Mere Humanity: The Ethical Turn in the Shorter Wartime Narratives of Irène

Némirovsky
Author(s): NATHAN BRACHER
Source: Yale French Studies , 2012, No. 121, Literature and History: Around "Suite
française" and "Les Bienveillantes" (2012), pp. 34-53
Published by: Yale University Press

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 NATHAN BRACHER

Mere Humanity: The Ethical Turn

the Shorter Wartime Narratives of
Irène Némirovsky

From the outset of World War II in September 1939 until her arrest
and deportation to Auschwitz in Julyl942, Irène Némirovsky contin
ued to write prolifically. In addition to the manuscript published in
2004 as Suite française, a biography of Anton Chekhov, and the novel
Les feux de l'automne, she also wrote a number of short stories, many
of which are remarkable for their socio-psychological portraiture and
plot structure. Until now, the lion's share of media attention and crit
ical scrutiny has focused first on the international acclaim of Suite
française and then on the sharp polemics surrounding her equally
sensational but virtually forgotten entry onto the Parisian literary
scene with the highly problematical David Golder. Némirovsky's
shorter works of fiction, however, have only received the most cur
sory consideration. Angela Kershaw notes that neither Dimanche
et autres nouvelles, published in 2000, nor Destinées, published in
2004 before Suite française, has attracted any significant attention,1
and the same could be said of the collection Les vierges et autres
nouvelles2 more recently published in 2009. What little discussion of
these shorter works there is has moreover focused almost exclusively
on venues of publication and putative links to the author's personal
itinerary: the stories have thus invariably been interpreted in terms of
biography and vice versa. Virtually no consideration has been given to
the specific features of the texts themselves. The present study seeks
to redress this imbalance by taking the opposite approach, relating
their thematic content back to the specific context of the early war
years during which they were written.

1. Angela Kershaw, Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Land
scape of Interwar France (New York: Routledge, 2009|, 187.
2. Irène Némirovsky, Les vierges et autres nouvelles (Paris: Denoël, 2009).

YFS 121, Literature and History: Around "Suite française" and "Les Bienveillantes,
ed. Golsan and Watts, © 2012 by Yale University.
34

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 NATHAN BRACHER 35

In her well-documented and finely-nuanced study, Kershaw not

that criticism of Némirovsky has been largely "politically ra
than aesthetically motivated" and observes that the challenge n
is "to uncover new connections" between Némirovsky's work
"the world of lived actuality" (Kershaw, 194). While her own s
provides an important beginning in that direction, she is mainly c
cerned with Némirovsky's place within the socio-economic ap
tus of French literary publishing during the interwar period, in o
words, with the objective structures that supposedly override
authorial intention and ultimately impose their "meaning" on
literary production. My point of view shall be almost the oppo
Arguing that neither the supposed cultural identity of the author
the economic structures of production and consumption impose
definitive interpretation of these literary texts, I shall explore th
"from within," as it were, but "looking out" to their immediate
text, namely, the declaration of war in early September 1939,
drôle de guerre from then until May 10, 1940, when the Germa
vasion brought about first a military route, then a civilian cata
phe, and finally the political implosion of the Third Republic and
creation of the Vichy regime.
It is certainly the case that in such overwhelming and inescapab
historical circumstances, no representation of any aspect of t
events or of people experiencing them could remain neutral. Fo
ing Gisèle Sapiro, Kershaw accordingly states: "The fall of Fr
posed a stark choice for intellectuals—to accept or to refuse th
cupation" (Kershaw, 33). The evolution of subsequent events wo
indeed eventually show that the May-June 1940 debacle and the en
ing creation of the Vichy regime on July 10, 1940 confronted not o
intellectuals, but everyone in France with a long series of decis
testing their willingness to reject the German occupation. Amid
shock and confusion created by the May-June 1940 disaster, howev
precious few, be they politicians, intellectuals, or common citiz
could lay claim to such lucidity or composure. From the ferve
Catholic Claudel, to the notorious "immoraliste" André Gide, w
out forgetting the erstwhile mandarin of the Nouvelle revue fran
Jean Paulhan, most of the brilliant French literati of the time wave
significantly in their attitudes toward Pétain, Vichy, and the
mans, as did the vast majority of their compatriots (Kershaw,
including the leadership of the Communist party, which encour
comrades to fraternize with the Germans and requested permis

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36 Yale French Studies

to republish their newspaper in Nazi-occupied Paris. With the notable

exceptions of René Char and Jean Guéhenno, who pointedly refuse
to publish anything as long as the Germans and Vichy controlled pub
lic life, it took most intellectuals anywhere from one to two years to
finally perceive their options in such a dramatically binary fashion
And even then, a good number, including several with impeccable left
wing pedigrees such as Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Jean-Paul Sartre
Simone de Beauvoir, and Frédéric Joliot-Curie failed to confront the
Occupation in Sapiro's dramatically binary terms, since they never
let it get in the way of their literary or professional careers.3
Be that as it may, Némirovsky's texts dating from the war period
have come under heavy suspicion. Noting that a significant portion
of these narratives focus on ethical questions and were published
in magazines known for their right-wing political orientation and
anti-Semitism, Jonathan Weiss was among the first to suggest tha
Némirovsky was pandering to Vichy's reactionary ideology with d
dacticism and sententious celebrations of rural life.4 While offerin
a much more thoroughly researched and nuanced biography of th
novelist, Philipponnat and Lienhardt also underscore the didactic
strain in Némirovsky's wartime short stories and wonder if she ha
not bought into Pétain's moral order as she had into Christianity, "for
lack of anything better."5 Emphasizing as does Sapiro the crucial im
portance of the socio-economic networks of literary publication an
readership, Kershaw argues that, regardless of Némirovsky's own sub
jective authorial intentions, which were indeed apolitical, her obje
tive "position in the literal field in the 1930s precluded her participa
tion in the intellectual opposition to Vichy" (Kershaw, 34). And while
Kershaw's precise knowledge of the evolution of events and men
talities during the Occupation leads her to warn against over-hasty
anachronistic judgments of the author's intention, she nevertheles
finds that "the discourses of the family, the nation, and Catholicism
in Némirovsky's late fiction are traditionalist, and appear to converge
toward an image of Frenchness close to that propagated by the Vichy
regime" (167). Although acknowledging that such is clearly not th

