Robert Brasillach, born in Perpignan, was a gifted, prolific novelist, poet, and playwright in Paris during the 1940-44 Nazi Occupation. As editor-in-chief of the fascist paper Je Suis Partout, Brasillach launched wounding attacks on Republicans, Communists, Jews and foreigners. For a time he was France's most envied and reviled writer.

Then, in the summer of '44, the Nazis abandoned Paris to the Resistance forces headed by Charles de Gaulle. The Liberation government quickly began punishing those accused of collaborating with the Germans. In four months the Courts of Justice condemned 6,763 persons to death; 1,500 were executed. Brasillach was convicted of "intelligence with the enemy" and, despite a petition for clemency signed by Albert Camus, François Mauriac, Jean Anouilh, Jean-Louis Barrault and Arthur Honegger, Brasillach went before the firing squad at Fort de Montrouge - the only writer of distinction to be killed for what he wrote.

Brasillach was the son of a French Army lieutenant who was killed in battle in Morocco when Robert was five. After graduation from Paris' élite Ecole Normale Supérieure, he wrote several acclaimed novels and co-authored, with his brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche, L'Histoire du cinéma (1935), the first prominent survey of film. He also won notoriety as a literary critic eager to toss incendiary insults at his elders.

In '30s Paris a writer had to take sides, and Brasillach's was on the far right. His brand of fascism was neither analytical nor truly political; it had a romantic, almost swoony quality. He could declare that "fascism is anti-Semitic," yet write warmly of Chaplin, Proust and Yehudi Menuhin. He never reconciled his love of France and his ardor for the Reich. How can one be both a French nationalist and a cheerleader for a conquering power? Brasillach's "soft" faction lost a battle with a more virulent group at Je Suis Partout, and he resigned. Yet he still could write, "I have confidence in the Wehrmacht and in Adolf's patriotism."

Brasillach's trial started. The writer was measured and brilliant in his own defense, explaining that he was a patriot, loyal to the constitutional Vichy government. But the real star was the prosecutor, Marcel Reboul. He nailed Brasillach on some of his rankest opinions: that Jewish families should be deported "en bloc," and that the pre-Vichy Republic was "an old syphilitic whore [with] her canker sores and her gonorrhea." He linked Brasillach's fondness for the Germans with an SS massacre of 600 villagers. And above all he accused the writer, rumored to be homosexual, of sleeping with the enemy. As Brasillach had appealed to Frenchmen's suspicion of Jews, Reboul counted on the jurors' aversion to homosexuals.

Brasillach, whatever his crimes or lapses, never stood a chance. The judge had served Vichy and may have thought he could exonerate himself by condemning Brasillach; the jurors were veterans of the Resistance he had denounced so furiously. They deliberated for 25 minutes. As Brasillach's death sentence was read, his supporters exploded into outrage, but the defendant shouted, "It's an honor!"

De Gaulle considered the plea for clemency, but upheld the sentence. He later wrote, "in literature as in everything, talent confers responsibility." If Brasillach had been less adept at his noxious art, he might have been spared.