Fascism a la Francaise.

IT WAS a splendid myth. France, defeated on the battlefield but unbowed in spirit, fought on magnificently in the Resistance against the Nazi beast and played a major role in its own Liberation. As one man, the French fought the German conqueror bitterly, bleeding him white, until France's Second Armored Division invaded Normandy and restored the country to freedom. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Hoist the tricolore. Let freedom ring.

Year by year pieces of this fiction have fallen away. But it is only now, with most of the active participants gone from the scene, that France is finally coming to terms with its wartime history.

During his last days on earth, the late Socialist president Francois Mitterrand still insisted that France was in no way responsible for the actions of the illegitimate regime of Vichy -- the puppet government which Frenchmen set up in southern France after the defeat of 1940. Himself a decorated official of that puppet government, Mitterrand absolved France of all Vichy's sins. Vichy wasn't France. The real France had nothing to do with the 774,721 Jews the Vichy regime deported during the war, virtually none of whom survived. Yet France's record was unlike that of any other country occupied by Nazi Germany. Its Third Republic legally and democratically voted itself out of existence in 1940, creating in its place Petain and Laval's "French State," technically neutral and sovereign. Again, like no other country overrun by the Germans, France was without a government in exile. The United States granted Vichy full diplomatic recognition, thus acknowledging the puppet regime's legitimacy, and it sent Admiral Leahy to its capital as American ambassador.

Another aspect of 1940 France that the mythmakers were not eager to bring to light was the number of Frenchmen who, if embarrassed by France's military defeat, actually agreed with Nazi ideas. Mieux vaut Hitler que le Front Populaire, the saying had it: Better Hitler than the Popular Front (the Socialist - Communist alliance that briefly ruled France in the late 1930s). A period quite lost to popular memory now -- although certainly not lost in 1940 -- was the earlier part of the twentieth century when not Berlin or Vienna but Paris was universally recognized as the capital of the authoritarian, anti-Semitic European Right. Indeed, not very long before that, during the Dreyfus Affair, great mobs had surged through the Paris streets crying, "Death to the Jews!"

At the end of World War II, the story of France's behavior under German rule was simply suppressed -- a suppression greatly facilitated by the terms of the general amnesty. The Fourth Republic forbade any public reference to what the French call faits de guerre, wartime events. Vichy leader Marshal Petain was convicted of treason, and his prime minister, Pierre Laval, was executed -- as were some 3,700 other Frenchmen convicted of open collaboration with the enemy. However, the huge corps of civil servants -- in France an elite group with high social standing -- which for years had obediently carried out Nazi orders, was virtually untouched.

But now the floodgates have opened and the story of wartime France is coming out with a rush -- to the astonishment of the younger generation of Frenchmen, to many of whom it seems like the history of a foreign country. Two years ago President Jacques Chirac, 13 years old at war's end, apologized to the Jewish people and abandoned the official government position that when French police rounded up thousands of Jews in July 1942, it was an action of the Nazi Occupation authorities and had nothing to do with France.

Only last month, Archbishop Olivier de Berranger shook the nation to its roots. Speaking in the name of all France's Catholic cardinals and bishops, he humbly apologized to Jews for the Church's silence in the face of French collaboration with the "murderous process" of the Nazi Holocaust, and begged the Jewish people for forgiveness. The French Church had in fact not been merely silent: Cardinal Baudrillart, then rector of the Catholic Institute in Paris, was an ardent Nazi supporter and called Adolf Hitler's mission noble and inspiring. "We beg the pardon of God," Archbishop Berranger said in a tone of anguish never heard from him in public before, "and we ask the Jewish people to hear this word of repentance." And now the French police have apologized. The French medical association has apologized. Everyone is apologizing.

But a high point came in October when, after all these many years, France placed on trial the celebrated Maurice Papon, who, as the Vichy regime's secretary general of the Gironde Department surrounding Bordeaux, coldly deported over 1,600 Jews, including many small children. As fate would have it, this same Papon, efficient and industrious, rose to considerable prominence in postwar France, serving as police commissioner of Paris during the Algerian War and later as budget minister under President Valery Giscard d'Estaing.

Now, with Papon, the ranks of France's entire civil service -- who up to this point have escaped chastisement -- are in a sense on trial. Answering all charges defiantly, Papon himself, 87 as the trial began, has refused to apologize for anything. Even under Vichy he was serving his country, he has declared. The trial, expected to last until Christmas, has brusquely brought the nation face to face with an anti-democratic past which for half a century it has been trying to forget.

