Gertrude Stein: a complex itinerary, 1940-1944

A version of this paper by Edward Burns, titled “So I Went on Looking at Pictures: Gertrude Stein’s Last Decade,” was delivered as part of Sundays at the Met, April 29, 2012, in conjunction with the exhibition The Steins Collect.

How did two Jewish lesbian women manage to survive in France during the Second World War, particularly after the line of demarcation ended in November 1942 and the Vichy government began to follow the stricter laws enacted by the Nazi government in Paris? How, too, did a well-known collection of modern art, with masterpieces by Picasso, Juan Gris, and Cézanne escape looting to survive intact during the occupation of Paris? Much has been made in recent years about Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas remaining in France during World War II. Their failure to return to the United States in 1939, and the discovery that Stein translated and wrote an introduction to a book of speeches by Marshal Pétain, has raised questions about her politics. Her failure to identify herself in her writings as Jewish has also entered the conversation.

In her thinking about political, social, and economic matters, Stein was a conservative Republican with what her friend William G. Rogers called the mentality of a “rentier,” a person of property. She opposed Roosevelt and the New Deal and was more afraid of communism than of fascism. In spite of her close friendship with Picasso, during the Spanish Civil War she did not denounce the revolt of General Franco against the duly elected Republican government.

In September 1939, when France and England declared war on Germany, Stein and Toklas were in Bilignin, the country house they had rented since the late 1920s. They obtained a forty-eight hour pass to return to Paris to collect their passports, to gather winter clothing, to arrange for bank transfers, and to secure the paintings in their apartment at 5 rue Christine.¹ When she arrived in Paris, Stein hastily arranged two meetings. The first was with her friend, the art historian and dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler remembers that on entering the apartment he saw Toklas with one foot on the frame of the portrait of Madame Cézanne, trying to remove the canvas. “I stopped her, and set myself to unframing this magnificent work in a less violent manner. They wanted to carry away with them only this picture and the portrait of Stein by Picasso, despite my protestations that they should take at least some small Picassos which would be very easy to wrap and would take up very little room. A happy Providence justified their confidence. The pictures left in Paris survived.” Before he left, Kahnweiler wrapped some of the larger paintings and placed them on the floor; others were covered and stored in cupboards.²

The second person Stein saw during this hurried trip to Paris was her friend Bernard Faÿ. During their visit, it is believed that Stein executed a document in which she placed the care of her pictures in his hands. The original of that document has not survived and only some notes on the back of an envelope attest to what Stein did. When her pass expired, she and Toklas returned to Bilignin. Periodically Faÿ reported to Stein on the safety of her collection (Stein did not return to Paris again until December 1944.)³

Stein wrote about the phony war, la drole de guerre (September 1939 to June 1940), in “The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France” which was published in The Atlantic Monthly in November 1940. The facts are there, but one wants to know more. On June 11, 1940, Stein and Toklas received permission to spend eight days in Bordeaux. They had seriously considered following the advice of the American Embassy that all Americans living in France should present themselves there to prepare to return to the United States. The fact that she had gone to Bordeaux does not appear in the piece. Her decision to remain in France becomes one of those wonderfully arranged Stein stories. Returning from Bordeaux (we have no information on what she did during her stay there), she stopped in Lyon to see the American Consul. “We were stopped every few minutes by the military; they were preparing to blow up bridges and were placing anti-aircraft guns and it all seemed very near and less than ever did I want to go on the road.” Near Bilignin, she meets her friends Dr. Gaston Chaboux and his wife Charlotte. After a discussion about whether to stay or return to the United States, Dr. Chaboux advised them, “I always think the best thing to  do is to stay. He went on, everybody knows you here, everybody likes you, we all would help you in every way. Why risk yourself among strangers. Thank you, we said, that is all we need.”⁴

In June 1940, France was divided into two zones — the Occupied Zone under the direct authority of the Germans, and the Unoccupied or Free Zone officially under French rule which was administered from Vichy. Under the armistice, all French territory was technically subject to Vichy’s laws, so long as those laws remained consistent with German regulations in the Occupied Zone. French officials were required to “collaborate” with their German counterparts.

