BOOKS

Loyalty to Simon

Richard Cobb

COMMUNISM AND COLLABORATION: SIMON SABIANI AND POLITICS IN MARSEILLE; 1919-1944 by Paul Jankowski Yale University Press, f25, pp.240

his is probably one of the most soph- isticated books ever written about the elusive, constantly shifting, frontierless subject of Collaboration and Collabor- ationism. It is a study of marginality, deeply researched, and written with com- passion, an observantly wry humour, and a serene wisdom that is never taken by surprise by any unexpected twist or turn. The author offers no easy answers, be- cause, drawing on a variety of personal case histories, of which he makes a sensi- tive use, he is well aware of the variety of motivations that might drive one individual into active collaboration, another into pru- dent, semi-collaboration, a third into a Resistance network, a fourth to work for both sides, a fifth into pure gangsterism. This, for instance, from one such case history:

For an unemployed accountant whom he had known since the early thirties Sabiani first tried the assurances sociales, where the salary was too low, then the Kriegsmarine, where the job was too demanding, and finally Vichy's Gardes Mobiles Republi- caines, where the protégé settled down as a secretary. Shortly after the Liberation, with his old patron gone, useless, an overnight liability, he prudently joined the Communist Party:

a peaceful readjustment no doubt made by many others. More tragic was the fate of a recruit to the Waffen SS, 'a 16 year-old ward of the state, homeless and adrift, who lied about his age...' and who never returned from the Eastern Front. And here are two more recruits:

a 17 year-old afraid to go home after being sacked by his employer for stealing two packets of cigarettes... a 24 year-old occa- sional shipyard worker, living in squalor with mentally diseased parents and no way out....

From such small beginnings could start the long journey East. These two were luckier: both got back. And there are scores of such examples. Paul Jankowski is never censo- rious, he never attempts to sit in judgment on his minor characters, and case histories of this kind, presented dispassionately, take his readers far below the still frigidi- ties of ideological commitment. Thus the ambivalence of individual motivations and of personal choices is explored at a much more effective, because more private, level, than in Sweet's recent study of Clermont-Ferrand from 1940 to 1944. He knows Marseille inside out: he has walked the local terrain (`Their world', he com- ments, of Sabiani and his network, 'was small, confined to the few short streets between the Vieux-Port and the Place de l'Opera...'); but he has also made much

more detailed use of judicial material provided by some hundreds of post- Liberation trials and by carefully con- ducted interviews with survivors, including Sabiani's daughter and his former chauff- eur and general factotum, many of whom turn out to have been remarkably talk- ative. Of course there are advantages, when embarking on an enterprise of this kind, of being an Anglo-Saxon historian, or, at least, of not being a French one.

It would be very tempting to fit Simon Sabiani (1887-1956) into some sort of convenient and easily definable historical slot. History becomes neater that way. Was he then a Fascist? And in what family of Fascism? Well, at times he wore the trappings of Fascism, spoke the language of Fascism, and he was certainly a Col- laborator, though, after 1942, an in- creasingly irrelevant one. Away from

Marseille, on his rather rare trips to Paris, we can see him, belted and uniformed, on a podium which he shares with Doriot: a little man with a glass eye beside a big man with heavy round spectacles. His only son, Francois (whom he had managed to inter- cept at the very last moment at the Spanish frontier in July 1940, when he had been preparing to join the London Gaullistes) was killed in June 1942, fighting in the Waffen-SS, on the Eastern Front.

Yet Simon Sabiani, who, in the course of a public career of a quarter of a century, had run the whole gamut of political extremism, from Communism and pacif- ism, through the oddly hybrid Socialist- Communist Party (a non-starter, if ever there was one), to the southern leadership of Doriot's PPF (which he had joined in 1936), does not fit readily into such collec- tive categories. He was not cut out to be a national figure, he was never a 'belonger' in the ideological sense, and his loyalty to the PPF was little more than a matter of short-term convenience: his power-base was local, excessively so (the author's sub-title is much nearer the mark than the title itself). He represented something that was unique to Marseille (where he had landed, aged 20, in 1907, bearing introduc- tions to various influential Corsicans from his village) and to its bizarre, scandalous, and, at times, hilarious politics: an extreme form of local clientelism, based, in his case, on the quatrieme canton, but in no way dissimilar from that of his contemporary rivals. The second illustration in the book is entitled: 'Simon Sabiani and friends, c. 1936': a tight group of men standing shoulder to shoulder, some wearing trilbies with wide black bands, some wearing caps, nearly all of them with silk scarves round their necks, one man bare-headed, his hair heavily brilliantined. There are no women. It is a friendly group, and, judging from the headwear (middle-class or gangster tril- bies, salopards en casquette, to use the class vocabulary in vogue at the time), one that represented his full network, extending from bar-owners, gangsters, enforcers (nervis), sailors and ex-sailors, municipal employees, firemen, dustmen, tram- drivers to people skilled in every form of electoral malpractice, and no doubt a large percentage of fellow-Corsicans, especially those from his native village of Casamac- cioli: Les Amis de Simon Sabiani, a group first formed in 1934, and much the best designation of his abilities as a ward politician and as a constant and ever- reliable source of jobs and municipal favours, a one-man employment agency (and, after 1942, for work with the various German organisations, including the Kriegsmarine and the Abwehr, within the city). But this loose personal following, based, as Paul Jankowski crisply com- ments, on 'a two-way street' (a narrow one, with lines of washing strung across from window to window) represented, in addition to the solid rewards of loyalty to Le Patron, also another sort of reality: the clannish politics of friendship within a confined urban area. A great many people liked Sabiani, speaking affectionately ab- out him years after his death in Barcelona in 1956, not just because he did a great many things for them, but also because he seems to have been a genuinely likeable man, ready to give up his days and his evenings listening to the first-comer. He took trouble, he did not forget, he seemed to care, and he was not stuck-up, was completely approachable and knew how to listen. What is even more surprising, given his popularity, is that he did not drink, did not follow the conventional toumee du pastis. Several of those interviewed by the author in the 1980s told him that they had joined the PPF because Simon had asked them to, 'we did it to please him, we could not have cared less about the Party': even in the post-Liberation trials, the judges made allowances for this sort of personal loyalty. One gathers that in PPF bars there would always be portraits of Sabiani, but never ones of Doriot, the locals were not interested in le grand Jacques, and it is possible that many of them had never heard of him. Of course Sabiani was not the only ward politician to rely on personal networks and clientelism. Tasso and the others employed similar methods, and, in more recent years the long municipal reign of Gaston Deffere was buttressed by simi- lar clans.