THE French have had to face too the fascist tendencies of an even more highly regarded set of their countrymen. One thing foreigners often fail to realize about France is the degree to which literature and politics are intertwined there. The list of French literary men who have played a political role, and of politicians and high-ranking civil servants who have played a literary role, is almost endless. For many generations the breeding ground of prime ministers was the faculty of letters of the Ecole Normale Superieure, for all the world as if its students were mandarins of the Chinese empire. For foreigners, Paris might have been a center of the visual arts, but for France's meritocracy, and for its governing class to this day, l'art noble has always been literature. Andre Malraux, the distinguished novelist, led every campaign rally for General de Gaulle during his years in the wilderness, and once de Gaulle was president became his most trusted cabinet member. Saint-John Perse, a French poet and Nobel Prize - winner, known to English speakers for his great influence on T. S. Eliot, was for many crucial years -- under his real name, Alexis Leger -- secretary general of the Quai d'Orsay, France's Foreign Office. Leon Blum, prime minister during the Popular Front, was the regular theater critic of a prominent literary magazine (and wrote a curious cultural work, De l'Amour, in which he earnestly recommended that, before settling down in marriage, young ladies should carry on an extensive number of love affairs to "get it out of their system" --far more the notion of a literary man than of a politician).

Even in my time law students destined for politics would still frequently take a degree in French literature as well. And I once reviewed a volume of literary and cultural essays by Francois Mitterrand which made it apparent that he was steeped, not merely in literary tradition, but in right-wing literary tradition. It was said that at one time Action Francaise -- Charles Maurras's monarchist political journal -- had made every single literary reputation in France with the sole exception of Marcel Proust, who nonetheless wrote the journal a most obsequious homage. The editors refused to publish it, supposedly because it was too fawning, but possibly also because Proust was Jewish. In those years, in France, anti-Semitism was everywhere.

French best-seller lists are now suddenly crowded with memoirs of France in its "fascist" period (few of which have been translated into English), for Papon's trial has not only fixed the nation's mind on its collaboration with the Nazi conqueror but has also recalled the ardent infatuation that much of the French nation once had for fascism itself -- another detail passed over rather quietly for decades, although it was perfectly evident in the country's literature.

Andre Gide, a Nobel Prize - winner considered by many the foremost French literary figure of the period, is frequently credited with prodigious acumen for having "seen through" the Soviet Union, a visionary process recounted in his Retour de l'URSS (Return from the USSR). This was easier for Gide than for many others, since somewhat earlier he had been a monarchist and an anti-Semite, hardly well disposed to Marxism. On the day the German army marched into Paris without firing a shot, he complained in his journal that France was in a state of deep decay. But soon afterward he made another entry: "To come to terms with yesterday's enemy is not cowardice but wisdom." Paul Claudel, another French literary giant of the period and a high-ranking member of the country's fashionable diplomatic service, wrote with exultation of the German victory: "No more Popular Fronts, trade-union confederations, raised-fist demonstrations, petitions signed willy-nilly by Communists and Catholics; no more of the vile tyranny of bistros, freemasons, wogs, pions, and schoolmasters." At the height of the war, Claudel's Soulier de Satin had a triumphal opening at the Comedie Francaise to an ecstatic ovation from German generals. And then there was Drieu la Rochelle, the impulsive, brilliant novelist who committed suicide in 1945 rather than be tried for treason and executed.

Many of the ornaments of French culture positively embraced the Nazis. Poet and playwright Jean Cocteau, fashion designer Coco Chanel, and film star Arletty (all homosexuals, for what it's worth), plus Sacha Guitry (France's John Barrymore), were on permanent display as proud hosts of the Nazis, even as Jews and various other undesirables were being deported to Auschwitz. At the Liberation, punishment for such figures was at best haphazard. Chanel was forced into retirement for about a decade. Cocteau got off scot free, perhaps because he was a witty, charming gentleman. Guitry, after spending a short time in prison, promptly came out with a new play, Le Diable Boiteux, in which he played Talleyrand, the celebrated statesman who in the turmoil of Napoleon's time served various contending French regimes while remaining loyal to la France reelle. The play was written in such a way as to make Talleyrand and Guitry -- the blatant Nazi collaborator -- seem virtually identical. It was a smash hit.

When Marshal Petain and Pierre Laval came to power in Vichy with their colleagues of the Etat Francais, why were so many literary Frenchmen not merely pleased but delighted? After its terrible loss of life in the Great War, France was in a desperately demoralized state, and Vichy was a deliberate construction by reactionary monarchists who wanted their country somehow to escape the squalor of the modern world and return to a pure, mythic France.