Marshal Philippe Pétain, a leading military figure of World War I became head of this new French state in June 1940. The new government blamed the Jews and the Popular Front of 1936 for France’s defeat. From the beginning, and without pressure from the Germans, his regime enacted a series of measures openly hostile to Jews — particularly those of foreign birth who had become French citizens. Stein and Toklas, as Americans, were not subject to certain regulations. But naturalized French citizens found that their naturalization could be revoked by a law passed in Vichy in July 1940. The Vichy government was ready to please the Germans, and anti-Semitic propaganda was permitted by a law passed in October 1940. This law defined Jews on the basis of racial criteria, and excluded them from many public service jobs and professions. A law passed in Vichy on October 4, 1940, allowed the French police to arbitrarily arrest “any foreigner of the Jewish race.” At the end of 1940, French officials in the Occupied Zone took a census of Jews — the following year Jews in the Free Zone were subjected to the same census — which in essence meant registration. The mass arrest of Jews was started in May 1941, and in August 1941 a major round-up of foreign Jews took place in Paris. Of these, more than 1,000 were placed in Drancy, a camp in the suburbs of Paris. The deportation of Jews from France did not begin until March 27, 1942 when more than 1,000 people were transported by train to Auschwitz.

How much of this did Stein know is difficult to determine. But it is impossible to believe that even in her small village in southeastern France she was not aware of what was happening around her. The story of Stein’s survival in France during the occupation is really two stories. The story of her relationship with the people in and around Belley whom she had known since the mid-1920s when she first discovered this town in the valley of the Rhone and had spent summers in a local hotel until she rented a house in the nearby hamlet of Bilignin. The sentiments of Dr. Chaboux no doubt express how the people felt about Stein and Toklas. They were never denounced, and their survival is in part due to their being well-liked by the people living in the Bugey, the region around Belley.⁵ Stein was a familiar figure who roamed the hills with her dog Basket. She talked to farmers, and had a genuine interest in the lives of the people she met. She participated in the life of the community, and she was considered one of their own. The lesbian relationship between Gertrude and Alice was known by many of the local people; it does not seem to have mattered to most of them. Robert O. Paxton, the American historian whose books forced the French to confront the horrors of the Vichy regime, has written about the officials in small towns across France who simply omitted information when it was demanded of them. This was clearly the case for Stein and Toklas.⁶

The second story, which helps to explain Stein’s ability to live out the war in France, is the story of her relationship with Bernard Faÿ, a friend since the 1920s. Faÿ was a historian of the Eighteenth Century and a specialist in American intellectual history. He came from a family of bankers and lawyers with Royalist and Catholic ties. He was well-connected in the world of power, intellectual circles (he was Professor of American Civilization in the Collège de France), and in the world of the arts. Pétain appointed him Director of the Bibliothèque Nationale after dismissing the Jew, Julien Cain. In this position, Faÿ made frequent trips to Vichy and he became the eyes and ears for the Marshal in Paris.

We do not know the precise circumstances under which Faÿ proposed that Stein translate a volume of speeches by the Marshal, Paroles aux Français. Messages et écrits 1934–1941. But there seems no doubt that he convinced her that it was important for Americans to understand what was happening in France and that Marshal Pétain, whose government at this time still maintained diplomatic relations with the United States, be presented in a favorable light. Did he confide in Stein his fears for what might happen in France as the Germans took command of the government? Probably without articulating it, he must have been convinced that if Stein did this translation it might be a bargaining chip to protect her and Toklas should the time ever arise when they were in danger. We just do not know how he proposed the project to her and what she knew about his motivation.

