Ugly Beauty (14 page)

But of course they were a bit more than that. As
everyone knew, the trade unions had obvious reasons for hating Schueller, who
publicly despised the workers’ democracy they stood for.

Another difficulty was that, as the war progressed,
people’s behavior changed with their expectations. In June 1940, a Nazi victory
seemed imminent and inevitable. But in June 1941, Hitler invaded Russia,
extending his fighting front by 1,800 miles and bringing the Red Army into the
war on the Allies’ side. And in December 1941, the Japanese bombing of Pearl
Harbor finally brought America, too, into the war. The German victory, which had
seemed so certain, now seemed far less assured. Behavior that had seemed most
ill-advised yesterday suddenly began to make sense, as prudent persons hedged
their bets—among them, Schueller. On December, 10, 1942, he sent a note to
L’Oréal representatives:

Competitors are
spreading lies about me. They come to clients with their order book and my
book The Economic Revolution with passages underlined in red pencil, and use
them to present me as a bad person who shouldn’t be dealt with.

They accuse me of being
German. I’m not.

They accuse me of being
Jewish. I’m Catholic. My father was a seminarist for a time.
. . .

I’m not interested in
politics, but in political economy. . . . I was almost made a
minister or an undersecretary but I refused because it would have been
impossible to do what I would have wanted.

I belonged to the
Economic Commission of MSR—but only so long as MSR was approved by Marshal
Pétain. When that was withdrawn, I resigned. . . .

I think it my duty, in
the present circumstances, to do all I can to help in what I consider to be
the revival of my country. . . .
48

He did so by quietly extending his support to the
Resistance as well as the occupiers. On the one hand, L’Oréal set aside a room
for MSR meetings; on the other, Schueller also organized a weekly mail and
parcel drop across the boundary between the
zone
occupée
and the
zone libre
, using a
L’Oréal van driven by an employee who happened to have an American passport
(accredited with a forged German stamp). On the one hand, he continued to
finance
La Révolution Nationale
; on the other, he
gave 700,000 francs to the underground in the maquis in the Puy de Dôme and sent
2 million francs to de Gaulle. He joined a network that helped more than two
hundred people escape into the
zone libre
in the
Cher, near Saint-Aignan; he helped others escape from Paris. At the beginning of
1944, his paint firm, Valentine, gave over 100,000 francs to help
réfractaires
—workers who went underground to escape
the STO. And all the time, while publicly supporting the official line, he
maintained, within occupied Paris, amicable contacts with friends from earlier
days.

One such was Fred Joliot-Curie. The two had moved
far apart since the early days at L’Arcouest. Joliot-Curie had remained in
academic research, which, far from being “dusty,” had won him, together with his
wife, Irène Curie, the 1935 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Like Schueller, he had
always been socially conscious, but there, too, they had moved in opposite
directions. Joliot-Curie was now a Communist and active in the Resistance, and
had sent his papers on atomic research to London as soon as war broke out,
keeping them out of Hitler’s grasp.

The contrast between Joliot-Curie’s wartime life
and that of Schueller illustrated the material advantages of collaboration. Both
men were now famous and distinguished. But despite his eminence, Joliot-Curie
was not sheltered from the general hardship, while for Schueller, life in
wartime was far from austere.

Schueller’s only real wartime inconvenience
occurred in 1941, when he was forced to move out of his luxurious apartment on
boulevard Suchet, in the smart 16th arrondissement, as all the apartment
buildings in that street had been requisitioned by the Germans. The owner of the
buildings wrote a pleading letter on behalf of his lessees to the sinister
Fernand de Brinon, then Vichy’s “Ambassador to Paris.” None of the foreigners
living in the apartment buildings had had to move; couldn’t at least the Aryan
French be spared? These were important people: Madame Roederer of the champagne
family; the president of Cinzano; M. Guerlain the perfumier; bankers;
industrialists.
49
No, they all had to go,
even though Schueller’s name was included on a list of important industrial
collaborators who, on the strict and express instruction of Reichsmarschall
Göring, were to be allowed to keep their apartments in otherwise requisitioned
districts. He moved to avenue Paul Doumer, a short walk away, but preferred to
spend his time at his grand house, the Villa Bianca, at Franconville.
Joliot-Curie, by contrast, could not even obtain a new tire for the motorbike on
which he relied to commute between the Collège de France, where he held a chair,
his lab at Ivry, and his temporary home outside Paris. His request was turned
down, and a little later he registered the acquisition of a bicycle, with
gears.

