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.

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.

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.

Other 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.

Deloncle agreed to Abetz’s arrangement—he could hardly have done otherwise. But, as always, there was a plot. He would take over the RNP from within, à la Cagoule, beginning, in the classic manner, by assassinating several Déatists. When these assassinations happened, Déat himself was in the hospital. A former secretary of Deloncle’s, a Mme. Massé, went to visit him there. A few days later, she too was killed and her body found in the Seine. She may have shown Déat some documents proving that Deloncle, his supposed ally, had been behind the assassinations, or perhaps simply wanted to warn him that Deloncle planned to use his absence in the hospital to take over the RNP. Either way, the visit proved fatal. An attempt was made, some time later, on Déat himself. It failed. But Marx Dormoy, who had once been Déat’s colleague in the Front Populaire, and who was now under house arrest in Montélimar, was blown up in his bed that July. Dormoy had been minister of the interior at the time of the Arc de Triomphe bombs and had overseen the arrest and imprisonment of the cagoulards. They had not forgotten—“nous sommes méchants”’—and this was their revenge.

Not surprisingly, morale in the wider RNP plummeted. Its membership had expanded during the early weeks of the enforced cohabitation, but soon fell into an irreversible decline. For Schueller, so accustomed to success, this was his first real experience of failure. “I’ve never known a man able to inspire so much confidence in a movement, so long as he was in charge,” Soulès observed.34 But now he was not in charge, and MSR no longer inspired confidence. Was it a good idea to associate so closely with a man as shady as Deloncle, and to throw good money after bad into a product as unsatisfactory as the RNP’s dreadful magazine, the Révolution Nationale? It was clearly time to distance himself. In late 1941, Schueller severed his connection with Deloncle and the MSR. This prompt dissociation was one of the main planks of his defense during his postwar trials for collaboration. Whatever his dealings with MSR, it was to his credit, the judges decided, that he had quit it in good time.

II

It is the opinion of German men and women that women who pluck their eyebrows, use cosmetics, color their hair, and try to draw attention to themselves through eccentric behavior (for example smoking, face powder, etc.) belong to an older generation whose time has passed. The younger generation is against all these things, and youth has to be counted not by years but by strength of feeling. The women who are doing such things should be ashamed. . . . To be young means to be natural, and to understand the admonitions and demands of a great era.

—DR. KRUMMACHER, LEADER OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST WOMEN’S ORGANIZATION, WRITING IN Koralle (A GERMAN GENERAL-INTEREST MAGAZINE), 1936

Schueller could not deny that throughout the war years he had been one of the voices of the Occupation. The radio broadcasts and newspaper articles, the public lectures and the pep talks to his workforce spoke for themselves. But politics, he assured the court, had played no part in those talks: they had been concerned purely with economics. “If, like me, you’re convinced that you’ve found the answers to the world’s economic and social problems, you obviously can’t stop talking about them just because the wrong people listen.”35

The burden of his broadcasts, speeches, and articles was indeed economic, the same ideas—about the proportional salary and bosses’ responsibilities—that he had been preaching for years. Thus, a radio talk on May 8, 1941, entitled “How Not to Die of Hunger This Winter,” was about the efficiency, or otherwise, of workers’ allotments and the importance of making the most of small parcels of land. And a public lecture titled “The Revolution of the Economy Is the Economy of a Revolution” (given at the Salle Pleyel, the concert hall on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré) was about the proportional salary and new ways to calculate taxes. But there were other ideas, too. In June 1941, he promised, to a standing ovation, that “We are going to become the first state of a new Community. We shall issue twenty decrees in twenty days, one a day following the Rassemblement Nationale Populaire’s assumption of power. Then, in spite of her defeat—because of that defeat—France will once again take her rightful place in the world.”36 A talk on taxes was more problematic, culminating as it did with the phrase: “There can be no patriotism without a mystique of blood and soil.” Since ignorance of that mystique’s associations was unlikely for one so well acquainted with Hitler’s writings, this implies extreme innocence, Nazi leanings, or amoral opportunism. After the war he pleaded ignorance and innocence; and since that was what people preferred to believe, they did not question it, or him, too closely.

These broadcasts and lectures were often published as articles, in propaganda newspapers such as L’Oeuvre or La Gerbe, or periodicals such as Révolution Nationale (which Schueller financed himself). But there was also another, and much more popular, vehicle for his ideas—his beauty magazine, Votre Beauté. For cosmetics were still, as they had always been, acutely political.

