Le Corbusier, Piaf, the feuding Le Pens … the wartime rifts that still divide France

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/10/france-world-war-divisions-le-corbusier

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This weekend marks the 70th anniversary of the moment when Charles de Gaulle announced to the French nation that it had finally come through the sufferings of the Nazi occupation.

For as long as almost any Frenchman or woman can remember, 8 May has been a public holiday, marked by military parades and politicians’ speeches. However, this year the holiday weekend has a special poignancy, because the number of people who can remember what happened 70 years ago is shrinking fast. But as that generation gradually dies out, the bad memories and unresolved conflicts dating back to the 1940s are still being played out in contemporary France.

In the past month or so, for example, there has been a mini-scandal surrounding an exhibition dedicated to the architect Le Corbusier at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The controversy centres on Le Corbusier’s alleged past as a “militant fascist” and “antisemite”, aspects of his life and work that have been excavated in two recently published books. In the first of these, Le Corbusier, Un Fascisme Français, Xavier de Jarcy claims that Le Corbusier never renounced the fascist ideals he embraced in the 1920s and that he was a supporter of Marshal Pétain and the Vichy regime, the French government that collaborated with the Nazis. In the second book, Un Corbusier, the architect and academic François Chaslin, who is an admirer of the architect, is unstinting in his descriptions and analysis of Le Corbusier’s links to fascist groups and ideologies, and points out that at one stage Le Corbusier maintained an office for 18 months under the Vichy government.

The Pompidou Centre has obviously been embarrassed by this, claiming that the exhibition was never intended to cover his whole life and work. This has led to accusations of cover-ups and manipulation.

The real damage to Le Corbusier’s reputation comes not just from the forensic evidence produced by the two authors, but with the hindsight that a fascist aesthetic obviously informs his designs – from this point of view, what was meant to be utopia now looks like an exercise in dehumanising brutalism. You can see this most clearly in the cheap, modernist architecture of the banlieues, the rotten suburbs outside most French towns and cities where alienation and violence are rife.

Even Edith Piaf, that most cherished of French celebrities, has not been immune to accusations of collaboration with the Nazis. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) has just launched an exhibition to mark the centenary of her birth. An extraordinary collection, it brings together photographs, song sheets, handwritten notes, posters and film clips – many of which have not been seen before in public. Notwithstanding, there has been low-level carping in the media – and especially in blogs – from those who refuse to forget that she gave concerts under the Nazi occupation and that she was noticeably anxious at the end of the war, fearful of being accused of sleeping with the enemy in every way.

But the return of bad memories from 70 years ago has taken its most dramatic form in the vicious argument between Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter, Marine, over the future of the Front National, which he founded and which she now leads. In the latest instalment, Jean-Marie was suspended from the party for making disparaging remarks about the Holocaust and praising the Vichy regime. He will most likely be stripped of his role as honorary president of the party, although he remains an MEP. In return the former leader has disowned Marine, threatened legal action and called for her to change her name. In the pages of Paris Match he described Marine’s betrayal as “like learning that you have cancer”.

On the surface this seems like a particularly nasty slice of family life made public, a bullying parent who can’t control his headstrong daughter. But there are also two competing versions of French history at work here. Le Pen père is a grizzled ex-paratrooper who fought to keep Algeria French and founded the Front National in 1972 to highlight issues such as immigration, race and identity. In this sense the Front National is not so much a political party as a tribe, whose belief systems are made up of the conviction that the Vichy government was a good thing, that the Holocaust was a “detail of history”, that France should empty itself of immigrants, and so on.

Arguably Le Pen senior has never seriously sought political power, but has been happy in his role as troublemaker-in-chief for the French republic, lobbing hand-grenades at will into the political arena. Marine Le Pen has, however, different ambitions. She can see a real political opportunity in the presidential elections due in 2017. But to get there she has had to “detoxify” the party of its past and its tribal beliefs in order to make it appeal to those who are disillusioned with the mainstream right and left parties in France but who cannot bring themselves to vote for a group of racist thugs.

Jean-Marie Le Pen cannot leave the past behind. To do so would be to destroy everything he has done and believed in for the whole of his career. Marine, in contrast, has to force a break with the past to create a new political order. It would be a further disturbing paradox if, having achieved this, she then takes France further to the right than it has ever been in the past 70 years.

This is partly why President François Hollande, in his speech at the commemorations in Paris, warned of the “resurgence of racism and antisemitism”, calling for vigilance and for the French to learn lessons from the past. This was not just a reference to the second world war, but also to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in January; his speech was meant as a salutary call to arms against future conflict in French society. In France right now, the warning signs are everywhere – 70 years on from the French experience of the second world war, the divisions it created have never quite gone away.