See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/30429510

Portrait of the Writer as a Traitor: the French Purge trials (1944-1953)

Article  in  E-rea · October 2006

DOI: 10.4000/erea.257 · Source: OAI

CITATIONS READS

15 75

1 author:

Gisèle Sapiro
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
162 PUBLICATIONS   1,288 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Interco-SSH : International Cooperation in the SSH View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Gisèle Sapiro on 21 January 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Portrait of the Writer as a Traitor: the French Purge trials
(1944-1953)

Gisèle Sapiro (CNRS - Centre de Sociologie Européenne)

Translated by Jennifer Birkett

To use the term “treason” to describe the attitude of a writer might seem an oxymoron. After
all, isn’t the writer the incarnation in the modern imagination of freedom and disinterestedness?
Unattached, free from dogma and social constraints, he is assumed to obey only the dictates of
his free subjectivity and his immediate inner convictions. In that condition, what cause could a
writer betray? And if his positions are inconsistent, is that not the perfect proof of his freedom
from all determinants?
The idea that enables us to escape from this apparent contradiction in terms is that of
the responsibility of the writer. It is no accident that this idea has long stood in opposition to
that of the artist’s freedom. In his famous article “What is an author,” Michel Foucault recalled
that the author was first defined, historically, in terms of his responsibility under the penal code
(789-820).
If a work offends the feelings of the community, its author and publisher are held
responsible. As the Durkheimian sociologist Paul Fauconnet put it in 1920, responsibility is
closely linked to sanctions. The rule of freedom of expression, installed in France under the
Restoration, defines certain limits to that freedom, when it becomes associated with crime,
offends against morality or attacks individual reputations, and such transgressions invoke
sanctions. So what limits the writer’s freedom, in social terms, is criminal responsibility. It can
be shown that the idea of the writer’s freedom has very largely been developed in response to
the idea of criminal responsibility, which he came up against in the course of his various trials
(Sapiro, “The Writer’s Responsibility.” I am preparing a book on this question).
In 1881, the Third Republic adopted the liberal press regime that is still in force today.
At the same time, primary education became obligatory. Confronted with this extension of
access to reading and knowledge, conservative Catholic intellectuals – in particular, Paul
Bourget – theorised the idea of “responsibility” and set it in opposition to the freedom and
gratuitiousness of art (see Sapiro, “The Writer’s Responsibility,” and Serry chap. 1). From the
Dreyfus Affair onwards, Zola tried to promote a different notion of the responsibility of the
writer as defender of truth and freedom, both conceived of as absolute moral values, existing
independently of the collective interests they bring into play (see Charle, and Suleiman).
Nevertheless, the conservative formulation of the writer’s responsibility prevailed right up to the
Liberation. It lies at the heart of the quarrel about “intellectual corruption,” in which literature
was held responsible for the military defeat of France: literature, it was argued, had harmful
effects because of its subjectivity, its pessimism, and its amorality; it helped “weaken” the
nation’s energies; and so on. (Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains,” chap. 2). With the Libération,
the concept of responsibility changed sides. It was redefined by progressive intellectuals from
the intellectual Resistance, especially Sartre, who gave it a philosophical dimension by linking it
to his idea of freedom (see Sapiro, “Responsibility and Freedom”).
The purge trials played a key part in this reversal. In Autumn 1944, the provisional
Government of the French Republic launched proceedings against writers suspected of the
crime of “intelligence with the enemy”, in accordance with articles 75ff of the penal Code, or
crimes relating to the ordinance of 26 August 1944, which created the crime of “indignité
nationale” (“national indignity”). I want to show here how the image of the writer-as-traitor
constructed in the course of these trials contributed to those shifts in the idea of responsibility.
I shall concentrate on the moral portrait painted of the traitor, rather than the content of the
accusations that were laid. That means looking at the material that was presented in the course
of the trials as the motives of the crime. My analysis draws on the transcripts of the trials,
where they exist, judicial archives (I have consulted a total of 30 files altogether in the National

Sapiro, Gisèle. “Portrait of the Writer as a Traitor: the French Purge trials (1944-1953).” EREA 4.2 (automne 90
2006): 90-99. <www.e-rea.org>
Archives, with the exception of Brasillach’s file, where the contents are known to have
disappeared), and press reports of court testimony. In my first section, I shall show how the
prosecution’s arguments constructed the moral portrait of the traitor, part of which can be
found in Sartre’s famous article, “What is a collaborator?” In my second section, I shall show
how that moral portrait was often reinforced by the strategy adopted by the defence.

