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1946: Jean Luchaire, Vichy journalist

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Collaborationist French journalist Jean Luchaire was shot on this date in 1946.

Fortuitously just too young for the trenches of the Great War, Luchaire (English Wikipedia entry | French) was the son of playwright Julien Luchaire, and he — the son — emerged in the interwar years as an important pacifist and advocate for French-German rapprochement.

The 1939-1940 war between those countries obviously dunked this philosophy into the crucible, and not long after the Wehrmacht marched into Paris on June 14, 1940, Luchaire emerged as a friend of the Vichy government.

His Les Nouveaux Temps* — founded in November 1940 with the direct backing of Germany’s Vichy ambassador** — became a premiere outlet of Vichy collaboration, and Luchaire directed the national press association to similar ends. After the liberation of Paris, he spent the war’s waning months in refuge with the remains of the Petain government, running a newspaper and radio station for the dead-enders.

Spurned for asylum by Switzerland after the war, he was captured by American soldiers in the Italian Alps and delivered to his homeland, where he was condemned as an occupation collaborator and shot at Fort de Châtillon, outside Paris.

His daughter Corinne Luchaire, a silver screen star in the late 1930s who became a society fixture in occupied Paris, published a postwar memoir defending her father’s conduct. She died of tuberculosis in 1950.

* Luchaire had founded and edited a newspaper called Notre temps in the interwar period. It’s not the same journal as the present-day publication of the same name, which was founded in 1968.

** The Francophile Ambassador Otto Abetz married Luchaire’s French secretary. Two of Abetz’s nephews, Peter and Eric Abetz, have had political careers in Autralia.

On this day..