Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon

  It is tempting—though probably false—to wonder whether eugenic considerations partly explain the fascist sympathies of Europe’s beauty tycoons. The perfumier François Coty famously backed the far-right Faisceau and Croix de Feu movements during the 1930s, and a little later founded the infamous paramilitary group Solidarité Française; Coco Chanel was a renowned horizontal collaborator. Eugenics, after all, did identify physical beauty—which, for these Europeans, naturally meant Caucasian beauty—as a prerequisite for most other desirable qualities. As the then-celebrated American psychologist Knight Dunlap put it in 1920, “All dark races prefer white skin.”46

  In his book Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment, Dunlap, who, inter alia, saw baldness as a sign of physical degeneration—“It is difficult to conceive of a baldheaded musical genius or artist”47—pointed the way, twenty years before the event, to notions of the Untermensch and the Final Solution. “Perhaps there are limits beyond which the preservation of the individual is undesirable. It seems not only useless but dangerous to preserve the incurably insane and the lower grades of the feeble-minded.”48

  Dunlap was not alone in these thoughts. Similar theories were commonplace among psychologists at the time, some of whom had little hesitation in acting upon them when they could with impunity. Their use of inmates in American state hospitals as fodder for experimentation during the 1920s and thirties has become notorious. If fascism is the absolute subjection of the individual to the needs of the state, as defined by the ruling dictatorship, then those psychologists—absolute dictators in their own realm—were undoubtedly fascists. And if—as after World War II—culpability is graded along a scale of readiness to eradicate undesirable individuals, with Hitler at one end and, say, H. G. Wells at the other, then Dunlap and his ilk would probably not have survived a Nuremberg.

  Most of those who held these views, however, lay at some point between these two extremes. In those cases, the matter of gradation could become a question of crucial personal concern. And one of these cases would be Eugène Schueller.

  [1] Now a small fruit and grocery store.

  [2] As it happens, one of the U.K.’s most consistently successful businesses, the John Lewis Partnership department-store chain, was, and still is, run in a similar way—in a “partenariat” (as opposed to a salariat), a scheme evolved by Schueller’s almost exact contemporary, John Spedan Lewis, and begun in 1928. There is, however, a vital difference. Schueller would have viewed with horror the idea that a “partenariat” should make the workers actual partners, with shares in the enterprise, as John Lewis’s scheme does.

  [3] The recommended daily intake for a woman between the ages of ten and fifty today is 1,940 calories.

  [4] During the war, when food was scarce, he in fact did provide his workers with land to use as vegetable gardens, though by no means all of them actually cultivated the allotted plots.

  [5] An ironic observation, from the standpoint of 2010. But of course banks still don’t like lending money to potentially risky enterprises.

  [6] Painting his ideal society in La Révolution de l’économie, he said that France, with her rich land, should concentrate on food production, leaving other trades to countries less naturally blessed and with more mechanical skills.

  [7] Ironically, through all this, Ford’s public image remained that of an enlightened humanitarian. In 1937, the year his thugs broke the back of one union organizer and severely injured several others, 59 percent of Americans still believed the Ford Motor Company treated its labor better than any other firm.

  [8] Hitler took more than philosophy and money from Ford. He saw how the auto industry, led by the Model T Ford, had transformed the American economy, and applied those lessons to the Third Reich, with impressive results that Schueller and many others came to envy and admire.

  Chapter Three

  What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?

  I

  Our readers are true Frenchwomen. They are worried and sad. That’s only natural. But sadness is not the same as losing heart. No one, in France, should lose heart. . . . Not to care about your appearance shows a lack of courage. Beauty is a discipline, and it’s cowardly to reject it.

  —Votre Beauté, NOVEMBER 1940

  In 1939, the year World War II broke out, Eugène Schueller was fifty-eight. Small, shy, rotund, full of a disarming nervous enthusiasm, his words tripping over each other in a vain attempt to keep up with his ideas, he had, Merry Bromberger remarked, “the candid eyes and hesitant manner of Charlie Chaplin. . . . [His] curls, whether permed or natural, have survived fifty years of experiments. . . . When people say chemicals are not good for the hair, the great hair chemist need only show his own froth of little waves.”1 Those waves were now an odd violet tint that suggested frequent use of his own products.

  Those products had bought him the grandest possible lifestyle. He had built himself two houses, the villa at L’Arcouest, where he relaxed, and an imposing pile at Franconville, just northwest of Paris, surrounded by elaborate terraced gardens—a highly impractical venture, he observed ruefully: seven servants and seven gardeners were needed to keep it up properly, and he liked to complain, somewhat hyperbolically, that the taxes he so bitterly resented paying meant he would never be left with enough to run it as it should be run. There was also a luxurious Paris apartment, on avenue Suchet, overlooking the Bois de Boulogne. And now a new war threatened, and who knew where he, and France, would be left at the end of it?

