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  The election in April 1936 of Léon Blum, the leftist candidate of the Popular Front and France’s first Jewish prime minister, polarized the country, thrilling progressives but horrifying wealthy conservatives such as Chanel and her friends, stoking their anti-Semitism. Overt hatred of the Jews became commonplace, even in political discourse: “It is intolerable that our country should be represented by a Jew. We speak French not Yiddish,” proclaimed one politician. “The soil of France is made to bear steeples not synagogues,” intoned another. Chanel had long harbored similar sentiments and later admitted, “I am afraid only of the Jews and the Chinese, and far more of the Jews.”

  For Chanel, and thousands like her, “Jewishness” was a racial condition that could never be reconciled with “Frenchness.” French chauvinism had begun justifying itself with genetic arguments. This was precisely the kind of thinking underpinning fascism, which constructed a story of biological greatness, according to which “myth becomes blood,” as critic Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has written.

  In the 1930s the majority of Jews living in France were foreign born, so one easy way to limit their influence was through immigration law. In 1931, France dramatically tightened its once-liberal immigration policies, and by 1938, it enacted measures specifically restricting Jews.

  The right wing was not alone in fomenting unrest in France during this time. In the two months before the Popular Front could take office, as many as two million French workers from every industry went on strike in an attempt to protect their new rights, which they feared would be revoked before even being granted. Chanel had been greatly unsettled by the violent, riotous strikes of 1934, but back then, Paul Iribe had been there to comfort her with his presence and bolster her worldview with his elitist philosophies. Now, just two years later, with Iribe gone and no one to take his place, Coco found herself entirely alone when the wave of strikes crashed right up on her doorstep.

  On June 6, 1936, Chanel’s entire Parisian staff walked out. Lining up outside her boutique on rue Cambon, the employees—mostly women—brandished collection boxes and demanded shorter hours, collective contracts, the abolition of piecework, and higher wages in the form of weekly salaries. The sight of her employees on the street, disrupting the calm, elegant façade of her business, enraged Chanel. She could not tolerate the prospect of losing control of her empire and had no respect for business owners who compromised. “Consent to negotiations? Show your workers the books? Those men were crazy,” she said of anyone who entertained the demands of labor.

  Chanel workers on strike, 1936 (illustration credit 10.1)

  Coco had no intention of altering her business practices. “I detest giving in, bending over, humiliating myself … conceding,” she told Claude Delay.

  Such rage was rooted partly in fear; since her work was her life, the strike threatened her very existence. Lashing out, she fired all three hundred employees immediately.

  In Chanel’s mind, the employees owed her their livelihoods and, therefore, their unquestioning loyalty and gratitude. The concepts of workers’ rights and labor negotiations left her cold. Long ago, when the young Gabrielle had earned a pittance sewing clothes in a back room, striking had not been an option. No one had intervened to help her demonstrate for better working conditions. Chanel had climbed her own way out (albeit with the help of various wealthy protectors), and she expected others to do the same. She often advised the women who worked for her to find rich men to take care of them. With all the zeal of a convert, Coco, the former seamstress, identified only with management. She had fully adopted a ruling-class mentality, seeing herself as a kind of “divinely anointed” ruler.

  But firing the staff accomplished little. The strikers did not disappear; on the contrary, they stayed on the premises. Staging a sit-in, they taunted Chanel, playing music and dancing in the workrooms, buoyed by a new sense of solidarity with all the other strikers around the country.

  Coco realized she’d have to try another approach and came up with a new plan. Insisting that she simply did not have the capital to raise salaries, she offered instead a disingenuous nod to socialism: a plan to resign immediately and sell her business to the workers themselves, explaining that they could now assume all financial responsibility for the House of Chanel and pay themselves whatever they wished. She would stay on in the role of consultant.

  The Chanel strike made headlines around the world. The usually liberal New York Times seemed largely sympathetic to Coco in its front-page story about the event: “With the same instinct she has shown in making for herself a leading place in the world of fashion, Gabrielle Chanel has acted boldly in the face of the advance of French socialism.… So far the workers’ union has not accepted her offer [but] she will not compromise or bargain further … whatever the results.”

