Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon

  Corrèze, who still lived with the Deloncles as one of the family, and who was standing naked in the hallway when the posse burst in, threw himself to the ground as soon as the shooting started, and escaped unharmed. He and Mercédès Deloncle, with whom he was still in love, were arrested and imprisoned, but released after a few days. Mercédès then vanished, not reappearing until more than a year later, when her daughter Claude married Guy Servant, an LVF stalwart and the son of a pro-Nazi friend, Patrice Servant.

  Corrèze, for his part, abandoned politics following the assassination and went underground to join a Resistance network. This volte-face counted in his favor when it came to the épuration: he was sentenced only to ten years’ hard labor. At the end of the Cagoule trial he received a further ten years, to run concurrently with the first sentence.

  He was freed in 1949, when an amnesty was announced: the three years he had already served before the Cagoule trial were judged to count as part of his sentence, making him eligible for freedom as this meant he had served five years in all, 50 percent of his sentence. However, prison was not his only punishment. Like many collaborators, including Mercédès Deloncle, whom he married as soon as he was freed, he had also been sentenced to dégradation nationale (public disgrace) and confiscation of all his property in France, past, present, and future. He turned to the man at once most likely to sympathize with him and most able to help: his old friend from the MSR, Eugène Schueller. Schueller had, after all, employed François Mitterrand, whose brother was married to Mercédès’ niece. And Schueller did not disappoint him.

  In fact, it was not Schueller who officially hired Corrèze, but François Dalle. Dalle insisted he did so without any input from Schueller. He thought Corrèze had paid his debt to society, his sentence was “not amongst the most serious,” and “as a participant in the Resistance, I thought it was important to demonstrate tolerance at a time of reconciliation in France.”21 But like so many of the pronouncements emanating from L’Oréal after Frydman’s revelations, this left much unsaid. For Corrèze was by no means the only cagoulard to find salvation at L’Oréal after the war. It was rumored that even Jean Filliol, who had been sentenced to death in absentia on three separate counts and had lived the rest of his life on the lam, was among them (though one scandal sheet hinted that Filliol didn’t actually have a L’Oréal job but was living on blackmail money extorted during a clandestine trip to Paris in 1946).22 Indeed, it was common knowledge in certain circles that Schueller “looked after his own” and “could be relied on to fish out people who were going under.”23

  Of course this was hardly surprising. Schueller had only by the narrowest of margins, and by a concerted effort on the part of influential friends, escaped the punishments meted out to so many of his wartime colleagues. The least he could do was to help the less fortunate as he himself had been helped. Just as Helena Rubinstein’s business success had allowed her to provide a refuge from the Jew-hunters, in the shape of far-flung employment, for her nieces, nephews, sisters, and brothers-in-law, L’Oréal allowed Schueller to do the same for Deloncle’s band of brothers. Jean Filliol’s son and daughter, using their mother’s name of Lamy, took a job with L’Oréal’s Spanish subsidiary, Procasa, as did the son of Michel Harispe, Corrèze’s confederate in Jewish expropriation, and Deloncle’s brother and son.1

  Corrèze, like the other ex-cagoulards, followed the well-trodden route to Franco’s Spain, where a sympathetic regime allowed them to start life afresh. But unlike most of them, for whom this exile was little more than an afterlife, he took his work seriously and put all his considerable energy and charm into making a success of it. Sent to the United States in 1953, “he visited all the New York hairdressers with his little bag of samples, selling our hair dyes.”24 Within a few years Corrèze was heading a sizable organization, had become an important figure in L’Oréal, and was considering the purchase of Helena Rubinstein, Inc. His subsequent negotiations in Israel were congenial on both sides. “They knew all about my past,” Corrèze said (somewhat of an exaggeration: what he told the Israelis was that he was not proud of his past during World War II, and that they should not bruit his name about because “then he wouldn’t be able to help anymore”25). He found them “delightful people.”26 And this liking was wholly reciprocated. “He was a big man, very warm and charismatic. You really wanted to please him,” said Gad Propper, the Israeli businessman who dealt with him.27

  In 1959, Corrèze was officially amnestied, and in 1966 he was rehabilitated. He could once more participate in French life and own property there. From then on he lived between the Bahamas and Paris, where his apartment overlooking the Seine was described by those who knew it as “palatial.”

  But although his past was now officially expiated, it lived on in the minds of those Corrèze and his friends had hunted. Deeds that the perpetrators recalled only with great difficulty remained vivid in their victims’ memories. Serge Klarsfeld, the indefatigable French lawyer and Nazi-hunter, had amassed a large collection of papers pertaining to the Nazi persecution of the Jews in France, among them several documents attesting to Corrèze’s anti-Semitic wartime activities. In the wake of Frydman’s accusations, Klarsfeld passed these papers on to the American Office of Special Investigations, so that the Justice Department could decide whether or not to place Corrèze on its special watch list of foreigners believed to have participated in religious or racial persecution.

