My Mother, the Fascist

Marine Le Pen talks about love a lot. In a 2022 Radio France interview, she rhapsodized, “Politics is an act of love, an act of care for others; politics is beautiful.” She repeated the notion in a May 2023 speech at the Fête de la Nation in Le Havre, where she stood before a sympathetic crowd waving French flags and declared that “politics is an act of love.” Earlier on, at the start of her meteoric political rise, she told the journalist André Bercoff that she got into politics out of love for her father — and has stayed in it out of love for the nation of France. Her father, ex-Rassemblement National (R.N.) leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, was deemed a liability by the party for his persistent Holocaust denial, defense of the Vichy regime, and alleged war crimes during the Algerian War. Hawkish and belligerent, Marine Le Pen generally does not come across as a romantic. She has none of the sincerity or passion for collective action that Vivian Gornick describes so eloquently in The Romance of American Communism, for instance. Her party mostly plays upon fear and hatred, xenophobia, economic disempowerment, and law and order. But Le Pen, perhaps in a bid for mainstream appeal, conjures up a darker and more isolating kind of love affair: a romance with fascism. 

If the R.N. owes its recent successes to Le Pen’s more mainstream rhetoric, it may also be stumped by her. She has been forced to abandon the more extreme aspects of her platform, including blood-based citizenship, explicit antisemitism, and a hardline stance against the European Union. The party has likely lost ground both to the conservatives and to the radical Reconquête, which sits to the hard right of the R.N. — at least in its messaging. 

The R.N. will not get to power, at least for the moment. Despite dire polling predictions following France’s July 2024 snap elections, the R.N. did not win anything close to a majority. But it did do exceptionally well by its own standards and perhaps was only held off by a remarkable yet seemingly unstable left coalition. The R.N. arose, after all, out of the chaos of the post-war years in a France that was not quite cleansed of fascism and, above all, out of the failures of France’s endless mid-century colonial wars. It is, in essence, a nostalgia-driven platform, evoking an imaginary time when France’s imperial interests dominated the world, life was better for the trodden-down workers, and there was still a romance to fascism, unsullied by the sour taste of defeat. 

This kind of nostalgia is the pervasive theme of Cécile Desprairies’s autofictional novel, The Propagandist (La Propagandiste), which New Vessel Press is publishing in a translation by Natasha Lehrer. The original French version, which was released in 2023 by Éditions du Seuil, was widely reviewed and longlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Desprairies is a World War II historian, but the book is less a history than a reconstructed memoir about her mother, Lucie, who was dubbed the “Leni Riefenstahl of propaganda” for her Vichy wartime activities. Desprairies is not alone in digging up buried collaborationist stories; Sorj Chalandon’s 2021 novel,
Enfant de salaud (Grasset), grappled with similar themes, but Chalandon’s collaborator father boasted to his son about fabricated Resistance exploits to cover his tracks. By contrast, Desprairies’ mother is not only unrepentant and unashamed but remains a fervent and ideologically driven supporter of Nazism until her death some 60 years later. 

“Once a Nazi, always a Nazi,” thinks one of her complicit relatives, watching Lucie scramble to whitewash her image post-war. The Propagandist is above all a love story: a blazing and uneasy romance with fascism. Lucie is barely 20 when she falls madly in love with a fanatical Alsatian eugenicist and with the idea of a new and superior world. Nazism is a total, encompassing ideology for her. It gives sudden meaning and purpose and beauty to her life. Some of her family members and friends are opportunists, in Desprairies’ description, denouncing their Jewish colleagues and neighbors, but Lucie is an idealist. She really believes in a Nazi future and keeps believing in it long after its collapse. “She was an ambassador for a lost cause,” writes Desprairies, “an empress without an empire.” She imagines a world so structured and so scrubbed clean of impurity that life is simple and devotional. 

Her first husband, Friedrich, is the one who inculcates her into this belief system. He is sober, humorless, obsessed with genetics. He is gunned down by American soldiers at the end of the war, and Lucie continues to mourn him for the rest of her life. She marries a more genteel fascist — a Pétainist — and has four children, but for all intents and purposes, she has been buried with Friedrich. She visits his grave every year, she names one of her children after him, she keeps their Burgundy country house totally unchanged, a living mausoleum to their brief romance. It is hard to untangle Lucie’s devotion to Friedrich from her devotion to the Vichy regime. The psychosexual appeal of Friedrich and the psychosexual appeal of fascist aesthetics seem to congeal in Lucie’s fanatical love affair. Desprairies puzzles it out, trying to make sense of her bizarre and fragmented childhood. She rereads the love letters the young couple exchanged, where their sweet nothings (“Know that here on earth, all things eventually pass, except true love”) intermingle with extreme ideology (“We simply have to get rid of the Jews”). After Friedrich’s death, time stops for Lucie. She starts counting from the year when she met him in order to anchor herself in time and to remember her own age. This calendar also coincides with the time of the occupation, making Friedrich inextricable from it, dead young and lovely, “a poster boy for National Socialism.” She makes a shrine to him, visiting and tending his grave, hanging up their photos all over her house. And she makes a shrine to Nazism, lovingly guarding her posters and magazines and keeping a copy of Céline’s antisemitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937) on her bedside table until the end of her life.

