‘Forces Occultes propaganda film’

    

The movie’s advertisement poster.

Say what you will about France’s nazi collaborators, but they really made an effort to slander Freemasonry in the movies.

Director Jean Mamy (employing the nom de guerre Paul Riche) was executed by firing squad on this date in 1949 at age 46 for his pro-nazi labors. His final directorial work in a pretty short film career is the 53-minute Forces Occultes from 1943, a story of a French politician in the Chamber of Deputies of the Third Republic. M. Pierre Avenel (Maurice Rémy) is a young idealist who identifies with the ethics professed by the Grand Orient of France and allows himself to be steered into the membership of a lodge, ignoring the warnings of his wife (Gisèle Parry) who says Masonry is only for mediocrities and social climbers. (It is said Mamy had been a Mason in a Grand Orient lodge during the thirties.)

Writing for L’Histoire par l’image in 2016, Pierre-Yves Beaurepairel explains:

The hero of the film is the naive and sincere deputy Avenel, who made the mistake of accepting the Freemasons’ invitation to join them. When he discovers that the Freemasons were involved in all the misfortunes that France experienced in the pre-war period—the Popular Front, the Stavisky scandal, in association with the Jews or with Anglo-Saxon finance—he decides to break the oath that requires him to keep the secrets of the order under penalty of a terrible death and to denounce the criminal actions. His “brothers” then decide to eliminate him. He miraculously survives this assassination attempt, but when he wakes up in his hospital bed, it is too late; the anti-France conspirators have plunged the country into the tragedy of war against Germany, despite the unpreparedness of the French armies. 

Naturally, I’ve never visited a Grand Orient lodge and cannot speak to how its rituals work, but I am familiar with French Rite EA° work, thanks to several lodges in our Tenth Manhattan District, and can say what is depicted in this film is very similar to what I’ve seen in l’Union Française and Garibaldi lodges. Regalia, chamber of reflection, circumambulation, and more are spot on, in my estimation. It’s not in tribute, of course; this is nazi propaganda to discredit the fraternity and its ideals Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité—also the motto of France itself.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. See the film here: