Robert Brasillach and «Notre avant-guerre»

Robert Brasillach at his trial.

Today is the birthday of Robert Brasillach (March 31, 1909 – February 6, 1945), French journalist, novelist and film historian (Histoire du cinema, co-written with Maurice Bardéche).


De Gaulle refused the request. At that point he was head of a Provisional Government that delicately balanced a coalition of communists, socialists, and Free French, and could not afford to spare the life of young writer mainly known for editing a pro-fascist newspaper, Je Suis Partout. Besides which, De Gaulle would soon be commuting the death sentence of his onetime mentor, 89-year-old Marshall Philippe Pétain.

Robert Brasillach’s Notre avant-guerre is basically a long and digressive essay, combining both a sentimental autobiography of his youth, c. 1925-1933, and a kind of journalistic aide-mémoire about political figures and crises of the latter 1930s. The French political upheavals in the Popular Front era (1936) loom large, as do the related events of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

Brasillach apparently completed his initial version around the start of the Second World War, dating his foreword 13 September 1939. However, the book did not come out until 1941, by which point the political landscape had changed a bit. His dream of a resurgent French nationalism no longer seemed quite apropos or relevant. So he inserted a number of emendations to bring the book up-to-date, and perhaps make it seem less foolishly optimistic.

The excerpts translated here deal mainly with the 1936-38 period, and include some conversations (and automobile ride) with Leon Degrelle, the young head of the Belgian Rexist party and fresh new face of the European right. Later on, Brasillach goes off on a two-week automobile excursion to the Spanish Civil War, with Pierre Cousteau and his own brother-in-law and friend Maurice Bardèche.

From Notre avant-guerre:

By the mid-1930s we’d come a long way from those muddled promises made in Geneva around 1925 [1], where they were building castles in the air. Granted, we young French weren’t entirely free of illusions ten years later. But our dreams had another coloration, subtly different, and this is difficult thing to understand, as I describe the intellectual adventure of the pre-war period. It was a time when everyone was turning to foreign countries, seeking (and often rejecting) their warnings and instructions. It was a time when French nationalism came to a new consciousness of itself, but also a time when we listened more closely than usual to what was going on around our borders. It was a time when a national spirit formed, as though in preparation for a French «fascisme». Such was the final formative experience for many young people on the eve of war, and yet it’s a story that seldom gets told.

  *   *  *

It was during a journey to Belgium in 1936 that I met for the first time some people possessed of this new spirit. Meanwhile the communist revolution was going on in Paris [June 1936], though I didn’t yet know about it yet.[2] A guided tour for journalists and travel-agency directors had been organized by Belgian tourism. I don’t know why, but I had been asked to be part of it. I have never done any other group trip: this one instance was both boring and highly amusing. Mainly I remember the comical aspect of the caravan, the oddball characters. I found some new companions and showed them the streets of Bruges, the quays of Ghent, once we got away from our chaperoned groups: Roger d’Almeras, Jean Barreyre.[3] We passed through the villages of the Ardennes, as enchanting still as in Shakespeare, where in twilight a banal castle of false Louis XIII style became a magical and green place I will never forget. And I took the opportunity to go and see somebody of whom there had a lot of talk in France for a few weeks, the leader of a new Belgian party, Leon Degrelle.

My fellow Frenchmen on the Belgium trip probably did not notice the slogans along our route—drawn in white on the pavements, black on the houses—saying “Vote Rex.” Or: “Rex will conquer.” Along the endless lengths of Flanders roads, and in the beautiful forests of the Ardennes, shone out these fateful words. You could see ingenious posters in bright colors, or immense photographs of a vigorous young man. Such were the last stages of this rough and surprising election campaign, which was to bring to the 200-member Belgian Chamber of Deputies twenty-one members of a new party that was unknown a year earlier: the famous Rexist party.

Young Degrelle, c. 1928.

I remember seeing Leon Degrelle for the first time, the very day of his thirtieth birthday. He was a lad with a full and smiling face, who didn’t even look his age. I watched him walk to his table after everyone else, I heard the sound of his voice more than his words. If it is true that a certain physical radiance, a certain animality, is necessary to a leader of men, it is certain that Leon Degrelle possessed this radiance and this animality. I had not heard him speak in public yet, but I was sure he must make a remarkable speaker.

You have to bear in mind that in 1936, a portion of Belgium (and also a little of the foreign opinion) was quite definitely enthralled with the head of Rex. People wanted to know about the movement’s ideas, they boosted him in major French newspapers. Men would say with a little irony: “Women love Leon Degrelle a lot. They find him so beautiful!” The Rexists actually joked about it all, with a frightful play on words. “This is what we call Rex-Appeal!”