In Britain and America, where women worked alongside men as a vital part of the war effort, glamor was recognized as being of the greatest psychological importance. When Helena Rubinstein asked President Roosevelt what she could do to help the war effort, FDR told her the story of a woman in London being stretchered out of a blitzed building. Offered a sedative, she insisted, first, on touching up her lipstick. “It just does something for me,” she said.

It certainly did something for Helena Rubinstein, Inc. The company’s range that year included 629 items: 62 creams, 78 powders, 46 perfumes, colognes, and eaux de toilette, 69 lotions, 115 lipsticks, plus soaps, rouges, and eye shadows. In 1941, its profits were $484,575; by 1942 they had almost doubled, to $823,529. That year every woman in the United States spent an average of twelve dollars on cosmetics.37 “You have got to look right down into their pocketbook and get that last nickel,” Madame remarked.

The war was good for business in other ways, too. In a development that she could never, at her most optimistic, have imagined—and one that would transform the postwar beauty industry—Helena Rubinstein became an official supplier to the U.S. Army. A few years earlier, Madame had tried to introduce a line of men’s toiletries, House of Gourielli, opening a lavish salon on Fifth Avenue she hoped would induce a new habit of male pampering. It failed to take off, however. The salon closed, and the men’s toiletries line faded away. But the war succeeded where all her efforts and advertising had failed, and moved men’s toiletries into the mainstream. When the Allies invaded North Africa in 1942, every GI was issued a kitbox containing sunburn cream, camouflage makeup, and cleanser, discreetly lettered on the inside “Helena Rubinstein Inc” and including instructions on how to apply cosmetics in desert conditions. Army PX stores routinely stocked a range of aftershave lotions, skin creams, deodorants, talcum powder, sunburn lotions, lip cream, and cut-price cologne, for use where no bathing facilities were available.38 A lucrative new market beckoned. “Men could be a lot more beautiful,” Madame observed hopefully in 1943,39 and if she had anything to do with it, they would be.

In Britain, too, glamor was taken seriously. It was becoming increasingly hard to source raw materials for the manufacture of cosmetics, which were classed as a nonessential industry. Even so, recruitment posters for Britain’s all-women Auxiliary Territorial Service, which provided drivers and ran army camps—a laborious and often drab life of catering, cleaning, and general maintenance—emphasized the importance of looking good. The most famous of these posters, Abram Games’s profile of a beautiful, poutingly lipsticked girl, her ATS cap set becomingly amid blond curls, caused something of a furor—for a poster, the ultimate compliment. People complained it was too sexy—and indeed, the girl might have stepped straight off a film set, perhaps one of those Powell and Pressburger wartime fables in which immaculately coiffed telephonists with cut-glass vowels inspire crashed airmen to cling to life. Games, however, stuck by his poster. It was, he insisted, drawn from life—a genuine ATS girl he had met in a train. British Vogue set out a detailed regime by which its readers might achieve comparable perfection, setting out a timetable for rising, washing, dressing, breakfasting, and making-up in one hour. Twenty of those sixty minutes were devoted to makeup. Lipstick, properly applied—color, blot, powder; color, blot, powder—would last all day without retouching. Helena Rubinstein had begun her career turning evening dresses into curtains. Now Vogue urged its readers to defeat rationing by turning their curtains into dresses—“Toile de Jouy curtains are ideal for pretty housecoats.”

The Nazis, with their embrace of naturism, sport, and motherhood, officially abhorred such degeneracy. Hitler stopped short of closing beauty parlors and hairdressers, allowing them to remain open throughout the war because, as he remarked to Goebbels in 1943, “women after all constitute a tremendous power and as soon as you dare to touch their beauty parlors they are your enemies.”40 But as always when women were offically relegated to the kitchen and the nursery, cosmetics were frowned upon. As early as 1933, it was decreed in Breslau that “painted” women could not attend Party meetings. The single women chosen to breed for Germany in the “Lebensborn” project, in which Aryan maidens were put at the disposal of SS officers, were not permitted to use lipstick, paint their nails, or pluck their eyebrows. Reddened lips and cheeks might suit the “Oriental” or “southern” woman, the sort of woman destined for Auschwitz or Belsen, but Aryan beauties supposedly preferred the purity of a suntanned skin, with its natural sheen of perspiration. “Though our weapon is but the wooden spoon, its impact must be no less than that of other weapons!” declaimed Reichsfrauenführerin Gertrud Scholtz-Klink.41

