Remembering Robert Brasillach
March 31, 1909–February 6, 1945

2,644 words

Editor’s Note: March 31st marks the 116th birthday of Robert Brasillach, the French journalist, novelist, film historian, and man of the right who was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad for “intellectual crimes” he was alleged to have committed as a German collaborator during the Second World War. The translation below is offered as a commemoration, and links to other resources regarding Brasillach’s life and work are at the end.

***

Robert Brasillach & Notre avant-guerre: The Pre-Phony War

In our last episode of his memoir Notre avant-guerre, Robert Brasillach was describing the sudden “storms of September 1938,” with the crisis over Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland. In France the general attitude, according to Brasillach, was: “if three million Germans want to be German, that’s their affair. Not ours.”

Here he proceeds to tell us what it was like that September, suddenly to be called up for mobilization, and finding yourself lost in the mis-administered confusion. Checking the call-up posters and your reservist booklet to see if you’re supposed to report somewhere. Not having a uniform or suitable uniform. Riding a train from Paris to a small village in Lorraine, when you were really intended to take a completely different train from a different station and report to a village with the same name up by the Belgian border…so now you have to ride some sluggish milk-trains for another day or two to get where you’re supposed to be.

And above all, not really believing any war is about to take place, yet nevertheless being primed for it by your own emotions and those you see around you.

We’re all familiar with the «drôle de guerre», or “Phony War” as American Senator William Borah called it: that lull from late 1939 till Spring of 1940, when the European war did not seem to be happening at all. But here is something that has left little residue in our collective memory but had an awful lot to do with the morale of the French poilu in 1939-1940. They’d already had a phony war, and had gone through the rigamarole of mobilization: going east, going north, getting lost; then being told, Oh never mind! Turns out there’s not going to be any war, at least not anytime soon!

Anyway, this is Robert Brasillach’s Pre-Phony War. From Avant notre-guerre:

***

[During the Czechoslovak crisis] we saw the most astonishing alliances being formed. We read lengthy speculations about the true intentions of the governments involved. Foreign countries were all lining up this way and that, taking sides. The newspapers reached their absolute apogee of journalistic insanity and shame. The afternoon press tossed out new theories and rumors indiscriminately, fresh meat to the wolves. The plutocrats of Paris-Soir and the communists of Ce Soir worked hand-in-hand to inform the world that war was on the horizon.

Suddenly hope returned. An old Englishman took a plane and rushed to Berchtesgaden to see the master of Europe. He brought back peace, that was the main thing; the rest was all details and procedure. The war party was suffering. But then a second meeting at Godesberg was interrupted, went awry[1]. That restored the war party’s vitality. The Czechoslovak government issued a mobilization order in eight languages[2] ​​to its people. In France, people just hung on, refusing to believe in this absurd conspiracy of fate. Ever since the Popular Front[3] government, France had no air force to speak of. No ammunition. If England joined in, it would have hesitated for a long time[4]. “This war would have been a crime,” the head of government, Monsieur Daladier, would later say. Yet there were those who breathed blood, greedily and lustily. By Friday evening[5], except in the newspapers, there had even been a vague resurgence of hope.

The next morning, the papers didn’t mention mobilization, but during the night, white posters, rather shabby-looking, with their intertwined gray flags, had been stuck up, and the first men ordered to report looked up their friends to find out if their call-up booklets said number 2 or number 3, which meant they too were on the first list to leave. Henri Poulain[6] came to tell me.

We will all remember that day when, from morning onward, we began to encounter men in the streets holding their little cardboard suitcases. «Immediatement et sans delai» [“Immediately and without delay”] is not an empty phrase for most French people, even if nowadays they proclaim themselves not to be in such a hurry. And I will admit that, in those first days, I had a great deal of sympathy for the brave fellows who were leaving, drunk on false ideas and red wine, towards the dangers prepared by those who have been deceiving them for twenty years.

Everyone noted this supreme brutality of fate, which suddenly confronted fifty-year-old men with the memories of their terrible youth. Since the mobilization system was not the same as in 1914, the men took to the streets with their booklets and looked to see if number 2 or 3 on their booklet[7] was really made in exactly the same way as number 2 or 3 on the poster. I saw some who came back several times, booklet in hand. That’s right, they weren’t mistaken. They took one last look, they shrugged a shoulder. What a story!

