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Swift Press The Propagandist An Extraordinary WWII Autobiographical Novel. New Yorker Best Books of The Year.
"Shows why historical fiction matters ... This haunting tale stayed with me."—Cara Black, author of Three Hours in Paris
In a grand Paris apartment, a young girl attends gatherings regularly organized by her mother. The women talk about beauty secrets and gossip, but the mood grows dark when the past, notably World War Two, comes under coded discussion in hushed tones. Years later, the silent witness to these sessions has become a prominent historian, and with this chilling autobiographical novel she sets out to unmask enigmatic figures in and around her family. Why, she seeks to understand, did they betray their Jewish neighbors and zealously collaborate with the Nazi occupation of France, remaining for decades hence obsessive devotees of that evil lost cause.
In a grand Paris apartment, a young girl attends gatherings regularly organized by her mother. The women talk about beauty secrets and gossip, but the mood grows dark when the past, notably World War Two, comes under coded discussion in hushed tones. Years later, the silent witness to these sessions has become a prominent historian, and with this chilling autobiographical novel she sets out to unmask enigmatic figures in and around her family. Why, she seeks to understand, did they betray their Jewish neighbors and zealously collaborate with the Nazi occupation of France, remaining for decades hence obsessive devotees of that evil lost cause.
208 pages, Paperback
Published May 8, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews
August 8, 2025
"In her début novel, a historian of Vichy France tackles her family’s real-life collaboration during the Second World War . . . The result is at once a ghost story, a tale of amour fou, a settling of accounts, and, one senses, a deeply personal act of expiation . . . allowing readers to identify with the human foibles of characters on the wrong side of history, while never excusing them."
—The New Yorker
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: In a grand Paris apartment, a young girl attends gatherings regularly organized by her mother. The women talk about beauty secrets and gossip, but the mood grows dark when the past, notably World War Two, comes under coded discussion in hushed tones.
Years later, the silent witness to these sessions has become a prominent historian, and with this chilling autobiographical novel she sets out to unmask enigmatic figures in and around her family. Why, she seeks to understand, did they betray their Jewish neighbors and zealously collaborate with the Nazi occupation of France, remaining for decades hence obsessive devotees of that evil lost cause.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Very much like My Dinner with Andre , only French and about Nazi collaborators, in their own damning words.
What a book to write from one's own experiences. I'm amazed she was not more vilified, as it seems her brother had the most powerful negative response to publishing what amounts to the filthiest of dirty laundry. The author "is a specialist in Germanic civilization and a historian of the Nazi occupation of France. She is the author of several historical works about the occupation and the Vichy regime. Born in Paris in 1957, The Propagandist is her first novel," though certainly not her first book (publisher's provided biographical info). I think my favorite title of hers is "Ville Lumière, Années Noirs" or roughly "City of Light in Years of Darkness" about the Nazi occupation. I wish someone would translate it because my days of slugging through big honkin' books in French are gone.
Lucie, the Propagandist of the title, was married to an Aryan named Friedrich before the convenient marriage to the narrator's rich father. It was Friedrich, the One True Love of Lucie's life and an early eugenics researcher, who formed the future matriarch's attitudes ever after. Lucie and her female relatives all use the corruption of French legal and social systems (this is the land of the Dreyfus Affair and the LePens' evil racism, recall) to benefit materially from the vanishing and lack of return of Parisian Jews.
Probably the best time I had reading about these vile people as they sat around discussing their necrotic morality was the details of how exactly the collaborators accomplished this feat of theft. "Listening" to them as they bemoaned being called collaborators and spewed hatred was, frankly, unpleasant. It's a lot like people in the US not protesting ICEstapo's disappearing of people the scum risen to the top don't like. If you're wondering what those "good Germans" and ordinary French collaborators thought of just sitting back and not speaking out, look in a mirror.
The last third of the book dragged past me. The horrified fascination of learning what these entitled sleazebags got up to in order to hide from justice while keeping their ill-got gains wore off; the stars fell from my eyes and my rating. The absence of a central conflict got to me at last. I can't help but praise the author and the book, while tutting over the story as a story.
What I want to say and do at this passage in US political history is very much what the author has done here: Hold an unsparing mirror to the inner workings of "good people" who make excuses for their inaction. Its consequences are real. The Gestapo, loyal only to The Leader, and constrained by no laws, is operating now.
What are you doing to resist it? Are you sitting in your comfy world tutting? At least sending money to help refugees somewhere? Anything? Or are you these detestable Parisian ladies' spiritual descendant?
—The New Yorker
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: In a grand Paris apartment, a young girl attends gatherings regularly organized by her mother. The women talk about beauty secrets and gossip, but the mood grows dark when the past, notably World War Two, comes under coded discussion in hushed tones.
Years later, the silent witness to these sessions has become a prominent historian, and with this chilling autobiographical novel she sets out to unmask enigmatic figures in and around her family. Why, she seeks to understand, did they betray their Jewish neighbors and zealously collaborate with the Nazi occupation of France, remaining for decades hence obsessive devotees of that evil lost cause.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Very much like My Dinner with Andre , only French and about Nazi collaborators, in their own damning words.
What a book to write from one's own experiences. I'm amazed she was not more vilified, as it seems her brother had the most powerful negative response to publishing what amounts to the filthiest of dirty laundry. The author "is a specialist in Germanic civilization and a historian of the Nazi occupation of France. She is the author of several historical works about the occupation and the Vichy regime. Born in Paris in 1957, The Propagandist is her first novel," though certainly not her first book (publisher's provided biographical info). I think my favorite title of hers is "Ville Lumière, Années Noirs" or roughly "City of Light in Years of Darkness" about the Nazi occupation. I wish someone would translate it because my days of slugging through big honkin' books in French are gone.
Lucie, the Propagandist of the title, was married to an Aryan named Friedrich before the convenient marriage to the narrator's rich father. It was Friedrich, the One True Love of Lucie's life and an early eugenics researcher, who formed the future matriarch's attitudes ever after. Lucie and her female relatives all use the corruption of French legal and social systems (this is the land of the Dreyfus Affair and the LePens' evil racism, recall) to benefit materially from the vanishing and lack of return of Parisian Jews.
