation that was used against the left and social movements. Merle Blanc, 172 (17 July 1937). Merle Blanc, 174 (31 July 1937). Merle Blanc, 121 (25 July 1936). Merle Blanc, 173 (24 July 1937). Merle Blanc, 96 (1 February 1936). Merle Blanc, 168 (19 June 1937). Merle Blanc, 245 (10 December 1938). Merle Blanc, 165 (29 May 1937). Merle Blanc, 95 (25 January 1936). Merle Blanc, 234 (24 September 1938). Merle Blanc, 235 (1 October 1938). Merle Blanc, 147 (23 January 1937). Merle Blanc, 231 (3 September 1937). Merle Blanc, 232 (10 September 1938). They were co-signatories to a pacifist public petition. Armand Charpentier, Ce Que Sera la Guerre des Gaz (Paris, Delpeuch, 1930), p. 93. Merle Blanc, 195 (24 December 1937). Merle Blanc, 233 (17 September 1938). For the contradiction between pro-Munich and pacifist attitudes compare passages of Club Botte-Moi-Le-Train president Vautel, Mon Film, pp. 131–2 and 182. Merle Blanc, 236 (1 October 1938).

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222

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88. So the government should replace the new decree laws with a tax on Nazi subsidies, Merle Blanc, 243 (26 November 1938). 89. Merle Blanc, 236 (8 October 1938). 90. Merle Blanc, 113 (30 May 1936). Merle Blanc, 230 (27 August 1938). 91. Merle Blanc, 239 (29 October 1938). 92. On ‘Expo’ workers, Merle Blanc, 171 (10 July 1937). 93. Merle Blanc, 244 (3 December 1938). 94. Merle Blanc, 244 (3 December 1938). 95. Merle Blanc, 245 (10 December 1938). Thorezmaringouin referring to Thorez’s efforts to extend the hand of friendship to the Catholics (Louis Marin was a prominent Catholic right-winger of the Republican Federation). 96. Mettler was the SFIO candidate for Le Havre in 1936, Dictionnaire Biographique du Mouvement Ouvrier Français. 97. Letter Fauxbras to Jean Charpentier (not to be confused with Armand Charpentier), 12 November 1944. 98. Bulletin du Syndicat National des Officiers de la Marine Marchande, 1 (August 1936). 99. Bulletin du Syndicat National des Officiers de la Marine Marchande, 3 (November–December 1936). 100. Ce Soir (20 March 1938). With Georges Bernanos, Louis Gillet, Jacques Maritain, Jean Schlumberger. 101. Le Liberté (27 March 1938). 102. La Flèche (25 March 1938). 103. There were many such petitions during the year, Siân Reynolds, ‘Pacifists into resisters? A biographical approach to women in wartime France: the peace petitions of 1938’, in Hanna Diamond and Simon Kitson (eds), Vichy, Resistance, Liberation: New Perspectives on Wartime France (Oxford, Berg, 2005), pp. 35–50. Bernard Laguerre, ‘Les pétitionnaires du Front Populaire 1934–39’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 37 (1990), pp. 500–15. Nicolas Offenstadt, ‘Signer pour la paix en 1938–39: Pétitions et pétitionnaires’, Cahiers de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, 26 (1994), pp. 249–63. 104. Jacques Doriot, Refaire la France (Paris, B. Grasset, 1938). 105. Bibliothèque royale Albert Premier, FS46 593 1 Press cutting: Trois manifestes (n.d. The entire list: Henry Bordeaux, André Bellessort, Pierre Benoit, Léon Bérard, Abel Bonnard, André Chaumeix, Admiral Lacaze, Louis Madelin, Branly, Funck-Brentano, Picard, Olivier Martin, Blathazar, Doctor Thierry de Martel, Demangeon, Albert Rivaud, Octave Aubry, Maurice Bedel, Jacques Boulenger, Robert Brasillach, Paul Chack, Drieu la Rochelle, Ramon Fernandez, Daniel Halévy, La Varende, François Le Grix, Henri Martineau, Henri Massis, Thierry Maulnier, J.-J. Tharaud). 106. Fauxbras papers, letter acknowledging membership, Roger Mane to César Fauxbras, 26 February 1939. He chaired a Rassemblement frontiste meeting in Vincennes, ibid., public meeting leaflet, 9 June 1939. He had a weekly column from, La Flèche (17 March 1939) to (30 June 1939). 107. Philippe Burrin, La Dérive Fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery 1933–1945 (Paris, Seuil, 2003), pp. 106–38. 108. His letter was printed in, La Flèche (3 March 1939). 109. Gaston Bergery to Fauxbras, 2 June 1939. A. Hunebelle to Fauxbras, 5 July 1939.

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Notes 223 110. Bergery to Fauxbras, 15 November 1939. Ministry of Justice official to Bergery, 11 December 1939. 111. Mentioning a letter of 5 April about whether reservists should be called up to regiments based on domicile or birth, Bergery to Fauxbras, 3 May 1940. 112. Burrin, La Dérive Fasciste, pp. 106–38 and 394–421. 113. Fauxbras, Journal 1939–44, pp. 32 and 41. 114. David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945 (Edinburgh, AK Press, 2009), p. 221. D. G. Berry, ‘Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste: Les anarchistes français et la guerre civile d’Espagne’, in Jean Sagnes and Sylvie Caucanas (eds), Les Français et la Guerre d’Espagne (Perpignan, Centre de Recherche sur les Problèmes de la Frontière, 1990), pp. 73–88. 115. See also, Fauxbras, Journal 1939–44, pp. 3 and 67. Amongst his collaborators on SIA were Aurèle Patorni, Gerard Rosenthal (Trotsky’s lawyer in France), Georges Pioch, Robert Louzon, Marceau Pivert. The paper was banned in 1939. D. G. Berry, ‘Solidarité internationale antifasciste’, pp. 73–88. 116. He received a further fine of 3000 francs for the same offence, Fauxbras papers, Police correctionnelle, report of Bureau Huissier-Audisseur, 4 May 1942. 117. Cheryl A. Koos, ‘ “On les aura!”: the gendered politics of abortion and the Alliance nationale contre la dépopulation’, Modern & Contemporary France, 7, 1 (1999), pp. 21–33. 118. The song ‘La Grève des Mères’ [The Mothers’ Strike] epitomized the anti-war position. 119. Faucier, Pacifisme et Antimilitarisme, pp. 166–89; Louis Lecoin, De Prison en Prison (Antony, Lecoin, 1947), pp. 189–98. 120. ‘Plaidoyer pour Fernand’, Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste (6 July 1939). 121. See his leaflet, AN 317 AP 206 Fernand Boverat, ‘La Lenteur inadmissible de nos Constructions Navales’ (22 November 1936). 122. Only a week before, Fauxbras also had Boverat and the Alliance National Contre la Dépopulation in his sights in his column in, La Flèche (30 June 1939). 123. Fauxbras papers, Tribunal de Premier Instance de la Seine: Bureau des Huissiers-Audienciers, Convocation à tribunal pour le 30 October 1939, 21 October 1939. 124. Fauxbras papers, Gérard Rosenthal to César Fauxbras, 14 July 1939. 125. Fauxbras papers, Huissier-Audencier Pierre Chassagne’s report, 18 December 1939. 126. Action Française (31 October 1939). 127. Fauxbras papers, press cutting, Gringoire (n.d.). 128. Marie-Monique Huss, ‘Pro-natalism in interwar France’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25, 1 (1990), pp. 39–68. His first article addressing the question was Merle Blanc, 112 (23 May 1936). Merle Blanc, 150 (13 February 1937). Merle Blanc, 190 (20 November 1937). 129. Fauxbras, Journal (19 September 1944), p. 126. On the continuities of prewar, Vichy and liberation France with regard to natalism and Boverat’s influence, see K. H. Adler, ‘Demography at the liberation: using history to forget the past’, in Hanna Diamond and Simon Kitson (eds), Vichy, Resistance, Liberation: New Perspectives on Wartime France (Oxford, Berg, 2005), pp. 183–94.

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224 Notes 130. Merle Blanc, 94 (18 January 1936). 131. Fauxbras, Journal, 1939–44, p. 16.

6 Survey of Defeat 1940 1. Joel Blatt (ed.), The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (Oxford, Berghahn, 1998); A. C. Pugh, ‘Defeat, May 1940: Claude Simon, Marc Bloch and the writing of disaster’, in Ian Higgins (ed.), The Second World War in Literature: Eight Essays (Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1989), pp. 59–70; Nicole Jordan, ‘Strategy and scapegoating: reflections on the French national catastrophe, 1940’, and Stanley Hoffman, ‘Trauma of 1940: a disaster and its traces’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 22, 1 (Winter 1996), pp. 11–32, 287–301. Claude Lembrez, Chronique de l’An 40 (Vergèze, C. Lembrez, 1994), p. 307, related the experience of a regiment that fought as well as it could in the circumstances it found itself in. 2. For his discussion, César Fauxbras, Journal 1939–44 (unpublished manuscript, n.d.), pp. 28–30 (6 August 1941). Pierre Dominique, Un État de Quat’Sous (Paris, Agence Inter-France, 1942); Lucien Rebatet, Les Décombres (Paris, Denoël, 1942). Paul Mousset, Quand le Temps Travaillait pour Nous (Grasset, Dijon, 1943); for an Anglophobe reminiscence of Dunkirk, Pierre Béarn, De Dunkerque en Liverpool: Journal d’un Quartier-Maître (Paris, Gallimard, 1941). An account by a reservist officer of France’s defeat, Guy des Cars, L’Officier sans Nom (Paris, Fayard, 1941). 3. Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 235. 4. Jackson, Fall of France, pp. 219–27. 5. Martin S. Alexander, ‘ “ No taste to fight?”: French combat performance in 1940 and the politics of the fall of France’, in Paul Addison and Angus Calder (eds), Time to Kill: The Soldiers’ Experience of War in the West, 1939– 1945 (London, Random House, 1997), pp. 167–76; Martin S. Alexander, ‘After Dunkirk: the French Army’s performance against “Case Red”, 25 May to 25 June 1940’, War in History, 14, 2 (2007), pp. 219–64. 6. Fauxbras papers, Centre de démobilisation du canton de Riom: Sterckeman’s demobilization papers, 19 March 1941. 7. Fauxbras papers, Renseignements sur les diverses positions de la compagnie, de l’escadron, de la batterie: Battalion Régional, n.d. 8. Fauxbras papers, letter Éditions Émile-Paul Frères to César Fauxbras, 7 November 1945. 9. Ledringhem, near Dunkirk (5 am, 29 May), Lederzeele (8 pm, 29 May), Thérouanne (30 May), Febvin-Palfart (31 May), Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise, Herlin-le-sec (1 June), Doullens (2 June), Foncquevillers (3 June), BapaumeThilloy (4 June), Cambrai (5 June), Beauraing, Belgium (6 June), Gedinne (7 June), Bertrix (8–9 June), Trier, Germany (11–13 June), Nuremburg (14 June), Kaisersteinbruch (Stalag XVII A), Austria (17 June), Heiligenkreuz (6 July). 10. Francis Ambrière, Les Grandes Vacances (Paris, Seuil, 1956), p. 61. 11. César Fauxbras, Sondage 1940: ou Pourquoi le Soldat Français ne Voulait pas Mourir pour Dantzig (Paris, Allia, 2011), p. 1.

