When Coline, the narrator of this novel, was a child, she watched her mother, Lucie, very closely. Sitting on the back seat of her 2CV, she listened to her muttered laments, her sighs of gloom and regret and her murmured refrain ‘the bastards’. At home, she was witness to the daily gatherings of her grandmother, aunt, mother and cousin – catty, scheming, insolubly bound to one another – who came together to keen over their misfortunes. It was not until many years later that she understood the cause of their unhappiness: they had been collaborators during Germany’s occupation of France, making comfortable lives out of their connections to the Nazis and the looting of Jewish property. The ‘bastards’ were those who turned on them after the war.

The Propagandist, a semi-autobiographical novel by Cécile Desprairies, a historian of France during the Second World War, is both an unusual and unsparing look at a time that France has tried hard to forget, and an unforgettable portrait of a singular woman and her frenzied efforts to launder her unsavoury past.

Lucie, the pretty, resourceful but poor daughter of a bullying Burgundian father, sees her life transformed when she takes up with Friedrich, a researcher in genetics and a true believer in Nazi ideology. It is 1940 and the Germans have just crossed the Maginot Line. Together, they dream of perfecting