Suite Francaise

Suite Française, by French-based Ukrainian writer Irène Némirovsky (born 1903), was published in the original French upon its discovery in 2004. However, Némirovsky started writing Suite in 1941, during the Nazi occupation of France, when those with a Jewish ethnic background like her faced persecution under the contemporary antisemitic regime. She and her husband, Michel Epstein, and their two young daughters, Denise and Élisabeth, had fled Paris for Issy-l’Évêque, a rural village in Burgundy. There, she daily retreated to the forest to write the Suite and completed two out of the five books she originally planned before her arrest and deportation to a concentration camp in Pithiviers on July 13, 1942. These books included Storm in June and Dolce. After Némirovsky was taken to Pithiviers, she was soon moved on to Auschwitz in Poland and died there of typhus a month later.

Although Némirovsky had been a successful novelist in Paris prior to the war, publishing David Golder in 1929 and Le Bal in 1930, alongside 12 other works, her daughter Denise retained the manuscript of Suite Française for more than half a century without reading it because she mistook it for a diary. However, when she was on the verge of delivering the diary to a French archive in the 1990s, she decided to read it and to her surprise found that it contained the two books of the Suite. After its 2004 French publication, the book became a bestseller and was translated into 38 languages. In 2015 director Saul Dibb adapted the second book, Dolce, into a film starring Michelle Williams and Matthias Schoenaerts.

This guide used the Sandra Smith translation of 2006. The ASIN for the Vintage Digital edition is B003NX6Y0G.

Content Warning: This guides discusses World War II antisemitism and violence against Jewish people.

Plot Summary

The completed books of the Suite include Storm in June and Dolce. They function independently as works, but Storm in June is chronologically earlier than Dolce, and some characters appear in both.

Storm in June begins on the June 1940 day that Parisians hear the rumor of the German invasion and begin planning to leave Paris. Némirovsky presents a cross-section of Parisian society preparing to flee for the countryside. A large bourgeois Catholic family, the Péricands, fills up a car with food and heirlooms before heading south. The kindhearted Michauds are a financially struggling couple who worry about the fate of their soldier son, Jean-Marie. They assume that their bank-manager boss, Monsieur Corbin, has saved them a place in his car but find themselves forced to walk when he transports his dancer mistress, Arlette, instead. Meanwhile, famous writer Gabriel Corte, who leaves town with his mistress, Florence, is disgusted at the mixing of social classes that occurs among refugees on the flight from Paris. Other major figures include Charles Langelet, a dandy who cares more about saving his precious ornament collection than any person, and the Péricands’ eldest son, Phillipe, a priest tasked with the safe evacuation of orphaned boys from an institution his grandfather patronized, even as he despises them and considers them degenerate.

As the Parisians flee, they experience shortages of food and fuel. Rather than the wartime ideal of solidarity, Némirovsky shows every group looking out for themselves, as the wealthy Péricands profit from their extended family’s generosity, while the poor Michauds see people killed before their eyes. Then their son, Jean-Marie, is injured and must depend upon the kindness of strangers in the village of Bussy, where he is nurtured and learns that one of the sons of the village, Benoît, is a prisoner of war. In contrast to this kindness, extreme selfishness also occurs. Charles Langelet betrays a young couple by telling them that he will watch their car while they sleep and then proceeds to steal their fuel. Philippe Péricand’s charges turn against him, as they team up to beat him and push him into a lake. Meanwhile, his younger brother, Hubert, sneaks off to battle filled with notions of the glory of France, only to run away when he despairs of never seeing his mother again.

Once the Germans have completed their occupation, the Parisian exiles return home. Charles Langelet gets his comeuppance when Arlette accidentally runs him over while he is on his way to supper, and Jean-Marie returns to his parents on learning the news that Madeleine, the girl from his home of convalescence in Bussy, intends to marry Benoît, the returning son of a farmer.

Set in Bussy, Dolce is a close examination of what happens to a town when a German regiment occupies it. The German officers are installed in the locals’ homes. While some older women—especially those like Madame Angellier, whose sons have become prisoners of war—are unequivocal in their disdain for the occupying army, the younger women cannot help being impressed by its attractive young male strangers. Lucile, Madame Angellier’s daughter-in-law, a young woman who never bonded with her husband owing to his disappointment over her lack of dowry and keeping of a mistress, strikes up a friendship with Lieutenant Bruno von Falk. Lucile and Bruno bond over a love of books and music, talking walks in the woods. Although Madame Angellier disapproves, seeking solace in hallucinations of her son Gaston’s youth and well-being, others in the town are eager to exploit Lucile’s closeness with the German to further their own ends. These include Madeleine Sabarie, a young woman who cannot get over Jean-Marie Michaud, the Parisian soldier from Storm in June, and yet finds that she must beg to hide her husband, Benoît, in Lucile’s house after he kills Kurt Bonnet, the German soldier who was residing in their own house, out of jealousy. Lucile is put in the difficult situation of lying to Bruno and risking her own life by hiding Benoît in the house. She refuses to give into Bruno’s sexual advances, suddenly feeling that it is wildly inappropriate to sleep with the enemy.

During the celebration of their first anniversary of the Occupation, the German regiment learns that it will be posted to Russia. Lucile uses the opportunity to score a travel pass from Bruno and secretly drives Benoît over to Paris, where he will meet his left-leaning friends from the army.