This stern philosophy was alien to France, where feminine beauty was an important part of the culture, and where devotion to style was epitomized by the haute couture for which Paris was renowned. Schueller’s own taste, however—oddly, it might be thought, for one whose business was so bound up with feminine beauty—tended, if his Révolution de l’économie is to be believed, rather toward the Nazi Kinder, Kirche, Küche (children, church, kitchen) model of womanhood. Votre Beauté reflected this. Its stern emphasis on fitness, sport, and diet, not to say the commercial imperative of selling more bottles of Ambre Solaire, had always inclined it to promote a healthy tan rather than lipstick and face powder, which were not L’Oréal products. Now it bracingly reflected the new hardship. Reappearing in a half-size format in November 1940, its first issue began with several pages of exercises as prescribed by Jean Borotra, the aging tennis star who had become the new regime’s General Commissioner for Sports. “Beauty,” the magazine declared, “is a discipline: it’s cowardly to let yourself go.” Naturally, wartime imposed certain difficulties when it came to grooming. But they could—must—be overcome. “No hot water? Tell yourself it’s all for the good! Cold water is far better for your health than hot. Hot water is a luxury for people made soft by carelessness. No more hot water, vive l’eau froide!” The magazine urged readers not to be nostalgic for the old days of culinary plenty: pictures of lamb chops were sternly crossed out, while plates of potatoes received a nod of approval with the exhortation: “Accept the restrictions bravely and with good grace—rationing will help you live longer.”1 Feeling the winter cold? Exercise was the thing! As for cosmetics, they were quite simply a relic of a discredited past age. “Women used to use far too much makeup—now we’re finding our true nature again,” readers were assured in the April 1941 issue.

When it came to product placement, however, the demands of commerce won out over propaganda. “For a woman used to looking after her body, soap is as necessary as bread!” urged an ad for Monsavon. A neighboring ad for L’Oréal was equally forthright. “Dyeing your hair is no longer a matter of coquetry, it’s a gesture of defiance, a social necessity.” But the tone remained stern. Frivolity and flirtation in the dancehall belonged to a past age. In wartime, survival was what mattered—and the race went to the fittest. “Jobs are scarce, competition’s hot—you have to look young! However capable and experienced you may be, gray hair will mean you don’t get hired.”

Strangely, Votre Beauté continued to feature the couture collections, some of which—Lanvin, Gres, Balenciaga—continued throughout the war years. Few of the magazine’s readers would have been able to afford these creations, but they had always been featured, and perhaps provided a comforting sense that life as it had once been was not wholly extinct. The most enthusiastic wartime clientele, however, was German. There was even a plan (soon abandoned) to remove the Paris couture houses wholesale to Berlin, a strangely schizophrenic notion given the official Nazi attitude toward chic, but one accurately reflecting the invaders’ taste for luxury.

Whether Votre Beauté’s readers shared its stern outlook was doubtful. Most wartime photos of young Frenchwomen show no sign of a retreat into scrubbed dowdiness. On the contrary, they tried their best to stay seductive against the odds. One urban legend told how a smart hairdresser employed young men to generate electricity for the dryers by cycling on stationary tandems in the cellars. And perhaps it was true: similar tandems can still be seen in the catacombs beneath the 15th arrondissement.

In those days of scarcity, when only approved publications were allotted paper and ink, Votre Beauté’s continued appearance confirmed that its owner toed the official line. It would form part of the case against him when, after the Liberation, Schueller had to face trial. In fact he was tried twice: once in 1946 for industrial collaboration as the owner of L’Oréal and Valentine—when he was all but convicted, scraping out an acquittal on the second hearing—and once in 1948 in his personal capacity as one of the leaders of MSR, when he was acquitted. Had he been found guilty on either count his businesses would have been nationalized, and he would have been banned from ever running a business in France again.

Fortunately for him, little of the evidence brought against him was as clear and undeniable as the volumes of Votre Beauté. As usual when alleged collaborators were brought before the courts, there was a jumble of conflicting testimony, leaving gaps and ambiguities that could be interpreted more or less according to taste. The transcripts of the evidence given in Schueller’s trials show how hard it was to be certain either of witnesses’ motivations or of their veracity.