Probably the best time I had reading about these vile people as they sat around discussing their necrotic morality was the details of how exactly the collaborators accomplished this feat of theft. "Listening" to them as they bemoaned being called collaborators and spewed hatred was, frankly, unpleasant. It's a lot like people in the US not protesting ICEstapo's disappearing of people the scum risen to the top don't like. If you're wondering what those "good Germans" and ordinary French collaborators thought of just sitting back and not speaking out, look in a mirror.
The last third of the book dragged past me. The horrified fascination of learning what these entitled sleazebags got up to in order to hide from justice while keeping their ill-got gains wore off; the stars fell from my eyes and my rating. The absence of a central conflict got to me at last. I can't help but praise the author and the book, while tutting over the story as a story.
What I want to say and do at this passage in US political history is very much what the author has done here: Hold an unsparing mirror to the inner workings of "good people" who make excuses for their inaction. Its consequences are real. The Gestapo, loyal only to The Leader, and constrained by no laws, is operating now.
What are you doing to resist it? Are you sitting in your comfy world tutting? At least sending money to help refugees somewhere? Anything? Or are you these detestable Parisian ladies' spiritual descendant?
January 11, 2025
This Parisian 'memoir of sorts' started out well but got gradually less interesting.
The author's mother was a convinced Nazi during the war and worked for a propaganda magazine. After the liberation she managed to stay under the radar and escape justice. The author was born in a household ruled by her mother, her aunt and grandmother and full of regret over the lost war, ideals and opportunities.
The descriptions of the mother's role in the war are interesting and so are the explanations on the way Jewish property was distributed.
It takes courage to write about your own family. But the second half of the book did not really hold my interest.
The author's mother was a convinced Nazi during the war and worked for a propaganda magazine. After the liberation she managed to stay under the radar and escape justice. The author was born in a household ruled by her mother, her aunt and grandmother and full of regret over the lost war, ideals and opportunities.
The descriptions of the mother's role in the war are interesting and so are the explanations on the way Jewish property was distributed.
It takes courage to write about your own family. But the second half of the book did not really hold my interest.
April 13, 2025
An interesting and brave family memoir/novel. The titular propagandist was Lucie, the author's mother, a Nazi sympathiser who led the family ideology and was famed for her poster campaigns encouraging her fellow Parisians to roll out the red carpet for their invaders.
Detailing the family's collaboration during the war, and it's escaping of justice after, this book is an interesting insight into a little-explored part of WW2 and its aftermath.
Whilst the first half is pretty riveting, I felt like it failed to conjure the drama or intrigue as it continued to make it really successful as a novel, and is probably better approached by the reader as a work of non-fiction.
Detailing the family's collaboration during the war, and it's escaping of justice after, this book is an interesting insight into a little-explored part of WW2 and its aftermath.
Whilst the first half is pretty riveting, I felt like it failed to conjure the drama or intrigue as it continued to make it really successful as a novel, and is probably better approached by the reader as a work of non-fiction.
April 16, 2025
2.5? Unfortunately not my favorite. Took me way too long for the length of it but I wanted to give it a shot and finish it anyways. The concept was fascinating though and a bit haunting.
I am usually drawn to WWII era novels, but the way this was written just wasn’t for me. Really scattered and I found it difficult to stay interested in the tale of Lucie when the text would suddenly jump to another side characters story or another period in time so abruptly. Idk.
I am usually drawn to WWII era novels, but the way this was written just wasn’t for me. Really scattered and I found it difficult to stay interested in the tale of Lucie when the text would suddenly jump to another side characters story or another period in time so abruptly. Idk.
October 28, 2025
This isn’t really a novel, but it was nonetheless a fascinating read. Loveeee History of the Everyday, and this gave me a perspective I feel Americans rarely get on Nazi collaborationism.
August 30, 2025
The author explores her own collaborationist family with unflinching honesty. Its seems that every one of them, from her mother to her great uncles and cousins, found a way to betray France to their Nazi occupiers. But I wanted more analysis of why they all fell so easily into this pattern. Was the author's family typical of its time and place or were they exceptionally venal? After reading the book, I still couldn't say.
December 1, 2024
A collection of memories scattered incoherently, with paragraphs in the middle of stories pertaining to completely different thoughts. An overall very interesting story told by a historian who very clearly isn’t a novelist.
August 4, 2025
A disturbing overview of the casual cruelty of those we call 'collabos'. Slightly confusing at times; it could have been structured better.
September 13, 2025
Really interesting premise and was so intrigued to see how the author would reflect on this part of history from a personal lens, and her emotional connection or dissonance from what she learns. However, it’s much more of a non-fiction take than I thought. Still learned lots about a perspective of the war I never considered, but not exactly as captivating in style
December 25, 2024
Historically fascinating and politically topical, though narratively quite tough to follow. I suspect I learned about as much as what went over my head.
February 17, 2025
I read The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies for the Albertine Book Club of New York. This short but engrossing novel is about a French family, headed by the matriarch Lucie, who collaborated with the Nazis. The narrator, named only once but who seems clearly to be the author herself, tells of the strange behavior of her mother Lucie, and other members of her family, such as two uncles, Gaston and Raphael, her aunt Zizi, and other members of their circle. As a child, the narrator learns snippets of information about their lives during the Second World War, but it’s not until she is an adult that she fully realizes they were collaborating with the enemy.
Lucie works as a propagandist producing war posters, and she is good at her job. Later she works for right wing publications. She keeps a low profile, yet she is well known and respected in the Vichy government. She and her sisters enjoy the spoils of the war, including fancy parties, and literal spoils, that is, apartments formerly owned by Jewish families, sold to them at basement prices, and objects stolen from the Jews. Aunt Zizi owns a suspicious antiques and resale store, while clothes and other objects are “donated” to Lucie and her sisters by Martine, a Jewish woman who is seemingly easy to fleece. The group of women that hangs out at Lucie’s apartment, mostly relatives, are referred to as the gynaeceum, and they are completely dependent on Lucie with regard to how to survive after the war. Lucie goes as far as to blackmail an uncle to try to get him to turn over stolen goods and apartments.
The other major character in the novel is Lucie’s first husband, Friedrich, a biologist working with the Nazis. When Lucie is widowed, her devotion to him remains strong for the rest of her life, to the confusion of her children and the chagrin of her second husband Charles, who tolerates her devotion by saying that one cannot be jealous of a dead man. But Lucie names her first child with Charles “Friedrich” which the boy changes to Felix as soon as possible. Charles is the definition of the long-suffering husband.
