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ÉRIC VUILLARD (born 1968) writes what he calls récits—compact narratives that seize on a documented moment of history and treat it with a novelist's eye. Book after book, he slips backstage into the salons and antechambers where power is actually exercised, convinced that the greatest catastrophes announce themselves in small steps. He shifts viewpoints and takes sides, hunting the telling detail that turns a room of dignitaries into a gallery of unmasked faces. He has trained this method on the plunder of the Congo, on Buffalo Bill's America, and on the crowd behind the fall of the Bastille. L'Ordre du jour won the Prix Goncourt in 2017 and confirmed him as one of the most distinctive voices in French letters today.
L'Ordre du jour opens on 20 February 1933. Three weeks after Hitler has become chancellor, twenty-four of Germany's most powerful industrialists cross Berlin to a meeting called by Hermann Göring, listen politely, and agree to bankroll the Nazi party. They run the firms whose names we still recognize today, and once the checks are signed, they go home to dinner. From there the book moves to the annexation of Austria five years later—an operation carried out through telephone calls, threats wrapped in courtesies, and a farewell luncheon where the guests keep up their small talk while a country is being erased.
Vuillard's subject is the distance between the catastrophe as history remembers it and the shabby, almost comic way it was actually arranged. When the tanks sent to seize Austria break down at the border and have to be loaded onto railway cars, he lingers on the breakdown, because farce is precisely what the official portrait crops out. He writes with irony and a cold, controlled anger in short, supple sentences, and refuses to pretend that anyone involved had no choice. History, he insists, is signed as often as it is declared—in checks, in handshakes, in calmly worded memos. The worst catastrophes of the century, he shows, arrive on tiptoe, one polite meeting at a time.