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Notes 225 12. Yves Durand, La Vie Quotidienne des Prisonniers de Guerre dans les Stalags, les Oflags et les Kommandos 1939–1945 (Paris, Hachette, 1987). 13. His repatriation began on 7 March 1941, Fauxbras papers, letter Croix Rouge Française, Lyons to Robert Sterckeman, 28 April 1941. He was then hospitalized in a camp in Montferrand before going to the Repatriation centre at Riom, Médecin-Général (13th region) to Robert Sterckeman, 5 May 1941. Centre de Rapatriation de Riom: Commandant le Centre de Rapatriation de Riom Captain Guignon’s note on Sterckeman’s repatriation, 1 April 1941. 14. For historical perspectives on French soldiers and the defeat, Jean Delmas, Paul Devautour and Eric Lefèvre, Mai-Juin 40: les Combattants de l’Honneur (Paris, Copernic, 1980); Charles Léon Menu, Lumières sur les Ruines: les Combattants de 1940 Réhabilités (Paris, Plon, 1953); J. Vidalenc, ‘Les divisions de série “B” dans l’armée française dans la campagne de France’, Revue Historique des Armées, 4 (1980), pp. 106–26. 15. Gérard Loiseaux, La Littérature de la Défaite et de la Collaboration (Paris, La Sorbonne, 1984). 16. Jacques Benoist-Méchin, La Moisson de Quarante: Journal d’un Prisonnier de Guerre (Paris, Albin Michel, 1941). Fauxbras, Journal, pp. 42–3 (12 September 1941). 17. André Chassaignon, Retours vers la France, Récits de Captivité (Paris, Éditions Littéraires Artistiques, 1945); Jean Cazeneuve, Essai sur la Psychologie du Prisonnier de Guerre (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1944). Also on prisoners’ psychology, François Boudot, ‘Sur la psychologie du prisonnier: thèse et souvenirs’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, 25 (1957), pp. 88–98. Alongside, these psychological studies stands the classic ethnographic study, Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück (Paris, Seuil, 1988); Donald Reid, ‘Germaine Tillion’s Operetta of Resistance at Ravensbrück’, French Politics, Culture & Society, 25, 2 (August 2007), pp. 141–50. 18. Chassaignon, Retours, pp. 140–3. 19. Cazeneuve, Essai, p. 93. 20. Richard Vinen, The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (London, Penguin, 2007), pp. 183–213; Sarah Fishman, ‘Grand delusions: the unintended consequences of Vichy France’s prisoner of war propaganda’, Journal of Contemporary History, 26, 2 (April 1991), pp. 229–54. She found that women readily returned to a life of domesticity on the homecoming of prisoners and did not perceive work outside the home as liberating, Sarah Fishman, We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940–1945 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991). Prior to this, the concern was with rescuing the prisoners from historical neglect, Durand, Vie Quotidienne, pp. 17–18. 21. Christopher Hill, ‘ “Where are we going?” International relations and the voice from below’, Review of International Studies, 25, 1 (January 1999), pp. 107–22. 22. Gustave Folcher, Marching to Captivity: The War Diaries of a French Peasant, 1939–45 (London, Brassey’s, 1996). 23. Jon Cowans, ‘Fear and loathing in Paris: the reception of opinion polling in France, 1938–1977’, Social Science History, 26, 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 71–104. For a critique of ‘survey mania’, Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Public opinion does not exist’, Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub (eds), Communication and Class

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226

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

Notes Struggle, vol. 1: Capitalism and Imperialism (New York, International General, 1979), pp. 124–30. Identifying public opinion as theoretically deficient, Henrik Prebensen, ‘Y a-t-il un revirement de l’opinion publique française en 1940?’, in Hans Peter Lund (ed.), La Langue, les Signes et les Êtres: Actes du Colloque de l’Institut d’Etudes Romanes de l’Université de Copenhague, le 3 Octobre 1998 (Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, 1999), pp. 173–94. The literature often fails to discriminate between contemporary and historiographical understanding of the term. Nevertheless, the concept has been applied with varying degrees of sophistication. For a study of Eure based on prefectoral reports and departmental French Forces of the Interior documents, Marcel Baudot, L’Opinion Publique sous l’Occupation: l’Exemple d’un Département Français (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1996). In some cases, press opinion passes for public opinion, Haim Shamir, ‘The drôle de guerre and French public opinion’, Journal of Contemporary History, 11, 1 (1976), pp. 129–43. Despite his greater sophistication, this is also the starting point for John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France: The French under Nazi Occupation (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 137–69. In others, such as Crémieux-Brilhac there is a breadth of sources and an attempt to identify key boundaries within public opinion: the political-press milieu, the army and the ordinary public. He defines his method as the ‘patient pursuit in search of the impalpable public opinion’, Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’An 40, 2 vols, vol. 1 (Paris, Gallimard, 1990), p. 14. Adopting a sociological approach to public opinion considering in turn notables and peasants, business and workers, Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 12. Using social geography to identify public opinion as the outcome of the interaction of patriotism and class, Étienne Dejonghe, ‘La Nord isolée: l’occupation et opinion (mai 1940– mai 1942)’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 26 (January 1979), pp. 48–98. Six pioneers, four dragoons, two reconnaissance, three mechanized infantry. In addition, tax-collectors, postal workers and railworkers who were imprisoned by mistake on account of their uniforms. The seven unaccounted for were from Morocco, Poland or undeterminable. ‘Polonais’ may mean unskilled labourer. Durand, Vie Quotidienne, pp. 19–46. Chassaignon, Retours, pp. 117–30. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 71. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 109 and unpublished version, p. 23, 31 May. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 36 (another airforce joke), 80. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 74. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 98. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 45. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 74. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 56–7. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 9–8. Accusations of being fascist, Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 59–62; reciprocal accusations of Stalinist and fascist, Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 141–2; hostility to Stalin, p. 33; references to antifascism, pp. 52–3 and 122–3. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 33.

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Notes 227 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 120. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 110. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 114–15. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 130. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 139. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 147–9. Philippe Lasterle, ‘Could Admiral Gensoul have averted the tragedy of Mers-el-Kébir?’, Journal of Military History, 67, 3 (2003), pp. 835–44. Bourdieu, ‘Public opinion does not exist’. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 17. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 21–3. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 137 and unpublished version, p. 104, 24 June. Italy’s entry into the war which took place on 16 June was subject to prior speculation. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 73. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 107. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 111. On Pétain myth, Dominique Rossignol, Histoire de la Propagande en France: de 1940 à 1944: l’Utopie Pétain (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), pp. 77–112. Jackson, France, pp. 123–5. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 9–10, 24–5, 30, 42–3, 52, 87–90, 100–2. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 111–12. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 112. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 113–14. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 129, 140 (although there was also criticism for his role in the defensive strategy based on the Maginot line), 118–19. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 29. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 42–4. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 21 and 33. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 16, 21, 33, 50 and 74–8. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 16. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 74–8. On Munich, Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 130–1. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 28. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 24–6. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 30–1. Also, an electrician-fitter on the Popular Front’s promises, Fauxbras, Sondage, unpublished version, p. 109 (25 June). Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 41–2. For the full quote see appendices. For an interesting discussion of the corrosive effect of the general strike upon the social fabric, see Pierre Laborie, L’Opinion Française sous Vichy (Paris, Seuil, 1990), pp. 141–54. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 98. On decree laws, Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 19, 64–5, 114–17, 120 (on Daladier), 130–1 (on Blum), 102–6, 120. For a best-selling example of a much wider literature, Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London, Granta Books, 1999). Using ‘Macchabs’, Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 9–10, 68–71, 112, 138–9 (other death references, millions etc.), 21–3, 26, 41, 47–8, 52, 64–5, 74–8, 112, 114–17, 141–2.

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228 Notes 73. Henri Dutailly, ‘Faiblesses et potentialités de l’armée de terre, 1939–40’, in Les Armées Françaises pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale: 1939–1945 (Paris, IHCC, 1986), pp. 23–32. 74. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 51, 57–8. 75. For the full quote see appendices: Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 24, 28–9, 38–9, 52–4, 85–6, 136–7, unpublished version, p. 83 (17 June). 76. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 14. 77. Matching Fauxbras’s own assumptions, Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 38–9, 99, 132–3. 78. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 99–100. 79. Lucien Robineau, ‘L’armée de l’air dans la bataille de France’, in Les Armées Françaises pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale 1939–45 (Paris, IHCC, 1986); Lucien Robineau, ‘La conduite de la guerre aérienne contre l’Allemagne de septembre 1939 à juin 1940’, Revue Historique des Armées, 3 (1989), pp. 102–12; A. D. Harvey, ‘The French Armée de l’Air in May–June 1940: a failure of conception’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25 (1990), pp. 447–65. 80. Jackson, Fall of France, p. 21. 81. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 80, (for another it was the lack of tanks and planes), 74–8, 139–40. 82. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 17–18. 83. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 102. 84. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 142–3. 85. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 113. 86. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 120. 87. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 118–20, 129. 88. Gamelin was dismissed on 19 May 1940, Martin S. Alexander, The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003). Blaming Gamelin, Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 132–3, (defending Gamelin), 38–9. 89. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 18. 90. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 111, 118. 91. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 9–10. 92. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 11–13. 93. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 15–16, 21–3, 35, 36–8. 94. ‘Der des ders’: Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 42–4, 50, 118–20 (on Danzig), 14, 24–6, 34–5, 68–71, 73–4, 87–90, 113–20, 141–2. 95. Parisian artisans of the furniture industry, Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 20. 96. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 19, 64–5, 114–17. 97. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 49. 98. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 111, 118. 99. Fritz was used on 28 occasions, Nazi on 20 occasions, Fridolin on 14 and Boche on 7. Fridolin is a familiar version of Friedo. Frisé – a version of Fritz – was used once, Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 82. Boche is a pre-First World War term for German. 100. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 52–4, 91, 108, 117, 138–9, 146–7. 101. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 35, 41–2, 96, 100–2, 108, 120–1, 127, 141–2. 102. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 78–80, 100–2, 120, 122, 127–9. 103. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 112. 104. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 31.

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Notes 229 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114.

115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

138. 139. 140.

Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 35. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 96 and unpublished version, p. 72 (11–13 June). Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 111. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 71. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 113–14, 135–6, 131–2. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 141–2. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 117. Fishman, ‘Grand delusions’. His officer who was a parish priest was a good sort, Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 19–20 (another believed that reservist officers were as ‘innocent’ as any reservists), 80. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 68–71. Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, ‘L’opinion française devant la guerre’, in Les Armées Françaises pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale 1939–45 (Paris, IHCC, 1986), p. 62. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 40–1. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 27, 83, 122. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 34–5. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 31–2, 68–71. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 65–8. François Achille Bazaine, the French Marshal, notorious for his surrender to the Prussians at Metz in 1870. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 14, 20. Fauxbras, Sondage, unpublished version, p. 104 (24 June). Fauxbras, Sondage, unpublished version, p. 10 (29 May). Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 91–2, 14. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 73–4. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 14. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 16. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 17. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 20. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 23. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 21–3. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 26. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 33. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 109. Fauxbras, Sondage, unpublished version, p. 98 (22 June). Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 33. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 13–14, 68–71. Jean Caseneuve, in his attempt to construct a psychological ideal type of the prisoner, emphasized the absence of women. Yet he rejected the view rooted in psychoanalysis that this would lead to what he called ‘perversions’. Instead, this absence created a separation anxiety from loved ones. Cazeneuve, Essai, pp. 39–54. It is worth noting that 57 per cent of prisoners of war were married, Durand, Vie Quotidienne, p. 298. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996). George Mosse, ‘Two world wars and the myth of the war experience’, Journal of Contemporary History, 21 (1986), pp. 491–513. Luc Capdevilla, ‘The quest for masculinity in a defeated France’, Contemporary European History, 10, 3 (2001), pp. 423–45. See also Joan

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230 Notes

141. 142.

143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149.

7

Tumblety, ‘Revenge of the fascist knights: Masculine identities in Je suis partout, 1940–1944’, Modern and Contemporary France, 7, 1 (1999), pp. 11–20. For sexualized humour, see one of many examples, Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 19. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 21, 73 (German stupidity for voting for Hitler who put them in barracks), 100–2, 111 (the English were getting themselves killed unnecessarily because of an exaggerated patriotism), 9–10. On pay, Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 85–6. When all of Paris was in flight, prisoners were not the only ‘heroes’, Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 110. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 11–13. Fauxbras, Sondage, p. 15. Fauxbras, Sondage, pp. 74–8, 82, 86. Fishman, We Will Wait. Marcel Déat, ‘Mourir pour Dantzig’, L’Oeuvre (4 May 1939).

Occupation Diary 1941–44 1. There is some common ground with the diary of Canard Enchaîné and Crapouillot journalist Galtier-Boissière with a focus on literary, pacifist and collaborationist circles, Jean Galtier-Boissière, Mon Journal Pendant l’Occupation (Paris, La Jeune Parque, 1944). See on his wartime attitudes, Simon Epstein, Un Paradoxe Français: Antiracistes dans la Collaboration, Antisémites dans la Résistance (Paris, Albin Michel, 2008), pp. 185–291. 2. Charles Rist, Une Saison Gâtée: Journal de Guerre de de l’Occupation, 1939–45 (Paris, Fayard, 1983); Anatole de Monzie, Ci-Devant (Paris, Flammarion, 1941); Henri du Moulin de Labarthète, Le Temps des Illusions, Souvenirs, Juillet 1940–Avril 1942 (Geneva, G. Bourquin, 1946); Joseph Barthélemy, Ministre de la Justice: Vichy, 1941–1943: Mémoires (Paris, Pygmalion, 1989); Paul Baudouin, The Private Diaries March 1940–January 1941 (London, Eyre & Spottiswode, 1948); beginning as a Pétainist, the publication of the third volume led to his arrest in June 1943 by the Gestapo, Alfred Fabre-Luce, Journal de la France: 1939–44 (Paris, Fayard, 1969), 3 vols; Jean Guéhenno, Journal des Années Noires, 1940–1944 (Paris, Gallimard, 1947); Henri Drouot, Notes d’un Dijonnais pendant l’Occupation Allemande: 1940–1944 (Dijon, Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 1998); for the diary of a Polish immigrant, Andrzej Bobkowski, En Guerre et en Paix: Journal 1940–1944 (Paris, Éditions Noir sur Blanc, 1991); Léon Werth, Déposition: Journal 1940–44 (Paris, V. Hamy, 1992); journalist of Catholic newspaper La Croix, Pierre Limagne, Ephémérides de Quatre Années Tragiques, 1940–1944, 3 vols (Paris, La Bonne Presse, 1945–7). 3. Mentioning laces, tooth paste, cigarette papers and other cheap items, César Fauxbras, Pourquoi la Marine a Trahi (unpublished manuscript, n.d.), p. 2. 4. Guéhenno, Journal des Années Noires, p. 83, 21 February 1941. 5. AN Z6 6 66 Direction de la police judiciaire, Le Serf’s report on Paul Chack, 12 October 1944. Pierre-André Taguieff (ed.), L’Anti-Sémitisme de Plume 1940–44 (Paris, Berg International, 1999), pp. 351–7; Jean-Paul Brunet, Doriot: du Communisme au Fascisme (Paris, Balland, 1986), pp. 232–3.

