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Recently, precisely on September 5, 2023, the jury of the Prix Goncourt announced the titles of the 16 novels in the running, to be gradually eliminated one by one until the winner is proclaimed on Tuesday, November 7, 2023. The selection includes two first-time novelists, one of whom is of particular interest to us: Cécile Desprairies, author of The Propagandist.
In brief: who is Cécile Desprairies?
Having pursued studies in philosophy and literature, Cécile Desprairies is acknowledged as a historian dedicated to professional studies on the German occupation of France and the Collaboration during 1940-1944. Following this path, she authored several works illuminating the events of this period. In Journey Through Occupied France, 1940-1945: Four Thousand Places to Rediscover, a monumental 1,120-page volume published by Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) in April 2024, Desprairies sheds light on a vast number of cities and places, highlighting the individuals who inhabited them during the Occupation and who possibly were collaborators, albeit unwittingly. The work also explores the indelible marks left on these areas, though collective memory often seeks to erase and purify these imprints.
Surprisingly, in August 2023, just four months after the publication of her latest historical work, she released an autobiographical novel titled The Propagandist with Seuil Publishing. The narrative tells the story of her mother Lucie—a mysterious and dangerous figure during Desprairies’ childhood—and delves into her family’s profound engagement with the Collaboration, its ideology, secrets and actions.
The narrative of The Propagandist: a denouncement of impunity?
In The Propagandist, nominated for the 2023 Goncourt, the historian narrates her childhood environment characterized by daily gatherings of the female members of her family, where amid light and entertaining exchanges, coded language and hushed conversations sparked young Cécile’s curiosity. As an adult and an expert in the history of occupied France during World War II, the protagonist becomes the narrator, unraveling the mysteries of those secretive discussions linked to the Collaboration.
Lucie is revealed as a propagandist for the Third Reich in Paris, romantically involved with an Alsatian man, Frédéric (now Friedrich), a geneticist swayed by theories of racial purity. The tale unravels the family’s zealous collaboration in various forms, driven by desires for wealth, fame and boundless freedom. Lucie’s story intertwines with those of bourgeois escorts favored by German officers, a great-uncle who enjoyed a luxurious life due to the occupier’s protection and the desperate attempts to whitewash their identities following the Allies’ victory.
The narration poses a significant question: besides being an autobiographical account breaking familial taboos, does The Propagandist indicate the blatant possibility—or indeed the glaring evidence—of impunity in the world? Despite historical instances of prominent figures facing judgment and punishment, a substantial number of these individuals manage to retain a scandalous and untouchable freedom, often facilitated by collective memory’s self-imposed blind spots.
Camus and his “Fall”
In Albert Camus’ narrative The Fall published in 1956 (12 years after the debacle, but not unrelated to it), a man named Jean-Baptiste Clamence, originally a lawyer in Paris and later a self-proclaimed “judge-penitent,” confesses in an Amsterdam bar to a man whom the reader neither sees nor hears, not even once. The confession revolves around an evening when he fails to assist a person in danger, specifically a young woman about to kill herself by throwing herself into the Seine from the Pont des Arts. However, the fall of this young woman soon triggers the descent of Jean-Baptiste Clamence who, fleeing Paris to take refuge in the foggy city of Amsterdam, paradoxically becomes increasingly insightful about his own past and life: a war comrade, abandoned and soon dead in a deportation camp in North Africa, women who loved him and whom he shamelessly took advantage of, his reputation as a lawyer built on deceit, the concealment of the original painting of the Mystical Lambs. Yet, despite declaring his guilt to his interlocutor, who is the umpteenth recipient of his repetitive narrative, and asserting that his listener is obviously just as guilty as he is, albeit for different reasons, nothing happens: no one arrests him, no one wants to arrest him, no one is arrested. He is therefore “condemned” to perpetual freedom, but also to unresolved guilt.
Indeed, The Fall is largely inspired not only by the outcomes of the Nuremberg Trials and the universal realization in the aftermath of the Second World War that all of humanity is guilty of crimes against humanity (thus, who to punish?), but also by the clear fact that evil in the world, even when explicitly acknowledged, succeeds, if not always then at least most of the time, in remaining unpunished, free, powerful and ever-ready to renew itself, and in some cases, to be forgotten…
Regarding some pertinent unavoidable examples
Who is thinking of punishing Israel for all the massacres perpetrated and that continue to occur on Palestinian land? For all the evils, alienations, abuses, ravages, crimes on Lebanese soil? Who considers punishing Syria for the horrors it committed in Lebanon (and continues to commit in various forms) and which it extended onto its own lands starting in 2011? Who is aiming to punish the multiple perpetrators of the double explosion at the Port of Beirut? Who intends to hold accountable the architects of Lebanon’s economic and financial crash and the theft of citizens’ savings? Apparently, not one living soul. There is likely hope to exhaust the victims, but the perpetrators, whoever they may be, remain unpunished and, at best, will be forgotten, in hopes that no one would dare pinpoint any responsible party, criminal, collaborator or traitor. For this very reason, kudos to Cécile Desprairies for having the courage to speak out, even if powerless to heal the wounds of all those who have suffered and continue to suffer.
