Suite française (; 'French Suite') is çaiseNéthe title of a planned sequence of five novels by Irène Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin. In July 1942, having just completed the first two of the series, Némirovsky was arrested as a Jew and detained at Pithiviers and then Auschwitz, where she was murdered, a victim of the Holocaust. The notebook containing the two novels was preserved by her daughters but not examined until 1998. They were published in a single volume entitled Suite française in 2004.
Background
The sequence was to portray life in France in the period following June 1940, the month in which the German army rapidly defeated the French and fought the British; Paris and northern France came under German occupation on 14 June. The first novel, Tempête en juin (Storm in June) depicts the flight of citizens from Paris in the hours preceding the German advance and in the days following it. The second, Dolce (Sweet), shows life in a small French country town, Bussy (in the suburbs just east of Paris), in the first, strangely peaceful, months of the German occupation. These first two novels seem able to exist independently from each other on first reading. The links between them are rather tenuous; as Némirovsky observes in her notebook, it is the history and not the characters, that unite them.
The third novel, Captivité (Captivity), for which Némirovsky left a plot outline, would have shown the coalescing of a resistance, with some characters introduced in Tempête en juin and Dolce having been arrested and put under threat of death, in Paris. The fourth and fifth novels would perhaps have been called Batailles (Battles) and La Paix (Peace) but these exist only as titles in Némirovsky's notebook, against which she had placed question marks. Nothing can be said about the plots of Batailles and La Paix. To quote Némirovsky's notes, they are "in limbo, and what limbo! It's really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens".
Books
Tempête en juin
The narrative follows several groups of characters who encounter one another rarely if at all. All are impelled to flee from Paris in advance of the German entry into the city. As transport and distribution collapse under German bombardment, all have to change their plans and nearly all lose the veneer of civilization.
The Péricands are making for Nîmes, where they have property. They reach the city but in the course of the journey, Charlotte Péricand's senile father-in-law is left behind (forgotten) while her second son, Hubert, runs away to join the army and shares in its collapse. Her elder son, Philippe, is a priest and is shepherding a party of orphans, who eventually kill him (in a death scene perhaps in need of revision, Némirovsky comments in her notebook, because it is melo [melodramatic]). Gabriel Corte, a well-known writer, flees with his mistress and makes for Vichy, where he may or may not find refuge and employment. Charles Langelet, an aesthete, flees alone in his car, filching petrol from trusting acquaintances in order to get as far as the Loire; he returns to Paris and, in the blackout, is killed in a road accident.
Maurice and Jeanne Michaud, minor employees at a bank, are instructed to go to Tours though deprived at the last minute of the transport promised by their employer. Their son, Jean-Marie is with the army and they have no word of his fate. They cannot get to Tours and eventually return to Paris, unemployed and almost destitute but destined to survive. Jean-Marie is in fact wounded; he is being tended by the Sabarie family at their small farm near Bussy, where he is nursed back to health by Madeleine, the Sabaries' foster daughter. At the end of the novel as postal services are restored, Jean-Marie is able to contact his family and return to Paris. The Michauds, alone among major characters, grow in moral stature as chaos spreads.
Dolce
The small town of Bussy and its neighbouring farms are the scene throughout. The German occupation seems sweetly peaceful but there is no doubt over the balance of power. The Germans get whatever they ask for; official notices promise the death penalty for those who disobey their regulations, and French collaborators, including the Péricands, make their own settlement with their German overlords.
