The “somber years” of France under German occupation, stretching from the debacle of May-June 1940 to the Liberation in summer 1944, are now viewed as having played a crucial role in France’s postwar politics, self-perception, and historiography. Yet the burden of that past still makes for a tendency to avoid some of its murkier aspects. This has to do both with the illusions that Vichy itself had fostered and with the myth constructed after the Liberation, one of whose main components was the denial that those very same wartime illusions had ever existed.
The difficulties involved in writing the history of that traumatized and fractured society are reflected in the competing narratives of the period. Was France a victim of Nazi conquest and rule, of its own decadence and corruption, or of the cataclysms of modern history? Conversely, were the French by and large passive, not to say indifferent bystanders, concerned primarily with their own safety, while much of the rest of the world went up in flames and some of their own neighbors were deported to death camps? Is there, indeed, any sense at all in talking about “France” and “the French” during those years, and if not, what are the implications of denying the national solidarity and identity of the population?
Between 1940 and 1944 France was geographically divided into an occupied and a “free zone.” The latter, however, was ruled by an authoritarian dictatorship and was under the influence of the Germans even before they occupied it in November 1942. Whereas Petain’s regime hoped radically to transform French life and politics, the Nazi occupation of France was far more benevolent than their occupation of Eastern Europe, excluding, of course, the treatment meted to the Jews and the Resistance. If the majority of the French quickly came to reject both the German occupation and the Vichy regime, they were also not keen to see the Third Republic restored. Germany’s astounding victory left a profound impression on the population, while Petain’s promise to rebuild the nation, made at a time of distress and anxiety, provided Vichy with an initial capital that cannot be dismissed when gauging contemporary French attitudes. Both the Germans and Vichy exploited and exacerbated the prejudices and animosities that characterized French society in the 1930s, thereby making the transition to foreign rule and domestic dictatorship appear all the more necessary.
While the initial compliance with Vichy and the Occupation is closely linked to prewar conflicts and perceptions, the ultimate resistance to German rule and to Petain’s regime must be analyzed within the larger social, economic, and political context and cannot be reduced to a mere expression of patriotism and sacrifice. Resistance expanded as a reaction to the growing brutality of the authorities, to increasing indications that Germany might lose the war, and, most important, to the compulsory recruitment of labor to German factories. Just as crucial is the fact that much of the resistance was directed at Vichy, rather than the Germans. In the climate of violence and vengeance that characterized the death throes of Vichy and the Third Reich, liberation from foreign rule and civil war between competing organizations and ideologies became inextricably mixed. No wonder that Vichy’s ambivalent legacy and the imperfect epuration that followed it have made coming to terms with those years exceedingly difficult.
Immediately after the war, Charles de Gaulle successfully installed the first narrative of the Occupation, asserting that the vast majority of the French had heroically resisted the Germans and eventually liberated themselves from Nazi rule. While it might have been necessary in order to facilitate France’s recovery, this version of the past both marginalized the fate of the Jews and served to reintegrate and legitimize some of Vichy’s worst henchmen. Beginning in the 1970s, a new narrative slowly emerged, arguing that most of the French had either collaborated with the Germans, supported Vichy, or simply protected their own interests and well-being; in some instances even the Resistance was portrayed as far less heroic than previously thought. Between the first screening of Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity in 1969 and the publication of Henry Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome in 1987, this narrative became increasingly prevalent, although not hegemonic. The publicity surrounding the cases of Klaus Barbie, Rene Bousquet, Paul Touvier, and Maurice Papon, and the revelations about Franjois Mitterrand’s dubious past have added to the sense of confusion and opaqueness, ambiguity and discomfort evoked by those four dark years. As the reality of Vichy recedes into the past, it is increasingly recognized as a profound moral fiasco with far-reaching consequences for the identity of postwar France.
