Portia Podsnap

On April 10, 1955, Easter Sunday, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin collapsed and died of a heart attack in a friend’s Manhattan apartment. He was 74 and had done nothing more strenuous that day than take a stroll through Central Park. At this time Teilhard was known mainly as a paleontologist and geologist, albeit one who also produced some odd and controversial theological writings.

However, in the decades since his death, the controversies surrounding Teilhard have reshaped themselves. Now he’s usually described as a French Jesuit who wrote some speculative theology incorporating human evolution; while also promoting some dangerous, rather verboten, scientific theories. He believed in eugenics. He persistently wrote about the natural inequality of the races. Unfriendly writers today describe him as a racist, a Nazi apologist, a transhumanist, a believer in sterilization of the unfit.

The reason for this redefinition is very simple: different eras come with different political biases. When Teilhard was doing scientific expeditions in China and elsewhere in the 1920s, race differences were a perfectly acceptable field of investigation. No scientist—surely no anthropologist or paleontologist—could blot his copybook by discussing them. Such discussion went with the territory.

But that was then. Nowadays the anti-Teilhard crowd get the vapors over a little anodyne remark he put in a letter in 1929, around the time he was helping to excavate the various skeletal remains that became collectively known as Peking Man:

Do the yellows [«les jaunes» i.e.,the Chinese] have the same human value as the whites? Licent [a fellow  paleontologist] and many missionaries say that their present inferiority is due to their long history of Paganism. I’m afraid that this is only a “declaration of pastors.” Instead, the cause seems to be the natural racial foundation… Christian love overcomes all inequalities, but it does not deny them. [1]

By “declaration of pastors” he meant sweet-nothing mutterings of missionaries: empty words, groundless explanations. Teilhard the Man of Science wasn’t having any of it. As he saw it, it was almost certainly due to race, genetics, evolution.

In 1951, when he was living in New York and working for the Wenner-Gren Foundation [2] (because the Jesuits had exiled him from France and then wouldn’t let him accept an appointment at Columbia University), Teilhard was raging against UNESCO. In 1950 UNESCO had issued an utterly vapid declaration, “FALLACIES OF RACISM EXPOSED: UNESCO Publishes Declaration by World’s Scientists.” No scientists are quoted, no cogent explanation given. They’re trying to lay down political correctness by fiat. (Read it here.)[3]

A modern pearl-clutching critic of Teilhard comments, aghast:

In his letter [to UNESCO] Teilhard argued against “the scientific uselessness as well as the practical danger” of this document, noting that “it’s not a question of “equality,” but of “complementarity in convergence”…which does not exclude the momentary prominence of certain of its branches over others.” Such a public argument points to a deeply held and seriously considered belief in inequality among humans. [4]

Then, in 1953, we find Teilhard similarly taking on the poltroonishness of the Roman Curia:

Why is it that in Rome, along with a “Biblical Commission” there is no “Scientific Commission” charged with pointing out to authorities the points on which one can be sure Humanity will take a stand tomorrow—points, I repeat, such as: 1) the question of eugenics (aimed at the optimum rather than the maximum in reproduction, and joined to a gradual separation of sexuality from reproduction); and 2) the absolute right (which must, of course, be regulated in its ‘timing’ and in its conditions!) to try everything right to the end—even in the matter of human biology. [5]

There’s another controversy that followed Teilhard for most of his career: the suspicion that he was a paleontological fraudster. He was present at the digs for two of the most famous hominid fossils of the 20th century: Piltdown Man (c. 1912) near Uckfield, Sussex, England; and Peking Man (1929-1930) in China.

The Piltdown find was always suspect, although tentatively accepted by authorities at the Natural History Museum in London and the Geological Society. Piltdown Man was conclusively declared a hoax in 1953. It was fabricated out of a Cro-Magnon skull and an orangutan jawbone, by Teilhard’s friend and neighbor Charles Dawson. Dawson was lawyer and amateur paleontologist apparently over-eager to find some “missing-link” pre-human fossils in his very own corner of England.

Doubts about Peking Man are more elusive. Teilhard was with a large group of scientists from research foundations, and a skull he found was identified as a specimen of Homo erectus, from about 500,000 years ago. Eventually there were other skulls, and 200 bones in all. However, the collection never made it out of China, and was lost in the early 1940s. [6]

Ergo, we have no Peking Man bones to examine. Some people doubt they ever existed, and it’s just Teilhard doing another Piltdown hoax. A current theory is that the box of bones is buried under a Peking—that is, “Beijing”—parking lot. [7]

Early-Life Check

Marie-Joseph Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born the fourth of eleven children on 1 May 1881 at his family’s country house in the Auvergne, just outside Clermont-Ferrand, in the dead-center of France. (“Chateau de Sarcenat, par Oreines, Puy-de-Dôme,” is the address he later provided for the family manse.) During the winter they lived with relatives in a townhouse in Clermont-Ferrand. Land of volcanos and Michelin tires; where in 1095 Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade, and where, in the late 1960s, Marcel Ophuls collected wartime stories from locals for The Sorrow and the Pity.