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Notes 231 6. Interviewing Chack’s daughter and his grand-daughter, Rigoulot, Les Enfants de l’Épuration, pp. 101–20; His granddaughter’s novel about Chack, Pons, Dark Rosaleen. A recent editor deemed Chack to be ‘chief in line [with Farrère] of numerous maritime authors who narrate the sea and sailor and elicit these vocations’ and his works were ‘well written and of a high moral and human standard’. Memorializing his life ‘in the service of the navy’, he also represented Chack as a simple Pétainist and, by implication, an unwarranted victim of the purge: ‘[h]is affiliation to the national revolution and in particular his anti-bolshevism got him arrested at the liberation and condemned to death.’ Paul Chack, Marins à la Bataille: Méditerranée 1914–1918 (Paris, Gerfaut, 2001), pp. 5–8. 7. The allegation that Paul Guieu had been arrested in relation to the demand for compensation from the CAA for the offices of the Ughetto brothers was corroborated by Fernand Dupré, the Ughettos’ solicitor for whom Guieu was working. AN Z6 6 66 Court de Justice (Seine): witness deposition: Fernand Dupré, 16 November 1944. 8. L’Humanité (19 December 1944); Le Figaro (19 December 1944); Time (1 January 1945). 9. Radio-Paris blamed the defeatism of Giono for 1940, Fauxbras, Journal 1939–44, p. 46 (26 September 1941); p. 54 (9 December 1941), on des Cars, p. 56 (14 December 1941); p. 57 on the award of the prix Goncourt to Pourrat; on Anglophobia and collaborationist explanations of defeat, p. 60 (3 January 1942); defeat and the Riom trial, p. 65 (19 March 1942 and 27 March 1942); on the opinion of an officer who paid Fauxbras a visit from a veterans’ organization, p. 72 (6 August 1942); on Dominique, p. 82 (27 February 1943). 10. Colonel Alerme, Les Causes Militaires de Notre Défaite (Paris, Publications du Centre d’Études de l’Agence Inter-France, 1941). Michel Alerme was also author of the Anglophobe Stratégie Anglaise (Paris, Flammarion, 1942) which emphasized the duplicity and self-interest of the British as an element in France’s defeat. Fauxbras is silent on this aspect of Alerme’s views. For Fauxbras’s discussion, Fauxbras, Journal, pp. 28–30 (6 August 1941). 11. Fauxbras, Journal, pp. 32–6 (12 August 1941). Anatole de Monzie (1876– 1947) had a long political career, with several spells in cabinet. He served as Minister of Public Instruction and of the Arts (17 April–17 October 1925), Finance Minister (3–17 April and 19–23 July 1925), Minister of Education (3 June 1932–29 January 1934) and Minister of Public Works (23 August 1938–5 June 1940). His political career ended when he was forced out as mayor of Cahors in February 1942. 12. Andor Adorjan, La Finlande: Rempart de l’Europe (Paris, F. Sorlot, 1940), pp. 7–8 for de Monzie’s preface. 13. Anatole de Monzie, Pétition pour l’Histoire (Paris, Flammarion, 1942). 14. Anatole de Monzie, La Saison des Juges (Paris, Flammarion, 1943). 15. de Monzie, Ci-Devant, pp. 61–4. 16. On the decrees established to intern ‘those harmful to national defence’ see entry for 21 November 1939, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 4. 17. de Monzie, Ci-Devant, p. 207. 18. de Monzie, Ci-Devant, p. 206.

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232 Notes 19. For the discussion of de Monzie: Dominique, Un État de Quat’Sous, pp. 68–84. 20. Dominique, Un État de Quat’Sous, p. 7. 21. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 82 (27 February 1943). 22. Rebatet, Les Décombres. Fauxbras noted reading this but made no comment about it in his diary. An Anglophobe account of the war up to Dunkirk of someone who worked as a liaison agent with the British army, Mousset, Quand le Temps; for an Anglophobe reminiscence of Dunkirk, Béarn, De Dunkerque en Liverpool. An account by a reservist officer of France’s defeat, des Cars, L’Officier sans Nom. 23. Robert Belot, Lucien Rebatet un Itineraire Fasciste (Paris, Seuil, 1994); Michèle et Jean-Paul Cointet (eds), Dictionnaire Historique de la France sous l’Occupation (Paris, Tallandier, 2000), p. 600. 24. He claimed that the book received 250,000 orders with the publishers, Lucien Rebatet, Mémoires d’un Fasciste: 1941–47 (Paris, Pauvert, 1976), vol. 2, pp. 62–3. 25. Loiseaux, La Littérature de la Défaite, pp. 519–24. 26. Fauxbras, Journal, pp. 30–1 (7 August 1941). Rist, Une Saison Gâtée, pp. 181–3 (12 August 1941). 27. This is a point that Julian Jackson made very effectively, Jackson, France, pp. 3–4. 28. Stanley Hoffman, ‘Vichy and collaboration’, Preuves (July–September 1969), pp. 61–74. 29. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 18. 30. Fondation Claude-Bellanger, La Presse Française de la Résistance à la Libération (Martigny, Fondation Claude-Bellanger, 1988), p. 25. 31. For example for a lengthy article on Mers el-Kébir, Gringoire (5 February 1943). He had written on Trafalgar in the same newspaper before the war, Gringoire (31 May 1935). See for an account written during the Vichy years about this ‘odious aggression’ claiming that the British fired before the deadline that they had given, Jean Montigny, Mers-el-Kébir (Saigon, Imprimerie de Thanh-Mau, 1942). 32. Aujourd’hui (3 January 1942); (30 January 1943); (29 October 1942). Contradicting his earlier argument put amongst other places in Chack, ‘Qui tient la mer’, pp. 1–15. 33. Aujourd’hui (3 January 1942). 34. Aujourd’hui (1 October 1942). 35. Aujourd’hui (25 March 1943). 36. In his preface, Chack argued that measures taken against the Jews up to that point had been too timid and too often poorly implemented. Louis-Charles Lecoc, L’Enjeu de la Geurre: les Juifs (Paris, Sorlot, 1943), pp. 5–7. 37. Aujourd’hui (15 April 1943). 38. Aujourd’hui (11 May 1943). 39. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 41 (12 September 1941). 40. Hervé Le Boterf, La Vie Parisienne sous l’Occupation (Paris, Education France Empire, 1997), pp. 309–11. 41. For Chack’s commentary on the exhibition, Aujourd’hui (17 July 1942) and (22 July 1942).

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Notes 233 42. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 64 (2 March 1942); p. 67 (4 May 1942); p. 69 (5 June 1942). Paul Marion opened this exhibition on 1 March 1942 at the Salle Wagram, Je Suis Partout (7 March 1942). 43. Fauxbras quoted from the Cri du Peuple of 1 March that had said of Chack in relation to the exhibition that, ‘Commander Chack is always a fighter. Glorious soldier, he went into the suburbs, into the factory yards, to fight the communists’. The exhibition provided evidence that he had received money from the Germans for his propaganda, AN Z6 666 Tribunal de premier instance, Procès-verbal de l’interrogatoire et de confrontation, 20 November 1944. 44. On the visit to Weimar of European intellectuals from 4 October to 3 November 1941, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 41 (25 October 1941); on the artists’ visit to Germany, p. 50 (31 October 1941). 45. Fauxbras, Journal, pp. 25–6 (15 and 17 July 1941). 46. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 26 (27 July 1941). 47. Aujourd’hui (2 February 1942). A PPF leaflet claiming 30,000, reproduced in Drouot, Notes d’un Dijonnais, p. 1041. 48. Aujourd’hui (2 February 1942). 49. Le Petit Parisien (2 February 1942). 50. On LVF meeting, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 62 (1 February 1942). 51. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 63 (2 February 1942). 52. On the release from prison of Lecoin and Louzon, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 38 (25 August 1941); on Wullens writing to Je Suis Partout, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 67 (3 May 1942); de La Fouchardière, p. 68 (21 May 1942); replying in Nouveaux Temps (4 November 1942) to threatening anonymous letters, Armand Charpentier, p. 75 (4 November 1942), after Montoire, saw the choice as ‘to live with Germany or die with England’, Aujourd’hui (10 November 1940). See also his contribution to Eugen Relgis, Les Voies de la Paix (Paris, Piton, 1936), pp. 32–3. He argued against the socialist/communist view that capitalism caused war, blaming patriotic ideology and calling for an apolitical pacifism. On Emery, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 79 (31 December 1942); on Giono, p. 46 and p. 81 (16 February 1943). 53. Epstein, Un Paradoxe Français. Albrecht Betz, ‘Trahison des clercs’, in Albrecht Betz and Stefan Martens (eds), Les Intellectuels et l’Occupation (Paris, Autrement, 2004), pp. 311–22. 54. Wullens had published Fauxbras’s articles, poems and reviews in his journal Les Humbles which oscillated between pacifism, libertarianism and Trotskyism during the 1930s. About the surprise this caused, Jean GaltierBoissière, Journal 1940–50 (Paris, Quai Voltaire, 1992), pp. 603–4 (27 January 1946). 55. For other ‘left’ collaborationist periodicals: L’Oeuvre, La France au Travail, La France Socialiste, L’Effort, L’Atelier. 56. Germinal, 2 (5 May 1944). 57. In his entry for 29 May 1944, Guéhenno, Journal des Années Noires, p. 332 (27 May 1944). 58. Germinal, 7 (9 June 1944). 59. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 27 (2 August 1941) and p. 28 (6 August 1941). 60. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 52 (13 November 1941).

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61. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 98 (5 December 1943). 62. Claude Lévy, ‘L’organisation de la propagande’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, 64 (October 1966), pp. 7–28. For the Parisian press, Donna Evleth, The Authorized Press in Vichy and German Occupied France 1940–1944: A Bibliography (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1999), pp. 99–144. 63. For the German control and competition between collaborationists at the radio station, Le Boterf, La Vie Parisienne sous l’Occupation, pp. 471–6. 64. César Fauxbras, Pourquoi la Marine a Trahi (unpublished manuscript, n.d.), p. 3. The German ambassador Otto Abetz or the Nazi propagandist Hibbelen trust created or provided subsidies to or bought shares in several newspapers. The occupiers funded Jean Luchaire’s Les Nouveaux Temps. Le Petit Parisien, Le Matin and Paris-Soir also received major contributions. Eveno, L’Argent de la Presse, pp. 116–21. 65. Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac and Georges Bensimon, ‘Les propagandes radiophoniques en France et l’opinion publique de 1940 à 1944’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, 101 (1976), pp. 3–18. 66. Jean-Pierre Rioux, ‘Ambivalences culturelles (1940–1941)’, in Jean-Pierre Azéma and François Bédarida (eds), La France des Années Noires (Paris, Seuil, 2000), vol. 1: De la Défaite à Vichy, pp. 515–36. 67. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 47 (5 October 1941) and p. 52 (17 November 1941). 68. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 31 (7 August 1941). 69. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 79 (13 January 1943). 70. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 69 (29–30 May 1942). 71. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 59 (3 January 1942). 72. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 57 (22 December 1941). Guéhenno, Journal des Années Noires, p. 136 (5 August 1941). 73. Guéhenno, Journal des Années Noires, p. 279 (11 September 1943). 74. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 24 (5 July 1941); p. 41 (5 September 1941); attitudes to working in Germany, p. 45 (24 September 1941); on the stalled German advance, p. 50 (30 October 1941); p. 61 (27 January 1942); curiosity about possible inclusion of Doriot or Déat in Vichy cabinet, p. 66 (16 April 1942); on disappointment about no British landing, p. 72 (20 August 1942); cynical about Vichy, smears about Darlan’s corruption and delight in his death, p. 78 (11 December 1942); on collaborationists and the food kitchens that closed down due in part to a popular boycott, p. 81 (1 February 1943). 75. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 18 (9 May 1941). 76. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 45 (24 September 1941). 77. Like Fauxbras on Doriot and Déat; Rist, Une Saison Gâtée, p. 299. 78. Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘Talk which was not idle: rumours in wartime France’, in Hanna Diamond and Simon Kitson (eds), Vichy, Resistance, Liberation: New Perspectives on Wartime France (Oxford, Berg, 2005), pp. 73–86. 79. Drouot, Notes d’un Dijonnais, pp. 428–30 and 440 (10–15 March and 8 April 1942); Guéhenno, Journal des Années Noires, p. 326 (12 June 1944). Nicolas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia, ‘Rumours influence: towards a dynamic social impact theory’, in Anthony R. Pratkanis (ed.), The Science of Social Influence: Advances and Future Progress (New York, Psychology Press, 2007). 80. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 53 (1 December 1941).