  The affair was now getting seriously embarrassing for L’Oréal, and on June 25, 1991, Jacques Corrèze resigned from the company. He was seventy-nine years old and suffering from cancer of the pancreas: on June 26, the day after his resignation, he died. A short statement was issued in his name. “I cannot change what has been. Allow me simply to express my most heart-felt and sincere regrets for the acts that I may have committed 40 years ago, and their consequences, however indirect.”28

  IV

  At the same L’Oréal annual meeting, in 1991, where Lindsay Owen-Jones had been cheered when he rejected any taint of racism, André Bettencourt, L’Oréal’s vice president, had reiterated Dalle’s contention that Jean Frydman’s real concern was financial.29 Infuriated, Frydman vowed he would not rest until Bettencourt had been forced to retract and, hopefully, was hounded out of L’Oréal.

  His task was not, on the face of it, easy. Since the war, Eugène Schueller’s group of young friends from 104 had done spectacularly well—and become spectacularly influential. By 1991, when the Corrèze scandal broke, François Dalle had become one of France’s industrial elder statesmen; Pierre de Bénouville was (among other things) second-in-command to Marcel Dassault, né Bloch, the aviation magnate; François Mitterrand was well into his second term as president of France. As for André Bettencourt, he had become not only a powerful political figure but immensely rich. He had been a valiant résistant, with the Resistance Medal and the Croix de Guerre 1939–45, with palms, to prove it. He was a senator, and had been many times a minister under presidents of both the right and the left—in the Foreign Ministry during the presidency of Pierre Mendès-France, a minister under General de Gaulle, and a cabinet minister under Georges Pompidou, who had been not just president but a close friend, as was François Mitterrand, the current holder of that office. And he was one-half of France’s wealthiest couple: the fortune inherited by his wife on her father’s death had grown. She was now France’s richest woman.

  Frydman was undeterred. In 1994, after reading Pierre Péan’s book Une Je
unesse française, which revealed the far-right connections and dubious youth of Bettencourt’s friend Mitterrand, he thought he would do some basic research himself—starting with the weekly columns Bettencourt had written for La Terre Française between December 1940 and July 1942. On the rare occasions Bettencourt had been confronted with his authorship of these pieces he had played them down as being harmless, unimportant contributions to an obscure farming magazine. But was that true? It should be easy enough to find out: the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris had a set of copies. Frydman’s brother David went to have a look at them.

  His first finding was that La Terre Française was by no means as innocuous as Bettencourt implied. It might have been, once, but during the Occupation it had been taken over by the Germans, acting through a small company called “Le Comptoir financier français.” This was wholly financed by the Nazi Propagandastaffel and in 1949 suffered the fate narrowly avoided by Eugène Schueller, of having its assets confiscated as punishment for aiding the enemy. The magazine’s contents were a careful mix of agricultural articles and general-interest hearts-and-minds pieces designed to appeal to a deeply conservative and distrustful section of the population.

  Bettencourt’s column Ohé les jeunes! was a mix of religious and political uplift geared to the Church calendar and the changing seasons. The pieces appeared between December 1940 and June 1942, and were featured prominently, sometimes taking up the entire front page. And what they contained was dynamite. Bettencourt’s public image was founded on his being an old résistant and a pillar of the Republic. But his wartime writings promoted a down-the-line antidemocratic pro-Nazi agenda. “All the old formulas of excessive liberty” must be abandoned: “the words democracy, dictatorship, republic, universal suffrage, organized proletariat, liberty, equality, have had their day.”30 Denunciations of suspect neighbors were a duty “insofar as they truly serve the community.”31 As for the Jews, “rubbing their hands [after the crucifixion, they] cried, ‘Let his blood fall on us and our children!’ You know exactly how it fell, and still falls. The edicts of the eternal Scriptures must and will be accomplished.”32 And, if this material were not graphic enough, “Their race is forever stained with the blood of the just. They will be universally accursed. . . . Today’s Jews . . . will be spat out [seront vomis]. It’s already happening.”233

  All these prejudices had long been familiar to the devotees of Action Française, and it was no surprise to find them voiced by an ambitious young man of Bettencourt’s religious and conservative background. His generation had never seen the Republic as anything but enfeebled and corrupt; for the circles in which he moved, the Jews embodied everything—liberalism, secularism, cultural dilution—that was destroying their beloved France. For forty years these same prejudices had been brandished in an ongoing and increasingly bitter war of words. Bettencourt was simply repeating what he had heard all his life.

  However, it could hardly have escaped this highly intelligent young man that by the time he wrote his pieces the war was no longer a war of mere words. On the contrary, in the context of the Nazi Occupation, the familiar phrases had become lethal weapons. The extolling of denunciation was particularly sinister—not just repellent in itself, but because it laid a duty on readers to impose what was probably a death sentence upon anyone who did not conform to the ruling ideology.3 And to denigrate the Jews in an era of deportations, expropriations, and extermination camps, was direct incitement to persecution.

