Cécile Desprairies is a leading historian of the German occupation of France. She has published six books on the subject since 2008 and has now published her first novel, The Propagandist, on the dark secrets of a French family who collaborated with the Nazis. The story is told by a young girl who has grown up surrounded by the lies told by her family and becomes a historian of the occupation.
“When I was a child,” the novel begins, “I would listen to my mother talking to herself about the 1940s.” It is the 1960s. The novel moves back and forward in time between the narrator’s childhood and the story of her mother, Lucie, the propagandist of the title, who is obsessed with the war years, a time of great glamour for her, who now spends her life brooding about the past with her female relatives. Her daughter listens, fascinated, to her mother’s stories. “I always had the feeling they were hiding something from me. There were explanations of things I couldn’t grasp or understand.” She grows up in a world of silence and evasions, “Obviously no one ever mentioned genocide or the Holocaust.” There are strange references to people, Jews who lost their homes to collaborators, and mysterious places like the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the roundup in Paris in July 1942 that led to the largest French deportation of Jews during the Holocaust.
Most strange of all, is that her mother and these other women “avoided uttering the word Jew. On the rare occasions they did, it was with a mixture of disgust and intense fascination”. And then there is the strange way these women talked about the fall, how their world suddenly collapsed in 1944, and “the bastards entered Paris like a swarm of locusts” and the good times of Vichy France suddenly came to an end.
Then there is the love of Lucie’s life, Friedrich, from Alsace, obsessed with racial science and the new biology, “race, blood, and genetics”. Lucie and Friedrich become part of the new class in Vichy France, mixing with leading figures such as the German ambassador in Paris, fanatics in love with the new Nazi order. And then their world comes crashing down. The German occupation ends. Those who collaborated with the Nazis have to go into hiding or risk disgrace.
The Propagandist is a fascinating novel about secrets and lies, how people reinvent themselves and cannot acknowledge the terrible things they have done during the war. Above all, it is a devastating account of Vichy France, how many French people embraced Nazism without any scruples and then lived desperately sad lives, obsessed with the past.
Most intriguing of all, is how little is said about the Holocaust, the deportations and the camps.
There are perhaps half a dozen references to the fate of France’s Jews. Lucie’s family were too busy whitewashing their past to care about what happened to their countrymen and their belongings. This is a dark and powerful account of how people could eagerly embrace evil and could never forgive those who liberated France.
The Propagandist
by Cécile Desprairies
Swift Press