Towards the end of his book Paul Jankowski sums up this essential aspect of Sabiani and Sabianisme:

Throughout his political career, Sabiani was an outsider. He belonged to the small, rough, inarticulate politics of the clientele, he never outgrew the camaraderie of the trenches; he was at home among small groups of men.. . . He was a political nomad who had many friends but never found a home. . . . He was only at home with his followers and dependants, whoever they were and wherever he found them. He was not very discriminating; he did not mind who they were as long as they were loyal to him.

Discriminating he certainly was not. In 1934 he made a point of publicising his friendship with the gangsters and trigger- men Carbone and Spirito: he did not have to, but it was a matter of personal honour for him to do so. Among his obliges were former murderers and ex-convicts; after 1942, the umbrella of Les Amis extended to torturers, miliciens, Jew-hunters, and black marketeers. It was an ever- expanding amicale. There were no rules of admission, apart from loyalty to Simon.

The backdrop to this unhappy and, for some active participants, disastrous story, is provided both by the most ancient and extraordinary city in France, and by a somewhat surreal topography of bars with names both suggestive and no doubt mis- leading: Le Bar Populaire, Le Bar du Veranda, Le Bar Titin, Le Colibri, Le Bar Casanova, Le Medan, Le Celona, Le Mistral, La Potiniere, Le Bar Figaro, Le Café Glacier, Le Studio, and, inevitably, Maxim's. Some would have been tiny one-roomed bars with curtains of beads or raffia in the place of doors onto the streets, others, like Le Café Glacier, would have been substantial establishments, with a double terrasse at a key-intersection. All, whatever the apparently disarming inno- cence of their names, would have been potentially dangerous to the non-initiated. Even the villa, 425 rue Paradis, at the far end of that long street, in which the Gestapo and the French torturers operated with great zeal, round the clock, before going off for a drink in the bar of the Hotel de Rome or that of the HOtel de Noailles, had a pretty garden that was regularly tended during the Occupation years: Sabiani of course provided the gardeners to keep the place looking nice.

T

here seems to be a similar ambivalence about the history of Mairseille at any time under the Third, Fourth and Fifth Repub- lics. Even electoral fraud, in its habitual forms: le toboggan (ballot-box stuffing), les urnes en promenade (the theft of the ballot-box), ballot papers ironed together, a massive turn-out of deceased voters, has its consistently comical side, at least as witnessed and described by the practising locals, who seem to have taken such things as a matter of course and as a subject of merriment. Fraud, corruption, clannish- ness and a great deal of underlying vio- lence are thus leavened by a meridional cynicism and light-heartedness, as if it were all a sort of game, including the killing, all the more when the killers have names like Carbone and Spirito, Palmieri, Toto, the well-named Tortora, Marcel l'Ukrainien, Antoine le Boxeur. Along with la Belle Rousse, they might have provided the characters in a 1920s novel by Pierre MacOrlan. But they weren't characters in anyone's novels, populist or otherwise, they were real, like the mysterious Albert, local head of the Abwehr, 'last seen heading out of town on 15 August, behind the wheel of a black Ford cabriolet', and so were their victims.

The author's magisterial Conclusion should be reproduced in full:

That poorly integrated groups are unguided missiles, that society ignores them at its own risk and peril, they they will sooner or later find a leader and that under certain circumst- ances they can do a great deal of damage the story of Sabiani's following is a study in the hazards of marginality. The story of Sabiani's person is a study in the hazards of conventional virtue. MOre than a reminder that virtuous men can preside over vicious doings, his life is a warning that traditional virtues like courage or loyalty or generosity — his virtues — can be positive menaces if harnessed to the wrong cause. They can go mad — and in Sabiani's case they did.