Historian wrote a novel about a family that helped the Nazis, relatives sued

On Wednesday On January 7, a trial began in France, where the historian and writer Cécile Desprairies responds to a defamation lawsuit filed by his own relatives. He was sued by his own brother and another relative, reports news agency AFP.

Desprairies (b. 1957) has written several historical works about the Nazi occupation of France and Vichy France, which supported Nazi Germany, but in 2023 his first novel was published The Propagandist. In writing it, he drew on his own family’s activities during World War II. “This is a fact: I grew up in a family of collaborators,” he commented around the time of the book’s publication.

The term “collaborator” refers to people who cooperate with the occupier, and often to the Nazi helpers in the occupied territories during the Second World War.

The Propagandist received good reviews in France when it was published in 2023, and with the English translation published in 2024, also in Great Britain and the United States. It was nominated for the Prix Goncourt literary award in France.

deprairiesin mother worked as a maker of Nazi propaganda posters. In his novel, the narrator’s mother also works as a propagandist, which the title of the novel already refers to. The narrator describes her mother as a “passionate collaborator”.

The narrator’s great-uncle and grandmother’s half-brother are described in the same way. The relatives are also described as anti-Semitic, and they do not regret their collaboration with the Nazis.

The characters in the book have different names than the author’s relatives, but according to the lawsuit, these are clearly recognizable in the book. The lawsuit accuses Desprairies of defaming his mother, great-uncle and grandmother’s half-brother, and the plaintiffs filed the suit as their direct descendants.

Desprairies has stated that the book is a novel and not a work of history, so it may also contain fictional elements. In an interview with The New York Times in the fall of 2024, he said that he does not consider his book to be an actual key novel, i.e. a narrative based on real-life events and people, in which mostly only the names of the characters would have been changed. At the same time, however, there are real events in the background, which he has studied as a historian.

“The whole history of the occupation and the collaborators in France is so incredible that I felt it necessary to base my novel on historical facts,” Desprairies told The New York Times.

He also said that his brother supported him throughout the writing process, but completely changed his mind after the book was published.