The family’s complicated double-barreled surname (pronounced, more or less: TAY-yahr duh shar-DAHN) is the legacy of two lines of ennobled ancestors. His father’s family had lived in the area at least since medieval times. His mother, though, was from Picardy; she was the great-grandniece of François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire. [8]

At 12 young Pierre was sent off to boarding school in Villefranche-sur-Saone, north of Lyons, after which received his baccalauréat in mathematics, before entering the Jesuit novitiate in Aix-en-Provence. [9] The Jesuits were expelled from France in 1901-1902. In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, France was going through another of its radical-Left, anti-Catholic fits. Teilhard would have to complete his seminary education on the island of Jersey, just off the coast of Brittany, and then in Hastings, Sussex, where he was ordained in 1911.[10]

1905-1908, he taught physics and chemistry at a Jesuit school in Cairo. He also went fossil-hunting and discovered an unknown ancient species of shark, which was later named for him (Teilhardia). Back in England, he finished seminary, crossed paths with Piltdown Man, then went to Paris to study at the Museum of Natural History. In the Great War he was a stretcher-bearer. Then, more studies at the Sorbonne, and finally the chair of geology at the Institut Catholique in Paris, where he infused his lectures with discussion of evolutionary thought.

Off to China

Presumably Teilhard would have stayed in France most of his life, apart from occasional expeditions. But the Jesuits were discomfited by all his talk of evolution. Simple minds might possibly imagine that all this evolution talk somehow fitted into Christian Doctrine; that seems to have been the concern.[11] For the Jesuits, this was not the time to stir up trouble with the Curia. The Society of Jesus was once totally dissolved, and banned entirely, for 40 years (1773-1814). On top of that, the Jesuits had been expelled from France 20 years ago and only been let back in, in 1914, for the sake of morale and the so-called “Union sacrée” during the Great War.

Teilhard attracted too much attention and speculated too openly. He needed to cultivate a lower profile.

The easiest solution to this was to send him far, far away. And so he went to China, and spent most of the next 23 years there, joining another Jesuit paleontologist named Fr. Emile Licent, who kept a fossil museum in Tientsin. One reads that Teilhard didn’t really like the Chinese, didn’t like the poor—I assume that means poor Chinese—and in all that time he never bothered to learn the language. This last part beggars belief; surely he picked up a little kitchen Chinese here and there?

Racist eugenic practices! Nazi experiments!

A recently minted PhD in theology at University of Notre Dame, one John P. Slattery, has carved out a kind of academic specialty in his takedowns of Teilhard. These began with a lurid attack on him in the Philosophy and Theology journal in 2016. Writes Slattery in the article’s abstract:

[F]rom the 1920s until his death in 1955, Teilhard de Chardin unequivocally supported racist eugenic practices, praised the possibilities of the Nazi experiments, and looked down upon those who he deemed “imperfect” humans. These ideas explicitly lay the groundwork for Teilhard’s famous cosmological theology, a link which has been largely ignored in Teilhardian research until now. [12]

Quite an aggressive opening sortie there. Racism! Eugenics! Nazi experiments! Imperfect humans!

Slattery kept these salvos up for another few years, with online debates and articles. One in particular quotes offending passages at length, from Teilhard letters and biographies. I will quote one more passage here, beginning with Slattery’s commentary:

Besides their obvious objectionable nature, Teilhard’s views withstand two troubling tests: first, he defends them boldly in the face of his respected Christian colleagues who disagree; second, he persists in such views despite the shocking revelations of what took place in the concentration camps and death camps of Nazi Germany. One of Teilhard’s early biographers recounts a 1947 public debate with Gabriel Marcel, the famous French Catholic existentialist, where Teilhard persists in arguing for forced eugenical practices:

“Once in a debate with Gabriel Marcel on the subject of ‘Science and Rationality,’ [Teilhard] shocked his opponent by refusing to permit even the appalling evidence of the experiments of the doctors of Dachau to modify his faith in the inevitability of human progress. ‘Man,” [Teilhard] asserted, ‘to become full man, must have tried everything’ …He added that since the human species was still so young…the persistence of such evil was to be expected. ‘Prometheus!’ Marcel had cried…’No,’ replied Teilhard, ‘only man as God has made him.’” (From Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas, Teilhard (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1977: pp. 237-8.) [13]

I don’t know what the doctors of Dachau are supposed to have done. But Teilhard’s response is admirable: The human species is young, so the persistence of evil is to be expected. This makes sense within the schema of Teilhard’s cosmogony: the Universe, or Creation, is continually evolving, continually perfecting itself.

Anti-Dysgenics = Transhumanism?

Not as emotional as Slattery, but much more far-fetched, is the anti-Teilhard diatribe that appeared in the “Strategic Culture Foundation” blog. In a 2021 essay, a writer named Matthew Ehret describes Teilhard as a “racist” and a founder of “transhumanism.”

