Abstract
Peter Tame’s ego-history concerns his research on political ideology and war literature in contemporary France, based on his work on Roger Vailland, André Chamson and André Malraux, as well as his more recent research interests in European war memories in the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, together with imaginary spaces and places in French fiction on the two World Wars. This chapter also discusses Tame’s research on the Left–Right polemics in the interwar years in France and fictional representations of Fascism and Communism before, during and after the Second World War. Focusing on Robert Brasillach, collaborationist and French Fascist (1909–1945), the subject of his PhD thesis and a subsequent publication, Tame revisits the unwritten rules and evolving research contexts surrounding the Vichy period since the early 1970s.
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Notes
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Cf. the French writers of the 1930s and 1940s, including Maurice Blanchot and Robert Brasillach—though not Louis-Ferdinand Céline —who figure in Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle’s book, Les Non-conformistes des années 30 (1969). The ‘taboo’ aspect of Brasillach’s career has certainly stimulated a number of critics and biographers. The title of Pierre Pellissier’s biography, for example, bears this out: Brasillach…le maudit (1989).
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The then director of Nouvelles Éditions Latines was Fernand Sorlot, who had gained notoriety before the Second World War for his links with the Extreme Right—which he maintained during and after the War—and for having published a French translation of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1934. Since he had not obtained Hitler’s permission, the German firm Eher-Verlag that had published the original work took him to court in 1936. Sorlot defended his act, claiming that he had voluntarily omitted to obtain permission since he had wanted to make the work available to the French reading public so that they might be better informed of Hitler’s intentions. After the war, Sorlot was condemned to ‘indignité nationale’ (national indignity) for his wartime publishing activities.
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The aim of the Association des Amis de Robert Brasillach is stated in its statutes as follows: ‘Le but de l’association est de faire connaître l’œuvre de l’écrivain et poète Robert Brasillach’ (The aim of the Association is to promote the work of the writer and poet Robert Brasillach): http://www.brasillach.ch/?page_id=38 (accessed 23 December 2015).
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To be fair, Isorni does attempt to explain Brasillach’s contradictions in terms of an alleged softening of his approach when he was in prison in Fresnes, along with others facing possible death for their convictions: ‘Il n’est pas douteux que, menacé par la mort et se trouvant dans une cellule où d’autres hommes qu’il avait combattus avaient été également menacés par la mort et même exécutés, la tendresse, l’amitié humaine ont remplacé la violence’ (Clearly, with the threat of death hanging over him, and sharing a cell with other men whose opponent he had been and who had also been threatened with death and even executed, the violence softened to an attitude of friendship and human companionship). Correspondence dated 22 May 1975.
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From the early 1990s, the quality of research undertaken by UK universities’ academic staff has been subjected every six years or so to rigorous scrutiny by subject-specialist peer-review panels in what was then called the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) (now Research Excellence Framework, or REF). With regard to the status of translations in the UK’s RAE, we were told at an information meeting held in London in 2001 that translations of literary works gained few ‘brownie points’, not being considered as ‘creative’ or even ‘academic’ works.
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Here, I am implicitly referring to Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992).
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Interview with Pierre Bayard. See http://www.mollat.com/player.html?id=65151866 (accessed 13 December 2014).
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See André Chamson, La Reconquête 1944–1945 (2005, 511–644) for an account of this epic itinerary.
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Both novels have been published in new editions recently by Pardès. Robert Brasillach, Six heures à perdre (2016) and Robert Brasillach, La Conquérante (2016). In 2016, I contributed prefaces to Pardès’s re-editions of four novels by Brasillach, Le Voleur d’étincelles (1932), L’Enfant de la nuit (1934), Le Marchand d’oiseaux (1936) and Les Sept Couleurs (1939).
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Editors’ note: Cf. Chapter “Currents and Counter-Currents” by Marc Dambre.
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I completed a lecture tour in India (18 September–13 October 2015) on the subject of Malraux and India, organised by the Amitiés Internationales d’André Malraux in conjunction with eleven Alliances françaises in the subcontinent. I was also involved in a previous series of lectures organised in Singapore during the France-Singapore festival Voilah! (20–22 May 2015).
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Tame, P. (2018). Writers in Conflict. In: Bragança, M., Louwagie, F. (eds) Ego-histories of France and the Second World War. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70860-7_11
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