Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon

  For manufacturers commited to the idea of a Franco-German community, however, this transfer of assets presented no problem. Rather it made sound economic sense. A mixte economy required mixte management. An investigative commission set up in the Lyon region in 1945 found “no trace of forcing” by Vichy or the Germans in this respect. On the contrary, when, as happened from time to time, Vichy tried to prevent such moves, the businessmen generally managed to get around the prohibition. “They say now that resistance, in 1940 and 1941, would have been premature and useless,” the commission reported. “But the question . . . never really arose for the bosses of finance and industry. . . . It simply didn’t concern them. . . . Resistance seemed absurd and pointless—a fight against themselves.”17

  Naturally, little if any of this was ever stated in so many words. When the occupation ended, and Schueller was tried for industrial collaboration, he was asked about his paint firm Valentine, whose product was of course of considerable interest to the occupiers, and which appeared to have sold them a good proportion of what it made. Schueller simply replied that he was no longer in charge there at the time. He had relinquished his majority holding, along with his position as Valentine’s CEO, in October 1940. What he did not say was that Valentine was closely involved with the German firm Druckfarben, and helped it take control of another French paint firm, Neochrome, in which Valentine had a 50-percent holding. Valentine (and thus Schueller) ceded 15 perent of its Neochrome holdings to the Germans, and as a “participation française” was necessary, retained the remaining 35 percent. . . .18 The German in charge of this transaction was a Dr. Schmilinsky. He valued his acquaintance with Schueller and went out of his way to introduce this “eminent industrial chemist and an eminent and ardent partisan of the Franco-German accord,” to his superiors in the German embassy.19

  Dr. Schmilinsky also described Schueller as being head of the economic section of a political party. For he had now made his choice. He would offer his services—and his money—to the Mouvement Sociale Révolutionnaire (MSR—which, in the French pronunciation, emerges as “Aime et Sers,” or Love and Serve—an acronym we shall encounter frequently in the following pages).

  MSR were the most extreme of the extreme. They were led by Eugène Deloncle, a clever and charismatic naval engineer whose hypnotic personal charm nullified his somewhat absurd appearance—short, plump, invariably bowler-hatted—and kept his inner circle spellbound. Deloncle, who operated under the nom-de-guerre of “Monsieur Marie,” was a plotter and intriguer; his favorite reading was Malaparte’s Technique of the Coup-d’état. Ultranationalist and deeply anti-German, he was nevertheless convinced that, given the fait accompli of the Occupation, collaboration was a “biological necessity” if France was to become, as he hoped, an independent fascist state.20 “The first priority for France is to collaborate. Why is she wasting so much time?” he demanded in a radio broadcast in January 1941.21

  Deloncle had been spurred into independent political action by the failure of the great antigovernment demonstration of February 6, 1934. Ever since 1789, French politics had been dominated by the never-resolved conflict between those who supported the Revolution and those who were against everything it stood for. For the antis, who included many if not most of the governing and officer class, this February day represented the last best chance of overturning the hated Republic. Forty thousand supporters of the royalist right—Charles Maurras’s Action Française and its youth wing, the Camelots du Roy; Colonel de la Rocque’s ultra-Catholic Croix de Feu; the fascist Solidarité Française; and the Jeunes Patriotes—gathered in the Place de la Concorde to march on the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais-Bourbon, on the other side of the Seine. For more than a month the rhetoric had been building. The climate of insurrection had reached the boiling point; the time had come for action.

  By the end of the day, sixteen were dead and a thousand wounded, including four hundred police. But at the crucial moment La Rocque, whose Croix de Feu were massed in a vital passage from where they could have overwhelmed the garde républicaine, called off his troops. He had decided that as a serving officer he could not march on the Chamber of Deputies. None of the other factions had either the men or the arms to act without him. The Republic was saved, and in the 1936 elections, a huge left-wing majority swept Léon Blum and his Popular Front to power.

  There was general gnashing of right-wing teeth, but for some, gnashing was not enough. In February 1936, Blum was attacked by Jean Filliol, the little killer who would become Deloncle’s hit man. On his way back from a meeting, Blum’s car had got caught up in the funeral cortege of a popular royalist historian. Filliol, who was attending the funeral, noticed it and seized his opportunity. He broke the car’s window, sank a bayonet into its backseat, and was preparing to sink it into Blum himself when workers from a nearby building site rescued the prime minister, who eventually found refuge in the nearby headquarters of the League of Catholic Women. Blum was bloodied and terrified but still alive. That June, he dissolved the right-wing ligues, making them illegal.

  Deloncle, always attracted by the clandestine, thereupon decided to set up his own secret army: the Organisme spécial de l’action régulatrice nationale, or OSARN. It was more commonly known as La Cagoule, “the hood”—an epithet referring to the Klan-type red hoods supposedly worn when members were inducted, and soon generally adopted. These chosen shock troops would be a French fascist party in embryo, and would counter what Deloncle dubbed “inaction française.” He organized them along the lines of the secret societies that perennially fascinated him, even when (as with the Freemasons) he hated them. Potential members were vetted. They needed a reliable “godfather” to vouch for them, and were allotted to separate cells that knew only their own members and doings, and that operated under names with anodyne and vaguely patriotic associations, different in every region. Connections between the center and the regions were kept indirect. Army officers received what was in effect a contract, promising protection in exchange for their support. And “traitors” were pitilessly executed. “Nous sommes méchants,” Deloncle liked to say—something Filliol made sure was no idle boast.

