A Review of Alice Kaplan’s The Collaborator

The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach. By Alice Kaplan (Chicago, the University of Chicago Press, 2000) 308 pp. $26.00 cloth £17.50 paper

On February 6, 1945, a French writer convicted of treason was shot by firing squad, exclaiming “Long live France anyway!” (Kaplan, 210). This occurred as Charles de Gaulle endeavored to cleanse his liberated France of the dishonor and tragedy of its World War II experiences. Set in the context of German occupation and the Vichy Regime, The Collaborator chronicles the writings and political activities of Robert Brasillach, a renowned literary critic, novelist, and journalist with fascist allegiances.

Through a comprehensive examination of Brasillach’s life and of the tumultuous history of his beloved France, Kaplan enables the reader to draw informed conclusions about his controversial execution. She addresses the death of Brasillach’s father (a general), his closeness to his sister, and his prowess for insult during his upbringing; his prestigious Ecole Normale education and his desire for male companionship; and, his separate but sometimes interwoven evolutions as an incisive literary critic, a sentimental novelist, and a fascist journalist.

In her analysis of Brasillach’s trial, Kaplan underscores France’s complex position during the Purge-era, when trials were conducted rapidly by the Liberation government against former collaborators. Though she recounts efforts to assemble a “clean magistrature” free of collaborators and touts prosecutor Marcel Reboul’s eloquence and rectitude, Kaplan acknowledges the messy nature of these Purge trials. This owed to substantial continuity between the Vichy magistrature and the Liberation government magistrature (Kaplan, 94). She also describes the partiality introduced by the trial’s four jurors, something largely ignored by preceding scholars: each suburban man harbored Resistance sympathies and lacked the appreciation for Brasillach’s high-brow literary talent held by his upper-class “Fifth Column” supporters (Kaplan, 184).

Relying largely on Brasillach’s writings, redacted versions published by his brother-in-law, legal dossiers, interviews, court transcripts, and works of other writers, Kaplan explores the contradictions within his writing and personality: his capacity for unyielding critique paired with excessive literary sentimentality, the implications of homosexuality and “a homoerotic attraction to the rituals of fascism” which emerged from his love of masculinity, and the perversion of his patriotism into Germanophilia (Kaplan, 8).

For Kaplan, despite Brasillach’s intellectual crimes, his execution was an unjust reflection of Purge hysteria that counterproductively gifted the extreme right with a martyr (Kaplan, 234). Exposing the evil and distorted reality of much of Brasillach’s journalism and fascist-influenced work, Kaplan is equally scrupulous — and rightfully so — in revealing the systemic legal and governmental imperfections that contributed to his execution. Given the strong distaste for Brasillach she reveals, this is noble of her.

Although The Collaborator provides highly relevant insight for historians, it is not an exclusively academic text; rather, this book’s strengths are its narrative flow and accessibility to all interested in Vichy and post WWII-era France. No scholar has deconstructed the Brasillach trial and all of its facets — from Brasillach’s life and essence to the lives of his jurors, lawyer, and prosecutor — in such depth. Kaplan thus offers her captivating assessment of the gray areas of justice as a case study and a crucial guide for the future.

Eddie Ryan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign