Robert Brasillach

Robert Brasillach
Robert Brasillach (1938)
Born	31 March 1909 Perpignan, France
Died	6 February 1945(1945-02-06) (aged 35) Fort de Montrouge, Arcueil, France
Occupation	journalist, author

Robert Brasillach (French pronunciation: [ʁɔbɛʁ bʁazijak]) (31 March 1909 – 6 February 1945) was a French author and journalist. Brasillach is best known as the editor of Je suis partout, a nationalist newspaper which came to advocate various fascist movements and supported Jacques Doriot. After the liberation of France in 1944 he was executed following a trial and Charles de Gaulle's express refusal to grant him a pardon. Brasillach was executed for advocating collaborationism, denunciation and incitement to murder. The execution remains a subject of some controversy, because Brasillach was executed for "intellectual crimes", rather than military or political actions.

Born in Perpignan, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure and then became a novelist and literary critic for the Action Française of Charles Maurras. After the 6 February 1934 crisis in the Place de la Concorde, Brasillach openly supported fascism. His politics are shared by several of his protagonists, notably the two male main characters in The Seven Colours (see below).

Brasillach wrote both fiction and non-fiction. While his fiction dealt with love, life and politics in his era, his non-fiction dealt with a great variety of themes, ranging from drama, great literary figures and contemporary world events. His work in the realm of cinema history (see below) was particularly influential.

Brasillach was fascinated by the cinema and in 1935 co-wrote a detailed critical history of that medium, Histoire du cinéma (re-edited in 1943), with his brother-in-law, Maurice Bardèche. This work remained the "most prominent aesthetic history of film for at least a decade", and a work that exerted considerable influence, via its impact on Georges Sadoul (who nonetheless disliked the authors) until the 1970s. Unlike several other authors and critics of the time, Brasillach did not see cinema through an overtly political lens, although the 1943 re-edition of his work did contain certain anti-Semitic comments not included in the original. Despite being fervent nationalists and personally believing that each nation and people had a unique cinema, the authors instead focussed on international trends rather than local particularities. Brasillach frequented Henri Langlois' Cercle du cinéma (Cinema Circle). His personal tastes are detailed in his major work on cinema and in numerous articles of the period. These tastes ranged from Russian cinema (Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevski) to classics such as Charlie Chaplin, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, René Clair and Jean Renoir and to certain Hollywood films, such as those of John Ford, Frank Borzage and King Vidor. Brasillach was drawn to originality and explored foreign cinema, and became the first major critic in France to address Japanese cinema, namely Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Heinosuke Gosho. While in prison, he worked on a third edition of his work on cinema and started to adapt a work on Falstaff which he hoped to film with Raimu.