  The proper equipment of this organization would require funds. Deloncle obtained signed letters of endorsement from the aged Marshal Franchet d’Espèrey, France’s most senior soldier, and set about raising them. Many of France’s biggest businessmen—Lafarge cement, the Byrrh and Cointreau liqueur interests, Ripolin paints, several of the big Protestant banks, the Lesieur cooking-oils magnate Lemaigre-Dubreuil—were sufficiently terrified by the looming specter of communism to fill his coffers. Louis Renault donated two million francs; Pierre Michelin gave a million, and sent another three and a half million in cash, in a briefcase. The Michelin tire empire was based in Clermont-Ferrand, in the Auvergne; the local branch of La Cagoule was composed entirely of Michelin engineers, placed by their employer at Deloncle’s disposal. Soon Deloncle’s organization had ten thousand members, among them many senior army officers.

  They at once set about their business. When Franchet d’Espèrey demanded a “blood proof” before raising any more money, it was provided in the shape of Dmitri Navachine, the Soviet representative in Paris, who in addition to being a Communist was a Jew and a Freemason, thus ticking all the hate boxes of the right. Filliol murdered Navachine in his trademark way—shot, then finished off with a dagger—while the diplomat was out walking his dogs in the Bois de Boulogne on January 24, 1937.

  O
ther murders followed. On March 16, 1937, a La Cagoule commando fired missiles into a socialist demonstration in Clichy, a working-class district of Paris. In June, in exchange for machine guns from Mussolini, the Italian socialist Carlo Rosselli was assassinated, along with his brother, Nello, in the quiet Normandy spa of Bagnoles de l’Orne: “the sad death in exile that seems almost inevitable for the best sons of Italy,” as Rosselli himself wrote of another Italian socialist (Filippo Turati) who had suffered a similar fate. The police solved none of these crimes: the details did not emerge until La Cagoule was finally brought to trial after the Liberation.

  On September 11, 1937, Deloncle overreached himself. At ten that evening, in a coup organized by Filliol and a team that included a Michelin engineer, two bombs exploded in Paris near the Arc de Triomphe. One destroyed the façade of the rue de Presbourg offices of the Confédération Générale du Patronat Français (the general confederation of French employers), raising a cloud a hundred meters high and blowing over a nearby taxi. The second destroyed the building of the iron and steel manufacturers’ association at 45, rue Boissière. Two people were killed and many more injured. Deloncle spread rumors, propagated by the right-wing press, that this attack was the work of Communist plotters. The police had infiltrated La Cagoule and soon began to unravel what had happened, but Deloncle’s numerous supporters in the army all believed in the Communist plot, their fears further fanned by a new Deloncle rumor, this time that a Communist takeover had been planned and was imminent. It was agreed that they would descend on Paris, avert the danger, and take over. The night of November 15–16 was fixed for the operation and assembly points arranged at four addresses where La Cagoule had established arms dumps: in a pension de famille for elderly ladies, an antiques shop, a radiography center, and a villa in the suburb of Rueil where the basement had been fitted up as a torture chamber. Unfortunately for the plotters, the police were waiting, arrested those cagoulards unable to escape in time, and confiscated the arms. Deloncle and his brother were picked up, as were a number of others, including, sensationally, a general—Duseigneur—and a duke, who held the Corsican title of Pozzo di Borgo. They were held in prison awaiting trial. When war was declared, however, the cagoulards were provisionally freed to join—or rejoin—the armed forces. And after the German triumph, they went their different ways.

  Supporting La Cagoule did not mean that you automatically supported the occupying Germans. On the contrary, many, especially among army officers, were proud nationalists. They had been unable to bear the spectacle of their beloved France mismanaged by a leftist rabble, and now found the thought of a teutonic hegemony equally intolerable. Some followed de Gaulle to London; others supported General Giraud, who had been an active cagoulard while governor of Metz, and who became a rival focus for resistance. Several joined Pétain in Vichy, where an increasingly vain pretense of independence was maintained. But a hard core, including Filliol, chose out-and-out collaboration. They followed Deloncle to Paris, becoming the MSR.

  For Deloncle, the debacle offered the prospect of a dazzling revenge as the hated Republic was destroyed, along with its “puppets.” “I witnessed their agony,” he wrote to his wife. “If you could have seen their faces, masks of terror, sweating dishonor, you’d have hugged yourself with joy.”22 Now he, whom they had forced into hiding and imprisoned, would prepare to take power. But to do so he would need money, and Schueller offered it.