The Moral Portrait of the Traitor

From the legal point of view, personal reasons are the motives of a crime. For writers, generally
assumed to have been acting rationally, reasons are of roughly four main kinds: personal
conviction, desire for fame, venality (desire for gain), and desire to do harm. There are degrees
of difference between the four, depending on the aim of the act of publication. These very
general motives have specific meaning in the intellectual domain, because of its particular
values.
Personal conviction can be an attenuating circumstance in so far as it is linked both to
freedom of expression of opinion and freedom of philosophical discussion, or to the particular
rules of literature (its autonomy), and if it can be considered rational in terms of particular
values, following the classification proposed by Max Weber. Being free to develop and publish
his own system of thought, the author who acts out of personal conviction and the writer bound
by the constraints of his art are deemed to have acted in good faith, not necessarily intending
to do harm, and not having realised the consequences of their acts. Sincerity and good faith are
attenuating circumstances. The accused is thought of as having made a mistake. Against this
“ethics of conviction” the prosecution usually sets the “ethics of responsibility,” to borrow the
terms in which Max Weber formulated that opposition. This is why the defence often tries to
transfer responsibility to others further up the hierarchy: a leader, a superior, or a mentor. The
prosecution can then blame the accused for his servility and lack of independence, which is
associated with weakness of character – a typically “feminine” feature, opposed to the strength
of character and independence of “superior” men. Servility is a primary moral characteristic of
the traitor.
The prosecution also tries to prove that the act of publication has not been determined
by moral factors alone (according to the Weberian paradigm of rational action regarding values)
but also – indeed, especially – by less pure aims. Desire for fame and desire for gain are
aggravating circumstances, because in this case the author has acted out of self-interest
without thought for the consequences of his actions. The metaphor commonly used to
designate this kind of act is “prostitution,” with the underlying analogy between selling one’s
body and selling one’s pen, which refers to the personalisation of the idea of the “author,” and
the identification of the man and his work. The quest for fame can lead ambitious authors to
break the law solely to get talked about, and by that means become famous. The desire to
make one’s name with the public, and acquire a reputation, however dubious, figures in the
social imaginary as one of the commonest “sins” of the ambitious writer, as portrayed by Balzac
in Illusions perdues. The expedient is equally despised by writers, who condemn easily-won
success and have no confidence in reputations built on scandal.
Servility, self-interest (usually venal) and the craving for fame are the features that
constitute the moral portrait of the traitor as the negative of the national hero, who at that time
was embodied in the image of the Resistance fighter. They are the mark of an inferior morality
and a certain irresponsibility that tended at that time to be imputed to women, children and
“savages” or “barbarians.” They invoke a system of “masculine” and “feminine” oppositions that
are characteristic of the mythical mindset: hardness/softness, strength/weakness,
coolness/impetuosity, self-control/slackness, bravery/cowardice (Bourdieu, 21-5).
These three characteristics represent the image of the writer-as-traitor as he appears in
the purge trials. To establish the motives of their literary crimes, questions were asked about
the reasons that could have induced men of letters with some degree of celebrity to put their

