CHAPTER 20
Jeune France was an association under the control of the Vichy government, created by Pierre Schaeffer in order to assist unemployed artists, though it would never really fulfill that role.1 It took up the baton from a national radio program, “Radio-Jeunesse,” also directed by Schaeffer and also answering to Vichy, which was named for a group of prewar musicians including both Daniel Lesur and Olivier Messiaen. Jeune France was formed officially on November 25, 1940. Its aims were to “renew the great tradition of French quality in artistic and cultural matters,” to “bring together groupings of young artists,” and, with a young audience in mind, to create study and resource centers. It also envisaged training organizers in cultural “maîtrises,” where apprentices were led by a maître, establishing centers for artistic creation, journals based on information and propaganda, touring exhibitions and theatrical productions, as well as drama festivals and celebrations. Beyond its own resources (subscriptions, shows, sales, and so forth), its financing came from the state (the General Secretariat for Youth, the Commission for the Struggle against Unemployment, the office of Marshal Pétain), as well as from the départements and towns that hosted the tours. Nonetheless, the association’s finances were always in the red. The headquarters was in Lyon, with Pierre Schaeffer as its head. Paul Flamand in Paris was in charge of its activities in the occupied zone. But the difficulties in communicating between the two zones made any concerted organization impossible. Those in each zone would always be at odds with one another over differences in how they conceived the undertaking; in the north, they privileged artistic creation and the formation of professional groups, whereas in the south they dedicated themselves to dissemination, to educating groups of young people, and to assisting preexisting groups and movements. Last, Roger Leenhardt was tasked with exploring ways to expand the association’s activities to North Africa.
Preparing the activities was a long and difficult task. Encountering difficulties with the German occupiers in the north, Jeune France initially established itself in a minuscule apartment behind the Place Saint-Michel, then in 1941 in Rue Jean-Mermoz, near the Champs Elysées roundabout, although the old premises were still retained. In the south, it was divided between Vichy and Lyon. The five main services were the research service, the implementation service (in charge of publications, events, organizing tours, workshops, construction, and notably the “maîtrises”), the administrative and financial service, the general service (for propaganda and market research), and the centers in the provinces. In total the association employed 126 people, who came from different backgrounds (far-right dissidence, Esprit, Ordre Nouveau, the scout movement). The figurehead role of the presidency was given—it seems without his knowledge (he was a prisoner of war at the time)—to Patrice de La Tour du Pin.
The most important personalities were in charge of the research service: Xavier de Lignac (general management, Paris); Jean Vilar (assisted by Romain Petitot, theater, Paris); Maurice Jacquemont (theater, Lyon); Maurice Blanchot (literature, Paris); Albert Ollivier, with Roy, Barjavel, Fabrègues (literature, Lyon); Jean Bazaine (plastic arts, Paris); and Daniel Lesur (music), Claude Roy (radio) and Leenhardt (cinema), all in Lyon. Louis Ollivier managed the administrative and financial services in Paris, in addition to the general services, whose documentation section was looked after by Yette Jeandet, a bookseller who seems to have remained in touch with Blanchot for a long time. Romain Petitot was in charge of the implementation of services in Paris, where Blanchot dealt with publications. Schaeffer was always head of the propaganda service for shows and for the radio, and Albert Ollivier was editor of Radio-Jeunesse. The implementation of each service was all the more piecemeal given that not all those involved arrived at Jeune France at the same time.
Georges Pelorson, a friend of Maulnier since their préparation and the École Normale Supérieure, introduced Blanchot to Jeune France as his successor, having just been given a role at the Vichy ministry of Education and Youth. A friend of Pelorson and a former Ordre Nouveau activist, Pierre Prévost introduced Blanchot to Ollivier, Petitot, and Lignac, who became his closest friends at Jeune France. They worked alongside each other in their unheated offices, in nearby cafés, and in the restaurants where they would lunch together at least once a week. Blanchot seemed to them to be utterly discreet and dedicated. His past on the far right, although it was recent and known to his friends, was never mentioned. Nothing in his magisterially indifferent attitude, discourse, or behavior gave it away. Indeed, nothing would give anyone cause to believe that he was subject to any major political influence. Subsequently, Lignac would always ask himself why Blanchot came to Jeune France. Perhaps he needed a safe haven: an official role that gave him lots of free time, without requiring compromises (this is the only way Lignac can explain it). As an unemployed journalist, Blanchot also needed money.
Those who contributed to Jeune France indeed seem to have been very well paid. Jean Bazaine recalls the figure of three thousand francs per month for section leaders such as himself and Blanchot. He states that he remembers this all the more exactly because this sum had come as a surprise. An item from the association’s 1942 draft budget confirms this figure, proposing 3,000 to 4,500 francs for the leaders of the artistic sections and administrative services.