  Her workers, of course, could not buy Chanel out, and refused the offer. The shop and studios on rue Cambon remained closed for three weeks. Eventually, the overheated atmosphere in Paris calmed down and employers and workers began settling their feuds. Chanel finally put an end to her strike, acceding to some of her workers’ demands. But she did so only grudgingly, after having publicly denounced her employees in a number of interviews. Chanel saw striking less as a political activity than as an illness, a collective madness. “You believe this was a matter of salary? Well, I can tell you it was the opposite.… Those people caught this like the Spanish flu, the way sheep catch gid.” (Gid is a parasite that causes illness in sheep, making them spin wildly. In her distress, Chanel had let down her guard, permitting herself this farm animal analogy that clearly betrayed her peasant roots.) Even worse, in Coco’s mind, striking was vulgar, unladylike behavior: “Imagine women … staging a sit down strike.… Very pretty. What idiots these girls were.”

  Other designers also coped with strikes. Coco’s archrival Elsa Schiaparelli, for example, had suffered a walkout but emerged from negotiations on good terms with her workers. Chanel’s imperious behavior left her relationship with her staff strained and awkward. They never forgot her disdain, or her blithe unconcern for the struggles of the people who’d helped make her one of the world’s richest women.

  Chanel’s response to the strike revealed her increasing brittleness—how quick she was to anger and how little empathy she permitted herself to feel. Coco preferred to see herself as she had convinced the world to see her: an icon of belonging and connection on the grandest but least personal scale imaginable.

  Ensconced permanently at the Ritz, Chanel occupied an insular, felted, and privileged world of aristocrats, multimillionaires, and proto-collaborators—a group to which she gravitated quite naturally. Such people confirmed her sense of belonging to an elite. Coco had long been at ease in the company of reactionary nationalists, even racists. With rare exceptions (Capel and Reverdy certainly), her lovers tended to hold the most archconservative views, their politics centered around protecting exclusivity and guarding treasure. Grand Duke Dmitri, with whom Chanel remained on friendly terms, joined the circle of Vasili Biskupsky, a known supporter of Hitler, and the führer himself had corresponded with Dmitri. The Duke of Westminster, like many members of the British royal family, had social ties to the Third Reich, and allied himself with pro-Nazi organizations.

  His Royal Highness, Edward, Prince of Wales, known to his friends as David, was another intimate of Chanel’s, introduced to her by her close friend Vera Bate, who was the prince’s cousin. Always thrilled to be associated with royalty, Chanel never minded (and may actually have started) the rumors that His Highness had also pursued her romantically. “She did not mind dropping hints that, at one time, a very imprecise time, the Duke had courted her,” recalled her friend Jacques Chazot. Edward, of course, as Edward VIII, was at the center of the world-rocking scandal of 1936 when he abdicated the throne of Great Britain to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson. Once he had relinquished the throne, David and his wife, now the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, remained close with Chanel, who designed much of the famousl
y chic Duchess’s wardrobe. (A true acolyte of Chanelism, the Duchess of Windsor coined the adage “One can never be too rich or too thin.”) After decades of rumors about the Windsors’ Nazi connections, the couple’s close relationship with the Reich is now a matter of historical fact. Not only were the Windsors socially friendly with Hitler, visiting him in 1936 at his private Bavarian estate, Berchtesgaden, the duke was actually conspiring with the führer about a possible return to the British throne if Germany won the war.

  Paul Iribe, of course, had been adamant in his Germanophobia, unlike many of Chanel’s friends in the later 1930s. But had he lived longer, he might have softened his stance, for he embraced the same brand of outspoken anti-Semitism, racism, and nationalism that would lead many Frenchmen ultimately to make common cause with Vichy and the Germans. Paradoxically, the extreme Germanophobia of many nationalist French often coexisted peacefully with a pro-fascist mentality and sometimes slid gradually into outright support for the so-called fascisme brun (brown fascism), supportive of Germany.