The translation project would need the approval of Pétain and his staff to go forward, and Stein first began work on an Introduction to present the Marshal to an American audience. On February 7, 1942 Faÿ wrote Stein that he had talked to the Marshal about the proposed translation and that he was pleased with the idea.⁷ Stein must have worked quickly, because on February 20, 1942, when he was in Vichy, Faÿ sent her Introduction to be reviewed by Dr. Bernard Ménétrel, the Marshal’s private secretary. Faÿ had a private meeting with Ménétrel to discuss a number of matters — one of which was the Stein project.⁸

Once the Introduction was approved, Stein began translating the speeches, and her notebooks (preserved at Yale) give evidence that she worked hard at finding a fluent English form for them. In November 1942, the Germans occupied all of France. In spite of a rapidly changing political situation inside and outside of France, Stein continued working on the translations. By January 1943, her friend Paul Genin and the sous-prefet of Belley, Maurice Sivan, urged her to abandon the project. They were concerned that it would bring too much attention to her. We do not know why Stein continued to work on the translation (which was never published) as long as she did. In February 1943, she moved from Bilignin to the railway town of Culoz, a few miles from Belley.

The translation of Pétain’s speeches has preoccupied Stein’s detractors in recent years; they have used it as the wedge (along with a clearly ironic remark about Hitler’s deserving the Nobel Peace Prize) to denounce her — the denunciation by extension extends to her literary works. How can one read this writer, they seem to be saying, when she has such odious pro-Vichy, pro-fascist views. Each retelling of the story enlarges what Stein actually did, and rarely cites specific information, sources, or puts the translation project in an historical context. By focusing exclusively on this aspect of Stein’s life, her detractors avoid confronting Stein’s published writings during the war. If they did, they would find that her publishers were exceptional individuals who struggled to maintain the intellectual tradition of freedom of thought and expression.⁹

A fact rarely mentioned is that Stein’s name appeared in the “Liste OTTO, ” a list of proscribed writers, published on May 10, 1943. Stein is among the list of Jewish authors, “Juedische Autoren, Écrivains Juifs,” writing in the French language whose works were banned. She is listed as “Miss Gertrude Stein” together with the name of Floury, the publisher of her 1938 book Picasso. Listing of writers and specific books which were censored by the Germans, with the complicity of French publishers, began with a “Liste Bernhard” in August 1940.¹⁰

Inclusion of a writer’s name on the “Liste OTTO” meant their books could not be sold and were to be removed from libraries. Interestingly, it did not completely forbid publication in journals — or at least that was how the “Liste OTTO” was understood by the poet, René Tavernier (1915–1989) who published translations of some of Stein’s earlier works and some new works in his journal Confluences beginning in July 1942.¹¹ Confluences had been founded in Lyon by Jacques Aubenque in July 1941. Others connected with the journal were Marc Beigbeder, Marc Barbezat, Auguste Anglès, Alain Borne, and Georges Lorris. Confluences was published from 1941 to 1943, and among the writers published in the journal were: Louis Aragon, Pierre Emmanuel, Paul Éluard, Henri Michaux, Françis Ponge, Robert Desnos, Max Jacob, Eugène Guillevic, Andre Frénaud, Jean Wahl, Louis Martin-Chauffier, Jean Paulhan, and Gabriel Marcel. Stein’s poem “Ballade” (translated by the Baroness d’Aiguy) appeared in the same issue as Aragon’s Nymphée (it was the publication of this poem, a thinly disguised attack on the French and on Vichy, which resulted in the journal being temporarily banned). It seems highly unlikely that Tavernier, who visited Stein during the occupation and remained a friend after the war, would have published her if there had been any indication that her behavior towards Vichy and the Germans had not been anything but correct. Journals such as Confluences and Fontaine, which was published in Algiers, appeared in a semi-authorized environment (with the consent of censors) or completely in secret.

