Desprairies The Propagandist

An Extraordinary WWII Autobiographical Novel. New Yorker Best Books of The Year.
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80075-524-6
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

'Astounding ... A haunting tale of guilt' The Telegraph, Five Star Review 'An unforgettable portrait of a singular woman and her frenzied efforts to launder her unsavoury past' Literary Review 'Aharrowing but elegantly constructed rot-riddled family romance' Financial Times 'Devastatingly effective' The Times 'In her debut novel, a historian of Vichy France tackles her family's real-life collaboration during the Second World War' New Yorker Best Books of the Year 'Full of so many secrets that it's a wonder she managed to write it all' New York Times 'Shows why historical fiction matters, how stories breathe life into forgotten moments ... Haunting' Cara Black, author of Three Hours in Paris In a grand Paris apartment, a young girl attends gatherings regularly organised by her mother. They talk about clothes and exchange the day's gossip, but the mood grows dark when they start to talk about her past, and the great love she is said to have known during the Second World War. When the girl grows up, she looks into the enigmatic figures in and around her family. Who was the man her mother fell in love with before the war? Why did they zealously collaborate with the Nazi occupiers of France? And why did they remain for decades afterwards obsessive devotees of that lost cause? In The Propagandist, a historian of Vichy France investigates the secrets, lies and omissions in her own family in the way she has investigated those of France itself. It is a masterpiece of psychological insight, revealing how people can spend a lifetime deceiving themselves, rather than confront their own past. READER REVIEWS 'A brilliant piece of fiction that unequivocally deserves five stars' 'Beautifully written' 'Nearly impossible to set down' 'Fascinating and complex'

Cécile Desprairies is a specialist in Germanic civilization and a historian of the Nazi occupation of France. The author of several historical works about the occupation and the Vichy regime, she was born in Paris in 1957. The Propagandist is her first novel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Desprairies, Cécile

Weitere Mitwirkende

Lehrer, Natasha

Leseproben

2

IN THE WINTER OF 1940, at a party in Paris for medical students, Lucie met a man called Friedrich. She had just turned twenty-one; he was twenty-four. Friedrich was from Alsace and had been ostracized by his prominent Catholic family. He looked like a modern-day Siegfried: tall, lanky, blond hair slicked back, high cheekbones; he had clearly not been born into the . With his jacket draped over his shoulders, he was a very attractive young man.

Lucie was also tall and slim. She had recently begun to go blond, and her hair was growing gradually lighter with the advance of the German Army. She was vivacious, with an impish expression and a strong nose.

Friedrich was hoping to become a researcher in genetic biology, a promising specialty for someone interested in exploring racial science. He was completing his medical studies in Paris, where he worked as a laboratory assistant at the Collège de France, a prestigious research establishment. His doctoral thesis focused on the “yellow body” or the that can form in the ovaries, and he was particularly interested in hormonal function, specifically the endocrine glands. Lucie was studying law, about which she was indifferent, but she was ambitious to succeed.

Not long after they entered each other’s lives, Lucie moved in with Friedrich, near the Jardin des Plantes, on Rue Cuvier, named for the renowned anatomist. They were young, and they made a fashionable couple; they could have been models for the photographer of the day, Hoyningen-Huene. Elegant, dynamic, and inseparable, they shared the same ideas, the same ambitions, and the same values. All it took was one of them to think something for the other to say it.

Lucie was an enthusiast. She always had been. Energetic too. Since her teens, in the Burgundy village of Les Chomettes, she had enjoyed an active love life in tandem with her studies. By the time she turned fifteen, she had already been taking lessons, as it were, with a local teacher, and she continued her erotic apprenticeship through a variety of encounters, always careful to ensure, since she was still a minor, that her father remained unaware.

When she met Friedrich, Lucie was enjoying a love affair, as blithe as it was ideological, with a lieutenant in the . Her came from East Prussia in Greater Germany and was in charge of housing. In other words, he had long-term plans. Their first formal encounter was in Les Chomettes; as the mayor’s granddaughter, Lucie had been instructed to welcome the officer during an inspection of his men, who were being lodged with various local families. Lucie and her German cavalier grew close, and they took to riding beautiful Trakehner horses through the Burgundy countryside, in full view of the locals. It was through him and his pillow talk that “Luzie,” his “darling L,” had her first encounter with German fascism.

(I never heard Lucie talk about or display her equestrian prowess, though she had a pair of tall polished boots in fawn leather that she liked to wear, a little incongruously, about town.)

The did what he could to sweeten Lucie’s life, allowing her to pocket the rental income from a small apartment in the next town that had been requisitioned and conveniently reassigned to Mademoiselle Lucie. She was supposed to collect the rent every month and sign the receipt in the requisition ledger, but she was capricious, and though at first she collected the rent regularly, she grew increasingly erratic about keeping the appointment. She had so much else to do!

