De Gaulle, asked to consider a plea for mercy, upheld the sentence, later explaining that ‘in literature as in everything, talent confers responsibility’. Brasillach was hanged on 6 February 1945, aged thirty-five. De Beauvoir had refused to sign the petition for clemency, arguing that although she opposed the death penalty in principle, in his case death was justified. But the position of de Beauvoir herself during the Occupation had been far from uncomplicated, and it is tempting to explain her especially intense hatred of intellectual collaborators such as Brasillach in the light of her recognition that he had been active in creating the world in which she too found herself to be complicit. A committed anti-Nazi, she had nonetheless managed to eat well for most of the last four years thanks partly to her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose mother continued to serve all the best black-market foods while sending her maid to stand in queues. De Beauvoir herself, once she worked for the German-controlled Radio-Paris, also had access to black-market foods which enabled her to entertain guests, including Picasso and Dora Maar, offering them ‘bowls of green beans and heaped dishes of beef stew, and I always took care to have plenty of wine’. She and Sartre may have voiced opposition to the occupiers and did not attend the openly German-supported salons of Florence Gould, but de Beauvoir signed the Vichy-inspired oath stating that she was neither a Jew nor a communist so that she could teach, and she continued to publish under conditions of Nazi censorship while other writers refused, thus working within the German system in Paris. Sartre in particular, by stepping into the shoes of Henri Dreyfus-Le Foyer, a Jewish teacher (and a great-nephew of Captain Dreyfus) who had been dismissed from the Lycée Condorcet, arguably profited from the war.
In March came the turn of Florence Gould herself. Recognizing her ambiguous position, she had made a generous donation to the FFI immediately after the Liberation and now invited passing Americans to her Thursday lunches. She still had to face a French investigating magistrate. In the event, she was not interrogated about her friendly relations with Germans, but rather was asked why she had invested in a Nazi-financed bank in Monaco late in 1944. Gould maintained in a sworn statement that she had been blackmailed into becoming a partner in the Banque Charles, claiming that, had she refused, her husband’s companies would have had to pay a far larger sum to the Aerobank, a Luftwaffe-controlled bank with links to the Banque Charles. She had acted in the way she had, she claimed, because she believed that ‘M. Charles could keep my husband, who was especially threatened, out of danger. He was sixty-seven and in fragile health and I feared he might be forced to leave his home at Juan les Pins and, as an enemy alien, be taken to Germany.’ She insisted that her actions had not in any way been ‘against the interests of the Allies’. She was not charged, and the salons continued. However, three years later the case was reopened, and a new report gave a more plausible account of the bank’s purpose as being not so much to help the German war effort but rather to channel German money abroad either to establish a Fourth Reich or to provide cash in the event of a Nazi defeat. Again Florence was not charged, but this report concluded that she, ‘a Franco-American, appears to have enjoyed singular protections during the Occupation and, if it’s not certain that she committed the crime of ‘intelligence with the enemy’, it is certain that we have no reason to congratulate her for her attitude’. Florence was extremely lucky.*
There was, however, a greater sense of urgency in the chase to catch those who had openly fulfilled Nazi policies. In September 1944, immediately after the Liberation of Paris and in some cases before, some Vichy government leaders including Fernand de Brinon (who had managed to shelter his Jewish wife), Pétain, Laval and several senior collaborators such as Céline, Lucien Rebatet, Jean Luchaire and his daughter Corinne had all fled to Sigmaringen, a village in southern Germany where, based in a German castle, they established a government in exile. However, just as American forces were approaching in April 1945 Laval was flown to Barcelona by the Luftwaffe but, under pressure from de Gaulle, the Spanish government delivered him to the American-occupied zone of Austria. There he and his wife were taken into custody, turned over to the French army and flown to Paris, where they were imprisoned at Fresnes. Mme Laval was later released but her husband remained in prison, awaiting trial as a traitor. Pétain handed himself over to French authorities on 26 April.
During his imprisonment Laval wrote his only book, a posthumously published Diary (1948), which his daughter Josée, determined to prove his innocence, smuggled out of the prison, page by page. Laval firmly believed that he would be able to convince his fellow countrymen that he had been acting in their best interests all along, a view Josée and her mother held with a passion. ‘They lived in a fever, where agony was mixed with hope. They were busy with pleas, interviews, telephone calls, whatever they could do to save Laval from death.’ One of those whose help Josée tried to enlist was the celebrated Catholic author Fran?ois Mauriac, who commented that if ever there was a desperate case this was it. ‘I shall never forget,’ wrote Mauriac, ‘the admirable daughter of Pierre Laval coming to me one evening as if I could save her father … Pierre Laval had in a way assumed all the hatreds, even those of the partisans of the Marshal. Never was a scapegoat more bitterly condemned – less for what he did than for what he said.’