  Coco’s friends largely resembled her lovers politically, and most of the artists close to her belonged to the conservative branch of modernism that allied itself with nationalism, classicism, and a lofty ideal of “French” purity and style. Cocteau figured prominently among those espousing this kind of “reactionary modernism,” serving as the unofficial leader of a group of composers known as Les Six, who often worked with him on productions and whom Chanel also counted as good friends. They were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Germaine Tailleferre, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Darius Milhaud. This group’s abiding passion for Greek antiquity (Honegger had composed the score for Cocteau’s Antigone) and for “purity” in French culture closely reflected the philosophies promulgated at the time by Action française and other nationalist organizations.

  Although suspected of collaboration and briefly arrested after the war by an épuration, or “purification,” committee (bodies set up by the government to investigate citizens suspected of having betrayed the nation), Cocteau never suffered any consequences; the government determined his actions amounted more to opportunism than to treason. The charges against him were dropped despite his many ongoing friendships within Hitler’s inner circle and his very strong pro-German leanings. (These friendships were facilitated by Cocteau’s fluent German, which he’d learned as a child from a German governess.) Some of Chanel’s artist friends “leaned” so far that they tumbled right over into collaboration. Ballets Russes star Serge Lifar gained notoriety as one of France’s most egregious collaborators, known to have visited Hitler on more than one occasion, and—most infamously—entertained Joseph Goebbels at the Paris Opéra Ballet. Prominent on this list as well was Maurice Sachs, who, although of Jewish descent, would register with the SS and work as a secret agent for the Reich.

  Among the most publicly protofascist of all Chanel’s intimates was Paul Morand—writer, diplomat, and, later, high-ranking Vichy official. Coco felt comfortable enough with Morand to grant him the series of 1946 interviews that later became The Allure of Chanel—one of the few biographies endorsed by the Maison Chanel. “They were very close,” says Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie. “She had confidence that he would reproduce what she said faithfully, even things that weren’t true.”

  Chanel with Serge Lifar, 1937 (illustration credit 10.2)

  Paul Morand (illustration credit 10.3)

  Morand’s strong racist beliefs make themselves clearly felt in many of his novels and travel essays. When it came to Jews, his tone could turn overtly murderous. In a 1933 editorial, Morand wrote, “At this time, every country except ours is killing its vermin.… Don’t let us leave Hitler to pride himself on being the only person to undertake the moral rehabilitation of the West.”

  He went on to say that if Frenchmen had to die in the war so many feared, “we want clean corpses”—meaning those of untainted blood. Describing his dear friend Coco, Morand later recalled her as “the exterminating angel of nineteenth-century style”—a description that chillingly conflates Chanel’s famous modernist streamlining of fashion with the kind of racial extermination Morand supported.

  This was Coco’s crowd: privileged, influential, accomplished, notoriously brilliant, and largely sympathetic to what we now consider some of history’s most heinous philosophies. But their views were not out of keeping with those of many distinguished and powerful Frenchmen at the time. Chanel’s cohort, in fact, reminds us of how alluring fascism proved to be, even to wealthy industrialists such as François Coty. The interests of multimillionaire businessmen might seem distinctly at odds with the tenets of National Socialism, a mass movement promoting state control, but French fascism’s condemnation of capitalism was faint at best. And even during the war, Nazi officials did little to dismantle the profitable French companies sympathetic to Germany—including certain couture houses. On the contrary, such businesses looked to them like potential revenue sources for a Reich-controlled France of the future.

  The Nazi myth … is the construction, the formation, and the production of the German people in, by, and as a work of art. The mythic power is that of dreams, of the projection of an image with which one identifies. The absolute, in effect, is not something outside of myself, it is the dream in which I recognize myself.

