The Propagandist
In Cécile Desprairies’s disquieting historical novel The Propagandist, a woman reflects on her mother’s experiences as a World War II collaborator.
Coline, Lucie’s youngest daughter, contrasts her mother’s duplicitous past with her later life as a discontented “bourgeois housewife.” For beautiful and intelligent Lucie, the German occupation of Paris was like a “fairy-tale,” filled with embassy parties and excitement. Lucie, her friends, and her family cooperated with the Nazis, celebrating the roundup of France’s “domineering” Jewish population and gaining what the Jews lost: apartments, furniture, gold watches, and career opportunities.
Lucie married Friedrich, a German medical student whose interest in genetic research mirrored Hitler’s racial obsessions. While Lucie studied law and biology, she also worked as a Vichy government propagandist, producing posters and other materials that linked French sentiments with Nazi dogma. But after the Allies liberated Paris, numerous collaborators were imprisoned and even executed. When Friedrich died under suspicious circumstances, Lucie was overwhelmed with grief.
Coline discusses her mother with ironic detachment. Rather than outright condemning her, she invites broader judgment through the meticulous arrangement of facts. She details how Friedrich regarded Jews as akin to “laboratory mice” or invasive “tubercular bacilli,” and how even after Lucie’s marriage to Coline’s father, Lucie still yearned for Friedrich and their fascist dreams. As an expert at personal transformation, Lucie also reworked her own image while helping her “clan” of collaborators assume new postwar identities.
The novel has a serpentine tension, with adaptable yet controlling Lucie as its most pernicious and fascinating character. Extending from the 1940s to the early 2000s, the story implies that the actions of some French wartime collaborators were obfuscated, ignored, or dismissed.
The chilling novel The Propagandist reveals a twisted legacy of wartime rationalization and collusion.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
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