Each artistic section was charged with establishing guiding principles for its policies, discovering works-in-progress, scrutinizing projects, and organizing roundtables, colloquia, and lectures. The literary section was asked to put together a committee in order to solicit works from young authors and to direct them toward publishing houses. It was also envisaged that a monthly journal of art and literature (both texts and critical studies) would be created. There was an ambition to launch multiple book series with the publisher Albin Michel: Works (anthologies providing a theoretical, genre-based way of approaching French works, including the most recent), Exchanges (aimed at publishing foreign authors), and Critical Essays (one of the two works envisioned was a collection named Tradition and Creation, which—as Blanchot wrote in a report—would “attempt to go deeper into the thought that fidelity to tradition is fidelity to a creative spirit”). It seems, however, that Blanchot did not carry through these projects during the many months he spent at Jeune France. In fact, it seems that he did nothing at all, that he went there precisely in order to do nothing. In the north, only one work appeared, that by Albert-Marie Schmidt on La Jeune Poésie (Young Poetry). It is true that the regime of censorship was particularly strong in the literary domain. If Jeune France did not have the infrastructure necessary for a real, working publishing house, it is doubtful whether Blanchot ever really tried to give it the means it would have needed to that end.
Demonstrating a similar indifference to government directives, the plastic arts section in the occupied zone appealed to tradition the better to encourage creation. It was rather active. In May 1941, Jean Bazaine organized an exhibition at the Braun gallery, “Twenty Painters from the French Tradition.” The painters included Manessier and Tal Coat. This was a daring exhibition at a time when Nazi sculpture was benefitting from enormous propaganda. The violent reactions it provoked, however, came less from the Germans than from the French editors and readers of Je suis partout.
Being close to Bazaine and Manessier at this time, Blanchot liked this type of painting, although without being intensely interested in it.2 He frequently visited Bazaine in his studio, where the two of them would discuss mainly literature. He went to the cinema and to the opera performances with which the Germans were trying to dazzle Parisian audiences at the time. He was close to Bernard Milleret, his office companion and an artist who regularly drew portraits in pencil, and who must have drawn Blanchot more than once.
Despite the presence of a considerable number of intellectuals, the actions of Jeune France remained largely empirical and were dictated by the artistic desires and political attitude of the individuals in question. According to Lignac, in Paris there was never a single “active member of the Resistance or dedicated Pétainiste”: “there were those who consented.” As an independent association, Jeune France did not depend on Vichy administratively, even though the latter provided 100 percent of its funding. While the government only oversaw the projects intermittently, the general idea remained that of reorganizing the cultural life of a half-occupied country and of renewing French inspiration, by way of a reconciliation between artists and the people. Some pieces of writing would push allegiance to the “national revolution” and with Maurice Bardèche there would even be a fascistic program of films; certain open-air theater celebrations would border on being epic personality cults; but overall, the members of Jeune France, especially in the north, would refrain from producing anything that too closely resembled propaganda.
The pressures on the association increased with time. The public powers demanded to be better represented on the management and administrative committees. The financial generosity of the state can be measured against the demands it made, which hardened from August 1941 onward, when Paul Marion and Pierre Pucheu joined the government, the former at the Ministry of Information and Propaganda, the latter at the Ministry of the Interior. Mounier, who rebelled against the fascization of the regime, was immediately stripped of his journal (Esprit was banned in August 1941) and shortly afterward removed from Jeune France.
In the fall of 1941, Lignac’s friends were still holding the line: that of remaining insubordinate to Vichy. However, inaction was no longer a possibility. Blanchot’s September 1941 dedication on the cover page of a copy of Thomas the Obscure announced the struggle that was around the corner: “To Paul Flamand, this book destined to estrange all readers.” It reflected the elitist challenge that was being set in opposition to the sometimes outlandish populism of the leadership.
Examining Xavier de Lignac’s archives leads us to contradict, at least in part, the accounts of the breakup of Jeune France given by Véronique Chabrol and Pierre Schaeffer, who in a few words (and making a few mistakes) brush over the association’s final months, which were in fact extremely tempestuous. Was Lignac’s attempt to regain control, assisted by Blanchot and Petitot, really an attempt at autonomy in the face of a government that was becoming more hardline? We can indeed think so, but not without underlining both the demanding nature and the naivety of such an undertaking. It is as if Lignac and Blanchot, in 1942, still believed in the possibility of working with Vichy money even while retaining independence in their creative choices.3 Or on the contrary, it could have been that amidst the general collapse, there was a move to voluntarily scuttle Jeune France in the name of a brief statement of dignity; this would have been a case of double or nothing, an extremely risky gamble but perhaps also the only possible, tenable one.
In October 1941, the appearance of a leaflet on Jeune France, which was the idea of the management, brought latent hostilities into the open. A weighty exchange of correspondence between Schaeffer or Flamand, on one side, and Lignac on the other, bore witness to this.
On October 27, Lignac sent two notes to Schaeffer. In a “note to the managing director of Jeune France” consisting of three typed sheets, he denounced the concessions made, the dithering, the lack of seriousness, the equivocation and the “most dangerous vulgarity” of the leaflet published. He introduced a second note containing “practical conditions” which were “the only ones on which Blanchot, Petitot and [myself] could still envisage contributing to Jeune France,” and without which they would resign publicly, causing as much noise as possible. “The values which we would have liked to work toward safeguarding are too insidiously compromised.” Lignac also denounced the leaders’ authoritarianism and betrayal.