Sapiro, Gisèle. “Portrait of the Writer as a Traitor: the French Purge trials (1944-1953).” EREA 4.2 (automne 91
2006): 90-99. <www.e-rea.org>
“talents” at the service of the enemy, the assumption being that that was incompatible with
professional ethics and social respectability.
Their servility towards the enemy could have been bought. Investigators tried first to
establish whether the accused had received payments from an enemy power in return for his
propaganda activities, which would also be irrefutable proof of “intelligence with the enemy”
and treason. They checked whether his living standards and lifestyle had improved following his
political activity, and whether he had met informally with foreign dignitaries during his trips
abroad. It is notable that when treason was the issue, desire for money always had immoral
motives and was accompanied by a scandalous lifestyle. Reports showing that Henri Béraud,
the famous polemicist on the extreme-right populist weekly Gringoire, awarded the Prix
Goncourt in 1922, changed his lifestyle around 1937-38. He changed his cars for luxury models,
he bought a little estate, and he apparently took to gambling; but the investigation failed to
establish that Béraud had received any payments from Italy, which he visited often, and the
change in his lifestyle seemed more likely to be due to his remarriage about that time than to
professional or political activities.
In the case of Alphonse de Chateaubriant, owner and editor of the weekly La Gerbe,
which he founded directly after the defeat of France in 1940, there was clear evidence of the
existence of payments from Germany. Aged 63, the author of novels charting the history of the
fallen landed aristocracy from which he came, which in 1911 had earned him the Goncourt,
Chateaubriant had flung his energies into an anti-modernist campaign that led him to look
beyond Catholicism for the archaic origins of a mysticism that he finally found embodied in
National Socialism (Thiesse, 154-6). The sheet of charges described him as a “servile and by no
means disinterested collaborator.” Thanks to the monies he received from Germany he had
“lived an extravagant life along with his mistress.” To support his immoderate lifestyle,
Chateaubriant had taken from the till of La Gerbe the sum of 1,125, 000 francs, all the profits
earned by the paper over the period. As proof of his duplicity, the enquiry adduced the fact that
as early as July 1944, while he was still claiming in his writings that he was convinced of a
decisive German victory, he was emptying his bank account and preparing to flee (Exposé par
le Commissaire au Gouvernement adjoint, Maurice de Coissac, 27 février 1947. Dossier
d’instruction de Chateaubriant).
The “venality” motive can also refer to more or less licit profits made from collaboration
with the enemy. These profits were considered the more illegitimate in that they were made
primarily out of the nation’s misfortunes. Céline notoriously declared on the 29th October 1943,
in Je suis partout: “Just shut up with all this talk of traitors. Are the first traitors, then, anyone
who’s earned a penny out of the Germans?” If the political positions of the accused seemed
incoherent or opportunistic, as in the case of the aged Abel Hermant, a member of the
Académie française, who began as a famous Anglophile and then after the defeat turned
Anglophobe and Germanophile, then suspicion of venality was the first accusation to come up.
“There is every reason to believe that M. Abel Hermant, who has no private means of his own,
set his writing and journalistic talents at the service of German propaganda, out of simple
venality,” explained one police inspector (Rapport de l’inspecteur Le Serf, 15 décembre 1944,
Dossier d’instruction d’Abel Hermant). At the trial of the journalist Jean Luchaire, in January
1946, the Government Commissioner Raymond Lindon began his prosecution speech in these
terms: “When men committed treason with their pen, their treason was often inspired by
fascism. In Luchaire’s case, it was inspired by venality and corruption.” (Lottman, p. 246)
Comparing Luchaire to Béraud, against whom he had asked for the death penalty, he said that
the anger that had moved him at the first trial was now joined by “disgust.”
However, greed for money is not enough to explain the phenomenon of the
Collaboration. Its most tragically famous figures, in particular Brasillach and Rebatet, could not
be accused of having been bought by the enemy or motivated by venality. Brasillach certainly
saw his income increase substantially during the Occupation: the weekly he edited, Je suis
partout, doubled and then tripled its pre-war figures, to become a flourishing enterprise. But his
lifestyle remained modest, and it seemed clear to the Government Commissioner, as to the

Sapiro, Gisèle. “Portrait of the Writer as a Traitor: the French Purge trials (1944-1953).” EREA 4.2 (automne 92
2006): 90-99. <www.e-rea.org>
Court, that this product of the Ecole Normale had not been motivated by vulgar self-interest. In
the same way, Rebatet had received no German money. And though the account of his motives
emphasised that the papers that took his articles paid well, and his pamphlet Les Décombres
(The Ruins), the best-seller of the Occupation, at 65,000 copies, had earned him 500,000
francs, that was not the basic reason for his treachery.
On the whole, the collaborators had tended to benefit from their commitment on every
level, material and symbolic. But their treason was most often the product of their political
convictions. Anxious to avoid accusing people for their opinions, the prosecution could not
overlook their political ideas, but they could refer to them to show that they had led to treason.
Political idealism had overwhelmed national sentiment. The change could have been produced
by blindness. Rebatet’s admiration for the regime in Germany had blinded him to the point
where, from 1936 onwards, he could not or would not see the threats facing France. That was
how he had come to wish for France’s defeat in 1940, and to envisage the country’s Occupation
by a foreign power as a source of new possibilities rather than a disaster. He had acted out of
“political passion” and “arrogant hatred of the people of the Republic.”
But submission to the conqueror came, more profoundly, from a kind of moral
baseness, the typical servility of weak men, bowing to force. The proof was that the verbal
violence in which Rebatet expressed his political passion, far from being matched by bravery, in
fact hid a cowardly streak, in line with the standard image of the traitor. We might have
expected, said the prosecutor, that having pushed young Frenchmen down the path of military
collaboration he would have gone off himself to join the ranks of the Waffen SS and “fired the
last shots alongside the last defenders.” Hadn’t he claimed in front of ten thousand Parisians
that he was no “chicken”? Instead, his behaviour was “far from glorious”: “he left shamefully
for Germany, and there he went to ground until the Allied troops came, with their crushing
contradiction of his prophecies” (Parquet cour de justice, 31 mai 1946, exposé des faits par le
Commissaire au gouvernement adjoint, M. Fouquin, dossier d’instruction de Lucien Rebatet).
The prosecution speech against Brasillach delivered by Marcel Reboul opened with the
list of titles to fame of the brilliant young graduate of the ENS (Ecole Normale Supérieure),
acknowledged by all his peers. The question he tried to answer was:
Why did a man with so many gifts, crowned by so much success, who could have become one of the most
eminent writers in our country, had he remained true to his first ambitions, misuse his gifts, successes and
authority, and attempt to seduce the young first into a sterile political cause and then into the enemy’s
camp? (Isorni, 127)