  Bettencourt’s first intimation that Frydman had disinterred his articles and was preparing to publish them was at a symposium on museum management he was moderating. When questions were invited, David Frydman stood up and said he was proposing to fund a museum of the collaboration. He had a set of Bettencourt’s articles for La Terre Française. Would Bettencourt agree to donate the manuscripts to Frydman’s museum?

  Later, Bettencourt would try to pretend that he could not remember what he had written all those years ago, and that in any case, his articles had been anodyne and unimportant. But his reaction to Frydman’s intervention indicated that, on the contrary, he remembered only too well, and knew the effect disclosure might have on his current image. The shock was palpable. He turned pale and left the room. When he returned, he was urged by a member of the panel not to answer, but rejected this suggestion with the words “I am a public figure, I must answer.” He went on: “It is true that I had the misfortune to write for La Terre Française, but I redeemed myself. I was in the Resistance. I even represented the National Council of Liberation at Geneva.”34

  Bettencourt at once used his powerful position as a senator to try to prevent the matter going any further. When Frydman returned to the library to make sure he had photographed everything, he found that all copies of La Terre Française had vanished. He looked elsewhere, in vain: the magazine had been removed from every library in France—except the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Versailles site, where he finally tracked it down. It had recently been moved there from the library’s then main building in rue Richelieu, probably escaping Bettencourt’s sweep because at the crucial moment it was in transit between locations.4

  In the autumn of 1994, Jean Frydman set out his findings in a pamphlet, Pour servir la mémoire, giving the names and details of the old fascists “recycled” by Schueller and reproducing the more explosive of Bettencourt’s Terre Française articles. The result was all he had hoped, and all Bettencourt had dreaded. Not only was there a renewed focus of attention on L’Oréal’s dark history, both in the French press and in other countries, but Serge Klarsfeld requested the U.S. Department of Justice to put Bettencourt on its watch list of undesirable aliens. That listing in turn prompted New York congressman Eliot L. Engel to write Bettencourt a letter demanding clarification on three counts. How had he been able to obtain an American visa, given that applicants were required to state whether they had been implicated in any Nazi persecutions? What about those articles, now republished by Frydman, from La Terre Française—in particular one containing the phrase “Today’s Jews will be spat out. It’s already happening”? And had Bettencourt, during the war, been a collaborator or a résistant?

  Bettencourt declined to respond to Frydman’s allegations, on the grounds that the conflict between Frydman and L’Oréal was still before the courts, and that as vice president of L’Oréal he was debarred from commenting. But he did reply to Congressman Engel’s letter. He had no memory of filling in a visa application form, as he normally used a diplomatic passport; in any case, he would not fill in such a form himself—tasks like that were the job of his staff. As a résistant, he had been imprisoned in Nancy and had met Allen Dulles, head of the American OSS, while on a mission to Switzerland. He had been asked to write for La Terre Française because he had previously been active in the Catholic young farmers association (Jeunesse Agricole Catholique), and this was a farming magazine. He had been France’s official representative at the funeral of Israel’s David Ben-Gurion, when he had been received by Golda Meir and Abba Eban, hardly a mission for an anti-Semite. Nor would anyone with a record of collaboration have been tolerated by de Gaulle or Mendès-France, who had not only been a staunch résistant but was himself Jewish. He held the Resistance Medal. His son-in-law was a Jew. He rested his case. As for Mr. Engel’s citation of a phrase about the Jews being “spat out,” supposedly published in the Christmas 1940 edition of La Terre Française, he assured him that no suc
h phrase appeared in that article. Indeed, it did not: it turned out that Frydman’s notes were in error. The phrase had appeared the following Easter, in a piece, also by Bettencourt, entitled “Carillon pascale.”

  Frydman’s pamphlet, and its repercussions, prompted investigations into other aspects of André Bettencourt’s wartime life—in particular, his claim to have been active in the Resistance. He had undeniably been awarded the Resistance Medal, but for what, exactly?

  In his letter to Congressman Engel, Bettencourt wrote that in 1944 he had been sent to Geneva to represent the Conseil National de la Résistance. There, under the assumed name of Grainville, he had contacted many members of the Resistance and also members of the English and American intelligence services, in particular Allen Dulles and Max Shoop of the OSS, on behalf of the Ministry for Prisoners of War. He returned to France with Dulles at the time of the Allied landings in the south of France.

  But these claims did not stand up to examination. It was true that Bettencourt did go to Switzerland in the summer of that year. Mitterrand had tasked him with contacting American agents in Switzerland in order to obtain funds on behalf of the Ministry for Prisoners of War, which was trying to foment unrest in German prisoner-of-war camps. Once he had the money he was to pass it on to Mitterrand.