For example, an item of evidence in both trials concerned a van requisitioned from L’Oréal by the Germans in 1944, when the Occupation was ending and they needed transport to evacuate both themselves and their loot. Everyone agreed that a van had indeed been handed over. But the courts heard three different versions of this story. In one, a late-model van was unquestioningly provided; in another, a van was provided, but it was a gazogène, a vehicle developed for use when petrol was unavailable and that ran on methane gas; in the third, a smart new van was promised, but the German in charge omitted to make a final check, and a broken-down old gazogène was substituted—one so decrepit that it had to be towed to within a few meters of the factory gate on a trailer, as it would never have made the entire journey unaided. Which story was true?

At least vans were visible objects. Either they were or were not there, had or had not been provided. Less tangible, and so that much harder to pin down, were policies and attitudes. The detested Service du Travail Obligatoire, or STO, under which Frenchmen were compelled to go and work in Germany, was one example.

At first the Germans had tried to raise a volunteer workforce by promising that for each volunteer who went to Germany, a French POW would be released. This arrangement was known as the Relève, and many of Schueller’s employees attested that he had addressed his workforce urging those unmarried and without family responsibilities to volunteer in this way. He offered substantial sums to any who did so volunteer, and explained that no one should hesitate to leave because they were worried about the living conditions they might expect: they would sleep in good beds and eat well. This was very far from the general horrific experience, though L’Oréal employees returning from Germany testified that they had received regular food parcels.

Schueller admitted that he had indeed encouraged men to volunteer for the Relève, but insisted that he had been motivated purely by the desire to repatriate prisoners. When it became evident that the Germans were not in fact fulfilling this promise, he ceased to support it. In any case, the program soon ceased to be voluntary, and the Relève was replaced by the compulsory STO.

But was Schueller’s real motivation as innocent as he tried to make it appear? One man testified that when he and his group left, “M.Schueller gave us lunch and a little pep talk, saying we didn’t need to be afraid, he had always felt more at home in Germany than in England.”42 The man was shocked to hear this overt enthusiasm for the invaders, though perhaps it was not entirely surprising given Schueller’s Alsatian parentage. Alsace borders Germany, its dialect is a form of German, and many Alsatians (though not Schueller) felt more German than French—so much so that some of the SS troops who perpetrated the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glâne in 1944 were Alsatian.2

There is no doubt that Schueller, like all employers, tried to minimize the number of workers obliged to undertake this hated journey, as much for his own sake as for theirs. Experienced men were hard to replace. His line was that the reason he had agreed to fulfill some German business orders was in order to keep his workers in France, which may have been true but of course was also a handy way of justifying collaboration. He pointed out that his products had no military value, produced figures showing that the profits derived from German sales were zero in 1940 and 1941, less than 3 percent of profits in 1942, just over 5 percent in 1943, and zero in 194443—and reiterated that he thought taking a few German orders would reduce the number of his workers forced to go to Germany. Schueller’s loyal manager at L’Oréal, Georges Mangeot, confirmed this story. He said they began to deal with the Germans in 1942 because they thought that otherwise, with no German business and in a nonvital industry, they would be disadvantaged with regard to STO.

The STO numbers did indeed come down—from 200 to 93 for L’Oréal, and from 75 to 5 for Monsavon. But Mangeot also described how, after discussing the matter with Schueller, he got the numbers reduced in quite another way—by bribing a German member of staff at the Bureau Allemand, who was later shot, having been caught taking similar bribes.44 And at Monsavon, the reduction was achieved by the young François Dalle, who persuaded a friendly commissaire de police to mislay, at considerable risk to himself, the factory’s list of eligible men (which included Dalle himself).45

Necessary collaboration, or bribes, or a bit of both? In the complex and shadowy world of occupied France, survival, even for those as well-placed as Schueller, was an endless balancing act, this morsel of disobedience bought at the price of that obeisance to authority. And this balancing act was inevitably reflected in the postwar trials that came to be known as the épuration, or purge. Evidence depends on record, and the record reflected at best only a small part of the reality. The judging panels had to reconstitute what was missing as well as they could.