  Unlike Henry Ford, whose enthusiasm for Hitler (including generous financial support) was rewarded in 1938 by the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, Schueller spent the prewar years warning his countrymen against the German “wolf” and the dangers it threatened. General mobilization and the ramping-up of war industries had at least averted the open civil war that had threatened France earlier in the decade, getting the economy moving and solving the problem of mass unemployment. But he saw that France was no match for Germany. Unless Britain sent 300,000 men and 5,000 aircraft, and the United States the same, all would be lost.2

  The Ministry of Defense was more sanguine, or more fatalistic. Its response to the impending threat was to extend the so-called Maginot Line of concrete fortifications and tank traps built after World War I to prevent any new German incursion (and to provide its defenders with munitions that in many cases were the wrong size for the guns).3 Few people thought it would work. As a gamekeeper on his father’s land near the Belgian border observed to the young François Dalle (later to become L’Oréal’s managing director), “You know as well as I do, Franchot, that the Maginot line won’t stop the Germans. They’ll go through Holland like they did last time.” 4

  They did just that, in a furious attack launched on May 10, 1940, through Holland and Belgium. By May 26 the French were in retreat and the British Expeditionary Force, sent to support them, had been driven back to Dunkirk beach. During the following week over 338,000 British, French, and Canadian troops were evacuated across the Channel, under constant German fire. On June 14 the Germans entered Paris, declared an open city to avoid bombardment; on June 17 Marshal Pétain, whose troops had triumphed over the Germans at Verdun twenty-five years before, ordered the French army to stop fighting; and on June 22 he signed the armistice, under the terms of which two-thirds of France would be occupied by Germany.
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br />   Although in the immediate aftermath of the invasion ten million panicked French citizens took to the roads, eventually most of them trickled back home and tried to take up the threads of their lives. Many put their faith in Pétain, who at least offered the promise of a French rather than a German government, and made themselves inconspicuous in hopes that the occupying authorities would leave them alone. The more defiant retreated into sullen noncooperation or more active resistance. A core of diehard nationalists and furious young men joined de Gaulle in London. And at the other end of the political spectrum, some actively welcomed the new German rulers: among them, prompted by a mix of practical necessity, economic evangelism, and political ambition, Eugène Schueller.

  A good many French businessmen of the time were, like Schueller, interested in social reform. Several thought, as he did, that a benign dictatorship—the equivalent of H. G. Wells’s “enlightened Nazis”—was the only efficient mode of government. One of these, Ariste Potton, wrote a novel on this subject in 1937 in which he set out his countrymen’s (and his own) psychological position: “The Frenchman wants to be free,” he declared, “but he’s happy to accept discipline, if he has confidence in the person in charge.”5 Potton’s fictional businessman, clearly a wishful self-portrait, is loved by his workers, whom he’s always treated well—something on which Schueller, too, prided himself. Unlike Potton, however, who left the question of his leader’s actual political standpoint unelaborated (he simply brings “social progress and economic revival” to France and peace to Europe) Schueller did not mince his words. “Need I say, I believe in an authoritarian state, properly led, and that I consider it impossible to build a representative state based on universal liberty and equality? . . . Everyone must realize that many are his superiors and deserve more than he. Life is about opportunity. Everyone must have his chance, and not try to deprive others of what he hasn’t got himself.”6

  In this state of inferiors and superiors, Schueller was in no doubt as to his own position. The merest handful of men, so long as they were true revolutionaries, would be enough, he thought, to change a nation’s fate.7 Postwar France would badly need such men—“what these days are called ‘Führers of the professions’ ”8—and Eugène Schueller would be one of them, hopefully as finance minister in whatever French government would replace the Germans when they left. He therefore set himself to acquire the skills without which success in politics is impossible. He was not a natural orator and was determined not to repeat the experience of Henry Ford. He engaged a private speech tutor to visit him every morning, and fitted out one of the rue Royale rooms as a small auditorium, where he could try out speeches on a few friends before risking himself in front of a wider public. And at the same time he looked around for a political group that would make a suitable vehicle for his ideas.

  Schueller’s decision to throw in his lot with the Germans was governed more by pragmatism than doctrine. An engineer hired by him during the war, and who made it clear he did not wish to work even indirectly for the Germans, reported that Schueller “saw my point of view.” But “he said he thought the Germans were very strong, and better organized, while the other side seemed completely without organization. It was just a social conversation . . . and I have to say, I think M. Schueller is too much of an opportunist to risk engaging himself absolutely in favor of anyone.”9

  In fact, there was more than mere opportunism to Schueller’s vocal welcome of the invaders. The Occupation solved a dilemma that had long frustrated him: that although Hitler’s new order corresponded remarkably closely to his own long-held visions, Hitler himself was unfortunately the enemy. Had that not been so, France would now be in a far better state. “We haven’t been as lucky as the Nazis, who came to power in 1933,” he would write in La Révolution de l’économie, published in 1941 by Guillemot et Delamotte, whose list was headed by the collected speeches of Adolf Hitler. But now, at last, the years of stasis were over. Finally, the French people would realize that only a complete transformation could save them; and then all the suffering—“the war, the defeat, the destruction of our armies, an entire nation in flight”10—would not have been in vain.