3. See Philippe Burrin, "Science et présence," 311-28, and "Inter arma sielent Mu
sae," 329-45 in Burrin, La France à l'heure allemande, 1940-1944 (Paris: Seuil,1997).
4. Jonathan Weiss, Irène Némirovsky (Paris: Éditions du Félin, 2005), 161-64. Cf.
Kershaw, 31-32.
5. Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, La vie d'Irène Némirovsky (Paris:
Grasset-Denoël, 2007), 342.

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 NATHAN BRACHER 37

case in Suite française, Kershaw argues that the latter text is exc
tional precisely because, having no hopes of ever finding a publicatio
venue, Némirovsky gave up on trying to present herself to the publ
and to authorities as a "French novelist" and thus allowed her "dis
course on Frenchness" to become more critical (168-70).
Némirovsky's wartime short stories have thus received rather
short shrift, since for the most part they are considered either as more
or less artful pot-boilers or thinly disguised exercises in ideological
toadying. As we know, by claiming that France's humiliating defeat
had been brought on by moral dissolution, impiety, political deca
dence, and the influence of "foreigners" (primarily Jews), Pétain and
his followers sought to solidify their grip on power by scapegoating
ideological enemies and engaging the French populace in a publicly
orchestrated exercise in self-flagellation. While Némirovsky's war
time short stories do indeed contain a number of didactic elements, a
careful analysis of these texts in reference to the chronology of events,
the dominant discourses of the early Occupation period, and to Suite
française will allow us to set them clearly apart from Vichy propa
ganda and see that Némirovsky focuses on the question of intersub
jectivity in a way that undermines the basic tenets of Vichy ideology.
Given the dramatic events that occasioned major transformations
in French politics, society, and culture from the declaration of war in
early September 1939 throughout the early Occupation period during
which Némirovsky wrote these works of shorter fiction and in which
we often find representations of this era itself, it is indeed impor
tant to consider their specific contents in light of the chronology that
Kershaw finds so crucial. We shall therefore focus first on two texts
written shortly after the outset of the war in the fall of 1939 and then
on a story penned in the wake of the May-June 1940 debacle and the
ensuing creation of the Vichy regime in July 1940. Dating from the
earliest moments of the war, "La nuit en wagon" offers in several key
respects a striking example of Némirovsky's attempt to mold what
she herself termed the "burning lava"(Philipponnat and Lienhardt,
403) of current events into works of literature. As suggested by the
title, the story depicts a group of French people taking the night train
to Paris only a few hours after France has declared war on Nazi Ger
many. In the same compartment are soldiers heading for duty and
civilians rushing to see loved ones just called into military service.
On the one hand, the work clearly contains elements of an occa
sional nature that are indeed "politically encoded," to use Kershaw's

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38 Yale French Studies

term. However, this encoding did not simply result from unforeseen
or unheeded objective circumstances: it is on the contrary quite clear
from the text itself that Némirovsky intended to support the war ef
fort by bolstering French public morale, just as she was doing in
series of patriotic radio talks (Philippinnot and Lienhardt, 332) given
during these months of the drôle de guerre ("phony war"). The very
first page specifies that the narrative takes place on "the first night of
the war" in a train carrying soldiers and women who in various ways
were traveling to Paris "to work, to serve."6 The narrator calls ou
attention to the remarkably congenial mood of this group of French
citizens of both bourgeois and rural farming stock who abandon their
habitually chilly reserve and class prejudices to share food, coffee, and
life stories. Némirovsky's didacticism is anything but subtle. When
an elderly woman rushing to Paris to retrieve the fine linens she r
gards as a sacred family heirloom takes out her food, the other pas
sengers in the compartment follow her lead: "They all did the same
sharing hard-boiled eggs, black coffee, ham, and peaches with thes
wonderfully fraternal gestures, a tenth of which would suffice to
make the world happy if they were saved for times of peace" ("La nuit
en wagon," 214).
These simple gestures are clearly presented as models of the unity
and cooperation necessitated by the declaration of war. And if the
reader does not get the message the first time, the narrator reiter
ates, noting a few pages later that "The magic spell continued. They
squeezed together without a peep to make room for the newcomer"
(215). The narrator moreover emphasizes the exceptional nature of
such fraternization among strangers of different regional and social
origins, particularly amid the sharp, rancorous ideological divisions
that marked the late 1930s in France: "I tell you, that night was like
no other. For several hours, people had not felt like passing judgment
on their neighbors, they had lost their inclination to tear each other
apart and hate each other" (217).
As indicated by the fact that the narrator in the above cited pas
sage addresses the reader directly ("I tell you"), the didactic character
of these passages is unmistakable: Némirovsky's text clearly seeks t
present simple, yet exemplary acts of good French citizenship avai
able to all willing to fulfill their patriotic duty in this time of war. In

6. Irène Némirovsky, "La nuit en wagon," Destinées et autres nouvelles (Pin

Balmas: Sables, 2004), 207. (Here as throughout, the translation is my own.)