Notoriously, people’s motive for testifying in these cases was, more often than not, revenge. Schueller’s case was no exception. His chief accuser, in both his trials, was a man called Georges Digeon who had once managed the L’Oréal canteen. It was Digeon who, in 1944, first drew the authorities’ attention to Schueller, in an affidavit accusing him of giving the MSR more than 20 million francs; of providing a room for it at rue Royale; and of being a member of the executive committee of Déat’s party. Digeon also raised the question of two vans: the one mentioned earlier, requisitioned by the Germans in 1944, and another allegedly given by Schueller to the MSR. This van had all its windows darkened except one at the back, enabling people to be photographed without their knowledge. Schueller, Digeon said, had provided these vehicles without question when asked. But others raised questions about Digeon himself. He was loathed throughout L’Oréal, was known by all as a collaborator who had done regular business with the Germans, and had been sacked in September 1944 “on the demand of the factory” for making baseless accusations. He had then gone straight to the local mairie, and had laid the accusations against Schueller that formed the basis of both the personal and industrial épuration trials.46 It could hardly be clearer that he was motivated by fury—and also, as with many such accusers, by an urgent need to divert attention from what he himself had done. On the other hand, that did not mean his accusations were groundless.

Another piece of evidence presented at Schueller’s trials was an anonymous letter from some members of the CGT trade union at Valentine, denouncing Schueller for his support of the STO, and for employing known collaborators.

If the few workers who are still there can bring themselves to tell the truth, they’ll confirm all this. We swear on the heads of our wives and children that we’re telling the truth, and we hope you’ll arrest that whole nest of collaborators, whether they’re millionaires or just working for a boss. . . . We promise to tell you who we are as soon as you start your enquiries, but you can’t trust these bastards, and as we need to eat we can’t sign our names yet because we’d be thrown out. . . . We swear on our honor that there’s no question of vengeance in all this, we’re just good Frenchmen who want to see the wicked punished.47

But of course they were a bit more than that. As everyone knew, the trade unions had obvious reasons for hating Schueller, who publicly despised the workers’ democracy they stood for.

Another difficulty was that, as the war progressed, people’s behavior changed with their expectations. In June 1940, a Nazi victory seemed imminent and inevitable. But in June 1941, Hitler invaded Russia, extending his fighting front by 1,800 miles and bringing the Red Army into the war on the Allies’ side. And in December 1941, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor finally brought America, too, into the war. The German victory, which had seemed so certain, now seemed far less assured. Behavior that had seemed most ill-advised yesterday suddenly began to make sense, as prudent persons hedged their bets—among them, Schueller. On December, 10, 1942, he sent a note to L’Oréal representatives:

Competitors are spreading lies about me. They come to clients with their order book and my book The Economic Revolution with passages underlined in red pencil, and use them to present me as a bad person who shouldn’t be dealt with.

They accuse me of being German. I’m not.

They accuse me of being Jewish. I’m Catholic. My father was a seminarist for a time. . . .

I’m not interested in politics, but in political economy. . . . I was almost made a minister or an undersecretary but I refused because it would have been impossible to do what I would have wanted.

I belonged to the Economic Commission of MSR—but only so long as MSR was approved by Marshal Pétain. When that was withdrawn, I resigned. . . .

I think it my duty, in the present circumstances, to do all I can to help in what I consider to be the revival of my country. . . .48

He did so by quietly extending his support to the Resistance as well as the occupiers. On the one hand, L’Oréal set aside a room for MSR meetings; on the other, Schueller also organized a weekly mail and parcel drop across the boundary between the zone occupée and the zone libre, using a L’Oréal van driven by an employee who happened to have an American passport (accredited with a forged German stamp). On the one hand, he continued to finance La Révolution Nationale; on the other, he gave 700,000 francs to the underground in the maquis in the Puy de Dôme and sent 2 million francs to de Gaulle. He joined a network that helped more than two hundred people escape into the zone libre in the Cher, near Saint-Aignan; he helped others escape from Paris. At the beginning of 1944, his paint firm, Valentine, gave over 100,000 francs to help réfractaires—workers who went underground to escape the STO. And all the time, while publicly supporting the official line, he maintained, within occupied Paris, amicable contacts with friends from earlier days.

One such was Fred Joliot-Curie. The two had moved far apart since the early days at L’Arcouest. Joliot-Curie had remained in academic research, which, far from being “dusty,” had won him, together with his wife, Irène Curie, the 1935 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Like Schueller, he had always been socially conscious, but there, too, they had moved in opposite directions. Joliot-Curie was now a Communist and active in the Resistance, and had sent his papers on atomic research to London as soon as war broke out, keeping them out of Hitler’s grasp.