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Notes 235 81. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 32 (12 August 1941); or in terms of social psychological taxonomies of motivations for rumour ‘self-enhancement’ and ‘relationship-enhancement’, P. Bordia and N. DiFonzo, ‘Psychological motivation in rumor spread’, in G. A. Fine, C. Heath and V. Campion-Vincent (eds), Rumor Mills: The Social Impact of Rumour and Legend (New York, Aldine, 2005), pp. 87–101. 82. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 55 (12 December 1941). 83. False rumours: the death of Colonel Collet, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 22 (4 June 1941); of re-mobilization, p. 22 (7 June 1941), p. 83 (13 March 1943); that the Russians had broken the siege of Leningrad and won at Smolensk, p. 46 (1 October 1941). 84. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 67 (3 May 1942). 85. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 118 (10 August 1944). 86. On the scuttling of the French fleet at Toulon on 27 November 1942, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 77 (28 November 1942); on Doriot, p. 77 (18 November 1942). See also Rist, Une Saison Gâtée, pp. 21 and 292–3 (20 November 1942). 87. Bobkowski, En Guerre et en Paix, p. 303 (4 March 1942). 88. For a survey of comparative resistance studies informed by James C. Scott’s notion of the weapons of the weak, see H. R. Kedward, ‘Resiting the resistance’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 9 (1999), pp. 271–82. 89. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 18 (9 May 1941), for three jokes, p. 93 (29 September 1943); two jokes, p. 107 (24 March 1944); p. 114 (6 November 1940). 90. For example, Guéhenno, Journal des Années Noires, p. 53 (5 August 1941). For a book of jokes during the occupation, Georges Fronval, Les Histoires que l’on Racontait Lorsqu’ils Étaitent Là (Paris, Chantal, 1944); Andre Halimi elicited the humorous material from newspapers but did not identify the role of unofficial humour, André Halimi, Ce Que a Fait Rire les Français sous l’Occupation (Paris, JC Lattès, 1979). 91. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 27 (5 August 1941); p. 61 (27 January 1942). 92. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 93 (27 August 1943). 93. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 39 (29 August 1941); on Hitler replacing von Brautisch as commander-in-chief, p. 57 (22 December 1941); p. 61 (27 January 1942); fall of Singapore, p. 63 (16 February 1942); scepticisms about Karkov, p. 69 (29–30 May 1942), British reversal in Egypt, p. 70 (2 July 1942); Axis defeat in Libya, p. 76 (7 November 1942); Russian advance, p. 78 (31 December 1942); Stalingrad, p. 80 (1 February 1943); disappointment at German counter-offensive, p. 83 (13 March 1942). 94. Outlining the propaganda themes about the USSR in France after the invasion: Germany’s ‘preventative’ offensive, the rapid defeat of the USSR (at first), the crusade against Bolshevik barbarism and the collusion between enemies, Pierre Mermet and Yves Danan, ‘Thèmes de propagande après 22 juin 1941’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, 64 (October 1966), pp. 69–82. 95. Fauxbras, Journal, pp. 23–4 (22 and 28 June 1941). 96. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 27 (5 August 1941). 97. Fauxbras, Journal, pp. 80–1 (1 February 1943). 98. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 79 (24 January 1943). 99. Guéhenno, Journal des Années Noires, p. 179 (23 June 1941).

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100. Marcel Baudot, ‘L’opinion publique devant la propagande allemande et l’invasion de L’URSS’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, 64 (October 1966), pp. 63–80. 101. According to the diary, British landing was rumoured in July 1942 and most people expected it in August 1942, pp. 72–3. 102. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 107 (17 May 1944). 103. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 17 (April 1941). 104. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 50 (30 October 1941). 105. On traffic ban, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 54 (8 December 1941); on curfews and opening hours, p. 55 (11 December 1941) and p. 64 (2 March 1942); p. 73 (19 September 1942). History textbooks, sewing and physical education were banned in schools, p. 47 (5 October 1941) and p. 48 (24 October 1941). 106. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 36 (13 August 1941). 107. On wine, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 43 (16 September 1941); on matches, p. 79 (8 January 1943). 108. On the fear of Russian victory, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 61 (30 January 1942), p. 80 (1 February 1943); on industrialists and Vichy, p. 45 (25 September 1941), p. 46 (29 September 1941). On Bélin, p. 51 (31 October 1941) and (3 November 1941). 109. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 26 (25 July 1941). 110. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 68 (22 May 1942). 111. Fauxbras, Journal, pp. 99–100 (24 December 1943). 112. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 102 (26 January 1944); p. 105 (6 March 1944). 113. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 114 (20 June 1944). 114. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 114 (14 June 1944); p. 114 (20 June 1944). 115. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 116 (4 July 1944), by this time butter cost 800 francs a kilo. 116. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 113 (8 June 1944). On new problems of supplying Paris, Le Petit Parisien (17 August 1944). 117. Translated in Appendix 8, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 64 (5 March 1942), p. 65 (30 March 1942). On a night of bombing on 29–30 May targeting the western banlieue of Gennevilliers with its Gnome et Rhône and Goodrich factories, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 68 (29–30 May 1942); p. 73 (10 September 1942); p. 83 (13 March 1943); p. 84 (4 April 1943). 118. Préfecture de Police de Paris BA1767 Bombing raids on Paris, 1939–45. 119. Le Petit Parisien (5 March 1942). 120. Including 25,000 francs from Maxim’s! Le Matin (6 March 1942). 121. Nouveaux Temps (6 and 7 March 1942). 122. Le Petit Parisien (5 March 1942). Le Matin (5 March 1942). ‘The English savagely bomb Paris. With cowardice, the planes of Churchill caused numerous dead amongst the civilian population. The ruins are considerable.’ 123. Le Petit Parisien (8 March 1942). Special edition of Le Matin (8 March 1942). 124. Le Petit Parisien (9 March 1942). 125. ‘Le manifeste des intellectuels français’, Nouveaux Temps (9 March 1942). 126. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 65 (27 March 1942). 127. According to d’Abzac-Epezy, 623 were killed but according to Lyndsey Dodd and Andrew Knapp, 370, Claude d’Abzac-Épezy, ‘Les premiers

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Notes 237

128.

129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

135. 136. 137. 138.

139.

140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148.

bombardements alliés sur la France et leur utilisation politique’, Revue Historiques des Armées, 2 (1993), p. 76; Lindsey Dodd and Andrew Knapp, ‘ “How many Frenchmen did you kill?” British bombing policy towards France (1940–1945)’, French History, 22, 4 (2008), p. 478. For a figure of 391, Eddy Florentin, Quand les Alliés Bombardaient la France (Paris, Grand Livre du Mois, 2003), pp. 65–76. Also with the figure of 391, Prefecture of Police, Paris, PP BA1767 Bombing raids on Paris, 1939–45. For police surveys of public attitudes roughly in line with Fauxbras’s assessment, Préfecture de Police de Paris, Situations de Paris, Renseignments généraux, 9 March 1942. For the local clandestine PCF response, L’Étincelle: Journal Édité Par le Parti Communiste de Boulogne-Billancourt (March 1942). Guéhenno, Journal des Années Noires, pp. 192–3 (4 March 1942). For other references to bombing, p. 319 (19 and 20 April 1944). Bobkowski, En Guerre et en Paix, p. 303 (4 March 1942). Rist, Une Saison Gâtée, p. 139 (16 March 1942). This destroyed workers’ housing nearby the factory, Dodd and Knapp, ‘How many Frenchmen did you kill?’, p. 479. Rouen was bombed on 17 August 1942 with nearly 140 deaths, for later bombing raids on Rouen, Fauxbras, Journal, pp. 82–3 (13 March 1943). Fauxbras, Journal, p. 38 (24 August 1941); p. 41 (12 September 1941); p. 47 (6 October 1941); p. 55 (14 December 1941); p. 69 (5 June 1942); p. 70 (26 June 1942); p. 72 (17 July 1942); p. 73 (9 September 1942), p. 84 (1 April 1943). Also on the bombing of the synagogues, Guéhenno, Journal des Années Noires, p. 153 (5 April 1943). Fauxbras, Journal, p. 19 (12 May 1941). Fauxbras, Journal, p. 64 (2 March 1942). Fauxbras, Journal, p. 72 (15–17 July 1942). Fauxbras, Journal, p. 37 (20 August 1941); p. 43 (16 September 1941); p. 44 (22 September 1941); p. 46 (28 September 1941); p. 48 (24 October 1941); p. 53 (5 December 1941); p. 55 (12 December 1941); on 100 Jewish and Communist hostages being shot, p. 55 (14 December 1941); after the bombing of the Rex cinema, 116 hostages were executed and there was an entertainments ban, p. 73 (19 September 1942); on the discovery of 26 executed hostages in the Château de Vincennes at the time of the liberation, p. 124 (29 August 1944). Fauxbras, Journal, p. 101. La Cagoule or the Comité Secret d’Action Révolutionnaire (CSAR) was a far right group formed in 1935 which assassinated anti-fascists. Trees painted on Avenue de Paris, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 27 (3 August 1941). Fauxbras, Journal, p. 18 (9 May 1941). On most people wearing tricolours on 14 July, Fauxbras, Journal, p. 24 (14 July 1941); p. 37 (20 August 1941). Fauxbras, Journal, p. 84 (20 March 1943). Fauxbras, Journal, p. 124 (29 August 1944). Fauxbras, Journal, p. 39 (28 August 1941); p. 60 (27 January 1941); p. 83 (13 March 1943). Fauxbras, Journal, p. 122 (23 August 1944). Guéhenno, Journal des Années Noires, p. 332 (24 August 1944), p. 344. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 123 (25 August 1944).

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238 Notes 149. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 124 (31 August 1944). 150. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 125 (6 September 1944 and 19 September 1944). On the purges, Marc Olivier Baruch, ‘Une histoire sociale de l’épurgation en France’, and Gisèle Sapiro, ‘L’épurgation du monde des lettres’, in Marc Olivier Baruch (ed.), Une Poignée de Misérables: L’Epurgation de la Société Française après la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Paris, Fayard, 2003), pp. 7–15, 243–78. 151. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 126 (13 September 1944). The Cour de la Justice tried Chack on 18 December 1944 and he was executed on 9 January 1945. Pierre Assouline, L’Épuration des Intellectuels (Paris, Éditions Complexe, 1996), pp. 40–1; Béraud, Quinze Jours Avec la Mort, pp. 221–3. 152. Chack was charged with ‘intelligence avec l’enemi’, AN Z6 666 Mandat au dépôt, 12 October 1944; Combat, 25 August 1944. 153. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 126 (6 September 1944). Philip Watts, Allegories of Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 32. 154. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 123 (25 August 1944). Corrin Laurens, ‘La femme au turban: les femmes tondues’, in H. R. Kedward and Nancy Wood (eds), The Liberation of France: Image and Event (London, Berg, 1995), pp. 159–73. Fabrice Virgili, ‘Les “tondues” à la libération: Le corps des femmes, enjeu d’une réappropriation’, and Françoise Leclerc and Michèle Weindling, ‘La répression des femmes coupables de collaboration’, in Françoise Thébaud (ed.), Clio, Histoire, Femmes, Sociétés, Résistances et Libérations (Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1995), pp. 111–29 and 129–51. 155. For ‘La police avec nous’, Fauxbras, Antide, pp. 124 and 203; Fauxbras, ‘Soliloque d’un copain’, pp. 27–32. 156. Kristin Ross, May 68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2002), pp. 19–64. Jean-Marc Berlière and Denis Peschanski (eds), La Police Française (1930–1950). Entre Bouleversements et Permanences (Paris, La Documentation Française, 2000). Jean-Marc Berlière (with Jean-Marc Chabrun), Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation d’après les Archives Inédites de l’Épuration (Paris, Perrin, 2001). 157. Fauxbras, Journal, p. 125 (2 August 1944).

Epilogue 1. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid: The Experience of Modernity (London, Verso, 1982). 2. Arthur Koestler et al., The God That Failed (New York, Harper, 1950). 3. Julien Benda, La Trahison des Clercs (Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1927). 4. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992). For a perceptive comment on this, Stanley Hoffman, ‘Battling clichés’, French Historical Studies, 19, 2 (Autumn 1995), p. 327. Also, Tony Judt, ‘ “We have discovered history”: defeat, resistance and the intellectuals in France’, Journal of Modern History, 64, suppl. (December 1992), pp. 147–72. 5. Epstein, Un Paradoxe Français, pp. 376–7. Fauxbras himself noted this paradox opening his study of the navy during the war with the case of the Maurrasian naval officer Estienne d’Orves who the Germans executed