The nature and stakes of the conflict were identified by some very early on. Former prime minister Edouard Daladier, incarcerated by Vichy and later the Germans following the armistice, had a clearer perception of reality from the confines of his prison cell than many of France’s politicians, generals, and bishops. As he wrote in the fall of 1941, “Only the outcome of the war is of real concern. If Germany should be victorious . . . I would just as soon not survive, just as soon not have to witness the moral decline and the decay that would result.” Later, on hearing about “the existence of crematoriums and the experiments with various gasses they perform on prisoners,” he noted that “centuries of effort and progress have been wiped out” by Nazi crimes and this war of “mass destruction.” Conversely, as early as November 1940, he commented that the Germans “would prefer a policy of ‘collaboration,’ to use the term in vogue in the French press,” since “this would guarantee Germany control over our principal industries... and reduce France to the state of a colony or a protectorate.” As Daladier clearly understood, this would be a far more effective policy than outright annexation, because it “undermines virtually all the material and moral reasons for revenge.” He also realized, however, that in the long run, any promoter of collaboration would be seen as “a servile partisan of surrender, a traitor ... who is organizing France so that the Krauts can squeeze the most out of her.” Hence his belief that France would eventually reject that “bunch of incompetent fools and traitors” who had “handed [her] over to the enemy.” Indeed, throughout his years in prison, Daladier was constantly preoccupied with recovering the moral fiber of the French nation and always on the lookout for signs of unity and patriotism. On hearing reports in 1942 of demonstrations on July 14 in French cities, he delighted in this proof of the “deep-seated feelings of rebellion and the growing sense of a veritable and profound national unity that extends from Communist workers to Catholics.” This “greatest national movement in all of French history” appeared to him as evidence that “our defeat was a necessary step for us, but not at all in the way it is presented by Petain and his cliques of hypocrites and traitors.” While he recognized that the deportations of Jews and the executions of Communists demonstrated that the “National Revolution has planted its roots in blood and infamy,” he nevertheless lauded the clergy who “have condemned the barbaric anti-Semitic acts that are being committed.”
Indeed, although Daladier damned Vichy and the collaboration, he shared with de Gaulle the desire to reestablish France’s glory and the illusion that by and large the French had acted honorably at a time of crisis and distress. For this reason he reacted with pride to news of French resistance and exclaimed that now “people admit to having underestimated the French,” since France has “once again become, in Churchill’s words, ‘one of the world’s leading powers.’” This same logic led him to insist that the purges be swift and reasonable. “Of all the wounds,” he wrote, “this is the most painful and the most grievous of all, which is why it should be lanced, without delay, so that the healing process might begin.” Despite his ready acknowledgment of “the horrors of the concentration camps,” he showed little inclination to associate them with French complicity. Always the politician, he looked forward to the future and thereby ultimately came to share the myths and illusions of the postwar period.
To be sure many of Vichy’s most objectionable aspects, of which the deportations of the Jews were doubtlessly the worst, can be partly ascribed to the condition of German occupation under which this regime operated. But the myth of the resistance denied both the responsibility of Vichy for the anti-Jewish policies it initiated of its own accord and the responsibility of “France” for Vichy. Over the past two decades a growing number of (initially, mainly foreign) studies have amply documented Vichy’s anti-Jewish legislative initiatives and ultimate willing complicity in Nazi genocidal policies. In reaction to this accusatory literature, other scholars now urge a more nuanced view of French conduct. One representative of this approach is John F. Sweets, who has argued that as of a relatively early phase, “most French people were unwilling to accept the ideology and programs associated with Vichy’s National Revolution”; that Vichy’s henchmen were untypical of the population as a whole; that the brutal practices of the Milice in its war on “Communism, Gaullism, the Jewish leprosy, [and] Freemasonry,” merely reflected “the violent temperament and unsavory character of some of its members”; and that officials charged with Jewish affairs were “hoodlums, thugs, [and] brutes of the most despicable sort.” While obviously partly true, such arguments neglect to note that Petain’s promises to cleanse France of “foreign elements” and purge it of the corrupt practices associated with the republic struck a powerful chord with many French. Indeed, one is reminded here of early assertions made in Germany about Nazi perpetrators. Moreover, as Sweets himself concedes, young men often joined the Milice for the same reason that others joined the Resistance, namely to escape compulsory labor in Germany; fighters in both groups commonly hailed from the same communities and social classes. Similarly, just as the architects of the “Final Solution” came from the top echelons of German society, so, too, the functionaries of Vichy stemmed from the established French elites; and as we now know, a significant number of perpetrators on both sides of the Rhine swiftly reintegrated into postwar society, more often than not in leading bureaucratic, administrative, and business positions.
