Ugly Beauty (21 page)

However, it could hardly have escaped this highly
intelligent young man that by the time he wrote his pieces the war was no longer
a war of mere words. On the contrary, in the context of the Nazi Occupation, the
familiar phrases had become lethal weapons. The extolling of denunciation was
particularly sinister—not just repellent in itself, but because it laid a duty
on readers to impose what was probably a death sentence upon anyone who did not
conform to the ruling ideology.
3
And to denigrate the Jews in an era of
deportations, expropriations, and extermination camps, was direct incitement to
persecution.

Bettencourt’s first intimation that Frydman had
disinterred his articles and was preparing to publish them was at a symposium on
museum management he was moderating. When questions were invited, David Frydman
stood up and said he was proposing to fund a museum of the collaboration. He had
a set of Bettencourt’s articles for
La Terre
Française
. Would Bettencourt agree to donate the manuscripts to
Frydman’s museum?

Later, Bettencourt would try to pretend that he
could not remember what he had written all those years ago, and that in any
case, his articles had been anodyne and unimportant. But his reaction to
Frydman’s intervention indicated that, on the contrary, he remembered only too
well, and knew the effect disclosure might have on his current image. The shock
was palpable. He turned pale and left the room. When he returned, he was urged
by a member of the panel not to answer, but rejected this suggestion with the
words “I am a public figure, I must answer.” He went on: “It is true that I had
the misfortune to write for
La Terre Française
, but
I redeemed myself. I was in the Resistance. I even represented the National
Council of Liberation at Geneva.”
34

Bettencourt at once used his powerful position as a
senator to try to prevent the matter going any further. When Frydman returned to
the library to make sure he had photographed everything, he found that all
copies of
La Terre Française
had vanished. He looked
elsewhere, in vain: the magazine had been removed from every library in
France—except the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Versailles site, where he finally
tracked it down. It had recently been moved there from the library’s then main
building in rue Richelieu, probably escaping Bettencourt’s sweep because at the
crucial moment it was in transit between locations.
4

In the autumn of 1994, Jean Frydman set out his
findings in a pamphlet,
Pour servir la mémoire
,
giving the names and details of the old fascists “recycled” by Schueller and
reproducing the more explosive of Bettencourt’s
Terre
Française
articles. The result was all he had hoped, and all
Bettencourt had dreaded. Not only was there a renewed focus of attention on
L’Oréal’s dark history, both in the French press and in other countries, but
Serge Klarsfeld requested the U.S. Department of Justice to put Bettencourt on
its watch list of undesirable aliens. That listing in turn prompted New York
congressman Eliot L. Engel to write Bettencourt a letter demanding clarification
on three counts. How had he been able to obtain an American visa, given that
applicants were required to state whether they had been implicated in any Nazi
persecutions? What about those articles, now republished by Frydman, from
La Terre Française—
in particular one containing the
phrase “Today’s Jews will be spat out. It’s already happening”? And had
Bettencourt, during the war, been a collaborator or a
résistant
?

Bettencourt declined to respond to Frydman’s
allegations, on the grounds that the conflict between Frydman and L’Oréal was
still before the courts, and that as vice president of L’Oréal he was debarred
from commenting. But he did reply to Congressman Engel’s letter. He had no
memory of filling in a visa application form, as he normally used a diplomatic
passport; in any case, he would not fill in such a form himself—tasks like that
were the job of his staff. As a
résistant
, he had
been imprisoned in Nancy and had met Allen Dulles, head of the American OSS,
while on a mission to Switzerland. He had been asked to write for
La Terre Française
because he had previously been
active in the Catholic young farmers association (Jeunesse Agricole Catholique),
and this was a farming magazine. He had been France’s official representative at
the funeral of Israel’s David Ben-Gurion, when he had been received by Golda
Meir and Abba Eban, hardly a mission for an anti-Semite. Nor would anyone with a
record of collaboration have been tolerated by de Gaulle or Mendès-France, who
had not only been a staunch
résistant
but was
himself Jewish. He held the Resistance Medal. His son-in-law was a Jew. He
rested his case. As for Mr. Engel’s citation of a phrase about the Jews being
“spat out,” supposedly published in the Christmas 1940 edition of
La Terre Française
, he assured him that no such phrase
appeared in that article. Indeed, it did not: it turned out that Frydman’s notes
were in error. The phrase had appeared the following Easter, in a piece, also by
Bettencourt, entitled “Carillon pascale.”