Along with Frenchmen who sought an authoritarian utopia in France's past were those like Colonel de la Rocque and his fascist Croix de Feu (with, as of 1937, a bigger membership than the Socialists and Communists combined) who sought their escape from the degenerate present in a wonderful, energized future. Both schools had an abundance of representatives in French literature. While the older wing -- Maurras himself, Maurice Barrcs, and Charles Peguy, all brilliant writers of whom only Maurras survived into the 1930s --had celebrated the French past, the younger wing, such as Celine and Drieu la Rochelle, were romantically enticed by fascism's newness and strength.

It is almost universally conceded that the most influential French writer of the 1930s was Louis-Ferdinand Celine, author of Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Journey to the End of Night). Voyage hit Paris in 1934 like a bombshell. Never had a literary work in France been written in the language of "the people," with their conversational speech rhythms, but also their vulgarisms and profanity. Celine was a master of mood. Many Frenchmen of the period responded to his cynical temperament without quite seeing where he was headed politically. But many others saw, and the sales of his books under the Nazi Occupation were huge.

The opening scenes of Voyage au Bout de la Nuit take place at the front during World War I, where "Ferdinand" (Celine's alter ego) is horrified by the inhuman behavior of French and Germans alike. Half crazed, he is discharged from the army and sets off for the French colonies of Africa, but finds colonial life (in Cameroon) as disgusting as life in Europe. Next it's the turn of America, where he ends up working on the assembly line at Ford. The only sensitive and generous person he finds in the United States is Molly, a Detroit prostitute. Then it's back to Paris, where Ferdinand completes his medical studies and sets up a practice in a working-class Paris suburb (as did Celine himself). Once again he finds life in France to be mean, petty, selfish, deceitful, and greedy. The novel ends on the same despairing note that Celine has maintained throughout. What can save man in this depraved state?

In real life, Celine first tried Communism, but when he went to the Soviet Union he hated it, publishing a book, Mea Culpa, about his change of heart. At this point there arose throughout the Continent a vision of a Europe strong and pure which might cast off the cynicism that poisoned Celine's life. The vision was of Nazi Germany. Distressing to Celine's admirers today -- who remain legion -- he shared with the Nazis an anti-Semitism of the most rabid sort. At the German Embassy in Paris, addressing novelist Ernst Junger (a Francophile and no anti-Semite), Celine erupted angrily: "Why don't the Germans hang and shoot all the Jews? If I had a bayonet, I know what I'd be doing!" By the time Junger had seen Celine twice more he said he wouldn't touch him with tongs. From being mad on the subject of Jews, Celine went mad entirely. Visiting Berlin in 1942 he declared with horror that the Nazi ministries were still filled with Jews and that the Nazis didn't even realize it.

Later Celine fled from France to Germany, and then to Denmark, thereby escaping almost certain execution. During a lengthy extradition process, he was tried in absentia in 1950. But in 1951, after the rage for vengeance had abated, he was pardoned and returned to his medical practice in the Paris suburbs, still anti-Semitic but now hating as well the Catholic Church, "founded by a dozen Jews." The Jews, he said, "should erect a monument to me for all the things I could have done to them that I didn't do."

A FAR more attractive version of the French literary fascist is Drieu la Rochelle, "rediscovered" with great enthusiasm by the French in the 1980s. But Drieu, inspired like Celine by the purity and strength he saw in Germany's New Order, also had a morbid fascination with death. If total beauty and total purity were not possible, then extinction was the only alternative. A celebrated novel, perhaps because director Louis Malle made an extraordinary film of it, is Le Feu Follet (Will-o'-the-Wisp). Its protagonist, again a surrogate for the writer, makes the rounds of all his friends and at the end, finding life insufficiently pure and idealistic, kills himself. It is this strange yearning for perfection in an imperfect world that won many of France's literary fascists a kinder assessment than one might have expected. "Misguided idealists" is the usual expression. Drieu la Rochelle, a good-looking, distinguished young man with high principles (of a sort), committed suicide in real life when after the Liberation of Paris he heard that a warrant had been issued for his arrest as a collaborator.

Those totally immersed in the present age of virtue -- who wonder of Drieu la Rochelle, "Why did a nice French boy like you ever become a fascist?" -- should be warned that precious few of France's literary fascists were nice French boys. Some insight in Drieu's case can be gained from his 1934 novel La Comedie de Charleroi. The story is told in the first person by a veteran of the Great War disillusioned by postwar France and convinced that the country is weak, mediocre, and exhausted. He says, "It's no fun being French; since the time of my birth in this country I haven't had a single happy moment." The book is revealing of the despair that seized the whole country in those years, and also, as is so often the case, of the tendency of those who despair of their own country to attribute virility and vitality to its enemy -- in this case, Nazi Germany.