The contrast between Joliot-Curie’s wartime life and that of Schueller illustrated the material advantages of collaboration. Both men were now famous and distinguished. But despite his eminence, Joliot-Curie was not sheltered from the general hardship, while for Schueller, life in wartime was far from austere.

Schueller’s only real wartime inconvenience occurred in 1941, when he was forced to move out of his luxurious apartment on boulevard Suchet, in the smart 16th arrondissement, as all the apartment buildings in that street had been requisitioned by the Germans. The owner of the buildings wrote a pleading letter on behalf of his lessees to the sinister Fernand de Brinon, then Vichy’s “Ambassador to Paris.” None of the foreigners living in the apartment buildings had had to move; couldn’t at least the Aryan French be spared? These were important people: Madame Roederer of the champagne family; the president of Cinzano; M. Guerlain the perfumier; bankers; industrialists.49 No, they all had to go, even though Schueller’s name was included on a list of important industrial collaborators who, on the strict and express instruction of Reichsmarschall Göring, were to be allowed to keep their apartments in otherwise requisitioned districts. He moved to avenue Paul Doumer, a short walk away, but preferred to spend his time at his grand house, the Villa Bianca, at Franconville. Joliot-Curie, by contrast, could not even obtain a new tire for the motorbike on which he relied to commute between the Collège de France, where he held a chair, his lab at Ivry, and his temporary home outside Paris. His request was turned down, and a little later he registered the acquisition of a bicycle, with gears.

Despite this disparity, the two remained on surprisingly amicable terms. For Joliot-Curie, Schueller presumably represented that invaluable wartime necessity—one of the enemy who could be trusted on a personal level. Despite what he must have felt about Schueller’s politics, he still felt able to request help for a Jewish chemical engineer languishing in a prisoner-of-war camp and who might be a useful employee in Schueller’s businesses. Schueller replied to his “cher ami,” from a spa where he was taking the cure for rheumatism, that to his great regret he could not help—he had “approached M. Scapini many times, and we got a few people out at first, but there’s been nothing doing on that front for a while now. You can imagine, I’m really sorry about this.”50 Georges Scapini was the man deputed by Pétain to negotiate with the German authorities regarding prisoners of war. If he couldn’t help, no one could.

In return, Schueller requested a favor of his own—one that throws a rare light on his personal life. In 1927 his first wife, Berthe, had died, and in 1932 he had married again. The second Madame Schueller was Liliane’s English governess, Miss Annie Burrows from Fulham (a genteelly run-down part of southwest London), a choice that may reflect her charm, or simply Schueller’s own loneliness and lack of social life. He felt that a wife at home was something every man needed. It was one of the social rules set out in the Révolution de l’économie. And his work-centered life afforded him few opportunities to meet suitable ladies.

At the time, Miss Burrows (generally known as Nita) must have been overwhelmed by her good luck. Although governesses in novels frequently married their wealthy employers, they rarely did so in real life. But when war broke out, her position, as an Englishwoman married to a leading collaborator, became equivocal, to say the least. She was by no means the only wife to find herself in a similarly awkward fix. The chief Vichy Jew-hunter, the odious Darquier de Pellepoix, was married to an Australian, while Fernand de Brinon, an arch-anti-Semite, had a Jewish wife. How Madame de Brinon felt we do not know. Madame Darquier drowned her troubles in drink. As for Madame Schueller, she seems to have taken refuge in nervous ill health. “The doctor who used to advise Madame Schueller, Dr. Layani, is a non-Aryan, and has escaped to the zone libre,” Schueller wrote. “I’m looking for a replacement, someone really good on women’s illnesses . . . and who can put up with my wife’s short temper. Would the director of the Hôpital Curie know anyone?” Joliot-Curie gave a name, and undertook to write a letter of recommendation. He enclosed, along with his note, two flasks of rabbit urine, one irradiated, the other a control.51 Between the politics and the business maneuvers, Schueller still kept up his interest in chemistry.

