The Propagandist – Cécile Desprairies

[New Vessel Press; 2024]

Tr. from the French by Natasha Lehrer

Cécile Desprairies’s new novel, The Propagandist, translated by Natasha Lehrer, follows a woman named Lucie, Nazi collaborator and unrepentant devotee of the Third Reich. The book opens with the adult narrator—Lucie’s daughter—recalling mornings of her childhood when all her female relatives would descend on the family’s apartment for daily exchanges of gossip and clothing. Detailed conversations unfold without context. The reader is dropped into these vivid, habitual mornings, in which the women snipe at one another, try on clothes, and mutter about the past. “It was like watching a play in a foreign language without subtitles,” the narrator recalls, “and I still didn’t know whether it would end well or badly.” The narrator’s lack of insight is reproduced in the reader. Why are all the women here? What are they going on about? And what invisible magnetism holds them together? The journey of the novel is to probe into the ambiguities and ellipses of those morning rituals, and finally, to understand them.  

These women’s daily conversations revolve not around contemporary politics, fashion, or even art, but matters of the past, however elusive or referential. The young narrator picks up on a mention of a prison camp, an Occupation. “What Occupation? Who were the prisoners?” She wonders but does not ask. “This was just one of the things left unsaid in my family; everyone was convinced that if things remained unspoken they did not exist.” Still, even in their elliptical style, the women reveal enough, as if leaving a trail of conversational breadcrumbs for la petite to grow up and follow. They mention the “Vél d’Hiv roundup”—short for Vélodrome d’Hiver, referring to the largest French deportation of Jews during the Holocaust. They mention an uncle, called Gaston, who took the only known photograph of the event. “This was said with pride,” the narrator recounts. “The story ended there.”

This great-uncle provides the transition from the narrator’s childhood, submerged in allusion, to her adult life as a historian of the French Occupation during World War II. The focus of the book shifts: away from those disorienting mornings, toward the time periods and events those mornings memorialized. The narrator sets out to illuminate for the reader all that was hidden in shadows for her. She starts with Gaston, the first of three detailed portraits she will paint throughout the book.

The novel takes an unusual form. The point of view feels at times untethered, as Desprairies sporadically chooses to inhabit her various key characters—Gaston, Lucie, and later another uncle—to explore their motivations. Though the story is ostensibly filtered through the consciousness of the young-girl-grown-up, her presence isn’t felt in the book until much later. So much of the story is relayed not as unfolding action but exposition, so that I found myself uncertain as to the arc of the story, or what kind of climax the tale was building toward.

Desprairies elaborates how Gaston ascends to editorial director of the major newspaper Paris-Soir, after Pierre Lazareff, his Jewish predecessor, had been forced out of his job and the country. “When his time eventually came,” Desprairies writes of Gaston, “the daily newspaper, under his direction, became an accommodating blend of news and propaganda.” Gaston’s position with the press is instrumental in launching the career of his promising young niece: Lucie, the narrator’s mother.

In Gaston, the reader receives their first clear image of a collaborationist—someone who aided the occupying German forces rather than defying them. France was occupied by the Nazis from 1940–1944, and the Vichy Regime—the seat of the French government, which moved from Paris to the central city of Vichy—took a collaborationist stance, facilitating Germany’s hold on the country. In 1942, when the German occupation expanded from the northern half to cover the entire country, the Vichy Regime continued to operate as a puppet government and was drained of any pretense of acting independently. In discussions about the French involvement in World War II, there’s an important but subtle distinction made between “collaborator” and “collaborationist.” Collaborators complied with the German occupation because they felt they had no other choice—economic scarcity and food shortages ravaged the population. Collaborationists, by contrast, actively supported the Nazi party and worked to further its spread. Those who openly opposed the Germans—members of the Résistance—were often swiftly executed.

Prior to reading The Propagandist, most of the narratives I’d encountered about the French occupation center those who organized in secret at great personal risk to undermine the Nazis. One encounters stories of the Résistance in Anthony Doerr’s acclaimed novel All the Light We Cannot See and François Truffaut’s 1980 film Le Dernier Métro (which I first watched in high school French class). But no matter how sensationally, romantically, or heroically their tales are told, members of the Résistance numbered among a tiny fraction of the French population. In an interview with the author hosted by the Mémorial de Caen (a Normandy-based museum of twentieth-century history), Desprairies said that in a country of forty million inhabitants, only 100,000 of those participated in the Résistance. “300,000 if you count the final three weeks,” Desprairies joked. Estimates do vary, but by the end of the war, several arms of the Résistance came together under Charles de Gaulle’s French Forces of the Interior (FFI), which numbered around 400,000. “But what about all the others?” Desprairies asked.