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Notes 239

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

for resistance activities, Fauxbras, Pourquoi la Marine a Trahi (unpublished manuscript), p. 1. Others have warned of such generalized equations: Reynolds, ‘Pacifists into resisters?’, pp. 35–50. Je Suis Partout (3 May 1942). For the ‘list of undesirable writers’, Pierre Assouline, L’Épuration des Intellectuels (Paris, Éditions Complexe, 1996), pp. 168–9. Ironically, more of Fauxbras’s associates appeared on the blacklist that the pro-resistance Comité National des Écrivains (National Writers’ Committee) produced than did members of Fauxbras’s Club Botte-Moi-Le-Train. Burrin, La Dérive Fasciste. For a general sociological effort to explain such affiliations, to which Fauxbras largely conforms, Sapiro, La Guerre des Écrivains 1940–53. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), pp. 340–1. Commenting on Gustave Hervé, C’est Pétain, Qu’il Nous Faut (Paris, Éditions de la Victoire, 1935). Merle Blanc, 95 (25 January 1936). Philippe Masson, La Marine Française et la Guerre, 1939–40 (Paris, Lavauzelle, 1991), pp. 290–5. Martin Thomas, ‘After Mers-el-Kébir: the armed neutrality of the Vichy French navy, 1940–43’, English Historical Review, 112, 447 (1997), pp. 643–70. Admiral Platon, Minister of the Colonies, Admiral Abrial, governor of Algeria and Minister of the Navy, Admiral Decoux, governor of Indo-China, Admiral Esteva, governor of Tunisia. Thomas, ‘After Mers-el-Kébir’, pp. 643–70. Jean Decoux, Adieu Marine (Paris, Plon, 1957); Darlan’s colleague Docteur wrote sympathetically of the former and the admirals in general, Amiral Paul Docteur, L’Énigme de l’Amiral Darlan (Paris, Éditions de la Couronne, 1949) and Paul Docteur, Verité sur les Amirals (Paris, Éditions de la Couronne, 1949); Darlan’s son also contributed to the debate publishing a selection of his father’s papers, Alain Darlan, L’Amiral Darlan Parle (Paris, AmiotDumont, 1954); Jacques Raphaël-Leygues and François Flohic, Darlan (Paris, Plon, 1986); Hervé Coutau-Bégarie and Claude Huan, Darlan (Paris, Fayard, 1989). Jean Decoux, Adieu Marine (Paris, Plon, 1957). Paxton, ‘Darlan, un amiral entre deux blocs’, pp. 3–19. For the terms of debate, see Paxton, Vichy France; Sweets, Choices in Vichy France. On the expectation of revolution following another war, Fauxbras, Mer Noire, pp. 256–7. Mauriac famously defended Chack against the supposedly arbitrary ‘lottery’ of execution in his polemic with Camus about the purge, Sapiro, Guerre des Écrivains, p. 609. The rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and the commemorative response of Jewish and anti-racist organizations is a case in point. Published in the original German two years earlier, Eberhard Jäckel, La France dans l’Europe de Hitler (Paris, Fayard, 1968). Other posters of the Atelier Populaire also related to Fauxbras’s themes of press propaganda, unemployment, the police, and the poster depicting

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Notes

sheep returning to normal is a reference to the mutinies of 1917 when troops imitated the sounds of sheep. 24. For example, cartoonists Wolinski and Siné were closely associated with the events and Charlie Hebdo or L’Enragé might have been modelled on Merle Blanc or Le Canard Enchaîné. 25. Action, 10 (14 June 1968).

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Select Bibliography Archives Archives Départementales de Seine-Saint-Denis Bobine 9 3MI6 9 85 La Page de Jean Le Gouin. Bobine 54 3MI6 54 372 La Page de Jean Le Gouin.

Archives de la Service Historique de la Marine (SHM), Vincennes Biographical file: Paul Chack (1876–1945). SS Ed 119 Black Sea Correspondence 1919. SS Ed 30 Black Sea Mutiny. SS G 3 Loss of the Léon Gambetta. SS G 32 Loss of the Danton.

Archives Nationales, Paris AN 434 AP 34 Parliamentary bills on the Navy recruitment in 1923. AN 8 AR 457 Eugene Merle, 1929. AN F22 682 Ministry of Labour: unemployment. AN F7 13066 Report on demonstration at Spanish embassy on 9 September 1909. AN F7 13163–5 Mutineers of the Black Sea. AN F7 13180 Police reports on ARAC. AN F7 13349–51 Anti-militarism. AN F7 13352 Report on conscientious objection. AN F7 13757 Tenants’ associations. AN F7 13952 Amnesty campaign for mutineers. AN F7 13960 On homosexuality in the navy. AN F60 1525 Reports on bombing, 1940–44. AN Z6 666 Trial of Paul Chack.

Bibliothèque royale Albert Premier FS46 593 1 Trois manifestes (n.d.).

César Fauxbras’s personal papers, private collection, Vincennes Fauxbras, César, Sondage 1940: ou Pourquoi le Soldat Français ne Voulait pas Mourir pour Danzig (unpublished manuscript, 1940–1). Fauxbras, César, Pourquoi La Marine a Trahi (unpublished manuscript, n.d., c.1945). Fauxbras, César, Journal 1939–44 (unpublished manuscript, n.d.). Press cuttings, 1931–40. Correspondence, 1925–57. 241

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242 Select Bibliography

Préfecture de Police de Paris Situations de Paris, Renseignments généraux. BA1767 Bombing raids on Paris, 1939–45.

Periodicals Action Française. Aujourd’hui. Bulletin du Syndicat National des Officiers de la Marine Marchande. Bulletin Officiel de la Marine. Cahiers du Bolchévisme. Canard Enchaîné. Combat. Germinal. Gringoire. Je Suis Partout. La Flèche. L’Humanité. L’Intransigeant. L’Oeuvre. La Vague. Le Crapouillot. Le Figaro. Le Matin. Le Moniteur de la Flotte. Les Nouveaux Temps. Le Petit Parisien. Le Populaire. Le Temps. Les Humbles. Merle Blanc. Révolution Proletarienne. Revue Maritime. Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste. Vie Ouvrière. Vigilance.

Contemporary literature Alerme, Colonel, Les Causes Militaires de Notre Défaite (Paris, Publications du Centre d’Études de l’Agence Inter-France, 1941). Alerme, Michel, Stratégie Anglaise (Paris, Flammarion, 1942). Bailby, Léon, Pour Quoi Je Me Suis Battu, Souvenirs (Paris, Plon, 1951). Barbusse, Henri, Le Feu: Journal d’une Escouade (Paris, Flammarion, 1965). Barbusse, Henri, Paroles d’un Combattant: Articles et Discours 1917–20 (Paris, Flammarion, 1920). Barrès, Auguste Maurice, L’Âme française et la Guerre (Paris, Émile-Paul, 1919).

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Barthélemy, Joseph, Ministre de la Justice: Vichy, 1941–1943 (Paris, Pygmalion, 1989). Baudouin, Paul, The Private Diaries March 1940–January 1941 (London, Eyre & Spottiswode, 1948). Béarn, Pierre, De Dunkerque en Liverpool (Paris, Gallimard, 1941). Benda, Julien, La Trahison des Clercs (Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1927). Benjamin, René, Gaspard (Paris, Arthème Fayard, 1925). Benoist-Méchin, Jacques, La Moisson de Quarante (Paris, Albin Michel, 1941). Béraud, Henri, Quinze Jours Avec la Mort (Paris, Plon, 1951). Bienaimé, Vice-amiral, La Guerre Navale, 1914–1918: Fautes et Responsibilités (Paris, Tallainder, 1920). Bobkowski, Andrzej, En Guerre et en Paix: Journal 1940–44 (Paris, Éditions Noir sur Blanc, 1991). Boudon, Victor, Avec Péguy de la Lorraine à la Marne (Paris, Hachette, 1916). Castex, Amiral, Théories Stratégiques (Paris, Société d’Éditions Géographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales, 1929), 7 volumes. Cazeneuve, Jean, Essai sur la Psychologie du Prisonnier de Guerre (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1944). Céline, Louis-Fernand, Voyage to the End of the Night (New York, New Directions, 1960). Chack, Paul, Branlebas de Combat (Paris, É ditions de France, 1932). Chack, Paul, ‘Qui tient la mer, tient la terre’, Notre Combat, 4 (13 October 1939), pp. 1–15. Chack, Paul, Deux Batailles Navales: Lépante-Trafalgar (Paris, Éditions de France, 1935). Chack, Paul, Marins à la Bataille: Méditerranée 1914–1918 (Paris, Gerfaut, 2001), 3 volumes. Chack, Paul, Pavillon Haut (Paris, Éditions de France, 1929). Chack, Paul, The Entente upon the Seas (Liège, Vaillant-Carmanne, 1928). Chack, Paul, Trafalgar (Paris, Éditions de France, 1938). Chack, Paul, Tu Seras Marin (Paris, Éditions de France, 1939). Champeil, M., La Révolte d’Oléron (Paris, Fédération des Jeunesses Communistes, 1930). Charpentier, Armand, Ce Que Sera la Guerre des Gaz (Paris, Delpeuch, 1930). Chassaignon, André, Retours vers la France, Récits de Captivité (Paris, Éditions Littéraires Artistiques, 1945). Cru, Jean Norton, Du Témoinage (Paris, Allia, 2008). Cru, Jean Norton, Témoins: Essai d’Analyse et de Critique des Souvenirs de Combattants Édités en Français de 1915 à 1928 (Paris, Les Etincelles, 1929). Dabit, Eugène, Les Faubourgs de Paris (Paris, Gaillmard, 1933). Darlan, Alain, L’Amiral Darlan Parle (Paris, Amiot-Dumont, 1954). Dartige de Fourchet, Vice-amiral Louis, Souvenirs de Guerre d’un Amiral, 1914–16 (Paris, Plon, 1920). de Bonneuil, Marie-Édith, Bivouacs aux Étoiles (Paris, Plon, 1938). de Monzie, Anatole, Ci-Devant (Paris, Flammarion, 1941). Débat, Georges, Marine Oblige (Paris, Flammarion, 1974). Decoux, Jean, Adieu Marine (Paris, Plon, 1957). des Cars, Guy, L’Officier sans Nom (Paris, Fayard, 1941). Descaves, Lucien, Sous-Offs: Roman Militaire (Paris, P. V. Stock, 1903).

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244 Select Bibliography Docteur, Amiral, Carnet de Bord (Paris, Nouvelle Société d’Édition, 1932). Docteur, Amiral Paul, L’Énigme de l’Amiral Darlan (Paris, Éditions de la Couronne, 1949). Docteur, Paul, Verité sur les Amirals (Paris, Éditions de la Couronne, 1949). Dominique, Pierre, Un État de Quat’Sous (Paris, Agence Inter-France, 1942). Doriot, Jacques, Refaire la France (Paris, B. Grasset, 1938). Drouot, Henri, Notes d’un Dijonnais Pendant l’Occupation Allemande: 1940–1944 (Dijon, Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 1998). du Moulin de Labarthète, Henri, Le Temps des Illusions, Souvenirs, Juillet 1940– Avril 1942 (Geneva, G. Bourquin, 1946). Fabre-Luce, Alfred, Journal de la France: 1939–44 (Paris, Fayard, 1969), 3 volumes. Farrère, Claude, Histoire de la Marine Française (Paris, Flammarion, 1934). Fauxbras, César, Antide: ou les Banqueroutes Frauduleuses, Roman Peut-être Philosophique (Paris, Flammarion, 1937). Fauxbras, César, Jean Le Gouin: Journal d’un Simple Matelot de la Grande Guerre (Louviers, Éditions l’Ancre de Marine, 2004). Fauxbras, César, Mer Noire: Les Mutineries Racontées par un Mutin (Paris, Flammarion, 1935). Fauxbras, César, Sondage 1940 (Paris, Allia, 2011) Fauxbras, César, Viande à Brûler: Journal d’un Chômeur Roman (Paris, Flammarion, 1935). Folcher, Gustave, Marching to Captivity: The War Diaries of a French Peasant, 1939–45 (London, Brassey’s, 1996). Fréville, Jean, Pain de Brique: Roman Contemporain (Paris, Flammarion, 1937). Fronval, Georges, Les Histoires que l’On Racontait Lorsqu’Ils Étaitent Là (Paris, Chantal, 1944). Galtier-Boissière, Jean, Journal 1940–50 (Paris, Quai Voltaire, 1992). Gide, André, Retour de l’URSS (Paris, Gallimard, 1936). Grenier, Fernand, Réponse à Kleber Légay (Paris, Éditions des Amis de l’Union Soviétique, 1937). Guéhenno, Jean, Journal des Années Noires, 1940–1944 (Paris, Gallimard, 1947). Guitard, Paul, Chômage (Paris, Maurice d’Hartoy, 1933). Hervé, Gustave, C’est Pétain, Qu’Il Nous Faut (Paris, Éditions de la Victoire, 1935). Jean Le Ramey and Pierre Vottero, Les Mutins de la Mer Noire (Paris, Éditions Sociales, 1973). Kertész, André, Paris Vu par André Kertész (Paris, Plon, 1934). Koestler, Arthur et al., The God That Failed (New York, Harper, 1950). Krivopissko, Guy (ed.), Vie à en Mourir: Lettres de Fusillés 1941–1944 (Paris, Éditions Tallandier, 2003). Laurens, Adolphe, Le Blocus et la Guerre Sous-marine (1914–1918) (Paris, Armand Colin, 1924). Laurens, Adolphe, Précis d’Histoire de la Guerre Navale 1914–18 (Paris, Payot, 1929). Le Moyne, François, Chantons la Mer (Paris, Éditions Ouvrières, 1944). Lecoc, Louis-Charles, L’Enjeu de la Geurre: les Juifs (Paris, Sorlot, 1943). Legay, Kléber, Un Mineur Français Chez les Russes (Paris, P. Tisné, 1937). Letellier, Gabrielle, Jean Perret, H.E. Zuber and A. Dauphin-Meunier, Une Enquête sur le Chômage (Paris, Institut Scientifique de Recherches Economiques et Sociales, 1938–46), 3 volumes.