Fontaine, the other journal where Stein published during the occupation was edited in Algiers by Max-Pol Fouchet, a classmate of Albert Camus. Fouchet took over the journal Methra (founded in 1938 by Charles Autrand) and renamed it Fontaine. He published writers living in both zones and those living in exile. The journal became the voice of resistance poetry in French North-Africa and drew the fire of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle who, in his position as the collaborationist editor of La Nouvelle revue française, wrote censors denouncing its contents. Éluard’s “Liberté” was published inFontaine. Stein first appeared in Fontaine in issue 11 (October / November 1940). Stein’s other connection in Algiers was Edmond Charlot (1915-2004), a heroic defender of freedom and the owner of the bookstore Les Vraies Richesses, who also published books. He published Stein’s Paris France in October 1941 (trans. Madame d’Aiguy) and her Petits poèmes pour un livre de lecture (trans. Madame d’Aiguy) in April 1944).¹²

Stein’s “Est Morte,” a translation of her “Is Dead,” appeared in Fontaine 27/28, a special number (June / July 1944) which celebrated writers and poets of the United States including Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Sara Teasdale, Robinson Jeffers, Conrad Aiken, Lola Ridge, Archibald MacLeish, Horace Gregory, Louise Bogan, Carl Sandburg, Allen Tate, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Frederic Prokosch, Marianne Moore, James Agee, Kenneth Patchen, James Laughlin, and Vachel Lindsay. So important was this issue considered as a sign of French-American solidarity, it was reissued by Max-Pol Fouchet after he moved to Paris in 1945. Again, it is difficult to imagine that someone as sensitive to political issues as Fouchet would have published Stein if he did not have confidence in her stand against Vichy and the Germans.

Like other literary journals published during the occupation Marc Barbezat’s L’Arbalète (The Cross-Bow) faced intense scrutiny by censors. There were temporary bans on publication, and police searches of his print shop were a common occurrence. Barbezat, who was encouraged by Tavernier, was a pharmacist in Lyon when in 1940, at the age of twenty-seven, he began hand-printing and assembling his journal. He drew on many of the same writers as Confluences, and he viewed his journal as part of the combat against fascism. It was Barbezat and his wife, the actress Olga Kechelievitch, who in 1943 discovered the work of an unknown prisoner, Jean Genet. In the autumn of 1944, Barbezat published issue 9 of L’Arbalète devoted to American writers and American culture.¹³ The issue begins with Stein’s “Langage et littérature américains” (“American Language and Literature,” translated by R.-L. Istre) and includes works by Dorothy Baker, Erskine Caldwell, Donald Henderson Clarke, Peter Cheney, Ernest Hemingway, Horace Mac Coy, Walter Edmonds, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston (listed as Norah Zeale Hurston), Henry Miller, Damon Runyon, William Saroyan, Nathanael West, Thornton Wilder, Thomas Wolfe, and Richard Wright (prefaced by Paul Robeson). The issue was handset by Barbezat and printed in an edition of 2,150 copies. It is evident that the planning began before the liberation of Paris in August 1944. It is hard to believe that Stein would have been included in this volume if there was any question about her political views after the end of the line of demarcation in November 1942.¹⁴

The insecurity that Stein felt after the move to Culoz in February 1943 is mirrored in the journal she was keeping, Wars I Have Seen. The rationing of scarce food and fuel enter the book. Neighbor did not talk to neighbor on the telephone fearful that conversations were being monitored. Travel became difficult, and Stein was aware of the forced travel of French workers to factories in Germany. She was aware of the deportations, and she knew the reality of being in a combat zone when the nearby city of Chambéry was bombed on May 26, 1944, and reports of the dead began to filter in the area. Cut off from the United States, and having used the money she had brought with her from Paris in 1939, Stein relied on the generosity of her neighbors Paul and Elena Genin. For almost a year, the Genins, who had moved, with Elena’s daughter Joan Clegg (now Chapman) from Lyon to the hamlet of Chazey-Bons not far from Belley, were Stein’s bankers, lending her money. Fearful that she would be unable to repay them, Stein arranged in late 1943 for a Paris art dealer, César M. de Hauke to come to Culoz to discuss the sale of Cézanne’s portrait of his wife. On January 1, 1944, de Hauke wrote Stein that Madame Cézanne was on his walls.¹⁵ Stein was not, as some detractors have stated, buying and selling art during the occupation. The Cézanne was the only work she sold.