The love affair left her with a quirky taste for onomastics and etymology. More significantly, she developed a fascination for the Project, whereby her native region of Burgundy was to become an autonomous state under control of the SS security service, within the Reich, as part of the New Order of Europe.

The Burgundians have been Celts since the fourth century AD. They have been French since Lothair II, the great-grandson of Charlemagne, founded the kingdom of Lotharingia. Though the new capital was to be Saint-Florentin, not Lucie’s birthplace, Les Chomettes, which was too obscure, Lucie was already picturing herself as First Lady of the First Village. magazine published stories with photographic portraits of the village’s hoary old winegrowers, whose light eyes and luxuriant moustaches seemed to support this new division of territory. Lucie’s own family were known for their pale blue eyes, which indicated they possessed Germanic blood, and were therefore most suitable for rebuilding . The whole thing was to be accompanied by a population transfer. Displacement was the order of the day. In the name of the Greater Germanic Reich, Tyroleans would come and settle in the region and place-names would be changed.

Lucie herself had dark eyes, not the perfect Aryan type. When asked, she would explain that eye color is a question of dominant and recessive genes, meaning that even if it didn’t look like it, she did have the blue gene. Her eyes were blue on the inside, that was all. It was not just a question of color; it was about the whole person. What mattered was having the gene, even if it was hidden.

The discovery of Nazi ideology had been a profound shock, the total, all-encompassing, systemic thought being developed on the other side of the Rhine, irrigating life, death, science, culture, politics, and behavior. And because the Reich was going to win the war, its promise was about to become a reality.

Lucie’s handsome German officer was transferred to a barracks outside Paris. From time to time he was able to take leave and Lucie would go up to the capital to show him around the City of Light. Her German lover was serious— there were vows, declarations, pledges. But soon he was sent to the Eastern Front, never to return.

Until meeting him, Lucie had come across only French fascism, a disorganized and motley mix of antirepublican nationalism, resentment, anarchism, and xenophobia. The anti-parliamentary demonstration on Place de la Concorde on February 6th, 1934, had been a missed opportunity: they should have crossed the bridge and taken the National Assembly, a hundred yards away. They failed to seize power— but this was not to be the fascists’ final word.

Lucie may have been antirepublican, but she was an emblematic product of republican meritocracy. Born into relative poverty—a fact from which she drew a kind of pride—her scholastic career was impeccable: she finished top of the class at the village school, gained the highest grade in the whole region on her school certificate, and was awarded a scholarship to attend high school in Paris. An achievement paradigmatic of France’s Third Republic, which did not, however, assuage her desire to even the score; quite the opposite in fact, for she discovered in Paris that it wasn’t enough to be intelligent, brilliant even, to succeed. At one of the most elite high schools in the capital, the little country girl from Burgundy was mocked by her Parisian classmates. She quickly shed her accent. But she would have her revenge. Her schoolmates, from well-to-do families, were almost all Jewish. She had found her target. Lucie would have the last laugh.

Her new lover, Friedrich, was there to help her rise socially; together, with their intelligence, they would become masters of the new world.

Thanks to shifting borders, Friedrich had changed nationality several times since he was born. Born German during World War I, he became French two years later, after the armistice; aged twenty-three, he became German again, after the annexation of Alsace in July 1940. He spoke both languages, was at ease in both cultures, and it was with full knowledge of the facts that he chose to follow the path to the New Order.

His parents chose France. For him, to align oneself with France was to align oneself with the losing side, crushed by the Wehrmacht and forced to sign the Armistice agreement. France had chosen the Europe of yesterday rather than the Europe of tomorrow. He had, quite naturally, chosen Hitler’s Germany, which was taking its revenge and had the dynamism to confront any challenge. The Reich proposed a coherent vision of society: everything was to be restructured and built anew. In reaction to his parents, and embracing the spirit of the times, Friedrich became an eager convert to the Nazi cause. Germany was a wonderland of modern medicine and science. Zoology, laboratories, and the microscope were all German innovations. Chemistry too—all those Nobel Prizes! So many exciting prospects.

Biology was the path to the most prestigious careers. German society was no longer conceptualizing in terms of simple biology but in terms of race, blood, and genetics, using the fundamental laws of nature to organize law, war, sex, international relations, and the supreme science of medicine. New avenues of biological research were consolidating the supremacy of medicine over all other sciences. Biology was the science of race, not simply of living organisms: living organisms structured according to racial laws. The racial laws had a reassuring aspect; you just had to be on the right side, and he was. Jews were to be treated like tubercular bacilli. Is there anything in nature as aggressive, blind, and hostile as a virus, a bacillus, a bacterium?

Friedrich’s official first name was Josef. Like Goebbels. All the men in his family were given Josef as a first name— to distinguish between them they were called by a diminutive: Sepp, Seppi, Seppala. The problem was that Josef was a...