Salon review of Alice Kaplan’s new book The Collaborator about French pro-fascist novelist and critic Robert Brasillach, who was executed by firing squad on direct order of de Gaulle in the waning days of WWII. Simone de Beauvoir called his condemnation symbolically rather than judicially sound, and disturbing questions remain unanswered about what was essentially an execution for “hate speech”, a finding that intellectual crimes were as noxious as political or military. Moral ambiguity and irony swirl around the case. The judge and prosecutor had themselves been Vichy collaborators. Alice Kaplan is the daughter of a Nuremberg prosecutor. De Gaulle explained his excepting Brassilach when he pardoned all who had not actively colluded with German authorities with the assertion that “talent is a responsibility.” “And there is the more obscure question, too, of

his actual involvement in denouncing Jews in hiding in the

pages of Je Suis Partout. It was never proved beyond doubt,

but clearly the intent to harm existed. It’s an open question

whether such ambiguities merit death. In a society at peace, it

is difficult to judge the mood of a place like wartime France,

where words could literally kill.” Brasillach himself, Kaplan says, represents the contradiction of someone who came to fascism through a devotion to the mythic and symbolic, with a disdain for the political and economic. She also raises fascinating speculation that his attraction to fascism may have been at base homoerotic. In any case, refining our modern conception of “hate speech” and “crimes against humanity” depend on grappling with the Brasillach case. “Kaplan, like de Beauvoir,

is right when she points out that executing people because of

their words is a dubious path to tread. If words are actions,

after all, why not have a thought police and arm them to the

teeth? Brasillach would have approved.”