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Lhande, Pierre, L’Enseigne de Vaisseau Auguste Lefèvre (Paris, Gabriel Beauchesnes, 1919). Lieutenant de Vaisseau Charles Ballande: Extraits de ses Lettres (Paris, Librarie de Fischbacher, 1916). Loiseaux, Gérard, La Littérature de la Défaite et de la Collaboration (Paris, La Sorbonne, 1984). Malherbe, Henry, La Flamme au Poing (Paris, Albin Michel, 1945). Marty, André, Les Heures Glorieuses de la Mer Noire (Paris, Éditions du Parti Communiste Français, 1932). Marty, André, La Révolte de la Mer Noire: 1918–1919 (Paris, Bureau d’Éditions, 1932). Marty, André, Le Parti Communiste Français Né et Forgé dans la Lutte contre la Guerre (Paris, Bethune, 1972). Menu, Charles Léon, Lumières sur les Ruines: les Combattants de 1940 Réhabilités (Paris, Plon, 1953). Montigny, Jean, Mers-el-Kébir (Saigon, Imprimerie de Thanh-Mau, 1942). Mousset, Paul, Quand le Temps Travaillait pour Nous (Grasset, Dijon, 1943). Prieur, Claude, De Dixmude à Nieuport (Paris, Perrin, 1916). Raffalovitch, Arthur, L’Abominable Vénalité de la Presse: d’Après les Documents des Archives Russes (1897–1917) (Paris, Librairie du Travail, 1931). Rebatet, Lucien, Les Décombres (Paris, Denoël, 1942). Rémy, Tristan, La Grande Lutte: Roman (Paris, Éditions Sociales Internationales, 1937). Rist, Charles, Une Saison Gâtée: Journal de Guerre de l’Occupation, 1939–45 (Paris, Fayard, 1983). Romains, Jules, Les Hommes de Bonne Volonté: Volume 19: Cette Grande Lueur à l’Est (Paris, Flammarion, 1945). Romains, Jules, Les Humbles (Paris, Flammarion, 1933). Ronarc’h, Vice-amiral, Souvenirs de Guerre (Paris, Payot, 1921). Schwerer, Amiral, Souvenirs de ma Vie Maritime (1878–1914) (Paris, SGIE, 1933). Thomazi, Auguste, La Guerre Navale dans la Mediterranée (Paris, Payot, 1929). Tillion, Germaine, Ravensbrück (Paris, Seuil, 1988). Tillon, Charles, La Révolte Vient de Loin (Paris, Juillard, 1969). Vautel, Clément, Mon Film: Souvenirs d’un Journaliste (Paris, Albin Michel, 1941). Ven, Captaine de Corvette, Les Armes Nécessaires dans une Flotte (Paris, Société d’Éditions, 1923). Vigné d’Octon, Paul, Pages Rouges (Marseilles, XXe Siècle, 1922). Von Trapp, Georg, To the Last Salute: Memories of an Austrian U-Boat Commander (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Werth, Léon, Déposition: Journal 1940–44 (Paris, V. Hamy, 1992).

Secondary literature Alexander, Martin S., ‘ “No taste to fight?”: French combat performance in 1940 and the politics of the fall of France’, in Paul Addison and Angus Calder (eds), Time to Kill: The Soldiers’ Experience of War in the West, 1939–1945 (London, Random House, 1997), pp. 167–76. Alexander, Martin S., The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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246 Select Bibliography Antier, Jean-Jacques and Paul Chack, Histoire Maritime de la Première Guerre Mondiale (Paris, Éditions France-Empire, 1969). Antier, Jean-Jacques, ‘Révolte des équipages de la flotte à Toulon’, Les Dossiers Histoire de la Mer (February–March 1980), pp. 73–86. Assouline, Pierre, L’Épuration des Intellectuels (Paris, Éditions Complexe, 1996). Audouin-Rouzeau, Stéphane and Annette Becker, 14–18 Understanding the Great War (New York, Hill and Wang, 2002). Audouin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, ‘Bourrage de crâne et information en France 1915–18’, in Jean-Jacques Becker and Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau (eds), Les Sociétés Européens et la Guerre de 1914–18 (Paris, Université de Paris X-Nanterre, 1990). Audouin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War (Oxford, Berg, 1992). Barré, Jean-Luc and Jacques Raphaël-Leygues, Les Mutins de la Mer Noire (Paris, Plon, 1981). Baruch, Marc Olivier (ed.), Une Poignée de Misérables (Paris, Fayard, 2003). Baudot, Marcel, ‘L’opinion publique devant la propagande allemande et l’invasion de L’URSS’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, 64 (October 1966), pp. 63–80. Baudot, Marcel, L’Opinion Publique sous l’Occupation: L’Exemple d’un Département Français (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1996). Becker, Annette, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930 (Oxford, Berg, 1998). Becker, Jean-Jacques, The Great War and the French People (Lemington Spa, Berg, 1985). Bell, Christopher M. and Bruce A. Elleman (eds), Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century (London, Frank Cass, 2003). Belot, Robert, Lucien Rebatet: un Itineraire Fasciste (Paris, Seuil, 1994). Berlière, Jean-Marc and Denis Peschanski (eds), La Police Française (1930–1950) (Paris, La Documentation Française, 2000). Berlière, Jean-Marc, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation d’après les Archives Inédites de l’Épuration (Paris, Perrin, 2001). Berry, David, A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945 (Edinburgh, AK Press, 2009). Betz, Albrecht and Stefan Martens, Les Intellectuels et l’Occupation (Paris, Autrement, 2004). Blatt, Joel (ed.), The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (Oxford, Berghahn, 1998). Boudot, François, ‘Sur la psychologie du prisonnier: thèse et souvenirs’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, 25 (1957), pp. 88–98. Brunschwig, Henri, ‘Vigné d’Octon et l’anticolonialisme sous la Troisième République’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 14, 54 (1974), pp. 265–98. Burrin, Philippe, La Dérive Fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery 1933–1945 (Paris, Seuil, 2003). Capdevilla, Luc, ‘The quest for masculinity in a defeated France’, Contemporary European History, 10, 3 (2001), pp. 423–45. Carley, Michael Jabara, Revolution and Intervention: The French Government and the Russian Civil War, 1917–1919 (Buffalo, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983).

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Charle, Christophe, La Naissance des ‘Intellectuels’ 1880–1900 (Paris, Éditions du Minuit, 1990). Coeuré, Sophie, La Grande Lueur à l’Est: les Français et l’Union Soviétique 1917– 1939 (Paris, Seuil, 1999). Cornick, Martyn, ‘The BBC and the propaganda war against occupied France: the work of Émile Delavenay and the European Intelligence Department’, French History, 8, 3 (1994), pp. 316–54. Coutau-Bégarie, Hervé and Claude Huan, Darlan (Paris, Fayard, 1989). Coutau-Bégarie, Hervé, Castex: Le Stratège Inconnu (Paris, Economica, 1985). Cowans, Jon, ‘Fear and loathing in Paris: the reception of opinion polling in France, 1938–1977’, Social Science History, 26, 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 71–104. Crémieux-Brilhac, Jean-Louis and Georges Bensimon, ‘Les propagandes radiophoniques en France et l’opinion publique de 1940 à 1944’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, 101 (1976), pp. 3–18. Crémieux-Brilhac, Jean-Louis, Les Français de l’An 40 (Paris, Gallimard, 1990), 2 volumes. Darreus, Henri and Jean Guéguiner, Historique de la Marine Française (Saint-Malo, Ancre de la marine, 1996). Delmas, Jean, Paul Devautour and Eric Lefèvre, Mai-Juin 40: Les Combattants de l’Honneur (Paris, Copernic, 1980). Dillaz, Serge, La Chanson Française de Contestation: des Barricades de la Commune a celles de Mai 1968 (Paris, Seghers, 1973). Dejonghe, Etienne, ‘La Nord isolée: l’occupation et opinion (mai 1940–mai 1942)’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 26 (January 1979), pp. 48–98. Douglas, Allen, War Memory and the Politics of Humour: The Canard Enchaîné and World War One (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002). Durand, Yves, La Vie Quotidienne des Prisonniers de Guerre dans les Stalags, les Oflags et les Kommandos 1939–1945 (Paris, Hachette, 1987). Dutailly, Henri, ‘Faiblesses et potentialités de l’armée de terre, 1939–40’, Les Armées Françaises pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale: 1939–1945 (Paris, IHCC, 1986), pp. 23–32. Epstein, Simon, Dreyfusards sous l’Occupation (Paris, Albin Michel, 2001). Epstein, Simon, Un Paradoxe Français: Antiracistes dans la Collaboration, Antisémites dans la Résistance (Paris, Albin Michel, 2008). Evelyn Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1993). Eveno, Patrick, L’Argent de la Presse Française des Années 1820 à nos Jours (Paris, Éditions CTHS, 2003). Evleh, Donna, The Authorized Press in Vichy and German Occupied France 1940– 1944: A Bibliography (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1999). Facon, P., ‘Les mutineries dans les corps expéditionnaires français en Russie Septentrionale (décembre 1918–avril 1919)’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 24 (1977), pp. 455–74. Faucier, Nicolas, Pacifisme et Antimilitarisme dans l’Entre-Deux-Guerres (Paris, Spartacus, 1983). Ferro, Marc, ‘Cultural life in France, 1914–1918’, in Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (eds), European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 295–307.

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248 Select Bibliography Fishman, Sarah, ‘Grand delusions: the unintended consequences of Vichy France’s prisoner of war propaganda’, Journal of Contemporary History, 26, 2 (1991), pp. 229–54. Fishman, Sarah, We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940–1945 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991). Fondation Claude-Bellanger, La Presse Française de la Résistance à la Libération (Martigny, Fondation Claude-Bellanger, 1988). Forcade, Olivier, Éric Duhamel and Philippe Vial (eds), Militaires en République 1870–1962 (Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999). Genevoix, Maurice, La Mort de Près (Paris, Plon, 1972). Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Guessler, Normand, ‘Henri Barbusse and his Monde (1928–35’, Journal of Contemporary History, 11, 2/3 (1976), pp. 173–97. Guillon, Jean-Marie, ‘Talk which was not idle: rumours in wartime France’, in Hanna Diamond and Simon Kitson (eds), Vichy, Resistance, Liberation: New Perspectives on Wartime France (Oxford, Berg, 2005), pp. 73–86. Guinard, D.-J., ‘Chômeur’, À Contre-Courant, 2 (August 1935), pp. 88–93. Halpern, Paul G., The Naval War in the Mediterranean 1914–1918 (London, Allen & Unwin, 1987). Harvey, A.D., ‘The French armée de l’air in May–June 1940: a failure of conception’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25 (1990), pp. 447–65. Hathaway, Jane (ed.), Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective (Westport, Praeger, 2001). Hazareesingh, Sudhir, ‘Why no peace movement in France?’, in Sudhir Hazareesingh (ed.), Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 178–206. Hoffman, Stanley, ‘Battling clichés’, French Historical Studies, 19, 2 (Autumn 1995), p. 327. Hoffman, Stanley, ‘Trauma of 1940: a disaster and its traces’, Historical Reflections/ Réflexions Historiques, 22, 1 (Winter 1996), pp. 287–301. Hoffman, Stanley, ‘Vichy and collaboration’, Preuves (July–September 1969), pp. 61–74. Hood III, Ronald Chalmers, ‘The French Navy and parliament between the wars’, International Historical Review, 6, 3 (1984), pp. 386–403. Hood III, Ronald Chalmers, Royal Republicans: The French Naval Dynasties between the Wars (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1985). Hurcombe, Martin, Novelists in Conflict: Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the Great War (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2004). Huss, Marie-Monique, ‘Pro-natalism in interwar France’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25, 1 (1990), pp. 39–68. Ingram, Norman, ‘Repressed memory syndrome: interwar French pacifism and the attempt to recover France’s pacifist past’, French History, 18, 3 (2004), pp. 315–30. Ingram, Norman, The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France 1919–39 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991). Irving, William D., ‘French conservatives and the “new right” during the 1930s’, French Historical Studies, 8, 4 (1974), pp. 534–62. Jäckel, Eberhard, La France dans l’Europe de Hitler (Paris, Fayard, 1968).

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Jackson, Julian, France: The Dark Years 1940–44 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001). Jackson, Julian, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003). Jackson, Peter, ‘Naval policy and national strategy in France, 1933–37’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 23, 4 (2000), pp. 130–59. Jenkins, Brian, ‘The six février 1934 and the “survival” of the French Republic’, French History, 20, 3 (2006), pp. 333–51. Jones, Edgar and Robert Hodgins Vermaas, ‘Flashbacks and post-traumatic stress disorder: the genesis of a 20th-century diagnosis’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 182 (2003), pp. 158–63. Jordan, Nicole, ‘Strategy and scapegoating: reflections on the French national catastrophe, 1940’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 22, 1 (Winter 1996), pp. 11–32. Jossifort, Tico, ‘The Black Sea revolt’, Revolutionary History, 8 (2002), pp. 99–114. Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 1 (2000): Special issue on shell shock. Judt, Tony, ‘ “We have discovered history”: defeat, resistance and the intellectuals in France’, Journal of Modern History, 64, suppl. (December 1992), pp. 147–72. Judt, Tony, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992). Kedward, H.R., ‘Resiting the resistance’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 9 (1999), pp. 271–82. Kenez, Peter, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977). Kitson, Simon, ‘The police and the Clichy massacre, March 1937’, in Richard Bessel and Clive Emsley (eds), Patterns of Provocation (Oxford, Berghahn, 2000), pp. 29–40. Koos, Cheryl A., ‘ “On les aura!”: the gendered politics of abortion and the Alliance nationale contre la dépopulation’, Modern & Contemporary France, 7, 1 (1999), pp. 21–33. Kselman, Thomas A., Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993). Laborie, Pierre, L’Opinion Française sous Vichy (Paris, Seuil, 1990). Laguerre, Bernard, ‘Les pétitionnaires du Front Populaire 1934–39’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 37 (1990), pp. 500–15. Lasterle, Philippe, ‘Could Admiral Gensoul have averted the tragedy of Mers-elKébir?’, Journal of Military History, 67, 3 (2003), pp. 835–44. Laurens, Corrin, ‘La femme au turban: Les femmes tondues’, in H.R. Kedward and Nancy Wood (eds), The Liberation of France: Image and Event (London, Berg, 1995), pp. 159–73. Le Boterf, Hervé, La Vie Parisienne sous l’Occupation (Paris, Education France Empire, 1997). Leclerc, Françoise and Michèle Weindling, ‘La répression des femmes coupables de collaboration’, in Françoise Thébaud (ed.), Clio, histoire, Femmes, Sociétés, Résistances et Libérations (Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1995), pp. 129–51. Lecoin, Louis, De Prison en Prison (Antony, Lecoin, 1947).

