Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon

  It was not a hard task, and he accomplished it easily enough, making the requisite contacts and forwarding the money—$2,500,000 in all,35 though what became of it is unclear. No POW insurrections of the type it was supposed to fund were recorded. However, he certainly did not, as he claimed, represent the Conseil National de la Résistance. That organization was headed by Jean Moulin and General de Gaulle, who were convinced that America’s ultimate intention was to turn France into an American client state, and forbade all contact with the American secret services in Switzerland, particularly in financial matters. When confronted with this faux pas by the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, Bettencourt backtracked: he had made a mistake, he had actually been part of the delegation of the Mouvements Unifiés de la Résistance—a different and much less significant body, headed by his old friend (and Jean Moulin’s mortal enemy) Pierre de Bénouville. But it transpired that this position, too, was impossible: the MUR had ceased to exist on December 31, 1943,36 nine months before Bettencourt visited Switzerland.

  Nor did he meet Allen Dulles: Bettencourt’s dealings were with Dulles’s deputy, Max Shoop.37 And even had Dulles and Bettencourt been acquainted, they could not have journeyed to France together. Dulles did not leave Switzerland until the night of August 29–30, while Bettencourt told Pierre Péan in an interview that from August 21 he was in Paris, where he and Dalle were helping Mitterrand with post-Liberation policy regarding prisoners of war.538

  Bettencourt’s first line of defense was to insist that everything about his past was known and had long been dealt with and dismissed. “I answered the questions about La Terre Française in my very first electoral campaign,” he told New York’s Congressman Engel. And some years later, interviewed for a book, he said, “Everyone knew perfectly well what my position was during the war.”39 When this tack failed to impress, he declared that although he regretted what he had written, it was insignificant: “I mentioned the Jews two or three times and the freemasons once. . . .”40 And finally he pleaded ignorance. He had not known what was happening to the Jews: “I would never have written those words if I’d had any idea of what the Jews were going through. . . . No one knew anything about Jews being arrested and deported to extermination camps,” he complained to an interviewer.41 Nor had he had any idea who the real owners of La Terre Française were: “I knew absolutely nothing about that. . . . For me it was just a magazine with a large circulation among agriculturalists.” 42 And when all these excuses failed, he simply went into denial. When confronted with yet another outrageously anti-Semitic, antidemocratic article written for yet another Pétainist youth publication (L’Élan, published in Bordeaux), “I don’t remember,” he flatly replied.43

  None of it worked. The Frydmans’ revelations ended Bettencourt’s public career. On December 13, 1994, he quietly resigned from L’Oréal (where he was replaced as vice president by his son-in-law, Jean-Pierre Meyers, by a supreme irony a Jew whose grandfather had died in Auschwitz) and declared he would not be standing in the Senate elections due to take place the following year. He insisted that these decisions had nothing to do with the Frydmans’ investigations or Congressman Engel’s letter, which he made a point of not having received until December 16, three days after his resignation. On the contrary, he said, L’Oréal’s CEO, Lindsay Owen-Jones, had been aware for some time of his impending departure: at the age of seventy-six he could no longer fulfil his duties as actively as he should, and from now on he would have to curtail his activities. But sources “close to L’Oréal’s management” told Le Monde that, on the contrary, the letter and the resignation were by no means unconnected. The troubles stemming from the Corrèze affair were only just behind them, and they were anxious that this new embarrassment should remain confined to Bettencourt himself and not taint the company or its principal shareholder, who was, of course, his wife.44

  The tone Bettencourt took thereafter, on the rare occasions when he consented to speak about the affair, was one of sadness and indignation. He was, he asserted, the victim of a malicious conspiracy. But “the more I say, the more I stoke the polemic. . . . It’s all a terrible trap,” he complained to Le Monde. “Have some consideration for my dignity. It’s appalling to imply that I could possibly have participated in genocide!” 45 And writing to Congressman Engel he reiterated the accusation that had so enraged Jean Frydman when he had first made it, saying that in his view, “this sudden revival of interest in articles . . . written half a century ago is at least partly due to the misrepresentation of events by people who want to make sure their financial interests prevail.” 46

  V

  It seems clear that neither André Bettencourt nor Jacques Corrèze felt guilty about what they had done during the war. Their regret was rather for the embarrassment their youthful acts caused them later. But that regret manifested itself quite differently in the two men, and had different roots.

  Bettencourt’s chagrin clearly stemmed from the sense that he had been unfairly picked out. Countless others—including, doubtless, many of his own acquaintances—had acted as discreditably as he. Even if they had not, as he had, actively promoted fascism, they had adjusted their lives to it without too much trouble. But the épuration was supposed to have dealt with all that. One of its important functions had been to act as an “exercise in the suppression of memory,” 47 so that France could step forward into the future, confident that the worst offenders had been punished. For private individuals, this amnesia took effect almost instantly. Thus, the journalist Merry Bromberger, profiling Schueller in 1954—only six years after his second trial—glossed over his wartime career with the comment “From time to time his enthusiasms have led him where he shouldn’t have gone.” 48

  All this meant that when Bettencourt said, “Everyone knew perfectly well what my position was during the war,” the truth was in reality just the opposite. People thought they knew—and wanted nothing more than to go on thinking so. No one in the French establishment welcomed his exposure. It undermined the whole edifice. If Bettencourt was shown to be a liar, whose story could be believed?

