The Propagandist

“In her début novel, a historian of Vichy France tackles her family’s real-life collaboration during the Second World War . . . The result is at once a ghost story, a tale of amour fou, a settling of accounts, and, one senses, a deeply personal act of expiation . . . allowing readers to identify with the human foibles of characters on the wrong side of history, while never excusing them.”

“Cécile Desprairies’s novel, The Propagandist, is full of so many secrets that it’s a wonder she managed to write it all . . . The book takes an insider’s perspective on occupied France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II.”

“This haunting autobiographical novel shows that the Nazi occupation of France is not an event in the distant past but part of family histories and memories that still go unspoken. Cécile Desprairies has written a brave and timely book.”

“Above all a love story: a blazing and uneasy romance with fascism . . . an eerie reminder of how deeply entrenched fascism remains in Europe. In recent decades, with the rise of far-right parties across the continent—and notably in Germany—this political tide has felt like quaint regression, doubling back on old and tired history, a defeated cause. But The Propagandist suggests that Nazism has never really faded.”

“The Propagandist is a tale of Vichy and a return of the French repressed that hits shelves just as the old demons stretch their limbs. A work of sly genre, it slips between fact and fiction to try to capture the truth of French collaboration with the Third Reich . . . an autobiographical story unafraid of the darkness under the City of Light.”

“For this spellbinding debut novel, historian Desprairies draws on her family’s collaboration with the Nazis . . . With a sardonic tone and an uncompromising vision, Desprairies lays bare the inequities of Vichy France. This will stay with readers.”

“The Propagandist shows why historical fiction matters, how stories breathe life into forgotten moments. Through the lens of one family, Desprairies’ narrator, a child, reveals her mother’s collaborationist past under the Nazi occupation of France. This haunting tale stayed with me.”

“An astute depiction of the occupation of France from the perspective of the collaborators, offering rare insight into the mindset of those all too eager to serve the Nazi cause.”

“Cécile Desprairies’ extraordinary work is a cross between the dispassionate inquiry of a historian and a family memoir . . . stand[s] out from the growing library of works focused on the Nazi era . . . Her readers . . . cannot but be mesmerized.”

“A sobering account of the confusion and damage wrought by unbridled ideology.”

“In Cécile Desprairies’s disqueting historical novel The Propagandist, a woman reflects on her mother’s experiences as a World War II collaborator . . . The novel has a serpentine tension . . . reveals a twisted legacy of wartime rationalization and collusion.”

“Somewhere between investigative inquiry and cathartic tale . . . The historian-novelist seeks neither to explain, forgive, or condemn. She simply writes, describes—unvarnished and without pretense. ‘If literature distances itself from evil, it becomes dull,’ wrote Georges Bataille. And becomes fascinating when it gets close to it.”

“Cécile Desprairies breathes new life into moldy old France where the ‘all so normal’ collaborators stuck together after the war in tenacious silence that still endures. She succeeds with the toughness of a historian who’s had enough, having suffered the pain of a descendant determined to put an end to the lies.”

“A portrait of a woman, a clan, and a constellation of eccentric characters,The Propagandist is also an implacable assessment of a France that has failed to fully examine its conscience.”