If the latter term had a father, it wasn’t Teilhard but his friend Julian Huxley, and Huxley certainly did not intend it in the deviant sense with which the word is bandied about today. It meant improvement of the race, avoidance of dysgenics. Teilhard is quoted discussing it in 1951:

So far we have certainly allowed our race to develop at random, and we have given too little thought to the question of what medical and moral factors must replace the crude forces of natural selection should we suppress them. In the course of the coming centuries it is indispensable that a nobly human form of eugenics, on a standard worthy of our personalities, should be discovered and developed. Eugenics applied to individuals leads to eugenics applied to society. [14]

Well, that looks quite reasonable. What’s not reasonable is the way Ehret makes hash of the salient facts of Teilhard’s life. He astoundingly claims that Teilhard himself concocted the “Piltdown Man” hoax in 1912 in England, and then pulled a similar hoax with “Peking Man,” which he calls Piltdown Man 2.0. Then, switching tracks, he implies Teilhard is to blame for such degeneracies as “Liberation Theology” and the absurd declarations of the current pope:

When he died in 1955, Chardin’s works were still largely banned as heresy by the Vatican. His work continued to spread as a sort of Soviet-era samizdat recruiting ever more converts to his particular “new and improved Christianity.” [15]

Who is Chardin? If you mean Teilhard, his writings were never “banned” by “the Vatican” or ever even placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. As a Jesuit priest, he was required to have approval from superiors before publishing (a particularly sticky problem with the Jesuits, as they often had friction with the Curia). Yes, Teilhard was prohibited from publishing some of them, just as he was prohibited from teaching—in Paris, in New York, and elsewhere—because that’s what sometimes happens when you become a soldier in the Society of Jesus. Or the Trappists, for that matter. Maybe the Carmelites. Never mind the specific, arbitrary reasons.

Ehret’s basic facts are all wrong, to the point where I suspect he’s just ginning us up with a fun conspiracy theory. He claims Teilhard was on “holiday” from schoolteaching in Cairo when he conjured up Piltdown Man in Sussex in 1912. In reality Sussex is where Teilhard lived; he hadn’t been to Cairo for four years. He’d been in England or Jersey for most of the past decade, ever since being expelled from France.

And of course Teilhard did not concoct Piltdown Man or promote it to the Geological Society, or the Natural History Museum in South Kensington; that presenter was his friend Charles Dawson. As for Peking Man, several research institutes and foundations participated in those excavations in the 1920s and 30s. Teilhard was just one of maybe a dozen prominent scientists who had a hand in them.

In the matter of Stephen Jay Gould

I suspect Ehret has fallen prey to the pixie dust scattered by Stephen Jay Gould many years ago, claiming that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was the prime instigator in the Piltdown hoax, with Dawson merely his sideman.  Prof. Gould wrote several essays, with follow-up commentary on the matter, collected in his books, The Panda’s Thumb (1980), and Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (1983), arguing that Teilhard was at the very least complicit in the perpetration of the Piltdown hoax. [16]

Stephen Jay Gould (son of Leonard S. Gold and Eleanor Rosenberg) was a first-generation Jewish-American, a paleontologist and historian of science who worked at both the American Museum of Natural History, by the west side of Central Park in New York City, and Harvard University, where he spent most of his career as professor of geology. With this background he had a particular interest in the story of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was also affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History when Gould was a kid. Perhaps the adult Gould had personal agenda against someone who advocated eugenics and the study of racial differences. Regardless, the Teilhard issue became an obsession with him for many years.

Gould’s main argument for Teilhard’s guilt is that he didn’t talk or write much about it once the hoax was suspect. Gould gives evidence that Teilhard even rewrote an autobiographical essay, deleting a reference to his early association with Eoanthropus dawsons (Piltdown Man). Rather than empathizing with a potentially embarrassing association, Gould’s peculiar mindset insists that Teilhard was just afraid of getting caught.

I doubt many people today (excepting perhaps Matthew Ehret) still buy Gould’s confusing argument in favor of Teilhard’s guilt. Since his death in 2002, Gould himself has turned out to be a most unreliable narrator. He based an entire book (The Mismeasure of Man), in which he accused a 19th century physical anthropologist of “racism,” on false data. As so often happens, the person who’s quick to accuse others of bias turns out to be heavily biased himself.

 

Notes

[1]  Matthew Ehret, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Transhumanism,” October 2021.