In Wars I Have Seen Stein mentions the generosity of Paul Genin, and she also writes that a young member of the Swiss legation in Lyon, François Lachenal, a friend of Tavernier’s, arranged in February 1944 for Stein and Toklas to obtain a Passeport de Protection. This document declared them to be temporary residents in France and therefore entitled to enter Switzerland. The “Passeport” was never used. She speaks, too, about seeing the “mountain boys” — members of the maquis. Raymond Godet, a neighbor of Stein’s in the country and a leader of a resistance group in Grenoble, told me when I spoke with him in 1969, that when he attended the performance of Stein’s two children’s plays on August 29, 1943, at the Château de Béon (his sons Mark and Maurice were in the plays), he spoke to Stein of the willingness of his group to help her escape France if it became necessary.¹⁶

Stein and Toklas returned to Paris in mid-December 1944. It was only after their arrival that they learned from Picasso and others that two Gestapo agents entered their apartment on July 19, 1944 with authorization to search for papers. They showed the concierge photographs and demanded to know how these two Jewish women had remained in their apartment. While the Gestapo searched the apartment, the concierge sent her son down the street to alert Picasso. Picasso immediately telephoned to Faÿ at his office in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The Gestapo returned the next day, and before they left they took a small footstool that Toklas had embroidered after a watercolor by Picasso, some pieces of silver, and some linen. They threatened to return in a few days to confiscate the pictures. As documents seized in Faÿ’s office when he was arrested on August 19, 1944 reveal, he alerted two different German agencies and insisted that they each had authority over Stein’s pictures. By the time the Germans had begun to sort out under whose authority the collection fell, the Paris insurrection had begun and the Germans had more important things to think about. In a letter to Picasso written on July 31, 1944, Faÿ details the actions he took, and the specific people he spoke to.¹⁷

After his arrest, Faÿ was held in various prisons. His trial was held from November 29 to December 6, 1946. He was charged with an anti-Masonic crusade which provided the Germans with information on the Masons in France. Many of these men and women were brought into custody, charged with crimes and deported. Faÿ was not charged with their deaths or being involved in their deaths; the specific charge against him was giving aid to the enemy between June 16, 1940 and the date of the liberation of Paris. He was sentenced to life in prison at hard labor. Stein, not being a French citizen, was not permitted to appear before the court. She did, however, give a deposition on March 14, 1946 to Faÿ’s attorney, Maitre Chresteil in which she spoke of her relationship with Faÿ and her knowledge of his devotion to Franco-American relations. She also credited him with saving her art collection. The two page testimony was sent to the court on April 12, 1946. In numerous court documents Faÿ is credited with saving many “Israelites” — in particular Gertrude Stein, and his role in saving her art collection is also cited in several documents submitted to the court as proof of his loyalty to France and his willingness to help Jews.

After Stein’s death, Alice Toklas continued efforts to have Faÿ’s sentence reduced or commuted. On September 30, 1951, with the help of friends, notably Toklas, Faÿ escaped from prison. He went first to Spain and then to Fribourg, Switzerland, where he lived under an assumed name and, under the protection of the Catholic Church, worked in schools. In 1958, he was pardoned by the then Minister of Justice, François Mitterand, and allowed to return to France.¹⁸