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 NATHAN BRACHER 39

that sense, we can indeed state that Némirovsky is, as Kershaw

it, serving up a certain "discourse on Frenchness" occasioned by
adapted to the needs of the moment. The largely transparent o
sional aspect of this text makes all the more interesting Némirovsk
narrative perspective in terms of national identity. If on the one h
we can safely surmise that the author sought to project a positive i
age of herself as engaged in patriotic service by providing such les
on civic devotion, we must also observe on the other hand that
narrator situates herself as a perspicacious outsider keenly awar
behaviors that the French simply take for granted. In order to poi
out just how remarkable the neighborly words and gestures ind
are, the narrator thus underscores the implicit code of silence
indifference that, while the obvious norm for the French, can be s
disorienting to foreigners.7

What silence in a railroad car in times of peace! What stubborn de

termination to ignore fellow passengers, to keep ones seat, one's be
longings, one's thoughts away from them! ... I don't know you. I
don't want to know you. I can help you stow this suitcase, ask you for
permission to smoke, to put the window down. I can exchange a few
mundane comments on the weather or the probable time of arrival,
but that's all. Do not go any further. Do not seek to make my acquain
tance! ("La nuit en wagon," 210)

The paradox would thus have it that Némirovsky implicitly—do

less unwittingly—situates herself as an outsider to the extent t
she calls attention to cultural specificity of the codes that, precisel
because they remain unspoken and unwritten, remain invisibl
those who observe them within their own culture.
In order to convey her message of national solidarity by celebrat
ing the exceptionally privileged nature of the caring and sharing that
occur in this little train compartment right after France has declared
war on Germany, Némirovsky thus has to observe the French from
the outside:

These people who had never met, and who would go their own ways
tomorrow, these French, so jealous of their privacy and eager to com
plain, were talking about themselves, their jobs, their homes, their
wives, not feverishly, not hysterically, but with a singular abandon,

7. Such is particularly the case for Americans, as Raymonde Carroll has pointed
out with her accordingly entitled book Évidences invisibles. Américains et Français au
quotidien (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987). See in particular "La conversation," 43-66.

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40 Yale French Studies

a warm and tender human accent, as if, finally, human beings had
ceased to be wary of their neighbors and were wanting to understand
them and to be understood. ("La nuit en wagon," 210)

While pointedly designating her characters as members of a national

community ("these French") in the first part of this passage, the nar
rator quickly goes on to define their exceptional camaraderie in terms
of a common humanity in the latter part. The same can be said for the
entire text, whose first paragraph situates these railroad passengers at
a very precise moment in time ("the first night of the war"), but then
relates that particular instant to historical crises and disasters that
intrude into the lives of people around the globe and in various eras:

In wars and revolutions, there is nothing more unusual than these

first instants during which you are breathlessly jolted from one life
into another, as if falling completely clothed from on top of a bridge
into a deep river, without understanding what is happening to you, yet
retaining an absurd hope. (207)

With this thematic preface to "La nuit en wagon," Némirovsky con

nects her text to deep-seated preoccupations of her writing that ex
tend far beyond the occasional elements that are, as we have seen, in
deed so prominent. Philipponnat and Lienhardt have pointed out that
the motif of drowning, doubtless anchored in the author's memory of
her beloved French governess's tragic death, haunts the entire corpus
of her writing (Philipponnat and Lienhardt, 71-73). The drama of pri
vate lives thrown into disarray by historical events constitutes one of
the dominant strains running through her wartime fiction, including
not only Suite française8 and Les feux de l'automne, but also two
other short stories written during the fall of 1939, "Le spectateur"
and "En raison des circonstances."
We are now poised to draw some preliminary conclusions. Since,
as we shall again see in our discussion of "Le spectateur," the didactic
strain is incontestably prominent in these texts dating from the out
break of the war in the fall of 1939, it can in no way be attributed to
the arrival of Pétain and Vichy, all the more in that the text celebrates
not some return to moral order, organic social hierarchies, or rural
virility, but on the contrary the egalitarian ideals of the Republic.
The didactic strain of the text encourages a sort of "Union Sacrée"

8. See Nathan Bracher, After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky's
Suite française (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010),
especially Chapter 7: "Private Lives and Public and Public Stories," 196-228.

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 NATHAN BRACHER 41

reminiscent of 1914. The ordeal of war demands that the French

aside their habitually rigid and rancorous socio-economic str
tions and link arms in national solidarity—hence not only th
ing of food, drink, and life stories, but also the prevailing at
of understanding and indulgence. The longest and most capt
life story told by these passengers of "La nuit en wagon" is that
young woman having defied her parents' bourgeois strictures to
away and spend twenty-four hours with a man who, while co
her had nevertheless had an affair with a married woman ri
the hotel kept by the young woman's parents. Although som
skeptical about the escapade, the bourgeois married women show
the contempt and indignation that one could normally expect
great deal of sympathy and understanding. The Vichy regime, w
would go so far as to require that window shades on trains be
Marseille and Nice be drawn so that passengers would not be tem
to ogle the women in bathing suits (of that era!) who might
the beaches, would have more than frowned on such a highly sy
thetic depiction of this blatant breech of the "morality" that in
Pétain's incessant scoldings.
A Pétainist depiction would moreover have stressed not sh
and mutual understanding but natural hierarchies in conformity
the putative organic order of society. Romance and pleasure
be conspicuously shunned in favor of the rigid obedience to
tary orders and stoic acceptance of pain and deprivation pres
as indispensable steps to national salvation. In "La nuit en w
Némirovsky instead emphasizes the commonality of experien
confronting suffering brought about not by the transgression of
putative moral or political order, but simply by the inscrutable
edy of war. She therefore provides a prototype of the recurrent
ing panoramas of panic, chaos, and destruction that will mark h
placable, yet compassionate depiction of the May-June 1940
and civilian exodus in the first half of Suite française:9