The narrator, like the real author, grows up to be a historian of the Second World War, and it’s of course the great irony that her family consisted of collaborators, usurpers, and, let’s call them what they were, thieves. But the shock is that they never have any remorse, even decades after the war, and Lucie, for a time at least, hold out hope that the side she was on would rise again.
Even though this is a novel, it is likely an “auto fiction,” the type of novel that is basically a memoir but with some of the facts changed to protect people. Generally in the States, we don’t appreciate memoirs with the facts changed, because we tend to privilege “truth,” as if anyone writing a memoir can really write the complete truth. The French realize that every truth contains some level of fiction either because memory is faulty or because it’s required to tell the story.
I enjoyed this novel, though there is no real climactic ending. We switch back and forth throughout the novel from the period during the war and Lucie’s life with her first husband, and her later life after the war, trying to lay low as to not be executed. We never really know how Friedrich died: was he really in a bicycle accident or was he recognized by the American soldiers as a Nazi? The denouement is that everyone else in the family eventually dies, but through natural causes, and forty to sixty years later: no one is really ever directly punished for any of their actions. Maybe the punishment is the existence of this book, which finally exposes the crimes that Lucie and the family worked their whole lives to conceal.
Lucie works as a propagandist producing war posters, and she is good at her job. Later she works for right wing publications. She keeps a low profile, yet she is well known and respected in the Vichy government. She and her sisters enjoy the spoils of the war, including fancy parties, and literal spoils, that is, apartments formerly owned by Jewish families, sold to them at basement prices, and objects stolen from the Jews. Aunt Zizi owns a suspicious antiques and resale store, while clothes and other objects are “donated” to Lucie and her sisters by Martine, a Jewish woman who is seemingly easy to fleece. The group of women that hangs out at Lucie’s apartment, mostly relatives, are referred to as the gynaeceum, and they are completely dependent on Lucie with regard to how to survive after the war. Lucie goes as far as to blackmail an uncle to try to get him to turn over stolen goods and apartments.
The other major character in the novel is Lucie’s first husband, Friedrich, a biologist working with the Nazis. When Lucie is widowed, her devotion to him remains strong for the rest of her life, to the confusion of her children and the chagrin of her second husband Charles, who tolerates her devotion by saying that one cannot be jealous of a dead man. But Lucie names her first child with Charles “Friedrich” which the boy changes to Felix as soon as possible. Charles is the definition of the long-suffering husband.
The narrator, like the real author, grows up to be a historian of the Second World War, and it’s of course the great irony that her family consisted of collaborators, usurpers, and, let’s call them what they were, thieves. But the shock is that they never have any remorse, even decades after the war, and Lucie, for a time at least, hold out hope that the side she was on would rise again.
Even though this is a novel, it is likely an “auto fiction,” the type of novel that is basically a memoir but with some of the facts changed to protect people. Generally in the States, we don’t appreciate memoirs with the facts changed, because we tend to privilege “truth,” as if anyone writing a memoir can really write the complete truth. The French realize that every truth contains some level of fiction either because memory is faulty or because it’s required to tell the story.
I enjoyed this novel, though there is no real climactic ending. We switch back and forth throughout the novel from the period during the war and Lucie’s life with her first husband, and her later life after the war, trying to lay low as to not be executed. We never really know how Friedrich died: was he really in a bicycle accident or was he recognized by the American soldiers as a Nazi? The denouement is that everyone else in the family eventually dies, but through natural causes, and forty to sixty years later: no one is really ever directly punished for any of their actions. Maybe the punishment is the existence of this book, which finally exposes the crimes that Lucie and the family worked their whole lives to conceal.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 13, 2024
This is the debut novel from Desprairies, a French historian who explores French complicity with Nazi crimes, much of which was kept secret for decades after the war finished.
The narrator and protagonist, Coline, grew up in the 1960s with a mother, Lucie, who frequently exhibited extraordinary behaviour that she would offer no explanation for. Family would visit to talk everyday matters but often make oblique references to past events by which they were bound together; they had collaborated with the Nazis Coline soon works out.
The book is about Coline’s attempts to understand exactly what happened and to come to terms with this calamitous legacy; who were ‘our martyrs’ they spoke about, and the sign in the Bois de Boulogne that indicated they were executed there, beneath the branches of a tall oak tree.
Still a young girl, Lucie keeps Coline home from school feigning illness to preach a different education, one involving the recital of German rivers and cities, and conjugating irregular verbs.
Nazi evils are addressed indirectly as Coline herself comes of age experiencing youthful confusion as to who were the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys due to her family allegiances.
At the heart of it all is Lucie, the inciter and ringleader, a truly fascinating character. During the war she met Friedrich, a biologist who worked with Mengele, they married and became devoted to the Nationalist Socialist cause. Friedrich died in suspicious circumstances towards the end of the war, but Lucie, a talented propagandist embarked on her own sort of postwar rehab, including writing for Vogue and Life magazines.
What materialises is a beautifully written, though harrowing account of a little known after effect of the war.
The narrator and protagonist, Coline, grew up in the 1960s with a mother, Lucie, who frequently exhibited extraordinary behaviour that she would offer no explanation for. Family would visit to talk everyday matters but often make oblique references to past events by which they were bound together; they had collaborated with the Nazis Coline soon works out.
The book is about Coline’s attempts to understand exactly what happened and to come to terms with this calamitous legacy; who were ‘our martyrs’ they spoke about, and the sign in the Bois de Boulogne that indicated they were executed there, beneath the branches of a tall oak tree.
Still a young girl, Lucie keeps Coline home from school feigning illness to preach a different education, one involving the recital of German rivers and cities, and conjugating irregular verbs.
Nazi evils are addressed indirectly as Coline herself comes of age experiencing youthful confusion as to who were the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys due to her family allegiances.
At the heart of it all is Lucie, the inciter and ringleader, a truly fascinating character. During the war she met Friedrich, a biologist who worked with Mengele, they married and became devoted to the Nationalist Socialist cause. Friedrich died in suspicious circumstances towards the end of the war, but Lucie, a talented propagandist embarked on her own sort of postwar rehab, including writing for Vogue and Life magazines.