[2] “The Wenner–Gren Foundation is a private operating foundation dedicated to providing leadership in support of anthropology and anthropologists worldwide,” says a current website. Founded in 1941 by Axel Wenner-Gren, the Swedish Electrolux tycoon, philanthropist, and longtime friend of both Hermann Goering and King Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor. When the Duke was exiled to the Bahamas as Governor, 1940-45, Mr. Wenner-Gren was a steady friend, with his Southern Cross yacht anchored nearly. This immediately attracted the scrutiny of British intelligence, as both the Duke and Wenner-Gren were regarded as Nazi sympathizers. Source: the hyper-sensationalistic Traitor King by Andrew Lownie, 2021. Needless to say, none of this Andrew Lownie scandal-mongering reflects on the Wenner-Gren Foundation, but it’s curious that the anti-Teilhard crowd haven’t yet homed in on this piquant connection.

[3] Despite this lamebrain document, UNESCO cannot have been all bad. After all, its co-founder and first director-general was Teilhard’s good friend Julian Huxley. However, he was gone well before 1950. It appears Huxley was given the heave-ho for public relations reasons, inasmuch as he openly supported birth control and eugenics. (Wikipedia link.)

[4] John P. Slattery in Religion Dispatches, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Legacy of Eugenics and Racism Can’t Be Ignored.”

[5] Teilhard letter, quoted in Slattery, Ibid.

[6] The loss and various theories are described in The Jesuit and the Skull, by Amir C. Aczel (Riverhead Books, 2007).

[7] Smithsonian Magazine, 2012. “Mystery of the Lost Peking Man Fossils Solved?”

[8] American Teilhard Association, “Biography of Teilhard de Chardin.”

[9] Robert Speaight, The Life of Teilhard de Chardin, 1967.

[10] Miscellaneous tie-in to George Orwell: Around the time Teilhard was in seminary in Hastings, little Eric Blair was starting primary school in Henley-on-Thames, 80 miles to the northwest, being taught by French Ursuline nuns. The Ursulines were in England for the same reason Teilhard was: they’d been thrown out of France.

[11] Simple and not-so-simple minds sometimes imagine that Teilhard’s difficulties with the Jesuits and the Holy See recurred because he was thought to be propounding heresy. Amir C. Aczel, in his otherwise enjoyable The Jesuit and the Skull (2007), keeps repeating this misapprehension. The real issue was politics and public relations, as well as maintenance of discipline.

[12] John P. Slattery, “Dangerous Tendencies of Cosmic Theology: The Untold Legacy of Teilhard de Chardin.” Philosophy and Theology, Vol. 29, Issue 1, 2017:

[13] John P. Slattery in Religion Dispatches, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Legacy of Eugenics and Racism Can’t Be Ignored.”

[14] Ehret, Ibid.

[15] Ehret, Ibid.

[16] Stephen Jay Gould’s confused and convoluted screeds on this subject remind me of those partisan writers of 30 or 40 years ago who kept cranking out books arguing, against all common sense, that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK and acted alone. A brief dip into “The Piltdown Conspiracy,” and “A Reply to Critics,” at the beginning of Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, will reveal an academic controversialist desperately spinning his wheels.

The Fabulous Pleven Boys

P. J. Collins

Many many years ago—say, during the Nixon Administration—I was peripherally involved with kiddy television. Kiddy TV was very hot just then, particularly up in Boston, where they had at least four “educational” kiddy shows running concurrently.

There was an Englishman named Chris Sarson who came up with the idea of having a kiddy show that was entirely written by kids. That sounded like a pretty rotten idea to me—a TV show written, and sort-of produced, by 7-to-12-year-olds. But what did I know? Not only did this ZOOM thing attract a steady following, there were all sorts of people lining up, trying to conceive and produce their own shows along similar formulas.

I recall one old guy, maybe thirty but looking forty, who didn’t even own a TV, had never seen ZOOM, in fact hadn’t watched much television since the Spin and Marty days, and had no connection at all to modern kids (not on any normal, healthy level anyway). Yet he nevertheless promoted himself as a producer/writer of his own forthcoming educational kiddy show: “just like ZOOM but more intellectual”—and it would be called Tops for Tweens!

“Sounds like a t-shirt fashion show,” a lady friend told him. So he came up with other names, equally silly, though none with the same sizzle. I believe he was unemployed at this point.

But our aspiring producer wasn’t entirely without professional experience in the kiddy-show realm. Oh no. For three or four weeks he’d been a staff writer for a children’s “science show” on the educational channel in Boston. The presenter was a hokey old “cowboy” host who’d been doing this sort of thing since 1947. Our new staff writer’s contributions were thought to be quite weird, but that was the point: he’d been brought in to come up with new and offbeat ideas. He proposed that Cowboy Duke’s Science Show do a segment on astrology. He’d invite an astrologer onto the program to show how it all worked. This horrified his midwit colleagues, because their high school teachers had taught them that astrology “wasn’t true” because “there are only twelve signs and there are more than twelve kinds of people.”

A debatable point. Anyway the contretemps amused rather than alarmed Cowboy Duke. Because, as I say, Cowboy Duke was looking to shake the show up a little. [1] And then the new writer proposed bringing General Patton’s daughter onto the show—because, he said, he’d met her and she was a witch. Or at least she said she was a witch—she lived in Ipswich, after all—and the kids at home would surely love to learn all about witchcraft.