  Although almost all enthusiastic collaborators would have agreed, most had arrived there by a very different route. Schueller was a pragmatist. But for his future allies, fascism’s attraction lay in doctrine rather than practicalities. By no means all were pro-German. But the Germans had achieved something they had long hoped for: the destruction of the hated Republic—la gueuse (the beggarwoman), as they disdainfully referred to it.

  Nor did they find any problem with other aspects of Nazi philosophy, such as anti-Semitism. Most had begun political life as followers of Action Française, the right-wing nationalist pressure group that had arisen out of the Dreyfus affair, and which advocated that the unfortunate Captain Dreyfus should not be pardoned even though he had been proven innocent, and that his accusers should not be charged with perjury. That would tarnish the honor of the French army—something rather more important than an injustice meted out to a mere Jew. For them, Jews and Freemasons not only represented the sinister forces of international capital and secularism that had imposed themselves on France at the time of the Revolution, but threatened, by their alien culture, everything that made France special.

  This toxic mix of xenophobic nationalism, Catholic fundamentalism, and fascinated envy was summed up by Henry Charbonneau, who would for a while become one of Schueller’s political colleagues:

  In every walk of life—political, economic, artistic, intellectual—the Jews were disproportionately prominent. Some professions were effectively under their control. It was truly a state within a state. . . . Personally, I’ve always felt defensive about this tentacular Jewish influence. Not that I’ve actually known many Jews, but they’ve always interested me. I was one of the first to see The Dybbuk when it was put on at the Théâtre Montparnasse in 1931. And later, when I was studying the culture of Andalusia, I really loved digging into the writings of the great Jewish savants of the Caliphate and Cordoba. . . . So it isn’t that I had anything against Judaism as such, but what always got under my skin was the notion that . . . you couldn’t really be talented, intelligent, witty, or even courageous unless you were a Jew or had Jewish friends. How could I bear to see intellectual and political life taken over by a minority many of whom weren’t even properly assimilated yet? 11

  For Schueller, who had once been a Freemason and who had many Jewish colleagues, these obsessions played little if any part in his thinking. He disliked the Republic not because he looked back nostalgically to the days of a Catholic monarchy but because, as he never tired of repeating, he was an authoritarian. For a man convinced that “Everyone’s first duty, whether boss, employee, or civil servant, is to obey,”12 the wave of strikes that paralyzed France in 1936 had been a glimpse into a terrifying future. His main objection to Léon Blum, who ended this situation by caving in to many of the unions’ demands, was his socialism, not his Judaism. The formulaic phrase, compulsory for all right-wing orators, about freeing France from “la franc-maçonnerie et la juiverie,” appeared only once in Schueller’s speeches and writings, when he used it to underline the need to make a complete break with the failed Third Republic—an institution with which, in the circles he was addressing, that phrase was conventionally associated.13

  For Schueller, as for many industrialists, the new Europe essentially meant a new economic order, neither French nor German but
“mixte.” They had long hoped for a breaking down of economic boundaries—as Schueller put it in La Révolution de l’économie, “a day when the mark and the franc would be one monetary unity in a European economy.”14 For years that had been a pipe dream: but if the Germans won, it would be the future. And if one thought this way, collaboration was a logical way forward.

  And this was not just a question of theory. At the most fundamental level, it was the only way to stay in business. The war years were very profitable for those who could keep manufacturing—anything that could be made could be sold, the occupiers would pay any price for luxuries, and there was a flourishing black market in scarce necessities. But only collaboration ensured access to raw materials.15 Later, Schueller would argue that he did only the minimum business with the enemy, but L’Oréal’s profits quadrupled between 1940 and 1944, and Monsavon’s doubled. He must have been selling something, in quantity; and it hadn’t been manufactured out of air.

  Part of this may be put down to ingenuity. Most industrialists, Schueller scornfully pointed out, were not good at making do. Despite a law making it compulsory to recycle scarce substances, they found it impossible to operate without their usual quantities of basic materials. Schueller, by contrast, tried wherever possible to use substitutes. Before the war, Monsavon soaps had contained 72 percent fats; during it, only 20 percent. The quality, admittedly, was less good—but people didn’t complain: anything was better than nothing.16 Even inferior materials had nonetheless to be sourced somewhere. And there was inevitably a price to pay. The Germans demanded not just that French manufacturers supply them, but that shares in French companies be transferred to German hands.