The reserve officers rushed to their tailors, to the shops, to have their clothes freshened up or to add a braid. Finding a new outfit was out of the question. Despite the Popular Front, we in France had not yet lost all of our rights. So when I went to a tailor and asked to have a small job done «Immediatement et sans delai», he drew himself up haughtily and balked at the order. But then he lightened up: “Sir, it’s Saturday.”

The old newsreels would show us a hot day in August 1914, the crowd in old-fashioned caps besieging the gates of the Gare de l’Est[8]. The 1938 recruits wear caps; they have donned their shabbiest clothes; they have been told this will get them hated at the mobilization center, and God knows when they will find them and in what state! Even the bourgeois seem to me to be dressed in old costumes. So this crowd looks like a vast proletarian mob. Even before they’re in uniform, they’re already just a big indistinguishable flock.

A little later in Soissons, at a train station with no lights, I watched us all get invaded by another herd. This was half a thousand country boys, gathered here on foot from the surrounding villages, all sweaty and dirty, shouting revolutionary songs, drunk from rolling under trains. It’s a sight I won’t forget. Seeing them clinging to the doors, laughing and crying at the same time, joking without pleasure, running obediently to their incomprehensible destiny, one suddenly grasped the meaning of the words: cannon fodder. It was cannon fodder in front of me, in a great anonymous pile. A great pile of warlike beasts, without understanding, but not without courage, and whose sight could fill one with a sort of horror and pity. We have seen it again since.

Meanwhile, they are there, everywhere. In the halls and courtyards of Paris, sometimes waiting there since morning. Few women among them. I saw a few just now, clustered in taxis, accompanying slightly tense young boys. At the gates of the Gare de l’Est, at the doors of the Gare du Nord, they disappear. Their men quickly gather, ask for their train from the mobilization officials, from the overwhelmed sergeants. The booklets don’t even always indicate the departement they have to reach. Often enough they’re supposed to report to tiny villages. The entire human cargo is piled up without order, with a few women who are heading to the cities of the North and East, and who make every effort, the poor things, not to appear out of place.

One thing we don’t see here, as they saw in 1914, are those famous “Men 40 — Horses (long) 8” wagons. We saw some this morning, but for that was for the “dressed” troops. This is not yet the real war. Right now the only mementos we get of the other war are the brown musette, the felted iron canteen, the «quart»[9], those mugs which many have rediscovered, and which now proudly fill the windows of hardware stores.

It’s six o’clock. Soon, night will fall, still warm at the end of September. We won’t see any of the cities, drowned in darkness, lit by bluish lamps. These sinister lights of cities on alert, we will find out in a few days that they were only turned on as a defense exercise. In another few days this will start to end; city lights will still be dimmed a little, but they will be a lot brighter. But here we are now on Saturday evening, and no one is thinking the blue lights are there just for practice, for a defense exercise.

The large, overloaded trains…from which burst forth shouts and songs, the large trains that picked up new stranded people in the stations at each stop…they’re crossing dead lands, blue and black lands, already the lands of war. On the platforms we can’t see, we hear rare crewmen, or employees without orders, shouting out contradictory and useless advice, then they disappear like ghosts, out of the blue cones of the street lamps. Now the men get in anywhere, they collapse in a corner, they wave at the door, maybe try to resume in a hesitant voice some verse of the Internationale, but it falls into a cold silence.

Ah, the glories of war mobilization and administration! They couldn’t fail to produce a few errors. So many villages in France bear the same name. As a result of a comical and somewhat ridiculous adventure, I left on Saturday afternoon and didn’t reach them until Monday, because two villages in the army zone have the same name and I was initially directed to the wrong one. One is not far from Belgium, the other in Lorraine. And to return from one to the other, once the error is recognized, we have to ride in those wonderful French cross-country lines that travel hardly any faster than the stagecoaches they replaced. Moreover, the flow of reservists was almost uninterrupted during the first two days. They filled the trains. So I had the chance to speak to dozens of them, all communists, all patriots, all exasperating for one’s intelligence, but moving for the heart. I drew from this forced journey a few additional reasons to hate those who made a people like ours what it was becoming.

If some old fighters from 1914 were able to refresh their impressions of what they knew and remembered, then we simple comrades of the Kriegsgefahrzustand (wartime footing) of 1938 mainly discovered what we did not know. We were offered to drink the red wine of mobilizations, we were shown the photographs of women and children. We spoke of the imminent peace, promised a speedy return. We encountered that trust of man in man that has always seemed the most magnificent gift of war.