A case can be made for the somewhat apologetic-sounding argument that the Germans’ “relative lack of success” in perpetrating genocide in France “testifies to ... the far wider network of support available after the German occupation of the south.” Yet while many brave individuals helped the victims, the murder of some 76,000 Jews living in France could not have been accomplished without the close collaboration of the French authorities and at least part of the population. That most French policeman acted “with a conviction that they were behaving as responsible professionals fulfilling their duty” only shows that they were not much different in this sense from their German counterparts. Similarly, and again not unlike the German case, the ineffectiveness of protests against deportations of Jews derived from the alleged “legality” of these measures, as well as from most people’s preoccupation with their own problems. In fact new evidence continues to support Robert Paxton’s well-known assertion that public opinion “offered a broad basis of acquiescence within which active participation in the Vichy regime was made legitimate.” For if there were indeed “symptoms of systematic distrust and indifference,” the population on the whole manifested little active opposition to the roundups of Jews; and if disillusionment with Vichy became increasingly widespread, until very late in the war the French were also keenly aware that theirs was the only major European country to have largely avoided devastation. In the meantime people tried to make the best of a bad situation, showing the Germans what Sweets calls a “modicum of civility,” which is why German soldiers remembered service in France as a one of the most pleasant experiences of the war. Indeed, in the region of Clermont-Ferrand that Sweets has closely examined, he found that “throughout most of the occupation relations were relatively good between the French and the Germans. Until the summer of 1944” (when the Allies landed) and despite the “limited number of troops at their disposal,” the Germans “do not seem to have felt threatened” in “accomplishing their basic missions at Clermont, those of pacification and of securing production for the war economy.” This comes very close to accepting Paxton’s argument that French attentisme, a “wait-and-see attitude,” made them into “‘collaborators’ in the functional sense.” No wonder that Clermont’s population could congratulate itself after the war that except for “certain measures against their Jews... for the most part . . . the region had been spared the flagrant atrocities” that occurred in other areas.
We are often prone to the illusion that spiritual leaders are endowed with moral courage and disinterested humanism. Hence the long-held myth concerning the role of the clergy in Vichy. Yet as W. D. Halls has recently shown in devastating detail, the Catholic Church was already highly critical of the republic in the 1930s, expressed vehement opposition to the Left, and, especially after the establishment of Leon Blum’s Popular Front government, became increasingly imbued with antisemitism, an attitude further encouraged by the Pope’s silence on Germany’s racist policies. No wonder that Catholic leaders were attracted to Petain’s melange of quasi-fascist authoritarianism and reactionary rhetoric, encapsulated in the slogan “Travail, Famille, Patrie” (Work, Family, Homeland). The fact is that many Christians perceived the debacle of 1940 as confirmation of France’s moral decline, corruption, and the “corrosive” influence of secularism, described by Cardinal Verdier as the equivalent of German racism. Only an alliance between the Church and Petain seemed to offer salvation from the Godlessness that had almost caused the nation’s extinction. Paul Claudel celebrated the delivery of France from anti-Catholic “teachers, lawyers, Jews, Freemasons . . . universal suffrage and Parliamentarism;” Archbishop Feltin asserted that the debacle facilitated undertaking “the task of inner regeneration;” and Monsignor Caillot saw it as putting an end to the “evil parenthesis” between the Revolution and 1940, in which the Freemasons and the Jews had introduced the separation of Church and state. As Halls remarks, it almost seemed as if God had sided with Nazism in order to purify France.