Obviously, when forced to account for himself by the épuration, he did his best to emphasize his Resistance-friendly activities and draw a veil over the others. It was not an easy task, given that those others had been so very public. But although Schueller’s was an extreme case, so many businessmen were prosecuted for collaboration following the Liberation that at least one employers’ federation, that of the ironmasters, circulated a questionnaire to its members to help them prepare dossiers in their own defense. Two main defense planks were recommended: one, that they had kept the largest possible proportion of their production for the use of the French civilian economy and had done as little as possible for the Germans; two, that they had obstructed the deportation of their workers for the STO.52

Schueller, like everyone else, stressed these. And like everyone else, he showed how he had helped Jews escape the Nazi horrors. All those he had helped in their hour of need now repaid the debt by writing letters in his support. Two brothers named Freudiger, neighbors in Brittany, had told him they were thinking of joining de Gaulle in London. Schueller warmly encouraged them to do so. Professor Levy of the École Normale, a consultant chemist to L’Oréal, fled to Lyon in the zone libre and received money while he was there, paid through L’Oréal’s Lyon branch. Another professor of chemistry, M. Meyer, who taught at Lyon University, was sacked from the faculty by Vichy and left without work. Schueller offered a loan to be repaid after the war, as well as other unspecified help. Every time the two met, Meyer testified, Schueller repeated his hatred of the Germans, of the Nazis, of racism. A L’Oréal chemist, M. Chain, first continued to work under a false name, but then had to vanish. He continued to be paid. Mlle. Huffner, a secretary, was paid under a false name, and money was sent to her when she left for the zone libre. M. Kogan, the factory manager at Valentine, was a Russian émigré, naturalized only recently, and was therefore caught by the Nazi laws that declared all Jews in this situation to be noncitizens, liable to deportation. Schueller bought him false papers to escape to Portugal; when they failed, and he was stuck in Spain, Schueller arranged a job with L’Oréal’s Spanish subsidiary. M. Schatzkes, L’Oréal’s commercial director, was sent to Lyon; when competitors complained that the Lyon branch had a Jewish manager, he was sent to Marseille; and when that became dangerous, he stayed in a villa at St. Jean Cap-Ferrat until Marseille became safe again. When the Germans finally arrived there, he and his wife were enabled to escape to Switzerland.

Almost everyone hauled up before the courts in the postwar purges could offer similar examples. Admiral Darlan himself, who for some time was Pétain’s deputy (and, thus, effectively head of the Vichy government), and who negotiated a political alliance between French Vichy forces and Nazi Germany, pleaded for Jews who had married into his own family—all belonging to “good old French Jewish families”—to be spared deportation. Perhaps helping a few individuals made it easier not to think about the rest—or perhaps, conversely, the thought of people one knew and liked being subjected to some terrible fate made the awful reality too uncomfortably clear.

The few contemporary documents that survive from the Jewish community show just how difficult it was to persuade people to confront that reality. Hélène Berr, the daughter of a prominent Jewish industrialist,3 kept a journal giving a day-by-day account of life as a Jew in occupied Paris. In entry after entry, she records her helpless horror as one after another of her friends and acquaintances is deported. In November 1943, the Berrs’ neighbor, Mme. Agache,

came rushing in because she had just heard that young Mme. Bokanowski, who had been sent to the Hôpital Rothschild with her two infants when her husband was in Drancy, had been taken back to Drancy. She asked Maman: “You mean to say they are deporting children?” She was horrified.

It’s impossible to express the pain that I felt on seeing that she had taken all this time to understand, and that she had only understood because it concerned someone she knew. Maman . . . replied: “We have been telling you so for a whole year, but you would not believe us.”

Not knowing, not understanding even when you do know, because you have a closed door inside you, and you only can realize what you merely know if you open it. That is the enormous drama of our age. Everyone is blind to those being tortured.53

Schueller, of course, had invested everything in not confronting these realities. While he comforted his conscience by helping his own Jewish acquaintances, his new friends and colleagues from MSR were dividing the spoils of abandoned Jewish property—that property whose “administration” was such a valued perk of collaborationist life. “I didn’t much enjoy the Friday policy meetings [of MSR at the L’Oréal offices] because they went on too long,” Henry Charbonneau remembered. “I was only too happy to leave L’Oréal’s fancy panelling for my office in rue Paradis (where we had taken over the LICA building) and get on with working on propaganda.”54 LICA was the Ligue Contre Antisémitisme.