It was at this point that the co-producers took Cowboy Duke aside and told him he had hired a madman. And so ended a promising career, so far as I know.

Down in New York we had Sesame Street, which had sort of kicked off the whole educational-kiddy-TV rage in 1969. It was nationally broadcast via PBS, but it was born and bred in Manhattan, hence its charming conceit of having a studio set that looked like a tenement block in Harlem, with a lot of colored people. As you know, Sesame Street was initially conceived as a kind of “Head Start”-style learning boost for poor “inner city” (i.e., black) preschoolers. But it became quickly accepted as a variety program for kids and stoners of all ages. (Oh man, THIS is near…and THIS is far! Dig it!) [2]

The producers eventually cleaned up the slum aspect, at least a little, and also fired Its star Muppet personality, Kermit the Frog. They said Kermit was “too commercial.” It seems he’d made one TV commercial, in Canada. That went against the PBS brand, I guess. [3] Like a blacklisted filmmaker, Kermit took refuge in England, where he eventually found his footing when he compèred The Muppet Show.

The Electric Factory

Meantime the Sesame Street people, Children’s Television Workshop, cloned the basic format—rapid-fire segments mixed with song and humor, just the sort of thing kids with ADHD like (or is that what caused ADHD in kids?)—and came up with a program that was neither set in a slum nor aimed at preschoolers. Six-to-twelve-year-olds were now the target audience. Like Sesame Street, this new show was shot in a commercial videotape facility way up on the Upper West Side, on Broadway near Zabar’s. When I visited the studio I’d refer to the new show as The Electric Factory, which was almost its name, but not quite. The assistant producer, Pat, would always look at me quizzically when I called it that. He’d smile, and correct me. So I kept doing it. I assumed that my position in such enterprises was sort of like being a one-kid “focus group,” an expert on what modern pre-adolescents were thinking. A subject on which I did not have a clue, as I’d put those days behind me.

Pat was a good-looking, slender, dark-haired fellow in his 30s. Great wife, cute kids. He had a very slight foreign accent, hard to identify. He was, or had been, French—Breton, actually. It was an accent so subtle you might not notice it at first. He’d grown up largely in New York. I guess he’d lived in Paris during the War, after which his widowed mother married an American songwriter. By happenstance the songwriter was Cole Porter’s first-cousin-once-removed, though Ted was scarcely as famous, rich or talented as Cole. However he was a pretty normal guy, so it all balanced out.

Anyway they came to America, where Pat went to prep school and college. After that, his career was entirely in television production and film distribution. He produced a “circuses of the world” prime-time show that you may remember. It was hosted by Don Ameche. Then he worked in soap operas and daytime programming. Memorably he was on the production team of that famous “gothic” soap opera of the late 1960s. That show was sort of the Law & Order of its era, in that just about any aspiring actor could get a chance to appear in it. I look down the cast list today and I see Marsha Mason, Harvey Keitel, Abe Vigoda, Conrad Bain…even Wilmot Robertson’s first cousin Cavada Humphrey, daughter of his mother’s sister and a one-armed Romanian nobleman.

A couple of Pat’s friends or colleagues had an off-putting way of taking me aside and telling me that there was a Big Secret That You Must Never Tell Another Soul. I suspected The Big Secret was cockamamie rubbish, although it took me 30 or 40 years to sort it out. The really creepy aspect was: how come, if it’s such a hush-hush Big Secret, you are now telling it to me, a fourteen-year-old near-total stranger? Although I met Pat and his family a few times, and even went with his wife and kids to pick out a Christmas tree one December, way the hell up Fifth Avenue, I didn’t know them well and I was hardly deserving of dark confidences from third parties.

The “Big Secret”

So now we come to the Big Secret which, I again remind you, is untrue. Pat’s father had purportedly been Minister of the Interior in the Vichy France government during the War, and “they” shot him afterwards, after so-called “Liberation.” Only it’s not so; didn’t happen. He died, but he didn’t die that way.

Today you say, “What the hell, why would anyone care to make up stories like that?” Well we were still only 20-something years after the War, you see. Imagine that someone today was telling you about a dark secret from 1997.

The Big Secret was impossible to verify. Back in the early 1970s, it was much harder to research things than it is today. Especially information about obscure things like the various ministries of the Pétain years. Today you can go to Google or Wikipedia, and be fed all kinds of disinformation, but at least that disinformation generally has a trail of references you can chase down. For Pat’s father there was nothing at all. Nothing. You couldn’t look him up in the encyclopedia or in The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature; he was too obscure. Besides, I didn’t even know what his name was. It was like being Inspector Lebel in The Day of the Jackal.

