The Propagandist
“Through lyrical prose and subtle observations, Desprairies invites readers to remember what’s come before them, so that we may do things differently in the here and now.”
Cécile Desprairies’s background as a historian is apparent on every page of her first novel, and The Propagandist reads both as history lesson and intricate family narrative. Set in Paris and Burgundy in the 1940s and 1960s, the novel moves seamlessly between time periods and invites the reader to gaze at the atrocities of World War II through a unique and often uncomfortable lens.
Told in first-person from the retrospective view of a historian, the novel centers on the narrator’s mother, Lucie, who collaborated with the Nazi regime during the Occupation of Paris. Always a good listener, Lucie worked her way into a position building propaganda, euphemistically called “cultural collaboration.” Her job was to translate German documentation into French slogans, creating posters and pamphlets that had a way of “twisting things to mean their opposite.”
In addition to her role as a propagandist for the Nazis, Lucie married one of their ranks. Killed young, this first husband, Friedrich, is not the narrator’s father, yet he haunts the narrator’s life. “Friedrich was a constant presence throughout my childhood. He was always there, dead and alive, absent and present.” Lucie marries Charles and has four children, but “It was halfhearted,” the narrator writes. “She had already lived her life.”
Lucie holds onto the memories of both her first love and the regime she’d devoted herself to, though her public persona matches neither. In the private of her apartment, with the women of her family who also benefited from the Nazi occupation, she revels in the glory of those lost days. Lucie teaches her children the German language, German geography, Mendel’s laws, “The strong and the weak.”
As a young girl, the narrator was privy to her mother’s conversations, though not fully aware of what she was hearing, which gives the novel a unique feeling of disorientation. We listen along with the six-year-old version of the narrator to conversations that our adult selves understand. There’s an innocence to these early observations—a lack of perspective and judgment—and this ambivalent tone carries through the rest of the novel.
Even Lucie’s lack of guilt—and she is guilty of plenty—is treated with neutrality. “Incapable of feeling guilt, Lucie wove endless fictions and used other people to her own ends.” It’s as though she has no choice in the matter, and her daughter is simply recording the events and secrets as they unfold.
The lack of abject judgment doesn’t absolve Lucie, of course, and it complicates the narrative in a refreshing and original way. This is not a novel of finger-pointing, but rather one of curiosity and exploration. What makes people align themselves with evil? Or more, what makes it possible for people to be blind to the evil they adopt?
As the title suggests, this novel is ultimately a case study in the power of propaganda, which is particularly relevant in today’s socio-political climate. By exposing the logical fallacies of Lucie and other collaborators, Desprairies forces us to interrogate where our information comes from and how our own beliefs are created. We’re told that Lucie’s “Good sense [was] scrambled by ideology,” and it is impossible not to cross-apply that same scrambling to the world around us.
There are innumerable famous quotes that capture the power of this novel—and the need for excellent historic fiction—but George Santayana’s words ring the most relevant: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Through lyrical prose and subtle observations, Desprairies invites readers to remember what’s come before them, so that we may do things differently in the here and now.