This pocket of history is scrupulously ignored by most people today. When I described the scope of the book to a French friend of mine while working on this review, she was appalled. “Why would any novelist choose that as their subject material?” she asked. For Desprairies, The Propagandist is not only an investigation into a fraught and forbidden slice of the past, it’s also personal. Lucie, the titular character, is based on Desprairies’s mother, and Desprairies lived the confusion of la petite. Given Desprairies’s personal investment in the material, I was eager for the narrator to relay her journey of uncovering these not-quite-buried family secrets. But Desprairies remains a historian, not a memoirist. Most of the book dwells on stories locked in the past, and the book maintains the staid tone of a lecturer delivering facts. Details and names, however, have been fictionalized. The book is presented as a novel and not a memoir. In her interview with the Mémorial de Caen, Desprairies voiced her frustration at the reader-sleuths whose reaction to the book has involved attempts to match the fictionalized characters with identifiable historical persons. “Fiction allows me to say things that strict recitation would not authorize,” Desprairies said. “I wish people would allow me my fiction.”

In The Propagandist, Desprairies challenges the reader to inhabit a morally fraught protagonist. Why would someone collaborate with Nazis? the novel asks. Who would do such a thing?

To answer this question, the exposition focuses on Lucie, starting with her adolescent love affair with a German lieutenant. His Nazi ideology complements Lucie’s long-simmering resentment of the posh Jewish girls who’d shown her up in school. Then Lucie meets Friedrich, the great love of her life, a handsome man from Alsace who shares both her biases and ideals. His birthplace is a key part of Friedrich’s biography, as Lucie’s rural Burgundy origins are to her. Desprairies decodes these nuances of personal allegiance that might be lost on readers without her deft explanatory hand. The book unfolds like a cipher; small details, seeded early, blossom later with damning implications. Alsace, Friedrich’s home, “had changed nationality several times since he was born.” As an American, I’m often tempted to read stories of World War II in a historical vacuum, forgetting the lingering geopolitics from World War I that continued to impact Western Europe. For example, one factor that contributed to Germany’s occupation of France was the fatigue of the French military, after they’d suffered enormous losses in the previous World War. “For [Friedrich],” Desprairies explains, “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.” Lucie had already developed a penchant for fascism, but when she meets Friedrich, she consigns herself entirely to his “vision of the world . . . total and all-encompassing; . . . It was to be her vocation for the rest of her life.” Both lovers are fervent supporters of the Third Reich. Friedrich is the intellectual master of the couple and Lucie his skillful implementer. Their passionate relationship—first love affair, then expedient marriage to placate Lucie’s family—is reinforced by their shared politics and unwavering vision for the future of France. “Lucie and Friedrich’s ambition was nothing less than to conquer the world.”

Shortly after their nuptials, Lucie rises to collaborationist prominence by designing propaganda posters for the ORAFF (the office that managed visual media). Desprairies describes “her style [as] a mixture of impudence and bad faith, a glib way with words, a way of twisting things to mean their opposite.” Lucie’s linguistic agility proves highly effective at translating Nazi values into the French cultural frame. Her skill and success grant her and her family access to Parisian high society. The narrator’s aunt and grandmother appear frequently in opulent spreads in Signal, the Nazi propaganda magazine. “To listen to them, the Occupation had been a fairytale period,” the narrator recalls.

But the Occupation doesn’t last forever, and collaborationists know that great suffering and public humiliation await them if they are exposed for having supported the losing side. Desprairies captures the looming despair and panic as WWII approached its end. “A few weeks after the Liberation, a gloomy Friedrich . . . announced he had decided to throw in his lot with the Americans”—not a true defection from his Nazi ideals but a flawed strategy for self-preservation. Friedrich gets himself killed. Lucie, a shrewd planner, begins coordinating the family’s efforts to go underground, lest they be subjected to the capricious vengeance of the épuration: the purge.

At this point (not yet halfway through the book), the story becomes about how collaborationists functioned—or failed to function—after the collapse of their cause. Desprairies seems less interested in how her characters promoted National Socialism during its heyday and more interested in their unflagging allegiance to it after it had gone out of style. Lucie bears a dual bereavement, the loss of the war and of Friedrich. “Alone with her ghosts,” Desprairies writes, “Lucie spent the rest of her life—sixty-two years—devoted to the memory of her great love, preciously guarding the image of the life and mission that might have been theirs had the French not been, as she saw it, such cowards.”

Desprairies takes a circuitous route through her sketch of the French Occupation. She concentrates on Lucie and her family but leapfrogs through time, moving by way of connection rather than chronology. The book is replete with references to French intellectuals, politicians, and power brokers. Long after the first chapter, I continued to identify with la petite from the opening scenes, struggling to match key words to their referents. Eventually, I realized that I didn’t need to comprehend each minor allusion, but the point was to soak in the story’s atmosphere. Sometimes the book veers into extensive backstory for minor characters—notably when Lucie is excoriating her family and friends for the ways they’ve exposed themselves—but Desprairies does this to illustrate the coherence of a world populated entirely by supporters of the Nazi cause.

