the political and cultural legacy of Vichy, a number of studies published in the eighties and nineties have examined the collaborationist views and activities of writers and intellectuals who voiced support for Hitler's New Europe or espoused the cause of Vichy's National Revolution.' Focusing primarily on major figures including Brasillach, C1line, Drieu la Rochelle, Montherlant, Morand, and Colette, these works also deal with minor luminaries who took advantage of les annies noires to forge short-lived successes on very little talent. This category would include Alfred Fabre-Luce, author of a widelyread chronicle of the 1940 defeat and its aftermath, Journal de la France, Alphonse de Chateaubriant, editor of the collaborationist weekly La Gerbe, and, arguably, Lucien Rebatet, author of Les Decombres, a wildly successful volume of memoirs published in 1942.2 If the specific details of these writers' collaborationist activities are of historical interest, more significant are the ideological motives and/or attitudes that prompted the writers in question to collaborate in the first place. It is in relation to these issues, moreover, that controversy has erupted both inside and outside France. Generally speaking, the minor talents are of little consequence in these debates because their insignificance confirms that they have had no real impact on the nation's exalted tradition. But as for the major talents who collaborated, the debate engages ideological as well as issues. First, the presence in France of reactionary and fascist writers and intellectuals has been linked to the larger debate over the nature and origins of French fascism itself. This was especially true in the early eighties, when Zeev Sternhell's Ni droite ni gauche and Bernard-Henri Levy's L'Iddologie franCaise provoked bitter polemics, and, in the case of Sternhell, resulted in lawsuits and a highly publicized court case.3 In more purely literary terms, the debate generally centers on the degree to which a writer's unsavory politics compromise or undermine his or her aesthetic achievement. In the case of a figure like Csline, whose