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250 Select Bibliography Lefebvre, P. and S. Barbes, ‘L’hystérie de guerre: étude comparative de ses manifestations au cours des deux derniers conflits mondiaux’, Annales MédicoPsychologique, 142 (February 1984), pp. 262–66. Lembrez, Claude, Chronique de l’An 40 (Vergèze, C. Lembrez, 1994). Loez, André, ‘Les mots et cultures de l’indiscipline: les graffiti des mutins de 1917’, Genèses, 59, 2 (2005), pp. 25–46. Loez, André and Nicolas Mariot (eds), Obéir/Désobéir: Les Mutineries de 1917 en Perspective (Paris, La Découverte, 2008). Maier, Charles S., ‘A surfeit of memory? Reflections on history, melancholy and denial’, History and Memory, 5 (1993), pp. 136–51. Manevy, Raymond, Histoire de la Presse 1914 à 1939 (Paris, Corréa, 1945). Martin, Laurent, Le Canard Enchaîné: Histoire d’un Journal Satirique 1915–2005 (Paris, Nouveau Monde, 2005). Masson, Philippe, Histoire de la Marine Française (Paris, C. Lavauzelle, 1983). Masson, Philippe, La Marine Française et la Guerre, 1939–40 (Paris, Lavauzelle, 1991). Masson, Philippe, La Marine Française et la Mer Noire (Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1982). Masson, Philippe, La Mort et les Marins (Grenoble, Glénat, 1995). Masson, Philippe, ‘La pensée navale française de 1871 à 1940’, Revue Historique des Armées, 1 (1982), pp. 42–51. Monier, Frédéric, Le Front Populaire (Paris, La Découverte, 2002). Monier, Frédéric, ‘Les obsessions d’Henri Béraud’, Vingtième Siècle, 40 (1993), pp. 62–74. Mosse, George L., Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990). Mosse, George L., The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996). Mosse, George, ‘Shell-shock as a social disease’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35 (2000), pp. 101–8. Offenstadt, Nicolas (ed.), Le Chemin des Dames: de l’Événement à la Mémoire (Paris, Stock, 2004). Offenstadt, Nicolas, Les Fusillés de la Grande Guerre et la Mémoire Collective (1914– 1999) (Paris, Odile Jacob, 1999). Offenstadt, Nicolas, ‘Signer pour la paix en 1938–39: pétitions et pétitionnaires’, Cahiers de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, 26 (1994), pp. 249–63. Paxton, Robert O., ‘Darlan, un amiral entre deux blocs: réflexions sur une biographie récente’, Vingtième Siècle, 36 (October–December 1992), pp. 3–19. Paxton, Robert O., Vichy France (New York, Columbia University Press, 1972). Paz, Maurice, Les Révoltes de la Mer Noire (Paris, Librairie du Travail, 1921). Pedroncini, Guy, Les Mutineries de 1917 (Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1967). Pons, Anne, Dark Rosaleen (Paris, B. Grasset, 1991). Prost, Antoine, Les Anciens Combattants et la Société Française: 1914–1939 (Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), 3 volumes. Rabaut, Jean, L’Antimilitarisme en France 1810–1975 (Paris, Hachette, 1975). Racine, Nicole, ‘The Clarté movement in France, 1919–21’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2, 2 (1967), pp. 195–208. Raphaël-Leygues, Jacques and François Flohic, Darlan (Paris, Plon, 1986).

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Index 200 families, 112, 141 À Nous la Liberté, 67, 74 Abetz, Otto, 150, 152, 157, 168, 234 Abortion, 102, 117, 118 Abrial, Admiral, 177, 239 n14 Abyssinian war, 104, 106–07, 112, 114, 120, 172 Action Française, 44, 47, 55, 84, 102, 103, 104, 133, 149 Airforce, 129, 136, 37, 177, 186 Alain, 115 Alerme, Colonel Michel, 149, 151, 231 n10 Algeria, 106, 112, 129, 158, 178, 179 Alliance Nationale Contre la Dépopulation, 117 Amiral Charner, 31 Antide (1938), 1, 81–99, 173, 174 Anti-French talk, 137 Anti-militarism, 5, 37, 44, 85–87, 88, 102, 110, 116, 117, 119 Anti-semitism, 47, 101, 102, 115, 139, 152, 153, 155, 162, 165–66, 175, 176, 180 Aragon, Louis, 84, 93, 114 Ardennes, 124, 128 Association de la Paix par le Droit, 86 Association des Écrivains Combattants, 22, 105, 200 n26 Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (AEAR, Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists), 92 Attentisme, 145 Auffray, Charles, 109 Augagneur, Victor, 24 Aujourd’hui, 148, 152, 154, 157 Austro-Hungarian navy, 20, 21, 31, 40, 52

Badina, Louis, 42, 206 n19 Bailby, Léon, 32, 102, 103, 104, 210 n71, 219 n22, 220 n31 Barbusse, Henri, 5, 18, 19, 26, 44, 62, 90, 172 Barrès, Maurice, 18, 30, 103 Barthélemy, Joseph, 147, 167 Bas Fonds, Les, 63, 68, 69, 74, 213 n10 BBC, 157, 159 Belle Équipe, La, 68, 71, 74, 79 Benjamin, René, 18, 19 Benoist-Méchin, Jacques, 125, 126, 151 Béraud, Henri, 34, 100, 176, 178 Bergery, Gaston, 82, 98, 116, 117, 119, 175 Bienaimé, Amédée-Pierre-Léonard, 24 Billancourt, 89, 113, 165 Bizerte, 2, 27, 29, 30, 31, 39, 42, 52, 57, 204 n101 Black Sea Mutiny, see under Mer Noire Bloch, Marc, 9, 123, 198 n30 Blum, Léon, 81, 84, 87, 95, 102–03, 105, 108, 109, 113, 219 n17 Bobkowski, Andrzej, 160, 164, 165 Boche, 139, 157, 191, 228 n99 Bolchévisme contre l’Europe (exhibition), 153 Bolsheviks, 49, 51, 55, 56, 83, 85, 89, 90, 112, 140, 148, 153, 154, 155, 179, 180, 184–85, 193, 194 Bombing, 112, 129, 153, 162–65, 171, 194, 236 n117 Bon, Vice-Admiral de, 24 Bonnard, Abel, 155, 164, 194, 222 n105 Bonneuil, Marie-Edith de, 104, 106 Boudu Sauvé des Eaux, 69, 74 Bourrage de crâne (wartime propaganda), 4, 168, 172, 179, 180 Boverat, Fernand, 117, 118, 223 n120 Brest, 2 253

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254 Index Brest-Litovsk, treaty of, 40 Breton, André, 47, 115 Briand, Aristide, 102 Brinon, Fernand de, 150, 164, 165, 194 Brittany, 142 Cagoule, La (Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire), 166 Camus, Albert, 239 n20 Canard Enchaîné, Le, 18, 49, 55, 100, 103, 200 n20 Candide (newspaper), 43, 102, 103, 219 n24 Candide (Voltaire), 82–84, 95, 97 Caporetto, 106, 133 Capy, Marcelle, 155 Castelnau, General de, 104 Castex, Admiral Raoul, 25, 37 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 19, 30, 36, 63, 152, 155, 164 Centre Syndical d’Action Contre La Guerre (Union Centre of Action against War), 111 Cercle Aryen (Aryan Circle), 148 Chack, Paul, 17, 21–23, 25, 26, 30–32, 34, 35, 37, 46, 55, 115, 148–49, 152–54, 156, 164, 167, 176, 178–80, 193, 201 n29, 222 n105, 231 n6 Challaye, Félicien, 115, 155, 175 Chamson, André, 114 Charpentier, Armand, 111, 115, 155, 175, 221 n83 Charpentier, Jean, 222 n97 Châteaurenault, 31 Chautemps, Camille, 72, 110 Chemin des Dames mutiny, 18, 54, 172, 189 Chiappe, Jean, 104, 168 Churchill, Winston, 132, 138, 162, 163, 236 Clemenceau, Georges, 44, 52, 53, 83, 14, 181, 188–89 Clichy, 109–10, 119, 168 Club Botte-Moi-Le-Train, 103–06, 119, 176, 221 n86 Colette, 114

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Collaboration or collaborationism, 3, 6, 34, 37, 95, 98, 100, 115, 116, 119, 125, 126, 135, 138, 140, 145, 148, 150, 151, 152–60, 162, 164, 167, 168, 171, 172, 175–78, 193 Comité d’Action Antibolchévique (CAA, Anti-Bolshevik Action Committee), 148, 153, 231 n7 Committee of the Unemployed, 65, 72 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT, General Confederation of Labour), 42, 81, 87, 94, 98, 99, 113, 114, 187 Consciousness, 8–13, 52, 53, 56, 57, 127, 129, 130–32, 135, 143, 145, 146, 157, 161, 162, 168, 169, 172, 174, 187 Constantini, Pierre, 154, 194 Cornier, Albert, 156 Coty, François, 101 Cowardice, 123, 126, 138, 144, 145, 187 Crever au Stalag, 125 Croix de Bois, 114 Crowd, The, 67, 70 Cru, Jean Norton, 4, 5, 29–30, 196–97 n16, 199 n2, 202 n67 see also Witness Culture of war, 7, 12, 197 n18 Dahl, André, 100 Daladier, Edouard, 37, 107, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 131, 134, 137, 149, 150, 151, 155 Danton, 2, 28–29, 31, 35 Danzig, 134, 137, 144, 145, 191 Darlan, Admiral, 37, 150, 158, 177, 239 n16 Darquier de Pellepoix, Louis, 150 Daudet, Léon, 102, 104 Déat, Marcel, 82, 98, 148, 154, 158, 175, 193–94 Death, 27–28, 29, 32–34, 36, 43, 48, 54, 69, 78, 135, 141, 143, 165, 171, 179, 202 n53, 204 n95 Decoux, Admiral, 177, 239 n14

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Index 255 Defeat of 1940, explanations, 123–24, 129–30, 135, 136–38, 144, 149–52 Defeatism, 31, 42, 85, 94, 124, 130, 134, 136, 137, 138, 144, 145, 190 Delaisi, Francis, 115 Deloncle, Eugène, 154, 166, 194 Demartial, Georges, 115 Descaves, Lucien, 5, 62, 114 Dominique, Pierre, 151 Dorgelès, Roland, 5, 18, 19, 111, 172 Doriot, Jacques, 6, 82, 88, 92, 98, 106, 115, 148, 154, 155, 156, 158, 189, 175, 193–94 Dormoy, Marx, 109 Drouot, Henri, 147 Duchemin, René, 101 Écho de Paris, L’, 67, 101, 103, 104 École des Mousses, naval military academy, 2 Emery, Léon, 155, 175 Époque, L’, 104 Epstein, Jean, 3 Ère Nouvelle, L’, 102 Esteva, Admiral, 177, 239 n14 Estienne d’Orves, Henri Honoré d’, 238 n5 Fabre-Luce, Alfred, 147 Fallada, Hans, see under Little Man, What Now? Faucier, Nicolas, 117 Fayard, Arthème, 104, 219 n24 Fayots, 50, 51, 54, 55, 154, 183, 184, 210 n77, 211 n103 Figaro, Le, 32, 101, 107, 168, 172 Fischer, Max, 3, 35 Flammarion, 3, 17, 62 Flèche, La, 36, 97, 100, 116–17 Folcher, Gustave, 126 Fournet, Admiral Dartige de, 24 France, 41, 42 France au Travail, La, 157 Franco-British naval accords (1913), 20 Franklin-Bouillon, Henry, 104, 219 n25

