The New Criterion Hilton Kramer:
The generation to which I belong has a bad conscience.
—Marc Bloch, 1940
France’s collapse thus gave to these aggrieved and remorseless enemies of modernity an unexpected opportunity to impose upon their shattered nation something akin to the retrograde vision of its destiny which they had long harbored as a fantasy of correction and revenge. Owing to France’s defeat, the momentum of history was on their side. With their Nazi conquerors, after all, they already shared many categorical antipathies. It required no campaign of persuasion by the Nazis to win the adherence of French fascists and their reactionary allies to a program designed to eradicate the influence—and in many cases the physical existence—of liberals, radicals, modernists, Jews, and others who were thought to represent the free-thinking cosmopolitan culture that was marked for extinction. With the country now cut off from the outside world, moreover, and Hitler’s victory in the war looking more and more inevitable, the new order could be imposed without fear of reprisal or opprobrium.
It is for this reason that what really happened to the life of art in Vichy France during the four years of the German conquest (1940-44) is not a subject that the French themselves have been eager to explore. Some things, of course, could not be denied—outright collaboration, for example —but it is nonetheless remarkable how quickly activities and alliances of real dishonor could be forgiven, if not forgotten, once the war had run its course and France had emerged—somewhat miraculously—as one of its victors. It was well known, to cite the most familiar examples, that certain artists—André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Aristide Maillol, Charles Despiau, and Jean Cocteau, among a host of lesser talents —had made their obeisances to the Nazi cause when pressed to do so, yet their tarnished reputations caused only minor delay when it came to elevating them to honored positions in the pantheon of French culture.
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