The closest thing to useful information was something I got from a French movie that had just opened at the Little Carnegie movie theater on West 57th Street. French movies were big that year. This one was called Le Souffle au coeur (Murmur of the Heart). It’s a semi-autobiographical film by Louis Malle, set in spring-summer 1954. This was the time of Dien Bien Phu, when the French finally gave up the ghost in Indochine. The movie’s mainly about adolescents, but at dinner adults are talking politics: “You know what’s happened? Pleven’s seized L’Express. You think the government will fall?”[4]

This Pleven would have to be René Pleven, at that time France’s defense minister. A highly verifiable name: he was at other times finance minister or foreign minister, or minister for colonies…as well as being prime minister twice. Definitely in the encyclopedia, however sparsely. As these were ministries during the musical-chairs governments of the Fourth Republic, René held some of those posts for only six months.

He was on the outs with Gaullists when the Fifth Republic came in, but during the Pompidou era, 1969-73, he turned up as justice minister. He distinguished himself early in that term by signing a pardon for Henri Charriere, the escapee from French Guiana prisons whose “creative nonfiction” memoir, Papillon, had been topping the bestseller lists.

René Pleven was in all the reference books, but none of them ever said he had a brother, let alone a nephew. And, strangely for a public figure and prominent statesman, he neither wrote a memoir of his public life nor saw a biography published during his lifetime. Even now, his travels and adventures are best gleaned from biographies of Charles de Gaulle or histories of the Fourth Republic. Most eminent people donate their private papers to a public archive or university library long before they die, but René Pleven did not. There doesn’t even seem to be much at the Archives Nationales.[5]

So if the figure of René Pleven has never been on your radar, that’s probably the way he wanted it.

And we must assume René was being careful and cagey all along, destroying most of his papers, or at least embargoing them till after his death. I am put in mind of June 1940, when the Germans were approaching Paris, and at the Quai d’Orsay the Foreign Ministry was busy incinerating decades’ worth of confidential documents in the courtyard. Leave no incriminating scraps or bordereaux behind! This instinct must have become embedded in French officialdom.

The only biography of him that I know of was published in 1994, a year after he died, age 91: René Pleven, un français libre en politique, written by a fellow Breton, Christian Bougeard. The author tells us at the front of the book that this is indeed the première biographie. Although it’s a rather circumlocutory and speculative biography, we do finally locate the mysterious brother. His sad story erupts briefly in Chapter VII, when René finally returns to France in late August 1944.

At this point René has spent the last four years with Charles de Gaulle, Jean Monnet and the other Free French in London, as well as in America and Africa. René now pays a visit to his mother in Dinan. He learns that his younger brother Hervé has been arrested and is in prison at Fresnes, south of Paris. A few weeks later, Hervé Pleven meets with misadventure. He is beaten to death or crushed by a crowd until he suffocates.

How Ya Fixed for Ciné Film, Monsieur?

So Hervé had indeed been in a government ministry, though he was hardly high-profile. He was an under-secretary at a minor Vichy ministry, the Ministry of Information. Not literally in Vichy; it wasn’t actually down south with the spas and casinos. Like most ministries and administrative offices, it was based in Paris.

In spring 1942 we find the following notice in a number of newspapers: «M. Hervé Pleven est nommé chef de cabinet au secretariat general a l’information.» So, he was chief of staff to the secretariat of information, the Information ministry. Some papers add the additional information that “M. Pleven, who is also a lawyer, has specialized for many years in matters pertaining to the cinema.” Hervé had in fact been a prominent film executive. We’ll come to that. In 1942-1944 he was merely a bureaucrat and thus very small fry indeed.

Hervé’s remit at the ministry was ostensibly film distribution and censorship, but I doubt he needed to censor anything. French cinema during the Occupation was not only apolitical, it tended to be fantastical, otherworldly. [6] Besides, according to a colleague in the ministry, Leon Gaultier, M. Pleven’s job actually consisted mostly of helping filmmakers who all had the same problem: they couldn’t get any film. [7]

And now…as the late Paul Harvey would say…the rest…of the story:

Bousculade

Biographer Christian Bougeard explains that the Minister of Information, Paul Marion, was a notorious “ultra,” a former member of Jacques Doriot’s PPF (Parti Populaire Français), a hard-right pro-Milice collaborationist faction. Not only that, but Marion actively promoted recruitment of Frenchmen into the Waffen SS, and at least one member of his ministry (Leon Gaultier) joined. All this would help explain why Hervé was rounded up in the épuration.

The circumstances of his death are explained in Bougeard as «Il mourut tragiquement en prison à l’automne 1944, “étouffé dans une bousculade”»: “Died tragically in prison [27 September 1944], ‘suffocated in a stampede.'”

Presumably that’s taken from the prison death register. Was it during a prison riot? A targeted killing? The screws at Fresnes, probably under Red control in September 1944, wouldn’t say or didn’t know. And René and his mother are unlikely to have investigated Hervé’s tragic end. After all, Hervé had been one of the “Vichy people” (as de Gaulle would say), and in 1944 and 1945 they were shooting people like that. The less said the better.