What materialises is a beautifully written, though harrowing account of a little known after effect of the war.
August 5, 2025
A fascinating exploration into the human condition that I call “justification.” The characters who ‘justify’ their way of life are French Nazi sympathizers who ride the coattails of Nazi leaders during the French occupation. The character development is so superb, that as a reader I could sympathize with why very flawed human beings could justify moving into a suddenly-abandoned, prestigious apartment in the heart of Paris and enjoying an elevated social status because of their alignment with a ‘morally-superior’ ideology. And I could understand why these characters viewed the Allies destroying the Nazi regime as a subjugation of a morally-superior utopia. This book begs the question of why human beings latch-on to destructive ideologies and refuse to let go, even in light of the evidence of their demise.
January 13, 2025
at times this was fascinating as a collection of memories that does cool things with the narrator filling in the gaps of her own understanding of her childhood as she grows, but as a novel, nothing much happens or builds.
April 21, 2025
I was surprised by this book. I don't think I've ever read any books where French collaborationalists with Nazi Germany were the main topics, protaganists even. I found it fascinating and very well done. Not apologetic in the least, not shying away from the reprehensible nature of their views, but touching on their steadfast belief in this cause even decades after the end of the war. While the names are changed, this is auto-fiction at its finest, written by a historian whose mother was a key figure. I love a book that surprises me and makes me think.
Read
October 15, 2025DNF. Was put off by the catty, inexplicably half-dressed women and was completely out when I realized what it was really about.
July 3, 2025
Fascinating and disturbing account of collaboration in occupied France during WW2 within a family.
October 23, 2024
I love New Vessel Press's mission of bringing serious literary works in translation to us anglophones, and they have introduced me to some writers I have fallen in love with (hello, Sergei Lebedev; bonjour, Jean-Philippe Blondel et Dominique Fabre!). Cecile Desprairies is a historian with a special focus on the Nazi occupation of Paris (and with good reason). I have read and admired both Ronald Rosbottom's top-notch histories of the Nazi occupation of Paris, and his blurb on the cover of this one got me to buy it.
It is billed as an autobiographical novel, but while Desprairies might be a fine historian, she is not a novelist. It is almost purely narrative in first person, but nearly entirely impersonal. The narrator is a child in an oppressively close-knit gynocratic family (they all have apartments in the same block and can keep tabs on each other through the windows), spending her days immersed in a clan of women who gather every day and talk. And talk. And talk. And bicker and boast and lie and cajole and complain. What is not immediately clear is that this is post-WW2 Paris, and these families are readjusting to the fact that their "side" has lost. For though they are French, they are ardent Nazi supporters. Their apartments (and many others at the time) previously belonged to (ahem) departed Jews, and the reasons for the "departure" are unspoken, shrugged off. If the apartment is empty, someone (like them) might as well live in it. At bargain prices, of course. They despise the Jews, though some might be marginally acceptable if useful. They don't really like the term "collaborators," because, after all, they themselves didn't actually DO anything terrible, they just carried on with their social lives, made livings, and if it meant they got some great deals on clothes or housing or art work, well, it was just there for the taking, right? They are all thoroughly loathsome.
The focus throughout is Lucie, the narrator's mother. Beautiful, smart, ambitious, hard-working, she labors and connives her way into a cozy job designing propaganda posters. She is utterly self-absorbed, seeking only fun, comforts, and an uninterrupted social whirl. She harbors a passionate, lifelong adoration of he first husband, a handsome young Nazi medical student studying genetics (or let's just say it: eugenics) who, if he hadn't been killed, would likely have been a golden heir to Joseph Mengele. Her second husband and father of her children was convenient: he was wealthy and well-connected, and that was all she wanted.
After the war, Lucie assembled the family clan, and issued orders as to where they would all live and how. She worked her connections, saw everyone settled, and almost every last wretched one of them lived to be nearly 100.
So what we have here is a chronology (told in a confusing, not-very-chronological fashion) of one French family who "made it through," through guile, weaseling, and a willful avoidance (in order to justify ignorance) of the horrors outside their windows, surviving without an ounce of guilt or sorrow or shame. Desprairies of course was a small child, and much would have been kept from her. But as a historian, she began to piece it all together, story by story, rumor by rumor, letter by letter. It is, in a horrible way, a fascinating look at how ordinary, self-absorbed people can become monstrous (Lucie's blackmailing of a great-uncle is appalling and sociopathic) in a monstrous world... and come through unscathed in any meaningful way.
Desprairies admits that her brother is furious that she has published this book. It's an important story to be told, and Desprairies has clearly put in the work to uncover it, sort it out, and try to tell it. But she has no narrative knack. I kept wishing she had written it as a straight, investigative history piece - like Rosbottom or Hochschild can do so fluidly. And maybe even showed us how she did it, how it made her feel... she mentions a relative having gifted her with a beautiful antique set of china, clearly from a looted household, which she cannot bear to use. But she still has it. What might she do with it? What ethics to consider? What options are honorable, which ones not? Now that she knows the whole story, what now?
A thorny, ugly, disturbing, important story - and sadly, not well-told. And we need it to be, just now especially.
It is billed as an autobiographical novel, but while Desprairies might be a fine historian, she is not a novelist. It is almost purely narrative in first person, but nearly entirely impersonal. The narrator is a child in an oppressively close-knit gynocratic family (they all have apartments in the same block and can keep tabs on each other through the windows), spending her days immersed in a clan of women who gather every day and talk. And talk. And talk. And bicker and boast and lie and cajole and complain. What is not immediately clear is that this is post-WW2 Paris, and these families are readjusting to the fact that their "side" has lost. For though they are French, they are ardent Nazi supporters. Their apartments (and many others at the time) previously belonged to (ahem) departed Jews, and the reasons for the "departure" are unspoken, shrugged off. If the apartment is empty, someone (like them) might as well live in it. At bargain prices, of course. They despise the Jews, though some might be marginally acceptable if useful. They don't really like the term "collaborators," because, after all, they themselves didn't actually DO anything terrible, they just carried on with their social lives, made livings, and if it meant they got some great deals on clothes or housing or art work, well, it was just there for the taking, right? They are all thoroughly loathsome.
