Cécile Desprairies’s novel, “The Propagandist,” is full of so many secrets that it’s a wonder she managed to write it at all.
In the first place, the book takes an insider’s perspective on occupied France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II, “still a sort of national family secret in France,” Desprairies said.
And it was inspired by Desprairies’s mother, who was herself a propagandist for the Vichy regime and its Nazi leaders — something her family only talked about in the most coded terms.
The secrecy around the issue was such that only after her mother died from a sudden heart attack did Desprairies finally feel free to embark on a career as a historian specializing in the Nazi occupation of France, which lasted from 1940 to 1944. In the same week her mother was buried, Desprairies said, she contacted an editor and signed a contract for her first book, an examination of the places in Paris where the collaboration occurred.
“It was a liberation of energy,” she said of her mother’s death. “It may not be very politically correct to say so, but that was how it felt — at last I had the right to speak up.”
Her debut novel, “The Propagandist,” translated from French by Natasha Lehrer, came to Desprairies after many years working as a historian. The story is told from the perspective of a girl growing up in Paris during the 1960s who attempts to piece together the coded conversations, vituperative outbursts and downright lies of family members who hark back to World War II as the best time of their lives.
When the book was published in France last year, it was longlisted for the Prix Goncourt, the country’s most prestigious literary award, and received high praise from critics. It is the product of “the toughness of a historian who’s had enough, having suffered the pain of a descendant determined to put an end to the lies,” the magazine Le Point said.
“It’s really a book that could only be written when I was mature enough,” Desprairies, 66, said in a recent video interview from Vienna, where she wrote much of the novel. “It’s not a young person’s book, even if it is a first novel.”
Though “The Propagandist” is largely autobiographical, Desprairies insists that it is not what the French call a roman à clef — a novel that is loosely based on real-life events but employs fictional names for its characters. The names of family members have been changed to protect their identity, but Desprairies does not take any liberties with real-life events.
“This whole story of the occupation and the collaboration in France is so utterly unbelievable that I thought it was absolutely indispensable to base my novel on historical fact,” she said. “If I hadn’t written my novel basing it on the historical record people would have thought I was off my head.”
In the book, a variety of mysterious illnesses invented by her mother forces the young narrator to stay at home, where she bears witness to an invasion of female relatives as soon as her father, a high-ranking functionary, has gone off to work. “My mother, aunt, cousin, and grandmother,” Desprairies writes, “gathered most mornings in an atmosphere that resembled a gynaeceum, the women’s quarters in a house in ancient Greece.”
It’s the kind of environment that Desprairies was familiar with as a child, when she was encouraged to feign similarly imaginary ailments to miss school and remain at home. “Perhaps the adults made the mistake of thinking that a quiet child didn’t understand what was being said,” she said. “I had the impression that these adults, their relations and their friends all spoke in a coded language that I would one day understand.”
The book’s female narrator later stumbles on an identity card dated 1943 with a photo of her mother, smiling, but with a different surname. It is the name the girl’s mother, Lucie, took from her first husband, Friedrich, the great love of her life, who died in mysterious circumstances during the war. Lucie is still besotted by the dead Friedrich, a trainee biologist, who shared her rampant anti-Semitism and unwavering support of the Nazi project.
Desprairies’s mother was 19 years old when the occupation started. Always careful to keep her identity a secret, she worked as a poster propagandist for the Vichy regime and its Nazi leaders, coming up with catchy art and slogans. “Everybody used pseudonyms from very early on during the occupation,” Desprairies said. “It’s as if they all knew that things were going to end badly.”
Desprairies’s mother was 24 when her first husband died. “She felt like she had lived everything that was worth living,” Desprairies said of her mother, “and yet after that she was married to my father for 58 years — a man who bored her a lot.”
One of Desprairies’s most lasting memories of her mother, which is brought to life in her novel, is of her removing a pile of posters atop her wardrobe to look at them one last time before she burned them.
“I remember those posters very well,” Desprairies said. Among the stack was the notorious Nazi propaganda poster Affiche Rouge, which was distributed by Vichy France in 1944, to discredit 23 immigrant fighters in the French resistance, known as the Manouchian Group.
Desprairies alludes to her mother’s propaganda activities but is careful not to divulge too much detail. “I don’t like to answer questions that are too personal, because my family is very angry with me at the moment because of my book,” she said.
This is notably true of her brother, she said. He supported her while she was writing “The Propagandist,” but “completely reversed his point of view and denied everything” once the book came out.
She continued: “Perhaps when you go out on a limb like this you must have nothing left to lose.”
Lehrer, Desprairies’s translator, noted that the book’s success in France meant that there was no way that her family members could divorce themselves from the novel. “As an insight into the collaboration from the inside, it’s an unbelievably brave book,” Lehrer said. “The fact that so few books of this kind have been written tells you how sensitive this subject remains in France even so long after the war.”
Despite her family’s lack of support, Desprairies has no regrets. “Everybody likes to be liked and feel at ease,” she said. “But at the end of the day I am free and perhaps nothing feels quite as good as that.”
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