  For what made the Bettencourt case so disturbing (and what so infuriated him) was the certainty that it was not unique. His shameful trajectory had, after all, only been revealed by the sheerest chance. If Corrèze had not become obsessed with taking over Helena Rubinstein, if the Boycott Office had not intervened, if Dalle had not picked Jean Frydman as a partner for L’Oréal, none of his wartime activity would have come out. It was possible that the fates had picked the one rotten apple out of the barrel—possible, but not probable. What of the industrialists who had so enthusiastically funded La Cagoule, and whose names still remained household words in France? Would their stories, had they been forced to reveal them, have been so very different? And how many public figures had, like Bettencourt himself, transformed themselves into résistants at the last minute—as his friend François Mitterrand put it, “mal embarqués, bien arrivés”?49 Were not their careers based, as his was, on lies and concealments?

  One of the people most anxious that Frydman should not pursue his vendetta to the bitter end was Mitterrand himself. “This story has gone too far,” his aide Charles Salzmann told David Frydman. The president didn’t want the affair discussed in the press because they might write “all sorts of things.”50

  But it was too late: they already had. As more and more of the L’Oréal story seeped out, Mitterrand’s many detractors seized upon the Schueller connection, pointing up his fa
r-right relations and questioning whether he had played the important part in the Resistance that he had always claimed. In particular, they pounced upon a decoration he had played down: the Francisque, the medal awarded for outstanding service to Vichy and Pétain. Mitterrand could hardly deny receiving it—when his party went into opposition, in 1962, the Gaullist deputies amused themselves by shouting “Francisque! Francisque!” whenever he rose to speak51—but he had hitherto explained it away by saying “When I received it in 1943, I was in England [i.e., on Resistance business]. That was really useful when I got back—it was the best possible alibi.”52 Now, however, when people looked into the issue more closely, they found that a photograph existed of him receiving the medal in person from the Marshal’s own hand.

  That Mitterrand should have been part of Vichy was no surprise. Of all the gang from 104, his background was probably the furthest right, and his family was intertwined, in many ways and on many levels, with La Cagoule. Not only was his sister, Marie-Joséphine, for many years the lover of Jean Bouvyer, who was involved in the Rosselli assassination, but the Mitterrands were actually related to the Deloncles via Mitterrand’s brother, Robert, whose wife was Mercédès Deloncle’s niece. During the days of La Cagoule and the MSR, the Mitterrands cut off contact with the Deloncles, but after Deloncle was killed they looked after his daughter, Claude, and her young children. And when, in 1949, Mercédès Deloncle finally married her long-time love Jacques Corrèze, the Mitterrands were present in force at their wedding. In 1984, when President Mitterrand, visiting New York, attended a party at the Hotel Pierre in New York given by the local French community, Corrèze’s friends and colleagues were astonished to see the president greet him with a warm hug.53

  But the point about Mitterrand’s far-right connections, which he so fervently did not wish exhumed, was that they had never been secret. When he first emerged as a leader of the left, during the 1950s, the political scandal sheets made much of this sudden volte-face. “Our aim here isn’t to determine the exact relations between M. Mitterrand and La Cagoule: everyone knows that that monster (by which of course we mean La Cagoule) had many heads and thousands of feet. We merely note that it’s odd that an eminent member of the UDSR [Mitterrand’s party] should be mixed up in the intrigues of [cagoulards] . . . who managed, during the Occupation, to construct a Vichyist/Gaullist/collabo/résistant synthesis before which the most persistent bloodhounds would lose heart,” commented one in 1953; in 1954, another invoked “the political waters in which Mitterrand first met his friend Schueller, the father-in-law of Bettencourt, who’s now a minister.”54 And the same was true of Jacques Corrèze. If anyone wanted to look, his beginnings with L’Oréal were an open secret. The latter article went on to mention “the cagoulard Jacques Corrèze, who owes his job in Madrid to Schueller . . . .” And later, as Lindsay Owen-Jones, Dalle’s successor, said quite plainly, “This is not a guy who tried to hide in Argentina or Brazil. He never changed his name.”55 It was all out there—if you wanted to know it.

  The truth was that most people did not want to know. They wanted to look forward, not backward. In the words of Mitterrand’s Socialist Party colleague Laurent Fabius, whom he had made France’s youngest-ever prime minister, “What did I care what he’d done thirty years ago?”56 François Dalle, for instance, knew all about Corrèze, but decided to employ him nonetheless. In Dalle’s eyes, he had paid his debt to society. “As a participant in the Resistance, I thought it was important to demonstrate tolerance at a time of reconciliation in France.”57

  But, then, neither Dalle nor Owen-Jones had ever suffered at the hands of Corrèze and his like. Those who had were not so blithe about letting bygones be bygones. And France’s problem, in the postwar years, was that the two sides—the victims and the rest—could never agree as to the best way forward. One side wished to move on, the other—for whom closure was impossible unless the past was recognized—could not move on until it had seen justice done. The L’Oréal affair exhumed this split, which was why so many people found it so painful.

