After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky’s ‘Suite française (review)

This book is an extended commentary on Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française, which was written during the early years of the Occupation and finally published in 2004. It is a textual and contextual study that does not seek to locate Suite française in relation to Némirovsky’s previous literary activities, but focuses exclusively on a single text, which is analysed via reference to published sources. In so far as Bracher’s concern is to resist anachronistic readings and to respect the text’s literary quality rather than conflating it with testimonial documents (p. xv), his study makes a useful contribution to a growing body of secondary literature on Némirovsky. Students will find this book attractive, as it offers detailed textual readings and includes references to accessible works of historical scholarship. The initial ‘scene-setting’ goes over familiar territory, but is useful in situating the novel. Unfortunately, Bracher’s engagement with the work of other scholars is unnecessarily adversarial, to the extent that he often stretches the point he is citing in order the better to knock it down. He suggests, for example, that Jonathan Weiss, in his biography of the author (Irène Némirovsky (Paris: Félin, 2005)), charges ‘that Irène Némirovsky never dared openly to condemn Philippe Pétain’ (Bracher, p. 75), when all that Weiss actually says is that Némirovsky did not accuse Pétain of having betrayed France and did not connect him directly with the politics of collaboration (Weiss, p. 170) — there is no suggestion that Némirovsky did not dare to condemn Pétain. Similarly, Weiss does not argue that Némirovsky failed to ‘connect her narrative to the urgent historical issues of her time’ (Bracher, p. 92), but that, like many French people at the time, her characters are less concerned with the government’s flight to Vichy and with Pétain’s speech than with their own self-preservation (Weiss, p. 167). Elsewhere, this adversarial approach leads Bracher to misrepresent his sources. According to Bracher, referring to an article of my own (‘Finding Irène Némirovsky’, French Cultural Studies, 18 (2007), 59–81 (p.77)), I argue that Némirovsky’s depiction of the Occupation ‘proves that resistancialism was false’ (Bracher, p. 161). These words do not appear in my article and my argument is not, as Bracher claims, anachronistic: I do not argue that Suite française itself countered the Gaullist myth during the war, but that the history of its publication after the war supports Henry Rousso’s account of the Vichy syndrome; it is because neither Némirovsky’s life and tragic fate nor her account of the war can provide an image of the French nation en résistance that her work did not find an audience during the period in which the résistancialiste myth was dominant. All this is a pity, because Bracher’s study offers a valuable account of Némirovsky’s manipulation of shifting points of view, particularly in relation to her depiction of the enemy. Indeed, Bracher’s analysis of Némirovsky’s portrait of the Germans via the multiple perspectives of a range of French people from a variety of sociopolitical backgrounds is the book’s main strength.