Was this simply the most exciting time in Lucie’s life, wonders Desprairies, faced with her mother’s delusion? Why was she so unable to move on, so unable to consider the experiences and tragedies of other people, so unable to experience empathy? Years after the war, Lucie runs into a former Jewish classmate, Bianca (known from Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs as her lover and pupil, Louise Védrine), and cannot muster a single feeling for her and her murdered family. They find nothing to say to each other. What is so striking about The Propagandist is how deeply it probes Lucie’s psyche. It diverges from Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil,” with which she famously diagnosed the dull and bureaucratic opportunism of Nazi officials. Lucie excels at Nazism. She finds a spiritual and political home and comforting ideological security in it. At best, she displays willful disregard for the mass deportations, murder, and repression of the occupation regime, much like the deliberate ignorance depicted in The Zone of Interest. She and Friedrich move into a fancy apartment on the Place des Pyramides that was previously occupied by Jewish owners, a transferral of property that she continues to defend after the war is over. “They must have done something to deserve it, no?” She will go on to live for 62 years and to indulge in deep libidinal nostalgia in secret along with all the other women in her family. As a child, Desprairies sits in on these meetings, only half understanding. Mostly, they remember the luxury of their lives under the occupation, the fancy parties they attended, the handsomeness of the German soldiers. But once, her grandmother recalls how hot it was during the Vél d’Hiv roundup, when over 13,000 Jewish people were arrested and deported. She describes stopping by a velodrome converted into a temporary prison, where a man inside put his arm through a gap in the enclosure and begged her for a glass of water in exchange for his watch. Instead, she took the watch and left. “It was said with no emotion,” Desprairies recalls.

Fascism is a family affair in The Propagandist. During the war, Lucie is recruited to create propaganda posters by her uncle, who has profited from the occupation by taking over a major French newspaper. For an initial exhibition, she chooses faces to represent different kinds of sins (lies, monopoly, mind control, and so on) with which the Jews and other undesirable social groups supposedly infect European society. The officials who see her selection are so impressed that she is personally congratulated by the Reich ambassador. Not a single one of her posters is ever rejected. She is a star propagandist. She earns her comparison to Leni Riefenstahl. After the war, she seamlessly changes faces, dating an American GI for a time and posing for Vogue and Life as a harmless pretty blonde girl. But she cannot really outrun her roots. She is too deeply embroiled and too fanatical. For the rest of her life, she will keep circling obsessively around the wartime years and the collective enemies of fascism (the Jews, the French Resistance, the Communists, the Americans) that dashed all of her hopes for a different world.

As a child, Desprairies finds wartime propaganda magazines and campaigns that her mother worked on in their house. She thumbs through copies of a periodical called Le Cahier Jaune (The Yellow Notebook) and finds “black drawings of ghoulish faces and seven-branched candelabras. […] There was a special full-color issue, entitled Je vous hais (‘I hate you’), illustrated with a face whose mouth was a huge gaping hole.” She is disturbed and confused by the images. Her education about Nazism up to this point has been piecemeal. Lucie is too cautious to thoroughly inculcate her young children for fear they will reveal too much about her hidden past. Information comes in scraps and fragments: eugenicist science, stories about the war, about Maréchal Philippe Pétain and Philippe Henriot (the head of collaborationist Vichy France and the minister of propaganda, respectively), and the Jewish plot to ruin the world.

Desprairies is a Germanist and a World War II historian, which perhaps can be seen as her way of unraveling the mess of her upbringing and reckoning with her family’s history. When I saw her present the book at Éditions du Seuil’s 2023 fall launch, she wondered out loud if she had been hiding behind this clinical version of history for decades without confronting her own personal stakes. She had waited until her mother was long dead to write this story. “The best game was one I invented,” she recalls in The Propagandist, reflecting on her childhood, “an updated version of [the card game] Happy Families. In our family of Nazi sympathizers, I would pretend there was the mad scientist father, the collaborator mother, grandfather Pépé F., the morphine-addicted grandmother, the disturbed little girl, and the son who was in over his head. But nobody ever wanted to play with me.” The Propagandist is an eerie reminder of how deeply entrenched fascism remains in Europe. In recent decades, with the rise of far-right parties across the continent — and notably in Germany — this political tide has felt like quaint regression, doubling back on old and tired history, a defeated cause. But The Propagandist suggests that Nazism has never really faded. Desprairies draws out an unbroken Pétainist lineage — some underground, like Lucie, and others out in the open, like her more respectable second husband, who worked as a civil servant his whole career, or her uncle, a powerful impresario who lived in luxury post-war off of his stolen wealth. She presents a vision of France where unrepentant collaborators and their descendants marry each other, work together, and socialize in an unspoken but implicitly understood grouping. Although she does not refer explicitly to the current political situation or to the R.N., it would be easy to tell a similar story about their origins. Even if Marine Le Pen has banished Vichy rhetoric from the party in a bid for mainstream electoral appeal, it lingers behind like mold, invisible spores infiltrating every corner.

Miriam Gordis is a writer and bookseller living in New York.

Photo illustration by Sharanya Durvasula. Photo source: Courtesy wigofoto.nl / Flickr