Schueller’s épuration hearing for personal offenses took place in 1948. He was acquitted with little trouble. In the end what seems to have weighed with the judge was less the evidence, which could be read so many different ways, than the character references given by two witnesses. One was his old friend Jacques Sadoul, who was still a Communist—an important recommendation, since the Communists had been the only political party to support the Resistance officially—and had now also become mayor of Ste. Maxime in the Var. And the other, whose evidence tipped the scales in Schueller’s favor, was Pierre de Bénouville, a garlanded Resistance hero, founder in 1942 of the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance, organizer of the Free French forces in Algeria, and who had been named a general on the Italian front—one of only three résistants to end the war with this rank.

Bénouville’s testimony concerned one of those incidents that now reads like something out of an action movie, but which were quite commonplace during the dark and dramatic days of the Occupation. One of Schueller’s Resistance contacts, a man named Max Brusset, notified him that a delegate of the Provisional Government in Algiers wanted to meet him. The meeting was to take place at Brusset’s apartment at 28, boulevard Raspail. It was agreed that Schueller would prepare a report concerning certain questions, and deliver it Saturday morning. Needing a little longer, he asked to delay the delivery until Monday morning at eleven. But at nine o’clock Monday, there was a phone call from Brusset: he had the flu, Schueller shouldn’t come. In fact, at seven that morning the Gestapo had arrived at the apartment. Brusset’s sixth-floor bedroom gave onto a terrace, from which he had been able to jump onto another terrace on the fifth floor and enter the apartment from which he was now phoning. He was able to contact all save one of the people who had been due to meet that morning; that one arrived as arranged, carrying incriminating papers, was arrested, and almost certainly shot. Bénouville knew Brusset, and had promised him that he would provide an authenticating certificate for this story when he returned to Paris.55 The panel accepted Benouville’s evidence and recommended a relaxe.

The hearings for industrial collaboration, however, which began in 1946 and were not resolved until two years later, had been more problematic. The panel found that Schueller’s Resistance activities were not enough to outweigh the evidence that he had collaborated with the Germans. He had organized lectures in his factories, promised help to men who volunteered to fight alongside the Germans, funded the MSR, published La Révolution de l’économie with its anti-union tirades, devised the economic policy of the RNP and encouraged the Relève. The panel did not feel that the various Resistance activities he had brought to their notice counterbalanced this, and found him guilty. In addition to disqualifying him from business, the panel also threatened to forward the evidence to the Court of Justice, which might have confiscated his assets, sentenced him to national disgrace, to a prison term, or even to death.

And if Schueller was not guilty of collaboration, who was? Not only did his name appear in RNP and MSR literature alongside those of Marcel Déat, who was sentenced to death, and Eugène Deloncle, whom only assassination saved from a comparable fate, but he had left an indelible trail in numerous articles, pamphlets, and broadcasts, all urging collaboration; his book La Révolution de l’économie had been published on the same list as the works of Hitler himself. Acts or motives might remain cloudy, but the published word was one thing that could not be denied.

Once again, however, Bénouville saved him. Twice—at the first hearing, and again after the guilty verdict—he sent urgent letters, stressing his desire to testify on behalf of the accused, visiting the judge and the Préfet, apologizing when business took him away from Paris at the crucial moment. Schueller, he insisted, was a victim of his fixation on proportional salaries, which had led him into various imprudent actions. But he had been of inestimable help to Bénouville.56 Bénouville got his way, and Schueller was let off.

Such solidarity between resisters and collaborators was not unusual during the épuration. As Schueller’s own activities demonstrated, channels of communication between the two sides had always remained open. During the Occupation, collaborators often put in a word for a Resistance figure in trouble. Now those who had been helped, helped in their turn. Bénouville testified in this way on behalf of many old friends. What was interesting about his efforts for Schueller, however, was that the two had met only once, and then briefly (when Schueller, anxious to buy himself onto the winning side, had promised financial aid when Bénouville needed it). Indeed, Bénouville insisted that Schueller had never approached him personally for help. What he had done, he had done for Max Brusset. Even so, it seems surprising that he should have put quite so much effort into getting Schueller cleared. Why had he done so?

The answer, like everything else about Schueller, could be traced back to the life rules he had evolved. The way both Schueller and Rubinstein conducted their family affairs would be decisive in the intermingling of their stories. And Bénouville, for Schueller, was family—albeit that family was a surrogate one, and Bénouville only a tangential member.