Church leaders took an active part in propagating Petain’s status as the savior of France. As Cardinal Gerlier declared, “Petain is France, and France, today, is Petain!” The ecclesiastical adulation of “le Marechal-Christ” (the Marshal-Christ) peaked with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, described by Cardinal Baudrillat as a “noble common enterprise,” in which the soldiers of the Legion des Volontaires Franjais (LVF) were fighting as “the crusaders of the twentieth century.” In late 1941 the prefects still reported excellent relations with the clergy, and on May Day 1942, just before the mass deportations of Jews began, Cardinal Suhard declared his “undying attachment” to Petain. Indeed, even while the Hierarchy protested the deportations, Church leaders insisted that they had “nothing in common with that strange adventurer de Gaulle” and warned that the liberation of political prisoners and Jews in North Africa were a dire indication of what might be expected from an Allied victory. This was no case of political opportunism, but rather of ideological connivance. Even the Protestant Pastor Boegner believed that there was a “Jewish problem,” and many others supported the enactment and implementation of “grave” but “justifiable” measures against the “pernicious power” of the Jews. How such policies could be accomplished on the basis of “the rules of charity and justice” was less obvious. Cardinal Gerlier tried to square the circle by arguing that while anti-Jewish measures were not unjust, they lacked “justice and clarity,” while the Archbishop of Toulouse somewhat lamely asserted that the “Jews are men and women.” But Gerlier soon qualified his protest by acknowledging that “the French authorities have a problem to resolve.” As Halls notes, “Even before the storm raised by their protests had died down bishops were again lavish in their expressions of loyalty to the Marshal.”
Among the lower clergy there were many instances of moral and physical courage. Some Protestant communities stood out in particular; the people of Le Chambon sheltered 1,000 Jews and smuggled another 4,000 across the border. Priests in the rural areas often supported the Resistance and helped those persecuted by the Germans, who retaliated by executing 216 priests and seven pastors. But the anti-Jewish stance of the Church leadership reflected a wider sentiment. Halls comments that “for some Frenchmen, including some Christians, the Jews served as a convenient scapegoat for the defeat of 1940.” This in turn was related not merely to economic resentment but to a long antisemitic tradition, exacerbated first by the Great Depression and the influx of refugees during the 1930s and then by Vichy and German incitement. While Church leaders “did not foresee the terrible consequences that flowed from their attitude” of identifying a “Jewish problem,” they were definitely in a position to observe the cruelty and brutality of the regime they supported. Yet instead of criticizing German atrocities, the Church indulged in recriminations against the Allies and the Resistance. Pere Roguet called the Allies “assassins and butchers,” Monsignor Duparc spoke of their “barbarism,” Cardinal Lienart characterized their actions as “carnage,” Cardinal Suhard condemned their “atrocities” and “crimes,” and Monsignor Piguet spoke of the “cataclysms of extermination” the Allies allegedly perpetrated. French resisters were similarly described by Lienart as “terrorists,” whose actions were called “banditry” by Monsignor Le Bellec and “criminal” by Monsignor Choquet. Conversely, as late as January 1944, Lienart thanked the Germans for their “correct and benevolent” behavior, “professed understanding” for their need to “occasionally . . . bear down severely,” and promised “to pacify the population and exhort it to act correctly.” When German units massacred ninety villagers near Lille in April as collective punishment for the derailment of a train, Lienart “enjoined silence.” Cardinal Suhard was just as obliging; described by the Germans as “anxious to depoliticize his clergy,” he was praised for having “genuinely sought a modus vivendi with the occupying forces,” which obviously manifested his “disposition to collaborate.”
If the Church supported collaboration, many of the extremists in Vichy were products of Christian education. While Catholic resisters described themselves as rebels against their superiors, Halls identifies “a distinctly Catholic element” in collaborationist institutions. The Milice especially “attracted many young men from the Catholic bourgeoisie” and from Action Catholique, whose explicit goal was to fight “pagan Freemasony,” destroy Bolshevism, and “save” France from the Jews. This “instrument of Nazi brutality” was, writes Halls, an “offshoot of an organization intensely patriotic and loyal, often commanded by young officers with a strongly religious upbringing.” All of which indicates that we are dealing here not merely with the dire effects of the Church’s silence, recently acknowledged by its leadership, but with a significant degree of congruity with Vichy. If Philippe Henriot—whose “great influence over Catholic opinion” derived from his “impeccable... Catholic credentials”—was dedicated “to reconcile national socialism and the Church,” the majority of the bishops greatly preferred Vichy to the republic, openly advocated collaboration, and can therefore not be acquitted of complicity in its policies. The illusion that any sort of harmony could be found between the ‘principes chretiens’ (Christian principles) of the Church and the ‘idees maitraisse’ (governing ideas) of the Revolution Nationale led to association with genocide. Nor did the Church have the moral courage to recognize this fatal “error” after the Liberation; by assuming a posture of “injured innocence,” the Church perpetuated the illusion of ignorance and resistance and further discredited its claim as the nation’s moral guide.