When those who started Jeune France came to ask me to work with them on founding and leading a new branch of the association in Paris, I thought that for them and for me it was essentially a question of working, as fully as possible, toward the conditions necessary for a free culture to survive even when threatened from all sides, from both within and without the new French regime. It seemed a matter of agreement between us that while the association envisaged playing some official role, taking on certain tasks of dissemination—without giving in to the requests or injunctions of propaganda—this was justified by the wider concrete support it received from the public purse. This timely concession represented the opportunity to use all the more freely the financial powers thus obtained in order to act in total independence and with the forethought and rigor that are necessary if we are to safeguard our spiritual values.
The following day, October 28, a meeting between Schaeffer and Lignac broke down; in Schaeffer’s words, it took place “in a regrettable atmosphere of mistrust.”
On October 29, Schaeffer responded in writing to Lignac’s two notes and to their meeting, stating that creative freedom was not incompatible with the task of dissemination. Not without reason, he denounced the inactivity of “your colleague Blanchot”: “a year on, no written work has been produced by Jeune France.” As he was summing up his letter, he received the resignations—written the day before—of Lignac, Blanchot, and Petitot, who no longer had “any illusions over the role that the association is destined to play.” Schaeffer added a few further sentences: he accepted the resignations, kept open the possibility of the three contributing as individuals, but warned against any further attempts to destabilize Jeune France.
On November 1, Lignac responded to Schaeffer’s demand with a further letter outlining the reasons behind his resignation. “The general activities of the association can only discredit the exemplary role” of the work of a number of free artists who had happened to believe in the association. A draft of this letter is corrected in Blanchot’s hand, confirming that he participated in drawing it up and was broadly in agreement. Lignac would even confirm later that he hardly ever did or wrote anything for Jeune France without gaining Blanchot’s approval. The latter was said to be “the real instigator” of this attempt at an “intellectual putsch,” and to have had no intention either of washing his hands of it or of profiting from it. This is not impossible: such a position of active withdrawal, of sovereign discretion, would also be that taken by Blanchot, the editor in the shadows, in the 1960s.
In reality, Lignac was preparing a counterattack. He checked that he had the support of Commissioner Hillairet, the second-in-command to Commissioner Perrin, whom the government asked to lead an inquiry into Jeune France.
On January 31, 1942, Commissioner Perrin sent a note to Mr. Jardel, general secretary to the government. He requested that Jeune France be dissolved and proposed that Lignac be named as the head of a new, free organization, and asked that the various activities be shared out in a coherent way. The new association would be in charge of artistic creation, without intervention by the state, with the latter overseeing “the organization of large events” and the management of maîtrises. “The state fulfills its functions by conserving, dedicating, supporting that which has proved itself; it cannot itself intervene regarding that which is seeking its form or still proposing it.”
On February 10, Lignac wrote a note echoing, sometimes word for word, that of the commissioner. He declared himself ready to dissolve Jeune France and to set up a new association. Annex 1 clearly defined the objective: “responding to the legitimate demands of those who wish, through works without concession, to reach the true sources of culture.” This required the stimulation of “private initiatives in favor of literature and the arts, while allowing them to remain independent,” as well as the staging of investigations and projects, editions, reissues, spectacles, concerts, exhibitions, “excluding any desire for simple dissemination, for propaganda or for entertainment.” On March 12, the minister who was secretary of state for national education and youth, Carcopino, officially conferred upon Lignac the task of forming “a new association destined to replace Jeune France.” The same day, he informed Schaeffer that Jeune France was being dissolved (the decree appeared in the Journal officiel on July 11). Dismissed on March 15, Flamand for a while refused to leave the premises or relinquish his role.
On April 2, Lignac sent to Carcopino a dossier of more than thirty pages on the creation of the new “Association for the Defense and Illustration of Artistic Values.” It established the need for a steering committee led by Giraudoux; a management team comprising Lignac as general secretary and Petitot as his assistant; an associate board with Bazaine, Dumay, Schmidt, and Blanchot, “literary critic at the Journal des Débats, resident in Paris.” On April 4, the minister replied favorably.
The success of Lignac, Petitot, and Blanchot would lead to nothing. Between the two letters just mentioned, on April 3 Pétain consulted Goering over the opportunity to call Laval back to power. In less than two weeks, Laval replaced Darlan in government and was given exceptional constitutional powers. Vichy overtly entered into collaboration. Any margin for autonomy for the new association became unthinkable: it was liquidated before it came into being.
Remaining totally inactive until fall 1941, reduced to powerlessness at the very moment they had placed themselves in a position to intervene, Lignac and Blanchot would never be able to “use Vichy against Vichy.” So much so that today Lignac states, “in a sense Jeune France never existed.”