If one were to ask, flat out, what Lucie did during the war, she would lie to you. She lied to everyone, even her children, about what she did during the Second World War. Decades later, with Lucie and most of her contemporaries dead and gone, it’s impossible for her daughter, Coline to figure out what really happened. Coline is a stand-in for the author of The Propagandist, by French historian Cécile Desprairies. (Natasha Lehrer does an incredible job with the tricky French grammar of this book.) The Propagandist is a work of history and of autofiction.
It’s clear from the first that Lucie, her sister, and her mother live in a France apart. They regularly meet in Lucie’s apartment, where they strip to their underclothes and crank up the heating to recreate the feeling of being in Algeria. (The family were pieds-noirs who “returned” to France before World War II.) The makeshift sauna is the most obvious—and least distressing—sign of the family’s difference. When the women meet, they gossip and plan and—when they’re sure no one else is listening—Lucie talks about her glory days during the German occupation and Vichy regime. In those days, Lucie worked as a propagandist, designing posters for ORAFF (Office de répartition de l’affichage), and was married to Friedrich, a German biologist and soldier.
When she was little, Coline learned never to question what her mother told her. Questions made her mother very upset. That said, Coline was still young when she started to become confused by the way Lucie would talk about the past. Stories Lucie told didn’t always line up with what other relatives said or what Coline was able to verify through other sources. There was also the way that Lucie would betray her loyalties. Even decades later, even after the purges of Vichy officials and collaborators, Lucie would still openly admire the Nazis and loathe Jews and other targets of the Nazis. Coline and her siblings were all taught not to talk about Lucie’s secrets outside of the family, but Coline clearly wondered about the truth.
What emerges from Desprairies’s book is a portrait not just of Lucie but of the lurking presence of collaborators in French society. They might hide, but they’re not gone. The Propagandist is a fascinating complement to books I’ve read about the long shadow of Nazism in Germany, such as Mary Fulbrook’s Reckonings. Lucie is French, and yet she throws in full-heartedly with her occupiers. Coline notes how Nazi racial theories gave Lucie a sense of superiority. Nazi and Vichy thefts of Jewish property gave Lucie a sense of entitlement. Lucie felt like one of Hitler’s chosen people and never seems to think about the deadly, monstrous cost of her own “good life” to people who were deemed unworthy (and worse) by the Nazis. Lucie hid but she never changed.
The Propagandist is a challenging book for many reasons, but I would recommend it to readers who are curious about people who are drawn in by authoritarian regimes, by racism, and by evil.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration.
I’m tempted (my library has it in French), but I don’t quite understand why you put the book “only” 3 stars. What was missing in your opinion?
For me, 3 stars is good – no major problems but it wasn’t a “couldn’t put it down” read. 🙂 There were parts of this book that dragged. I’d add that I wished there was more history about Vichy and French collaborators, but then I would be getting into criticizing the book for not being what I wanted, if that makes sense. The narrator is very clear that this is the story of a family, not a wider history.