Reboul put forward three arguments. In the first place, Brasillach had committed treason in
order to get out of prison camp, that is, out of self-interest. Secondly, yet another instance of
the weak yielding to the powerful, he had let himself be seduced by the invader’s strength: that
was a near-explicit charge of homosexuality, based on the pleasure Brasillach had taken in the
humiliation of France (Kaplan, 179). Alluding to Brasillach’s claim in his article “La Naissance
d’un sentiment” that, “During those years, thinking Frenchmen effectively got into bed with
Germany, with a few arguments, and the experience will have left them with happy memories”
(cit. Isorni, 138), Reboul said: “Your almost carnal attraction to brute force may have made you
try to lead your country into that bed of such happy memories,” and he greeted with derision
Brasillach’s claim of attachment to the “emasculated France” that was left (Isorni, 142, 167).
Finally, it was the desire to increase his audience that led Brasillach to treason, that is, his
search for symbolic rather than material profit, and his desire for fame. “I wonder what
intellectual Papacy in German publishing they may have dangled in front of you,” he suggested,
and later he argued:
“Brasillach’s treason is, above all, intellectual treason. It was motivated by pride. He got tired of breaking
lances in the peaceful jousts of pure literature. He needed an audience, a public platform, and political
influence, and he would have done anything to get them.” And:
“He wanted an audience, and he wanted real influence, especially political influence, and to get them he
took complicity with the enemy to its furthest extremes. (Isorni, 141, 146, 147)”

Sapiro, Gisèle. “Portrait of the Writer as a Traitor: the French Purge trials (1944-1953).” EREA 4.2 (automne 93
2006): 90-99. <www.e-rea.org>
So Brasillach committed treason out of weakness and vanity. The idea of intellectual
prostitution, not for money but for material and symbolic gain (getting out of the prison camp,
and winning an “audience” and a “public platform”) is certainly present by implication in
Reboul’s charges against what he calls the treachery of a “clerc” (an intellectual) (Isorni, 137),
referring to Julien Benda’s famous pamphlet of 1927, La Trahison des clercs (on the debate
around this book, see Cornick, chap. 2).
Brasillach’s intelligence, his powers of persuasion and his influence were all put to the service of
enemy propaganda, and that constituted intellectual treason. The writer was a traitor because
he abandoned pure literature out of his desire for power, a bigger readership, and political
influence (Réquisitoire de Me Reboul, Isorni, 137, 146-47). The intellectual was a traitor
because he took advantage of his influence over the young, and his powers of persuasion, to
try and turn them into informers and criminals (159). The critic was a traitor because he gave
himself up to propaganda and denounced wholesale Communists, Jews, Protestants, Catholics,
civil servants, university men, and students – his talent allowed him to “vary the epithets”
(Isorni, 160-64). And finally, the ultimate “intellectual crime,” the university man was a traitor,
because he “insulted his Alma Mater” by demanding the suppression of freedom of thought in
the Universities (Isorni, 165).
In his famous article “What is a collaborator,” Sartre reworked and universalised some
of these characteristics, which he took straight from the trials, to paint a moral portrait of the
traitor – one which is much better remembered than his pseudo-Durkheimian analysis of
collaboration in terms of social disintegration. Sartre began by reminding readers that the
collaborator’s motives could be reduced to self-interest and ambition. Besides the fact that
disinterested collaborators did exist, their authority resided not in their personal prestige but in
the strength of the occupying army. But all collaborators believed there would be a German
victory.
According to Sartre, that belief revealed one feature of their world-view: historical
realism, which induced them to surrender to the fait accompli. This “political positivism,” which
was how Maurras defined his own philosophy of history, led them to approve the existing state
of affairs simply because it was the case. This was a form of “making the present into the past,”
which relativised events, and identified progress with the movement of history. It was the origin
of their “docility in the face of a future they refused to create.” To that extent, realism takes the
opposite stance to the voluntarism of human freedom, which “means saying yes or no
according to principles,” and “acting without hope, persevering without success”. It is an
inverted morality, which derives law from facts, instead of judging facts in the light of law and
of universal principle. The collaborator identifies what is with what ought to be. At the same
time, he picks and chooses the facts on which his realism is based. For example, he chooses to
consider the defeat of 1940 as a fact. Here there appears a second characteristic of the
collaborator: bad faith. That bad faith is nurtured by his “feudal” submission to individual
realities – a man, a party, a foreign nation – and that, added to his submission to particular
facts, leads him into a state of permanent contradiction. Talleyrand is his model.
His other characteristics also derive from this attitude of submission: cunning and
femininity. Cunning is the weak man’s weapon – strength, for him, being the origin of law and
the foundation of the power of the master. Cunning is notably a woman’s weapon. At a time
when the Resistance was festooned with all the virtues of virility, Sartre saw in collaboration a
typically “feminine” phenomenon of passivity and submission. Quoting the sexual metaphors
used by some collaborators to describe relations between France and Germany, in which France
played the woman’s role, he saw in them “a curious mixture of homosexuality and masochism.”
He added that “homosexual circles in Paris supplied many brilliant recruits.” In this affirmation,
Sartre was echoing and helping to spread a contemporary prejudice, expressed, as shown, by
Reboul, the prosecutor at Brasillach’s trial. But the prejudice, as I have demonstrated, is linked
more generally to the construction of the image of the traitor as the negative of the Resistance
hero, with, consequently, feminine features.

