This work by Claude Levy is a valuable tool for better understanding the press during the collaboration and the Vichy regime. Jean Luchaire, a journalist from the 1930s, a friend of Otto Abetz long before the war and even before Nazism, is a kind of romantic, dreaming of seeing France and Germany reconcile and unite to build Europe.
While these utopian constructs nurtured by Aristide Briand were possible before 1933, they became improbable after Hitler came to power. From this period, Jean Luchaire, in pursuing this ideal, began to lose his way, even more so after the 1940 armistice. Is he a traitor? Is he a naive believer in his German friend’s fine words?
Reading this book does not really answer the question. Claude Levy shows us all the intricacies of the Vichy regime where collaboration existed from the left to the right, and as under the Third Republic, all these politicians of the old regime condemned it and preached a new order, a national revolution and Europe.
We will note with interest the pro-European stance of those who today condemn it in the name of a timid withdrawal into oneself. But it is true that then Europe was that of Hitler, racism, and a dictatorship where humans were mere elements without any rights except to obey. That is why Vichy was a patchwork of all the failures and embittered individuals of the Third Republic, where these outcasts took revenge for their failures.
Today’s anti-European positions are certainly the opposite reaction to the choices of 1940. In any case, a book worth reading because it allows for a better understanding of today’s two extremes, whose similarity should make reasonable people take notice.
Thierry Jan
