Lucien Rebatet
Lucien Rebatet (born November 15, 1903 in Moras-en-Valloire , Département Drôme , † August 24, 1972 ibid) was a French anti-Semitic journalist and writer.
Live and act
Rebatet was the son of the notary Pierre Rebatet and his wife Jeanne Tampucchi; his maternal grandfather was Hippolyte Tampucci .
He attended the College of the Marist Fathers in Saint-Chamond ( Loire department ) and, after a short stay at the University of Lyon, studied at the University of Paris between 1923 and 1927 . He then found employment with an insurance company.
In 1929 he gave up his profession and became a writer. Under the pseudonym "François Vinteuil" (later "François Vinneuil") he wrote music and film reviews for the magazine Action Française . With effect from April 30, 1932, his friend Pierre Gaxotte hired him for his magazine Je suis partout . On September 14, 1933, Rebatet married Veronique Popovici in Galați ( Romania ).
Rebatet wrote for Gaxotte's Journal until Operation Overlord in 1944. At the same time, Rebatet acted as spokesman for Action Française from 1938 and therefore worked very closely with Charles Maurras . In January 1940 he was drafted into the army, although he at that time a pamphlet was published in which he the Nazis glorified and wished that France would lose the war. He had already praised Adolf Hitler in various articles and z. B. in “Je suis partout” accused the Jews of having started the war in order to overthrow the Führer.
After the German conquest of France , Rebatet became a radio reporter for the Vichy regime at Ici la France . But after a short time he resigned and wrote for Jacques Doriot's magazine Cri du peuple . His pamphlet Les Décombres had a circulation of 65,000 copies in 1942 thanks to the generous paper allocation from the German censor Gerhard Heller .
After the Allied invasion Rebatet fled in August 1944 to Sigmaringen to Louis-Ferdinand Céline , who is among the leaders of the Vichy regime to Sigmaringen Castle had brought to safety. Rebatet continued to write his novels there and fled to Austria at the end of the war . There he was arrested on May 8, 1945 in Feldkirch .
He was brought to France and sentenced to death in 1946; the following year his death sentence was overturned. Rebatet was released from prison on July 16, 1952, and a year later he was able to work as a journalist again. In 1954 he was entrusted with the feature section of Dimanche Matin . In prison he had written the highly acclaimed novel Les deux étendards when it appeared in 1952 .
Rebatet was enthusiastic about fascism until the end of his life and his articles were known for their anti-Semitism . In the presidential elections against Charles de Gaulle on December 5 and 1965, respectively, Rebatet first supported Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour and in the second ballot François Mitterrand .
Lucien Rebatet died on August 24, 1972 in his hometown at the age of 68 and was finally buried there.
The literary scholar George Steiner strictly separated Rebatet's biography from his work and praised Rebatet as a great writer, whose novel Les deux étendards he counts as one of the "secret masterpieces of our time". The extensive novel is characterized by an infallible humanity, filled to the brim with music, with love, with empathy for pain. Steiner particularly pointed out the inexplicable connection between the "despicable, twisted Rebatet and the miracle of his prose".
Trivia
Patrick Modiano's first novel La Place de l'Étoile , completed in 1967, begins with an anti-Semitic abusiveness by a journalist named Léon Rabatête in a special issue of Ici la France in Vichy France: ... How much longer do we have to keep washing our hands because of the Jewish rabble ?
Jonathan Littell mentions Lucien Rebatet in his factual novel Die Wohlgesinnten (Les Bienveillants) and describes him as a friend of his protagonist Maximilian Aue.
Works (selection)
- Autobiography
- Les mémoire d'un fasciste . Pauvert, Paris 1976 (2 vols.)
- Fiction
- Neither god nor devil. Roman ("Les deux étendards. Roman", 1952). Langen Müller, Munich 1964.
- Les décombres . l'Homme libre, Paris 2006, ISBN 2-912104-42-4 (reprinted by EA Paris 1942).
- Les épis mûrs. Novel . Le dilettante, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-84263-645-6 (reprinted by EA Paris 1954).
- Non-fiction
- Le bolchévisme contre la civilization . 2nd Edition. NEF, Paris 1940.
- Les étrangers en France . New edition La Reconquête, Paris 2009.
literature
- Robert Belot: Le lecteurs des “Décombres”. Un Témoignage inédit du sentiment fascist sous l'occupation . In: Guerres mondiales et des conflits contemporains. Vol. 41 (1991), Issue 163, pp. 3-31, ISSN 0755-1584 .
- Robert Belot: Lucien Rebatet. Un itinéraire fasciste (XXe siècle). Édition du Seuil, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-02-012981-7 .
- Jacques Chancel et al. a .: Lucien Rebatet . In: Ders .: Radioscope, Vol. 1 . Laffont, Paris 1970, pp. 221-251.
- Michèle C. Cone: Vampires, viruses, and Lucien Rebatet . In: Linda Nochlin (Ed.): The jew in the text . Thames & Hudson, London 1995, ISBN 0-500-01667-4 , pp. 174-186.
- Pascal Ifri: Le dossier d'un chef-œuvre maudit. "Les deux étendards" . L'âge d'homme, Geneva 2001, ISBN 2-8251-1489-8 .
- Pascal Ifri: Rebatet (Qui suis-je?). Éditions Pardès, Puiseaux 2004, ISBN 2-86714-326-8 .
- Pol Vandromme: Rebatet . Éditions Pardès, Puiseaux 2002, ISBN 2-86714-264-4 (reprinted by EA Paris 1968).
- Philippe Vernet: Ombre et lumière sur Lucien Rebatet . Altair Éditions, Braine-L'Alleud 1992.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ George Steiner: In the room of silence . Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-42231-1 , pp. 150 .
- ↑ Patrick Modiano: Place de l'Etoile . Translation by Elisabeth Edl , Hanser, Munich 2010, p. 11
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Rebatet, Lucien |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French journalist and writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 15, 1903 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Moras-en-Valloire |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 24, 1972 |
| Place of death | Moras-en-Valloire |