And it wasn’t really going to war, we wouldn’t be so ridiculous as to believe it. But I swear that all those men who were leaving and whom I met, with their farewells in the stations, their confidences, their sadness—they indeed showed the genuine emotions attending one’s departure for war.

They rushed to ask for information, to complain, to inquire. They did so with the natural freedom of the French people wanting discuss some matter, and do not consider it beneath their dignity to speak. They did not hide from me, sitting there in an officer’s uniform, the fact that they were communists. They did so in remarkable ways, sometimes.

“The war is wanted by the fascists and the two hundred families,” they told me.[10]

I didn’t think it was worth arguing. But they themselves added, which surprised me: “And also by the Jews, and by the Americans, who want to sell us supplies. Americans are all basically Jews anyhow.”

I am not repeating these remarks because I believe them to be a brilliant analysis of the crisis. I just found it surprising that these things were being said, and said repeatedly, by these men.

They had no enthusiasm for this venture, as I said. Just sadness, along with a grave attitude, a dead seriousness. An emotion very dangerous to stir up, I thought. Dangerous to arouse, and dangerously ignoble to deceive.

“If we have to go, we will,” they’d say. “We must defend ourselves.”

Notes

[1] On 22 September 1938, a week after their meeting at Berchtesgaden, Prime Minister Chamberlain met Chancellor Hitler at Bad Godesberg. Hitler rejected the proposed agreement of a week earlier, and issued an ultimatum to the Prague government. The Communist faction in the Czechoslovak government argued for war rather than cede the Sudetenland.

[2] I have seen this factoid elsewhere but have found no authoritative listing of those “eight languages.” However, the major languages of the country in 1938 were German, Czech, Slovak and Ruthenian, with minority Hungarian and Polish speakers. Thus the other two languages were presumably French and English, for reasons of diplomacy and because the founding Masaryk family were English-speaking semi-Americans.

[3] The Popular Front government under Leon Blum (1936-1937, 1938) halted military expenditures, although in 1936 it attempted to supply rifles to the Republican (Popular Front/Communist) side in Spain.

[4] Great Britain had no assistance treaty with Czechoslovakia, therefore no obligation to take sides in this potential war. France did have such a treaty, as did the USSR.

[5] The final Munich Agreement was signed on 30 September 1938, but it is unclear whether Brasillach means that Friday, or the previous, after Bad Godesberg. Most likely he means 23 September, since his train-riding must take place in the interim.

[6] Per French Wikipedia: «Henri Poulain (31 August 1912, Mortain, Fr. – 20 April 1987 in Switzerland, was a French journalist and writer, politically engaged with the extreme right, an antisemite and collaborationist.»

[7] “Reservists,” able-bodied Frenchmen between 20 and 45 who were liable to be called up for military service, received these «fascicules» or little booklets, advising when and how to report if a call-up was announced. The 2 and 3 referred to were tranches of potential conscripts: if you were a 2 you looked to see if the posters were announcing that all 2’s must report to such-and-such a railway station on this date. Brasillach has some fun with the sad whimsy in all this: “Does the 2 on the poster look like the 2 in my fascicule?”

[8] The Gare de Nord and Gare de l’Est are two adjacent railway stations in the north of Paris. Presumably the men who were being mobilized for the north—by the border of neutral Belgium, or perhaps Sedan—would be assigned to trains from the Gare de Nord (where the Eurostar now has its Paris terminus), while those going out toward Strasbourg and the Maginot Line would be shunted through Gare de l’Est. Brasillach speaks of going to the Gare de l’Est and winding up in the wrong village in Lorraine, which suggests he was at the wrong station to begin with.

[9] 250ml mug in French military jargon: a quarter-liter.

[10] “Les 200 familles” was a familiar buzzphrase in 1930s French politics, popularized in a 1934 speech by Eduard Daladier, but having its origin much farther back. An 1800 law governing the Banque de France prescribed that the 200 largest shareholders would choose its 15-member board of directors, or “Council of Regency” of the bank. This rule was later amended, but the magic number 200 was remembered in political slogans. It was particularly favored in the 1930s by Communists and Popular Front socialists. They would claim, for example, that the 200 Families were allied with Franco’s nationalists in Spain, and Fascists and National Socialists in general. This was in keeping with the Marxist dogma that rightist and nationalist movements are a product of late-stage capitalism. Today “The 200 Families” is often labeled a “conspiracy theory of the left.”