Nevertheless, if Vichy strove to create the illusion of enthusiastic support and de Gaulle fabricated the myth of universal resistance, thanks to Philippe Burrin’s research we now know that most of the French “lived through the occupation with the sole preoccupation of ‘getting through it.’” Between the two extremes of resistance and collaboration, and following an initial period in which submission to the occupiers was the rule and collaboration was perceived as “participating in a common task,” the majority of people chose to accommodate themselves to the situation and simply wait things out. While the men of Vichy “accepted defeat so easily” because “mentally they were ready both to switch direction in the country’s external policies and also to change its internal structures,” the enthusiasm with which they were greeted was generated by an almost total rejection of the Third Republic and by the shock of military collapse. To be sure, if at the beginning there were very few signs of hatred against the Boches, whose military prowess and orderly, “correct” behavior were often admired, the prevailing mood of resignation and acceptance— even among future resisters—gradually changed in the fall of 1940.
And yet, as Burrin notes, this “did not resolve the confusion in people’s minds and still left room for a widespread desire for accommodation.”
Ultimately, German economic exploitation and Vichy’s increasingly authoritarian rule made the French perceive the policies of collaboration as placing them between “a boot and a bottom.” Yet while the regime clung to the illusion of sharing power in a German-dominated Europe and was “carried away by scenarios whose realism was daily shrinking away to nothing,” the Germans were pleased to find that the cooperation of the French on all levels of society “almost exceeded what was to be expected from the administration of an occupied country.” Thus the French contributed massively to the German war effort even as Vichy pursued its claim to sovereignty by doing the dirty work for the Germans, including political repression, ideological persecution, and eventual acceptance of German methods in dealing with the “Jewish question.” Burrin notes, “No knife was being held to Vichy’s throat” during the mass deportations of 1942, yet “without the cooperation of the police, the SS were paralyzed.” To the contrary, Pierre Laval’s advocacy of “national prophylaxy” demonstrated that in Vichy “raison d’etat was stiffened by ideological complicity.”
Collaboration by the regime depended on the public’s focus on material self-interest. To be sure, support for Vichy was “fragile, shaky, and dwindling.” At the same time, the population’s remarkable passivity was fostered by uncertainty, the hardships of daily life, and the repressive policies of Vichy and the Germans. Indeed, because the regime persecuted mainly Jews and Communists, the public attitude can be defined as “complicit resignation.” Some people retreated into silence and avoidance of contact with the Germans; but the conduct of many others made the occupiers feel anything but unwelcome. Educated men and women found their counterparts among the Germans, and numerous French celebrities socialized with the occupiers. For those of a less intellectual taste, there were other distractions. At the liberation, between 10,000 and 20,000 women were punished for liaisons with Germans, and a “minimum of several tens of thousands of French women engaged in sexual relations with the occupiers,” producing some 50,000 to 70,000 children. Denunciations, reported by prefects to have reached flood levels in the autumn of 1941, constituted yet another form of instrumental contact with the Germans.
Not surprisingly, the business elites were particularly quick to adapt. By 1944 the majority of French industrial undertakings were working for the Reich, with some 14,000 French firms taking German orders of either civilian or military nature. Banks swiftly struck deals with the Germans and just as expeditiously began directing large funds to the Resistance with the turn of the tide in 1944. Lower down on the social scale, at least 10,000 Frenchmen became temporary managers of some 40,000 despoiled Jewish businesses. As for labor, by 1944 half a million French men and women were employed by the Wehrmacht or the Todt Organization, with a total of at least 200.0 citizens volunteering for work in Germany and another 200.000 prisoners of war held in Germany willingly converting to the status of workers. The German firm IG Farben employed French workers at its plant in Auschwitz.