How many times people had imagined what this first night of the wa
would be like! Civilians pushing and shoving their way into trai
German planes bombing train stations, cars stacking up bumper
bumper on the highways, panicked people fleeing cities to seek refu
in the forest as in the times of massive invasions .... ("La nuit e
wagon, 209)

9. See Bracher, Chapter 3, "Epic Suffering," in After the Fall, 65-97.

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42 Yale French Studies

Like the full-blown epic catalogues of misery that will appear in Suite
française, such images foreground the common humanity of those
caught up in the maelstrom of events that far outstrip their capac
ity to understand or control them, and, again, give another variation
on the recurrent theme of the intrusion of history into private lives.
Since we find such important themes and motifs from Suite française
to be already present at the core of this story dating from the fal
of 1939, it is hard to claim as does Kershaw that Némirovsky's last
novel is radically different from the rest of her late fiction or that
Suite française was only possible because Némirovsky was no longer
interested in being French.
Nor is "La nuit en wagon" anomalous in these respects. Also com
posed and published in the earliest phase of the war during the fall of
1939, "Le spectateur" shares a significant number of traits with "L
nuit en wagon," beginning with its explicit reference to the outbreak
of hostilities central to both the story's plot and the psychology of it
main character, Hugo Grayer. The text accordingly focuses on the
questions of national allegiance and civic duty, but from a perspec
tive diametrically opposite to that of "La nuit en wagon," since i
accentuates their total absence. Hence the title: as a foreigner, a Ur
guayan national whose considerable fortune has been spread out in
various international investments, Grayer—like myriad globetrotters
and tourists before and after—comes to France as an aloof, epicurean,
cosmopolitan "spectator" to enjoy and consume the country's many
scenic, cultural, and gastronomical delights. Far from sharing any re
sponsibility in the coming ordeal or participating in the war effort in
any way, Grayer is on the contrary intent not only on dissociating
himself completely from France's involvement in the armed conflict,
but even more importantly on escaping any and all physical injury
or financial damage that might be brought about by the historica
calamity.
Once again tied closely to specific circumstances, Némirovsky's
didacticism proves to be even more prominent, central, and explicit in
"Le spectateur" than in "La nuit en wagon." The very first sentences
of the text depict Hugo Grayer wallowing in the exquisitely rich and
subtle flavors of a sumptuous meal washed down with a vintage wine.
Emphasizing his lavish tastes and luxurious lifestyle, Némirovsky's
narrator informs us that Grayer now devotes his life to "stringing
together [his] divertissements," and regards his wife Magda as little

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 NATHAN BRACHER 43

more than psychological furniture.10 And for those of us who mi

still be a little slow to catch on, the narrator has Grayer recall th
jilted female acquaintance once labeled him as "selfish" (égoiste
curring twice in five lines). Going well beyond the mundane, sc
yard stereotype of the child hoarding marbles or chocolate, howev
Némirovsky presents Grayer's fundamental character flaw as
ming not from a petty lack of generosity but from a deep-seated
chological and intellectual egocentrism that we might think of
synthesis of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche. For having given
matter some reflection, Grayer considers himself well-versed in t
ways of a world "made up of crazed killers and stupid victims" (33
He therefore declares as would Rand: "All the tragedies that be
humankind are unleashed by those . . . who love others more t
themselves, and desire that we recognize that love" (332). Grayer h
thus concluded as did Nietzsche (who famously asserted that on
an aesthetic phenomenon could the world be justified) that the sec
to happiness is to "consider the world as a very curious spect
deserving to be praised in the tiniest details of its stage productio
for "then everything [takes] on great beauty" (333). Citing Fonten
Grayer, when no longer buoyed by fine food and drink, thus s
consolation in "the contemplation of this old imperfect unive
through art and literature (333).
In sum, the exquisitely sensitive Hugo Grayer, moreover kno
for his collection of china, represents exactly the sort of the cons
mate aesthete that Némirovsky will so fiercely satirize in Suite fr
çaise with the figures of Gabriel Corte and Charles Langelet. W
them, Grayer shares a highly privileged lifestyle and a set of
heeled, finely tuned tastes for luxury and aesthetic sophistication
not only allow him to dwell in a bubble of self-indulgent bliss but
convince him of his superiority over the vulgar masses incapable a
unworthy of such delicacies. Like Langelet, who knows he is not li
the common people caught up in this hideous mess of war,11 and l
Corte, who insists that war must present a noble tableau whose gr
deur must not be spoiled by the vulgar cries of the common pe

10. Némirovsky, "Le spectateur," Dimanche et autres nouvelles (Paris: St

2000), 332.
11. See Némirovsky, Suite française (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 2004), chapter 7. Also
available in English as Suite Française, translated by Sandra Smith (New York: Vintage
International, 2007).