Action Française and RKO France

Hervé’s career can be assembled only from the tiniest scraps and oddments, mainly from newspapers, film journals, and Ancestry-dot-com. Born in Rennes in December 1903, buried at Père-Lachaise c. October 1944. Like his brother he had been a fan of Charles Maurras and Action Française when he was young. But while René is (suspiciously) insistent in the Bougeard biography that he never joined AF, younger brother Hervé became quite active in the student arm of the society. In an early 1921 issue of the AF student paper, L’Étudiant français, we learn that “In Le Mans, Hervé Pleven will be speaking at the next conference, 13 Feb 21.” Hervé was then seventeen. [8]

His prewar career was an impressive one. Like René he went to law school, became an avocat, then worked as a business executive, mostly for American corporations. During the 1930s Hervé was head of, or at least general counsel for, RKO France. We can only speculate about how this happened.

In America, RKO was a movie studio and theater chain that Joseph P. Kennedy and David Sarnoff assembled in the late 1920s, RKO Radio Films. JPK bought up a chain of 700 vaudeville houses so they could be wired for Sarnoff’s Photophone optical sound system. Thus, almost overnight, around 1928, the industry converted to talkies.[9]

And this American consortium apparently lucked into finding a very young Breton lawyer, fluent in both French and English, to help set up RKO France operations.[10] RKO France was producing films at least by 1931 (e.g., L’Aviateur, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and a mostly French cast) but they seem to be few and far between. Perhaps their main business was distribution, not production.

There is no clear record of how Hervé met RKO. But his brother’s business connections suggest René had a hand in it. For a few years after law school, René worked with Jean Monnet for an American investment bank called Blair & Co. [11] [12] Eventually this led to René taking a job with a London subsidiary of one of Blair’s clients, the Automatic Telephone Company. [13] Meantime Blair & Co. was also financing motion-picture industry offerings and acquisitions for Joseph P. Kennedy and associates in Hollywood. While Blair as a company name was absorbed into Bank of America and Transamerica in 1929, by that point RKO Radio Pictures (or RKO Pathé as it was sometimes styled) was up and running. So it’s reasonable to assume Hervé became acquainted with RKO through the Blair/René connection.

Big Brother, Little Brother

Having no real facility for languages, I find a deeper wonderment in how the Pleven brothers gained fluency in English. I can barely stagger through Christian Bougeard’s biography of René, and that’s written in perfectly clear French. Presumably the Plevens learned English while growing up in Little Britain (Bretagne), where I presume the folk instinctively keep a weather eye out against the Paris-French hordes. Remember what they did to us in 1793, lads! You love your land, but you never know when you might have to jump the Channel («La Manche»).

Anyway, when René had to write his thesis as a final qualification for his law degree, he was persuaded to write it on—and I quote—”the social policy of the Lloyd George government as demonstrated by the situation of agricultural laborers in England during and after the [1914-18] war.” [14] What an odd and dreary topic! I gather his advisor was a professor of rural economics and wanted a fluent English reader to tackle this recondite subject. Same old story of professors getting their grad students to do hard research for them!

René versus Hervé: the two brothers appear to have been very dissimilar physically. If you see a picture of René where he’s seated, he looks like this little mousy, milquetoast character. “Oh, he’s the minister of economics and finance? Yes, I can believe that.” Then you see him standing, and it turns out he’s built like a linebacker: big-headed, big-boned, nearly as tall as the 6’5″ Charles de Gaulle (that’s about 195cm in French) himself. I have no pictures of Hervé and would never have the gall to ask his relatives. But from a 1929 passenger manifest I find him to have been doll-like in comparison, a mere 5’8″ (173cm), scarcely taller than most of the officers and ministers you see here, whom René Pleven and Charles de Gaulle just tower over in 1940s photos. From 1943:

With the fall of France in June 1940, René joined his old mentor and colleague from Blair & Co., Jean Monnet, and headed for London, to manage the nonexistent finances of General de Gaulle’s new cause. Monnet found de Gaulle difficult and impractical, so he soon shoved off to Washington DC, where he was a popular advisor to President Roosevelt and his administration.

For René, things were different. De Gaulle kept him very busy, sending him off to America to help raise awareness and maybe funds for the newly christened “Free French.” The excursion was not a total disaster, but neither was it a shining success. While FDR liked Jean Monnet very much, he refused to meet René because he perceived him as basically a drum-beater for de Gaulle. Which, Lord knows, René was at that point. President Roosevelt was appointing a very capable ambassador to Vichy France (Admiral William Leahy, later to be FDR’s chief of staff), and relations with the Pétain people were stable and good. Pétain’s government, from any reasonable diplomatic perspective, was the legitimate government of France. Objectively FDR was right. Meantime, most of the possible recruits whom René met were cranks or otherwise unworkable. [15]

After Liberation, René’s public career is pretty much a matter of public record, and I’ve summarized most of it above. Minister for colonies, for economics and finance, premier (or president du conseil—literally, head boy at the ministers’ table) twice; foreign minister, defense minister, etc. etc. A Swiss Army knife of a politician or bureaucrat. His major initiative is remembered as the “Pleven Plan,” a western European defense community that the American State Department, and certain British politicians (mainly Winston Churchill), had been encouraging. Unlike NATO, this “European Defence Community” would not include the USA or UK. France would be the dominant nation. Nevertheless the plan was rejected by the French Assembly in 1954, not long after Dien Bien Phu and the fall of the government in which René had been defense minister. As the Gaullists had turned against him because of Indochina, René went into eclipse for the next 15 years, till Pompidou made him justice minister in 1969.