Frydman’s pamphlet, and its repercussions, prompted
investigations into other aspects of André Bettencourt’s wartime life—in
particular, his claim to have been active in the Resistance. He had undeniably
been awarded the Resistance Medal, but for what, exactly?

In his letter to Congressman Engel, Bettencourt
wrote that in 1944 he had been sent to Geneva to represent the Conseil National
de la Résistance. There, under the assumed name of Grainville, he had contacted
many members of the Resistance and also members of the English and American
intelligence services, in particular Allen Dulles and Max Shoop of the OSS, on
behalf of the Ministry for Prisoners of War. He returned to France with Dulles
at the time of the Allied landings in the south of France.

But these claims did not stand up to examination.
It was true that Bettencourt did go to Switzerland in the summer of that year.
Mitterrand had tasked him with contacting American agents in Switzerland in
order to obtain funds on behalf of the Ministry for Prisoners of War, which was
trying to foment unrest in German prisoner-of-war camps. Once he had the money
he was to pass it on to Mitterrand.

It was not a hard task, and he accomplished it
easily enough, making the requisite contacts and forwarding the money—$2,500,000
in all,
35
though what became of it is unclear.
No POW insurrections of the type it was supposed to fund were recorded. However,
he certainly did not, as he claimed, represent the Conseil National de la
Résistance. That organization was headed by Jean Moulin and General de Gaulle,
who were convinced that America’s ultimate intention was to turn France into an
American client state, and forbade all contact with the American secret services
in Switzerland, particularly in financial matters. When confronted with this
faux pas by the satirical weekly
Le
Canard Enchaîné
, Bettencourt backtracked: he had
made a mistake, he had actually been part of the delegation of the Mouvements
Unifiés de la Résistance—a different and much less significant body, headed by
his old friend (and Jean Moulin’s mortal enemy) Pierre de Bénouville. But it
transpired that this position, too, was impossible: the MUR had ceased to exist
on December 31, 1943,
36
nine months before
Bettencourt visited Switzerland.

Nor did he meet Allen Dulles: Bettencourt’s
dealings were with Dulles’s deputy, Max Shoop.
37
And even had Dulles and Bettencourt been acquainted, they could
not have journeyed to France together. Dulles did not leave Switzerland until
the night of August 29–30, while Bettencourt told Pierre Péan in an interview
that from August 21 he was in Paris, where he and Dalle were helping Mitterrand
with post-Liberation policy regarding prisoners of war.
5
38

Bettencourt’s first line of defense was to insist
that everything about his past was known and had long been dealt with and
dismissed. “I answered the questions about
La Terre
Française
in my very first electoral campaign,” he told New York’s
Congressman Engel. And some years later, interviewed for a book, he said,
“Everyone knew perfectly well what my position was during the war.”
39
When this tack failed to impress, he declared
that although he regretted what he had written, it was insignificant: “I
mentioned the Jews two or three times and the freemasons once.
. . .”
40
And finally he pleaded
ignorance. He had not known what was happening to the Jews: “I would never have
written those words if I’d had any idea of what the Jews were going through.
. . . No one knew anything about Jews being arrested and deported to
extermination camps,” he complained to an interviewer.
41
Nor had he had any idea who the real owners of
La Terre Française
were: “I knew absolutely nothing
about that. . . . For me it was just a magazine with a large
circulation among agriculturalists.”
42
And
when all these excuses failed, he simply went into denial. When confronted with
yet another outrageously anti-Semitic, antidemocratic article written for yet
another Pétainist youth publication (
L’Élan
,
published in Bordeaux), “I don’t remember,” he flatly replied.
43