  This problem was not unique to France. In one form or another it affected many countries after the war. But what made the French situation particularly edgy was that anti-Semitism had for so many years been one of the mantras of the anti-Republican right—and that for many, the differentiation this implied between French Jews and the “real” French had never really been effaced. Thus, in 1980, when a bomb exploded at a synagogue in Paris’s rue Copernic, the then prime minister, Raymond Barre, commented, “This disgusting attack was aimed at the Jews who were going to the synagogue, but it actually injured innocent Frenchmen who were crossing the street.”58 If as late as 1980, in the mind of a moderate politician, Jews and “innocent Frenchmen” were still instinctively differentiated, then it was clear just how embedded in the national psyche Action Française’s demonization still remained.

  Obviously, there were real differences between a Bettencourt, who simply blew with whatever wind prevailed, and a Corrèze, who had been a committed Nazi and who made a point of insisting that he had always acted on principle. The Senator Bettencourt of 1994 probably was genuinely different from the young man he had once been, just as the climate of postwar opinion was genuinely different from that in which he had been brought up. Admittedly his career was based on lies. But by the time Frydman resuscitated them he had told the official story so often that he had probably come to believe it. Had he truly been that young fascist cheerleader? His reaction to David Frydman’s revelations showed that he knew he had. But how could that young man have turned into the person he was now? Was it really he who had inveighed against “the republic and her masks of parliamentarianism and liberalism,” he who had called for “a leader who commands, not a crowd of clerks eternally discussing”? 59 It was impossible—yet it was true. A journalist who spoke to him on the phone after his resignation said he sounded “wounded and tormented.”60 “There’s this incredible atmosphere of hate,” Bettencourt said.

  I had to withdraw from the only occasion I’ve been offered to put my side of things on television. . . . because I found out they were going to accompany it with images of the Germans marching up the Champs-Élysées. . . . You just have to put up with it; every time you talk about it you just fall into another trap. To say I’m an anti-Semite is shameful when my only daughter is married to a Jew who’s like a son to me. After fifty years of an existence devoted to my country, am I only to be seen as an anti-Semite and anti-Freemason? It’s horrible.61

  No such bitter regret was ever felt by Corrèze. He had never, as Bettencourt had, suppressed the person he had once been. On the contrary, he insisted that he did what he did when the MSR was in its prime “for a noble cause,” haughtily declaring that although he had lost faith in the MSR some time before Deloncle died, he had not abandoned his old mentor while he lived because “I do not desert my friends.”62 Had his views changed simply because they were no longer admissible? It seems unlikely. Rather, his whole life had been a continuation of the same game, and when that game was exposed, he was not so much embarrassed as furious.

  Naturally, he never went so far as to publicly glory in his past. When first questioned about his role in expelling Jews—including Georges Mandel, who until June 1940 had been minister of the interior, and Bernheim the well-known art dealer—from their homes and businesses, he, too, resorted to evasion, first denying everything. “I can’t recall it—I don’t think that can be true,” he said first, then insisted th
at there was a difference between what he had done and actually maltreating Jews (“faire des saloperies contre les juifs”).63 Which was true enough: he had waited for others to do the dirty work, and then taken the profits. A few days later he issued a written statement asserting that “There’s no one, among those hunted during the Occupation, Jewish or not, who can complain of having suffered, in his person or his goods, from my activity.”64 But in the end his actions were what they were, and he did not apologize for them.

  The characteristic that struck reporters during the Cagoule trial in 1948 was his arrogance. He sat aloofly at the end of the row, leaning away from his fellow accused, his handsome head thrown back, viewing the proceedings from a distance down his well-shaped nose. He answered questions, when addressed, with a weary politeness. He was, journalists remarked, a romantic figure. He was also utterly unrepentant. And unrepentant he remained. Interviewed on television in June 1991, he was asked, “Do you feel you were a real anti-Semite?” to which he flashed savagely back, “I don’t know if I was, but I’m about to become one!”65

  He did not, like Bettencourt, try to cheat the gods. Rather, in a classic tale of hubris, he simply gave them the finger, pushing his luck, because he felt himself invincible. Given his past, and his defiant arrogance, it is hard to believe that Helena Rubinstein’s Jewishness played no part in Corrèze’s absolute determination to acquire her business. He never showed any interest in the very comparable Elizabeth Arden, who was an equally powerful player, who died only a year after Madame, and whose business went downhill in much the same way as Helena Rubinstein’s. On the contrary, it seems in character that, having arrived in New York and sized up the situation, he should have decided to resume the old game he had so enjoyed in Paris—Colonel Corrèze redivivus, minus only the high boots and cross-belts. Everything he did points to his enjoyment of this underlying drama, his pleasure doubtless enhanced by the fact that only he was aware of it.