The focus throughout is Lucie, the narrator's mother. Beautiful, smart, ambitious, hard-working, she labors and connives her way into a cozy job designing propaganda posters. She is utterly self-absorbed, seeking only fun, comforts, and an uninterrupted social whirl. She harbors a passionate, lifelong adoration of he first husband, a handsome young Nazi medical student studying genetics (or let's just say it: eugenics) who, if he hadn't been killed, would likely have been a golden heir to Joseph Mengele. Her second husband and father of her children was convenient: he was wealthy and well-connected, and that was all she wanted.
After the war, Lucie assembled the family clan, and issued orders as to where they would all live and how. She worked her connections, saw everyone settled, and almost every last wretched one of them lived to be nearly 100.
So what we have here is a chronology (told in a confusing, not-very-chronological fashion) of one French family who "made it through," through guile, weaseling, and a willful avoidance (in order to justify ignorance) of the horrors outside their windows, surviving without an ounce of guilt or sorrow or shame. Desprairies of course was a small child, and much would have been kept from her. But as a historian, she began to piece it all together, story by story, rumor by rumor, letter by letter. It is, in a horrible way, a fascinating look at how ordinary, self-absorbed people can become monstrous (Lucie's blackmailing of a great-uncle is appalling and sociopathic) in a monstrous world... and come through unscathed in any meaningful way.
Desprairies admits that her brother is furious that she has published this book. It's an important story to be told, and Desprairies has clearly put in the work to uncover it, sort it out, and try to tell it. But she has no narrative knack. I kept wishing she had written it as a straight, investigative history piece - like Rosbottom or Hochschild can do so fluidly. And maybe even showed us how she did it, how it made her feel... she mentions a relative having gifted her with a beautiful antique set of china, clearly from a looted household, which she cannot bear to use. But she still has it. What might she do with it? What ethics to consider? What options are honorable, which ones not? Now that she knows the whole story, what now?
A thorny, ugly, disturbing, important story - and sadly, not well-told. And we need it to be, just now especially.
May 19, 2024
This semi-fiction is certainly one of the most dialogue-free 'novels' you might come across; no wonder I'd prefer to call it faction. It is, we are told, at least semi-autobiographical. In chapter one our narrator is a young girl, amazed at what goes on in her mother's apartment, with the other, older females of the family (who both live in the same small set of blocks) gathering daily, stripping semi-naked, swapping clothes gained by a benefactress as if there's no tomorrow, and – well, not so much putting the world to rights but wishing themselves back into their past world, where they had better husbands, lovers, bank balances, situations – and where "the bastards" were being put in their places. For yes, these charmers hark back to Nazi-rule Paris. It's obvious early on who the allegedly illegitimate are.
Chapter Two is a stronger hark back, to how our author's mother got to tie her Nazism with a handsome worker in eugenicist biology, and worked as a sloganeering writer of government hate speech. But I think the third is even more galling. It suggested to me that, in post-War France, Vichy or otherwise, while some people were gaudily portrayed and punished as collaborators, literally sleeping with the enemy or just selling them one or two things they shouldn't, the rest of the population had just a thin veneer of respectability. I was left feeling that all you had to do was remove a sheet of tracing paper from everyone's biography and see the house purloined from Jewish owners in their name, work out which pro-Nazi newspaper they worked for, or tell just how much said tracing paper effected their ability to turn into a mass-murderer of cats. Everyone could be besmirched in these years, but like sought like too much, and the tracing paper stayed in place, intact, along with far too many reputations.
Thusly everyone who had their anti-Semitic feelings could keep them, but the book seems to want to tell us how that could be the case in the 1960s, when we started. Or rather, the blurb as I read it seems to want the book to tell us that, as did I – and it didn't. The second half was a waste of time, in that regard at least. This is a world sans repentance, and the book drifts towards everyone's deaths to little benefit. Throughout, the narrator has appeared to be the same age, even if in scenes she wasn't born for, the style is forgivingly light, and the whole purpose of the book, an attack on the thoughts of that generation, was not there. With leftist anti-Semitism on the rise and rise daily, here in 2024 Europe, we needed so much more. I can see this being a very different book in France, where the family concerned must be easily identifiable as one of note, but for anywhere it's surely nowhere near damning of the characters enough.
Chapter Two is a stronger hark back, to how our author's mother got to tie her Nazism with a handsome worker in eugenicist biology, and worked as a sloganeering writer of government hate speech. But I think the third is even more galling. It suggested to me that, in post-War France, Vichy or otherwise, while some people were gaudily portrayed and punished as collaborators, literally sleeping with the enemy or just selling them one or two things they shouldn't, the rest of the population had just a thin veneer of respectability. I was left feeling that all you had to do was remove a sheet of tracing paper from everyone's biography and see the house purloined from Jewish owners in their name, work out which pro-Nazi newspaper they worked for, or tell just how much said tracing paper effected their ability to turn into a mass-murderer of cats. Everyone could be besmirched in these years, but like sought like too much, and the tracing paper stayed in place, intact, along with far too many reputations.
Thusly everyone who had their anti-Semitic feelings could keep them, but the book seems to want to tell us how that could be the case in the 1960s, when we started. Or rather, the blurb as I read it seems to want the book to tell us that, as did I – and it didn't. The second half was a waste of time, in that regard at least. This is a world sans repentance, and the book drifts towards everyone's deaths to little benefit. Throughout, the narrator has appeared to be the same age, even if in scenes she wasn't born for, the style is forgivingly light, and the whole purpose of the book, an attack on the thoughts of that generation, was not there. With leftist anti-Semitism on the rise and rise daily, here in 2024 Europe, we needed so much more. I can see this being a very different book in France, where the family concerned must be easily identifiable as one of note, but for anywhere it's surely nowhere near damning of the characters enough.
October 22, 2024
Cecile Desprairies’ autobiographical novel, “The Propagandist,” in which her narrator, a historian like herself specializing in World War II and French collaboration, attempts a greater understanding of her collaborator mother, Lucie, gave me a fresh insight into how to better apprehend current right-wing historical revisionism that would make into a love-fest the events of Jan. 6, and, still more egregiously, in Jack Posobiec’s “Unhumans” (shamelessly plugged by J.D. Vance), make admirable such reprehensible figures as Chile’s Pinochet and Spain’s Franco.