While all this activity was going on, increasing numbers of French children and adults began learning German. The Berlitz language school increased its enrollments from 939 adult students of German in 1939, to 7,920 in 1941; the German Institute in Paris from a few hundreds in the 1930s, to 15,000 by 1942, mostly taught by French instructors. Altogether, some 30,000 students took courses at the German Institute; the majority were adult members of the urban middle class and the liberal professions, with a total of about 100,000 French people learning German during the Occupation. This in turn reflected the accommodation of the intellectual and academic elites. Institutions of higher education, ranging from the College de France to practically all universities, rapidly and voluntarily purged themselves of their Jewish members, without any registered public protests by the professors. The prominent historian Lucien Febvre demanded the resignation of Marc Bloch, the Jewish coeditor and cofounder of their journal Annales, so as to save it from being banned. While Bloch joined the Resistance and was executed by the Germans, Febvre continued to edit the journal—which in no way promoted resistance—from the safety of his country house. Similarly, such respectable French publishers as Gallimard purged their lists of Jewish authors and turned to publishing texts by German racial ideologues and French collaborators. Nor did many renown French writers desist from having their works published during the Occupation, including Louis Aragon, Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, Paul Claudel, Marguerite Duras, Paul Eluard, Francois Mauriac, Jean Paulhan, Romain Rolland, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Paul Valery. Marcel Ayme wrote for the fascist antisemitic journal Je suispartout, Mauriac contributed to the collaborationist Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, Camus cut out a chapter on Franz Kafka from Le Mythe de Sisyphe to have it published in 1942, Antoine de Saint-Exupery paid a quasi-official visit to Germany to promote the translations of his books there, and Aragon excised references to Heinrich Heine and the Dreyfus Affair from his writings to facilitate their publication in Germany. Other artists followed suit. Jean Cocteau expressed admiration for Hitler, Abel Gance made a friendly visit to wartime Germany, and Pierre Fournier gave concerts in the Reich. That some of these men and women eventually ended up in the Resistance only highlights the moral confusion and the depth of accommodation that characterized the French intelligentsia in the first years of the Occupation.
Created by men who deluded themselves that they could turn the clock back to the ancien regime while simultaneously finding a place for France in a Nazi-dominated Europe, Vichy was supported or at least tolerated by a population that strove to keep out of harm’s way and pursue its economic or intellectual interests in conditions of relative safety. As these illusions were shattered, the Resistance emerged as a means to transform France and purge one’s conscience and record. The eventual failure of the resisters to create a new postwar society, the rapid return to normality and the reintegration of the old elites, along with the resisters’ urge to legitimize their own newlywon positions of power and influence made it appear necessary to mask the sins of the past and the sordid reality of the present with a new myth of glorious self-liberation. To be sure, while committed collaboration, in Burrin’s words, was both “engendered by society” and ultimately “tore itself away from society,” there was also a good deal of heroism and sacrifice, although some of it was in the service of evil. But France under the Germans was characterized primarily by accommodation to a generally unpleasant condition and a reluctance to fight against what was finally recognized as a criminal regime obsessed with murdering a host of helpless victims. And if the purges affected no less than 150,000 people, we should note that in 1944 no less than four million French citizens were working directly for the Germans in one capacity or another. Hence one must agree with Burrin that “deliberate, voluntary accommodation extended well beyond the circle of those punished in the purges,” even if “the great majority of French people had no faith in collaboration and wanted none of it.” This is a hard truth to swallow; no wonder that, even fifty years after the event, it could only be expressed so bluntly by a Swiss historian.
Self-liberation was thus the final illusion of the Occupation and the founding myth of postwar France. But if it failed to liberate the French from the ghosts of the past, this was also liberation from an ambiguous, often troubling event, whose legacy consisted not only of mirth and hope but also of pity and sorrow. For the Jewish survivors of the camps, as Primo Levi wrote, “the hour of liberation was neither joyful nor lighthearted. For most it occurred against a tragic background of destruction, slaughter, and suffering... which seemed definitive, past cure.” Indeed, “leaving the past behind . . . almost always . . . coincided with a phase of anguish.” Such camp survivors rarely experienced a sense of triumph when their liberators appeared at the gate, nor for many years thereafter, as they learned of their personal losses and tried to come to terms with the universal wound the Nazis had inflicted on humanity. Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose book on a childhood spent entirely in the camps appears to have been a work of fiction rather than an authentic memoir, nevertheless captures the sense of being denied the very awareness of liberation. As he notes in the closing pages of the book, he (or his protagonist) learned of it only years later, as a high school student in Switzerland, when his class was shown documentary footage of the Holocaust. While to others it appeared almost inconceivable, to him these were scenes of his childhood memories. Then, however, “came something so unexpected as to be unreal, that I knew nothing about: ... the liberation of the camps. . . . And everywhere, over and over again, faces transfixed with happiness at being liberated ... I was there too, in a camp, and I didn’t see anything. No one freed us, and nobody brought us food, and nobody tended us. . . . Nobody ever told me the war was over. Nobody ever told me that the camp was over, finally, definitely over.”
