French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s (review)

This lucid, well-conceived book draws fascinating parallels between pro-fascist writers in France under the Vichy regime in World War II and intellectuals of the 1990s who were addressing world crises such as the breakup of Yugoslavia and the legacy of communism. Golsan's argument that the memory of Vichy and fascism inflects the ways noted authors Alain Finkielkraut, Régis Debray, and Stéphane Courtois have understood Europe's more recent political struggles is both intriguing and highly persuasive. The balanced structure of the book, which focuses on three authors from the Vichy period and three from the 1990s, allows him to set up how complicity with Vichy and fascism operated during World War II in the works of Henry de Montherlant, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, and Jean Giono, before he explores how the memories of fascism work their way into political debates of the 1990s. Golsan deftly shows how the contemporary writers' explicit and implicit references to World War II unwittingly make them complicitous with unsavory positions associated with Nazism.

Golsan first traces the political pronouncements of Montherlant, the collaborationist, pederastic man of letters who was often "overtly procollaborationist, anti-French, and ultimately pro-Nazi" (33). Châteaubriant offers a more strident, sometimes incoherent, example of pro-Hitlerian propaganda that aligned itself with millenarianism and promoted an ahistorical return to the "regional and rustic virtues" (70) of an anti-capitalist, pre-industrial society. Giono, arguably the most literarily gifted of the early three writers, is portrayed as a militant pacifist who also promoted peasant ideals over city corruption and who made no difference between German and Anglo-American ideologies.

Although Golsan makes important distinctions among Finkielkraut who supported Croatian independence, Debray who defended Serbia, and Courtois who undercut the specificity of Nazism's crimes in his indictment of communism, he shows how echoes of World War II inform all three authors' arguments. In defending Croatia against Serbian aggression, Finkielkraut likens Serbia to the Nazis while neglecting the fact that the Croatian nationalist party of the 1990s had a Nazi-affiliated past (108). When Debray defends the likes of Milosevic, he uses the memory of Serbian victimization by Croats in World War II. Courtois' introduction to the Livre noir du communisme not only equates communist gulags and exterminations with the Holocaust, it argues that Soviet crimes against humanity were far more deadly than the Nazis' genocidal killing.

For some readers, making the link between Pro-Nazi stances and writers like Finkielkraut or Debray might seem excessive, but Golsan goes to great lengths to present a judicious, thorough evaluation of all six writers. He never overstates his case and is careful to consider fully all the nuances of their political positions. This is why his arguments about complicity are so powerful. In the six case studies, Golsan demonstrates how the writers justify their choices in the present through their peculiar visions of a history tinted with their passions and ideals (67). For those interested in twentieth-century French history, culture, and politics, Golsan's work is not to be missed.