Sapiro, Gisèle. “Portrait of the Writer as a Traitor: the French Purge trials (1944-1953).” EREA 4.2 (automne 94
2006): 90-99. <www.e-rea.org>
 Sartre’s final explanation for collaboration, which he thought was the best one, was
hatred. Collaboration was the direct expression of social disintegration: the collaborator “hates
the society where he has been unable to play any part.” In certain cases, like that of Drieu La
Rochelle, to whom Sartre devoted one of his clandestine articles on the theme (“Drieu, ou la
haine de soi”), “self-hatred” had turned into hatred of man in general: “He was determined to
see himself as a typical product of a completely rotten society.” All the psychological
characteristics of the collaborator – realism, refusal of universal law, right-wing anarchism,
cunning, femininity and self-hatred – could be explained, for Sartre, by Durkheim’s concept of
disintegration.
I have shown elsewhere, on the basis of an inquiry about the social attributes of
collaborationist writers, that Sartre’s analysis was partly wrong. The collaborator is more often a
professionalized man of letters, belonging to professional literary organisations, than a
disintegrated person. But he is not given symbolic recognition, and this is probably in part a
reason for his resentment. Furthermore, his position probably does not correspond to his initial
ambitions. The phenomenon of disintegration described by Sartre might well be a subjective
experience deriving from the collaborator’s subjective relation to his social position, rather than
an objective fact (Sapiro, “La collaboration littéraire”).

The Image of the Irresponsible Writer

The arguments of the defence generally consisted in pleas for the good faith, sincerity, and
disinterestedness of the accused: he had not acted out of desire for gain, and was not
motivated by base financial interest. Evidence was presented of his professional integrity,
including his integrity in the field of political conflict. He had not been bought by the enemy,
and that turned an accusation of treason into the lesser charge of holding the wrong kind of
views (délit d’opinion). The most politically committed, like young Lucien Combelle, made a
contrast between doctrine and politics; Combelle said he had acted out of loyalty to his socialist
ideals. Similarly, Robert Brasillach could plausibly argue that his fascist anti-semitic views were
rooted in a thoroughly French tradition. In connection with one of the articles he had published
in the Fascist weekly Je suis partout, under the title “Loyalty to National-Socialism,” Rebatet
invoked his loyalty to the principles that he cherished: “authority vested in the State, and
concern for social issues.” They all swore they had defended these ideas and principles in the
interests of France, out of patriotism, unless, like Lucien Combelle, they invoked a higher ideal
such as socialism. In any case, they said, they had only been following the official policies of
the French government and its representative, Marshall Pétain. Admittedly, some of them
acknowledged, their pens had sometimes run beyond what they really thought, but such
remarks had been written “polemically.”
Whereas the prosecution, to establish their responsibility, tried to show their influence,
and the consequences of their writing, the accused denied that what they said had had any real
effects. Surely the welcome given to the Allied soldiers, and the country’s enthusiasm for
liberation, proved that the press, which everyone knew was controlled by the occupying power,
had no “appreciable influence,” said the defence lawyer Moureaux, at the trial of the journalist
Stéphane Lauzanne (Transcript of Stéphane Lauzanne’s trial, 128). The prosecution laid great
emphasis on the denunciations, and the defence denied them. Rebatet was accused of having
denounced his fellow-writers in an article of 22 October 1943, published in Je suis partout
under the title “L’Intelligence Service.” Here is one of the extracts cited in the charge:
What are we to make of an official French publication that refuses to acknowledge that Malraux is a
Bolshevik … Among its contributors, our late-lamented doyen André Bellesort serves as cover for “the
Englishman,” Thierry Maulnier, pride of the former Figaro … According to them, there is no French
literature after Claudel, the man who celebrated the day Algiers fell, or Mauriac, that sanctimonious Red, or
the Tharauds, who became Israel’s lackeys after having studied Israel’s crimes more closely than anyone
else, or that great humanitarian Duhamel, who did nothing but bleat when we were strong and could use
our weapons, and turned into a spiteful belligerent the day our weakness forced us to make peace.Rebatet
said that these were not denunciations. He had been talking about “writers who were extremely well
known, and whose political positions were public knowledge. In any case,” he added, “none of them was
ever troubled by the authorities, at least not as a result of that article.” Moreover, he had not asked in his