Halfway through the book, Desprairies introduces her third key collaborator, Uncle Raphaël, treated in the text like he was by his family: as an enigmatic but beguiling outcast. Unlike Gaston, who collaborates for professional advancement, and Lucie, who adheres to Nazi ideology, Raphaël is an aesthete. He is devoted to art, music, culture, and society. These pursuits are all made available to him by his wealthy lover, the inheritor of a large rubber fortune, which the lover continues to grow by supplying rubber to the German war effort. For Raphaël, “the fascist years were his time of glory.” The Third Reich benefits him, even as it criminalizes and disdains his sexual orientation. “That was the main reason Lucie, with her fascist ideals and aversions, disliked him,” Desprairies notes. However, that’s not the only source of tension between them. Lucie also resents Raphaël for his enormous inheritance (independent of his lover’s). Greed, economic plunder, and requisition factor significantly into the novel. Countless buildings and apartments are mentioned that were provided to collaborationists after being vacated by previous Jewish tenants. Desprairies’s characters model how their entitlement is underwritten by bigotry. Raphaël is her primary example of one who profited, materially, from the Occupation. Even with his lover’s wealth, their opulent lifestyle is facilitated by the plunder of Jewish property. For Raphaël, the question of Nazism pales alongside the potential for self-enrichment. “He would have done the same,” Desprairies explains, “whoever was in power.”

The book’s atypical shape—a triptych of portraits, loosely ordered, framed by the incomplete tale of a daughter’s reckoning with intergenerational loss and fascist complicity—left me uncertain where exactly to place my investment in the tale. Since the book opens in the aftermath of the women’s erstwhile collaboration, there’s minimal suspense regarding what will happen. Lehrer’s translation reads as formal and reserved, shorn of the dark humor that would be more pronounced in the French. The text is sprinkled with proper nouns and particular descriptors—Desprairies refers to the group of women as “the gynaeceum,” an ancient Greek term for women’s quarters—which might be familiar in the original but create further distance for an American reader. For me, the novel struggles to pick up enough narrative inertia to pull me along.

When one has advocated for the overthrow of a republic, and that overthrow is crushed, how can one be restored to civil life? In The Propagandist, characters immediately go undercover in order to protect themselves from the pending reckoning. Lucie, that chameleon, manages to get herself a job with the US Army. “It was a dream come true for her: to move seamlessly from the camp of the occupier to that of the liberator.” While Lucie will never abandon her Nazi convictions, she is willing to pretend otherwise in order to save her skin, and she encourages her family members—who are all implicated by their glamorous moment in the spotlight—to do the same. Uncle Raphaël, despite his personal history of collaboration, gets himself appointed as vice president of the Comité d’épuration des gens du spectacle, the purge commission for the entertainment industry. By following discrete characters through these years of tumult, Desprairies shows the widespread lack of integrity in the post-war process and how shrewd individuals capitalized on the shifting balance of power for their own protection and self-advancement.

Desprairies paints Lucie as a woman of inexhaustible self-interest. “Incapable of feeling guilt,” Desprairies writes, “Lucie wove endless fictions and used other people to her own ends.” In these moments, the book also shows itself to be about the trauma of growing up with an unstable mother. Lucie, bereft of lover and cause, remains in a state of dissociated devastation for the rest of her life. What hope is there for someone who refuses to reevaluate their ideals?

The narrator’s recollections are poetic and immersive, evoking a lost era while refusing to romanticize it. Regarding the flamboyant Uncle Raphaël, Desprairies writes, “I remember nuggets of solid gold, huge amethyst crosses, cameos on long chains, signet rings, and several stylish pairs of cuff links . . . without vulgarity, but with pure satisfaction, [he held] out to visitors a beautiful, manicured hand that seemed to hint at all the caressing it had done.” Because the novel is composed of a narrator’s attempts to make coherent her family’s veiled past, it eschews a traditional plot structure. Readers who look to novels for suspense and a clear chain of cause-and-effect may find it difficult to stay engaged with (or even to follow) Desprairies’s meandering, interpretive composition. At times, it’s unclear whose story Desprairies is seeking to tell. Lucie’s? Friedrich’s? La petite, who grows up to disentangle her mother’s convoluted references? Regardless of exactly whose story it is, The Propagandist is a dense and complex novel that paints a compelling multigenerational portrait. Desprairies hits the mark of addressing a facet of the French Occupation I hadn’t considered before, and she does so in a way that leaves me with more curiosity than when I started. This novel is filled to the brim with questions about the nature of history, loss, and restitution, and after reading it, so am I.

McKenzie Watson-Fore is a writer, artist, and critic currently based in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University and serves as the executive editor for sneaker wave magazine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Offing, Belmont Story Review, Psaltery & Lyre, and elsewhere. McKenzie can be found at MWatsonFore.com or drinking tea on her back porch.