Meantime…his nephew, Hervé’s son, continued to work in television and film production and distribution. By the 90s he wound up as an executive, or bureaucrat, with the New York City Mayor’s Office for Film, Theater and Broadcasting. Mainly it was all about facilitating film-making in the city. Doing pretty much what his father was doing in Paris fifty years earlier. Making sure movie-makers had access to locations. And, I suppose, enough film.

 

Notes

[1] Cowboy Duke’s Science Show was not actually the program name, but people familiar with the Boston educational channel in those days will know what I’m talking about. Tops for Tweens! is also a made-up proxy title, as silly as the real ones. ZOOM of course was a real name for a real show that ran 1972-1980 and then was revived in 1999.

[2] And inspired the second-most brilliant comedy show I ever saw on Broadway, Avenue Q.

[3] TIME magazine, November 23, 1970 (Stefan Kanfer cover story): “Kermit the Frog is being canned for commercialism”

[4] Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber at L’Express published a secret report about military operations in Indochina, whereupon the magazine’s operations were suspended and all copies of the offending issue were seized. Servan-Schreiber was a persistent opponent of the war in Indochina. A court later ruled that the publication had not violated the penal code. (Source: New York Times, 10 July 1954.) And yes, the (Joseph Laniel) government did fall, in June 1954, as a direct result of Dien Bien Phu.

From René Pleven’s obituary in the Independent, 16 January 1993:

Pleven was Minister of Defence at the time of the fall of the French army base at Dien Bien Phu to Vietnamese guerrillas in 1954. He was manhandled by Gaullists at the Arc de Triomphe and was referred to dismissively as the ‘Duc de Dien Bien Phu’ for some time after.

[5] Archives Nationales has papers from René’s late-career stint as justice minister, but they didn’t come from René. Their inventory date is 1995, with a note that these papers were entered into the Archives by “donations from Michel Worms de Romilly and Louis Andlauer and Patrick Pleven” (nephew and in-laws).

[6] Notable French films of 1940-44 include La Nuit Fantastique, Le Corbeau, and Les Enfants du Paradis.

[7] Leon Gaultier, Siegfried et le Berrichon: Parcours d’un “collabo”, 1991. Gaultier served in the Information ministry with Paul Marion and Hervé Pleven, joined the Milice, later the Waffen SS.

[8] L’Etudiant français (Action française student paper), issue date of 15 Feb 21.

[9] Kennedy himself soon sold off his interest in RKO and got out of the film business by 1930, except for occasional advisory work for Paramount and others. The story is told in many places; one is Cari Beauchamp’s Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years (2010).

[10] I cannot tell when Hervé joined RKO France. However in 1935 we find him as general counsel, on a business trip to New York, in a trade publication: Film Daily for Friday, April 5, 1935.

[11] Jean Monnet (1888-1979) was a polymath financier, diplomat, politician, often called a founding father of the EEC/EU.

[12] There seem to have been many financial institutions with the approximate name Blair & Co. This one, a New York-based investment bank, merged with Bank of America/Transamerica in 1929. Like J. P. Morgan & Co., Blair specialized in international loans to foreign governments. As an interesting aside, biographer Bougeard notes that the young John Foster Dulles advised Blair & Co. (including Jean Monnet and René Pleven) when negotiating a loan to Warsaw. Dulles and Pleven would again meet up during the Fourth Republic, when Pleven was variously prime minister, foreign minister or defense minister, and Dulles was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. There is a famous but unsubstantiated legend that in 1954 Dulles offered «deux bombes atomique» to foreign minister Georges Bidault, who refused the offer on the grounds that the bombs would kill the whole French garrison. M. Bidault claims this in the Peter Davis documentary, Hearts and Minds (1974).

[13] Automatic Telephone Company, Europe, was the London-based subsidiary of an American firm that pioneered telephone switching equipment for direct dialing. I have read that René also worked in Canada, and perhaps America, but the record is unclear whether he worked in situ or simply reported there or attended business meetings.

[14] Christian Bougeard, René Pleven: Un Français libre en politique. Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1994.

[15] William R. Keylor, Charles de Gaulle: A Thorn in the Side of Six American Presidents. Rowan & Littlefield, 2020. A good description of what proved to be René’s fool’s errand in America 1940, in one of the few books on de Gaulle that give more than brief mention of René Pleven.