None of it worked. The Frydmans’ revelations ended
Bettencourt’s public career. On December 13, 1994, he quietly resigned from
L’Oréal (where he was replaced as vice president by his son-in-law, Jean-Pierre
Meyers, by a supreme irony a Jew whose grandfather had died in Auschwitz) and
declared he would not be standing in the Senate elections due to take place the
following year. He insisted that these decisions had nothing to do with the
Frydmans’ investigations or Congressman Engel’s letter, which he made a point of
not having received until December 16, three days after his resignation. On the
contrary, he said, L’Oréal’s CEO, Lindsay Owen-Jones, had been aware for some
time of his impending departure: at the age of seventy-six he could no longer
fulfil his duties as actively as he should, and from now on he would have to
curtail his activities. But sources “close to L’Oréal’s management” told
Le Monde
that, on the contrary, the letter and the
resignation were by no means unconnected. The troubles stemming from the Corrèze
affair were only just behind them, and they were anxious that this new
embarrassment should remain confined to Bettencourt himself and not taint the
company or its principal shareholder, who was, of course, his wife.
44

The tone Bettencourt took thereafter, on the rare
occasions when he consented to speak about the affair, was one of sadness and
indignation. He was, he asserted, the victim of a malicious conspiracy. But “the
more I say, the more I stoke the polemic. . . . It’s all a terrible
trap,” he complained to
Le Monde
. “Have some
consideration for my dignity. It’s appalling to imply that I could possibly have
participated in genocide!”
45
And writing to
Congressman Engel he reiterated the accusation that had so enraged Jean Frydman
when he had first made it, saying that in his view, “this sudden revival of
interest in articles . . . written half a century ago is at least
partly due to the misrepresentation of events by people who want to make sure
their financial interests prevail.”
46

V

I
t seems
clear that neither André Bettencourt nor Jacques Corrèze felt guilty about what
they had done during the war. Their regret was rather for the embarrassment
their youthful acts caused them later. But that regret manifested itself quite
differently in the two men, and had different roots.

Bettencourt’s chagrin clearly stemmed from the
sense that he had been unfairly picked out. Countless others—including,
doubtless, many of his own acquaintances—had acted as discreditably as he. Even
if they had not, as he had, actively promoted fascism, they had adjusted their
lives to it without too much trouble. But the
épuration
was supposed to have dealt with all that. One of its
important functions had been to act as an “exercise in the suppression of
memory,”
47
so that France could step forward
into the future, confident that the worst offenders had been punished. For
private individuals, this amnesia took effect almost instantly. Thus, the
journalist Merry Bromberger, profiling Schueller in 1954—only six years after
his second trial—glossed over his wartime career with the comment “From time to
time his enthusiasms have led him where he shouldn’t have gone.”
48

All this meant that when Bettencourt said,
“Everyone knew perfectly well what my position was during the war,” the truth
was in reality just the opposite. People
thought 
they knew—and wanted nothing more than to go on
thinking so. No one in the French establishment welcomed his exposure. It
undermined the whole edifice. If Bettencourt was shown to be a liar, whose story
could be believed?

For what made the Bettencourt case so disturbing
(and what so infuriated him) was the certainty that it was not unique. His
shameful trajectory had, after all, only been revealed by the sheerest chance.
If Corrèze had not become obsessed with taking over Helena Rubinstein, if the
Boycott Office had not intervened, if Dalle had not picked Jean Frydman as a
partner for L’Oréal, none of his wartime activity would have come out. It was
possible that the fates had picked the one rotten apple out of the
barrel—possible, but not probable. What of the industrialists who had so
enthusiastically funded La Cagoule, and whose names still remained household
words in France? Would their stories, had they been forced to reveal them, have
been so very different? And how many public figures had, like Bettencourt
himself, transformed themselves into
résistants
at
the last minute—as his friend François Mitterrand put it, “
mal embarqués, bien arrivés
”?
49
Were not their careers based, as his was, on lies and concealments?