After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky's Suite française

Chapter 2. Narrating the Fall

28 Chapter 2 Narrating the Fall Irène Némirovsky, as we have seen, refused to rally her Suite fran- çaise under any particular banner and resolved to maintain her composure in the face of the increasingly sinister events of the early war years. In her fictional narrative as well as in her personal life, she displayed neither cynical detachment nor wounded isolationism. By all accounts, her situation was indeed highly precarious and warranted a great deal of reserve. She was after all the sole breadwinner for her household, and her husband had been fired from la Banque des Pays du Nord after the May–June 1940 debacle in circumstances not unlike those depicted for the Michauds in chapter 28 of Tempête en juin.1 She moreover remained unsuccessful in seeking French citizenship for herself and her family. As a Russian Jewish émigrée, she appeared doubly suspicious in the eyes of the Nazis as well as the French State, which in spite of her brilliant literary career in Paris and long residency in France had denied her persistent applications for naturalization. Given such increasingly difficult circumstances, it would indeed not be surprising to find that she, like the overwhelm1 See Philipponnat and Lienhardt, La vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 345, and Némirovsky, Suite française, 263–65. Narrating the Fall   29 ing majority of French people, had been deeply unsettled by France’s defeat and the ensuing hardships. Traumatized by the collapse of institutional infrastructure and terrified by the violence of the war unfolding on their territory, the masses that Henri Amouroux famously if abusively labeled “40 millions de Pétainistes”2 flocked into the waiting arms of the paternalistic savior figure skillfully projected by “le Vainqueur de Verdun.” As notes Philippe Burrin, their weariness of the war and their yearning for consolation and respite from the storms of history made it all the harder for them to face the sinister nature of the Third Reich.3 Personal Destinies As a stateless Jew specifically targeted early in the Occupation by the persecutory measures imposed by the Germans and legislated by Vichy, Irène Némirovsky found herself hemmed in on all sides. She was in fact keenly aware of the autobiographical factors preventing her from more clearly favoring the Resistance in Suite française. Her own assessment of the political posture of Jean-Marie Michaud, the wounded soldier destined to appear as a Resistance hero in a subsequent section of Suite française, thus takes on a particulary poignancy: Pour que Jean-Marie ait une attitude politique juste il faudrait 1) que je connaisse l’avenir 2) que j’aie moi une attitude politique juste, autre que celle qui consiste à grincer des dents et à mordre mes barreaux ou à faire des trous dans la terre pour m’échapper.4 In order for Jean-Marie to have the right political stance, it would be necessary 1) for me to know the future 2) for me to have the right political stance, other than that which consists of gritting my teeth and biting at the bars of my cell or digging holes in the ground to escape. 2 Henri Amouroux, Quarante millions de Pétainistes (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1977). 3 Philippe Burrin, La France à l’heure allemande (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), 39. 4 Philipponnat et Liendhardt, La vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 401. 30   Narrating the Fall When analyzed carefully, Suite française reveals some of the scars inscribed onto those figurative prison bars by an author otherwise unable to lash out against her oppressors. We have amply demonstrated that her refusal to adhere to any specific didactic purpose sets her depictions of the May–June 1940 debacle apart from those of her contemporaries . We have similarly noted that she consciously resisted the urge to denounce villains while praising heroes with her fictional narrative of the historical event. Ultimately, however, novelists and historians alike choose their material, configure their “facts,” and sequence their discourse into coherent narratives. Whether they be true to life or imaginary, some words and actions are selected, highlighted , and developed while countless others are consigned to oblivion .5 To borrow from Sartre’s famous dictum, authors cannot but situate themselves historically by situating the specific elements of their narrative—in Némirovsky’s case, her characters, their discourse, and her own indirect free-style commentary—with respect to their own time...