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44 Yale French Studies

(chapter 14), Grayer is confident that he can and should rightfully

extract himself from the absurd mess by fleeing. With this portrait
of Hugo Grayer, who admits that the plight of great stone cathedrals
moves him more than that of human beings and who had only started
to take notice of the Spanish Civil War when certain newsreel images
of the violence had reminded him of El Greco paintings, Némirovsky
prefigures precisely the sort of self-serving, amoral aesthetic narcis
sism embodied by Langelet and Corte in Suite française.
By entitling this text "Le spectateur," Némirovsky thus under
scores the basic posture that not only characterizes Grayer's socio
economic, intellectual, and psychological disposition at the very
outset of the war in September 1939, but that will also define the
arrogant, highly privileged self-satisfaction that she will masterfully
skewer with her portraits of Langelet and Corte, who both flee Paris
in the June 1940 civilian exodus. Like Grayer, the Parisian aesthete
depicted in Suite française smugly presume that their exceptional ar
tistic sensitivity sets them apart from the vulgar masses and thus
entitles them to exemption from the violence of history. The parallel
between "Le spectateur" and Suite française is particularly evident
in chapter 27 of the novel, when Némirovsky underlines the hypo
risy of Corte's contrived outward expressions of concern and his ca
lous indifference to the human suffering so dramatically visible al
around him. At last safely lodged in the most luxurious hotel in what
Némirovsky calls the queen of provincial spas - obviously the town
of Vichy, since the text indicates that all the important government
officials were taking up residence there—Corte outwardly feigns p
triotic shock and sorrow at the fall of France while avidly savoring hi
hot bath, scalding coffee, cool cocktails, and cushy bed, all the more
now that he is no longer bothered by the sight of people and bridges
torn apart by bombs or unattended women giving birth on the road
side (chapter 27).
Similarly, Grayer, confident of safely removing himself from the
oncoming horrors of war by securing passage on an ocean liner, aug
ments his own psychological and material comfort in thinking that
he can now take in the historical drama about to unfold on the stage
of Europe as a discerning theatre-goer, that is, as a "spectator":

He felt all at the same time compassion, a proper indignation, and

this comfortable quietude that one experiences when taking in a stage
production. (337)

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 NATHAN BRACHER 45

Seeing all these strong, handsome men in danger of dying, he fel

sort of ironic tenderness for himself.... (339)

They were leaving Europe behind. Soon, they would no longer thi
of her. She would be like a stage when one has left the theater, li
Shakespearian play trickling blood when the curtain fell and the s
lights were extinguished. (340)

The major difference in "Le spectateur" is that Némirovsky

ironic twist of the plot to expose the folly of Grayer's preten
to allow her narrator to spell out the lesson of the story,
in Suite française, Corte's destiny is simply left in suspens
extant chapters, even though the author's notes reveal that
planned to depict him as a prominent collaborator in the no
sequent developments.
For although the ocean liner flies the flag of a neutral co
it comes under attack by a submarine whose shells and to
quickly transform the vessel into a death trap for all its pa
irrespective of their national origins or aesthetic sensibilit
again, as we have seen in "La nuit en wagon" and as in Sui
çaise, Némirovsky uses a sort of epic catalogue to undersc
common plight of people of various groups caught up in the v
of history surpassing their ability to understand, much less co
what is about to transpire:

An invisible hand tossed, shook, and mixed together all these grou
that had until then been distinct, just as various alcoholic drinks
mixed in a shaker. Luxury passengers and those in the third c
women in mink coats and little Jewish German children that a
American charity wanted to settle in an orphanage in Uruguay, th
now were all together running, colliding, and throwing thems
into the lifeboats, while the boats were slowly descending toward
sea. ("Le spectateur," 344)

While obviously reminiscent of the tragic sinking of the L

the scene composed by Némirovsky in the fall of 1939 neve
represents here as we have seen in "La nuit en wagon" a r
markable prefiguring of the chaotic scenes of panic that would
casioned by the German bombing of towns, train stations, and
during the May-June 1940 debacle in France that Némirov
so vividly depict in the first part of Suite française, and in w
Hannah Diamond points out,12 many upper-class French people
nantly found themselves sharing the same plight as the comm

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46 Yale French Studies

they were so used to contemptuously ignoring. In "Le spectateur

is often the case in Suite française,13 Némirovsky uses a simile like
ing the panicked crowd to a frightened animal to accentuate the co
monality of their terror, as the crowd of passengers on the sin
ship thus appears "to form one sole being, trembling like an ani
threatened with a whip" ("Le spectateur," 344).
In sharp contrast to Suite française, in which ethics are only
umbrated by their glaring absence, however, Némirovsky's did
cism in "Le spectateur" is indeed pronounced and explicit, and b
in-depth analysis. Philipponnat and Lienhardt rather dismissiv
limit the text to a denunciation of carefree attitudes of the 1930s
lippinnat and Lienhardt, 331 ), in other words, a lesson tailored to
times that would dovetail with Pétain's sententious. A closer lo
however, quickly reveals that such a simplistic analysis ignores
underlying thematics of intersubjectivity that Némirovsky so p
edly emphasizes and that will prove so prevalent in Suite franç
Beyond the illusion of neutrality, which the text does indeed di
age, since the sirens warning of the submarine attack ring in Gray
ears "as an echo of those resounding at that very instant in Eur
(342), Némirovsky exposes Grayer's self-aggrandizing pretension
socio-economic and psychological self-sufficiency to relentless iron
to such an extent that her main character is required to confro
avow, and renounce his egocentric illusions one by one. Her n
tor thus points out that, having so proudly considered himself
epitome of "a civilized man," Grayer now "felt reduced to the level
savages" (343), no different from any of the hundreds of others fac
the prospects of being torn apart by explosions or of drowning in
dark, icy depths of the Atlantic.
Indeed, the text heavily underscores the wretched human vul
ability that this epicurean member of the world's socio-econo
elite now ineluctably shares with the humblest of passengers,
he lies shocked and injured in a crowded lifeboat: "He lay amo
others, [who were] wet like him, freezing like him, dazed like h
(345). Thus repeating "like him" to emphasize the human fr
ity that Grayer shares on an equal basis with even the most low
Némirovsky moreover specifies that those nearest Grayer in the li
boat just happen to be two of the little Jewish orphans destined
12. Hannah Diamond, Fleeing Hitler (Oxford and New York: Oxford Universi
Press, 2007), 73-74.
13. See Bracher, chapter two, "Narrating the Fall" in After the Fall, 28-64.

