An Old Tale of Shame for Today’s France

On Monday, July 13, 1942, two French gendarmes knocked on the front door of a large stone house in the little Burgundy village of Issy-L’Eveque. The house had been rented recently to the Epstein family, which, like many, had fled Paris in the wake of the catastrophic French defeat in June 1940.

Michel Epstein was a banker; his wife was a well-known author who had published novels and stories under her maiden name, Irene Nemirovsky. They had two daughters, Denise and Elisabeth.

Nemirovsky was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she died Aug. 19, 1942, at the age of 39. Her husband was deported in October 1942, but the two girls managed to get away and find protection with the French Resistance. Denise, the elder daughter, put everything of her mother’s she could find in a suitcase, which she carried with her from cellar to convent through more than a dozen moves, until at last the war was over.

In the suitcase were leather-bound notebooks, photographs and two unfinished manuscripts. These were to be the first two volumes of a major novel, a roman-fleuve that would chronicle the French defeat, the occupation and, hopefully, liberation.

Now, almost 63 years after her mother’s death, she has deciphered these manuscripts, written in tiny letters on scraps of paper, and has published them in Paris. “Suite Francaise,” or “French Suite,” has finally appeared.

The novel, which traces the history of France from June 1940 to the summer of 1942, is in two parts. “Tempete en Juin” (“Storm in June”), the first volume, tells the story of the defeat of 1940. The second volume, curiously titled “Dolce,” is anything but sweet. It recounts the occupation of a French village, like that in which Nemirovsky lived, and the reaction of its inhabitants to the German soldiers billeted there.

“Suite Francaise” is an ambitious undertaking. It seeks to portray France in all its complexity, as both player and victim of the forces that were unleashed in 1940. Critics have compared it to Tolstoy both in scope and structure, but in its theme it is a fundamentally French novel, more like Vercors’ “Le Silence de la Mer” than “War and Peace.”

The book caused a sensation at the Frankfurt Book Fair and was an immediate bestseller. In a very unusual move, Nemirovsky was posthumously awarded the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most coveted literary prizes. The publishing magazine Livres-Hebdo called it “the most important novel of the year.” English-language rights were bought by Random House.

Its considerable literary merit aside, “Suite Francaise” also owes its success to a continued French preoccupation with the country’s history during World War II. No period in recent French history, not even the Algerian war, has spawned as many books, films and memoirs.

Nemirovsky’s novel deals with the heart of the problem: It is not about why the French lost in 1940 but rather how they behaved after they lost. France’s legitimate government, recognized by the United States as such, signed an armistice with the Germans and collaborated with them, to the point of sending Jewish men, women and children to the death camps. When the war was over, and the Free French under Charles de Gaulle marched into Paris, many of the Vichy government’s leaders were jailed or executed. But “purification,” as it was called, did not end the controversy.

In today’s France, beset by anti-Semitic acts and a foreign policy seen by many as anti-Israel, the issues of the occupation period have not lost any of their urgency. They pose the question of the kind of country France is. Is it a republic open to all its residents, whatever their race or religion? Or is it -- as it was during the Vichy regime -- a country where rights are reserved for the ethnically French?

The current French government obviously prefers the former and has recently moved to silence Vichy apologists at the University of Lyon. But the issue will not go away and, in a very real sense, Nemirovsky’s “new” novel can be seen as a metaphor for France’s current problems. Therein, perhaps, lies the real reason for its success.