The Collaborator: The Trial & Execution of Robert Brasillach

In this rare scholarly page-turner, Kaplan (a professor of Romance Studies at Duke and author of the acclaimed memoir French Lessons) employs the skills of a biographer and literary critic to flesh out the life of Robert Brasillach, a prolific and controversial French critic who was executed for treason, at age 35, after France's liberation from the Nazis. A fascist-leaning writer known for his defense of Nazi crimes (in 1942, he wrote his most incriminating phrase, ""We must separate from the Jews en bloc and not keep any little ones""), Brasillach was the only distinguished writer put to death by the postwar French government. Kaplan looks closely at the trial itself and asks big questions about artistic accountability and Brasillach's legacy (he is, according to Kaplan, a martyr to Holocaust revisionists). Meanwhile, she doesn't shy away from the topic of Brasillach's homosexuality. She deftly describes his relationship with a German intellectual--a ""Franco-German alliance expressed in miniature""--and looks at how the prosecutor used metaphoric allusions to Brasillach's homosexuality as a weapon against him in court. Everyone in the courtroom comes to life here: Kaplan examines the friendship between the prosecuting and defense attorneys as well as the jurors who convicted Brasillach. She also delineates the conflicted reactions of French intellectuals, many of whom criticized the verdict even though they abhorred Brasillach's beliefs. Throughout, Kaplan--whose father was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials--brilliantly demonstrates how a trial, and the lives of individuals, can serve as a metaphor for an entire nation. (Apr.)