Communism and Collaboration: Simon Sabiani and Politics in Marseille, 1919-1944

256 Pages·1989·9.202 MB·English

by  Paul Jankowski

COMMUNISM AND
COLLABORATION
1 The old city of Marseille, c 1930
COMMUNISM
AND
COLLABORATION
Simon Sabiani and Politics
in Marseille, 1919—1944
Paul Jankowski
Yale University Press
New Haven and London
Copyright © 1989 by Paul Jankowski
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any
form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publishers.
Set in Linotron Bembo by Best-set Typesetter Limited, Hong Kong,
and printed and bound in Great Britain at the University Printing House,
Oxford by David Stanford, printer to the University of Oxford.
Library of Congress CIP Data
Jankowski, Paul, 1950-
Communism and collaboration: Simon Sabiani and politics in
Marseille, 1919-1944 / by Paul Jankowski,
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-300-04345-7
1. Sabiani, Simon. 2. Marseille (France)—Politics and
government. 3. Marseille (France)—Biography. 4. Politicians—
France—Marseille—Biography. 5. Ex-communists—France—Marseille—
Biography. 6. Fascists—France—Marseille—Biography. 7. World
War, 1939-1945—Collaborationists—France—Marseille—Biography.
8. Parti Populaire Française. I. Title.
DC801. M37S235 1989
944'. 91—del 9
[B] 88-18708
CIP
Printed in Great Britain
at the University Printing House, Oxford
by David Stanford
Printer to the University
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
1. The Confluence: Popular Politics in Pre-war Marseille 1
2. The Rise of Simon Sabiani, 1919-1931 23
3. Sabianisme, 1931-1935 36
4. Sabiani at Bay, 1934-1936 45
5. ‘Fascism’, 1936-1939 55
6. Vichy’s Rivals, June 1940 to November 1942 71
7. The Dregs of Society, November 1942 to August 1944 93
8. The PPF and Others, November 1942 to August 1944 121
9. To Sigmaringen and Back, August 1944 to September 1956 137
Conclusion Virtue Gone Mad 147
Appendices I-IV 151
Notes 177
Sources 219
Index 233

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1 The old city of Marseille, c 1930 (National Archives,
Washington, D.C.) ii
2 Simon Sabiani and friends, c 1936 (C. Baudelaire/
Bibliothèque Municipale, Marseille) viii
3 The Quai des Belges, c 1930 (National Archives,
Washington, D.C.) xvi
4 Young upstart and old Mayor: Sabiani and Flaissières
from Le Bavard, 30 March 1929 (Musée d’histoire de
Marseille) 24
5 Sabiani and his paper on the eve of electoral defeat.
May 1936 (Musée d’histoire de Marseille) 53
6 German soldiers on the Calanques (Archives
départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône) 119
7 Shells landing near Notre Dame de la Garde, August 1944
(National Archives, Washington, D.C.) 145
8 The three faces of Simon Sabiani (Musee d’histoire de
Marseille and LAPI/Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris) 148
i Map of Marseille: the twelve cantons, 1931
(Archives Nationales, Paris) 2
ii Map of Marseille: the fourth canton, 1924 (H. Lan/
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) 4
iii Map of Marseille: the twelve cantons 168
2 Simon Sabiani and friends, c 1936
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I began work on this book thinking of it as a contribution to
the controversy over ‘French fascism’. A study of Simon Sabiani
and his following in Marseille, from his Communist beginnings to
his collaborationist end, would yield some local findings relevant, I
thought, to the wider discussion. But I soon found that Sabiani’s
story had a life of its own and when I looked at the recondite litera­
ture about ‘French fascism’ I began to reconsider my participation.
Rather than spend several years of my life and several hundred pages
of the reader’s time worrying about a hypothetical description for an
unknown man, I decided to give the subject whatever treatment it
deserved and forget about its assigned pigeonhole. I decided to write
a thesis about Sabianisme and worry about fascism later.
Sabianisme is a rather tragic story. It began as a typical if noisy
prewar marseillais political clan and ended in disaster, its members in
disgrace, in exile, in prison, or in front of a firing squad. I set out to
tell how and why it all happened, taking Sabiani’s agitated life as a
narrative thread; and then I looked again at the literature about
‘French fascism’.
Historians have been arguing about the existence and nature of an
indigenous French fascism for over thirty years, so much so that the
subject is almost as controversial as Italian fascism or German
Nazism. But it is much more limited: the protagonists in the debate
have focussed almost obsessively on ideology.
At first they concentrated on the enthusiasms of intellectuals,
mostly journalists and men of letters, for a new man and a new élite
and a romantisme d’action — the enthusiasms of Brasillach for ‘fascist
joy’ and of Je Suis Partout:
French fascism does exist. It’s not a party... but above all a state of
mind, a family of reflexes, a heroic way of seeing life, it’s a lot of
X COMMUNISM AND COLLABORATION
hardship and demands, it’s a constant will to grandeur and
purity...
They recognized some French precursors, variously identified as
Péguy and Barrés and Sorel and Hervé, among others, and differed
at times over the ‘Frenchness’ of the tradition they discerned rather
than over its intellectual badge.1
More controversial were the political and social philosophers.
Nolte, but not de Felice, thought Maurras fascist — de Felice found
the idea ‘absolutely impossible from any point of view’. Grossman,
but not Bergounioux, thought Déat close to fascism by the mid-
1930s — Bergounioux saw him as a Jacobin republican whose views
were never more than reactions to events. For Plumyène and Lasierra
he was only fascist after 1940. Most agreed that Georges Valois in his
Faisceau phase was fascist, but some saw only an aberration in his in­
tellectual development, the opportunistic digression of an ambitious
crank whom even Brasillach, in his own day, had called a ‘highly sus­
pect lunatic’.2 The arguments went on: the problem was that no one
could agree on definitions, on the ingredients of a ‘fascist minimum’.
The problem deepened and the controversy intensified with the
appearance of Sternhell’s Ni Droite ni Gauche. l’Idéologie du Fascisme
en France. Now all sorts of thinkers were pre-fascist or fascist with­
out even knowing it — Déat, de Man, Mounier, Maulnier, Sorel,
among others — and one of them, unfortunate enough to find him­
self included within the long arm of the author’s law, sued for libel.
Stemhell’s fascists formed a ‘socialisme national’ with roots in the
late nineteenth century, a union of disaffected left-wing marxists and
right-wing nationalists; they marked a synthesis of a certain socialism
with a certain nationalism. Their ideological family was the forerun­
ner of other fascist ideologies, and was all the purer in its ancestral
French form for escaping the forced miscegenations of political
office. They were fascist well before 1940 and if some later joined the
resistance they had already flaunted their true ideological colours
and their hostility to liberalism, democracy and Marxism alike.3
Stemhell’s work provoked a storm of protest. His critics attacked
him for ignoring the context in which his thinkers thought up their
theories; for a fallacious fatality, a ‘causalité régressive’ in which
they were pre-fascist in 1930 because they were fascist in 1940; for
exaggerating the very limited influence of a very limited number;
for imposing an artificial coherence on their views; for ignoring or
trivialising their anti-Nazi sentiments; for leaving out the fascists
of the right, men like Céline or Brasillach who had never been
Marxists, disillusioned or otherwise. Above all they attacked him for
wielding the stigma of fascism so freely and flexibly as to threaten
almost anyone: it was the problem of definition all over.4