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 NATHAN BRACHER 47

Uruguay. But the irony continues: having finally grasped the hum
ity he shares with them, he tries "to speak to them, to reassure t
(345), but of course they cannot understand a word of what he ha
say. Equally ironic is the fact that the physical humiliation of
injured, soaked, chilled, and nauseated to the point of vomiting
not, as he had feared, reduce him to savagery, but on the cont
leads him to embrace the shared humanity that he had previo
shunned, and thus achieve a small measure of dignity in the fa
death. Némirovsky's text is clear on this point:

... he had told someone - Magda? someone else? - that he would be

curious to know what feelings were aroused by extreme peril. Now
he knew. He also knew that all was not lost right away, that human
shame, pity, and solidarity remained for a long time in the heart. From
having responded with moderation, with dignity, he felt comforted.
He wanted to do even better. He rasped: "Thank you." (347)

While the woman nearest him returns the gesture by addressing h

directly instead of using the ultra-proper third person constructi
the others simply look on him with pity, incapable of helping him
any way.
The ironic turnabout is now complete, since Grayer ends up in
precisely the same position as those he himself had so recently con
templated with the indifferent curiosity suggested by the title "Le
spectateur." And once again, the narrator calls this irony to our at
tention: "He cried out. And nobody could help him. People looked at
him with pity. That is all they could do for him. To hell with their
pity! He too had watched with compassion those French soldiers who
were going off to fight" (347-48).
Far from simply castigating years of flippant hedonism as Philip
ponnat and Lienhardt imply, the text stands Grayer's paradigmati
cally egocentric socio-economic, political, and intellectual posture on
its head. If explicit and insistent, Némirovsky didacticism aims not
to deliver sententiously moralistic scoldings but a lesson on intersub
jectivity, in other words, the irrevocable connections with others and
the basic human vulnerability that Grayer finds himself willy-nilly
sharing not only with his fellow passengers, his compatriots, or even
his fellow Europeans, but with people facing war's death and destruc
tion around the globe, as far away as China. Némirovsky brings her
text to its crescendo with a dramatic reversal of perspective that bears
citing at length:

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48 Yale French Studies

How bearable tragedies appear when they only strike the other! How
strong seems the human body when it's the flesh of another that is
bleeding! How easy it is to look death in the face when it approaches
someone else! Well, now it was his turn. This no longer concerned
some Chinese child, Spanish woman, Central European Jew, or these
poor, charming French, but him, Hugo Grayer! It concerned his body
rolling in the foam of the sea and in vomit, frozen, solitary, miserable,
trembling! Just as, before going to bed, he had perused, then calmly
crumpled up those newspapers containing stories of bombings, tor
pedoings, fires - Ah! there were too many of them, pity was wearing
itself out - so, tomorrow, good, peaceful folks would contemplate for
an instant the image of a wrecked ship floating on a smooth, monoto
nous sea, and they would not lose a single mouthful of bread or swal
low of wine, or hour of sleep. He would be inflated with water, eaten
by sea creatures, and in some cinema hall in New York or Buenos
Aires, these words would appear on the screen: "The first neutral ship
torpedoed in this war!" And it would be old and forgotten and of no in
terest to anyone. People would keep on thinking about their business,
their illnesses, their worries. Boys would keep on grabbing girls by the
waist in the darkness,- children would keep on sucking candy. (348-49)

Némirovsky's text thus focuses on Grayer's realization of inter

jectivity, of the basic humanity that he shares in particular with a
those that he was in the habit of discounting, brushing aside, or
regarding. This realization results not only from the ironic twis
events that places him at the heart of the very catastrophe tha
was confident of dodging, but also from the dramatic reversal of p
spective: Grayer "Le spectateur" who had presumed to take in
violence of history much as one would enjoy an opera or a play fro
the safety of a luxury box must now endure the ultimate humiliat
of having himself become a spectacle for the countless moviego
who will gawk at the sensational newsreel stories.
In order to accurately assess Némirovsky's strong emphasis
ethics here as well as in her other wartime narratives, it is cru
to analyze both the precise tenor of her didacticism and the na
tive devices used convey it. On the latter score, we can observe
Némirovsky also uses reversal of perspectives in a major way in
first part of Suite française, and most strikingly the injustice and
pocrisy of the novelist Gabriel Corte, the aesthete and grand b
geois par excellence whose vain pretensions to superiority are s
tered not only by his encounter with members of the proletariat w
snatch away his champagne and foie gras, but also by the alternatin