   *  *  *

I saw Leon Degrelle a few times in those years, in Paris or in Brussels. Pierre Daye [4] arranged our first meeting. The contrast was striking between Daye, thoughtful, smiling, curious about everything, and this young man Degrelle, impetuous and ever-ebullient. He was touching when he spoke of his little daughter Chantal, who’d been gravely ill for some years, and for whom the party was making pilgrimages; and he himself would sometimes on a snowy night run over to Notre-Soul de Ham, because she was in danger. He seemed to me symbolic of our time, richly alive and picturesque. He took on new challenges with joy, tempted by life, its pleasures and promises, never worrying too much about life’s temptations or making a wrong move.

I will remember for a long time, I suppose, that night in a car, on the road from Namur to Brussels, in the soggy woods, where Leon Degrelle, on his return from a meeting, told me, in no particular order, stories about his country childhood—birdwatching and stealing applies, this little boy in sabots. I remember his voice, a little hoarse from his speechmaking—a voice I listened to without seeing his face, in spite of all the brisk wind and the swerving of the car, and the noise of the rain against the windows. He talked to me about his family:

“All my father’s family is French, native of Soire-le-Château, near Maubeuge. At the little cemetery all mine are buried. We were an extremely large family. All this is inscribed on our livre de raison [family register], which I still possess. They mark the birth, the reason why the children were given such names, and how the old ones died. I had an ancestor who was killed at Austerlitz, on the very day a daughter was born, and she was called Souffrance. Another daughter, born at the time of Napoleon’s wars—she too—and was called Victoire. For four hundred years, farmers called Degrelle have cultivated the same field. In the livre de raison, there are also the love letters of the fiancé to fiancée. Along with their love, they give current news, the harvest. They say: the wheat, or the rye, will be good this year. I think, you see, that in France in the time of kings there were millions of families that were like mine; and that’s why France is a great country.”


“Put me twenty kilometers from Bouillon, out in the woods,” said Leon Degrelle. “I’ll find my way with my eyes closed. As children, we could see the trains come down from the woods over the Semois. The wonderful thing there, that’s the winter. It brought us tree trunks, pines, covered with ice, and sometimes an enormous boar, all swollen and tangled with grass, which got caught against the piers of the bridge.

“Then came spring. Boys running on the slopes, searching for the eggs to find. We’d study the young pines. In the old pine trees, the birds won’t nest. For hours you had to wait to see the mother approach the young tree. Alors, we climbed, and found the nest. We ate the hot eggs. Or we would go to steal apples. My father had apples too—but stolen apples have such better taste!”

And Leon Degrelle added:




I did not want to interrupt this boy so sensitive to all that surrounds supports him, when he evoked the familiar demons of his childhood.


   *   *   *

Eventually Rex lost its power of seduction, along with Degrelle’s attraction to the crowds. The success of Rexism is explained by the atmosphere of 1936, by the Popular Front, by the communist menace. Thousands of brave people, who certainly had no dictatorial ideal, believed in Rex against Moscow. Outside Belgium, their effort was regarded with immense sympathy. Degrelle’s youth and dynamism formed a charming legend. There was agreement among classes and across the various factions of the country: the Rexist program was attractive, and it was right. The proof is that all parties and the government have more or less resumed it.

There were mistakes in maneuvers, and imprudent actions, maybe serious, I don’t know. Rex was carried [in 1936] by the anti-parliamentary wave, independently of Degrelle’s oratorical talent, by the deep needs of young people who thought they’d found in the movement the answer to their deepest aspirations.

When the war of 1939 broke out, Leon Degrelle vigorously supported the policy of neutrality. Belgium, however, was to enter the war on May 10, 1940. The chief of Rex was arrested in order to prevent disorder. For months the party had been disintegrating, and several very serious accusations had been made against the young leader. [Degrelle had reportedly accepted funds from Hitler and Mussolini.] But let us not forget that in 1936, in any case, there were on the Rexist platforms the wounded veterans of the old war, wearing the French Croix de Guerre: patriotic fighters, and authentically francophiles. In 1936 there was no need for a Frenchman to regard the Rexists as enemies of his country, let alone Germans. Likewise with their leader—son of a Frenchman, married to a Frenchwoman. However you judge his later actions [After a period of imprisonment by the French, Degrelle returned to Belgium and openly collaborated with the Germans.] we did see the curious birth of a movement, and the arrival of an astounding figure. And we can recognize that the success of nationalism in these years came from its power to stir up a crowd with visions, and (be it good or bad) poetry.

