Forces occultes

"Forces occultes" represents Vichy France's most determined effort at nazi propaganda.

The film depicts the rise of a young MP who, to further his career, joins the French Freemasons. He subsequently starts to believe that along with the Jews, they deliberately want to push France into a war against Germany.

This is, of course, pure odious Vichy propaganda...

At the Liberation, screenwriter Jean Marquès-Rivière, producer Robert Muzard and director Paul Riche (real name Jean Mamy) were all severely punished for their overt collabaration with Vichy and the Nazis. On November 25th 1945, Muzard, also the director of the popular magazine "Ciné-Mondial" was condemned to 3 years imprisonment. Jean Marquès-Rivière, who had fled France, was condemned to death, to National degradation (loss civil rights as a French citizen); all his assets were also confiscated. Director, Jean Mamy (a.k.a Paul Riche), a journalist at the French nazi newspaper "Au pilori" and a fierce anti-semite was also condemned to death. He was shot by a firing squad at the Montrouge fortress on March 29th 1949.

If "Forces occultes" really "represents Vichy France's most determined effort at nazi propaganda" as one reviewer claimed, then one cannot really say they put much effort into their propaganda. A mere 45 minutes short, the film is very heavy-handed and all-too-obvious in making its point. Today the movie's in-your-face symbolism (a huge hairy spider with the masonic symbol on its back) comes off as rather campy or silly. How anyone can still regard this as "dangerous" is beyond me.It is simply too dated and too badly done to still be effective.

The hero Pierre Avenel is too clear-cut and cardboard-straight to be a real character, and that also makes it hardly believable why he is joining the Free Masons in the first place or staying with them for so long (at least five years, the movie tells us) if they are not doing any good and being just slimy, pushy characters from the beginning on. How these people could possibly rule the world is explained later, when it is revealed that these are merely the peasants in a far bigger game.

However the film is interesting for historical reasons. Avenel can be seen as a fascist idealist in the vein of Jacques Doriot. In the beginning he fiercely attacks the corruption in the parliament of both the Left and the Right. The parliamentary system is shown as ineffective and old-fashioned - at one satirically exaggerated point the parliamentarians merely utter a "cock-a-doodle-doo" or the mowing of sheep. While parliamentarians debate all day the real powers that be act behind the facade. Left or Right are merely pawns in a game for power, which reflects the fascist claim for being beyond both Left and Right and for overcoming the crisis of parliamentarianism (see Zeev Sternhell's books for that). And there is lot of cleaning up to do: FORCES OCCULTES paints the picture of a vast global conspiracy. A map in the beginning shows that only three fascist countries in the world are liberated from "Jewish-Masonic influence": Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Another crucial ideological point is the claim that the Free Masons (among them many Jews) dragged France into the war against Germany while at the same time undermining the state. This was a way to blame the pre-war elites for the disaster of 1940 and to show the necessity to replace them with fascism (which was not identical with the actual Vichy government).

The most convincing scene is the detailed depiction of a scurrilous Masonic initiation ritual. Director Jean Mamy, executed in 1949 for collaboration himself was a member of the Grand Orient de France from 1931-39, so this may be quite authentic.