Instances par excellence, such reconceptualizations, of what Desprairies identifies as the German general subjunctive mood, in which “it would be as if” becomes “that’s how it was.” “Als ob,” the construction is called in German, a way of expressing “the unreal while simultaneously, with the grammatical rigor of German, lending it a high degree of credibility.” So “one remains rooted in a kind of delirium without ever returning to reality. “
The grammatical heaviness aside, it’s as good a definition as any of propaganda, particularly as practiced in the Third Reich, where, as Lucie’s first husband, Friedrich, puts it, it was “all or nothing” with Hitler. And indeed no more ardently committed a couple could you find than Friedrich, whom Desprairies casts as being more Nazi than the Nazis, and Lucie, who gave her all to promoting the Third Reich canon.
A collaborationist Rosie the Riveter, Cecile says of Lucie – or Luzie, as she was called by the Germans, who couldn’t get enough of her propagandizing, to where, with her banners or handbills, she became known as the Leni Riefenstahl of the poster. And indeed she pulled out all the stops, Cecile notes, to merit the comparison, including lending an enthusiastic hand to the “Signal,” Germany’s propaganda showpiece in France.
A full-on loyalist, Lucie went to her grave unwavering in her love for the Reich and for Friedrich, something strikingly evident in letters between the two.
“So much sensuality and lunacy, as if every shred of good sense had been scrambled by ideology,” Cecile says of their correspondence in her book which, as I say, aims for some greater understanding of her mother’s mindset.
And while I think even she would acknowledge that she never fully succeeds (if indeed it could be achieved at all), the book did provide me, with its als ob formulation, a way to get a better handle on today’s Trump-born right-wing revisionism, something which his niece, Mary Trump, with her insider vantage point, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a specialist in autocracy as well as a promoter of Desprairies’ book, have been sounding the alarm about, even if their warnings seem to be falling largely on deaf ears.
Hear them, America. “Als ob” doesn't have to be reality.
Instances par excellence, such reconceptualizations, of what Desprairies identifies as the German general subjunctive mood, in which “it would be as if” becomes “that’s how it was.” “Als ob,” the construction is called in German, a way of expressing “the unreal while simultaneously, with the grammatical rigor of German, lending it a high degree of credibility.” So “one remains rooted in a kind of delirium without ever returning to reality. “
The grammatical heaviness aside, it’s as good a definition as any of propaganda, particularly as practiced in the Third Reich, where, as Lucie’s first husband, Friedrich, puts it, it was “all or nothing” with Hitler. And indeed no more ardently committed a couple could you find than Friedrich, whom Desprairies casts as being more Nazi than the Nazis, and Lucie, who gave her all to promoting the Third Reich canon.
A collaborationist Rosie the Riveter, Cecile says of Lucie – or Luzie, as she was called by the Germans, who couldn’t get enough of her propagandizing, to where, with her banners or handbills, she became known as the Leni Riefenstahl of the poster. And indeed she pulled out all the stops, Cecile notes, to merit the comparison, including lending an enthusiastic hand to the “Signal,” Germany’s propaganda showpiece in France.
A full-on loyalist, Lucie went to her grave unwavering in her love for the Reich and for Friedrich, something strikingly evident in letters between the two.
“So much sensuality and lunacy, as if every shred of good sense had been scrambled by ideology,” Cecile says of their correspondence in her book which, as I say, aims for some greater understanding of her mother’s mindset.
And while I think even she would acknowledge that she never fully succeeds (if indeed it could be achieved at all), the book did provide me, with its als ob formulation, a way to get a better handle on today’s Trump-born right-wing revisionism, something which his niece, Mary Trump, with her insider vantage point, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a specialist in autocracy as well as a promoter of Desprairies’ book, have been sounding the alarm about, even if their warnings seem to be falling largely on deaf ears.
Hear them, America. “Als ob” doesn't have to be reality.
June 29, 2025
Really more like 3.50, but rounded up as it's an important story.
The book's author, Cecile Desprairies, is a French historian specializing in the Vichy era and the Nazi occupation of France during WWII. She's written a number of non-fiction books on the subject, including about French collaboration during that period.
This is her first work of fiction, though she's acknowledges it's heavily autobiographical. It's the story of Lucie, written from the point of view of her daughter who, from the time she's very young, tries to make sense of the weird mood swings her mother displays, as well as the myriad contradictions and misdirection her mother, aunt, grandmother along with her mother's extended family endlessly transmit about where their wealth and property came from and what they did during the war years and after the liberation of France.
The author comes to realize that a lot of the family's assets--including apartments, furniture, jewelry and other signs of wealth--likely were acquired from Jewish sources whose owners fled or were 'deported' by the Nazi regime. She also learns that her mother had been a highly successful--even sought after--propagandist for the Nazi regime, and was married to an Alsatian medical student/scientist who was strongly influenced by Josef Mengele and his ideas regarding scientific racism as it served the Nazi positions on Aryan supremacy and the Jewish 'question.'
Though Lucie and her husband thrived during the war years, she was canny enough to keep as low a profile as possible, never taking credit for her successful efforts or allowing herself to be highlighted publicly in case the political climate changed. Thus, though her husband was killed during the war by anti-regime resisters, Lucie managed to 'hide' below the radar, and escaped being targeted as a collaborator once the war ended.
After the war Lucie married a successful albeit passive civil servant who allowed her to call the shots on their lives and marriage. She transformed herself into a housewife, gave birth to four children, including the story's narrator, and spent much of her time with her sister, mother and younger adult cousin, meeting with them almost daily once her husband went to work to discuss fashion, grumble about their lives and allude to their 'glory days' during WWII.
As the author begins to build a picture of who her mother was, the novel gets more intense. Unfortunately, however, the way Desprairies has constructed this story, it's often difficult to follow. The plot jumps around in time, which sometimes makes the trajectory, and the facts, difficult to string together in a coherent timeline.
Still, I applaud the effort. It makes clear that the stain of collaboration remains existent in France, even 80 years later.
The book's author, Cecile Desprairies, is a French historian specializing in the Vichy era and the Nazi occupation of France during WWII. She's written a number of non-fiction books on the subject, including about French collaboration during that period.