*  *  *


The Spanish war lasted from July 18th, 1936, to April 1st, 1939. The Spanish generals, soon to be commanded by Franco, had suddenly risen against the Popular Front government. To the Marxists, it was all about the “rebels” against the “Republicans.” To others it was Nationalists versus Reds. Up until the alert of September 1938 [when leftist International Brigades were banned from combat zones, per order of the tottering Republican government] the Spanish war never ceased a single day to excite French opinion. First of all, we had to defend ourselves at every moment against the Marxists who were pushing for us to intervene alongside the Spanish Reds: petitions, demonstrations, newspapers, parliamentarians—there was simply no let-up. Georges Bernanos [5] and Jacques Maritain, those confused Catholics, took the side of those who dug up Carmelite graves and laid the bodies on church steps; who killed sixteen thousand priests and ten bishops.

 *  *  *

One day [in 1939] I met Georges Bernanos, now booted out of Majorca, where he’d pitched his vagabond’s tent. This corpulent mop-top laid out his grievances to me for an hour, repeating the same fuliginous phrases, shaking that crazy old lion’s head and banging on about his old hobbyhorses. First he was going to publish a book against Spain; then—and this is in 1939, right on the eve of the war—he was going to do a book denouncing the younger generation in France. Two utterly hopeless ventures. The Bernanos meeting jolted me, and I persuaded myself I’d just seen a madman.

Ce Soir, a Communist journal that dared not announce itself as that, was specially founded to support the cause of the “republicans” of Spain, because Vendredi [a Popular Front weekly, 1935-39] was only a weekly newspaper, and too intellectual to be successful. But as for us, we followed with wonder the beautiful events of the war. The whole world was passionately following the siege of Alcazar in Toledo [siege of Nationalist rebels in Andalusia, July-September 1936]. The resistance of Oviedo [siege of Nationalists in northwest Spain, August-October 1936],  of the sanctuary of La Cabeza [siege of nationalists at a religious shrine in August 1936, broken by Republican forces May 1937], we learned about later. They spoke of the administrative skill of General Franco, of the human reforms, of the Auxilio Social [Social Aid, a pro-Franco humanitarian relief organization]. One would dream of the figure of the young founder of the Falange, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera [6]. The left-wing press portrayed General Queipo de Llano [7] as a ridiculous figure—he who took Seville alone, and who is a picturesque and beguiling man. Italy and Germany sent volunteers on the side of Franco, while meantime France and Belgium took the side of their opponents. These daily incidents and the never-ending danger in Spain were with us every moment. We would learn the songs of the Falange and the Requetés [Carlist militia], the salute of ¡Arriba España! [“Cara al Sol”: Falangist anthem]:

The flags will return victorious,
At the happy step of peace . . .

In October 1936 I’d written a little book with Henri Massis about the Alcázar, based on an idea he had. Charles Maurras had gone to Spain and been received by General Franco as though he were a head of state. In April 1938 Pierre Gaxote and Pierre Daye, accompanied by M. de Lequerica, made a triumphant journey to Seville.


At that time, crossing the frontier was arduous. It was first necessary to sign papers in Paris releasing the French State from all responsibility, and to swear that nothing would be done contrary to non-intervention, nothing which might have led one to think that one was inclined to a one political faction rather than to another. Happy joke! At the International Bridge of Irun, you were fingerprinted and photographed, but otherwise treated with good grace. When we had gone through, we saw that an anonymous man had written on our safe-conduct pass: “Viva Je Suis Partout!” [9]


1. Brasillach refers to the post-WWI Geneva protocols regarding disarmament; probably thinking also of the Locarno Treaties the same year, guaranteeing the borders of France, Germany and Belgium.

2. The Front Populaire government under Leon Blum, beginning in June 1936, was a coalition of the Communist Party and various other leftist parties in the Assembly.

3. Roger d’Almeras and Jean Barreyre were journalists and film critics, like Brasillach.

4. Pierre Daye, 1892-1960, was a Belgian journalist, Rexist party supporter, and correspondent for Brasillach’s Je Suis Partout.

5. George Bernanos, 1888-1948, French novelist and pro-monarchist polemicist. Briefly supportive of the Spanish rebels, then an anti-Francoite.

6. José Antonio Primo de Rivera was a Spanish nobleman and founder of Falangism, executed by the Republicans in December 1936.

7. Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, 1875-1951, Spanish general, hero of Seville, accused in Republican legend as responsible for mass executions after the battle.

8. Pierre-Antoine Costeau, 1906-1958, French right-wing journalist and brother of deep-sea explorer Jacques Costeau.

9. The excerpts were translated for this article from the Livre de Poche edition of Notre avant-guerre: Mémoires. Paris, ©1992, Maurice Bardèche. Pages 301-320.

Robert Brasillach and «Notre avant-guerre»