Le Corbusier, Piaf, the feuding Le Pens … the wartime rifts that still divide France
Modern divisions have roots in unresolved conflicts of the Nazi occupation
German soldiers
German officers and Parisians mingle near a cafe on the Champs Elysees on Bastille Day in 1940. Photograph: Chas. Baulard/ Bettmann/CORBIS
Andrew Hussey in Paris
Saturday 9 May 2015 19.04 EDT
This weekend marks the 70th anniversary of the moment when Charles de Gaulle announced to the French nation that it had finally come through the sufferings of the Nazi occupation.
For as long as almost any Frenchman or woman can remember, 8 May has been a public holiday, marked by military parades and politicians’ speeches. However, this year the holiday weekend has a special poignancy, because the number of people who can remember what happened 70 years ago is shrinking fast. But as that generation gradually dies out, the bad memories and unresolved conflicts dating back to the 1940s are still being played out in contemporary France.
In the past month or so, for example, there has been a mini-scandal surrounding an exhibition dedicated to the architect Le Corbusier at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The controversy centres on Le Corbusier’s alleged past as a “militant fascist” and “antisemite”, aspects of his life and work that have been excavated in two recently published books. In the first of these, Le Corbusier, Un Fascisme Français, Xavier de Jarcy claims that Le Corbusier never renounced the fascist ideals he embraced in the 1920s and that he was a supporter of Marshal Pétain and the Vichy regime, the French government that collaborated with the Nazis. In the second book, Un Corbusier, the architect and academic François Chaslin, who is an admirer of the architect, is unstinting in his descriptions and analysis of Le Corbusier’s links to fascist groups and ideologies, and points out that at one stage Le Corbusier maintained an office for 18 months under the Vichy government.
The Pompidou Centre has obviously been embarrassed by this, claiming that the exhibition was never intended to cover his whole life and work. This has led to accusations of cover-ups and manipulation.
The real damage to Le Corbusier’s reputation comes not just from the forensic evidence produced by the two authors, but with the hindsight that a fascist aesthetic obviously informs his designs – from this point of view, what was meant to be utopia now looks like an exercise in dehumanising brutalism. You can see this most clearly in the cheap, modernist architecture of the banlieues, the rotten suburbs outside most French towns and cities where alienation and violence are rife.
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Poster Comment:
We will soon see the 71st anniversary. The Le Pens are the populists of note in France and are disparaged at every opportunity, even "Holocaust denial".