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 NATHAN BRACHER 49

narrative point of view that has the reader see Corte from both
inside and the outside.14 Conversely, Maurice and Jeanne Micha
the two characters that Némirovsky depicts as models of lucidi
compassion, and equanimity, throughout the chaos and mayhem
the civilian exodus, are precisely the ones who display a capacity fo
stepping outside of their individual situation and viewing both
historical disaster and themselves from the outside, as others
them. Though much more subtle, the second part of Suite fran
also uses an ironic reversal of perspective to expose the hypocrisy o
a central character: when Lucille, who repeatedly insists that he
mantic idyll with the German officer has nothing to do with the w
and is really nobody's business, visits a seamstress openly having
affair with a German soldier, the reader realizes that the seamstre
claims to a personal happiness totally oblivious to historical re
ties are in essence identical to those made by Lucille, the bourg
spouse of a prisoner of war who chides the seamstress about sleepin
with the enemy.15
We find in these wartime short stories many other elemen
and in particular the stark depictions of marriage and family b
in the November 1939 story "En raison des circonstances" as w
as in the 1942 text "Les vierges," which also show that, contrary
allegations, Némirovsky's thematics are in fact incompatible w
those of Vichy ideology. The basic point is clear: in-depth analysis
Némirovsky's fiction penned shortly before and soon after the esta
lishment of the Vichy regime reveals neither rupture nor dram
shift, but instead strong continuities of both narrative technique a
thematics. Some seem to assume that any and all preoccupation w
ethics can only be symptomatic of Pétain and Vichy. It is impor
to recall, however, that such intellectuals as Marc Bloch, Jean T
cier, Jean Guéhenno, and Léon Werth—who cannot be suspecte
harboring the slightest pro-Vichy sentiment—all expressed ser
concerns about the moral fiber of the French nation in the summer
of 1940. More importantly, close consideration of the specific nature
of the ethical elements found in Némirovsky's shorter wartime nar
ratives reveals them to be radically different from the propaganda of
"National Revolution," whose "morals" are driven by the two priori
ties of scapegoating and establishing hierarchical order.

14. See Bracher, "Le fin mot de l'histoire: La Tempête en juin et les perspectives de
Némirovsky," Modem and Contemporary Francelè/ 3(August 2008): 265-77.
15. See Suite française, chapter 11.

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50 Yale French Studies

In order to reinforce its power and justify its vengeful, punitiv

ideology, Vichy was intent on stigmatizing certain people and retur
ing to a highly contrived notion of the past. It thus blamed the de
on certain specific social and political groups—first and foremost J
and the Popular Front—while at the same time touting the virt
of a supposedly rural, organic, "natural" social hierarchy whose
thority had, Vichy insisted, been grievously ignored under the Thi
Republic. As we have amply demonstrated, however, Némirovsk
texts of both the immediate prewar and Occupation periods rel
lessly attack hierarchical pretensions and dramatize the vulnerabilit
of people of all socio-economic and national origins in the fac
historical catastrophes. Rather than trying to explain the catastrop
as a result of certain political or moral transgressions, Némirov
fiercely satirizes all those who would set themselves apart and c
to deserve a special status in the wake of historical calamity.
Such is precisely the case with "M. Rose," a story written shortl
after the May-June 1940 debacle and that Philipponnat and Li
hardt over-hastily dismiss as a more or less Pétainist exercise in sel
flagellation (Philipponnat and Lienhardt, 342). Once again, howev
a close analysis of the text reveals that such suspicions are groun
not in fact but in presumption, for when we compare this early
cupation period narrative published in August 1940 with Suite f
çaise, we find no major discontinuity that would justify allegat
of ideological opportunism or complicity with Vichy. As in "Le
tateur," the text is centered on one main character, the eponym
Monsieur Rose, who is both strongly reminiscent of Hugo Gra
and a préfiguration of Suite françaises Gabriel Corte and Char
Langelet in that Némirovsky immediately depicts him as enscon
in privilege, wealth, and self-indulgent pleasure. Since "the worl
populated with imbeciles,"16 he is confident of his self-assured
riority. The same hubris moreover convinces him that, with judicio
doses of prudence and calculation, he, his fortune, and his collec
of fine china can escape the calamity of war.
Here as in the other wartime short stories, Némirovsky's dida
cism is indeed palpable, but, again, the precise meaning of her "
sage" is in fact totally different from the ambient discourses of
tain's scoldings and Vichy's scapegoating. For while the latter m
a point of setting certain social groups (Jews, communists, inte