  —PHILIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE

  Fascism’s ingenious use of aesthetics resembled the inner workings of the fashion world to a startling extent. While it’s true that many Parisians endorsed its principles over dinner at Maxim’s, fascism at its core was a phenomenon for the masses, designed to appeal to and manipulate enormous crowds. Fascism worked a special, transformative magic upon crowds, granting them shape and purpose and conferring upon their thousands of participants—even those of the humblest social station—an ennobling sense of transcendence and belonging. The fascist images of history—the ones graven in our collective minds—all involve crowds: the Nuremberg rallies, the festival of Bayreuth, Hitler’s speeches. Fascism choreographed vast seas of people into homogenous wholes, subsuming thousands into a single look, smoothly coordinated motion, and the harmony of cheers roared in unison: “massings of groups of people … uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers,” as Susan Sontag wrote.

  From such scenes emerged a distinctly paradoxical pleasure: The mass fascist spectacles insisted upon the essential superiority of all those present, their natural aristocracy of blood. But at the same time, the rallies and parades provided elitism’s apparent opposite: the comfort of being entirely engulfed and dissolved in a vast, oceanic wave. Herein lies the movement’s most irresistible seduction: Fascism promised acquirable greatness without the burden or loneliness of standing out, a way to transcend the masses while being held securely in their warm embrace—elitism and democracy in perfect equipoise.

  Rows of SA (Sturmabteilung) standard-bearers at the Nazi Party Congress in September 1935, Nuremberg, Germany (illustration credit 10.4)

  Fascism’s allure came beautifully packaged, too, presented with all the glossy appeal of a high-end advertising campaign. Like sophisticated marketing experts, Nazi propagandists “aestheticized politics,” as philosopher Walter Benjamin declared.

  Aestheticizing politics meant first aestheticizing the crowds, turning those enormous seas of people into thrilling mass spectacles. For pageantry, theatrical power, and awe-inspiring scale, nothing could compete with fascism. In the hands of master propagandists such as Joseph Goebbels, the crowd itself became a totalizing work of art—a Gesamtkunstwerk—in the manner of Richard Wagner. “The masses are made to take form, [to] be design,” as Susan Sontag wrote. Leni Riefenstahl’s films of the crowds at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin indelibly demonstrate the excitement conjured in such settings.

  To justify the massive scale of its project, fascism needed a story, a unifying, lofty—if utterly fictional—narrative that could convince followers to subsume their individual lives to a larger goal, to accept “the understanding of life as art, as
well as the body, the people, [and] the State as works of art.” Accordingly, party officials crafted the “fascist myth,” a fairy-tale rewriting of history, infused with equal parts heroism and regret. Hoping to cloak their political intentions in august drapery, they turned to antiquity, borrowing their myth from ancient Greece and allying themselves with its classical art and literature.

  Adolf Hitler greets an SA officer at a Reich Party Day ceremony, September 1934, Nuremberg, Germany (illustration credit 10.5)

  In the fascist reconstruction of history, the ancient race of Hellas represented the earliest incarnation of the superior white European, the Aryan. In their telling, Aryans descended directly from the ancient Greeks and were the world’s last, noble vestiges of that advanced people. Curing Europe’s malaise and restoring its long-lost vigor required a eugenics-based approach—repopulating the continent exclusively with Aryans and purging the polluting lower races. Europe would return to its earlier incarnation, as grand and racially pristine as it had been in antiquity.

  Bolstered by the work of such intellectuals as Arthur de Gobineau, Georges Sorel, and especially, racial ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, this fascist myth took on the fervent quality of a new, secular religion complete with a story of a lost golden age and the promised reward of a new, fascist paradise, a “utopia of blood and soil.”

  Like all myths, this one inspired imitation in others, exerting its influence by provoking identification in the crowds and inciting them to emulate the story’s heroic figures. Beautiful and invincible, the Greek-Aryan superman starring in this myth offered an uplifting and inspiring image.

  This new origin story lent a patina of intellectual grandeur to what was essentially a massive landgrab fueled by murderous racism. The Greek-Aryan origin myth harnessed history, art, and literature to paper over the ghastly horror underlying fascism, granting it apparent cultural gravitas.