This is her first work of fiction, though she's acknowledges it's heavily autobiographical. It's the story of Lucie, written from the point of view of her daughter who, from the time she's very young, tries to make sense of the weird mood swings her mother displays, as well as the myriad contradictions and misdirection her mother, aunt, grandmother along with her mother's extended family endlessly transmit about where their wealth and property came from and what they did during the war years and after the liberation of France.
The author comes to realize that a lot of the family's assets--including apartments, furniture, jewelry and other signs of wealth--likely were acquired from Jewish sources whose owners fled or were 'deported' by the Nazi regime. She also learns that her mother had been a highly successful--even sought after--propagandist for the Nazi regime, and was married to an Alsatian medical student/scientist who was strongly influenced by Josef Mengele and his ideas regarding scientific racism as it served the Nazi positions on Aryan supremacy and the Jewish 'question.'
Though Lucie and her husband thrived during the war years, she was canny enough to keep as low a profile as possible, never taking credit for her successful efforts or allowing herself to be highlighted publicly in case the political climate changed. Thus, though her husband was killed during the war by anti-regime resisters, Lucie managed to 'hide' below the radar, and escaped being targeted as a collaborator once the war ended.
After the war Lucie married a successful albeit passive civil servant who allowed her to call the shots on their lives and marriage. She transformed herself into a housewife, gave birth to four children, including the story's narrator, and spent much of her time with her sister, mother and younger adult cousin, meeting with them almost daily once her husband went to work to discuss fashion, grumble about their lives and allude to their 'glory days' during WWII.
As the author begins to build a picture of who her mother was, the novel gets more intense. Unfortunately, however, the way Desprairies has constructed this story, it's often difficult to follow. The plot jumps around in time, which sometimes makes the trajectory, and the facts, difficult to string together in a coherent timeline.
Still, I applaud the effort. It makes clear that the stain of collaboration remains existent in France, even 80 years later.
January 6, 2025
I think this is an important book. It took me a while to read but I am glad that I did. It definitely reads more like a nonfiction history book than a fiction book, but I think that’s the point. I thought the way the author portrayed Lucie’s character was the best part of the book. The narrator grew up trying to decipher what Lucie was trying to say and what she was trying to cover up. I think the reader has the same experience in the opening scene where the narrator observes the women discussing the Occupation in very vague terms. It leaves you guessing and wondering what they mean and you are left with just very unspecific ideas about what the women did and how they think. This disorientation and feeling of distrust towards the women persists throughout the book as you learn who they are and what they supported, probably the same way the author felt when she uncovered her family’s history. I also think the way that Lucie’s character avoided almost any real experiences with Jewish people, and seems to not think at all about what the occupation meant for them and their families, was what truly delivered the message of the story to me. Even though we know Lucie is Anti-Semitic, it’s shocking when she runs into an old classmate who is Jewish and casually thinks that she “must’ve escaped.” The author really emphasized how out of touch with reality Lucie was throughout the second half of the book, but I think that moment was the most powerful because it shows how people can detach themselves from things they chose not to care about or think about. Not only did Lucie actively support Nazism, she actively denied the experiences and struggles of Jewish people. This is why I think it’s an important book for these times because that delusion and selective reality is something that seems very common today regarding a bunch of different issues. And I guess that’s kind of the whole point of the book- that this family profited off a genocide and covered it up without a single feeling of remorse, never thinking that they did any harm.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 30, 2025
Mixing historical fiction and the author's own family history, The Propagandist tells the story of a family of French collaborators during and after WWII. This provides an interesting concept that for me was not fully delivered on.
A large part of this novel is made up of the narrator's experiences as a child, when she was largely unaware of her family's activities during the war. This means that she is often hearing references to collaboration that "she wouldn't understand until she was older". While some of this is common knowledge, it is irritating to not expand on some of the lesser-known points of collaboration - ultimately requiring the reader to go and read something else instead. This is sometimes not the case and the book shows real potential. A couple of sections are detailed from an older, more knowledgeable perspective, such as the propagandist history of the newspapers for which her mother worked, and I would have liked to have seen more of this.
The structure is also quite chaotic with seven chapters each moving freely through time. The jumping back and forth felt like a hindrance, and in the end not a great deal was learnt. I appreciate that the primary aim here may not have been to educate, as it is based on family history. Disregarding its capacity to educate, the book otherwise largely consists of lacklustre anecdotes about people stealing furniture.
The author is primarily a historian, and it does feel like you would need to know more going into this for some references to click. The book was originally published for a French audience who would likely hold greater subject knowledge going into this, and I can see that French reviews are much more positive. It is quite short and I am not convinced it is laid out in the most interesting or insightful way. I am not sure who the correct audience for this would be, but ultimately this one was just not for me.
A large part of this novel is made up of the narrator's experiences as a child, when she was largely unaware of her family's activities during the war. This means that she is often hearing references to collaboration that "she wouldn't understand until she was older". While some of this is common knowledge, it is irritating to not expand on some of the lesser-known points of collaboration - ultimately requiring the reader to go and read something else instead. This is sometimes not the case and the book shows real potential. A couple of sections are detailed from an older, more knowledgeable perspective, such as the propagandist history of the newspapers for which her mother worked, and I would have liked to have seen more of this.
The structure is also quite chaotic with seven chapters each moving freely through time. The jumping back and forth felt like a hindrance, and in the end not a great deal was learnt. I appreciate that the primary aim here may not have been to educate, as it is based on family history. Disregarding its capacity to educate, the book otherwise largely consists of lacklustre anecdotes about people stealing furniture.
The author is primarily a historian, and it does feel like you would need to know more going into this for some references to click. The book was originally published for a French audience who would likely hold greater subject knowledge going into this, and I can see that French reviews are much more positive. It is quite short and I am not convinced it is laid out in the most interesting or insightful way. I am not sure who the correct audience for this would be, but ultimately this one was just not for me.
December 21, 2024
At times challenging to understand. There’s a lot of cultural context and wordplay that I can imagine was a nightmare to translate. Many phrases being spoken in German by a French woman and all translated to English. Not to mention her many intentional obfuscations. But really interesting look at denazification and the whitewashing in the post Vichy period. I also couldn’t help but think of cancel culture while reading about Lucie’s intense fear of anyone discovering her ties to the nazis. I didn’t find Lucie or the family sympathetic, but they were human, with human desires. They were not cartoonish villains.