Sapiro, Gisèle. “Portrait of the Writer as a Traitor: the French Purge trials (1944-1953).” EREA 4.2 (automne 95
2006): 90-99. <www.e-rea.org>
 article for “steps to be taken against them;” he insisted he had, as “a man of letters,” been defending his
position “against other men of letters who were openly defending their own” (Procès verbal de
l’interrogatoire du 31 octobre 1945. Dossier d’instruction de Lucien Rebatet).

In the trials of writers, numerous literary arguments were mobilised to explain texts that had
been called into question. Both defence and accused sought excuses in literary genres and
scholarly references. Asked in the course of questioning to justify what was in his writing, Abel
Hermant said one article was literary criticism and another “just literary knockabout.” He
invoked psychology, and comic effect, explaining: “This article proves that when a man of
letters tries his hand at politics he always lapses into literature. The writer in me was struck by
the comic side to the way the young Bolsheviks were received in England” (Procès verbal de
l’interrogatoire du 6 juillet 1945. Dossier d’instruction d’Abel Hermant). Similarly, Rebatet
argued that his virulent pamphlet Les Décombres was a “confession,” not a piece of
propaganda. The aim of the confession was to rid him of political issues, and “free him from
some of the things that made him angry,” so that he could devote his attention to literature
(Procès verbal du 2e interrogatoire du 27.10.45. Dossier d’instruction de Lucien Rebatet).
Justifying his style by reference to the playwright and satirist Courteline, he noted that “an
author is much more concerned with producing a colourful effect, or painting particular types or
characters, than with setting out and propagating a political thesis.” Such an author will answer
polemically when attacked. But, he added, “Isn’t the polemicist’s bark always worse than his
bite?” (Note by Rebatet on Les Décombres, in Dossier d’instruction…)
Brasillach’s defence counsel, Jacques Isorni, referred to Renan to explain his client’s
infamous remark, quoted above: “During those years, thinking Frenchmen effectively got into
bed with Germany, with a few arguments, and the experience will have left them with happy
memories.” Had not Renan written in the preface to his book La Réforme intellectuelle et
morale (Intellectual and Moral Reform) that “Germany was my mistress?” (193) In fact, Isorni
said in his Memoirs, he discovered much later that the phrase came straight from Jean
Giraudoux’s Siegfried et le Limousin: “They’ve just caught me committing adultery with
Germany. Yes, Siegfried, I’ve slept with her.” (cit. Kaplan, 286 n. 61). Just as in the nineteenth
century arguments of “art for art’s sake” had been developed to exculpate writers accused of
offences against morality and society, the flag of literature was again flourished to justify the
offending writings, even though they were not fiction.
The defence also made much of the loyal and worthy services these intellectuals had
performed for their country. They had all served and defended the interests of French culture.
Abel Hermant swore that his primary concern had been “the preservation of the French genius.”
Claude Autant-Lara gave evidence that Lucien Rebatet had given signal service to the cause of
French cinema. Moreover, were they not themselves part of the French cultural heritage?
Witnesses called by the defence attested to the talent of the accused. Marcel Aymé, Paul Valéry
and François Mauriac wrote letters to confirm Brasillach’s gifts as a writer and critic. Lara said of
Rebatet that he was “one of our best film critics.” Henri Béraud had won the Prix Goncourt,
Abel Hermant was a member of the Académie française. Was France to lose these men of
talent, who were among her claims to fame?
Just as literature was opposed to politics to justify the texts, writers were opposed to
polemicists. In contrast to the prosecution, who tried to show that a writer’s talent made his
propaganda all the more effective, and that celebrity increased responsibility, the defence
separated the two planes of literature and politics. The polemicist might have been in error, but
the writer had to be saved at all costs.
In September 1944, just as the Comité national des écrivains (National Writers’
Committee) began to draw up its list of writers who had collaborated, Jean Paulhan claimed for
writers “the right to make mistakes,” which he later also termed “the right of aberration.” It was
the right to make mistakes, a consequence of good faith, which the defence invoked in most of
the trials. The error of judgement came from ignorance of the true facts, misinformation, the
powerful influence of Marshall Pétain, or the influence of some other figure. Or it could be some
kind of professional deformation, as in the case of the journalist Stéphane Lauzanne, who