Despite this disparity, the two remained on
surprisingly amicable terms. For Joliot-Curie, Schueller presumably represented
that invaluable wartime necessity—one of the enemy who could be trusted on a
personal level. Despite what he must have felt about Schueller’s politics, he
still felt able to request help for a Jewish chemical engineer languishing in a
prisoner-of-war camp and who might be a useful employee in Schueller’s
businesses. Schueller replied to his “cher ami,” from a spa where he was taking
the cure for rheumatism, that to his great regret he could not help—he had
“approached M. Scapini many times, and we got a few people out at first, but
there’s been nothing doing on that front for a while now. You can imagine, I’m
really sorry about this.”
50
Georges Scapini was
the man deputed by Pétain to negotiate with the German authorities regarding
prisoners of war. If he couldn’t help, no one could.

In return, Schueller requested a favor of his
own—one that throws a rare light on his personal life. In 1927 his first wife,
Berthe, had died, and in 1932 he had married again. The second Madame Schueller
was Liliane’s English governess, Miss Annie Burrows from Fulham (a genteelly
run-down part of southwest London), a choice that may reflect her charm, or
simply Schueller’s own loneliness and lack of social life. He felt that a wife
at home was something every man needed. It was one of the social rules set out
in the
Révolution de l’économie
. And his
work-centered life afforded him few opportunities to meet suitable ladies.

At the time, Miss Burrows (generally known as Nita)
must have been overwhelmed by her good luck. Although governesses in novels
frequently married their wealthy employers, they rarely did so in real life. But
when war broke out, her position, as an Englishwoman married to a leading
collaborator, became equivocal, to say the least. She was by no means the only
wife to find herself in a similarly awkward fix. The chief Vichy Jew-hunter, the
odious Darquier de Pellepoix, was married to an Australian, while Fernand de
Brinon, an arch-anti-Semite, had a Jewish wife. How Madame de Brinon felt we do
not know. Madame Darquier drowned her troubles in drink. As for Madame
Schueller, she seems to have taken refuge in nervous ill health. “The doctor who
used to advise Madame Schueller, Dr. Layani, is a non-Aryan, and has escaped to
the
zone libre
,” Schueller wrote. “I’m looking for a
replacement, someone really good on women’s illnesses . . . and who
can put up with my wife’s short temper. Would the director of the Hôpital Curie
know anyone?” Joliot-Curie gave a name, and undertook to write a letter of
recommendation. He enclosed, along with his note, two flasks of rabbit urine,
one irradiated, the other a control.
51
Between
the politics and the business maneuvers, Schueller still kept up his interest in
chemistry.

Obviously, when forced to account for himself by
the
épuration
, he did his best to emphasize his
Resistance-friendly activities and draw a veil over the others. It was not an
easy task, given that those others had been so very public. But although
Schueller’s was an extreme case, so many businessmen were prosecuted for
collaboration following the Liberation that at least one employers’ federation,
that of the ironmasters, circulated a questionnaire to its members to help them
prepare dossiers in their own defense. Two main defense planks were recommended:
one, that they had kept the largest possible proportion of their production for
the use of the French civilian economy and had done as little as possible for
the Germans; two, that they had obstructed the deportation of their workers for
the STO.
52

