Militant intellectual, critic, film scholar and poet (recently the editor Julian Ladolfi Borgomanero released its "Poèmes de Fresnes" written in prison before shooting), Robert Brasillach prisoner was formed in 1944 to rescue his family and the mother who had been brutally captured as hostages. He was accused of filofascismo, anti-Semitism and collaboration in one of the major processes of the post-war period, whose symbolic content went far beyond the purely legal and moral.
In the death sentence , in the denial of grace on the part of General de Gaulle , in the refusal of the French intellectuals to sign up (with a few exceptions, including Camus ) , in the protests with which so many fascists reacted to what they saw as an unjust sentence , and above all announced and, finally, the execution capital celebrated at Fort Montrouge on February 6, 1945, he played a collective ritual with many meanings .
Settling of accounts with the recent past of his country, ideological mortgage on the near future, pedagogical and exemplary performance staged for the masses : this , and much more , was the process Brasillach , who defended himself by appealing to the ideals of a vitalistic and giovanilistici generation , troubling the French anti-democratic tradition , from De Maistre to Maurras , contextualizing his nefarious positions on the basis of realpolitik patriotic , admitting some guilt but also did not hesitate to go on the attack when it comes to the emergence of a kind of truth , which holds more of the same innocence , the truth of the facts or of the story, as he says. Self-defense , that without asking for leniency, rather slips into a vibrant J'accuse .
Between judgments sometimes unacceptable ( " not anti-Semitic ... but I've always been a ministry composed of 37 Jewish members ... so much" ) and sometimes questionable ( " the partnership had as a conditio sine qua non for the future independence of France" ) , Brasillach makes some uncomfortable thoughts on the winners' accounts .
For example: " The United States, after a violent campaign against Hitler not have gone to war in 1939 ... I only went to war in 1941 after the attack on Japan ... the Americans were thinking only of their own war " ; " The massacres of the partisans have always seemed to me something revolting , but I also agree with the story , which is not the prerogative of any people ... the British have done the same thing with the Boers . The Communists have collected documents incredible and inexhaustible on the procedures adopted by France in Indochina ... villages slaughtered, massacred children , sexual torture with water or electricity " ; " All governments recognized the government of
Marshal Petain , including the Vatican , the United States , the British rulers . Not to mention the Soviets ... How can we not consider this government legitimate ? " " I need not tell you that the newspapers of the Resistance ... they violently protested against the savage bombing of Nantes. All this does not inspire a great love for the Anglo-Saxons . "
The serious faults of Brasillach , summarized in the indictment of "intelligence with the enemy ", ie with Nazi Germany , do not go out in the least weakened by these considerations. It is certain , however, that his self-defense dry and free of rhetoric is one of those painful and controversial documents on which not only the winners but also losers should long question .
Stefano Cazzato
ConquisteDelLavoro