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

Kaplan, Alice. The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. 308.

Among French literary fascists who collaborated with the Germans and supported the Nazi cause during World War II, perhaps no figure is more emblematic than Robert Brasillach. Hated and despised after the Liberation for his role as editor of the vehemently pro-German Parisian weekly Je suis partout and for his denunciations in the newspaper of Jews attempting to flee Nazi and Vichy persecution, Brasillach nevertheless became a martyr for the postwar extreme right following his trial and execution for treason during the first few months of 1945. In this sense Brasillach remains a “site of contested memory,” and serious efforts to gauge his literary worth have more often than not been overshadowed by the attempts of his apologists to inflate his talent as novelist and critic and by his detractors to dismiss him as a third-rate hack who is only remembered because of his unsavory politics and the dramatic nature of his death.