Schueller, like everyone else, stressed these. And
like everyone else, he showed how he had helped Jews escape the Nazi horrors.
All those he had helped in their hour of need now repaid the debt by writing
letters in his support. Two brothers named Freudiger, neighbors in Brittany, had
told him they were thinking of joining de Gaulle in London. Schueller warmly
encouraged them to do so. Professor Levy of the École Normale, a consultant
chemist to L’Oréal, fled to Lyon in the
zone libre
and received money while he was there, paid through L’Oréal’s Lyon branch.
Another professor of chemistry, M. Meyer, who taught at Lyon University, was
sacked from the faculty by Vichy and left without work. Schueller offered a loan
to be repaid after the war, as well as other unspecified help. Every time the
two met, Meyer testified, Schueller repeated his hatred of the Germans, of the
Nazis, of racism. A L’Oréal chemist, M. Chain, first continued to work under a
false name, but then had to vanish. He continued to be paid. Mlle. Huffner, a
secretary, was paid under a false name, and money was sent to her when she left
for the
zone libre
. M. Kogan, the factory manager at
Valentine, was a Russian émigré, naturalized only recently, and was therefore
caught by the Nazi laws that declared all Jews in this situation to be
noncitizens, liable to deportation. Schueller bought him false papers to escape
to Portugal; when they failed, and he was stuck in Spain, Schueller arranged a
job with L’Oréal’s Spanish subsidiary. M. Schatzkes, L’Oréal’s commercial
director, was sent to Lyon; when competitors complained that the Lyon branch had
a Jewish manager, he was sent to Marseille; and when that became dangerous, he
stayed in a villa at St. Jean Cap-Ferrat until Marseille became safe again. When
the Germans finally arrived there, he and his wife were enabled to escape to
Switzerland.

Almost everyone hauled up before the courts in the
postwar purges could offer similar examples. Admiral Darlan himself, who for
some time was Pétain’s deputy (and, thus, effectively head of the Vichy
government), and who negotiated a political alliance between French Vichy forces
and Nazi Germany, pleaded for Jews who had married into his own family—all
belonging to “good old French Jewish families”—to be spared deportation. Perhaps
helping a few individuals made it easier not to think about the rest—or perhaps,
conversely, the thought of people one knew and liked being subjected to some
terrible fate made the awful reality too uncomfortably clear.

The few contemporary documents that survive from
the Jewish community show just how difficult it was to persuade people to
confront that reality. Hélène Berr, the daughter of a prominent Jewish
industrialist,
3
kept a journal giving a day-by-day
account of life as a Jew in occupied Paris. In entry after entry, she records
her helpless horror as one after another of her friends and acquaintances is
deported. In November 1943, the Berrs’ neighbor, Mme. Agache,

came rushing in because
she had just heard that young Mme. Bokanowski, who had been sent to the
Hôpital Rothschild with her two infants when her husband was in Drancy, had
been taken back to Drancy. She asked Maman: “You mean to say they are
deporting children?” She was horrified.

It’s impossible to
express the pain that I felt on seeing that she had taken all this time to
understand, and that she had only understood because it concerned someone
she knew. Maman . . . replied: “We have been telling you so for a
whole year, but you would not believe us.”

Not knowing, not
understanding even when you do know, because you have a closed door inside
you, and you only can realize what you merely know if you open it. That is
the enormous drama of our age. Everyone is blind to those being
tortured.
53

Schueller, of course, had invested everything in
not
confronting these realities. While he
comforted his conscience by helping his own Jewish acquaintances, his new
friends and colleagues from MSR were dividing the spoils of abandoned Jewish
property—that property whose “administration” was such a valued perk of
collaborationist life. “I didn’t much enjoy the Friday policy meetings [of MSR
at the L’Oréal offices] because they went on too long,” Henry Charbonneau
remembered. “I was only too happy to leave L’Oréal’s fancy panelling for my
office in rue Paradis (where we had taken over the LICA building) and get on
with working on propaganda.”
54
LICA was the
Ligue Contre Antisémitisme.

Schueller’s
épuration
hearing for personal offenses took place in 1948. He was acquitted with little
trouble. In the end what seems to have weighed with the judge was less the
evidence, which could be read so many different ways, than the character
references given by two witnesses. One was his old friend Jacques Sadoul, who
was still a Communist—an important recommendation, since the Communists had been
the only political party to support the Resistance officially—and had now also
become mayor of Ste. Maxime in the Var. And the other, whose evidence tipped the
scales in Schueller’s favor, was Pierre de Bénouville, a garlanded Resistance
hero, founder in 1942 of the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance, organizer of the
Free French forces in Algeria, and who had been named a general on the Italian
front—one of only three
résistants
to end the war
with this rank.