The Collaborator. The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (review)

Book Reviews Alice Kaplan. The Collaborator. The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Pp. xvi + 308. $25.00. Alice Kaplan's Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life ( 1986) and her study of a Louis-Ferdinand Céline pamphlet (Relevé des sources et citations dans Bagatelles pour un massacre, 1987) were timely contributions to research on strains of fascist ideology found in French letters during the 1930s and 1940s. With The Collaborator Kaplan continues in the vein announced by her French Lessons (1993) by seeking to bring her interests to a broader reading public. The project has certain risks. The call to counter popular histories promoting—inadvertently or disingenuously—inaccurate accounts of this traumatic period generated the painstaking historical and literary scholarship of the past three decades. Regardless of her change in target audience —or precisely because of it— Kaplan needed to remain rigorous in order not to undo gains made possible in part by her early works. On the whole, Kaplan is successful. Her extremely readable account provides the historical background necessary for nonspecialists while discreetly maintaining a scholarly apparatus (the notes are omitted in the text but included at the end). Brasillach is an appropriate subject since he was the most significant collaborationist writer to have paid with his life during the Purge, and the trial provides a strong narrative structure in which the debates of the period are conveniently cast in a spectacular mode. Fittingly, the 45 pages covering the trial itself are the book's most dramatic and informative. Inspired by the historical field developed by Henry Rousso (a consultant for The Collaborator ), Kaplan makes contributions to the study of the memory of the Purge trials as well. By presenting the negationist views expressed by Brasillach's brother-in-law Maurice Bardeche, for instance, she shows why vigilance remains important. Kaplan also exposes the revisionist strategy employed by Bardèche in his manipulative publication of Brasillach's "complete" works (Bardeche slips in significantly expurgated texts). The shortcomings to this book are few. Despite good initiatives on her part, Kaplan ultimately uncovers scant new historical information. Brasillach's rejected pardon file is made available for the first time, but Kaplan runs into dead ends in her quest to reconstruct the identity and thought processes of the jurors. Brief passages ( 144, 148) where she imagines their impressions should probably be deleted; she recognizes that we no longer have any way of knowing what they thought ( 141, 142,186). She is also occasionally on thin ice in her use of reminiscences from relatives or colleagues who have little knowledge of the jurors in question (one woman did not even know that her uncle had served on the jury [ 136-37], while another contributor makes serious but unverified accusations against political rival René Desvillettes [138-39]). Similarly, in the absence of real evidence, the "outing" of Brasillach must rely on speculation. Moreover, despite her caution (7,8), Kaplan runs into problematic formulations in her discussion of a "homosexual attraction" for fascism. (A more productive approach, for example, would be to explore ties between the 1930s cult of virility and the widespread homophobia found on the French right and left.) These few elements detract only slightly from the book as a whole, which demonstrates once again Kaplan's thorough commitment to investigating the history of the French right-wing. Ralph Schoolcraft Texas A&M University Jacques Berchtold. Les prisons du roman (XVlP-XVIII' siècle): Lectures plurielles et intertextuelles de "Guzman d'Alfarache" à "Jacques le fataliste." Geneva: Droz, 2000. Pp. 784. 75 Swiss Francs. As his title suggests, Jacques Berchtold focuses on the novelistic representation of homo in carcere, that is, human nature as it is depicted in a series of literary characters in prison. The author Vol. XLII, No. 1 137 ...