The liberation of France, comments H. R. Kedward in a new collection of essays he coedited with Nancy Wood, was “a complex amalgam of opening and closure,” whose protagonists “looked backward as well as forward.” Whereas “scores of resisters... closed a chapter in their own lives at the moment of liberation,” others climbed onto the “Resistance bandwagon” or used “acts of resistance as a personal point de depart,” or point of departure, in their postwar careers. While we should not underestimate “the human immensity of the struggle to close the door firmly on Nazism,” we can also recognize now the explanatory limitations of the Resistance narrative. Indeed, even the heroism of the resisters was never unambiguous. As was revealed in the film Au coeur de l’orage (In the Midst of the Storm), released in 1948 but understandably shelved shortly thereafter, this attempt to glorify the Resistance in the Vercors region unwittingly displayed the vanity and incompetence of the fighters and the calamity they brought down on the surrounding communities by provoking murderous acts of collective punishment by the Germans. Similarly, the studies presented in the Kedward and Wood collection complicate the portrayal of the Resistance as an instance of “pure” French heroism by showing the active participation of immigrant Jewish groups in the fighting, as well as demonstrating that while women retained a gendered view of their role in the Resistance, Jewish women resisters became also increasingly aware of the tension between their “Frenchness” and “Jewishness.” We also learn that contrary to the myth of police participation in the liberation of Paris, in fact, “most policemen carried out . . . orders” to deport Jews “even after obedience to Vichy had ceased to be automatic,” and that while the educational establishment rewrote children’s stories in a manner consistent with Vichy’s ideology, following the Liberation these same writers hastily adapted such books to the myth of the Resistance.
The Liberation saw a resumption of the wars over French identity, in which the recovery of freedom was accompanied by recrimination and violence. Thus, while many women “emerged from the war with new and important rights,” and “with an increased awareness of their own potential,” this process also exacerbated the crisis of masculine identity, rooted in the double failure of French men to defend the patrie and provide for their families. The mass phenomenon of les femmes tondues (the shearing of women’s hair for alleged association with the enemy), which obviously also had a basis in reality, can simultaneously be seen as a male reaction to the fact that “women’s new-found independence and importance during the war— in economic life and in Resistance activity especially—contrasted sharply with the humiliation of French men.” On a more elevated level, while the Liberation was expected to release creative spirits from the stranglehold of tyranny, French literary and intellectual culture remained haunted by the ghosts of collaboration and complicity, not least because the purges had cast a dubious light on the role of intellectuals during the Occupation. Thus, for instance, Jean Paulhan, who rightly criticized the hypocrisy of the epuration of the intellectuals, had served during the Occupation as editor of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s collaborationist Nouvelle Revue Frangaise. Similarly, the Paris trial of Otto Abetz, Nazi sympathizer and German ambassador to France before and during the Occupation, gingerly avoided mention of his embarrassing links with the French intelligentsia, even while his defense ironically presented him as a proponent of Franco-German reconciliation. Even more disturbing was the attempt by collaborationist French pacifists to justify their activities by both denying the genocidal character of the Nazi regime and charging the Allies with employing Hitlerian methods against the Germans.