16. Némirovsky, "M. Rose," Dimanche et autres nouvelles, 351.

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 NATHAN BRACHER 51

tuais, freemasons) and individuals (notably Léon Blum) apart fr

the rest of the nation, stigmatizing them as the cause of France's
feat, and thus separating them from the "good French people," if
actively excluding them altogether from the national commun
Némirovsky's text here as in both "Le spectateur" and in Suite
çaise denounces Rose's acute egocentrism as both illusory and un
The text accordingly stresses that, when war breaks out, Rose,
Hugo Grayer, sees no reason to participate in either the efforts or r
required to support the national effort, even though, unlike Graye
he himself is a French citizen. Némirovsky moreover underscores
discrepancy between his pious public displays of patriotism and
inner cynicism: "Like everyone else, he spoke of necessity an
alted noble sacrifice,- he gladly and forcefully spoke of the rights
duties of citizens, but in his mind established an essential differen
between himself and others: he left the duties for them and only
the rights" ("M. Rose," 356).
As in "Le spectateur," Némirovsky uses an ironic twist of t
plot, this time consistent with historical events, i.e., the May-J
1940 debacle, rather than totally fictional, as in the case of the tor
doed ship in "Le spectateur." Finding himself out on the open r
lacking food and water and subject to bombing, Rose realizes
humanity is to be found not in setting oneself above and apart
rather in sharing in the vulnerability of others facing the trauma
war. So it is that Rose's attempt to place his person and his pos
sions in safety by fleeing the German onslaught instead result
his joining in the panic and chaos of the flood of terrorized civilia
also fleeing the conflict. The ordeal ultimately strips him of ev
thing: his car,.his chauffeur, his possessions, his food, his shelter,
his illusions, leaving him "resembling a tramp" (366). He manag
survive thanks only to the kindness of a certain Marc Beaumon
young man who just might be the illegitimate son he had aband
about 20 years previously. The thematics of intersubjectivity c
to a head when M. Rose must himself care for Marc, who has b
wounded in a bombing. When offered a ride in a passing car, Rose
fuses in order to stay by Marc's side. An instant later, he sees the
and its occupants destroyed along with the bridge that it was cross
in hopes of reaching safety.
It is true that Némirovsky makes her didacticism explicit in
very last sentence: "Livid and trembling, he [Rose] fell back do
next to Marc, just barely understanding that life had just been giv

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52 Yale French Studies

to him" (370). It could be argued that this is a bit of a "happy endin

in any case brighter than Hugo Grayer's dim prospects of soon bein
a corpse swollen with seawater, then eaten by sea creatures. If a
heavy-handed, Némirovsky's lesson remains clearly distinct from t
morals of Vichy, for such a lesson on shared humanity remains a le
son on equality, an equality that requires people to care for others
that is radically removed from a discourse that seeks to assign blam
designate individuals and groups as anti- or non-French, and jus
dictatorial power. In addition to stigmatizing and scapegoating, Vich
propaganda posited on the contrary a natural, organic superiority o
some groups and individuals over others.
It is not possible within the constraints of the present article to
plore the many other significant parallels linking Némirovsky's
occupation short stories to those published during the Vichy er
well as to Suite française, but the fundamental pattern is clear. Sin
we find essentially identical thematics and character constructions
"La nuit en wagon," "Le spectateur," "M. Rose," and Suite frança
the notion that Némirovsky's textual thematics fluctuated firs
cording to her changing ideological allegiances occasioned by th
rival of the Vichy regime and then in response to her disillusionme
with France simply cannot be substantiated, for both before and af
the war and in both her short stories as well as in Suite frança
we find on the contrary a continuous focus on egocentrism, so
economic hubris, and shared humanity.
Finally, it is important to observe that Némirovsky is hardly alo
in using of irony and reversal of perspectives in connection with t
outset of World War II and in emphasizing the impossibility of esc
ing involvement in the war. In a number of his editorials of the la
1930s, François Mauriac, whose work Némirovsky admired (Ph
ponnat and Lienhardt, 218) and whose newspaper articles she m
well have read, repeatedly evoked the ostensibly indifferent or blas
cinemagoers gawking at newsreel images of the horrific violenc
flicted on civilians during the Japanese incursion into Nanking
throughout the Spanish civil war. Mauriac also dramatically reve
perspectives within his articles and insisted that the victims p
tured in the newsreels were staring out at their European spectator
who might soon find themselves the object of newsreels showing t
bombing of cities in France.17 In The Plague's symbolic representat
of the war and the Occupation, Camus underscores the city of Oran
easygoing determination to ignore the oncoming catastrophe fr

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 NATHAN BRACHER 53

which they assumed they could escape because of the "ordinary

ture of their city and lifestyle. Camus furthermore foregrounds t
journalist Rambert's gradual realization that he could not exem
himself from the ordeal. Joseph Losey's haunting film Monsieur K
depicts the tragically ironic fate of the eponymous art collector, w
much like the aesthetes satirized by Némirovsky, presumed he coul
continue his highly privileged existence while remaining oblivi
to the suffering of Jews whose treasures he was buying for a pittan
after following Klein's various efforts to prove that he is not the J
ish member of the Resistance bearing the same name, we see him
the final scene locked in the boxcar that is carrying him and on
his financial victims to the same horrendous destination.
Proceeding on the basis of largely circumstantial evidence (ques
tions of publication venues) and seemingly presuming guilt by asso
ciation, the tribunal of critics has leveled charges of ideological com
plicity against Irène Némirovsky's wartime literary production. Since
our careful textual forensics have demonstrated that the thematics of
"La nuit en wagon," "Le spectateur," or "M. Rose," are incompatible
with the conjectural paradigms advanced by either Weiss, Philippon
nat and Lienhardt, or even Kershaw, we would do well to dissipate
the cloud of suspicion that has stood in the way of a close consider
ation of both the actual literary qualities of these texts and the tenor
of their representations. If Némirovsky did accept regrettable venues
for some of her wartime short stories ("La nuit en wagon" and "Le
spectateur" appeared in Gringoire, while "M. Rose" was published
in Candide), the texts themselves are, contrary to what has been al
leged, clearly incompatible with Vichy ideology: they rather deserve
to be read and interpreted in the same vein as works by Mauriac,
Camus, and Losey.

17. See Bracher, "Mauriac and the Spanish Civil War: Ethics and Aesthetics of
Commitment," Romance Notes 33/ 3 (Spring, 1993): 297-304.

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