Sapiro, Gisèle. “Portrait of the Writer as a Traitor: the French Purge trials (1944-1953).” EREA 4.2 (automne 96
2006): 90-99. <www.e-rea.org>
according to his lawyer, Moureaux, was “led astray by his great learning, his deep knowledge of
international problems, and his instinctive need always to investigate both sides of the
question” (Plaidoirie de Me Moureaux. Transcript of Stéphane Lauzanne’s trial). Most often, the
accused shifted responsibility onto their sources of information, or onto Marshall Pétain. The
famous polemicist Henri Béraud, whose work appeared in a paper that sold 300.000 copies
before the war, wrote in his defence statement: “How could a simple citizen like myself, whom
the Marshall commanded at Verdun, helped in his literary career, and treated like a son, have
doubted his authority?” (Mémoire à l’intention du juge d’instruction, daté du 4 novembre 1944.
Dossier d’instruction d’Henri Béraud.) Or they blamed the person in charge of the publication, in
the case of newspapers (Bunau-Varilla in Lauzanne’s case, Carbuccia in that of Béraud), or,
finally, some intellectual influence. Stéphane Lauzanne, for example, invoked the authority of
Cardinal Baudrillart, and Lucien Combelle quoted Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. The concept of
“taking the passive course” was frequently used to express the feeling of having been tricked,
misled or deceived. Stéphane Lauzanne talked about his client’s “weak character.” He may have
been over 70, but “more than anyone else he was under the influence of his employer,” Bunau-
Varilla, editor of Le Matin; consequently, Lauzanne said, “the old man’s sense of responsibility
was diminished and even partly destroyed,” and that ought to be taken into account in
considering attenuating circumstances. (Plaidoirie de Me Moureaux. Transcript of the trial of
Stéphane Lauzanne, 115, 117.) Abel Hermant, though at 83 years of age the oldest of the
intellectuals on trial, went further than anyone in casting all responsibility onto his sources of
information and the authority of Marshall Pétain, alleging his own credulity and naivety
throughout his eleven question sessions with the examining magistrate and then in questioning
before the judge at the tribunal. He had read an article in the papers and repeated the
information without checking it; he had been told someone was a Communist and he had
written it without checking; he had been told that dissidents going over to the enemy were
traitors and he had believed it and written it; he had been wrong and he had been deceived
(Dossier d’instruction d’Abel Hermant).
As Alexandre Astruc put it in Combat, Hermant did much more than appeal to the
legitimacy of the armistice and the authority of Marshall Pétain:“He sketched out […] another
set of defence arguments, in which the writer’s irresponsibility played the greatest part. After
having played the Fascist on the air at Radio-Paris, and been generally thought of as an
engaged writer, he now presented his writings as pure exercises in style. He claimed comic
licence. Even literature itself was called in to save him. In his view, a man of letters who gets
involved in politics always lapses into literature. He came close to arguing that in the phrase
“working in intelligence with the enemy” the word is “intelligence,” and that was hardly true in
his case.” Up to this point, the arguments adduced all came within the paradigm of rational
action. But some people did not hesitate to resort to explanations founded in that of irrational
action. In his defence speech for Georges Suarez, Monsieur Boiteau stressed that his client’s
great talent went with an “impulsive” character; he was “sick,” and subject to “fits of anger”
(Suarez, 110). Similarly, when questioned during the preliminary examination of Rebatet’s file,
Robert Denoël, his publisher, saw in his verbal violence, his anti-semitism, and his
Germanophilia, aberrancies that he attributed to his “hypersensitive” nature, which he thought
made him at times “pathologically violent.” Neurotic behaviour and hypersensitivity, the
opposite of self-control, refer to characteristics thought of as typically feminine, and reinforce
the “feminised” image of the traitor.
The representation, since the nineteenth century, of the creative act as something
basically irrational is not unconnected with the claim that it cannot be subject to penal
responsibility; in so far as penal responsibility presumes freewill, children and madmen are
considered irresponsible. The fortunes of the theme of Celine’s insanity, which drew on that
particular representation of artistic creativity, are related to this key moment in the debate on
the responsibility of writers who collaborated, and the attempts of the defence to absolve them,
and redeem what they did, by invoking their talent.
The theme of insanity is the most drastic formulation of that paradigm of irresponsibility
that most of the collaborators who came to trial adopted as a defence strategy. There is