The manner in which the contested memory of the Liberation continues to feature in the French discourse on the twentieth century can be gauged from the recent discussion of Alain Resnais’s classic Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) by the philosopher Alain Brossat. Resnais made an analogy between a young woman whose head was shaven for a love affair with a German soldier and a Japanese man from Hiroshima. For Brossat this “symbolic equivalence” consists in the fact that both are survivors of a catastrophe struggling to emerge from the “tyranny” of a cataclysmic memory. As Nancy Wood perceptively notes, Brossat presents “modern History” as having “inflicted the ‘grand’ and ‘infinitesimal’ legacies of catastrophe.” Such an “analogy of ‘survivorship,’” she writes, “potentially embraces all of us who must live under History’s tyrannous shadow.” And since “we are all nominated as History’s ‘survivors,’ we risk losing sight altogether of the specific sufferings of real survivors of this century’s catastrophes.” In other words the assertion of universal victimhood releases us all from responsibility for past and present sins.
This specific case indicates a peculiar French manner of linking the nation’s past to the catastrophic events of this century. While Resnais’s earlier Night and Fog (1955) presents the suffering in the Nazi camps as universal, avoiding any mention of the Jews and implying that the victims were primarily (French) political resisters, Hiroshima, mon amour focuses on an innocent French victim of history’s cataclysmic events, for which Hiroshima serves merely as a backdrop. The victims of history are thus either those who fought against evil or those whose innocent love was destroyed by “heroes without imagination,” as the French heroine of Hiroshima, mon amour describes the patriots who shaved her hair. Significantly, the script for the film was written by Marguerite Duras, whose memoirLa Douleur (translated as The War, 1985) is about her own suffering while awaiting the return of her husband from Nazi captivity; deeply concerned with her own pain, she desists from any reference to the genocide of the Jews. Just as interesting is the fact that the man she waits for is Robert Antelme, the author of L’espece humaine (The Human Species, 1947), a haunting memoir about political inmates in the Nazi camps, frequently cited as the paradigmatic depiction of French suffering under the Germans.
The perception of France as a heroic, tragic victim of uncontrollable outside forces and as the conscience of civilization, which is still prevalent in certain intellectual circles, has made for a muddled discourse on catastrophe and identity. Illusory resemblance may have a liberating effect of its own. As could be seen in an academic conference at the Sorbonne in 1997, the mere use of the term camps can facilitate false analogies between genocide and ethnic cleansing, colonialism and postcolonialism, persecution and prejudice, immigration and cultural hegemony, while totally avoiding any discussion of French complicity in the genocide of the Jews. Similarly, the frequent analogy between Antelme and Primo Levi (which Antelme himself would have strongly rejected) tends to obscure the fact that while only a fraction of the 76,000 Jews deported from France survived the camps, well over half of a roughly equal number of French political deportees managed to return. In this sense concern for the victims of history can serve to avoid confrontation with the more troubling episodes in one’s own national past.
The continuing evolution of intellectual thinking in this direction can be gleaned from Brossat’s most recent book, L’epreuve du desastre (The Proof of Disaster). Brossat argues that “the prevailing contemporary propensity to perceive extremity and catastrophe as strictly a matter of the past” prevents those who “only stress the singularity” of the Shoah from recognizing that “the Palestinian camps are inexorably linked to the Jewish disaster.” Hence, he concludes, “our relationship to catastrophe remains essentially under the tyrannical hold of a double bind: . . . so long as the plunder and oppression of the Palestinians appears as compensation for the crime of Auschwitz; so long as the ‘uniqueness’ of the Nazi crimes serves also as the alibi for the avoidance, indeed the uninhibited negation of the Soviet extermination or the colonial atrocities—the life without end of catastrophe will continue to pierce the flesh of the democratic order as it expands throughout the world.” In other words it is the insistence on the Nazi genocide of the Jews and the singularity of Auschwitz that perpetuates the presence of evil in the world. Hence, if we only spoke less about the Jews and “their” Shoah, the lot of humanity would be greatly ameliorated. This final illusion about the beneficial effects of repression indeed indicates thatFrance’s “relationship to catastrophe remains essentially under the tyrannical hold of a double bind,” whose parameters, however, are the debilitating impact of 1914—18 and the complicity of Vichy in the murder of the Jews. It is the illusion that one can somehow compensate for one’s own crimes by reference to the injustice of others that has led to “the life without end of catastrophe.” For France’s “proof of disaster” is the moral debacle of Vichy; that should be the point de depart for all attempts to dispel the illusions of the past and to resist the obfuscation of the present.