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The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach By Alice Kaplan University of Chicago Press, 312 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Controversy has continued to surround Brasillach's fate. Kaplan, the daughter of a Nuremberg prosecutor, reminds us that it is difficult to consider these matters -- and individuals like Brasillach -- with a cool and measured eye. On the other hand, she agrees with Simone de Beauvoir, who attended Brasillach's trial, that his sentence was symbolic rather than judicially sound. The case is even more charged for us today because our very definition of "hate speech" is a product of the events of the 1940s, the period that created much of our contemporary moral debate about whether and how to punish the sort of "intellectual crimes" Brasillach committed.

De Gaulle later declared that whereas he had pardoned from execution all those who had not actively colluded with German authorities, he had to make an exception for Brasillach. "Talent," he loftily declared, "is a responsibility." Brasillach had fully earned his death warrant, in other words, because of his poisonous pen.

Only in France, it is often said, could the misuse of words carry a death sentence. With Brasillach's death, France attempted both to close the terrible wounds of the Occupation and to affirm the majesty of the written word. Had he been tried just a year later, many historians believe, Brasillach almost certainly would not have died. And the French intelligentsia, many of whom attended his sensational trial at the Palais de Justice in January 1945, were certainly uneasy with his condemnation. Fascist he may have been; but Brasillach was still one of them -- an intellectual, a literary star, a renowned literary critic of exceptional sensitivity and acuity, the youthful author of the world's first sustained work of film criticism, the superb "L'Histoire du Cinema" of 1937.

An odor of bad conscience hung over the whole affair, for Brasillach's judge and prosecutor had themselves -- as he pointed out in his spirited defense -- been employed by Vichy. Was Brasillach, as his contemporary defenders on the far right now claim, a sacrificial lamb butchered by the forces of Gaullism on the altar of some fictive "national unity"? Or were his guilt and his punishment simply two independent vectors which should not have met at the stake, as Kaplan suggests?

Brasillach was born in 1909 to a comfortable upper middle class family from Perpignan. His father served in the colonial military in Morocco and was killed there in 1914. Three years later, his mother remarried a wealthy doctor and the family moved to the small town of Sens near Paris.

The embittered boy had already written what Kaplan calls his first work of vitriol to this prospective stepfather, insulting him with impressive dexterity and thus providing sundry biographers with an interpretive handle for explaining his later fascism. Hating his bourgeois pseudo-father, in other words, and hating the sham, left-of-center Third Republic of the '30s could be seen as synonymous. Either way, explaining Brasillach's political proclivities is not a simple task. Yet we cannot understand fascism without understanding why gifted, superlatively educated boys like Brasillach drifted into it. Brasillach, along with peers like Celine and Drieu La Rochelle (both of them now acknowledged as among the greatest of 20th century French writers), represents the most disturbing face of fascism. Not the usual stony Freikorps face, but that of the puny, bespectacled and disillusioned poet.

The usual place to start is the right-wing Action Francaise paper, the brainchild of the violent and rather rancidly radical monarchist Charles Maurras and a hotbed of rightist revolutionary thought -- and action. It was the paper's Camelots du Roi (a kind of monarchist street gang) who created the right's greatest martyrs of the '30s when 15 of them were killed by the Paris police during a demonstration in 1934. Brasillach venerated their memory all his life. Was it a turning point in his own spiral into fascist mythology? Perhaps. But many Action Francaise writers went on to be heroes of the Resistance. The roots of Nazism and its appeal to men like Brasillach, in reality, go far deeper than questions of simple nationalism or even of racism -- and Brasillach was certainly a racist by anyone's definition.

By the early '30s, Brasillach had already made his name as a literary critic with a scathing attack on Andre Gide and an odd book on Virgil called "Presence de Virgile", which celebrated the Roman poet's love of young boys. He went on in the intellectually high-quality pages of Action to become a feared young Turk of the Left Bank literary scene. At the same time, as Kaplan tells it, he wrote a series of rather thin, lyrical novels, with plots turning around sublimated incest and a great deal of sentimental and artificially arranged "atmosphere." Kaplan thinks there is a politically telling disjunction between the critic and novelist: the one fierce, witty, lethally lucid; the other lost in bamboozling lyricism.

What, then, does this disjunction in Brasillach's work tell us about the mind of a talented writer toying with his first steps toward moral catastrophe? To Kaplan, it's a question of denial. The same brittle polarity, she argues, was brought to bear on Brasillach's view of decadent, democratic France (the object of his lucid, devastatingly critical side) and young Nazi Germany (the object of his romanticizing, "soft focus" side). Nazism, in other words, was first and foremost a lyrical mood, a religious effusion that harnessed his harsher side only when dealing with the Jews: His anti-Semitism had nothing soft-focus about it.

Next page | Hitler, too, longed for the day he could retire from politics and become an "artist"