Will-o'-the-Wisp is aptly titled, as Drieu flitted from poetry to the Surrealists, from Communism to Action Francaise -- but always convinced that France was sinking, unsavable. He was a great philanderer, alternating between wives of wealthy industrialists and vast numbers of common prostitutes -- with whom he felt more at ease but who gave him syphilis. In his last years this left him impotent.

The notion that Drieu was some kind of serious political thinker is hard to sustain if one reads his intimate Journal, which was published only four years ago. In the middle of the war he thought Britain was likely to make peace with Germany and attack Russia, Japan, and then the United States. (I repeat: Britain might attack the United States.) He also had a vision of Hitler forming an alliance with the Jews. Hollywood and Hitler? Hitler and Hollywood? Unbeatable! He had another idea for the Jews: deport them all to Madagascar, where they would form a cozy Jewish colony of the French empire. Drieu was quite obsessed with Jews, and, although his first wife and many of his mistresses were Jewish, his Journal positively explodes with the most vicious anti-Semitism. Nor was he consistent in his admiration for the Nazis. When they suffered a military reversal they were "cowardly sneaky liberals." When they triumphed they were "the last rampart of liberty in Europe."

Very cowardly as a boy, Drieu became intoxicated with the aggressive energy and power of the new Nazi state. "And then all of a sudden there was fascism!" he wrote. "Everything was possible again! Oh, how my heart swelled!" The Nazis were "not ruthless enough," however, "not bloody enough," "too timid." Their ascendancy would have been assured by more "cold-blooded acts of violence."

Along with Drieu, the most prominent of France's self-declared fascist essayists and novelists before World War II -- and the most visible of collaborators during the Nazi Occupation -- was an unusually bright young writer named Robert Brasillach. From the age of only 22 he wrote the principal literary column of Action Francaise. At 28 he also became editor-in-chief of the nationalist, fascist, anti-Semitic weekly Je Suis Partout. And at 36, soon after the Liberation, he was tried for treason and executed. But Brasillach is in a sense the model for French literary fascism, for he most clearly transformed Charles Maurras's monarchist, classical aesthetics into an explicitly modern, fascist mode, writing with feeling that the Nazi Party's rallies in Nuremberg "are the highest artistic creations of our time." For if Celine and Drieu were more powerful writers, Brasillach was the great ideologue of literary fascism. It could be argued on Brasillach's behalf that, for him, fascism was at its most profound level an aesthetic experience. At its root, it was a feeling of unity, of being unified both with one's immediate group and with one's nation.

"A youth camp at night," he wrote, "the impression of merging one's body with one's entire nation, a totalitarian celebration, these are the elements of fascist poetry." Not only, he felt, were such experiences -- of youth and the outdoors, of collectivity, of scouting, armies, sports teams, youth camps, songs, and marches --central to the creation of the "new fascist man," but they also produced a feeling of intense joy. In his Introduction to the Fascist Spirit, something of a fascist credo, Brasillach focused on what he called the "new human type" created by fascism, and on the inability of its adversaries to understand "fascist joy." "The young fascist," wrote Brasillach, "supported by his race and his nation, proud of his vigorous body and his lucid mind, scornful of the abundant goods of the world, the young fascist in his camp, with his comrades in peace who can become his comrades in war, the young fascist who sings, who marches, who works, who dreams, is above all a joyous being."

OF course the writers and artists of France were not the only representatives of their calling who were drawn to fascism. Equally brilliant peers of theirs in Italy, Britain, and Ireland rallied to the Nazi cause. The debate as to what attracted them has been going on for decades. Among such celebrated intellectual leaders there was considerable variety of temperament, although many were of a morbid disposition. Almost all showed signs of being ill at ease in the modern world, and while some wished to return to a pure, pre-industrial society, even more dreamed of a shining world to come, incorporating the material advantages of today with a vision of a new social harmony.

After the slaughter of the Great War and the civil strife of the 1920s and 1930s, fascism seemed to offer a stable society ruled by a charismatic leader, who, opposing Communism while resisting decadence, would by his very personality guarantee a serene and manly peace. The malevolent aspect of this romantic fascism was apparently not much in evidence to most of its literary adepts, people with great artistic gifts who showed no better judgment in political affairs, often worse, than the ordinary run of mankind.

Strange as it might seem today, fascism gave hope to millions of Frenchmen, artists and non-artists alike. Until lately, the part that France took in turning that "hope" into a reality was kept below the surface of French cultural memory. Now that it has begun to break free, there are those who fervently wish that interest in the subject would pass. But it will not pass.