Sapiro, Gisèle. “Portrait of the Writer as a Traitor: the French Purge trials (1944-1953).” EREA 4.2 (automne 97
2006): 90-99. <www.e-rea.org>
something paradoxical in the fact that, at the Liberation, the people who four years earlier were
accusing literature of being partly responsible for the defeat of 1940 now declined all
responsibility for the consequences of their own writing. Indeed, only Brasillach, who was
executed, and Drieu La Rochelle, who committed suicide, claimed full responsibility for their
acts. While writers coming out of the Resistance, especially Sartre, were reappropriating the
paradigm of the writer’s responsibility, and using it as the basis of their theories of engaged
literature, the schema of irresponsibility was being used to reinforce the portrait of the traitor as
servile, venal and prepared to do anything in the name of ambition and fame. It established the
negative or feminine version of the virile image of the intellectual, conscious of his symbolic
power and of the influence of his writings; and it was that virile image that the purge trials in
France reaffirmed, by condemning writers to death.
However, in Sartre’s thinking, the treachery is not to the State, but to the intellectual’s
mission, which is the defence of freedom. According to Sartre, it is the intellectual’s duty to
betray a State which suppresses the freedom of its citizens, as did the Vichy regime. The very
notion of legal responsibility, in the modern sense, rests on the idea of a subject endowed with
free will. Sartre drew all the logical consequences of this philosophical principle, set out most
notably by Kant, and turned it against the State by developing his concept of intellectual
responsibility founded on freedom, of which the writer is the perfect embodiment. According to
Sartre, the writer is an undetermined subject who makes choices that engage him and for
which he must take responsibility, following the tradition established by Zola and Voltaire. As
the embodiment of freedom, he is responsible for the freedom of others. This theory of
engaged literature allowed Sartre to transcend the opposition between freedom and
responsibility which up to that point had structured discussion in the literary arena. Against the
definition in criminal law of authorial responsibility, Sartre’s theory established the independent
professional ethics of the responsible intellectual.

Works Cited

Archives Nationales Françaises: Dossiers d’instruction de Chateaubriant; Abel Hermant; Lucien

Rebatet, Georges Suarez; Transcript of Georges Suarez and Stéphane Lauzanne’s trials.
Astruc, Alexandre. “Abel Hermant condamné à la réclusion perpétuelle,” Combat, 16-17
décembre 1945.
Benda, Julien. La Trahison des clercs. Paris: Grasset, 1927.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “Le Nord et le Midi: contribution à une analyse de l’effet Montesquieu,” Actes
de la recherche en sciences sociales 35 (novembre 1980), Paris : Editions du Seuil, 21-
25.
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. “Céline nous écrit,” Je suis partout 638 (29 octobre 1943).
Charle, Christophe. Naissance des “intellectuels”, 1880-1900. Paris: Minuit, 1990.
Cornick, Martyn. Intellectuals in History. The Nouvelle Revue française under Jean Paulhan
(1925-1940), Amsterdam: Atlanta, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. “ Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur? ” [1969]. Dits et écrits, t. I, 1954-1988, Paris:
Gallimard, 1994.
Fauconnet, Paul. La Responsabilité. Étude de sociologie. Paris: Alcan, 1920.
Isorni, Jacques. Le Procès de Robert Brasillach. Paris: Flammarion, 1946.
Kaplan, Alice. Intelligence avec l’ennemi. Le Procès Brasillach, translated by Bruno Poncharal.
Paris: Gallimard, 2001. (The Collaborator. The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach,
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000.)
Lottman, Herbert R. L’Epuration 1943-1953. Paris: Fayard, 1986 (The Purge, New York:
Morrow, 1986).

Sapiro, Gisèle. “Portrait of the Writer as a Traitor: the French Purge trials (1944-1953).” EREA 4.2 (automne 98
2006): 90-99. <www.e-rea.org>
 Sapiro, Gisèle. La Guerre des écrivains (1940-1953). Paris: Fayard, 1999; rééd. 2006.
——. “La collaboration littéraire”, in Albrecht Betz et Stefan Martens (dir.), Les Intellectuels et
l’Occupation (1940-1944). Collaborer, partir, résister, Paris: Editions Autrement, 2004,
39-63.
——. “Responsibility and freedom: foundations of Sartre’s concept of intellectual engagement.”
Journal of Romance Studies 1-2 (2006), 31-48.
——. “The Writer’s Responsibility in France: from Flaubert to Sartre,” French Politics, Culture
and Society (forthcoming).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Drieu ou la haine de soi,” Les Lettres françaises (clandestines) 6 (1943).
——. “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” La République française (New York), août 1945; rpt.
Situations, III. Lendemains de guerre, Paris, Gallimard, 1949, rééd. 1976, 43-61.
Serry, Hervé. Naissance de l’intellectuel catholique. Paris: La Découverte, 2004.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “L’engagement sublime: Zola comme archétype d'un mythe culturel,”
Les Cahiers Naturalistes 67 (1993), 11-24.
Thiesse, Anne-Marie. Ecrire la France. Le mouvement régionaliste de langue française entre la
Belle Epoque et la Libération. Paris: PUF, 1991.

Sapiro, Gisèle. “Portrait of the Writer as a Traitor: the French Purge trials (1944-1953).” EREA 4.2 (automne 99
2006): 90-99. <www.e-rea.org>

View publication stats