In the aftermath of the defeat of 1940, Gertrude Stein, like many people in France, at first took an attentiste position — placing their faith in Pétain to steer France to better days. She was not, by any interpretation of the facts, a “major collaborator with the Vichy regime and a supporter of its pro-Nazi leadership,” as Alan Dershowitz has asserted in a May 1, 2012 posting, “Suppressing Ugly Truth for Beautiful Art.”¹⁹ In “Gertrude Stein: September 1942 to September 1944” in the Stein-Wilder letters, Ulla Dydo and I address the Lansing Warren interview with Stein which appeared in the New York Times Magazine of May 6, 1934, in which she said, “I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize” (see Stein / Wilder, 414) and the denial by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo that Stein nominated Hitler for the peace prize. Stein’s knowledge of the Gestapo raid on an orphanage in the village of Izieu, about twenty kilometers from Belley, and thirty kilometers from Culoz, in which forty-four Jewish children (ages four to seventeen) and their seven supervisors were seized and sent to death camps, was raised in response to Janet Malcolm’s second article about Stein and Toklas in The New Yorker. Malcolm spoke with Joan Chapman about what Stein might and might not have known at the time. Chapman’s intimate relationship with Stein and Toklas during the last years of the war is a reliable source of information about this tragic moment. Only a handful of people knew about the orphanage in Izieu and the Jewish children hidden there — it could only work if it was a well-kept secret. The horror of the deportation only became widely known after the war. To suggest as  Dershowitz does, that Stein had knowledge of what was happening in Izieu, is to fabricate a situation in which Stein was kept informed by some Nazi network of all they were planning.²⁰

In this essay I have emphasized that that Bernard Faÿ is not the only thread in the complex tapestry of Stein’s life during the occupation. I have provided information which calls into question Dershowitz’s description of “Stein’s ignoble role in the Nazi occupation of France.” Stein’s  survival during the war was aided to a significant degree by the people of the Bugey who respected her as a friend and did acts large and small to provide for her well-being. The admiration for Stein’s work, as evidenced by her friendship with active members of the French resistance and by those whose publications stood for resistance to fascism are key, and too often overlooked, facts.²¹

Editor’s note: We have included as part of the Stein dossier a document provided by Edward Burns: Marion Van Renterghem, “Edmund Charlot, éditeur du monde libre,” in Le Monde, February 28, 1997 (“The sign of true wealth, the adventure began in 1936, Algeria: A bookstore, a publishing house, a place of resistance, led by a man of daring, discoverer of Camus, Lorca, Gertrude Stein … ”): [PDF]

1. Stein and Toklas moved from 27 rue de Fleurus in March 1938 to the rue Christine, a street one block long between the rue Dauphine and the rue des Grands Augustins (Picasso lived and had his studio at No. 7).

2. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, introduction to Gertrude Stein’s Painted Lace and Other Pieces [1914–1937] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955, Volume 5 of the Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein, ix–xviii, see particularly xvii–xviii).

3. Stein’s complex relationship with Faÿ has been explored in a number of books: see Edward Burns and Ulla Dydo, eds., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, Appendix IX (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 401–21. See also Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), and Antoine Compagnon, Le Cas Bernard Faÿ: du Collège de France à l’indignité nationale (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). Another useful source of information about Faÿ is Martine Poulain’s Livres pillés, lectures surveillées. Les bibliothèques françaises sous l’Occupation (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). Faÿ writes about his relationship with Stein in his memoir, Les Précieux (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1966).

4. Stein, “The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York, Modern Library, 1946, [615]–637, see particularly 624).

5. It is important to remember that denunciation sent the poets Robert Desnos and Max Jacob (a Jew who converted to Catholicism) to German death camps. After the Liberation, collaborationist authors were denounced and old scores were settle in trials which resulted in about 1,600 death sentences and 38,000 prison terms. The CNE, Comité national des écrivains (CNE, National Writer’s Committee) established blacklists of collaborationist writers and boycotted any publication that accepted their work. My research has not uncovered any mention of an investigation into Stein’s activities during the war, nor have I located documents which advocated retaliation against her.

6. Dominique Saint-Pierre’s Gertrude Stein, le Bugey, la guerre: d’août 1924 à décembre 1944 (Bourg-en-Bresse, France: Musnier-Gilbert Éditions, 2009) is a meticulously researched account of Stein’s life in this region (once she rented the house in Bilignin, she usually left Paris in May and returned in October).

7. Faÿ’s letters to Stein are in the Gertrude Stein-Alice B. Toklas Papers, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (usually cited as YCAL, the Yale Collection of American Literature).