  Schueller said he first met Deloncle at the end of 1940, “when he came to find me and said he was utterly converted to my social and economic ideas, which he wanted to include in his party’s program.”23 In fact, many historians claim he was the secret financier behind La Cagoule, in which case they would have met much earlier. But there seems to be no evidence—other than the historians’ assertions—to support that. La Cagoule’s finances were not secret, at least within cagoulard circles; nor did Schueller’s name appear on the carelessly uncoded list of members kept by La Cagoule’s archivist, Aristide Corre, and found by the police when they searched his rooms five days after the Arc de Triomphe bombs. The list was sketchy regarding the provinces, but was clear and full as far as Paris membership was concerned, giving all members’ names and addresses.

  When the new party was born, on September 15, 1940, describing itself as “European, racist, revolutionary, communitarian [i.e., Franco-German in outlook], authoritarian,” Schueller was the first member to sign up (the second was Filliol).24 On the new party’s letterhead, where his name appeared just below that of Eugène Deloncle, he was named as “president and director of technical commissions and study committees.” As well as money, he gave the MSR a meeting room adjacent to his own luxurious offices in the L’Oréal building on rue Royale.25 In return, a nod to the proportional salary was included in the MSR manifesto of aims. Alongside the standard racist and nationalist clichés that Deloncle took so chillingly literally (“We want to construct the new Europe in co-operation with National Socialist Germany and all the other European nations liberated, as she has been, from liberal capitalism, Judaism, Bolshevism, and Freemasonry. . . . The racial regeneration of France and the French . . . Severe racial laws to prevent such Jews as remain in France from polluting the French race . . . We want to create a united, virile and strong youth . . .”) there was a promise “To create a socialist economy that will assure a fair distribution of goods by raising salaries along with production.”26

  What all this meant varied according to one’s point of view. When the young engineer Georges Soulès (later to become known as Raymond Abellio, a writer on the occult) visited MSR headquarters for the first time, he noticed with some amusement that Deloncle, “so warm, voluble, full of charm and Gascon verve,” and who spoke so spontaneously and enthusiastically when he was discussing his militias and their doings, only mentioned Schueller—whom he referred to as “our future minister of the national economy, the most important man in the movement”—at the end of their conversation, as an afterthought.27

  The truth, of course, was that what mattered to Deloncle was Schueller’s money. Indulgence of his economic ideas was the price that had to be paid for it. But if Schueller recognized this (later he said, “No doubt Deloncle knew how passionate I felt, and how easy it would be to use me as a front man in certain industrial circles if he flattered me”28), it was of little importance. All that mattered was that his ideas be propagated and, eventually, implemented. And why not through the charismatic and energetic Deloncle?

  Other right-wing politicians could see plenty of reasons why not. The prospect of Schueller’s money being made available to this crazed fanatic terrified them—so much so that in 1940, General de La Laurencie, Pétain’s then representative in the Occupied Zone, sent his nephew to try to persuade Schueller to moderate his support for the MSR.29 But Schueller stuck with Deloncle. Part of the attraction, Soulès said, was that Deloncle was an engineer, not a professional politician. Like Schueller himself, he was a new and energetic force amid the professors, lawyers, and old soldiers who generally cluttered the political scene.

  Schueller’s defense, when he later had to try to justify his actions, was that he had been misunderstood and misled—that, in the words of his daughter, Liliane, “He was a pathological optimist who hadn’t the first idea about politics, and who always managed to be in the wrong place.”30 That, though, was not convincing. It was hard to believe that a person who had made such a huge success in the cutthroat world of business could be quite such an innocent. On the other hand
, his decision to associate himself with a murderous fantasist like Deloncle threw serious doubts on his political judgment. No one familiar with Deloncle’s cagoulard past, with its melodramatic plots and bloody assassinations, could have imagined the MSR would ever form a government.

  Perhaps the explanation is that the past, even the recent past, had no interest for Schueller. A true Fordist in this respect, his sole concern was to select the most efficient route to the desired future. Having picked the MSR as his route, and with his blind faith in the power of his economic ideas, perhaps he truly thought he could promote a coherent political program within it—that, in Soulès’ words, it “would take on new colors, and an intelligent game would become possible, Deloncle’s personal game reduced, channeled, made wise, by the application of systems and ideas.”31 If he did think this way, however, he had misread his man. Deloncle was happy to tolerate intellectuals, but only so long as they confined themselves strictly to cultural activities.32 He, and only he, would dictate the action.

  In February 1941, Otto Abetz, the German ambassador to Paris, pressed the MSR to combine with Marcel Déat’s far larger Rassemblement Nationale Populaire (RNP) to maximize their power and influence. As Abetz perhaps foresaw, it was not a natural meeting of minds. Déat was an old pacifist and socialist who had been part of the Front Populaire. He had bitterly opposed France’s entry into this war, which he saw as a British plot to further its imperial interests, and had worked his way across the political spectrum to become a pro-German national-socialist. He thus embodied everything that the anti-German, right-wing, bellicose Deloncle most loathed. At the RNP, Soulès noted, “one was received in a quiet, discreetly elegant salon that might have belonged to a studious professor who had suddenly become famous; at the MSR the anteroom was a closed guardroom, entirely military, with no trace of politics.”33 Indeed, the MSR had acquired smart new paramilitary uniforms, with khaki shirts, cross-belts, breeches, and black boots and gloves, in which they continued to stalk their enemies just as in the glory days of La Cagoule.