André Gide and the Second World War: A Novelist's Occupation

Introduction

ARGUABLY THE MOST influential French writer of the early twentieth century , André Gide is a paradigmatic figure whose World War II writings offer an exemplary reflection of the challenges facing a leading writer in a time of national collapse. Tracing Gide’s circuitous “intellectual itinerary” from the fall of France through the postwar purge, this book examines the ambiguous role of France’s senior man of letters during the Second World War. Eschewing simplistic or partisan readings that summarily label the writer as either collaborator or resister, this study of Gide’s neglected wartime writings focuses on the author’s profound political ambivalence and his unacknowledged efforts to reinvent himself over the course of the war. With the exception of the early wartime Journal, Gide’s publications during France’s “dark years” have received scant critical attention. André Gide and the Second World War scrutinizes the entire wartime oeuvre in depth, tracing the evolution of Gide’s political views and, most important, reading the wartime texts against each other. For it is the interplay among these texts that reveals the full complexity of Gide’s political positionings and the rhetorical brilliance he deployed to redress his tarnished image. From late 1941 until after the Liberation, I argue, Gide made a systematic effort to conceal objectionable or ambiguous statements made during the early months of the war. The author’s strategies range from outright deletions in the Pages de Journal to the subtler reworkings of the “Interviews imaginaires”—a series of literary essays in which Gide revisits infelicitous observations, giving them a new, resolutely patriotic flavor. Through careful editing and judicious placement of wartime texts in periodicals associated with the resistance, Gide created the impression that his thinking followed a neat trajectory from unavoidable defeatism to appropriate patriotism.1 Reading the published works against Gide’s diary, however, exposes the author’s persistent political ambivalence. This book challenges Gide’s characterization of his political evolution as a straightforward march from “darkness into light” (J 4)2 and shows how 1 Introduction methodically the author constructed his narrative of redemption.3 Gide’s intricate maneuverings ultimately offer privileged insights into three issues of broad significance: the relationship of literature and politics in World War II France, the repressions and repositionings that continue to fuel controversy about this period, and the role of public intellectuals in times of national crisis. WARTIME FRANCE: THE DRIFT OF PUBLIC OPINION An individual who amply documents his life in diaries, correspondence, and published writings leaves a reasonably clear record of his evolving viewpoints. A politically diverse nation of forty million is another matter—especially when the complications of censorship, propaganda, and a division into two administrative zones make it difficult to assess what most citizens knew at any given time. Consequently, the historical précis that follows gives only a general sense of the predominant trends in public opinion during the Occupation of France. In the years following the First World War, the scarred French nation wished only for peace. During the 1930s, the government adopted a policy of non-intervention vis-à-vis the Spanish Civil War and the growing threat of Nazism. Most citizens applauded the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which France and Britain averted war with Germany by condoning Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, France and Britain reluctantly declared war on the Reich. A six-month period known as the “drôle de guerre” (phony war) ensued, but, when the attack came, it was crushing. In May 1940, German armies swept through Belgium and the Netherlands, pierced the French frontier at Sedan, and marched into Paris on 14 June. Just days later, Premier Paul Reynaud resigned in favor of World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain, who immediately sued for peace. With the signature of the Armistice on 22 June, France was divided into a German-occupied zone in the north and along the Atlantic coast and an unoccupied zone in the south, where citizens were free of direct German control but had to face the authoritarian policies of the Vichy government (established in early July 1940) as well as that regime’s increasing collaboration with Germany. The Armistice was greeted with despair but also with relief, since France’s prompt surrender spared the lives of thousands of French soldiers. There seemed no other course of action given that the United States declined to intervene and England seemed likely to fall in France’s wake. To...