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Fréville, Jean, 82, 212 n120 Fridolie, 138 Fridolin, 138 Fritz, 138 Galtier-Boissière, Jean, 97, 115, 147, 230 n1 Gamelin, General, 123, 137, 228 n88 Gance, Abel, 19 Gaulle, Charles de, 132, 137, 138, 168 Gaulois, 31, 101 Gerbe, La, 157 German invasion of the Soviet Union, 161, 162, 193 Germinal, 155–56 Gestapo, 112, 148 Gide, André, 90, 111 Giono, Jean, 19, 115 Graffiti, 13, 40, 53, 56, 161, 166, 180 Grapes of Wrath, 73, 74, 76 Great War, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11–13, 17–37, 45,62, 82, 100, 103, 110, 111, 115, 125, 127, 130, 134, 135, 143, 170, 171, 172, 173, 179 Greenwood, Walter, see under Love on the Dole Gringoire, Le, 102, 103, 118, 148, 152 Guéhenno, Jean, 114, 147, 158, 162, 164, 165, 167 Guichen, 39 Halbwachs, Maurice, 7–10, 198 n30 Hamp, Pierre, 115, 155 Hanau financial scandal, 102 Hazebrouch, 124, 149 Health, 61, 65, 68–69 Henriot, Philippe, 104, 107, 176 Hervé, Gustave, 6, 100, 102, 103, 172 Historical Service of the French Navy, 17, 21–22, 23, 25, 26, 30, 153, 183 Hitler, Adolf, 75, 105, 110, 112, 116, 130, 132, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 151, 160, 186, 187, 190, 191 Hitler-Stalin Pact (MolotovRibbentrop), 98, 116, 131 Homme Libre, L’, 102 Hôtel du Nord, 63, 68, 156, 213 n10 Housing, see Landlords

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256 Index Humanité, L’, 55, 69, 82, 88, 101, 102, 111, 116 Humbles, Les, (Jules Romains), 66, 71, 77 Humbles, Les, (Maurice Wullens), 93, 175 Humour, 13, 88, 129–30, 132, 137, 142, 143, 146, 160, 168, 174 Imperialism, 49, 106 Intellectuals, 6, 9, 18, 35, 70, 76, 82, 83, 94, 97, 106, 115, 116, 118–19, 145, 154, 164, 172, 174–76 International Exhibition of 1937, 81, 95, 108 Internationale, 41, 54, 55, 86, 184, 185, 212 n109 Intransigeant, L’, 32, 103–04 Jamet, Claude, 155 Je Suis Partout, 102, 155, 157, 175, 175, 219 n24 Jean-Bart, 41, 184, 185 Jean Le Gouin (1932), 1, 2, 3, 5, 17–37, 38, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 56, 173, 174, 176, 182–83 Jeanson, Henri, 117 Jeune École, 31, 199 n13 Jèze, Gaston, 107 Jokes, 129–30, 160, 162 see also Humour Jolinon, Joseph, 115 Jour, Le, 102, 103 Journal des Débats, Le, 102 Journal, Le, 102, 104 Jouvenel, Bertand de, 150 Juif et la France, Le (exhibition), 153 Justice, 41, 184 Kérillis, Henri de, 104, 107, 112 Kherson, 20, 41, 51, 210 n83 Kuhle Wampe, 69, 215 n83 La Ciotat, 3 La Fouchardière, Georges de, 100, 115, 155, 156, 175, 233 n52 La Rocque, François de, 104, 105, 106, 109

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Lacaze-Duthiers, Gérard, 155 Lagrange, Léo, 109 Lambert, Abbée Gabriel, 106 Landlords, 61, 64, 65, 67, 68, 145, 213 n53 Lapeyère, Admiral Boué de, 24 Lauzanne, Stéphane, 102, 103, 104, 107, 176, 178 Laval, Pierre, 79, 93, 108, 125, 128, 166, 177 Le Havre, 2, 65, 78 Lecache, Bernard, 100 Leclerc, General, 167 Lecoin, Léon, 86, 117, 155 Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme (LVF, Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism), 140, 153, 154, 193–94 Léon Gambetta, 27, 31–34, 46, 53, 172 Leygues, Georges, 22, 37 Liberation of France, 34, 144, 148, 159, 166–68, 169, 177, 178, 180 Ligue des Combattants de la Paix (LICP), 86 Little Man, What Now?, 70 Lois scélérates (the villainous or rotten laws), 102, 221 n67 London, Geo, 104 Louzon, Robert, 117, 155 Love on the Dole, 70, 71, 73, 74 Luchaire, Jean, 102, 163, 234 n64 Maginot line, 136–37 Malherbe, Henry, 18 Malo-les-Bains, 2, 196 n4 Malraux, André, 114 Man, Henri de, 151–52 Margueritte, Victor, 115 Marin, Louis, 102, 113, 222 n95 Martinet, Marcel, 115 Marty, André, 42–43, 44, 52, 56, 172, 174, 207 n26 Marxism, 81, 83, 87, 89, 92, 96, 99, 119, 175, 215 n1 Masculinity, 49, 70–72, 135, 143–44 Matin, Le, 29, 32, 101, 102, 107, 112 Mauriac, François, 239 n20

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Index 257 Maurras, Charles, 47, 102, 103, 104, 151 Mediterranean, The, 1, 20, 36, 39 Memory, 4, 5, 6–13, 17, 18, 23, 31, 34, 35, 36, 42, 43, 44, 45, 73, 80, 87, 103, 127, 132–33, 135, 172, 174, 178, 196 n15 Mer Noire (1935), 1, 20, 21, 26, 38–57, 173, 174, 184–85 Méric, Victor, 86, 100 Merle (or ‘Merlo’), Eugène, 100, 219 n13 Merle Blanc, 43, 100–13 Mers el-Kébir, 23, 129, 132, 138, 152, 163, 177, 232 n31 Micro-history, 4–5, 57, 82 Mirabeau, 41, 54 Modern Times, 67, 74 Modernity, 61–62, 67, 71, 170–71 Monnet, Georges, 109 Montherland, Henry de, 114 Monzie, Anatole de, 147, 149–51, 193 Moulin de Labarthète, Henri du, 147 Mourning, 7, 8, 135, 164 Mussolini, Benito, 102, 103, 106, 112, 132, 150, 159, 160, 220 n44 Natalism, pro-, and anti-, 116–18 Navy, French, 1, 2, 11, 19–57, 114, 140, 152, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179, 183–85 Nivelle, General Robert, 18, 40 Nizan, Paul, 90, 93 Northerners, 49, 142, 109 Notre Temps, 102 Nouveaux Temps, Les, 157, 163 Occidentalism, 152 Occupation of France, 2, 98, 100, 147–69, 172, 178, 180, 193–95 Odessa, 40, 41, 42, 211 n105 Oeuvre, L’, 21, 100, 102, 155, 157, 194 Orwell, George, 62, 78, 97 Otrante, the straits of the, 31 Pacifism, 19, 85, 86, 94, 98, 100, 111, 112, 116, 119, 120, 123, 124, 149, 150, 151, 155, 175 Pacifisme intégral (absolutist pacifism), 86

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Paris-Soir, 101 Parti Communiste Française (PCF, French Communist Party), 25, 35, 37, 42–44, 55, 81–82, 83, 87–89, 91–92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 102, 109, 110, 111, 116, 173, 199, 207 n26 Parti Frontiste, 97, 116, 119 Parti Populaire Français (PPF, French Popular Party), 115, 148, 149, 154, 194 Parti Social Français (PSF, French Social Party), 102, 109 Patorni, Aurèle, 118 Pelletan, Camille, 31 Pétain, Marshal Philippe, 44, 102, 117, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133, 145, 147, 148, 150, 164, 168, 172, 177, 178, 191 Petit Journal, Le, 102 Peyerimhoff, Henri de, 101 Pézard, André, 115 Pioch, Georges, 115 Pivert, Marceau, 88, 117 Platon, Admiral, 177, 239 n14 Poilu, 5, 10, 18, 33, 47, 48, 50, 83, 111, 133, 188, 191, 206 n6 see also Great War Police, 39, 46, 52, 62, 64, 65, 68, 79, 84, 109, 112, 113, 127, 161, 166, 167, 186–87, 194 Populaire, Le, 35, 102 Popular Front, 74, 87, 107, 113, 119, 134, 165, 190 Poulaille, Henri, 115, 156 Pourquoi La Marine a Trahi (1945), 22, 177 Prisoners of war, 1, 4, 5, 10, 13, 123–46, 148, 162, 170, 174, 176, 185–93 Prix Goncourt, 3, 18, 62, 158, 231 n9 Provence, 39 Public opinion, 7, 3, 23, 37, 101, 127, 135, 145, 146, 162, 164, 168, 225 n23, 226 n24 Radio-Paris, 148, 157, 158, 165, 193, 194, 195

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258

Index

Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP, National Popular Assembly), 148, 154, 155, 194 see also Déat, Marcel Rebatet, Lucien, 151 Reboux, Paul, 100 Recouly, Raymond, 104, 176 Renault, 113, 165, 194, 216 n16 see also Billancourt Renoir, Jean, 19, 68, 69, 79, 213 n32 Reserved occupations, 128, 141 Reynaud, Paul, 104, 113, 114, 133, 149, 150, 151 Rif, The, 106, 112, 172 Riom trial, 123 Rist, Charles, 147, 165 Robespierre, 27, 28, 30, 35 Rolland, Romain, 18 Romains, Jules, 66, 77, 90, 114 see also Humbles, Les, (Jules Romains) Rosendaël, 2 Rosenthal, Gerard, 118 Royal Air Force (RAF), 163–65, 194–95 Royal Navy, 19, 128 Rumour, 13, 84, 115, 131, 146, 156–60, 165, 168, 169, 181, 184 Salengro, Roger, 102, 103 Santa Maria di Leuca, 33 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 147 Scize, Pierre, 100 Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO, French Section of the Worker’s International), 35, 38, 81, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94, 96, 102, 109 Self-censorship, 33, 135 see also taboo Senès, Rear-Admiral, 31, 33 Serge, Victor, 90 Shirkers (embusqués), 48, 73, 171 Sites of memory, 7, 13 see also memory Six February 1934, 46, 48, 49, 64, 72, 83, 113, 139, 180 see also Stavisky affair

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Slang, 10, 18, 28, 33, 44, 157, 202 n53 Social hierarchies, 46, 48, 49, 64, 139, 180 Société des Gens de Lettres, 3, 22, 62 Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste, 100, 117–18 Sondage 1940, see prisoners of war Song, 13, 28, 39, 53–55, 56, 183–84 Sous les Toits de Paris, 63 Southerners, see under northerners Souvarine, Boris, 90, 91, 217 n28 Soviet Union, 76, 84, 88, 90–92, 97, 111, 116, 153, 154, 161, 162, 193 Stakhanovism, 94, 110, 217 n37–39 Stalinism, 87–93, 97–99, 110, 111, 119, 131 State capitalism, 91, 92, 217 n28 Stavisky affair, 84 Steinbeck, John, see under Grapes of Wrath Sterckeman, Clovis Ernest, 2 Sterckeman, Kléber Gaston Gabriel Alcide (pseud César Fauxbras), 1, 2, 21, 35, 45 Suarez, Georges, 152, 154 Submarines, 20–21, 23, 26, 28, 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 52, 152 Suicide, 62, 68–69, 70, 72, 78, 79, 84 Surrealism, 93 Surveillante, 2, 205 n101 Syndicalism, 5, 113, 114, 116, 120 Syndicat National des Officiers de la Marine Marchand (SNOMM, National Union of the Officers of the Merchant Navy), 114 Taboo, 33, 135, 179, 181 see also self-censorship Taittinger, Pierre, 104 Tardieu, André, 104, 109 Taylorism, 67, 70, 94, 118 Temps, Le, 32, 101 Thorez, Maurice, 43, 84, 87, 105, 113, 114, 116 Tillon, Charles, 29, 54, 180 Tondues (shaven-headed women accused of collaboration), 144

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Index 259 Toulon, 39, 41, 42, 52, 53, 159, 183, 185 Tours, Congress of, 38, 42, 81 Trafalgar, battle of, 20, 25, 54, 152, 200 n26 Trauma, 10, 33, 36, 123, 135, 178 Trotsky, Leon, 83, 88, 89, 90, 91, 97, 99, 118, 175, 207 n26 Truth, 4, 17, 21, 26–27, 32, 34, 35–36, 56, 92, 144, 145, 146, 170, 172, 173, 179, 181, 183, 202 n50 Unemployed, the, 3, 5, 10, 61–80, 81, 83, 84, 89, 94, 96, 106, 108, 112, 174, 176 Unemployment, 1, 5, 7, 108, 113, 119, 134, 172, 173, 174, 181, 187 see also the unemployed Vague, La, 55–56, 155 Vautel, Clément, 103, 104, 106, 176 Vel d’Hiv (Velodrome d’Hiver), 154, 166, 193 Verdier, Cardinal, 150 Verdun, battle of, 7, 17, 18, 20, 64, 68, 73, 78, 130, 131, 133, 172 Vergniaud, 41

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Viande à Brûler (1935), 1, 3, 61–80, 92, 95, 100, 174 Vichy, 37, 47, 113, 120, 123–28, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 158, 159, 160, 162, 165, 167, 168, 174, 176, 177, 179, 180 Vigné d’Octon, Paul, 5, 203 n77 Vincennes, 3, 43, 147, 164, 167, 188, 193, 194 Vintrigner, Fernand, 117 Vive La France!, 23, 29–34, 202 n66, 204 n94, 204 n98 Vogt, Blanche, 104 Vološinov, Valentin, 9 Voltaire, 2, 39, 205 n101, 212 n109 Voltaire, see Candide (Voltaire) von Trapp, Georg Ritter, 32 Vygotsky, Lev, 9 Washington Naval Conference (1921–2), 24 Wendel, François de, 101, 102 Werth, Léon, 115, 155, 175 Witness, 1, 2, 4, 7, 12, 27, 29, 30, 33, 118, 170, 181 Wullens, Maurice, 115

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