Lots of time hopping, even within sections. that made the when’s hard to remember.
Also some names would change slightly - Hermine to Herminette, Raphael to rafi. Nothing crazy but adding to the layer of complexity when trying to keep all these people straight. Maybe this was intentional to show how her mother also did this kind of intentional wire crossing and obfuscation?
Made me appreciate the parallels and crossovers and shared history of French and Germany. To think of French people who want to be German and vice versa. Also the antisemitism is a clearly shared cultural value.
Also interesting the way that many had relationships with Jewish individuals, often romantic? I’m not sure I totally understand the Jewish side of that, but it seemed strategic to me on the Nazi sympathizer side.
All in all fascinating and complex
Lots of time hopping, even within sections. that made the when’s hard to remember.
Also some names would change slightly - Hermine to Herminette, Raphael to rafi. Nothing crazy but adding to the layer of complexity when trying to keep all these people straight. Maybe this was intentional to show how her mother also did this kind of intentional wire crossing and obfuscation?
Made me appreciate the parallels and crossovers and shared history of French and Germany. To think of French people who want to be German and vice versa. Also the antisemitism is a clearly shared cultural value.
Also interesting the way that many had relationships with Jewish individuals, often romantic? I’m not sure I totally understand the Jewish side of that, but it seemed strategic to me on the Nazi sympathizer side.
All in all fascinating and complex
October 14, 2025
The book is among the very few to reveal something we hardly came across in the past 80 years ever since the World War II was over. It is about the OTHER side of the story and the OTHER side of the people who lost the war. More interestingly not from Germany but from France! The reason I gave it a three star is largely because the story was still told in a very vague way. For example, I understood the greatest love between Lucie and Friedrich, but how about her husband Charles? What kept him staying with her for the following almost seven decades was a myth. Maybe that’s the intention of the author to make us feel the anxiety and frustrations she had been suffered for her entire life about the opaque and half truth and myth of many stories she heard or observed from her mother’s generations and close friends and relatives who were all from the OTHER side during the war. Most of them lived a very long live but all lived with a very taboo fashion about what had happened in that four years of war.
We need more of the OTHER side of the story before the truth will be all gone with those people and their offsprings who might know a bit more when they grew up with them.
We need more of the OTHER side of the story before the truth will be all gone with those people and their offsprings who might know a bit more when they grew up with them.
September 2, 2024
Though this is purported to be a "novel" by a well known Historian, it reads more like a "roman a clef" based on memories of the authors/family during the German Occupation of 1940 -> 1945. It is truly the story of people who do anything to survive, and in their cases to enjoy themselves. They take no pity of why they are living in the apartment of a "departed" Jewish family, because it was empty and some one was going to live there, why not them.
That the kept all of the previous tenants furniture and clothing was just their way of protecting it in case the "owners" came back. The spent the all their time collaborating with the military, civilian government and the Vichi Milice (Gestapo). After the war they become "resistants" who helped the Free French by spying on the Germans by insinuating themselves into the new German/French society.
These are the people who always see themselves as 'deserving' to live the live of the top tier even though they do nothing to deserve it. Just a pleasure to read.
That the kept all of the previous tenants furniture and clothing was just their way of protecting it in case the "owners" came back. The spent the all their time collaborating with the military, civilian government and the Vichi Milice (Gestapo). After the war they become "resistants" who helped the Free French by spying on the Germans by insinuating themselves into the new German/French society.
These are the people who always see themselves as 'deserving' to live the live of the top tier even though they do nothing to deserve it. Just a pleasure to read.
June 2, 2025
A memoir of a French family who collaborated with the Nazis during World War 2 and scarcely suffered any ill effects from it, despite living long lives thereafter, often in flats that had been requisitioned years earlier from Jewish citizens sent to the camps. The author's mother Lucie is the main character and despite her repellent anti semitism she must have been a rather feisty and vigorous character. The author, in her sixties, clearly delayed publishing this book until the death of her mother and other relatives. The details are very vivid, often chillingly so. My only reservation is that this very fine example of life writing is marketed as a novel, which it isn't really. The story is too discursive, moving from one character to another and back in forth in time, and dialogue is usually reported rather than given directly. Always lucid, even when grim, the book is very well presented with a fascinating even-handedness. Recommended.
September 11, 2025
Those seeking to change the world often view their surroundings through political and social ideals. For some, politics becomes the driving force behind their actions, whether it’s the willingness to risk one’s life to obtain a political end or political ideas coloring the way one views those of a different religion or race. That was certainly true of the real life Leon Trotsky, a portion of whose life is featured in the novel “Bronshtein in the Bronx” by Robert Littell (Soho Press). The need to understand how politics influenced her mother’s actions during World War II France is what led French historian Cecile Desprairies to write her autobiographical novel “The Propagandist” (New Vessel Press). Each work offers insights into the role politics played in these families’ lifes.
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/book...
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/book...
September 11, 2024
If one were to ask, flat out, what Lucie did during the war, she would lie to you. She lied to everyone, even her children, about what she did during the Second World War. Decades later, with Lucie and most of her contemporaries dead and gone, it’s impossible for her daughter, Coline to figure out what really happened. Coline is a stand-in for the author of The Propagandist, by French historian Cécile Desprairies. (Natasha Lehrer does an incredible job with the tricky French grammar of this book.) The Propagandist is a work of history and of autofiction...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration.
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration.
January 30, 2025
A very interesting, quick read. You don’t hear much about the traitors in history, just a little bit about their existence and their quick and just demise, like Hitler or Quisling.
But justice often isn’t served against the traitors, is it? Just look at Operation Paperclip, the mass pardons for Confederate soldiers and other examples of people who did terrible things against their own and paid no price for. They simply melt back into society.
The people in this family are truly noxious. Even the gay uncle is a fascist lover. And yet, many of us have family which would have been Nazis or Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s and 1940s had they only lived during that era instead of now. Lot of food for thought.
But justice often isn’t served against the traitors, is it? Just look at Operation Paperclip, the mass pardons for Confederate soldiers and other examples of people who did terrible things against their own and paid no price for. They simply melt back into society.
The people in this family are truly noxious. Even the gay uncle is a fascist lover. And yet, many of us have family which would have been Nazis or Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s and 1940s had they only lived during that era instead of now. Lot of food for thought.
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